"If your soul is dry and your prayers are dead, here is living water to revive and refresh you." — David Murray Jesus's ministry on earth as a human was marked by a devotion to prayer. Through his prayer life, we see what it means to truly depend on God. Examining all of Jesus's prayers recorded in the New Testament, this book reflects on the content and structure of the Son of God's words to his Father— helping us imitate his example as we commune with our heavenly Father as adopted sons and daughters in Christ.

After the worldwide success of The World Book of Happiness and The World Book of Love, author Leo Bormans has spent two years studying the scientific research on hope and meeting the most prominent experts in the field. Hope is not a luxury of the privileged few. It represents a universal psychological resource that can be found in all corners of the world. Hope is all of this: a tool for envisioning definable goals, a coping resource, an expression of trust and openness as well as a spiritual gift earned by faith or ritual. In the course of a lifetime every individual is apt to experience these different shades of hope. The World Book of Hope is an inspiring quest to the breadth and depth of hope. It offers a universal framework for understanding and using the most powerful tool of mankind: hope. Without hope there is no life. In this book, 100 professional researchers from all over the world share what we know about hope. Not spiritual philosophy but evidence based knowledge of recent experiments and life-long research, set in a language everybody understands. This book unveils the secret power of hope in love and relationships, study and work, health and illness, education and care, freedom and prison, management and leadership, therapy and economy, youth and old age. It even shows how we can make pessimism work and how we can benefit from post-traumatic growth: one door closes, another one opens. AUTHOR: Leo Bormans is a journalist, writer and public speaker. For more than twenty years, he was the chief editor of the school magazines Klasse and Yeti. At present, he travels around the world as the Ambassador of Happiness & Quality of Life. SELLING POINTS: * A record of worldwide scientific research on hope * Including a selection of ten of the world's most hopeful projects * Full of inspiring examples 75 colour and 50 b/w images Also available: The World Book of Love ISBN 9789401422741

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Pulitzer Prize–winning author Jon Meacham explores the seven last sayings of Jesus as recorded in the Gospels, combining rich historical and theological insights to reflect on the true heart of the Christian story. For Jon Meacham, as for believers worldwide, the events of Good Friday and Easter reveal essential truths about Christianity. A former vestryman of Trinity Church Wall Street and St. Thomas Church Fifth Avenue, Meacham delves into that intersection of faith and history in this meditation on the seven phrases Jesus spoke from the cross. Beginning with “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do” and ending with “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit,” Meacham captures for the reader how these words epitomize Jesus’s message of love, not hate; grace, not rage; and, rather than vengeance, extraordinary mercy. For each saying, Meacham composes an essay on the origins of Christianity and how Jesus’s final words created a foundation for oral and written traditions that upended the very order of the world. Writing in a tone more intimate than any of his previous works, Jon Meacham returns us to the moment that transformed Jesus from a historical figure into the proclaimed Son of God, worshiped by billions.

Do we live in a world that makes sense, not just now, but totally and forever? If, as scientists now predict, the universe is going to end in collapse or decay, can it really be a divine creation? Is there a credible hope of a destiny beyond death? In this engaging and intellectually scrupulous book, a leading scientist-theologian draws on ideas from science, scripture, and theology to address these important questions. John Polkinghorne carefully builds a structure of the hope of the life to come that involves both continuity and discontinuity with life in this world—enough continuity so that it is we ourselves who shall live again in that future world and enough discontinuity to ensure that the second story is not just a repetition of the first. Polkinghorne develops his argument in three sections. In the first, he considers the role of contemporary scientific insights and cultural expectations. In the second, he gives a careful account of the various testimonies of hope to be found in the Bible and assesses the credibility of belief in Jesus’ resurrection. In the final section he critically analyzes and defends the Christian hope of the life of the new creation.

This introduction to Reformed apologetics explores foundational principles and offers practical guidance for talking with unbelievers.