🎉Cyber Week Sale: Get 30% Off Everything Published by The Good Book Company
In a short space of time, a day or maybe even an hour, we can experience a huge range of emotions. The ups and downs mean that life really can feel like a rollercoaster. Those emotions might range from anger to awe, disappointment to delight, or even outrage to a sense of being overjoyed. There can even be days when we feel as if our emotions have been erased, as if we’ve turned into a robot, numb compared to those around us.
There are some great things about emotions, but there are times when emotions can seem like the enemy. There have definitely been days when I’ve wished my feelings away, days when I’ve been convinced emotions are not good. but, that denies how God made me, as a thinking, feeling, relational person.
Graham Beynon’s book, Emotions: Living Life in Colour, is a great read, helping us to discover what it means to be fully human, putting our feelings in their right place as we seek to live and grow to be more like Jesus, loving our Heavenly Father.... continue reading
Rebecca Manley Pippert has done more to shape the church’s evangelism, and done more evangelism herself, than virtually anyone else in the last fifty years. Her bestselling Out of the Saltshaker was listed as one of the fifty most influential Christian books of the 20th century in Christianity Today. More recently, she has been based in Europe, encouraging Christians of all ages but particularly students to read the Bible with their non-Christian friends. The fruit right across the continent has been astonishing.
Now, Becky has turned her mind to a gap she’s noticed as she’s told people about Christ throughout the world. When people become Christians… what next? Or, when people have read the Bible with a friend, or done a course such as Christianity Explored or Alpha, and are interested but not yet converted… what next?
It’s worth asking yourself what you do. What your church does. What comes next for the nearly believer, or the new believer, or even the newly committed believer?... continue reading
Looking up and looking down at others is something we all do yet, for many of us, it's so habitual we hardly notice we're doing it. Unfortunately the consequences are far more evident. Sophie de Witt's, Compared To Her takes a good hard look at how we compare ourselves to others and the reasons why we do it. It's a problem we just cannot afford to ignore! Sophie offers hope by presenting the God-given remedy and convincing us that rather than being doomed to dissatisfaction, contentment is a realistic option.
Read more HERE and get the ebook for just £3 until midday on Thursday using code htch0714 at the checkout.
Work is well underway on our second graphic novel: Light in the Darkness
We're currently on the inking stage of this exciting project, which is the prequel to our first, popular graphic novel, 'The Third Day' - and we thought you'd like a glimpse of how it's going.
Light in the Darkness uses the biblical text of Luke chapters 1-2 and visualises the drama and emotion of Luke's narrative as we explore the characters of the very first Christmas...
We're expecting it to be available in early October - just in time for your Christmas shopping!
Watch this space...
If you are a regular reader of this blog, you'll know we made a lot of this book when it first came out. But with many churches and church people absolutely snowed under at this time of year, it is well worth reminding you of it again.
The run up to camps and summer holiday clubs can be exhausting. Calls on everyone's time are immense - energy and big smiles are required. It's exciting but the constant need to be here, do this, speak at that, make something else or greet this group can be draining and make life feel very tiring.
John Hindley examines just how and why this happens in Serving Without Sinking. It is an issue he has been aware of for a very long time and knows that it isn't just for Christmas either. The good news is he also has some encouraging help backed by Scripture to relieve the burdens we feel in this situation. He shows us how we can maintain that joyful servant heart at this busiest of times.
Read more HERE and get the book for just £4 - use code hsws0714 at the checkout.
Home groups are coming to an end. Christian Unions are in abeyance for the next few weeks. Church meetings slow down as pastors and congregation members alike go off on their holidays. For a brief period of time, diaries can seem refreshingly empty ...
It may be that you're looking forward to a much-needed rest over these warmer months - if that is the case, please don't let me stop you! But if you'd like to keep on learning through the summer months, then why not consider using the summer break to dig into a short course in practical ministry from The Good Book College?
Since 2006, The Good Book Company has offered a range of distance-learning courses and some of our most popular are available to be studied over the summer vacation period.
So whether you're looking to dip a toe into Pastoral Care, Women's Ministry, Administration or Christian Mission and Ministry - we have a short course for you.
Each course takes in the region of 70 hours and is done in the comfort of your own home - with optional, practical assignments to help you consolidate your thinking.
Why not take a tour of our short courses here and consider fuelling up this summer with some biblical, accessible training that comes to you ...
It is plain to see all around us that the church has a very different place in our society to that of the 20th century. Where the church was a fairly focal point of both local life and the state as a whole a hundred years (maybe even 30 years) ago, now the church is seen to have no real place in society. We have become a nation that used to be Christian, now Jesus is no more than a name from the past or a baby that appears at Christmas. This is why this book is important for us to read. Not just leaders of the church, but also the 'everyday Christian'. What Chester & Timmis do is to show the state of the church as it is today and how we 'should do church' in light of the culture we live in. Their argument is for us to show our culture that church isn't a building but a life lived as Christians together.
There isn't anything radically different here compared to other books of a similar nature but it is a model that is clearly producing fruit in a tough area of the UK. The authors want to show us how living lives with gospel intentionality has been far more beneficial than just getting people to come to an event in a church building. This is so helpful to be reminded of and the examples they give of how it has been worked through in their ministry add weight to their argument.
What they do in Sheffield won't exactly fit into every church setting throughout the country but their heart for the lost people of the UK will. This book is invaluable if we are to reach a culture/country with the love of Jesus and the hope of eternity.
Read more HERE and get the ebook for just £6 until midday on Thursday. Use code ece0114 at the checkout.
Anyone who has been a Christian for any length of time will have experienced the pain of seeing people who had professed faith stop believing in Jesus. When I was at university, my Christian Union was very encouraged because a first-year student went forward at an evangelistic event and said she had become a Christian. A few weeks later she said she wasn’t a Christian after all. Last year I was preaching at a church and met the ex-wife of a man who had seemed to be wonderfully converted. Having been a committed Christian and church member for several years, he tragically announced that he was no longer a believer and was leaving his wife.
The first thing we should do when our friends fall away is to pray for them and seek to share the gospel with them again, urging them to come back to Christ. They may be suffering a temporary crisis of faith, but even if they turn away for a long time, we should not give up hope for the possibility of their salvation. They may be as bewildered as everyone else is at their decision to renounce their faith, and value some help in unpicking the reasons why they have changed their thinking. But they still need to trust in Jesus as Lord just as much as anyone else who is not professing faith. We should continue to love them and demonstrate to them the truth of the gospel in our own life (see Jude v 22).... continue reading
How much time do you spend worrying about what the future holds? Will I stay healthy? What does my job or career hold in store for me? What will happen if ...? The look of the future often affects how we feel at this point in time. A bright future making us feel happy, content and lively (a total feel good factor you might say) whereas an uncertain future can bring completely the opposite feelings.
If you are worried about your future… or if your future doesn't seem to make any difference to your now… or if you simply want to get more excited about where you will spend eternity, then have a read of Stephen Witmer's Eternity Changes Everything.
In this book, Witmer lifts up our eyes to see beyond the “now” that presses in on us to what is eternal. More than that, he lifts up our eyes to see the eternal God in the magnificence of his redeeming purposes. What encouragement this brings to the spiritually weary and what challenge it brings to those tempted to fall sleep amidst the buzz and plenty of our modern world! This treatment of deep, biblical themes is fresh, pastoral, and stimulating.
Read more and get the book HERE for just £2.50 until midday Monday. Use code hece0714 at the checkout.
