From a New York Times bestselling author, this book encourages readers to ask God for what they need, and to not be afraid of the miracles He has in store for us.

Joel Osteen wants you to know that God is listening and waiting for you to and ask Him for your dreams, for the big things in your heart, for your deepest hopes, for what looks impossible. How many miracles are we missing out on because we're not praying bold?

Pray Bold will challenge you to think bigger, to stretch your faith, to receive what you're believing for when you pray, and to pray prayers that move the hands of God. This book includes reflective questions for group or individual study and 30 days of bold prayers to take you to the next level. You'll learn to pray with confidence, you'll dare to pray bold–and that's when you'll see the all-powerful Creator of the universe go to work.

The newly updated edition of the study guide companion to Joyce Meyer's bestselling book of all time, Battlefield of the Mind.

Thoughts affect every aspect of our lives, and that's why it's so important to be in control of them. Learn to master your thoughts and win the battles of your mind with this engaging, practical study guide--now updated with fresh and inspiring new content that will help you make the most of what you learn in Battlefield of the Mind.

Do you ever get a glimpse of yourself that is exactly who you want to be, but always seems just out of reach? The happier, kinder, less stressed, more courageous you? The ideal version of you isn't imaginary at all. It's actually the authentic you trying to break through. And it’s not a future version of yourself you have to chase. The true you may be new to you, but it’s not new to God. It's the you He knew all along.

In Do the New You, New York Times bestselling author and pastor Steven Furtick speaks directly to the challenge of living out your God-given identity and calling. He explores and unpacks six practical mindsets everyone can adopt to get from who you are today to where God is taking you.

These six statements are truths you can speak over yourself any time and anywhere:

• I’m not stuck unless I stop
• Christ is in me. I am enough
• With God there's always a way and by faith I will find it
• God is not against me, but he's in it with me, working through me, fighting for me.
• My joy is my job
• God has given me everything I need for the season I’m in

These simple, powerful, memorable phrases will shift your focus, feelings, and actions to align with God’s vision of you. God isn’t just calling you to do you. He’s calling you to do the new you—the unique and powerful person He created you to be.

What if there was a way to put a stop to your worrying before it steals your peace of mind? In The Answer to Anxiety, Joyce Meyer reveals truth from God’s Word that shows us how to focus on God when we’re feeling unsettled. She also teaches readers practical steps based on Scripture that we can take when we need to face our fears.

God doesn’t want you to live with worry and anxiety. And when you understand that He has a plan for you, you can experience the life-changing peace He offers.

Janet Hodgson traces the life of Xhosa prophet Ntsikana (1780–1821) from his birth through his years as a Christian convert, evangelist, and composer of enduring hymns.

Ntsikana is known as one of the first Christians to adapt Christian ideas to African culture, writing hymns in isiXhosa and translating concepts into terms that resonated with his Xhosa community.

Even today, his hymns are among the most important in the amaXhosa churches, and he is regarded as an important symbol of both African unity and Black Consciousness.

It is the gut-wrenching experiences we live through that shape us into the people we are today-pliable instruments in the hands of the Heavenly Potter. Through her own hard trials, Sarah Jane Kellogg has come to believe that out of the anguish of the soul-the mind, will, and emotions-revelation is birthed.

In an inspirational memoir, Sarah Jane unpacks the incredible true story of a family tragedy kept secret for decades. As a child, Sarah Jane reveals how she was told her grandparents died in an automobile accident, only to discover later that their lives were taken by a family member. While relying on the memories of her three older cousins and other observers, Sarah Jane provides glimpses into her loving family, the mental illness that ravaged their lives, the emotional wounds that took years to heal, and her own personal grief experiences shared to help other believers find God's pathway to reconciliation after tragedy.

There Is Life after Tragedy is the true story of one family's faithful journey as a long-held secret is revealed that proves God's glory is always within reach, even in difficult circumstances.

Relentless Gratitude carefully weaves together timeless biblical truths with findings from scientific studies on the life-changing power of gratitude.

You cannot go wrong leading a life of gratitude.

In almost every conceivable scenario, it works. With gratitude, you can improve your health and well-being. Gratitude can improve your productivity at work, relationships with people, and most importantly, your relationship with God.

During tough times, gratitude brings hope and makes us resilient in the face of adversity. Gratitude is akin to a moral fertilizer that fuels the growth of positive traits—so much so that it is often referred to as the mother of all virtues.

Relentless Gratitude carefully weaves together timeless biblical truths with findings from evolving scientific studies on the subject gratitude. It delivers a profound perspective on gratitude that promises to transform your life in a lasting way.

The author shares insights on the importance of leading a life of gratitude, especially in times of hardship and uncertainty. Relentless Gratitude unveils the blessedness of a grateful heart and brings to life the following life lessons:

There is a paradox in American Christianity. According to Gallup, nearly eight in ten Americans regard the Bible as either the literal word of God or the inspired by God. At the same time, surveys have revealed gaps in these same Americans' biblical literacy. These discrepancies reveal the complex relationship between American Christians and Holy Writ, a subject that is widely acknowledged but rarely investigated. The Bible in American Life is a sustained, collaborative reflection on the ways Americans use the Bible in their personal lives. It also considers how other influences, including religious communities and the internet, shape individuals' comprehension of scripture. Employing both quantitative methods (the General Social Survey and the National Congregations Study) and qualitative research (historical studies for context), The Bible in American Life provides an unprecedented perspective on the Bible's role outside of worship, in the lived religion of a broad cross-section of Americans both now and in the past. The Bible has been central to Christian practice, and has functioned as a cultural touchstone, throughout American history, but too little is known about how people engage it every day. How do people read the Bible for themselves outside of worship? How have denominational and parachurch publications influenced the interpretation and application of scripture? How have clergy and congregations influenced individual understandings of scripture? These questions are especially pressing in a time when denominations are losing much of their traditional cultural authority, technology is changing reading and cognitive habits, and subjective experience is continuing to eclipse textual authority as the mark of true religion. From the broadest scale imaginable, national survey data about all Americans, down to the smallest details, such as the portrayal of Noah and his ark in children's Bibles, this book offers insight and illumination from scholars across the intellectual spectrum. It will be useful and informative for scholars seeking to understand changes in American Christianity as well as clergy seeking more effective ways to preach and teach about scripture in a changing environment.

Early Americans have long been considered "A People of the Book" Because the nickname was coined primarily to invoke close associations between Americans and the Bible, it is easy to overlook the central fact that it was a book-not a geographic location, a monarch, or even a shared language-that has served as a cornerstone in countless investigations into the formation and fragmentation of early American culture. Few books can lay claim to such powers of civilization-altering influence. Among those which can are sacred books, and for Americans principal among such books stands the Bible. This Handbook is designed to address a noticeable void in resources focused on analyzing the Bible in America in various historical moments and in relationship to specific institutions and cultural expressions. It takes seriously the fact that the Bible is both a physical object that has exercised considerable totemic power, as well as a text with a powerful intellectual design that has inspired everything from national religious and educational practices to a wide spectrum of artistic endeavors to our nation's politics and foreign policy. This Handbook brings together a number of established scholars, as well as younger scholars on the rise, to provide a scholarly overview-rich with bibliographic resources-to those interested in the Bible's role in American cultural formation.

Surviving Your Child's Adolescence helps parents meet the 10 deepest needs of their teenager. These needs include:

This study contextualizes the achievement of a strategically crucial figure in Byzantium's turbulent seventh century, the monk and theologian Maximus the Confessor (580-662). Building on newer biographical research and a growing international body of scholarship, as well as on fresh examination of his diverse literary corpus, Paul Blowers develops a profile integrating the two principal initiatives of Maximus's career: first, his reinterpretation of the christocentric economy of creation and salvation as a framework for expounding the spiritual and ascetical life of monastic and non-monastic Christians; and second, his intensifying public involvement in the last phase of the ancient christological debates, the monothelete controversy, wherein Maximus helped lead an East-West coalition against Byzantine imperial attempts doctrinally to limit Jesus Christ to a single (divine) activity and will devoid of properly human volition. Blowers identifies what he terms Maximus's "cosmo-politeian" worldview, a contemplative and ascetical vision of the participation of all created beings in the novel politeia, or reordered existence, inaugurated by Christ's "new theandric energy". Maximus ultimately insinuated his teaching on the christoformity and cruciformity of the human vocation with his rigorous explication of the precise constitution of Christ's own composite person. In outlining this cosmo-politeian theory, Blowers additionally sets forth a "theo-dramatic" reading of Maximus, inspired by Hans Urs von Balthasar, which depicts the motion of creation and history according to the christocentric "plot" or interplay of divine and creaturely freedoms. Blowers also amplifies how Maximus's cumulative achievement challenged imperial ideology in the seventh century-the repercussions of which cost him his life-and how it generated multiple recontextualizations in the later history of theology.

In Union Made, Heath W. Carter advances a bold new interpretation of the origins of American Social Christianity. While historians have often attributed the rise of the Social Gospel to middle-class ministers, seminary professors, and social reformers, this book places working people at the very center of the story. The major characters-blacksmiths, glove makers, teamsters, printers, and the like-have been mostly forgotten, but as Carter convincingly argues, their collective contribution to American Social Christianity was no less significant than that of Walter Rauschenbusch or Jane Addams. Leading readers into the thick of late-19th-century Chicago's tumultuous history, Carter shows that countless working-class believers participated in the heated debates over the implications of Christianity for industrializing society, often with as much fervor as they did in other contests over wages and the length of the workday. Throughout the Gilded Age the city's trade unionists, socialists, and anarchists advanced theological critiques of laissez faire capitalism and protested "scab ministers" who cozied up to the business elite. Their criticisms compounded church leaders' anxieties about losing the poor, such that by the turn-of-the-century many leading Christians were arguing that the only way to salvage hopes of a Christian America was for the churches to soften their position on "the labor question." As denomination after denomination did just that, it became apparent that the Social Gospel was, indeed, ascendant-from below.

For more than 800 years scholars have pointed to the dark augury having to do with "the last Pope." The prophecy, taken from St. Malachy's "Prophecy of the Popes," is among a list of verses predicting each of the Roman Catholic popes from Pope Celestine II to the final pope, "Peter the Roman," whose reign would end in the destruction of Rome. First published in 1595, the prophecies were attributed to St. Malachy by a Benedictine historian named Arnold de Wyon, who recorded them in his book, Lignum Vitae. Tradition holds that Malachy had been called to Rome by Pope Innocent II, and while there, he experienced the vision of the future popes, including the last one, which he wrote down in a series of cryptic phrases. According to the prophecy, the next pope (following Benedict XVI) is to be the final pontiff, Petrus Romanus or Peter the Roman. The idea by some Catholics that the next pope on St. Malachy's list heralds the beginning of "great apostasy" followed by "great tribulation" sets the stage for the imminent unfolding of apocalyptic events, something many non-Catholics would agree with. This would give rise to a false prophet, who according to the book of Revelation leads the world's religious communities into embracing a political leader known as Antichrist. In recent history, several Catholic priests--some deceased now--have been surprisingly outspoken on what they have seen as this inevitable danger rising from within the ranks of Catholicism as a result of secret satanic "Illuminati-Masonic" influences. These priests claim secret knowledge of an multinational power elite and occult hierarchy operating behind supranatural and global political machinations. Among this secret society are sinister false Catholic infiltrators who understand that, as the Roman Catholic Church represents one-sixth of the world's population and over half of all Christians, it is indispensable for controlling future global elements in matters of church and state and the fulfillment of a diabolical plan they call "Alta Vendetta," which is set to assume control of the papacy and to help the False Prophet deceive the world's faithful (including Catholics) into worshipping Antichrist. As stated by Dr. Michael Lake on the front cover, Catholic and evangelical scholars have dreaded this moment for centuries. Unfortunately, as readers will learn, time for avoiding Peter the Roman just ran out.