Women Spiritual Growth

Every pastor's wife is a faithful servant and leader in her own right. She has great influence on her church, her community, her family, and her husband, and she finds joy in seeing God move in the lives of others. Yet she also faces unique challenges that too often go unnoticed and unaddressed.

Is there a Christian spirituality that embraces the entire reality of womanhood? The answer, Shannon K. Evans suggests, is an emphatic yes. There is a spirituality that meets us in every part of our lives, developed by the women who came before us. Six mystics—Teresa of Ávila, Margery Kempe, Hildegard of Bingen, Julian of Norwich, Catherine of Siena, and Thérèse of Lisieux—revealed a faith big enough to hold the female experiences of sex and desire, the yearning for bodily autonomy, the challenges of motherhood and identity, as well as life with male authority and—sometimes—violence.

Plain and simple, life doesn’t always turn out the way we imagined. Yet, we can respond in God-glorifying ways even when circumstances fall short of our desired hopes and expectations. With practical and biblical counsel from the scriptures, we have the tools we need to put away sinful responses and be women who smile at the future.

The Baxters make plans to come together for a summer lakeside reunion, a celebration like they haven’t had in years. But before the big day, the unthinkable happens. As the Baxter family rallies together, memories come to light in the grief-stricken hours of waiting and praying, memories that bring healing and hope during a time when otherwise darkness might have the final word.

Does the Bible feel confusing and complicated to you? Perhaps some of it feels familiar, but overall, does it feel impossible to navigate? Maybe you recognize the stories, but you just don’t know how they all fit together. Yet they do fit together. In her unique and remarkably listenable way, Angie Smith - best-selling author of What Women Fear, Mended, I Will Carry You, and Seamless - helps you tie together all the loose, disconnected threads you find in the Bible, weaving them into a beautifully crafted storyline.

Your best days are ahead of you, not behind you. It may not always seem like it, look like it, or feel like it - but it’s true. Bible teacher, best-selling author, and activist Christine Caine wants to see you step into a life that is greater than you could ever hope, think, or imagine - even when things are hard. In How Did I Get Here?, Christine invites us to press on - past our fears, past our mistakes, past our insecurities, past our comfort zones, past whatever is holding us back - to reach for more of Jesus.

We all want to live simpler lives and to put Jesus first – and we struggle with both. While we are busy strategizing new ways to streamline our calendars and clean out our closets of the clutter, what really needs attention is what will give us long-term clarity and peace — the priority order of Jesus over everything in our lives. In Jesus Over Everything, Lisa shares eight statements of choice to help us grow in our understanding of what it means to put Jesus first amid the craziness of our days.

In tough times, we can become more familiar with pain than progress and more acquainted with loneliness than companionship. But what if the purpose of our faith is not to reach the Promised Land but to recognize that God is with us in our lowest moments and times of our own personal wilderness? In Experiencing Friendship with God, speaker and pastor Faith Eury Cho draws on ancient wisdom about intimacy with God to help us cultivate a relationship with Him, even among all the complications of today’s world.

We all want our lives to change for the better - to become the healthiest versions of ourselves in spirit, soul, and body. Yet we still struggle. Author Trina McNeilly, looking for order in her own life, embarked on an inward journey to the home of her heart and soul to find healing and health from the inside out. Unclutter Your Soul is for all of us who are cluttered and overwhelmed with loss, fear, chronic stress, unhealthy coping mechanisms, crippling depression, or anxiety.

Throughout Keep Showing Up, Karen includes ideas to implement in your marriage right now, such as powerful statements to speak to your spouse, date-night-on-a-shoestring suggestions, and discussion starters. Discover how your "incompatibility" can become the strength of your marital team in this real-life guide to both living with and loving your spouse - differences and all.

Each day we speak thousands of words in dozens of places. One thing is certain about the words we speak, type, and text: they are powerful, and they have consequences. They can impart love and life or deliver discouragement and defeat. No wonder Scripture contains more than 3,500 verses about the power of the tongue. This devotional will take you on a journey over the next forty days to learn to choose and use your words wisely--saving you a boatload of regret and wounded relationships.

As a girl, Alia Joy came face to face with weakness, poverty, and loss in ways that made her doubt God was good. There were times when it felt as if God had abandoned her. What she didn't realize then was that God was always there, calling her to abandon herself. In this deeply personal exploration of what it means to be "poor in spirit", Joy challenges our cultural proclivity to "pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps." She calls on listeners to embrace true vulnerability and authenticity with God and with one another....

Casey Cox is still on the run, fleeing prosecution for a murder she didn’t commit. Dylan Roberts—her most relentless pursuer—is still on her trail, but his secret emails claim he knows the truth and wants to help her. He’s let her escape before, but trust doesn’t come easily.

Modern Christians are steeped in a language so distorted that it has become a stumbling block to the religion, says internationally renowned Bible scholar Marcus J. Borg. Borg argues that Christianity';s important words, and the sacred texts and stories in which those words are embedded, have been narrowed by a modern framework for the faith that emphasizes sin, forgiveness, Jesus dying for our sins, and the afterlife. Here, Borg employs the "historical-metaphorical" method for understanding Christian language that can restore for us thesewords of power and transformation.

If you're tired of hearing the watered-down Christian teaching and hungry for a deeper spiritual life - one that gives real answers to your hardest questions - Stop Calling Me Beautiful teaches you how. Jesus doesn't offer a powerless salvation. He makes your brokenness part of his whole redemption story - if you allow him to. Don't settle for a feel-good faith. If you want victory over insecurity, fear, shame, and the circumstances you are facing, it's time to embrace Jesus. All of him.

Christy Nockels knows firsthand how easily our desire to serve God - even when using the gifts he has given us - can overshadow our delight in simply being with him. When God called her to lay down her ministry for a season, Christy was forced to confront how her sense of purpose and worth had become tangled up in her work. God then lovingly invited her to discover true rest in his presence as she learned to live as the Beloved.

People unfamiliar with Scripture often assume that women play a small, secondary role in the Bible. But in fact, they were central figures in numerous Biblical tales. It was Queen Esther’s bravery at a vital point in history which saved her entire people. The Bible contains warriors like Jael, judges like Deborah, and prophets like Miriam. The first person to witness Jesus’ resurrection was Mary Magdalene, who promptly became the first Christian evangelist, eager to share the news which would change the world forever.

Join Tilly Dillehay as she uncovers seven common sources of envy and challenges you to change the way you think about God's glory. In doing so, you will learn to rejoice with others, you will experience greater contentment, and you will discover how to truly love your neighbor as yourself.

Imagine what your life would be like without worry. Women worry a lot. We worry about our children, our friends, our careers, our families, our spouses - the list could go on and on. Yes, we want to be content and trust God with our worries, but it’s a struggle to let go and free ourselves from the burden of anxiety. If you’re tired of worrying about all the what-ifs in your life and want to experience the calm and contentment promised in Scripture, Calm My Anxious Heart is what you’ve been looking for.

Growing up in the green room of SNL, being born to a fire-eater and adopted by a SWAT cop, having internal organs explode, and adopting a deaf girl from China, Scarlet Hiltibidal has been given some strange life experiences - and lived in fear through most of them. But life changed for Scarlet when she learned to hold the gospel up to her fears and realized that though she can't fix herself or protect herself, Jesus walked into this broken, sad, scary place to rescue, love, and cast out her - and your - fear.