GENUINE AND WHOLESOME SPIRITUALITY This is the goal of all Christian living. It sounds so simple, doesn't it? Perhaps the principle may be, but living by the principle is another matter altogether. In Balancing the Christian Life, Charles Ryrie reminds you that 'the Bible must be the guide and test for all our experiences in the spiritual life ...and if any experience fails to pass that test, it must be discarded.' He warns that 'an unbalanced application of the doctrines related to spirituality will result in an unbalanced Christian life.' Ryrie examines numerous key issues of spirituality, including The old and the new life Sanctification Using your gifts Routine faithfulness Wiles of the Devil Temptation Confessing and forgiving For more than 25 years, Balancing the Christian Life has been changing lives worldwide. Take time to read this classic study--and allow it to change yours.

The resident theologian of the Brownsville Revival reveals the key to empowered, passionate living--uncompromising, liberating holiness.

In the early 1900s, Starr Daily was a hardened criminal, the kind of man who seemed destined to spend his life behind bars. Everyone, including Starr himself, believed that he was beyond rehabilitation and without hope in this world. Then, like the poet once said, he was “touched by the Master's hand.” Where HATE had once been the driving force of his life, now LOVE ruled. The love of God changed Starr Daily; and as he learned to walk in that love, he changed his circumstances, the people around him, the prison institution, and the course of his life.Love Can Open Prison Doors does more than tell the story of how one man was changed by God's love. It opens the eyes of the reader to the limitless possibilities of what love can do.

C.2 COUNTY FUNDS. AMAZON. 08-10-2009. $10.00.

For 300 years, Franciscans were at the forefront of the spread of Catholicism in the New World. In the late seventeenth century, Franciscans developed a far-reaching, systematic missionary program in Spain and the Americas. After founding the first college of propaganda fide in the Mexican city of Querétaro, the Franciscan Order established six additional colleges in New Spain, ten in South America, and twelve in Spain. From these colleges Franciscans proselytized Indians in frontier territories as well as Catholics in rural and urban areas in eighteenth-century Spain and Spanish America. To Sin No More is the first book to study these colleges, their missionaries, and their multifaceted, sweeping missionary programs. By focusing on the recruitment of non-Catholics to Catholicism as well as the deepening of religious fervor among Catholics, David Rex Galindo shows how the Franciscan colleges expanded and shaped popular Catholicism in the eighteenth-century Spanish Atlantic world. This book explores the motivations driving Franciscan friars, their lives inside the colleges, their training, and their ministry among Catholics, an often-overlooked duty that paralleled missionary deployments. Rex Galindo argues that Franciscan missionaries aimed to reform or "reawaken" Catholic parishioners just as much as they sought to convert non-Christian Indians.

People have lost faith in all collective institutions: government, corporations, the media, and the church. We are in the midst of a spiritual disaster, a flood of biblical proportions, and house churches provide lifeboats for people who are seeking a more authentic, life-giving form of Christian community. Many people remember that the early church started in homes, but they don’t understand that house churches are still a legitimate and viable model today. House churches can create the intimacy so many people are hungry for. They can nurture life-changing discipleship for individuals and create justice-centered communities. Networked house churches can become truly diverse, multi-ethnic communities that spread the Gospel by emphasizing practices over programs. These communities de-center the preacher, opting instead for grassroots organizing, but they are not leaderless — they are leader-full. This book provides an alternative model for denominations and established churches to consider. It will help pastors reconnect with the traditions of community organizing, itinerant preaching, and discipleship training that sparked Methodism and other church movements in the United States. Church Comes Home offers alternative ways to look at some of the problems facing our church and our culture.

“If there were a Guinness Book of World Records entry for ‘amount of times having prayed the sinner’s prayer,’ I’m pretty sure I’d be a top contender,” says pastor and author J. D. Greear. He struggled for many years to gain an assurance of salvation and eventually learned he was not alone. “Lack of assurance” is epidemic among evangelical Christians. In Stop Asking Jesus Into Your Heart, J. D. shows that faulty ways of present- ing the gospel are a leading source of the confusion. Our presentations may not be heretical, but they are sometimes misleading. The idea of “asking Jesus into your heart” or “giving your life to Jesus” often gives false assurance to those who are not saved—and keeps those who genuinely are saved from fully embracing that reality. Greear unpacks the doctrine of assurance, showing that salvation is a posture we take to the promise of God in Christ, a posture that begins at a certain point and is maintained for the rest of our lives. He also answers the tough questions about assurance: What exactly is faith? What is repentance? Why are there so many warnings that seem to imply we can lose our salvation? Such issues are handled with respect to the theological rigors they require, but Greear never loses his pastoral sensitivity or a communication technique that makes this message teachable to a wide audience from teens to adults.