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One fateful starless night, 17-year-old Ira Wagler got up at 2 AM, left a scribbled note under his pillow, packed all of his earthly belongings into in a little black duffel bag, and walked away from his home in the Amish settlement of Bloomfield, Iowa. Now, in this heartwarming memoir, Ira paints a vivid portrait of Amish life - from his childhood days on the family farm, his Rumspringa rite of passage at age 16, to his ultimate decision to leave the Amish Church for good at age 26.

You can't put it into words, but something is happening to you. Your stomach churns, your heart aches, and the tension in your marriage is making you feel weary and a little crazy. The constant criticism, disrespect, cruelty, deceit, and gross indifference are eroding your confidence and breaking your spirit. For any woman caught in an emotionally destructive marriage, Leslie Vernick offers a personalized path forward.

In the overlooked moments and routines of our day, we can become aware of God's presence in surprising ways. How do we embrace the sacred in the ordinary and the ordinary in the sacred? Framed around one ordinary day, this book explores daily life through the lens of liturgy, small practices, and habits that form us. Each chapter looks at something - making the bed, brushing her teeth, losing her keys - that the author does every day. Come and discover the holiness of your every day.

It's easy for American Christians to forget how Jesus said his followers would actually live, what their new lifestyle would actually look like. They would, he said, leave behind security, money, convenience, even family for him. They would abandon everything for the gospel. They would take up their crosses daily...BUT WHO DO YOU KNOW WHO LIVES LIKE THAT? DO YOU?

Life isn't always easy for women today! In the shuffle of so many responsibilities, it's easy to lose focus on pursuing godliness in every task. That's why a woman must train herself to reflect on everything she encounters and determine whether or not it encourages holiness. Her character, relationships, ministry, even her soul - all need to be examined and ultimately surrendered to God before she can develop the godly character she so desperately wants.

Have you ever wondered why we Christians do what we do for church every Sunday morning? Why do we "dress up" for church? Why does the pastor preach a sermon each week? Why do we have pews, steeples, choirs, and seminaries? This volume reveals the startling truth: most of what Christians do in present-day churches is not rooted in the New Testament, but in pagan culture and rituals developed long after the death of the apostles.

This book helps listeners develop practices that will result in deep, formative, and faithful reading so they can contribute to the flourishing of their communities and cultivate their own spiritual and intellectual depth. The authors present reading as a remedy for three prevalent cultural vices—distraction, hostility, and consumerism—that impact the possibility of formative reading. Deep Reading provides resources for engaging in formative and culturally subversive reading practices that teach listeners how to resist vices, love virtue, and desire the good.

Welcome to the wilderness - the place between receiving a promise from God and seeing it come to pass. God uses the wilderness to prepare and equip you for your destiny. Contrary to what many may think, getting through this season isn’t just a matter of waiting on God. You have a part to play in navigating through it. And if you don’t want to waste time wandering in circles, it’s important to learn what that is. Author John Bevere equips you with key biblical insights and profound stories that will help you navigate your dry or difficult seasons and step into all that God has for you.

Scripture reveals that the great business of life is to glorify God by enjoying Him forever. In this paradigm-shattering work, John Piper reveals that the debate between duty and delight doesn't truly exist. Delight is our duty. Join him as he unveils stunning, life-impacting truths you saw in the Bible but never dared to believe.

It's unnerving, isn't it? When our faith feels ungrounded, untethered . . . unreal. When our certainty is adrift, as though an undercurrent has pulled us away from shore into the deep, into the darkness. And if this is you—if you're in a dark night of the soul—please know that you are not alone. (And you are not as far away from safety as you may feel or fear.) The night is not your enemy. In fact, the night is necessary. Revered author, speaker, and mentor Dr. Alicia Britt Chole offers a groundbreaking perspective that reveals spiritual disillusionment as an unexpected friend.

Being a leader means working with people, and that's not always easy! Whether in your office, church, neighborhood, or elsewhere, your interpersonal relationships can make or break you as a leader. That's why it's so important to be a "people person" and develop your skills in tapping that most precious of all resources: People.

Reflecting on 40 years of matrimony, John Piper exalts the biblical meaning of marriage over its emotion, exhorting couples to keep their covenant for all the best reasons. Even in the days when people commonly stayed married "'til death do us part," there has never been a generation whose view of marriage was high enough, says Pastor John Piper. That is all the more true in our casual times.

Who am I? It's a question we all ask ourselves at some point. Depending on the season we focus our identity on our job performance, marital status, personality type, or social network, among other options. However, there's a larger question to consider. Who does the Bible tell me I am in Christ? From the wisdom and perspective of insightful authors, we'll seek to answer this question by: exposing our false notions of identity; understanding the biblical truth of our identity in Christ; and reflecting on what it looks like to live in our new (and true) identity.

Many Christians have never understood the fear of the Lord, which builds passion and intimacy into their relationship with god and makes their lives real and pure. In this rerelease of his book, John Bevere dispels the false understanding of god. Understanding why and how to fear god is the beginning of knowing Him as He yearns to be known. In his lovingly confrontational style, Bevere challenges believers to reverence God anew in their worship, prayers, and daily living.

Many believers feel stunted in their Christian growth. We beat ourselves up over our failures and, in the process, pull away from God because we subconsciously believe He tallies our defects and hangs His head in disappointment. In this new edition - now with a foreword by Michael W. Smith, testimony by Rich Mullins and the author's own epilogue, "Ragamuffin Ten Years Later," Brennan Manning reminds us that nothing could be further from the truth.

Biblical womanhood - the belief that God designed women to be submissive wives, virtuous mothers, and joyful homemakers - pervades North American Christianity. From choices about careers to roles in local churches to relationship dynamics, this belief shapes the everyday lives of evangelical women. Yet biblical womanhood isn't biblical, says Baylor University historian Beth Allison Barr. It was born in a series of clearly definable historical moments.

Following the Sermon on the Mount, this follow-up to The Good and Beautiful God guides us to look behind character flaws and to replace our false beliefs with Jesus' narratives about life in the kingdom of God.

In his new book, When a Jew Rules the World, Richardson paints a picture of what that 1,000-year reign will be like, along the way blow-torching the notion that gentile Christians have "replaced" the Jews and Israel as the people of promise. Richardson lays out the tragic history of anti-Semitism within the church from the very beginning in what may be the most thorough repudiation of what has become known as "Replacement Theology", or, as Richardson calls it, "Supersessionism".

This world is no friend to grace. God has given us some resources, however. As we grow in character qualities like hope, patience, repentance and joy, we ill grow in our ability to persevere. The biblical passages in these studies offer encouragement to continue in the path Christ has set forth for us.

Andy Crouch unleashes a stirring manifesto calling Christians to be culture makers. For too long, Christians have had an insufficient view of culture and have waged misguided "culture wars." But we must reclaim the cultural mandate to be the creative cultivators that God designed us to be. Culture is what we make of the world, both in creating cultural artifacts as well as in making sense of the world around us. By making chairs and omelets, languages and laws, we participate in the good work of culture making.