Scripture
Luke 9:62
Genesis 1:27
Genesis 2:18
Romans 5:8
Isaiah 40:28-31
More Like this from The Busy Mom
Dare to be a Daniel: Talking to Your Kids About Standing for the Lord – This is startlingly new territory for parents: explaining why a man is being celebrated as a woman on the cover of a magazine is not something we’re used to talking about. Here’s the thing: If we don’t set a place for the truth of Scripture at the table of our children’s hearts, the world will set out a feast all it’s own.
A Spiritual Crisis and a Crossroad: How Should Christians Respond? – Looking around, it’s clear that many Christians have unbuckled the belt of truth under enormous pressure from the culture. Many pastors have begun exchanging the truth of God’s Word for the easy “truth” of the world in an effort to be “loving,” except that denying the truth of God is never loving. I have to wonder if those pastors who will not stand on the authority of Scripture care more about winning a popularity contest than they do about speaking the truth.
And so, we find ourselves in a full-blown spiritual crisis. So where do we go from here? What do we do?
Resources
The Jesus Storybook Bible – The Moonbeam Award Gold Medal Winner in the religion category, The Jesus Storybook Bible tells the Story beneath all the stories in the Bible. At the center of the Story is a baby, the child upon whom everything will depend. Every story whispers his name. From Noah to Moses to the great King David—every story points to him. He is like the missing piece in a puzzle—the piece that makes all the other pieces fit together. From the Old Testament through the New Testament, as the Story unfolds, children will pick up the clues and piece together the puzzle. A Bible like no other, The Jesus Storybook Bible invites children to join in the greatest of all adventures, to discover for themselves that Jesus is at the center of God’s great story of salvation—and at the center of their Story too.
Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream, by David Platt – What is Jesus worth to you? 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?
In Radical, David Platt challenges you to consider with an open heart how we have manipulated the gospel to fit our cultural preferences. He shows what Jesus actually said about being his disciple–then invites you to believe and obey what you have heard. And he tells the dramatic story of what is happening as a “successful” suburban church decides to get serious about the gospel according to Jesus.
The Cost of Discipleship, by Deitrich Bonhoeffer – One of the most important theologians of the twentieth century illuminates the relationship between ourselves and the teachings of Jesus.
What can the call to discipleship, the adherence to the word of Jesus, mean today to the businessman, the soldier, the laborer, or the aristocrat? What did Jesus mean to say to us? What is his will for us today? Drawing on the Sermon on the Mount, Dietrich Bonhoeffer answers these timeless questions by providing a seminal reading of the dichotomy between “cheap grace” and “costly grace.” “Cheap grace,” Bonhoeffer wrote, “is the grace we bestow on ourselves…grace without discipleship….Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again, the girl which must be asked for, the door at which a man must know….It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life.”
The Cost of Discipleship is a compelling statement of the demands of sacrifice and ethical consistency from a man whose life and thought were exemplary articulations of a new type of leadership inspired by the Gospel, and imbued with the spirit of Christian humanism and a creative sense of civic duty.
