Download or read book Jesus Becoming Jesus written by Thomas Weinandy and published by CUA Press. This book was released on 2018-04-06 with total page 505 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jesus Becoming Jesus presents a theological interpretation of the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke. Unlike many conventional biblical commentaries, Weinandy concentrates on the theological content contained within the Synoptic Gospels. He does thi

Download or read book Think Act Be Like Jesus written by Randy Frazee and published by Zondervan. This book was released on 2014-12-30 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Bible teaches that the goal of the Christian life is to become like Jesus—for our own personal growth and for the sake of others. Every believer needs to ask three big questions: What do I believe? What should I do? And who am I becoming? In Think, Act, Be Like Jesus, bestselling author and pastor Randy Frazee helps readers grasp the vision of the Christian life and get started on the journey of discipleship. After unfolding the revolutionary dream of Jesus and showing how our lives fit into the big picture of what God is doing in the world, Frazee walks readers through thirty short chapters exploring the ten core beliefs, ten core practices, and ten core virtues that help disciples to think, act, and be more like Jesus Christ. This compelling new book can be used in conjunction with the 30-week all-church Believe campaign or read separately as an individual study. Either way, readers will deepen their understanding of what it means to not just know the Story of God, but to live it.

Download or read book Sensing Jesus written by Zack Eswine and published by Crossway. This book was released on 2012-11-30 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a book about the behind-the-scenes reality of a life in ministry. It tells you what Zack Eswine wishes somebody else would’ve told him. With over 20 years of experience in ministry, Zack shares with incredible honesty about his own failures, burnout, and pain, all the while addressing the complexities of leadership decisions, church discipline, family dynamics, and so on. Presenting sound pastoral theology couched in autobiographical musings and powerful prose, this book offers a fresh and biblically faithful approach to the care of souls, including your own.

Download or read book How Jesus Became Christian written by Barrie Wilson and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2010-07-16 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In How Jesus Became Christian, Barrie Wilson asks "How did a young rabbi become the god of a religion he wouldn’t recognize, one which was established through the use of calculated anti-Semitism?" Colourfully recreating the world of Jesus Christ, Wilson brings the answer to life by looking at the rivalry between the "Jesus movement," informed by the teachings of Matthew and adhering to Torah worship, and the "Christ movement," headed by Paul, which shunned Torah. Wilson suggests that Paul’s movement was not rooted in the teachings and sayings of the historical Jesus, but solely in Paul’s mystical vision of Christ, a man Paul actually never met. He then shows how Paul established the new religion through anti-Semitic propaganda, which ultimately crushed the Jesus Movement. Sure to be controversial, this is an exciting, well-written popular religious history that cuts to the heart of the differences between Christianity and Judaism, to the origins of one of the world’s great religions and, ultimately, to the question of who Jesus Christ really was – a Jew or a Christian.

Download or read book How God Became Jesus written by Michael F. Bird and published by Zondervan Academic. This book was released on 2014-03-25 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his recent book How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher From Galilee historian Bart Ehrman explores a claim that resides at the heart of the Christian faith— that Jesus of Nazareth was, and is, God. According to Ehrman, though, this is not what the earliest disciples believed, nor what Jesus claimed about himself. The first response book to this latest challenge to Christianity from Ehrman, How God Became Jesus features the work of five internationally recognized biblical scholars. While subjecting his claims to critical scrutiny, they offer a better, historically informed account of why the Galilean preacher from Nazareth came to be hailed as “the Lord Jesus Christ.” Namely, they contend, the exalted place of Jesus in belief and worship is clearly evident in the earliest Christian sources, shortly following his death, and was not simply the invention of the church centuries later.

Download or read book Jesus Becoming Jesus Volume 2 written by Thomas G. Weinandy and published by CUA Press. This book was released on 2021-03-26 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jesus Becoming Jesus, Volume 2: A Theological Interpretation of the Gospel of John: Prologue and the Book of Signs follows upon the first volume of this series entitled Jesus Becoming Jesus. The first volume was a theological interpretation of the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke. Unlike many conventional biblical commentaries, Weinandy concentrates on the theological content contained within John’s Gospel. He does this in the light of the Church’s doctrinal and theological tradition, particularly in keeping with the Second Vatican Council’s Dogmatic Constitution, Dei Verbum. This is accomplished through a close reading of John’s Gospel, theologically interpreting each chapter of the Gospel sequentially. In so doing he also takes into account the Johannine corpus as a whole. He also relates John’s Gospel to relevant material found within the Synoptic Gospels, the Pauline Corpus and other New Testament writings. This original theological interpretation focuses primarily on the intertwining theological themes contained within John’s Gospel, specifically within the Prologue and the Book of Signs – light and darkness, the seven miracle-signs, the sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist, the seven “I Am” sayings, the contentious dialogues with the Jews, Jesus’ relationship to his Father as the Father’s incarnate Word and Son, etc. Within all of these interlocking themes one finds the importance of Jesus’ saving actions – the salvific works of his Father. The overarching theme of this book, as the title suggests, is that Jesus, being named Jesus, throughout his public ministry is enacting his name and so becoming who he is – YHWH-Saves. Weinandy offers a singular, vibrant, and luminous reading of John’s Gospel; one that reveals the Evangelist’s theological depth and doctrinal sophistication. In so doing, Weinandy makes manifest the particular beauty of the Gospel According to John.

Download or read book Just Jesus written by Walter Wink and published by Image. This book was released on 2014-01-21 with total page 139 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Until his death in 2012, Walter Wink was one of the most influential Christian intellectuals of our time. He was a pastor and theologian, a political activist and a writer. He first becme a practitioner of active nonviolence during the Civil Rights Movement in Selma Alabama, and continued to seek social justice for all under dictatorships in Chile and the apartheid in South Africa. Always through the lens of Jesus, Wink's life and work demonstrate just how important the need to understand "the Son of the Man" is in today's modern world. Wink shows us that inspiration and insight can come from any source: a Pentecostal Church in Oklahoma, dreams, Buddhist meditation centers, childhood traumas, an empty forest, illness, and the Gospels. Wink's work in social justice and his life as a theologian are inextricably entwined, finding evidence for nonviolent resistance in the Bible and seeing the need for Jesus in daily struggles. "An autobiography of my interest in Jesus, perhaps that is too ambitious," writes Wink. "What I have done here is far less grand. I have simply written down vignettes, or excerpts of my life's story that I find interesting. These autobiographical reflections are in no way exceptional. Everyone has a life story. My story may, at the very least, show why I theologically think the way that I do." Just Jesus is the jubilant autobiography of the man who sought justice in all walks of life, including his own.

Download or read book Being Jesus in Nashville written by Jim Palmer and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2012-03-07 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Author and former pastor Jim Palmer should be dead. Over the course of a year that included two near-death experiences, as Palmer set out to disentangle Jesus from the religious machinery of Christianity, he discovered a profound and unexpected answer to the question on his mind: “What would Jesus do?” Exploring what it really means to “be Jesus” in his hometown of Nashville, Tennessee, Palmer learns that Jesus was special not because he was more divine than the rest of us, but because he was courageously more human than most. Unfortunately, this realization crystallized for him while he was hanging upside down in his overturned car, expecting to die. When Palmer was miraculously pulled from the wreckage alive, he emerged with a new courage to embrace his life as never before. In Being Jesus in Nashville, Palmer shares his personal stories, ideas, concepts, and an innovative approach to humanity as he learns that being Jesus means seeing people as they truly are; letting it happen, not making it happen; being at peace, whatever happens; putting no limitations on God; living without separation from God; following your own path; living as everyone’s neighbor. With spiritual insight and refreshing theological glimpses, Palmer shares how he traded in his Christianity for Jesus and how this brought him closer to God.

Download or read book How Jesus Became God written by Bart D. Ehrman and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2014-03-25 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York Times bestselling author and Bible expert Bart Ehrman reveals how Jesus’s divinity became dogma in the first few centuries of the early church. The claim at the heart of the Christian faith is that Jesus of Nazareth was, and is, God. But this is not what the original disciples believed during Jesus’s lifetime—and it is not what Jesus claimed about himself. How Jesus Became God tells the story of an idea that shaped Christianity, and of the evolution of a belief that looked very different in the fourth century than it did in the first. A master explainer of Christian history, texts, and traditions, Ehrman reveals how an apocalyptic prophet from the backwaters of rural Galilee crucified for crimes against the state came to be thought of as equal with the one God Almighty, Creator of all things. But how did he move from being a Jewish prophet to being God? In a book that took eight years to research and write, Ehrman sketches Jesus’s transformation from a human prophet to the Son of God exalted to divine status at his resurrection. Only when some of Jesus’s followers had visions of him after his death—alive again—did anyone come to think that he, the prophet from Galilee, had become God. And what they meant by that was not at all what people mean today. Written for secular historians of religion and believers alike, How Jesus Became God will engage anyone interested in the historical developments that led to the affirmation at the heart of Christianity: Jesus was, and is, God.

Download or read book Misquoting Jesus written by Bart D. Ehrman and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-06 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When world-class biblical scholar Bart Ehrman first began to study the texts of the Bible in their original languages he was startled to discover the multitude of mistakes and intentional alterations that had been made by earlier translators. In Misquoting Jesus, Ehrman tells the story behind the mistakes and changes that ancient scribes made to the New Testament and shows the great impact they had upon the Bible we use today. He frames his account with personal reflections on how his study of the Greek manuscripts made him abandon his once ultraconservative views of the Bible. Since the advent of the printing press and the accurate reproduction of texts, most people have assumed that when they read the New Testament they are reading an exact copy of Jesus's words or Saint Paul's writings. And yet, for almost fifteen hundred years these manuscripts were hand copied by scribes who were deeply influenced by the cultural, theological, and political disputes of their day. Both mistakes and intentional changes abound in the surviving manuscripts, making the original words difficult to reconstruct. For the first time, Ehrman reveals where and why these changes were made and how scholars go about reconstructing the original words of the New Testament as closely as possible. Ehrman makes the provocative case that many of our cherished biblical stories and widely held beliefs concerning the divinity of Jesus, the Trinity, and the divine origins of the Bible itself stem from both intentional and accidental alterations by scribes -- alterations that dramatically affected all subsequent versions of the Bible.

Download or read book Becoming Like Jesus written by Christopher J. H. Wright and published by Langham Publishing. This book was released on 2016-05-14 with total page 143 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the last sermon he ever preached, John Stott echoed the Apostle Paul when he said that God’s greatest desire and plan for us is to become like his Son, Jesus Christ. BUT HOW? Stott prayed daily that God would bear the fruit of the Holy Spirit in his own life; a prayer clearly answered and evident in his Christlikeness. Chris Wright, a close friend of John Stott, reflects on all nine qualities that the Apostle Paul includes in the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians. He shows how they are rooted in the character of God, first revealed in the Old Testament, and modelled and taught by Jesus. With applications to encourage biblical growth with depth, and questions at the end of each chapter, this is an ideal resource for preachers, study groups and personal reflection. Many people rightly stress the importance of the gifts, power and ministries of the Holy Spirit, but easily neglect Paul’s command to live and walk by the Spirit and cultivate the fruit that only he can bear in our lives. Paying close attention to the beautiful and robust qualities that Paul includes in the fruit, and seeking daily to cultivate them with God’s help, is surely one way we can become more and more like Jesus.

Download or read book Everything written by Mary E. DeMuth and published by Thomas Nelson Inc. This book was released on 2012 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "I don't write this book as a condemnation or as a sermon. The last thing I want to do is provide a 'how to be the best Christian in ten easy steps' guide. I pen these words as a fellow struggler who is learning that what we think about God matters, how we allow Him to reign in our hearts matters, and how we obey Him in the moment matters. It all matters. Everything." Author and speaker Mary DeMuth has been abused, foreclosed, abandoned, and betrayed. She has been pressed and drained till it was too much . . . But it was just enough to bring her to a place of surrender, piece by precious piece. In that surrender, she found the freedom of giving everything to God. And through Scripture, community, and the work of the Holy Spirit, she gives it all over again, every day. In this gentle and challenging book, DeMuth describes the process and the nuances that shape us to be more like Christ. Her words are clear, vulnerable, and thought provoking, and every chapter is infused with Scripture. Most of all, DeMuth provides personal and practical evidence that there is no greater pursuit than Christ. We must surrender everything, but it does not compare to the Everything He is, the Everything He gives.

Download or read book Jesus Religion written by Jefferson Bethke and published by HarperChristian + ORM. This book was released on 2013-10-14 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Abandon dead, dry, religious rule-keeping and embrace the promise of being truly known and deeply loved. Jefferson Bethke burst into the cultural conversation with a passionate, provocative poem titled "Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus." The 4-minute video became an overnight sensation, with 7 million YouTube views in its first 48 hours (and 23+ million in a year). Bethke's message clearly struck a chord with believers and nonbelievers alike, triggering an avalanche of responses running the gamut from encouraged to enraged. In his New York Times bestseller Jesus > Religion, Bethke unpacks similar contrasts that he drew in the poem--highlighting the difference between teeth gritting and grace, law and love, performance and peace, despair, and hope. With refreshing candor, he delves into the motivation behind his message, beginning with the unvarnished tale of his own plunge from the pinnacle of a works-based, fake-smile existence that sapped his strength and led him down a path of destructive behavior. Along the way, Bethke gives you the tools you need to: Humbly and prayerfully open your mind Understand Jesus for all that he is View the church from a brand-new perspective Bethke is quick to acknowledge that he's not a pastor or theologian, but simply an ordinary, twenty-something who cried out for a life greater than the one for which he had settled. On this journey, Bethke discovered the real Jesus, who beckoned him with love beyond the props of false religion. Praise for Jesus > Religion: "Jeff's book will make you stop and listen to a voice in your heart that may have been drowned out by the noise of religion. Listen to that voice, then follow it--right to the feet of Jesus." --Bob Goff, author of New York Times bestsellers Love Does and Everybody, Always "The book you hold in your hands is Donald Miller's Blue Like Jazz meets C. S. Lewis's Mere Christianity meets Augustine's Confessions. This book is going to awaken an entire generation to Jesus and His grace." --Derwin L. Gray, lead pastor of Transformation Church, author of Limitless Life: Breaking Free from the Labels That Hold You Back

Download or read book Becoming a Follower of Jesus Softcover written by and published by Christian Art Gifts Incorporated. This book was released on 2019-02-09 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Becoming Worldly Saints written by Michael E. Wittmer and published by Zondervan. This book was released on 2015-02-03 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If following Jesus involves a life of sacrifice and suffering, is it wrong for a Christian to seek purpose and joy in this world? Many Christians sense a tension between their desire to enjoy life in this world—the beauty of God’s creation, the rich love of deep relationships with others—and the reality that this world is fallen and broken, in need of redemption. How can we embrace and thrive in the tension between enjoying creation and promoting redemption? By living out our God-given purpose. As “worldly saints,” created in the image of God, we are natural creatures with a supernatural purpose—to know and love God. Because we live in a world that is stained by the curse of sin, we must learn to embrace our nature as creatures created in the image of God while recognizing our desperate need for the grace that God offers to us in the gospel. Writing in a devotional style that is theologically rich, biblically accurate, and aimed at ordinary readers, Mike Wittmer helps readers understand who they are, why they are here, and the importance of the story they tell themselves. In Becoming Worldly Saints, he gives an integrated vision that shows how we can be heavenly minded in a way that leads to earthly good, empowering believers to seize the abundant life God has for them.

Download or read book Being with Jesus written by Jim Branch and published by CreateSpace. This book was released on 2014-11-07 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A thirty-day journey through some favorite gospel stories, designed to help us not only grow in our knowledge of Jesus, but also grow in our ability to be with Jesus, to see his face, to hear his voice, and to know his heart.

Download or read book Life in Christ written by Jeremy Walker and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "To be a disciple of Jesus Christ is to be in a position of privilege and blessing beyond anything the world might offer," begins author Jeremy Walker. Life in Christ explores the unsearchable riches of the Christian pilgrimage and traces its trajectory, highlighting key elements in the believer's experience. Do you wrestle with assurance? Have you grasped the engagement demanded in Christian living? Do you find the way wearying at times? Do you struggle with your Christian identity? Walker provides instruction for Christians to assess their own standing and progress in the faith exhorting and equipping and always pointing them ahead to the hope of the glory of Christ. Along the way, he encourages God's people to live a life to the praise of His glory as he examines some of the basic truths that establish and direct a true child of God. "In this splendid book on the very central issues of eternity, Jeremy Walker, like J. C. Ryle of old, carries the reader along with an excellent, gripping style. It is a book that everyone should read and then pass on to others who need an explanation of the true gospel, especially those slaves of political correctness sadly found in many modern pulpits." Erroll Hulse, pastor, conference speaker, author, and founding editor of Reformation Today