Good For Evil Or Love To Enemies

You cannot make it without God’s mercy. Do we just need God’s grace in dark and shameful moments? Are prayers for mercy only for those times when we really mess up? Jonathan Parnell says we need God’s mercy all the time. In fact, contrary to many church cultures, Parnell shows that asking God for mercy should be as regular as asking God for our daily bread. There’s no doubt that David was in a terrible predicament when he first prayed the words of Psalm 51. It was a dark and shameful moment in the Bible, and one so dark and shameful it seldom feels relevant to us today. But David’s most desperate prayer is really a prayer for all of us—and not just for our worst moments, but for our every moment. In these pages, you'll discover: how to pray a daily, memorable prayer derived from Psalm 51 how to practice daily repentance and soul care how to pursue God and experience his joy in the Christian life This is God’s mercy, and it’s Mercy for Today.

for every healthy tree bears good fruit --; Demand #28 : love your enemies--lead them to the truth --; Demand #29 : love your enemies--pray for those who abuse you --; Demand #30 : love your enemies--do good to those who hate you, give to the one who asks --; Demand #31 : love your enemies to show that you are children of God --; Demand #32 : love your neighbor as yourself,

An extraordinary true story of grace, mercy, and the redemptive power of God When her father was murdered, Laurie Coombs and her family sought justice—and found it. Yet, despite the swift punishment of the killer, Laurie found herself increasingly full of pain, bitterness, and anger she couldn’t control. It was the call to love and forgive her father’s murderer that set her, the murderer, and several other inmates on the journey that would truly change their lives forever. This compelling story of transformation will touch the deepest wounds and show how God can redeem what seems unredeemable.

Explore this stunning quality of God’s grace: It never ends! In this revision of a foundational work, John Piper reveals how grace is not only God’s undeserved gift to us in the past, but also God’s power to make good happen for us today, tomorrow, and forever. True life for the follower of Jesus really is a moment-by-moment trust that God is dependable and fulfills his promises. This is living by faith in future grace, which provides God's mercy, provision, and wisdom—everything we need—to accomplish his good plans for us. In Future Grace, chapter by chapter—one for each day of the month—Piper reveals how cherishing the promises of God helps break the power of persistent sin issues like anxiety, despondency, greed, lust, bitterness, impatience, pride, misplaced shame, and more. Ultimate joy, peace, and hope in life and death are found in a confident, continual awareness of the reality of future grace.

Theology is the study of God, what He has done, is doing, and will do in the world. And it's not just for those with formal education or those who work at your church. It's for you in your everyday moments, questions, and decisions. It's for the big and little, the exciting and mundane. Our theology is the basis of our faith and touches every part of our existence. In this 8-session study, explore the essential doctrines of Scripture, God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, humanity, salvation, the church, and the end times to know God more deeply through these foundational truths. Features: Leader helps to guide questions and discussions within small groups Personal study segments to complete between 8 weeks of group sessions Daily foundational Bible verses for memorization Additional resources to support and reinforce weekly study Benefits: Worship with a greater understanding of who God is and His work in the world. Increase your ability to discern between truth and false teaching. Examine foundational truths to better understand what you believe and deepen your relationship with God.

Jesus commands us to love our neighbors. So why are so many Christians taught to fear their neighbors? The American church is known as a people who are afraid, who have been nurtured through fear into hatred, and who have moved from hatred to violence--or at least to neglect. This fear, too often lived out boldly in the name of Jesus, is a false religion. God instructs us to welcome strangers. We are not to withhold hospitality or help from anyone in need. So why do we fear strangers, especially those needing hospitality, afraid that their presence may threaten what we have? Jesus taught us to love our enemies. We are to pray for those who actively harm us. Instead, we create enemies in our minds, seeing anyone who thinks, believes, looks, or lives differently from us as dangerous, a threat to our way of living. The Christian community exists to declare and demonstrate God's love and to follow Jesus in practicing love over fear, even in unsafe times and places. It's time to reclaim our brave fear of God and risk transformative love for the sake of our neighbors, the strangers among us, and our enemies. We are people of the Kingdom. Fearing Bravely teaches us that we have nothing to fear. Instead, we can respond to our fear problem with a brave love that emerges from choosing to let our fear of God overcome our fear of everything else. Catherine McNiel writes with conviction, wisely guiding us to recognize our fear and, with God's help, not let it limit us to love courageously all who are among us.

The classic collection of sixteen sermons preached and compiled by Dr. King As Dr. King prepared for the Birmingham campaign in early 1963, he drafted the final sermons for Strength to Love, a volume of his best-known homilies. King had begun working on the sermons during a fortnight in jail in July 1962. Having been arrested for holding a prayer vigil outside Albany City Hall, King and Ralph Abernathy shared a jail cell for fifteen days that was, according to King, ‘‘dirty, filthy, and ill-equipped’’ and “the worse I have ever seen.” While behind bars, he spent uninterrupted time preparing the drafts for classic sermons such as “Loving Your Enemies,” “Love in Action,” and “Shattered Dreams,” and continued to work on the volume after his release. A Gift of Love includes these classic sermons, along with two new preachings. Collectively they present King’s fusion of Christian teachings and social consciousness, and promote his prescient vision of love as a social and political force for change.

The publication of the King James version of the Bible, translated between 1603 and 1611, coincided with an extraordinary flowering of English literature and is universally acknowledged as the greatest influence on English-language literature in history. Now, world-class literary writers introduce the book of the King James Bible in a series of beautifully designed, small-format volumes. The introducers' passionate, provocative, and personal engagements with the spirituality and the language of the text make the Bible come alive as a stunning work of literature and remind us of its overwhelming contemporary relevance.

Renowned in the blogosphere as The Anchoress and as Catholic Portal editor of the popular Patheos.com, Elizabeth Scalia offers a powerful critique of the “gods” we worship today, reminding readers that life’s deepest desires can be satisfied only in Christ. Strange Gods, Scalia's debut book, is packed full of the iconoclastic vim and vigor that has won her a large, faithful Internet following. She presents readers with a surprising look at the ways in which modern people still commit the sin of idolatry in their everyday lives. While literal golden calves no longer dot the landscape, Scalia describes how legitimate loves become obsessively twisted into idols. She unmasks idolatry in a number of everyday experiences—friendships that become needy or possessive, commitments political and religious that grow so intense they lead to hatred of others, to name a few—and points to the incarnation of Christ and authentic worship of him as a way out of idolatry and into peace, happiness, and love.