Accused of a crime she didn't commit, Kelly Carmichael skips bail and heads to Indigo Springs. It's a shot in the dark, but with her freedom at stake she has no choice if she wants answers. When forest ranger Chase Bradford starts asking questions, Kelly tells him she's a stranger passing through. That's the first lie. Now she has to keep lying. She's walking a dangerous tightrope…especially when she starts falling for the single father. How will Chase react when he finds out who she really is? Will the honorable guy feel duty-bound to bring her in? Or will he stand by her? If only she had the courage to trust him with the truth….
Growing up the son of agnostics, John Koessler saw a Catholic church on one end of the street and a Baptist on the other. In the no-man’s land between the two, this curious outside wondered about the God they worshipped—and began a lifelong search to comprehend the grace and mystery of God. A Stranger in the House of God addresses fundamental questions and struggles faced by spiritual seekers and mature believers. Like a contemporary Pilgrim’s Progress, it traces the author’s journey and explores his experiences with both charismatic and evangelical Christianity. It also describes his transformation from religious outsider to ordained pastor. John Koessler provides a poignant and often humorous window into the interior of the soul as he describes his journey from doubt and struggle with the church to personal faith
A pioneering look at the implications of Christian faith for foreign language education. It has become clear in recent years that reflection on foreign language education involves more than questioning which methods work best. This new volume carries current discussions of the value-laden nature of foreign language teaching into new territory by exploring its spiritual and moral dimensions. David Smith and Barbara Carvill show how the Christian faith sheds light on the history, aims, content, and methods of foreign language education. They also propose a new approach to the field based on the Christian understanding of hospitality.
especially those who have sensed that the denial of the mother's voice has played a critical role in their own self-alienation and its melancholy moods, will discover that this book has much to offer them as well." Donald Capps, Princeton Theological Seminary --Book Jacket.
“Wealth without work Pleasure without conscience Science without humanity Knowledge without character Politics without principle Commerce without morality Worship without sacrifice. https://vidjambov.blogspot.com/2023/01/book-inventory-vladimir-djambov-talmach.html … The train is our life, lived in artificial conditions, devoid of any living breath and true joy, fenced off by various kinds of soft and hard partitions and double frames from the world of God. We look at this world through glass, admire its beauty, but we preferred it to cramped plastic cabins, foam rubber beds, suitcases, bales, shaking to the silly grumbling of the radio ... /// And so, just as for the completeness of reality, a flat picture lacked spatial depth and this space itself would lack the passage of time, so for all this world around us, with all its beauty and wealth, with all our many deeds, searches in it requires one more dimension, one direction, movement, one more essential depth - this is the entry into the spiritual world, the approach to God, the union with Him by grace. Without this deepening, or rather, elevation in the degrees of spirituality, our life remains the same flat bright picture without space for life - one dream. Without this ascent into another world, our being is just a frozen, dead space devoid of life, like a motionless sculpture - again, one illusion, again just a landscape running through the glass, at which we gaze with boredom from the cramped compartment of a passenger carriage. /// A Christian does not quickly and easily achieve true love for God. Here is what Saint Bishop Ignatius says about this: /// “Quite often we begin to serve God by means of such a method that is contrary to the ordinance of God, forbidden by God, which brings harm to our souls, not good. So, some, having read in the Holy Scriptures that love is the highest of virtues, that it is God, they begin and intensify immediately to develop in their hearts the feeling of love, by them to dissolve their prayers, divine contemplation, all their actions. God turns away from this unclean sacrifice. It requires love from a person, but true, spiritual, holy love, not dreamy, carnal, defiled by pride and voluptuousness. It is impossible to love God otherwise than with a heart purified and sanctified by Divine grace. Love for God is a gift from God: it is poured into the souls of God's true servants by the action of the Holy Spirit. On the contrary, that love, which belongs to our natural properties, is in sinful damage that encompasses the entire human race, the entire being of every person, all the properties of every person ... /// A Prayer [to] St. Bishop Ignatius: /// O Lord! /// Grant us to see our sins, so that our mind, drawn fully to the attention of our own faults, ceases to see the faults of our neighbors - and would thus see all our neighbors as good. /// Grant us to behold, in the light of Thy Grace, the various ailments living in us, which destroy the spiritual movements in the heart, and introduce into it blood and carnal movements, hostile to the Kingdom of God. Grant us the great gift of repentance, preceded and born of the great gift of the seeing of our sins. /// Protect us with these great gifts from the abysses of self-delusion, which opens in the soul from its unnoticed and incomprehensible sinfulness, and is born of the action of voluptuousness and vanity the soul does not notice and does not understand. /// Preserve us with these great gifts on our way to You, and grant us to reach You, who calls on sinners who are aware of being such and rejects those who recognize themselves as righteous; /// may we forever praise Thee in eternal bliss, the One True God, the Redeemer of the captives, the Savior of those perished. Amen.
What is a church? This can be a difficult question to answer and Christians have offered a variety of perspectives. Gregg Allison thus explores and synthesizes all that Scripture affirms about the new covenant people of God, capturing a full picture of the biblical church. He covers the topics of the church's identity and characteristics; its growth through purity, unity, and discipline; its offices and leadership structures; its ordinances of baptism and the Lord's Supper; and its ministries. Here is a rich approach to ecclesiology consisting of sustained doctrinal reflection and wise, practical application. Part of the Foundations of Evangelical Theology series.
Meet the "Seven Deadly Sins" The seven Sinclair brothers and sisters live for scandal and delight in disgrace . . . until their father decrees that they must reform. Propriety has never come easily, but now they have no choice. Marry in haste . . . or regret in poverty! The Sinclairs of Scotland are known throughout society as the Seven Deadly Sins. Cast out by their father and denied their inheritance unless they mend their wild ways, they travel to London to seek respectability. No member of the clan is more scandalous than Sterling Sinclair, the Marquess of Blackburn. The ladies of the ton are powerless to withstand his rakish charms . . . until Miss Isobel Carington comes along. Ten thousand pounds if she marries Sinclair! Isobel is horrified to learn that's the amount wagered at White's Club—and now all of London is eagerly betting on her future! She's already publicly spurned the marquess, a man she hardly knows, but she's sure he is up to something, as he launches a bold campaign of seduction anyway. But soon she is surprised to learn there is much more to this man than reckless adventure and bad behavior . . . and, against her will, she begins to relish the thrill of sinning with this stranger . . .
A tour de force, voice-driven debut that examines how one woman finally found the middle ground between Heaven and Hell--an NPR Best Book of the Year. As a young girl, Maggie Rowe took the idea of salvation very seriously. Growing up in a moderately religious household, her fear of eternal damnation turned into a childhood terror that drove her to become an outrageously dedicated Born-again Christian —regularly slinging Bible verses in cutthroat scripture memorization competitions and assaulting strangers at shopping malls with the “good news” that they were going to hell. Finally, at nineteen, crippled by her fear, she checked herself in to an Evangelical psychiatric facility. And that is where her journey really began. Surrounded by a ragtag cast of characters, including a former biker meth-head struggling with anger management issues, a set of identical twins tormented by erotic fantasies, a World War II veteran and artist of denial who insists that he’s only “locked up for a tune-up,” and a warm and upbeat chronic depressive who becomes the author’s closest ally, Maggie launches a campaign to, in the words of Martin Luther, "Sin bravely in order to know the forgiveness of God."
