Your God is Too Glorious


Book Description

Most of us are regular people who have good days and bad days. Our lives are radically ordinary and unexciting. That means they're the kind of lives God gets excited about. While the world worships beauty and power and wealth, God hides his glory in the simple, the mundane, the foolish, working in unawesome people, things, and places.In our day of celebrity worship and online posturing, this is a refreshing, even transformative way of understanding God and our place in his creation. It urges us to treasure a life of simplicity, to love those whom the world passes by, to work for God's glory rather than our own. And it demonstrates that God has always been the Lord of the cross--a Savior who hides his grace in unattractive, inglorious places.Your God Is Too Glorious reminds readers that while a quiet life may look unimpressive to the world, it's the regular, everyday people that God tends to use to do his most important work.




God's Glorious Girl


Book Description

God's Glorious Girl is a board book for girls ages 0-4 that brings to life a message of faith and identity in a beautiful declaration poem. In God's Glorious Girl, young girls will hear the truth about who God created them to be from the very beginning of their lives through a racially diverse group of young girls. With themes of courage, forgiveness, faith, kindness and more, this book will help build a foundation of faith and confidence in God for each girl who hears these words.




Night Driving


Book Description

Journeys that begin in brokenness rarely follow a straight road to healing. There are twists and turns--and setbacks--on the path of repentance. Night Driving tells the story of a pastor and seminary professor whose moral failures destroyed his marriage and career, left his life in ruins, and sent him spiraling into a decade-long struggle against God. Forced to fight the demons of his past in the cab of the semi-truck he drove at night through the Texas oil fields, Chad Bird slowly began to limp toward grace and healing. Drawing on his expertise as an Old Testament scholar, Bird weaves together his own story, the biblical story, and the stories of fellow prodigals as he peels back the layers of denial, anger, addiction, and grief to help readers come face-to-face both with their own identities and with the God who alone can heal them.




The Christ Key


Book Description

Reading the Old Testament can seem like exploring an old, mysterious mansion, packed with of all sorts of strange rooms. The creation room, vast and sublime. The exodus room, with hardhearted pharaohs and dried-up seas. The war room, with bloody swords and crumbling walls. The tabernacle room, with smoking altars and dark inner sanctums. What does this odd and ancient world have to do with us, who are modern followers of Jesus? As it turns out, everything! Every chapter in the Old Testament, in a variety of ways, tells the story that culminates in Jesus the Messiah. What Christians today call the Old Testament is what Jesus and the earliest believers simply called the Scriptures. That was their Bible. From its pages, they taught about the Messiah's divine nature, his priestly work, his ministry of salvation. The Christ Key will reintroduce readers to these old books as ever-fresh, ever-new testimonies of Jesus. By the end, you will see even Leviticus as a book of grace and mercy, and you will hear in the Psalms the resounding voice of Christ.




Upside-Down Spirituality


Book Description

In our age when the church can too often seem like a poor copy of the world, Chad Bird challenges us to reclaim the astounding originality of our ancient, backward faith. Where the world stresses the importance of success, Bird invites readers to embrace nine specific failures in the areas of our personal lives, our relationships, and the church. Why? Because what human wisdom deems indispensable is so often an impediment to our spiritual growth, and what it deems insignificant is so often essential to it. With compelling examples from the Bible and today, Bird paints an enticing picture of the counterintuitive, countercultural life that God wants for us. He helps readers delight in all of the ways that Jesus turned the world upside-down, allowing us to experience true freedom, not from our weaknesses but in the midst of them.




Unveiling Mercy


Book Description

Unveiling Mercy will do just that—unveil how the mercy of God in the Messiah is spoken of from the very opening Hebrew word of the Bible, all the way to the closing chapter of Malachi. By the end of the year, you will have entered the Old Testament through 365 new doorways, looked with fresh eyes at old verses, and traced a web of connections all over the Scriptures that you've never spotted before. You'll begin to see what one person meant when he described Hebrew words as "hyphens between heaven and earth." Reading the Bible in translation can be like "kissing the bride through the veil." Each of these 365 devotions is crafted so as to lift that veil ever so slightly, to touch skin to skin, as it were, with the original language. You do not need to know anything about Hebrew to profit from these meditations. They are not written to teach you the language of Abraham, Moses, and Isaiah, but to give you a taste of their insights, to expose you to their eloquence, to laugh with them at their winking wordplays, to un-English their idioms, and—most importantly—to trace their trajectories all the way into the preaching of the Messiah and the writings of his evangelists and apostles.




Gentle and Lowly


Book Description

Christians know that God loves them, but can easily feel that he is perpetually disappointed and frustrated, maybe even close to giving up on them. As a result, they focus a lot—and rightly so—on what Jesus has done to appease God’s wrath for sin. But how does Jesus Christ actually feel about his people amid all their sins and failures? This book draws us to Matthew 11, where Jesus describes himself as “gentle and lowly in heart,” longing for his people to find rest in him. The gospel flows from God’s deepest heart for his people, a heart of tender love for the sinful and suffering. These chapters take readers into the depths of Christ’s very heart for sinners, diving deep into Bible passages that speak of who Christ is and encouraging readers with the affections of Christ for his people. His longing heart for sinners comforts and sustains readers in their up-and-down lives.




Glorious Weakness


Book Description

As a girl, Alia Joy came face to face with weakness, poverty, and loss in ways that made her doubt God was good. There were times when it felt as if God had abandoned her. What she didn't realize then was that God was always there, calling her to abandon herself. In this deeply personal exploration of what it means to be "poor in spirit," Joy challenges our cultural proclivity to "pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps." She calls on readers to embrace true vulnerability and authenticity with God and with one another, showing how weakness does not disqualify us from inclusion in the kingdom of God--instead, it is our very invitation to enter in. Anyone who has struggled with feeling inadequate, disillusioned, or just too broken will find hope. This message is an antidote to despair, helping readers reclaim the ways God is good, even when life is anything but.




God's Brave Boy


Book Description

God's Brave Boy is a board book for boys ages 0-4 that brings to life a message of faith and identity for young boys to hear from the beginning of their lives. In God's Brave Boy, young boys will hear the truth about who God created them to be through a racially diverse group of young boys. With themes of courage, faith, adventure, kindness, and more, this book will help build a foundation of faith and joy for each boy who hears these words.




Shepherding God's People


Book Description

This comprehensive textbook on pastoral ministry for pastors, church leaders, and students articulates a biblical model for shepherding God's people. Written by a leading psychologist and seminary professor who has served as a pastor for more than two decades, the book covers twelve major areas of pastoral ministry, highlights the essential work of the Holy Spirit, and focuses on the personal and family life of the pastor. It includes cross-cultural perspectives of special interest in our diverse world and a foreword by John Ortberg.