Our Own God

Our Own God PDF Author: G. D. Watson
Publisher: Kingsley Press
ISBN: 1937428958
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 172

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Book Description
Because of his clear understanding of the workings and ways of God in the soul, G. D. Watson has been called “the apostle to the sanctified.” Our Own God is a great example of the way in which Watson was able to pass on this understanding to his readers with great ease and clarity. Here is a paragraph from the first chapter: “God is our own in a peculiar, individual way, privately and personally, so as to thrill us with a joy with which no stranger can intermeddle. God can never be to any other creature in all the universe just exactly what he is to us. Have we ever thought for five minutes of the grandeur of being created with a unique, individual personality all to ourselves, with a private nature, a great soul world in ourselves, a distinct orb of conscious, immortal existence, and walled in from all other creatures, with a deep privacy of nature into which no one in all the universe can enter except the Lord our God, our loving Creator? Probably this is the greatest glory of our creation, that each of us has in our personality a sacred sanctuary in the ocean depths of our souls, with a door that never opens except to the touch of that eternal, blessed one who created us out of his love, and then redeemed us from an awful fall out of what seems even a greater love than creation.”

Our Own God

Our Own God PDF Author: G. D. Watson
Publisher: Kingsley Press
ISBN: 1937428958
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 172

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Book Description
Because of his clear understanding of the workings and ways of God in the soul, G. D. Watson has been called “the apostle to the sanctified.” Our Own God is a great example of the way in which Watson was able to pass on this understanding to his readers with great ease and clarity. Here is a paragraph from the first chapter: “God is our own in a peculiar, individual way, privately and personally, so as to thrill us with a joy with which no stranger can intermeddle. God can never be to any other creature in all the universe just exactly what he is to us. Have we ever thought for five minutes of the grandeur of being created with a unique, individual personality all to ourselves, with a private nature, a great soul world in ourselves, a distinct orb of conscious, immortal existence, and walled in from all other creatures, with a deep privacy of nature into which no one in all the universe can enter except the Lord our God, our loving Creator? Probably this is the greatest glory of our creation, that each of us has in our personality a sacred sanctuary in the ocean depths of our souls, with a door that never opens except to the touch of that eternal, blessed one who created us out of his love, and then redeemed us from an awful fall out of what seems even a greater love than creation.”

God on Your Own

God on Your Own PDF Author: Joseph Dispenza
Publisher: Wiley + ORM
ISBN: 1118040988
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
In this spiritual self-help memoir, a former Roman Catholic monk recounts his journey away from religion toward his own personal spirituality. After spending eight years in a monastery, Joseph Dispenza walked away from his life as a monk—and the religion of his youth—in search of a different kind of spiritual path. Outside the confines of organized religion, Dispenza was able to create a spiritual life that gives direction and meaning to all he does and all he is. God on Your Own is a book for anyone who has left (or is thinking of leaving) organized religion but wants to continue on a spiritual path. Dispenza, a noted author and retreat leader, provides a spiritual road map for those who want to make the transition from conventional religion toward a richer and more satisfying direct relationship with the Source, without rules, dogmas, or doctrines. Throughout the book, Dispenza offers wise, compassionate guidance, speaking as one seeker to another. He has made this journey himself, gleaning spiritual truth from across traditions and practices.

God

God PDF Author: Reza Aslan
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0553394738
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The bestselling author of Zealot and host of Believer explores humanity’s quest to make sense of the divine in this concise and fascinating history of our understanding of God. In Zealot, Reza Aslan replaced the staid, well-worn portrayal of Jesus of Nazareth with a startling new image of the man in all his contradictions. In his new book, Aslan takes on a subject even more immense: God, writ large. In layered prose and with thoughtful, accessible scholarship, Aslan narrates the history of religion as a remarkably cohesive attempt to understand the divine by giving it human traits and emotions. According to Aslan, this innate desire to humanize God is hardwired in our brains, making it a central feature of nearly every religious tradition. As Aslan writes, “Whether we are aware of it or not, and regardless of whether we’re believers or not, what the vast majority of us think about when we think about God is a divine version of ourselves.” But this projection is not without consequences. We bestow upon God not just all that is good in human nature—our compassion, our thirst for justice—but all that is bad in it: our greed, our bigotry, our penchant for violence. All these qualities inform our religions, cultures, and governments. More than just a history of our understanding of God, this book is an attempt to get to the root of this humanizing impulse in order to develop a more universal spirituality. Whether you believe in one God, many gods, or no god at all, God: A Human History will challenge the way you think about the divine and its role in our everyday lives. Praise for God “Timely, riveting, enlightening and necessary.”—HuffPost “Tantalizing . . . Driven by [Reza] Aslan’s grace and curiosity, God . . . helps us pan out from our troubled times, while asking us to consider a more expansive view of the divine in contemporary life.”—The Seattle Times “A fascinating exploration of the interaction of our humanity and God.”—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette “[Aslan’s] slim, yet ambitious book [is] the story of how humans have created God with a capital G, and it’s thoroughly mind-blowing.”—Los Angeles Review of Books “Aslan is a born storyteller, and there is much to enjoy in this intelligent survey.”—San Francisco Chronicle

Your Own Jesus

Your Own Jesus PDF Author: Mark L. Hall
Publisher: Zondervan
ISBN: 031032534X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
Why are so many Christians living such empty, fruitless lives? Why is their faith so weak, their character so shallow? Perhaps it's because they have merely inherited someone else's Jesus. They've relied on what their family, friends, or pastors have told them about Jesus rather than discovering the living Lord themselves. A true storyteller and a teacher with a heart for ministry, Mark Hall traces the downward spiral caused by spiritual compromise with the World, and then charts the upward road to wholeness and health that comes when we claim our very own Jesus. When that happens, believers experience authentic fellowship with the one living God. Through fascinating personal stories, scriptural insights, and practical interactive studies, Your Own Jesus will set readers free to live without compromise with the Jesus they come to know intimately and love fully.

How God Becomes Real

How God Becomes Real PDF Author: T.M. Luhrmann
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691234442
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
The hard work required to make God real, how it changes the people who do it, and why it helps explain the enduring power of faith How do gods and spirits come to feel vividly real to people—as if they were standing right next to them? Humans tend to see supernatural agents everywhere, as the cognitive science of religion has shown. But it isn’t easy to maintain a sense that there are invisible spirits who care about you. In How God Becomes Real, acclaimed anthropologist and scholar of religion T. M. Luhrmann argues that people must work incredibly hard to make gods real and that this effort—by changing the people who do it and giving them the benefits they seek from invisible others—helps to explain the enduring power of faith. Drawing on ethnographic studies of evangelical Christians, pagans, magicians, Zoroastrians, Black Catholics, Santeria initiates, and newly orthodox Jews, Luhrmann notes that none of these people behave as if gods and spirits are simply there. Rather, these worshippers make strenuous efforts to create a world in which invisible others matter and can become intensely present and real. The faithful accomplish this through detailed stories, absorption, the cultivation of inner senses, belief in a porous mind, strong sensory experiences, prayer, and other practices. Along the way, Luhrmann shows why faith is harder than belief, why prayer is a metacognitive activity like therapy, why becoming religious is like getting engrossed in a book, and much more. A fascinating account of why religious practices are more powerful than religious beliefs, How God Becomes Real suggests that faith is resilient not because it provides intuitions about gods and spirits—but because it changes the faithful in profound ways.

Man Seeks God

Man Seeks God PDF Author: Eric Weiner
Publisher: Twelve
ISBN: 1455505706
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description
Bestselling author of Geography of Bliss returns with this funny, illuminating chronicle of a globe-spanning spiritual quest to find a faith that fits. When a health scare puts him in the hospital, Eric Weiner-an agnostic by default-finds himself tangling with an unexpected question, posed to him by a well-meaning nurse. "Have you found your God yet?" The thought of it nags him, and prods him-and ultimately launches him on a far-flung journey to do just that. Weiner, a longtime "spiritual voyeur" and inveterate traveler, realizes that while he has been privy to a wide range of religious practices, he's never seriously considered these concepts in his own life. Face to face with his own mortality, and spurred on by the question of what spiritual principles to impart to his young daughter, he decides to correct this omission, undertaking a worldwide exploration of religions and hoping to come, if he can, to a personal understanding of the divine. The journey that results is rich in insight, humor, and heart. Willing to do anything to better understand faith, and to find the god or gods that speak to him, he travels to Nepal, where he meditates with Tibetan lamas and a guy named Wayne. He sojourns to Turkey, where he whirls (not so well, as it turns out) with Sufi dervishes. He heads to China, where he attempts to unblock his chi; to Israel, where he studies Kabbalah, sans Madonna; and to Las Vegas, where he has a close encounter with Raelians (followers of the world's largest UFO-based religion). At each stop along the way, Weiner tackles our most pressing spiritual questions: Where do we come from? What happens when we die? How should we live our lives? Where do all the missing socks go? With his trademark wit and warmth, he leaves no stone unturned. At a time when more Americans than ever are choosing a new faith, and when spiritual questions loom large in the modern age, Man Seeks God presents a perspective on religion that is sure to delight, inspire, and entertain.

God Has a Name

God Has a Name PDF Author: John Mark Comer
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
ISBN: 0310344247
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
God Has a Name is a simple yet profound guide to understanding God in a new light--focusing on what God says about himself. This one shift has the potential to radically alter how you relate to God, not as a doctrine, but as a relational being who responds to you in an elastic, back-and-forth way. In God Has a Name, John Mark Comer takes you line by line through Exodus 34:6-8--Yahweh's self-revelation on Mount Sinai, one of the most quoted passages in the Bible. Along the way, Comer addresses some of the most profound questions he came across as he studied these noted lines in Exodus, including: Why do we feel this gap between us and God? Could it be that a lot of what we think about God is wrong? Not all wrong, but wrong enough to mess up how we relate to him? What if our "God" is really a projection of our own identity, ideas, and desires? What if the real God is different, but far better than we could ever imagine? No matter where you are in your spiritual journey, the act of learning who God is just might surprise you--and change everything.

What We Talk About When We Talk About God

What We Talk About When We Talk About God PDF Author: Rob Bell
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062389378
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
How God is described today strikes many as mean, primitive, backward, illogical, tribal, and at odds with the frontiers of science. At the same time, many intuitively feel a sense of reverence and awe in the world. Can we find a new way to talk about God? Pastor and New York Times bestselling author Rob Bell does here for God what he did for heaven and hell in Love Wins: he shows how traditional ideas have grown stale and dysfunctional and reveals a new path for how to return vitality and vibrancy to how we understand God. Bell reveals how we got stuck, why culture resists certain ways of talking about God, and how we can reconnect with the God who is with us, for us, and ahead of us, pulling us forward into a better future—and ready to help us live life to the fullest.

No More Faking Fine

No More Faking Fine PDF Author: Esther Fleece Allen
Publisher: Zondervan
ISBN: 0310344778
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
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.

Lies We Believe About God

Lies We Believe About God PDF Author: Wm. Paul Young
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1501101412
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
From the author of the bestselling novel The Shack and the New York Times bestsellers Cross Roads and Eve comes a compelling, conversational exploration of twenty-eight assumptions about God—assumptions that just might be keeping us from experiencing His unconditional, all-encompassing love. In his wildly popular novels, Wm. Paul Young portrayed the Triune God in ways that challenged our thinking—sometimes upending long-held beliefs, but always centered in the eternal, all-encompassing nature of God’s love. Now, in Wm. Paul Young’s first nonfiction book, he invites us to revisit our assumptions about God—this time using the Bible, theological discussion, and personal anecdotes. Paul encourages us to think through beliefs we’ve presumed to be true and consider whether some might actually be false. Expounding on the compassion fans felt from the “Papa” portrayed in The Shack—now a major film starring Sam Worthington and Octavia Spencer—Paul encourages you to think anew about important issues including sin, religion, hell, politics, identity, creation, human rights, and helping us discover God’s deep and abiding love.