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Take Care of My Sheep
0$5,07This first part of The Pastors’ Manual deals with what it means to be a pastor. Jethro’s first advice to Moses is: ‘You must be the people’s representative before God’ (Exodus 18:19). The pastor is called to carry his congregation to God in prayer and at the same time represent God to the church. This is a special position, in which the pastor speaks on behalf of both the church and God. The pastor’s entire life is marked by this responsibility. In this book we will look at how this ministry affects his spiritual life and his daily existence. We will also consider the task itself, typical pitfalls, and how to persevere as a pastor. While reading and studying this chapter, never forget the promise of our Lord in 1 Thessalonians 5:24: “The One who calls you is faithful, and He will do it”!
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Passion for Preaching
0$5,07The second advice Jethro gives his son-in-law Moses is: “Teach them the decrees and laws”. In our contemporary language this means: preach to them the Word of God. Teaching and preaching are intertwined in the Bible and so Moses has the task of preaching. Today preaching is seen as one of the main tasks of a pastor. When the congregation has gathered to worship and listen to the Word of God, the preacher is there to explain and apply God’s words to His people. In preaching, God’s words as they are written down in the Bible come alive. In order to preach biblically and relevantly, the pastor needs to dig deep into the Word, bring it close to the hearts and lives of the people. He has to make sure that the Word of the Lord has touched his own heart as well. This part will show you how to do so.
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Wa Anta Ya Azizi
0$6,76What can we find in the underprivileged fringe outskirts? We find poverty, misery, boredom, tiresome and poor services. However, if we lived in such a place, we could find a positive value hidden in all of this negativity. We might find simple people, transparent souls and a kind of deep and abyssal wisdom, which give life a meaning. The world of underprivileged is a place of joy hidden behind sadness- joy that is disconnected from technology and means of comfort. However, it is generated from inside- from the heart of humanity.
This book narrates stories from one of those underprivileged places in Homs (Syria), where people are famous for sense of humor. They are social, simple and express their feelings and experiences with simple words, but deep meanings. Therefore, the stories here are theirs, and I retold them with a bit of fantasy and a lot of literature. These stories describe their misery on one hand, and their hopes and optimism on the other. They include useful experiences to all people, no matter which social class they belong to.
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Qal Arrawi
0$6,76Stories are obligatory passages to express facts that go beyond words. They are a gate of respect through which man can look at the horizons of the secret and meaning of existence. A gate of respect because stories do not push or try to convince anyone, they rather present an event, and leave to the reader or listener the freedom to understand and decide.
This book is like a garden of stories, where you can pick fruits, sometimes easily and in others you need to exert some effort. You may find inedible stories, simply because they are colorful flowers, which covers the garden in beauty, so the spectator can enjoy its presence before leaving the place.
At the end of each story, a question or a piece of thought is included for thinking and devotion.
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Encounters with Jesus
0$10,14One of the biggest obstacles for people to accept or believe in Christianity is that they think they know all about it already. After all, hasn’t it been around for thousands of years? Doesn’t everybody know what Christians believe?
But if we look at Jesus’ encounters with various men and women during his life, we will find some of our assumptions challenged. These conversations were not about personal sins or specific religious views and practices, nor were they a set of talking points or a political platform. Instead, in these encounters we see him meeting people at the point of their big, unspoken questions: Who are we, and why are we here? Why be a good person; why love instead of hate? What’s wrong with the world—And what, if anything, can make it right?
The Gospels are full of encounters that made a profound impact on those who spoke with Jesus in this way. In this 10-part ebook series, available as a hardcover book in Fall 2013, Timothy Keller explores these encounters and how they can still address our questions and doubts today.
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Teach Me Your Way
0$5,07This part is about the third word of advice Jethro offers Moses, in which he says: ‘show them the way they are to live and how they are to behave’ (Exodus 18:20). Here, Jethro is talking about the task of teaching the people of God. Teaching focuses on the practical application in daily life of that which has been preached. In the Bible, teaching always centres on practising what we preach.
In the worldwide church, this teaching is known as discipleship. How can we live our lives as disciples of Jesus? How can we grow in following Christ? What does it mean to be a child of the Father? These things require knowledge of what the faith is really all about, and instruction as to how to put this knowledge into practice day by day. Discipleship combines our creed with our conduct; it deals with what we believe and what we do. That is what this part of the Pastors’ Manual is all about: what do you teach your people in order to help them grow as disciples of Jesus. You can present the many questions in this section to your congregation when you teach them these lessons and you can also use them to go deeper into these lessons yourself.
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Simply Good News
0$10,14The Gospel means good news. But if the message has been around for 2,000 years, what makes it significant today? What’s so “good” about stories involving damnation, violence, and a God who sacrifices his only son?
Noted Bible scholar N.T. Wright shows us how Christians today have lost sight of what the “good news” of the gospel really is. In Simply Good News, he takes us back in time to reveal how the people of the first-century—the gospel’s original audience—would have received Jesus’ message. He offer a clear and thoughtful analysis of what the “good news” really is, and applies it to our lives today, revealing its power to transform us.
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Vanishing Grace
0$13,52Philip Yancey has been asking this all his life as a journalist. His perennial question is more relevant now than ever. Research shows that favorable opinions of Christianity have plummeted drastically―and opinions of Evangelicals have taken even deeper dives.
So what’s so good about the Good News?
In his landmark audiobook, What’s So Amazing about Grace, Yancey issued a call for Christians to be as grace-filled in their behavior as they are in declaring their beliefs. He now aims this book at Christians again, showing them how they have lost respect, influence, and reputation in a newly post-Christian culture. Exploring what may have contributed to hostility toward Evangelicals―especially in their mixing of faith and politics instead of embracing more grace-filled ways of presenting the gospel―Yancey offers illuminating stories of how faith can be expressed in ways that disarm even the most cynical critics. Then he explores what is Good News and what is worth preserving in a culture that thinks it has rejected Christian faith.
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When The Internet Goes Down
0$8,45The existence of pain and evil has baffled people in the world over the centuries, at various scientific, cultural, philosophical and theological levels. It is a universal dilemma which is difficult to understand. What is even more complicated when one tries to reconcile this dilemma with the holiness of God and His love, care and mercy for humans.
We may wonder: is it possible that God is pleased with the presence of evil, pain and suffering in the lives of human beings, who created them in his image? Did God create the world and abandoned it? How can we reconcile between God’s sovereignty and the spread of injustice, corruption, evil and tyranny?
This book presents a study of the Book of Habakkuk, and it is particularly important these days considering what the Arab world is passing through.
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When The Internet Goes Down
0$8,45The existence of pain and evil has baffled people in the world over the centuries, at various scientific, cultural, philosophical and theological levels. It is a universal dilemma which is difficult to understand. What is even more complicated when one tries to reconcile this dilemma with the holiness of God and His love, care and mercy for humans.
We may wonder: is it possible that God is pleased with the presence of evil, pain and suffering in the lives of human beings, who created them in his image? Did God create the world and abandoned it? How can we reconcile between God’s sovereignty and the spread of injustice, corruption, evil and tyranny?
This book presents a study of the Book of Habakkuk, and it is particularly important these days considering what the Arab world is passing through.
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Prayer
0$15,21Christians are taught that prayer is the main way to experience God. But aside from learning prayers by rote, few receive guidance in how to make the most of this essential Christian act. In Prayer, renowned pastor Timothy Keller shows us how to make prayer genuinely meaningful.
With his trademark insight and energy, Keller offers brilliant and inspirational biblical guidance, as well as prayers for specific situations, such as dealing with grief, love, and forgiveness. Using great model prayers from the Bible and great Christian teachers throughout history, he discusses ways to make prayers more personal and powerful, and how to establish a practice of prayer that works for each reader.
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The Listening Life
0$11,83
Christianity Today’s 2017 Book of the Year Award – Spiritual Formation Logos Association Bookstore Award.
“Be quick to listen, slow to speak.” ―James 1:19
How would our lives change if we approached every experience with the intention of listening first? In this noisy, distracting world, it is difficult to truly hear. People talk past each other, eager to be heard but somehow deaf to what is being said. Listening is an essential skill for healthy relationships, both with God and with other people. But it is more than that: listening is a way of life.
Adam McHugh places listening at the heart of our spirituality, our relationships and our mission in the world. God himself is the God who hears, and we too can learn to hear what God may be saying through creation, through Scripture, through people. By applying a posture of listening, we become more attentive and engaged with those around us.
Listening shapes us and equips us to be more attuned to people in pain and more able to minister to those in distress. Our lives are qualitatively different―indeed, better―when we become listeners. Heed the call to the listening life, and hear what God is doing in you and the world.
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Emotionally Healthy Spirituality
0$11,83Peter Scazzero learned the hard way: you can’t be spiritually mature while remaining emotionally immature. Even though he was pastor of a growing church, he did what most people do:
· Avoid conflict in the name of Christianity
· Ignore his anger, sadness, and fear
· Use God to run from God
· Live without boundaries
Eventually God awakened him to a biblical integration of emotional health, a relationship with Jesus, and the classic practices of contemplative spirituality. It created nothing short of a spiritual revolution, utterly transforming him and his church.
In this book Scazzero outlines his journey and the signs of emotionally unhealthy spirituality. Then he provides seven biblical, reality-tested ways to break through to the revolutionary life Christ meant for you.
“The combination of emotional health and contemplative spirituality,” he says, “unleashes the Holy Spirit inside us so that we might experientially
know the power of an authentic life in Christ.”
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You are What You Love
0$11,83You are what you love.
But you might not love what you think.
In this book, award-winning author James K. A. Smith shows that who and what we worship fundamentally shape our hearts. And while we desire to shape culture, we are not often aware of how culture shapes us. We might not realize the ways our hearts are being taught to love rival gods instead of the One for whom we were made. Smith helps readers recognize the formative power of culture and the transformative possibilities of Christian practices. He explains that worship is the “imagination station” that incubates our loves and longings so that our cultural endeavors are indexed toward God and his kingdom. This is why the church and worshiping in a local community of believers should be the hub and heart of Christian formation and discipleship.
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Surprised by Joy
0$11,83The Shape of My Early Life is a partial autobiography describing Lewis’ conversion to Christianity. The book overall contains less detail concerning specific events than typical autobiographies. This is because his purpose in writing wasn’t primarily historical. His aim was to identify & describe the events surrounding his accidental discovery of & consequent search for the phenomenon he labelled “Joy”. This word was the best translation he could make of the German idea of Sehnsucht, longing. That isn’t to say the book is devoid of information about his life. He recounts his early years with a measure of amusement sometimes mixed with pain.
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Grace Notes
0$15,21” “There is no writer in the evangelical world that I admire and appreciate more.” – Billy Graham Philip Yancey’s words—captured in his many bestselling books—have influenced the lives of millions of readers by strengthening their faith, building their hope, sparking their creativity, and challenging their comfort zones. If you’re one of those readers, you know personally how his insights have affected your mind and heart. And if you’re new to Yancey, you’re in for a life-altering experience. These meditations—all drawn from the beloved and bestselling writings of the author—will take you through an entire year of Yancey’s insight and imagination, covering a broad range of topics: • How to rediscover God through the wonders of nature, music, and romantic love • Why grace means you can’t do anything to make God love you more or less • What happens when you cut through preconceptions to encounter the “real” Jesus • How to renew your understanding and practice of prayer • Where you can see God in unexpected people and places • How to cope when life crashes in around you Every day, experience the best from a beloved author who, with freshness, clarity, and energy, has so brilliantly articulated God’s wonderful but mysterious relationship with you. “
