God Knows My Heart

When a Christian fundamentalist-turned-scoffer becomes the senior religion reporter for one of the nation's top newspapers, she and God find themselves on a collision course. As her journey begins, Christine Wicker knows God primarily as "the source you never get to interview." Despite this, she pursues Him anyway and begins to glimpse a God she hasn't dared hope might exist. She finds Him in unlikely places--the ceremony of a Wiccan coven, an East German shop window, a Northern Ireland breakfast table. To her grumpy amazement, she also finds Him in a place she swore she would never again look--the confines of a Southern Baptist church. It's a hard trip with surprising turns, but in the end Wicker finds a faith that answers the soul's call without ignoring the world's realities.

The NIV is the world's best-selling modern translation, with over 150 million copies in print since its first full publication in 1978. This highly accurate and smooth-reading version of the Bible in modern English has the largest library of printed and electronic support material of any modern translation.

Scripture reveals a God who meets us where we are, not where we pretend to be. No More Faking Fine is your invitation to get honest with God through the life-giving language of lament. If you've ever been given empty clichés during challenging times, you know how painful it is to be misunderstood by well-meaning people. When life hurts, we often feel pressure--from others and ourselves--to keep it together, suck it up, or pray it away. But Scripture reveals a God who lovingly invites us to give honest voice to our emotions when life hits hard. For most of her life, Esther Fleece Allen believed she could bypass the painful emotions of her broken past by shutting them down altogether. She was known as an achiever and an overcomer on the fast track to success. But in silencing her pain, she robbed herself of the opportunity to be healed. Maybe you've done the same. Esther's journey into healing began when she discovered that God has given us a real-world way to deal with raw emotions and an alternative to the coping mechanisms that end up causing more pain. It's called lament--the gut-level, honest prayer that God never ignores, never silences, and never wastes. No More Faking Fine is your permission to lament, taking you on a journey down the unexpected pathway to true intimacy with God. Drawing from careful biblical study and hard-won insight, Esther reveals how to use God's own language to come closer to him as he leads us through our pain to the light on the other side, teaching you that: We are robbing ourselves of a divine mystery and a divine intimacy when we pretend to have it all together God does not expect us to be perfect; instead, he meets us where we are There is hope beyond your heartache, disappointment, and grief Like Esther, you'll soon find that when one person stops faking fine, it gives everyone else permission to do the same.

Do you know how much you matter to God? In this powerful and deeply vulnerable book, Beth Redman writes to pass along a message that changed her life—that the God who made us also understands us intimately and proclaims our worth by naming us and calling our name. He hears our cries and reaches out to help us and fight for us. He knows our past but is already hard at work shaping our future—helping us, defending us, and restoring the damage life has done. And no matter what others do, our heavenly Father will never, ever leave or forget us. Drawing on Scripture and her own experience, Redman invites us to explore the revolutionary implications of being loved by a God who knows our name. And she invites us to call on His name as well—to respond to His heart and love Him as He has loved us from the beginning.

When a Christian fundamentalist-turned-scoffer becomes the senior religion reporter for one of the nation's top newspapers, she and God find themselves on a collision course. As her journey begins, Christine Wicker knows God primarily as "the source you never get to interview." Despite this, she pursues Him anyway and begins to glimpse a God she hasn't dared hope might exist. She finds Him in unlikely places--the ceremony of a Wiccan coven, an East German shop window, a Northern Ireland breakfast table. To her grumpy amazement, she also finds Him in a place she swore she would never again look--the confines of a Southern Baptist church. It's a hard trip with surprising turns, but in the end Wicker finds a faith that answers the soul's call without ignoring the world's realities.

“If there were a Guinness Book of World Records entry for ‘amount of times having prayed the sinner’s prayer,’ I’m pretty sure I’d be a top contender,” says pastor and author J. D. Greear. He struggled for many years to gain an assurance of salvation and eventually learned he was not alone. “Lack of assurance” is epidemic among evangelical Christians. In Stop Asking Jesus Into Your Heart, J. D. shows that faulty ways of present- ing the gospel are a leading source of the confusion. Our presentations may not be heretical, but they are sometimes misleading. The idea of “asking Jesus into your heart” or “giving your life to Jesus” often gives false assurance to those who are not saved—and keeps those who genuinely are saved from fully embracing that reality. Greear unpacks the doctrine of assurance, showing that salvation is a posture we take to the promise of God in Christ, a posture that begins at a certain point and is maintained for the rest of our lives. He also answers the tough questions about assurance: What exactly is faith? What is repentance? Why are there so many warnings that seem to imply we can lose our salvation? Such issues are handled with respect to the theological rigors they require, but Greear never loses his pastoral sensitivity or a communication technique that makes this message teachable to a wide audience from teens to adults.

How do we find contentment in God when we feel so hidden? Sara Hagerty unfolds the truths found in the biblical story of Mary of Bethany to discover the scandalous love of God and explore the spiritual richness of being hidden in him. Every heart longs to be seen and understood. Yet most of our lives is unwitnessed. We spend our days working, driving, parenting. We sometimes spend whole seasons feeling unnoticed and unappreciated. In Unseen, Sara Hagerty suggests that this is exactly what God intended. He is the only One who truly knows us. He is the only One who understands the value of the unseen in our lives. When this truth seeps into our souls, we realize that only when we hide ourselves in God can we give ourselves to others in true freedom--and know the joy of a deeper relationship with the God who sees us. Our culture applauds what we can produce, what we can show, what we can upload to social media. Only when we give all of ourselves to God--unedited, abandoned, apparently wasteful in its lack of productivity--can we live out who God created us to be. As Hagerty writes, "Maybe my seemingly unproductive, looking-up-at-Him life produces awe among the angels." Through an eloquent exploration of both personal and biblical story, Hagerty calls us to offer every unseen minute of our lives to God. God is in the secret places of our lives that no one else witnesses. But we've not been relegated to these places. We've been invited. We may be "wasting" ourselves in a hidden corner today: The cubicle on the fourth floor. The hospital bedside of an elderly parent. The laundry room. But these are the places God uses to meet us with a radical love. These are the places that produce the kind of unhinged love in us that gives everything at His feet, whether or not anyone else ever proclaims our name, whether or not anyone else ever sees. God's invitation is not just for a season or a day. It is the question of our lives: "When no one else applauds you, when it makes no sense, when you see no results--will you waste your love on Me?"

Change your life by changing the messages that enter your mind! Learn to see yourself through God’s eyes by spending thirty-one days feeding your heart a new, biblical message of encouragement. Every day, our hearts and minds fill with messages—about ourselves, the world, and God—that we replay again and again. Some of these messages are accurate and helpful. Others run counter to truths that God wants us to understand and embrace. In Dwell on These Things, author John Stange shows how—instead of living at the mercy of whatever thought pops into your mind—you can choose to • replace feelings of discouragement with a sense of God’s goodness • practice seeing yourself in the loving way God sees you • exchange negative self-talk for positive biblical messages • learn to face the day with hope in your heart There’s no need to remain stuck thinking unhelpful thoughts. Learn how you can fill your mind with encouraging, life-enriching truths through a gospel-saturated, thirty-one-day challenge that can help you replace a destructive mindset with a positive, empowering, and godly one.