A fallen world is full of reasons to lose heart. From the large-scale tragedies of war, famine, and natural disasters, to the more personal tragedies of broken relationships and broken dreams, it can be difficult to avoid discouragement--even for the believer. And yet, Scripture calls us to a life of hope, based not on wishful thinking or avoiding our problems but based on who God is, what he has done, and what he is still doing. In this short, giftable book, pastor Jason Meyer shows you that though the reasons for discouragement seem strong, the reasons we have to take heart and hold on to hope are stronger yet. Through biblical truth and personal stories, Meyer encourages the weary and anxious believer by shining light on the nature of reality, the nature of God, and the intersection of the two in our daily, rubber-meets-the-road lives. The result is a book that lifts our spirits in a world that too often seeks to drag us down.

Among Christian devotional works, My Utmost for His Highest stands head and shoulders above the rest, with more than 13 million copies sold. But most readers have no idea that Oswald Chambers's most famous work was not published until ten years after his death. The remarkable person behind its compilation and publication was his wife, Biddy. And her story of living her utmost for God's highest is one without parallel. Bestselling novelist Michelle Ule brings Biddy's story to life as she traces her upbringing in Victorian England to her experiences in a WWI YMCA camp in Egypt. Readers will marvel at this young woman's strength as she returns to post-war Britain a destitute widow with a toddler in tow. Refusing personal payment, Biddy proceeds to publish not just My Utmost for His Highest, but also 29 other books with her husband's name on the covers. All the while she raises a child alone, provides hospitality to a never-ending stream of visitors and missionaries, and nearly loses everything in the London Blitz during WWII. The inspiring story of a devoted woman ahead of her times will quickly become a favorite of those who love true stories of overcoming incredible odds, making a life out of nothing, and serving God's kingdom.

In The Holy Spirit and Christian Experience, Simeon Zahl presents a fresh vision for Christian theology that foregrounds the relationship between theological ideas and the experiences of Christians. He argues that theology is always operating in a vibrant landscape of feeling and desiring, and shows that contemporary theology has often operated in problematic isolation from these experiential dynamics. He then argues that a theologically serious doctrine of the Holy Spirit not only authorizes but requires attention to Christian experience. Against this background, Zahl outlines a new methodological approach to Christian theology that attends to the emotional and experiential power of theological ideas. This methodology draws on recent interdisciplinary work on affect and emotion, which has shown that affects are powerful motivating realities that saturate all dimensions of human thinking and acting. In the process, Zahl also explains why contemporary theology has often been ambivalent about subjective experience, and demonstrates that current discourse about God's activity in the world is often artificially abstracted from experience and embodiment. At the heart of the book, Zahl proposes a new account of the theology of grace from this experiential and pneumatological perspective. Focusing on the work of the Holy Spirit in salvation and sanctification, he retrieves insights from Augustine, Luther, and Philip Melanchthon to present an affective and Augustinian vision of salvation as a pedagogy of desire. In articulating this vision, Zahl engages critically with recent emphasis on participation and theosis in Christian soteriology, and charts a new path forward for Protestant theology in a landscape hitherto dominated by the theological visions of Barth and Aquinas.

The first survey to utilise the approaches of the new cultural history in analysing how Reformation Europe came about.

A fresh and conservative approach to studying the Scriptures through the eyes of the Reformed Theological heritage, this Silver Medallion award winner is the first NIV study Bible incorporating a summary of Reformed theology.

...[C]oncern about the [inherited doctrine of vocation and its relevance for modern life] was generated out of the complexities and frustrations especially of industrial life, and it has produced a voluminous literature of a popular and semi-popular kind which has served to drive home the problem of daily work upon the conscience of contemporary Christians, and also to provide certain resources for handling it. In addition to this varied literature, the last years have also seen a very general discussion of the question at every level of church life: in ecumencal conferences, in the curricular material of the major denominations, and in conferences and study groups of all kinds. About the urgency and importance of the problem of vocation there is now no doubt. But now we find that the rather simple formulae in which we have been dealing with it do justice neither to the Biblical and Reformation inheritance, nor to the profound dilemmas that appear not only in industry, but in every area of professional and commercial life. The problem now is not only to equip our lay-people with fuller theological resources for the understanding of the meaning of discipleship, but to utilize their practical experience of day-to-day dilemmas and day to-day decisions. ...Gustaf Wingren's conscientious analysis of Luther's teaching on the matter...remains our prime resource for the understanding of the relation of faith and works. Nothing could exceed the patience and thoroughness with which Wingren has combed through the Luther corpus.... [I]t will serve to put the full range of Luther's insight at the disposal of those who care for theology as part of their care of all the Churches. Alexander Miller Stanford University

This volume is a unique interpretation of what Martin Luther contributes to renewed appreciation of Biblical diversity. The Church in the West is struggling. One reason behind this is that the prevailing models for Theology have imposed logical and modern ways of thinking about faith that renders theology academic, and therefore largely irrelevant for daily life. By letting the first Reformer speak for himself in this book, Mark Ellingsen shows how Martin Luther’s theological approach can reform the Church’s theology today. The real Luther-not the one taught by his various systematic interpreters-presents Christian faith in its entirety, with all its rough edges, in such a way as to direct on how and when to employ those dimensions of the Biblical witness most appropriate for the situation in which we find ourselves.

Few figures in history have defined their time as dramatically as Martin Luther. And few books have captured the spirit of such a figure as truly as this robust and eloquent life of Luther. A highly regarded historian and biographer and a gifted novelist and playwright, Richard Marius gives us a dazzling portrait of the German reformer--his inner compulsions, his struggle with himself and his God, the gestation of his theology, his relations with contemporaries, and his responses to opponents. Focusing in particular on the productive years 1516-1525, Marius' detailed account of Luther's writings yields a rich picture of the development of Luther's thought on the great questions that came to define the Reformation. Marius follows Luther from his birth in Saxony in 1483, during the reign of Frederick III, through his schooling in Erfurt, his flight to an Augustinian monastery and ordination to the outbreak of his revolt against Rome in 1517, the Wittenberg years, his progress to Worms, his exile in the Wartburg, and his triumphant return to Wittenberg. Throughout, Marius pauses to acquaint us with pertinent issues: the question of authority in the church, the theology of penance, the timing of Luther's Reformation breakthrough, the German peasantry in 1525, Muntzer's revolutionaries, the whys and hows of Luther's attack on Erasmus. In this personal, occasionally irreverent, always humane reconstruction, Luther emerges as a skeptic who hated skepticism and whose titanic wrestling with the dilemma of the desire for faith and the omnipresence of doubt and fear became an augury for the development of the modern religious consciousness of the West. In all of this, he also represents tragedy, with the goodness of his works overmatched by their calamitous effects on religion and society.