Unfailing: Standing Strong on God’s Promises in the Uncertainties of Life (Seedbed Resources)
Author(s): Rob Renfroe
Publisher: Zondervan
Price: $1.99       (Ends Dec 21)

We’ve all experienced the pain of broken promises. When those we love fail to keep their commitment to us, we feel betrayed and hurt, less likely to trust again. People fail us. Plans fail. But there is one who is unfailing, who always keeps his word.

In Unfailing, pastor and teacher Rob Renfroe reminds us that because God is faithful to his Word we can base our lives on what he has said. And though hard times may follow where we experience confusion, loss, and pain–feeling overwhelmed–if we stand on the promises of God we, too, will not fail. Jesus promised that everyone who hears his words and puts them into practice is like a wise man who builds his house on a rock. Though the storms blow and the streams rise, the house does not fail because it is built on the rock.

Renfroe unpacks seven key ways in which God will not fail you, looking at God’s promises, grace, peace, presence, guidance, power, strength, and love. Each of these is an important and essential aspect of God’s trustworthy and unfailing character, reflecting his faithfulness to you. Each chapter includes a sample prayer as well as personal reflection questions that help you to further apply these truths to your life.

The Sacred Overlap: Learning to Live Faithfully in the Space Between (Seedbed Resources)
Author(s): J.R. Briggs
Publisher: Zondervan
Price: $3.99       (Ends Dec 21)

The widening of political, racial, generational, and religious differences often leads to an “us vs. them” mentality all too common today. In The Sacred Overlap, author J. R. Briggs communicates a refreshing vision that embraces tension and calls us to live in radical love and faithfulness between the extremes that isolate and divide people.

Read the gospels and you’ll see how Jesus was committed to crossing cultural, social, political and religious either/or waters, engaging in many and/also activities. He comforted the disturbed and also disturbed the comfortable. He was too religious for the pagans and also too pagan for the religious elites. He hung out with filthy lepers and also dined with the filthy rich. He was alarming and disarming at the same time.

This is not a spineless embrace of religious syncretism where we take bits from world religions, personal preferences, and ideologies and throw them into a cosmic blender for a tasty theological smoothie. Instead, Briggs offers a fresh understanding of evangelism and discipleship, showing how we need to be engaged in both of these at the same time. He shares creative ways to engage with God’s mission with those who are intrigued about Jesus, but turned off by church. He explores what it means to be joyful in the midst of heart wrenching pain and suffering in the world. And he models what it means to maintain a posture of convicted civility which emphasizes equally both grace and truth.

The Sacred Overlap helps readers see that Christians are called to live with their feet firmly planted in two different worlds–in both heaven and earth–living naturally with grace and truth. Only then can a Christian be a faithful witness in the way of Jesus.