This weeks Free Stuff Friday is sponsored by The Good Book Company. They are giving away to one winner a bundle of their new releases!

This September Releases Bundle Includes…
God’s Big Promises Bible Storybook by Carl Laferton
Watch children discover God’s big promises and how Jesus keeps every one of them! God’s Big Promises Bible Storybook contains both familiar stories, such as Noah & the ark, David & Goliath, and Daniel & the lions’ den, and lesser-known stories such as Jacob & Esau and Simeon & Anna. Together, these 92 theologically faithful stories point to the one big story of the Bible: God making and keeping his promises to redeem his people.
Bright, colorful icons indicate which stories relate to a promise made or a promise kept within 5 distinct themes: Rescue, People, Land, Joy and King. It is a great first Bible to introduce a child to the stories of the Bible and the promise-keeping God who loves them. It also provides a trusted starting point for children to cultivate a lifelong love of God’s word.
The Christian Manifesto by Alistair Begg
What does genuine Christian living look like in the 21st century, and how can we be motivated to live that way?
The answer comes from Jesus’ sermon in Luke 6 (sometimes known as the Sermon on the Plain), which starts, “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God,” and goes on to lay out God’s vision statement for the Christian life. It is a manifesto that transcends politics, culture, and personality, detailing God’s intentions for his people.
Alistair Begg unpacks this sermon, encouraging Christians to live a radically different life that upends the world’s values and philosophies. It’s a lifestyle that is counterintuitive and countercultural, yet one that God blesses with true meaning and impact.
As we look at the kindness and compassion of Jesus and ask for the Holy Spirit’s help, we’ll grow in both the motivation and the ability to obey Jesus’ teaching and experience the blessing that comes from that.
Training Young Hearts: What Are Hands For? and What Are Mouths For? by Abbey Wedgeworth
The new Training Young Hearts series addresses the attitudes of the heart that underpin behavior and explains how the gospel of grace enables us to change. What Are Mouths For? and What Are Hands For? are the first two in the series and address both positive and negative behaviors related to little ones’ mouths and hands.
Parents, teachers, and other loved ones can refer back to these resources when specific behaviors need both to be corrected and to be connected to forgiveness, grace, and growth.
Faithfully Present by Adam Ramsey
Most of us feel that life is rushing past us. We reach the end of another day or week or year and wonder where it went. So we double down on trying to do more or do better—or distract ourselves with the many diversions the 21st century has to offer. But often we’re so busy thinking about the next thing that we’re at risk of missing the main thing: the people and places God has put in front of us, right here, right now.
There is a better way to live. In this thought-provoking book, Adam Ramsey helps us to embrace the time and place we are in and to live each day fully and faithfully present with God and with others. Readers will discover fresh joy in the little things, freedom from the tyranny of time, and contentment in every season of life.
Hopeward by Dai Hankey
This positive and encouraging book takes readers on a hopeward journey with Jesus from despondency to joy. They will discover how Jesus can restore and sustain them, and they will be re-energized to carry on serving him in a joyful and manageable way.
Author Dai Hankey is a church planter in Cardiff and founder of Red Community, a Christian charity that fights human trafficking in Wales. Speaking from a personal experience of burnout, he comes alongside weary Christians to explore what it looks like in practice to really lean on Jesus and enjoy his rest.
Enter Here
Giveaway Rules: You may enter one time. When you enter, you permit The Good Book Company to send you marketing emails which you may unsubscribe from at any time. The winner will be notified via email, and those who do not win will receive an email with the option to download a free e-copy of 12 Things God Can’t Do by Nick Tucker. The giveaway closes on Friday, September 29th at noon EST.

Good morning and happy Monday!

I am away this week so will not be updating Kindle deals very often. Beyond that it will be business as usual. That said, there are some good ones there today.
(Yesterday on the blog: How We Worshipped)
Bulletproof
This article deals with sorrows and hope, with fear and faith.
You Are Not a Slave to Sin—Even if You Feel Like One
“Imagine yourself travelling down a long country road. Looking ahead, on one side you see a high chain link fence, and on the other you see an open field. As you drive closer, you can see people behind the fence and people in the field.” This opens quite a helpful illustration for our relationship to sin.
Making and Keeping Friends in Ministry
“Ideas of friendship will undoubtedly vary from person to person. Some may define friendship in terms of common interests, common enemies, or shared experiences. I imagine for you, like me, friendships in your own life come in all shapes and sizes. This has been the case throughout history.”
Three Signs of False Teachers
It is important to be able to spot a wolf in sheep’s clothing. “When a wolf looks at sheep, what does he see? Food. His motivation for getting close to sheep is not to care for their needs or protect them from danger; it’s to feed on them. But in order to get close to sheep, a wolf employs deceptive tactics to keep the sheep from discerning his dangerous presence before he can achieve his aims.”
Idols of the heart and “Vanity Fair”
CCEF has shared one of David Powlison’s classic journal articles titled “Idols of the Heart and ‘Vanity Fair.’” It’s a long read, but a rewarding one.
Isn’t Christianity just an oppressive set of rules?
“Whenever I ask someone with no experience of church what they think a Christian is, they usually tell me that they think a Christian is someone who tries to be good. Someone who follows a complex set of rules to try and obey their God. It is easy to see why people get that impression.” I’m so thankful our faith is so much more than that!
Flashback: Are You Living Worthy of the Gospel?
We need to live in such a way that we enhance the reputation of the gospel and the Christ of the gospel. We must not do anything that damages its reputation.

A passion to preach without a discipline to prepare is just a desire to perform. —H.B. Charles Jr.

The relationship of the Christian to the political process is one of those issues that arises time and again and cycle after cycle. It is one of those issues that often generates more heat than light and that brings about more division than unity. Yet I would like to think we can agree that there is one unique contribution that Christians alone can and must make to the process.

Christians can vote and perhaps should vote, but the same is true of everyone—there’s nothing unique to the Christian when it comes to the responsibility of citizenship in a democratic nation. Christians can lobby, but people of any faith or any conviction can lobby. Christians can march, demonstrate, and picket, but so can atheists, Muslims, and Hindus. None of these things is wrong—in fact, each of them has its place and can often be the good and right course of action. But none of them is unique.

Yet there is one key contribution that Christians alone can make to politics: prayer. While I’ll grant that people of any faith can pray and perhaps even do pray for the political process, only Christians can pray and be heard. Only Christians pray to the actual God who actually exists and who actually oversees and intervenes in the affairs of men. Only Christians have the privilege and even the right (through the reconciling work of Christ Jesus) to have an audience with the true and living God. Only Christians delight the heart of the Father when we speak to him. Only Christians can approach and plead with the God of whom it is rightly said, “The king’s heart is a stream of water in the hand of the LORD; he turns it wherever he will” (Proverbs 21:1).

A church may express its belief that its members ought to make their Christian convictions known in the way they vote. A pastor may recommend to his congregants that they consider weighing some policies more substantially than others as they evaluate the various parties or representatives. A church may help its people get registered to vote or instead choose to remain silent about such things. There are many matters that are neither demanded nor forbidden in the Bible and in these each church must follow its own convictions.

Voting, lobbying, and campaigning may make a difference to a nation, but we can be absolutely certain that prayer will make a difference to a nation.Share

But to be faithful to God, a church must pray. To honor Scripture, a church must pray. To express love to the country and its citizens, a church must pray. It must pray because it alone has the ear of the Almighty and it alone has been commanded to make “supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings … for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way” (1 Timothy 2:1–2). If we are to honor the Emperor (1 Peter 2:17) surely we ought also to pray that God would grant an Emperor who acts honorably. Voting, lobbying, and campaigning may make a difference to a nation, but we can be absolutely certain that prayer will make a difference to a nation.

We pray because prayer is expected of us and commanded of us. We pray because our prayers are heard. We pray because our prayers are effective. We pray most simply and most sublimely because God invites us to pray. And this, Christian, is our one unique contribution.