Description of Resources
I often remind people that these books are not about Christianity but about helping believers, as well as those at a distance or disenchanted with what they have seen in Christianity, to know God in a way that enables them to trust him in every part of their lives.
The first volume, The Gap Between God and Christianity: The Turbulence of Western Culture (Resource Books, Wipf & Stock, 2022) is meant to help us examine the foundation and formation of our faith and how subtle influences in our culture create distance between God’s desires, plans, and purposes for us and our daily experience.
The second and third volumes are intended to lead us in spiritual formation. Finding Freedom and Grace in a Broken World: A Journey in the Purposes and Providence of God (Wipf & Stock, 2024), emphasizes the way we think about God. The second volume, An Intervening Love: The Mystery of God’s Providence and the Paradox of His Grace (Wipf & Stock, 2025), emphasizes our freedom in Christ, a world gone wrong, and the mystery of God’s providence.
The fourth book coming out, The Ancient Code of Biblical Wisdom: God’s Design for Human Wellbeing (Wipf & Stock, TBP 2026), unlocks our understanding of God’s design and desire for us on our journey in this life. It uncovers how the Old Testament Wisdom books connect with the wisdom, freedom, and grace we have in Christ, who is our wisdom in the New Testament.
Finally, the current project, Trust Renewed, takes a deeper look at the God we come to love. Here, without ignoring the themes in the first four books, we look more deeply at God’s grace at work in the most unlikely people, knowing God intimately, and growing in the severe necessity of trusting him.
Books Available at:
Purpose
The purpose of the three books is that we who know or want to know God might become what he wants us to be in a broken world that is trying to shape us into something else. Trusting God’s work in us to this end, that we might fulfill his purposes and help others to do so, should be the outcome of our relationship of grace with him. Of course, for one who does not know him, the Bible introduces this God of grace and goes on to reveal his purpose, providence, and plan for the world. Trust and freedom are central to the readings, helping us achieve our goal of living for the purposes of God. I am writing for people who are finished with Christian routines and rituals and tired of an “information only” approach to God—people who want a flourishing faith and a living relationship of trust with him in our broken world.
The outcome of the reading is to know the peace of God that surpasses understanding and logic in whatever circumstances we find ourselves. It is not an absence of the storms of life but a peace that stills our hearts with quiet hope as we “rest in the Shadow of the Almighty,” El Shaddai himself. It is to trust the strength, grace, and providence of the God who loves us.
Thomas M. Stallter