LITMIR.BIZ

Love, seduction, betrayal, violence, riddles, and myth all find their place in the biblical story of Samson. Samson is the last of the judges, with 20 percent of the book devoted to him–more than any other judge. From the beginning, Samson is unlike any other judge, which the author suggests when narrating Samson's birth. Samson is destined, even before his birth, to deliver Israel. He doesn't lead his people into battle, he acts alone; his battles are personal vendettas. Samson fights with a lion, defeats the Philistines with the jawbone of an ass, captures foxes, sets Philistine fields on fire, and carries the Gates of Gaza on his shoulders. So what stands behind these stories? Was Samson a mythological hero like Hercules and Gilgamesh? Like other men in the Hebrew Bible, Samson can't resist foreign women. Time after time, he follows Philistine women who eventually betray him. Samson is defeated not by physical strength, but by the powers of seduction, making this story a tragedy. Who were these women and how did they defeat Samson? Readers of this volume will rediscover Samson and better understand his achievements and failures. This study will afford a provocative and useful insight into the character of Samson.

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Finding Our Voice is a series of meditations on how to express the deepest sense of who we are in a troubled world. What is the core of our being? How do we find the language to name that core? If the core of our faith is identifying and embodying the prophetic for our time, surviving that naming is as challenging as finding our voice. Often as not, the prophetic lands us in hot water. We feel alone and abandoned. Recognizing others in the same situation is crucial to our ability to hold fast. With others our voice grows more certain and finds a home, even in exile. Soon the community we left is replaced by a new community of fellow travelers. We are not alone.

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What if heaven is more real, physical, exciting, and compelling than anything we have ever heard? And what difference would it make? Myk Habets takes readers on a journey of discovery into what God has in store for those who love him. Forget playing harps on fluffy clouds. The reality of what God has in store for us will change the way you live, work, and play.
Habets answers a series of questions about heaven that are asked by children and addresses things we all want to know but are often too afraid to ask. Written in easy-to-read language and incorporating insights from some of the best Christian novelists, Habets explains the meaning of a «Christian imagination» and how it can be put to work in creating a vision of the future that results in a life characterized by faith, hope, and assurance. This book appeals to all who want to know what the Bible says about life after death, and finds a way to make it understandable to others. It may even make you laugh out loud along the way.

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Are the Ten Commandments the standard for Christian living? There are many viewpoints on the place of the Mosaic Law today. Some affirm that while we are not saved through keeping the law, it remains our standard for living, a pattern to be followed. Others say we are free from the law. This brief examination of the law affirms all of God's revelation as Christian Scripture, but acknowledges covenantal differences in God's dealings with believers. The progress of salvation history, and our identification with Christ, has altered our relationship to the Mosaic Law. Using the Law «lawfully» requires us to recognize the way in which the New Testament, and chiefly the Apostle Paul, treats the law. Paul presents the believer as having died to the law, and serving now in the new way of the Spirit, a way that does not depend on the Mosaic law. The pattern for the New Testament believer remains Jesus himself. While keeping all of God's law, he went beyond its requirement to demonstrate a love for sinners that the law did not know.

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The author claims that the gospel of Mark is a speech or sermon. To prove this he shows how Mark used many of the elements of Aristotle's rhetoric. Literary critics noticed these rhetorical features in Mark, but remained with a literary critical model of that gospel instead of a rhetorical view that the evidence called for. They continued to translate the first word of Mark, arche, as «beginning» to provide Mark's story of Jesus with a chronological beginning. The author translates Mark's first word as «guiding principle» to provide Mark's persuasive speech or sermon with a logical starting point.

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The church doesn't need to be more spiritual. It needs to become more human. Since God decided becoming human was right, so must the church. Jesus' language was consistently understood by nonreligious people. Elitist in-house church language may never reach the growing number of Americans without a religious background who have given up on God. This book views the church as a unique people-group and the reader as an anthropologist. Employing basic ethnographic methods, the reader looks at the church again for the first time without a religious lens. Based upon the premise that all good theology emerges from good anthropology, the book first considers the rituals celebrated around the symbols of a manger, cross, bread, wine, and tomb. Such symbols then become the basis for theological interpretation. Dietrich Bonhoeffer is the reader's conversation partner to help make the theological journey from human community to church, manger to incarnation, cross to redemption, and tomb to resurrection. The church will flourish in the twenty-first century to the degree that it proclaims the Gospel using nonreligious language with a human accent.

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In a day when rules are being rewritten, guilt has come up with a bad rap. Many parents rush to emancipate their children from such troubling apprehensions–and the results are telling. This coming-of-age memoir traces the challenges of a fatherless boy growing up amidst the folly of his peers and the ever-present predators who cannot be wished away. Faced with the reality of evil, the theological concept of Original Sin looms large. This book is an observation that trouble often springs from circumstances that look pretty benign. It's the prerequisite of every murder trial, that accidents happen from a confluence of events and decisions that seem innocuous but end badly. We who live in the world are wounded by the same evil that sociologists explain away. Yet part of adulthood is the willingness to call things what they are. When Jesus cast out demons, he first asked their names, because naming something is to see it clearly. We must render verdicts. Sound judgment is a forgotten virtue, and failure to judge will leave us accountable to our children for the weeds that have grown in the course of our neglect, as evil that goes unchecked is sure to grow.

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This book is a collection of short reflections on mentoring and discipleship in honor of Scott M. Gibson. Gibson says: «The missing ingredient in the Church today is discipleship.» This book casts a vision for all believers for what mentoring and discipleship can look like in the local church, in Bible colleges and seminaries, and in Christian friendships. We hope that you will be inspired by Scott M. Gibson's example to be selfless and intentional about mentoring and discipling others. Gibson desires to see a multiplying effect of true mentorship and discipleship rippling across congregations in North America and around the globe. He has spent his life prioritizing discipleship because he wants to look more and more like his Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and he wants the same for others. Read this book and be moved to serve as a mentor and to make disciples.

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The foundation of a good biblical sermon is the biblical text. Take Up and Preach is a helpful guide for the preacher in how to approach a biblical text with the intention of preaching its life-giving message. Blayne Banting uses memorable images and careful instructions to aid the preacher through the process of understanding a theology of preaching, selecting and interpreting a preaching text right up to the point of producing the sermon outline. Take Up and Preach both grounds and guides the preacher in a sound method for biblical preaching, and does so with a number of practical helps to aid in the process.

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This book has been written on the premise that the mode of coping with death of virtually all African ethnic communities has taken proportions and turns that are neither cultural, scriptural, nor necessary. Current rites are complicated, time-consuming, expensive, and are leaving most families and their neighbors impoverished. They have been extremely commercialized and a large number of Africans do not have resources to bury their dead the «modern» way. Were the Agikuyu (read: Africans) to curb numerous funeral demands which they deem necessary and «customary,» when in actual fact they are not, funerals for them would become cheaper, faster, and simpler; would be decent enough for the dead; would take care of those left behind; and would be environmentally friendly. How Africans in the Diaspora, away from their ancestral homeland, should cope with death is also addressed. Also addressed is the issue of cremation. It is shown that at the resurrection, God will accord us new spiritual bodies which will have no bearing with the material substance of our earthly (mortal) bodies.

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