Assured: Discover Grace, Let Go of Guilt, and Rest in Your Salvation
Greg Gilbert (Baker)
Maybe it’s a theological puzzle you can’t resolve. Maybe it’s a sinful habit you can’t shake. Often enough, you can’t pinpoint an exact reason. But to one degree or another, even committed believers sometimes wonder, Am I really saved? In Assured, Louisville pastor Greg Gilbert shares the good news that “doubt can be tamed. It can be resisted. It can be brought to its knees. In fact, it may surprise you to find out that doubt can even become, ironically, one of the means God uses to deepen your faith in and dependence on Jesus, to drive you back to the cross and to a desperate trust in Christ.”
Unwanted: How Sexual Brokenness Reveals Our Way to Healing
Jay Stringer (Navpress)
If pornography, infidelity, or other besetting sexual sins have you in their grips, how can you escape? You can pray for deliverance, seek out accountability, and do your best to flee temptation. But as therapist and minster Jay Stringer suggests in this book, which draws on nearly 4,000 survey responses, the secret to progress lies in uncovering the “key drivers of unwanted sexual behavior”—the underlying tangle of psychological wounds and relational needs, often rooted in childhood experiences. “The sooner we assume a posture of curiosity for our sexual brokenness,” he writes, “the more we will prepare our hearts for the redemptive work ahead.”
Surprised by Jesus Again: Reading the Bible in Communion with the Saints
Jason Byassee (Eerdmans)
When you’ve read or studied the Bible for a long time, you can fall into trap of approaching God’s Word as if there were nothing unpredictable in store. “This is a mistake,” writes pastor and theologian Jason Byassee in Surprised by Jesus Again. What we need, he argues, is “to see how strange scripture is. Every Christian in every age has been tempted to paper over scripture’s cracks, explain away its oddities, show it’s no different or more demanding than what we hearers already think we know about God and the world.” Byassee helps us read the Bible with fresh eyes, enlisting insights from Origen, Augustine, and other great interpreters from church history.
