How can you become a more effective leader? By building a strong spiritual foundation from the ground up! Writing as a friend and mentor, MacDonald draws from biblical truth and life experience to help you grow in all areas of leadership, including cultivating spiritual formation, encouraging restoration and renewal, and dealing with difficult people.
Just like Superman, who can leap over any hurdle and defeat every foe, followers of Christ have the supernatural ability to conquer the challenges we face. But the problem for both Superman and us is there’s a kryptonite that steals our strength.
Of course, both Superman and kryptonite are fictional. But spiritual kryptonite is not. This study offers answers to why so many of us are unable to experience the divine strength that was evident among first-century Christians.
Can you live up to the example Jesus set? Why would anyone choose a mentor who’s impossible to follow? What if it’s possible to experience real transformation? What if we really can be conformed to his image–in this life? The Impossible Mentor explores why Christians find Jesus a worthy role model but also hold the conviction that no one could possibly live up to his example. Discipleship and spiritual formation books come and go at the pace of diet and exercise manuals, with approximately the same results in the lives of believers. It’s the same cycle: good intentions, fresh starts, followed by frustration, guilt, and eventually resignation. You can break the yo-yo cycle of false starts and the guilt that follows when you stumble. The Impossible Mentor explores the four great challenges to following Jesus, and suggests five practical answers that have helped people of faith through the ages. You can put these answers to work in your life, right now. Author Ray Hollenbach combines slice-of-life vignettes with Biblical resources in a highly readable, conversational style: part pastor, part theologian and fellow-traveller, he explores how to take the yoke of discipleship Jesus offered in a manner that will break the cycle of resolve-and-failure.
Jesus swept onto the scene declaring that the Kingdom of God had arrived! He proclaimed that we would experience life at its fullest only when we organize our lives around the Kingdom. E. Stanley Jones suggests that life in any other way is a muddled, maddening, and impossible way to live. Throughout the centuries we have lost the Kingdom as a clearly defined and workable system for order and influence in our daily lives. We have reduced the Kingdom by putting it into narrower molds, a refuge now, a present security, a future hope, anything but the Kingdom as Jesus preached it – God’s total answer to man’s total need now.” Dr. Jones shows us how to claim our spiritual heritage and the abundant life promised us by embracing the Kingdom and Person of Jesus. He suggests how our experience with God and His Kingdom should be taught and shared in the life of the individual, in the life of the church and in the nations of the world.
We have all heard about spiritual warfare, and putting on the armor of God. But who are we fighting? And what form does our conflict take? Dr. Greg Boyd, in God at War: The Bible and Spiritual Conflict, attempts to answer these questions and more.
Some in our culture, because of the call for Christians to be peacemakers, feel that a warfare mentality is un-Christian. Dr. Boyd feels that a warfare mentality is the only mindset that enables us to truly deal with the very real problem of evil (and a call to be a peacemaker assumes that war is going on). He shows that the writers of the Bible, like the cultures around them, saw existence as a cosmic conflict between good and evil, and how the Bible calls us to join that conflict. This call is to more than just exorcism and the like. It is a call to holiness and a passion for God. All godly actions, including prayer, feeding the poor, charity, etc., can be seen as warfare, as acts which stand against the evil and chaos present in our world.
Is God to Blame? This is often the question that comes to mind when you confront real suffering in your life or in the lives of those you love. Pastor Boyd deals with this question honestly and biblically while avoiding glib answers. Writing for ordinary Christians, Boyd wrestles with a variety of answers that have been offered by theologians and pastors in the past. He finds that a fully Christian approach must keep the person and the work of Christ at the very center of what we say about human suffering and God’s place in it. Yet this is often just what is missing and what makes so much talk about the subject seem inadequate and at times misleading. What comes through is a hopeful picture of a sovereign God who is relentlessly opposed to evil, who knows your suffering, and who can be trusted to bring you through to renewed life.
Deep within you lies the same faith and longing that sent Peter walking across the wind-swept Sea of Galilee toward Jesus.
In what ways is the Lord telling you, as he did Peter, “Come.”
Anxiety. Depression. Fear. Loneliness. These are all symptoms of a soul that has lost touch with its source of life. Like a flower snipped from the vine, the soul that is not turned toward God can only wither away.
