Grace & Mercy: A Devotional Journey was created from a desire for a fresh look at discipleship within the modern, busy church. The book explores the progression of the seed planted in a sermon: how truth gets watered, germinates, sprouts, grows and eventually bears fruit. Grace & Mercy demonstrates how to have a nourishing and flourishing spiritual life. A soft plot line meanders throughout and the book gently explores themes of communication, discipleship, positive expectations, and diligence. Each chapter includes devotional content for individual readers and exploratory questions for group discussion. Readers can expect to: • Discover the value of slowing down, paying attention, and soaking in the wisdom of biblical truth expressed each week in the Sunday sermon • Understand how to live a more contemplative life • Grow in their faith from week to week • Improve awareness in the way God is moving through the people who are in their lives • Be stirred up toward love, gentleness, and goodness toward one another "Pictures and stories and memories are three of God's sweet gifts to help us visualize his truths and strengthen our hearts. Katie and Chris use all of these to paint little portraits that add color and depth to how I understand and experience God." --Kirk Freeman, Lead Pastor, CrossBridge Community Church, San Antonio, Texas "My wife, Beth, is often suggesting daily devotionals for me, but I just can't get into them. She was surprised to see me devouring Grace & Mercy and asked, 'What's different about this one?' I paused a moment, looked up and said, 'I can relate to these. Let's gather some friends and dig into it.' Grace & Mercy provides an interesting and engaging tool to study the Bible." --Jim Lenaway, Pastor, B-Free Church, Bradford, Pennsylvania "Grace & Mercy presents an honest, encouraging look at life with its disquieting issues. Katie welcomed me to sit beside her "knee to knee" with Jesus, the Wonderful Counselor, then to journey onward, with Him leading the way. --Chuck Rizer, Lieutenant Colonel, Army Chaplain (retired), author of Downwind of Thunder "This devotional is wonderfully refreshing and special. I love the practical, chatty, relatable style that makes recognizing God's presence and love in our lives so accessible. If you want to benefit from experiencing God in your everyday life, Grace & Mercy is for you." --Rob Davis, Founding Pastor, Vineyard Church, Hopkinton Massachusetts From Loving Healing Press www.LHPress.com
Where’s God when times are hard? He’s winking to let us know He’s with us! Life is mysterious and cryptic. It defies explanation, especially in times of suffering and distress. We wonder, Where is God in all of this? He’s with us—and the Scriptures wink to show us His redemptive activity unfolding in our lives. In Winks from Scripture, Chris Palmer takes you through familiar New Testament stories and points out unfamiliar features that have the effect of a punchline. When the Scriptures wink, you’ll be surprised, delighted, and challenged not to give up hope. “Biblical stories are loaded with mystery,” Chris says. “That mystery keeps us asking questions about the story’s details. In doing so, little ironies and nuances emerge that we hadn’t seen before. This is God winking at us, letting us know He’s there, guiding our lives.” In Winks from Scripture, you will: • Come to embrace mystery • Learn how to appreciate uncertainty and integrate it into a vibrant life of faith • Discover how God triumphs over suffering • Observe how the New Testament writers understood the Old Testament through Jesus • Renew your hope in God’s beautiful plan of creation and redemption Guided by careful scholarship and heartfelt, pastoral reflection, these thirty studies offer a fresh perspective to the most difficult questions of the Christian faith, certain to bring comfort to your soul.
Grace & Mercy: A Devotional Journey was created from a desire for a fresh look at discipleship within the modern, busy church. The book explores the progression of the seed planted in a sermon: how truth gets watered, germinates, sprouts, grows and eventually bears fruit. Grace & Mercy demonstrates how to have a nourishing and flourishing spiritual life. A soft plot line meanders throughout and the book gently explores themes of communication, discipleship, positive expectations, and diligence. Each chapter includes devotional content for individual readers and exploratory questions for group discussion. Readers can expect to: • Discover the value of slowing down, paying attention, and soaking in the wisdom of biblical truth expressed each week in the Sunday sermon • Understand how to live a more contemplative life • Grow in their faith from week to week • Improve awareness in the way God is moving through the people who are in their lives • Be stirred up toward love, gentleness, and goodness toward one another "Pictures and stories and memories are three of God's sweet gifts to help us visualize his truths and strengthen our hearts. Katie and Chris use all of these to paint little portraits that add color and depth to how I understand and experience God." --Kirk Freeman, Lead Pastor, CrossBridge Community Church, San Antonio, Texas "My wife, Beth, is often suggesting daily devotionals for me, but I just can't get into them. She was surprised to see me devouring Grace & Mercy and asked, 'What's different about this one?' I paused a moment, looked up and said, 'I can relate to these. Let's gather some friends and dig into it.' Grace & Mercy provides an interesting and engaging tool to study the Bible." --Jim Lenaway, Pastor, B-Free Church, Bradford, Pennsylvania "Grace & Mercy presents an honest, encouraging look at life with its disquieting issues. Katie welcomed me to sit beside her "knee to knee" with Jesus, the Wonderful Counselor, then to journey onward, with Him leading the way. --Chuck Rizer, Lieutenant Colonel, Army Chaplain (retired), author of Downwind of Thunder "This devotional is wonderfully refreshing and special. I love the practical, chatty, relatable style that makes recognizing God's presence and love in our lives so accessible. If you want to benefit from experiencing God in your everyday life, Grace & Mercy is for you." --Rob Davis, Founding Pastor, Vineyard Church, Hopkinton Massachusetts From Loving Healing Press www.LHPress.com
Chris was born in a typical Mid-western town in southern Michigan in 1951. His parents, returning from World War II, began building a life with their two children. As he grew older, Chris was driven by a restlessness that denied him any measure of peace or serenity. After years of odd jobs and geographic moves, he slipped into a subtle disrepair, ultimately sinking into a near irrevocable insanity on skid row, surviving on drugs and alcohol, missions, blood banks and strange women. Existing for many years in a small room deep within an abandoned tenement building, there appeared to be no inspiration for change. A most desperate condition, and one of which only divine intervention makes recovery possible, is when a person becomes a non-person. When someone loses interest in life, yet retains that vita, the spark forbidding a swift and deliberate self-destruction, one carries on but less?intact as a human being.
Pastor Chris does some really neat Bible Studies; when he taught one on the gospel stories that are unique to Luke, I thought he should write a book about it. He said yes, if I include my thought in it as well. The Young Pastor-Pastor Chris Halverson is currently the Pastor of St. Stephen Lutheran, South Plainfield, NJ. He came here directly from Seminary at the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia. Before that he was a Missionary in England and did an M. Phil. in Intertestamental Studies at the University of Cambridge (St. Edmund's College). The Not So Young Parishioner-Linda Nietman, a life long Lutheran is a retired Navy Nurse. She worked at the bedside and as a nursing instructor for 25 years. While she at one time considered the ministry, she had found her true calling as a nurse and as an active parishioner.
The Author of this book, Chris Briscoe, wrote this to help us all come closer to answering that great mystery, "Is there a God?" Chris invites us to approach this problem from a different angle. For example, when scientists discovered six billion chemical-codes written on our double-threads of DNA (the double-helix- "double- spiral staircase") - it forces us to ask the question, "How could nature have written all that code when nature does not have a mind - it does not have real intelligence but works according to commands, so how could nature have written all that code or even inspired itself to write the code; which our bodies need to build the trillions of molecular machinery our bodies need, let alone which the first supposed cell needed when it arrived here on the earth. Scientists, engineers and architects today acknowledge that those molecular machines are actually the epitome of perfectly design and function; therefore, they are the strongest evidence that there must be a most intelligent mind and molecular scientist behind nature to have been inspired and designed every organism. Chris' premise is that when we look into the world of the cell and even the most "rudimentary" organism, it reveals a level of design element and complexity which could not have possibily originated in nature, alone. In other words, there must be a mind behind nature, the most intelligent molecular mind, just as there has to be a programmer behind computer program made. (Book's Index: Christian Apologetics)
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