The book shares with its readers relevant and biblical insights as it relates to Christian discipline. All of which, should be to encourage growth and development, rather than punishment.

More and more church leaders, pastors, and members are looking for guidance on how to practice church discipline in a biblical way. Here is a contemporary and concise how-to guide that provides a theological framework for understanding and implementing disciplinary measures in the local church, along with several examples of real-life situations. Drawing on both Matthew 18 and 1 Corinthians 5, this brief hardback helps leaders face the endless variety of circumstances and sins for which no exact scriptural case study exists, sins which don't show up on any list and need a healthy framework to be corrected appropriately in love. This volume is part of the 9Marks: Building Healthy Churches series. Look for upcoming, quick-read formats of the following marks of a healthy church: expositional preaching, biblical theology, the gospel, conversion, evangelism, church membership, discipleship and growth, and church leadership.

Exchange Your Guilt for True Freedom and Forgiveness Do you struggle with feelings of guilt about your past? Or are you bogged down by a conscience that haunts or imprisons you? This is not how God intends for you to live. Your conscience was not created to hold you prisoner, but to guide you and point you to freedom from guilt and bad habits. It's designed to tell you the truth so you are not held in bondage to lies or sin. A clear conscience enables you to live in the present without being distracted, both mentally and emotionally, by your past. Longtime pastor and bestselling author Erwin W. Lutzer shares what it means to live in the power of a clear conscience as you learn how to deal with guilt and replace it with joy discover how the truth that can hurt you can also heal you realize the incredible extent of God's forgiveness and love for you You'll find yourself encouraged by the truths that no failure is permanent and no life is beyond God's power to bring about change.

Although many refer to the American South as the "Bible Belt", the region was not always characterized by a powerful religious culture. In the seventeenth century and early eighteenth century, religion-in terms both of church membership and personal piety-was virtually absent from southern culture. The late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, however, witnessed the astonishingly rapid rise of evangelical religion in the Upper South. Within just a few years, evangelicals had spread their beliefs and their fervor, gaining converts and building churches throughout Virginia and North Carolina and into the western regions. But what was it that made evangelicalism so attractive to a region previously uninterested in religion?Monica Najar argues that early evangelicals successfully negotiated the various challenges of the eighteenth-century landscape by creating churches that functioned as civil as well as religious bodies. The evangelical church of the late eighteenth century was the cornerstone of its community, regulating marriages, monitoring prices, arbitrating business, and settling disputes. As the era experienced substantial rifts in the relationship between church and state, the disestablishment of colonial churches paved the way for new formulations of church-state relations. The evangelical churches were well-positioned to provide guidance in uncertain times, and their multiple functions allowed them to reshape many of the central elements of authority in southern society. They assisted in reformulating the lines between the "religious" and "secular" realms, with significant consequences for both religion and the emerging nation-state.Touching on the creation of a distinctive southern culture, the position of women in the private and public arenas, family life in the Old South, the relationship between religion and slavery, and the political culture of the early republic, Najar reveals the history behind a religious heritage that remains a distinguishing mark of American society.

The 1925 Tennessee v. John Scopes case--the Scopes Monkey Trial--is one of America's most famous courtroom battles. Until now, however, no one has considered at length why the sensational, divisive trial of a public high school science teacher indicted for teaching evolution took place where, and when, it did. This study ranges over the fifty years preceding the trial to examine intertwined attitudes toward schooling and faith held by Tennessee's politically dominant white evangelical Protestants. Those decades saw accelerating social and economic change in the South, writes Charles A. Israel. Education, long the province of family and community, grew ever more centralized, professionalized, and isolated from the local values that first underpinned it. As Israel tells how parents and church, civic, and political leaders at first opposed public education, then endorsed it, and finally fought to control it, he reveals their deep ambivalence about the intangible costs of progress. Lessons that Evangelicals took away from failed adult temperance campaigns also prompted them to reexert control over who and what influenced their children. Evangelicals rallied behind a 1915 bill requiring the Bible to be read daily in public schools. The 1925 Butler bill criminalized the teaching of evolution, which had come to symbolize all that was threatening about theological liberalism and materialistic science. The stage for the Scopes trial had been set. Delving deeply into the collective mind of a people in an age of uncertainty, Before Scopes sheds new light on religious belief, ideology, and expression.

One of The Wall Street Journal's 10 best books of 2021 One of Air Mail's 10 best books of 2021 Winner of the Peter J. Gomes Memorial Book Prize In the year of the nation’s bicentennial, Robert A. Gross published The Minutemen and Their World, a paradigm-shaping study of Concord, Massachusetts, during the American Revolution. It won the prestigious Bancroft Prize and became a perennial bestseller. Forty years later, in this highly anticipated work, Gross returns to Concord and explores the meaning of an equally crucial moment in the American story: the rise of Transcendentalism. The Transcendentalists and Their World offers a fresh view of the thinkers whose outsize impact on philosophy and literature would spread from tiny Concord to all corners of the earth. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the Alcotts called this New England town home, and Thoreau drew on its life extensively in his classic Walden. But Concord from the 1820s through the 1840s was no pastoral place fit for poets and philosophers. The Transcendentalists and their neighbors lived through a transformative epoch of American life. A place of two thousand–plus souls in the antebellum era, Concord was a community in ferment, whose small, ordered society founded by Puritans and defended by Minutemen was dramatically unsettled through the expansive forces of capitalism and democracy and tightly integrated into the wider world. These changes challenged a world of inherited institutions and involuntary associations with a new premium on autonomy and choice. They exposed people to cosmopolitan currents of thought and endowed them with unparalleled opportunities. They fostered uncertainties, raised new hopes, stirred dreams of perfection, and created an audience for new ideas of individual freedom and democratic equality deeply resonant today. The Transcendentalists and Their World is both an intimate journey into the life of a community and a searching cultural study of major American writers as they plumbed the depths of the universe for spiritual truths and surveyed the rapidly changing contours of their own neighborhoods. It shows us familiar figures in American literature alongside their neighbors at every level of the social order, and it reveals how this common life in Concord entered powerfully into their works. No American community of the nineteenth century has been recovered so richly and with so acute an awareness of its place in the larger American story.

No one familiar with the Bible needs to be told that it is a truly remarkable work. But it takes help to understand this ancient collection of diverse forms of literature written by different people across many centuries. The Eerdmans Commentary on the Bible (ECB) is the finest single-volume Bible handbook available. Written by world-class Bible scholars, the ECB encapsulates in nontechnical language the best of modern scholarship on the sixty-six biblical books plus the Apocrypha. The only one-volume Bible commentary to cover all the texts (even including 1 Enoch) regarded by one or more Christian churches as canonical, the ECB provides reader-friendly treatments and succinct summaries of each section of the text that will be valuable to scholars, students, and general readers alike. The primary objective of this work is to clarify the meaning of each section of the Bible. Rather than attempting a verse-by-verse analysis (virtually impossible in a one-volume work), the ECB focuses on principal units of meaning—narrative, parable, prophetic oracle, section of argument, and so on—highlighting their interconnectedness with the rest of the biblical text. The volume also addresses and answers major issues—including the range of possible interpretations—and refers readers to the best fuller discussions. Beyond providing reliable, informative commentary, this hefty volume also includes thirteen introductory and context-setting articles that do justice to the biblical documents both as historical sources and as scriptures. The sixty-seven contributors to the ECB come from a wide variety of backgrounds and are acknowledged leaders in the field of biblical studies. Their contributions stand out either for their fresh interpretations of the evidence, or for their way of asking new questions of the text, or for their new angles of approach. While the translation of choice is the New Revised Standard Version, many of the contributors offer their own vivid translations of the original Hebrew or Greek. Cutting-edge, comprehensive, and ecumenical, the ECB is both a fitting climax to the rich body of interconfessional work undertaken in the latter part of the twentieth century and a worthy launching pad for biblical study in the twenty-first. Special Features of the ECB The only one-volume commentary to cover all the texts (including the Apocrypha and 1 Enoch) regarded by one or more Christian churches as canonical Thirteen major essays that introduce each section of Scripture and its study Encapsulates in nontechnical language the best of modern scholarship Includes superb bibliographies and an extensive subject index Written by sixty-seven first-rate Bible scholars Designed for use by scholars, students, pastors, and general readers