Like reading Christian books? Don’t have the funds to purchase many? Can you write 200 words down expressing your opinion? Have a computer? Well then you’re in luck with Book Sneeze.
If you’re a blogger and enjoy reviewing books, sign up for a free account, choose a book from their available books and they’ll send you a copy for free. The catch? All you need to do is post a 200 word review, good, bad or ugly, let them know about it and go ahead and do it all over again.
Sounds too good to be true right? Well I tried it out and received my first book to review, Wild at Heart: Discovering the Secret of a Man’s Soul – I’ll go ahead and read it and post a review here and it’s mine to keep!
Book Sneeze is part of Thomas Nelson publishing and one can only request their titles – click here for current titles available. For other free opportunities, check this post out.
Be sure to grab yourself a free Audio Book download of Mark Driscoll’s, “Religion Saves: + nine other misconceptions” – available now @ www.christianaudio.com.
This book is based on the same titled sermon series held at Mars Hill Church in Seattle. Check out the sermons here.
Basically Mars Hill Church opened up a web based survey and asked for people to post any questions they would like Mark Driscoll to address. After receiving thousands of questions and thousands of votes against these questions, the top ten areas were addressed in a sermon series and a book was put together.
Now you can download a copy of the audio book for free thanks to www.christianaudio.com!
Simply log in or create an account and for the month of February, it’s yours for free! Simple!
John Piper is the Pastor for Preaching at Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA. John is the author of more than 30 books and more than 25 years of his preaching and teaching is available free at desiringGod.org
His website includes a vast resource of quality teaching and preaching and he freely makes this available for the Body of Christ.
In today’s age of “celebrity pastors” who make a living on travelling the world pushing their books at inflated places and then travelling on to their next destination in their Lear Jets to talk more about the so called “prosperity gospel”, John is a welcome contrast.
He is perhaps best known by the quote embedded in the following image…
“God is most glorified in me when I am most satisfied in Him” – what a way to view your life! What a sharp contradiction to the “live your best life now” or “seven steps to happiness” so freely peddled into today’s Christian bookstores.
Although John is a Pastor, Speaker and Author – and he writes a tonne of books, what contrasts him from others is that he also makes his books, and all his teaching material, freely available to all! What an awesome blessing he is to the Church and a glowing example of what it means to be a servant of Jesus.
Below are just 10 examples of books available for free download from his website desiringGod.org. In fact, if you head over to his website, you will find 54 books available for free download in PDF format.
Feel free to download to your heart’s content – Download Adobe PDF Reader here.
The great business of life is to glorify God by enjoying him forever. Discord between duty and delight doesn’t exist: delight is our duty. Piper stuns us again and again with things we saw in the Bible, but never dared to believe. Join him on this dangerous quest for maximum joy in God. But beware, it may cost you your life. Never mind – "the steadfast love of the Lord is better than life" (Psalm 63:3).
God created us to live with a single passion: to joyfully display his supreme excellence in all spheres of life. The wasted life is the life without this passion. God calls us to pray and think and dream and plan and work, not to be made much of, but to make much of him in every part of our lives.
Music Video by Lacrae | Don’t Waste Your Life
Fifty Reasons Why Jesus Came To Die | Download PDF
The death of Jesus is of foremost importance for the world. And the central issue of Jesus’ death is not the cause, but the meaning—God’s meaning.
The most spectacular sin in the history of the world is the murder of the innocent, pure, perfect, and infinitely worthy Son of God. And at the center of that evil is the Satan-empowered betrayal of Jesus by his friend, Judas.
The Misery Of Job & The Mercy Of God | Download PDF
Job lost everything: his wealth, his health, and his ten children. All swept away in one satanic storm. Reduced to a heap of flesh, ashes, and tears—rebuked by friends and jeered by strangers—righteous Job wrestled over the purpose and presence of God in the midst of unbearable pain.
Video of John Piper’s Poetry on the Book of Job
The Power Of Words & The Wonder Of God | Download PDF
John Piper, Sinclair Ferguson, Mark Driscoll, and other leaders from Desiring God’s 2008 national conference examine the life-altering power of our words and their impact in sharing the gospel.
Conference video trailer upon which this book is based…
It has been ten years since the Prodigal Son left everything he knew – his home, his sister, his older brother, and his father. And now the prodigal’s sister intends to fulfil her promise, to find the Prodigal dead and bring him home alive.
Many people seek to better their lives by leaving, changing, swapping, or modifying their commitments. But God’s Word holds up a beautiful value that, while difficult, leads to deep satisfaction and great reward: endurance. Such long, steady, hold-the-course perseverance is especially needed within our vacillating generation.
The timeless themes of sex, racial tension, and God’s perplexing and perfect plans are as much a part of our human experience today as they were for Ruth and Boaz over three thousand years ago.
I’m currently reading my first Ted Dekker novel. After years of seeing his stuff at the Christian bookstore and wondering how good “Christian fiction” is, I decided to get over my Tim Lahaye “Left Behind” mentality and dig into this book – albeit after borrowing it from a local library.
What I meant by the Left Behind comment is that Christians sometimes come across as real losers trying to follow a popular trend. When Lahaye came out with the Left Behind series, you were almost outcast if you didn’t read the books and actually like them.
I read a few but soon got over the “let’s stretch out this shocking theology over X amount of books so we can rake in the money” approach – similar to how shows like “Prison Break” and “Lost.”
And to think that end time understanding of millions of people is influenced by such trash makes me wonder who the bigger culprit is: Dan Brown or Tim Lahaye? Scary thought.
So that was my mindset as I picked up Adam at my local library. Surprised to see a Christian author in the library, I read the blurb and decided to have another crack at Christian fiction. I’m about a quarter through it and love it!
Dekker is an author I resonate with. He shy’s away from typical cliché one would expect from a Christian fiction writer and delivers in a way where you can admire the research an author has undertaken in order to generate his work. It’s real, it’s deep, it flows and it captures you.
Ultimately, Adam is a story about demon possession played out in a scientific “CSI” type environment. To pull this off, Dekker had to do his research and any “hokey pokey christian cliche” would sink this story. I’m glad to report that so far, this story aint sinking and is actually getting more intriguing all the time.
Have a listen to Dekker himself describe some of the thinking behind the book and then go do yourself a favour and grab a copy from somewhere.
Want a free audio book with no strings attached? While there might be a few ways to get your hands on some second rate stuff out there, www.christianaudio.com is a great place to check out if you’re into Christian audio books.
One of the cool features of the site is its “First Chapters” podcast where they release the first chapter of a certain book as a podcast. You get to hear the first chapter and, if you like it, you can go ahead and purchase the rest of book.
But by far the coolest thing about www.christianaudio.com is the free monthly download. And instead of being stingy by offering titles no-one has even heard of, www.christianaudio.com make available awesome titles.
This month is no exception. The free audio book is Leonard Sweet’s “So Beautiful” – released on www.christianaudio.com even before the printed version is released! What a deal!
Leonard Sweet is currently the E. Stanley Jones Professor of Evangelism at Drew Theological School (Madison, NJ), and Visiting Distinguished Professor at George Fox University (Portland, OR). He the author of more than one hundred articles, 600 published sermons and thirty books, most recently The Gospel According to Starbucks (2007).
The blurb on “So Beautiful” goes along the lines of..
What is commonly known as DNA today was called “…so pretty!” when it was discovered years ago, and over the course of his ministry, author Leonard Sweet has discovered that this divine design also informs God’s blueprint for the church. In this seminal work, he shares the woven strands that form the church: missional, relational, and incarnational. Sweet declares that this secret is So Beautiful!
Using the poignant life of John Newton as a touchstone, Sweet calls for the re-union of these three essential, complementary strands of the Christian life. Far from a novel idea, Sweet shows how this structure is God’s original intent and shares the simply beautiful design for His church.
And to wet your appetite even more, check out the following short promo..
In this day and age where “truth” is relative to someones own worldview and “absolute truth” seems like an oxymoron, the claims made in the Bible are often seen as ludicrous by our postmodern (and increasingly post “everything”) society.
Standing up to the onslaught of questions and attacks on what we believe and why we do the things we do, a “tolerant” society is becoming increasingly intolerant to sound Christian doctrine. Even some in the “church” seemed to have caved in and have allowed humanistic world views determine what’s right and what’s wrong in the Bible – instead of declaring the Bible perfect and having ultimate authority.
So it’s in this climate that I want to introduce to you, if you are a small percentage of the population that don’t already know about him, Tim Keller from Redeemer Presbyterian Church. Check out Keller on Wikipedia for some background on the guy. In a nut shell, he is passionate about the Bible, has a brilliant mind and is a goldmine resource for church planting.
I’ve started listening to the guy only recently and have enjoyed the way he engages you in his, what I like to call, “philosophically stylised, yet easily accessible sermons.” And it’s this style that allows him to do a sermon series on “The Problem With Christianity – Why it’s so hard to believe it.” Listen in below via an audio stream or right click on the “download” and save to your PC.
He takes complex issues and hits them head on in a way that almost makes you feel really dumb if you held onto the issues in the first place. Fascinating stuff! These are the themes from his latest book “The Reasons For God.” Click here to purchase from amazon.com. Hope you enjoy the messages…
Exclusivity: How can there be just one true religion? | Download
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Suffering: If God is good, why is there so much evil in the world? | Download
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Absolutism: Don’t we all have to find truth for ourselves? | Download
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Injustice: Hasn’t Christianity been an instrument for oppression? | Download
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Hell: Isn’t the God of Christianity an angry Judge? | Download
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Literalism: Isn’t the Bible historically unreliable and regressive? | Download
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For more Tim Keller resources – constantly updated, click here and here.
You’re probably reading this right now cause the heading to this post either freaked you out or excited the daylights out of you! C’mon you can admit to it – even to yourself if need be.
Truth is, porn addiction is in epic proportions in our culture today. Even if you’re a Christian, you are not immune to it as statistics show that Christians – both male and female – are addicted to porn as much as anyone else on this planet.
To help combat this issue, Mark Driscoll of Mars Hill Church has made available a free ebook he has written over the years to help combat this issue – especially from a male perspective. He is releasing chapters over the next few months – in conjunction to the current sermon series at Mars Hill Church called “The Peasant Princess” (website can be found here). Once fully released, he will make the entire ebook free for download.
The website for the ebook is here and the introduction can be found here. Be notified of chapters as they are released by subscribing to The Resurgence feed here.
This whole exercise will prove to be controversial to say the least. Human sexuality strikes us to the core of who we are and the way we practice our sexual desires impacts us greatly. So to directly tackle this issue in a Driscoll style will raise a few eyebrows. And he anticipates this as he has said:
“In closing, I want to say two things. One, a lot of folks will not like the content or tone of this book and I love them and wish them well. You get what you pay for and this is free. Two, a lot of young guys (and some older guys too) tell me they have been helped by this content and if God uses it to help some guys I would be overjoyed with that. So, let the critics fire away and I’ll gladly take the shots for the guys who are walking wounded in an effort to help them get their shield up and sword sharpened.”
You just got to admire the way Driscoll approaches this issue. Anyway I hope you enjoy reading this free ebook and are edified and built up in this area of struggle for so many people.
I’ve posted earlier on the ESV Study Bible here. I can’t wait for this little beauty to come out. Almost everyday, there are updates to the ESV Study Bible blog showcasing the features and endorsements for this awesome resource.
But one resource that really got me excited is a video of the online version of the ESV Study Bible. This resource is available for free to those who purchase a copy of the ESV Study Bible. What an asset! Check out the video below:
If you’re a Bible geek like me, you should be jumping up and down by now! What these guys have done in redefining what a study Bible should be in print form, they have also replicated online – and it’s free to those who ordered a copy!
Well I’ve ordered mine. Click here to order yours through Amazon – the most cost effective way to order.
Behind all the smiles and masks of many peoples lives lie deep and dark secrets of pain and hurt. Inside of us are truly sobering cries for help amongst some of the cruel blows life can dish out.
Way too often we are unaware of our need for redemption and for a fresh start in life. Is it possible? Is there a way to delve into the deepest and darkest secrets of our soul?
Is there a way to face our reality in a truly honest way – acknowledge our condition – and find deliverance?
Welcome to the heart of Jesus.
Instead of being a victim 2000 years ago, Jesus stands for redemption. He pays the price for all our mistakes, hurts and pain. He is in the business of restoring a broken mankind to what it can truly be – forgiven and redeemed.
But to understand the power of Jesus’ transforming nature, we need to understand what He is. Not just a “nice guy” or a “good teacher.” In Him, the will of God is revealed to mankind. And what’s His will?
“For this is the will of my Father, that everyone who looks on the Son and believes in him should have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.” John 6:40
You may be going through really tough times right now. Deliverance is assured in Jesus. If not right away, certainly on the “last day” – if you believe in Him.
But I believe that this process can be sped up if we have a proper understanding of Jesus’ redemptive nature. And that’s why I invite you to check out this short video on the latest book by Mark Driscoll:
Is this resonating with you? Are you in one of those dark areas? Are you at that point where you just need deliverance and a helping hand? I know at times I am. I can’t wait to get my hands on this book to get to know my King’s heart for me.
In the mean time, here is chapter one. Hope you find hope in the story of Kate’s tragedy. And to my King, I say thank You for your passion towards those who believe in You.
I can’t wait to get my copy of one of the most anticipated study bibles to be released. The ESV Study Bible is set to redefine the expression of a “study bible” as it is a vast volume containing the English Standard Version Bible text as well as the following features:
2,752 pages—equivalent to a 20-volume Bible resource library all in one volume.
1.3 million words—written by 95 leading evangelical scholars and teachers.
20,000 notes—focusing especially on understanding the Bible text and providing answers to frequently raised issues.
Over 50 articles—including articles on the Bible’s authority, reliability, and interpretation; on biblical archeology, theology, worship, prayer, and personal application.
Over 200 full-color maps—created with the latest digital technology, satellite images, and archaeological research; printed in full color throughout the Bible.
200-plus charts—offering key insights and in-depth analysis in clear, concise outline form; located throughout the Bible.
80,000 cross-references—to encourage easy location of important words, passages, and biblical themes.
40 all-new illustrations—including full-color renderings and architectural diagrams of the Tabernacle, the Ark of the Covenant, Solomon’s temple, Herod’s temple, the city of Jerusalem in Jesus’ time and throughout the history of Israel, and many more.
Below is a 5 minute video explaining some of these features:
And to give you a taste of what’s to come, click on the following links for a sample PDF of the text or JPG for the graphic:
Officially released on October 15, 2008, there are a number of styles to choose from. Pre-order before August 15 to get your 25% discount. For more info, click here and be sure to check out the ESV Study Bible blog for more snippets in the future.
If you’re an Aussie or or Kiwi, then this post is for you! Bernie Dymet form Christianity Works is generously offering a free book to you.
“How To Get Close To God” is yours simply for the asking. Click here to order your book right now! I ordered my copy today and look forward to receiving the book and check out Dymet’s view on life and faith.
I must admit, I don’t know too much of where Dymet comes from and am sometimes reluctant to endorse those I know nothing about. From his website, he is described as:
“Berni is a dynamic preacher of God’s word, with a passion for helping people to connect with God amidst the realities of life. He has a wonderful ability to communicate deep, life changing truths in a way that makes sense to the rest of us – talking about issues that really matter. Things that each one of us experiences in our own lives.”
For those out of Australia and NZ, Bernie offers the book for $5.50 AU plus postage and handling – still a bargain.
I’ll let you know what I think in due course. But in the mean time, thank you Bernie for the generosity of your ministry. I really appreciate it!
The theme of book seems very fitting as we are all in the continuum of life and “hecticness.” To be swamped by the everyday demands of modern life is very normal and I look forward to the advice you offer.
“Vintage jesus” is perhaps on the top of the list of books I want to read. But until I get a physical copy in my hands, I can get stuck into the following tidbits from a number of chapters:
This book, co-authored by Mark Driscoll and Dr Gerry Breshears is based on a the Vintage Jesus sermon series preached at Mars Hill Church in 2007. Love this kind of work as it presents the truth of Jesus in an accurate, no nonsense, religious free context. His life, death and resurrection have nothing to do with religion – it’s a love story between a Holy God and a fallen mankind.
Desiring God | 
Finally Alive | 
The Misery Of Job & The Mercy Of God | 
A Sweet & Bitter Providence | 
