Truth on Fire: Gazing at God Until Your Heart Sings by Adam Ramsey — Knowing God truly, experiencing Him deeply.
What would it look like to genuinely love God with our head AND our heart? To have a faith marked by right thinking AND right feeling? To know God deeply AND worship him passionately? Too often, Christians act as though these things are at odds with one another. But what if God intends for us to possess a Christianity that is radically committed to biblical truth, in a way that did not diminish the life of the heart, but actually intensified it?
Adam Ramsey invites us to engage both our minds and our emotions in our walk with God as we gaze at him until our hearts sing. He sums it up like this:
“My hope in these following pages is to paint a biblical portrait of what God is actually like, so that we can gaze upon him together until our hearts can’t help but sing. To behold him in such a way that our daily experience is transformed with a deepened awareness of who it is we pray to, who it is that is with us, and who it is that we are loved by. To let God’s truth set our hearts on fire.”
If you yearn for God but desire a clearer biblical picture of this God whom you love, or if you have been walking with God for a while now, but your experience of him has become settled or dry, then this book is for you.
Send Out Your Light: The Illuminating Power of Scripture and Song by Sandra McCracken — In the middle of Psalm 43, God offers us a dynamic invitation: Send out your light.Prolific singer-songwriter Sandra McCracken believes we each have the opportunity to hear and answer this invitation.
This book is written in three parts: part one is the becoming, the creation, how God makes us and gives us an identity. Part two is the disorientation of loss, displacement, and the dark night of the soul. Part three is reorientation, how God brings us through the darkness and illuminates our path with Scripture, sending us out to take his light to others.
This has been the shape of Sandra McCracken’s life. Through it all, songs and Scripture have been there to light the way, helping her respond to God’s call.
How will you respond to God’s call to send out his light?
Prayer in the Night by Tish Harrison Warren — How can we trust God in the dark?
Framed around a nighttime prayer of Compline, Tish Harrison Warren, author of Liturgy of the Ordinary, explores themes of human vulnerability, suffering, and God’s seeming absence. When she navigated a time of doubt and loss, the prayer was grounding for her. She writes that practices of prayer “gave words to my anxiety and grief and allowed me to reencounter the doctrines of the church not as tidy little antidotes for pain, but as a light in darkness, as good news.”
Where do we find comfort when we lie awake worrying or weeping in the night? This book offers a prayerful and frank approach to the difficulties in our ordinary lives at work, at home, and in a world filled with uncertainty.
It Happens After Prayer by H.B. Charles — Life’s inevitable difficulties and disappointments can discourage us from praying, but our response should be to pray anyway and keep praying. Whatever we seek, God invites us to come to Him with confidence, believing that He is able to answer—and He will answer.
We can pray for:
- Forgiveness like David
- Wisdom like Solomon
- Healing like Hezekiah
- A child like Hannah
- Deliverance like Jonah
- Mercy like the 10 lepers
- Salvation like the thief on the cross
But are you convinced that prayer works, even when you don’t get the answers you want? In It Happens After Prayer, Pastor HB Charles, Jr. motivates and encourages us to respond to the challenges of life with prayer, to pray without ceasing, and to pray with great expectations.
Are you ready for a new level of earnest, passionate, God-size prayers? Don’t let another day go by without praying and seeking the face of God, because it happens after prayer.
Washed and Waiting by Wesley Hill —Wesley Hill’s personal experiences and biblical reflections offer insight into how a nonpracticing gay Christian can “prove, live out, and celebrate” the grace of Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit.
For many who are on this path, it’s a lonely one. The reality of loneliness and isolation of the celibate homosexual Christian is something that Hill lives and takes seriously in his pursuit of the gospel-centered life. To those on a similar journey, it’s often a life of uncertainties and questions.
In Washed and Waiting, Hill explores the three main struggles that have been part of his daily effort to live faithfully:
- What exactly does the gospel demand of gay and lesbian Christians, and how can it enable them to fulfill its commands?
- How do Christians who experience homoerotic desires live with the loneliness such desires entail? Is there any relief for it? What comfort does the gospel offer?
- Can those of us who struggle with homosexuality please God and truly experience his pleasure in the midst of sexual brokenness?
Interspersed throughout these main sections are character sketches and stories of people who have experienced this journey’s trials and triumphs.
Hill offers wise counsel that is biblically faithful, theologically serious, and oriented to the life and practice of the church. As a celibate gay Christian, he gives us a glimpse of what it looks like to wrestle firsthand with God’s “No” to same-sex sexual intimacy and contemplate serious and difficult questions.
