The Bible has the astounding power to transform lives. The stories of people like Francis of Assisi, Antony of Egypt, Augustine of Hippo, Martin Luther and Martin Luther King Jr. vividly demonstrate this. Why aren't more of us transformed by Scripture today? Too often we study biblical texts without believing that God truly inhabits this book. Scripture seeks to capture our minds, not merely educate them. In these pages Chris Webb explains that we can transform our Christian life by reading as lovers rather than as theorists. This is possible by coming to the text prayerfully, expectantly, in humility and empty-handed. When we open the Bible, it does not say to us, "Listen: God is there " Instead, the voice of the Spirit whispers through each line, "Look: I am here." Reading the Bible this way can reconfigure the habits of your heart, refresh your imagination and memory, reshape and redeem your emotions, realign your reality individually and communally for kingdom life, and take us beyond the Bible into a renewed way of life. Here is the work of today--which is also the work of the whole of life--to open your heart afresh to the living Word of God.

Feasting on the Gospels is a new seven-volume series that follows up on the success of the Feasting on the Word series to provide another trusted preaching resource, this time on the most prominent and preached upon most preached upon books in the Bible: the four Gospels. With contributions from a diverse and respected group of scholars and pastors, Feasting on the Gospels includes completely new material that covers every single passage in the Gospels, making it suitable for both pastors who preach from the lectionary and pastors who do not. Moreover, these volumes incorporate the unique format of Feasting on the Word, giving preachers four perspectives to choose from for each Gospel passage: theological, pastoral, exegetical, and homiletical. Feasting on the Gospels offers a unique resource for all who preach, either continuously or occasionally, on the Gospels.

New York pastor Timothy Keller is known for his ability to connect a deep understanding of the Bible with contemporary thought and the practical issues we all face in our lives. My Rock; My Refuge - his first devotional, consisting of all new material - offers inspiration for every day of the year, based on the book of Psalms. Here Keller helps readers apply the principles he laid out in his book Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God. He walks them verse by verse through the entire Psalter, the one biblical book designed to teach us how to pray, how to spiritually handle every possible life situation, and how to actually know God. This title is published in the US as The Songs of Jesus.

In the decade since its original publication, THE EVERYDAY LIFE BIBLE has sold 1.1 million copies, taking its place as an invaluable resource on the Word of God. Simultaneously, Joyce Meyer's renown as one of the world's leading practical Bible teachers has grown, as she continued to study and teach daily. This new edition updates Joyce's notes and commentary to reflect the changes made in the revision of the Amplified Bible which refreshes the English and refines the amplification for relevance and clarity. The result is THE EVERYDAY LIFE BIBLE is easier to read and better than ever to study, understand, and apply to your everyday life.

First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Our oldest Christian traditions invite us to listen as well as speak when we pray, yet often the Voice seems barely audible. With over 40,000 copies sold since its original release in 1996, "Echoes of Eternity: Volume I" is helping many who desire to quiet their hearts and listen. "Echoes of Eternity" presents 365 brief meditations gathered from one pastor's faithful daily practice of listening to God. Each reading includes a Scripture verse and encouraging words that speak of Christ as our anchor, the treasure of God's love, and His lasting peace.

Sized to fit easily into a purse or pocket, "Echoes of Eternity" can facilitate a quiet moment alone with God at any time or place.

"Pray with your heart open. Pray with your ears open---open to Me and My word. Enter My presence with thanksgiving, and come "boldly" to the Throne of grace. I welcome you, My beloved child."

Let the wisdom of Colossians transform relationships in every area of your life -- home, church, and even the world -- with this study guide from renowned Bible teacher Joyce Meyer. Paul's letter to the Colossians reminds us that as we have died with Christ, we also need to die to our sins. It encourages us that because we have also been raised in Him, we must submit to Jesus and adopt qualities motivated by Christian love. In this comprehensive study tool, Joyce Meyer's commentary on Colossians affirms the Lordship of Christ and offers practical advice on family, relationships, and faith.

Stephen Ahearne-Kroll examines the literary interaction between the Gospel of Mark's passion narrative and four Psalms of Individual Lament evoked in it. These four psalms depict a David who challenges God's role in his suffering, who searches for understanding of his suffering in light of his past relationship with God, and who attempts to shame God into acting on his behalf only because he is suffering. Mark alludes to these psalms in reference to Jesus; David's concerns become woven into the depiction of Jesus. Reading David's challenge to God as part of Jesus' going 'as it is written of him' (i.e., suffering and dying according to Scripture; Mark 14:21) calls into question the necessity for Jesus' death within an apocalyptic framework of meaning. Finally, the suffering King David offers a more appropriate model for Jesus' suffering in Mark than that of the servant from Deutero-Isaiah.

The Revelation Of St John The Divine. the terminal document of the Holy Bible, subject of countless studies and interpretations.

Is Revelation in fact the ultimate Satanic text, an invocation to the Anti-Christ, the Great Beast 666 who is poised to take control of our decaying planet?

Is it a prophecy of nuclear war and entropy, the utter destruction of the universe which comes with the breaking of the Seventh Seal?

Or is it an eye-witness account of the first wave of alien invasions of Earth, a primitive response to deep-space technology we can only now begin to comprehend?

Revelation is presented here as a work in its own right, as its millennial significance reaches critical mass, to be re-evaluated by theologians, scientist and the common man alike. In his revolutionary introduction, apocalypse watchman Kenneth Rayner Johnson (author of Armageddon 2000) ponders each and every possibility of the text's origins and meaning -- and emerges with a staggering conclusion.

For someone who has exercised such a profound influence on Christian theology, Paul remains a shadowy figure behind the barrier of his complicated and difficult biblical letters. Debates about his meaning have deflected attention from his personality, yet his personality is an important key to understanding his theological ideas. This book redresses the balance. Jerome Murphy-O'Connor's disciplined imagination, nourished by a lifetime of research, shapes numerous textual, historical, and archaeological details into a colourful and enjoyable story of which Paul is the flawed but undefeated hero.
This chronological narrative offers new insights into Paul's intellectual, emotional, and religious development and puts his travels, mission, and theological ideas into a plausible biographical context. As he changes from an assimilated Jewish teenager in Tarsus to a competitive Pharisee in Jerusalem and then to a driven missionary of Christ, the sometimes contradictory components of Paul's complex personality emerge from the way he interacts with people and problems. His theology was forged in dialogue and becomes more intelligible as our appreciation of his person deepens. In Jerome Murphy-O'Connor's engaging biography, the Apostle comes to life as a complex, intensely human individual.

The first translation into a modern language of an important patristic text, Gregory of Nyssa's treatise on the inscriptions of the Psalms. The book shows Gregory's indebtedness to classical culture as well as to Christian tradition, and compares his early understanding of the stages of the spiritual life with that in his later treatises.

Second Corinthians is Paul's apology to the Corinthians for failing to visit them, using rhetorical persuasion in his letters, and appearing unapproved for the collection. The scholarly consensus maintains that 2 Corinthians is a conglomeration of letters due to its literary and logistical inconsistencies. Consequently, most interpretations of 2 Corinthians treat only parts of it. However, a different consensus is emerging. Fredrick Long situates the text within Classical literary and rhetorical conventions and argues for its unity based upon numerous parallels with ancient apology in the tradition of Andocides, Socrates, Isocrates and Demosthenes. He provides a comprehensive survey and rigorous genre analysis of ancient forensic discourse in support of his claims, and shows how the unified message of Paul's letter can be recovered. His study will be of relevance to Classicists and New Testament scholars alike.

Exceptionally popular author, with several titles selling well over 100,000 copies.

Did rebel angels take on human bodies to fulfil their lust for the 'daughters of men'? Did these fallen angels teach men to build weapons of war? That is the thesis of the Book of Enoch, a text cherished by the Essenes, early Jews and Christians but later condemned by both rabbis and Church Fathers. The book was denounced, banned, cursed and 'lost' for over a thousand years -- until in 1773, a Scottish explorer discovered three copies in Ethiopia. Elizabeth Clare Prophet examines the controversy surrounding this book and sheds new light on Enoch's forbidden mysteries. She demonstrates that Jesus and the apostles studied the book and tells why Church Fathers suppressed its teaching that angels could incarnate in human bodies. Contains all the Enoch texts, including the Book of Enoch, and biblical parallels. This book takes you back to the primordial drama of Good and Evil, when the first hint of corruption entered a pristine world -- Earth.

This volume examines characterization in the four Gospels and in the Sayings Gospel Q. Peter in Matthew, Lazarus in John, and Jesus as Son of Man in Q are examples of the characters studied. The general approach is narrative-critical. At the same time, each contribution takes special effort to widen the scope beyond the narrated world to include the text's ideological and real-life setting as well as its effective history. New ways of doing narrative criticism are thus proposed. The concluding essay by David Rhoads delineates the development and envisions the future of narrative criticism in Gospel studies.

In this 2006 text, Daniel M. Gurtner examines the meaning of the rending of the veil at the death of Jesus in Matthew 27:51a by considering the functions of the veil in the Old Testament and its symbolism in Second Temple and Rabbinic Judaism. Gurtner incorporates these elements into a compositional exegesis of the rending text in Matthew. He concludes that the rending of the veil is an apocalyptic assertion like the opening of heaven revealing, in part, end-time images drawn from Ezekiel 37. Moreover, when the veil is torn Matthew depicts the cessation of its function, articulating the atoning role of Christ's death which gives access to God not simply in the sense of entering the Holy of Holies (as in Hebrews), but in trademark Matthean Emmanuel Christology: 'God with us'. This underscores the significance of Jesus' atoning death in the first gospel.

The Synoptic Gospels contain traditions about Jesus which differ in some respects from Gospel to Gospel and, it is presumed, from the very earliest Christian traditions. Scholars often seek to establish the earliest form of each tradition and the methods and criteria they use are of the greatest importance. Dr Sanders here provides a reassessment of this whole problem. His study deals directly with the question of determining the reliability of the Synoptic Gospels.

The present study focuses on the theology of the Book of Jeremiah. That theology revolves around themes familiar from Israel's covenantal faith, especially the sovereignty of YHWH expressed in judgment and promise. The outcome of this theological nexus of context, person, and tradition is a book that moves into the abyss and out of the abyss in unexpected ways. It does so, in part, by asserting that God continues to be generatively and disturbingly operative in the affairs of the world, up to and including our contemporary abysses (such as 9/11). The God attested in the Book of Jeremiah invites its readers into and through any and all such dislocations to new futures that combine divine agency and human inventiveness rooted in faithfulness.

Judaean society in the first century did not conform to the stereotypical 'Mediterranean honour culture', in that it lacked a significant gentile population and was dominated by a powerful religious elite. Timothy Ling argues that this demands a new social-scientific approach to the Gospel and Letters of John that moves away from the accepted 'sectarian' interpretation. He attributes their distinctiveness instead to their roots in Jesus's Judaean ministry, as contrasted with the Galilean ministry that has attracted much recent study. In particular, Ling contends that the numerous references to 'the poor' in the New Testament can be better understood in the context of the 'alternative' ideologies found among pietistic religious groups practising asceticism, renunciation, and other forms of 'virtuoso religion' in first-century Judaea. In doing so, he mounts a convincing challenge to the current dominant reading of the Gospel of John as a product of early Christian sectarianism.

In this exhilarating book, John Pritchard reclaims the narrative power of the gospels by retelling well-known stories in vivid, imaginative language, and showing us how our own stories fit into the Christian story and can be transformed by it. He takes key narratives like the visit of Mary to Elizabeth, the parable of the rich fool, and the Last Supper, and helps us to be part of them. We are given the opportunity to see the people involved more clearly, not least of all Jesus himself - and so to consider whether we might live our own lives a little differently. An ideal resource for anyone concerned to communicate the Christian faith in a lively, contemporary style, Living the Gospel Stories Today will prove no less helpful as an aid to personal meditation and group discussion.

2020 Christian Book Award winner! Written by VeggieTales(R) creator Phil Vischer, the Minno Laugh and Grow Bible for Kids is more than a children's storybook Bible . . . it's a deep, engaging, and whimsical gospel experience. The Minno Laugh and Grow Bible for Kids guides readers ages 4 to 8 from Genesis to Revelation, retelling beloved Bible stories AND tackling tricky questions like "What is sin?" Each story is vividly illustrated, takes just five minutes to read, and includes a Family Connection section to encourage family Bible study and help readers learn, talk, and pray together! PLUS, bonus content connects the dots of each Bible story, making the Minno Laugh and Grow Bible for Kids a family devotional Bible that provides a big picture, applicational view of the Biblical narrative. Key Features: Written by VeggieTales(R) creator Phil Vischer Includes 52 beautifully-illustrated Bible stories from Genesis to Revelation Family Connection at the end of each story makes this children's Bible perfect for family devotional time. Features bonus content including maps, charts, and other tools not usually found in a Bible for kids Clearly teaches kids ages 4 to 8 about God's love and the gospel Previously published as the Laugh and Learn Bible for Kids.