Shake Free: How to Deal with the Storms, Shipwrecks, and Snakes in Your Life - Softcover

Rodriguez, Samuel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1601428219 ISBN 13: 9781601428219

Verlag: PRH Christian Publishing, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

Based on the story of the apostle Paul's near catastrophic shipwreck (see Acts 27-28) , this is a call to individuals to "shake off" problems and disasters in life and move forward to new health and wholeness.

Some days you feel as if you take one step forward only to fall back two—or ten— steps. You struggle and push through one obstacle after another. You know God is present, but when is he going to rescue you from all the storms, shipwrecks, and snakes surrounding you? The apostle Paul faced a great crisis such as this on his epic voyage to Rome, which ended with a disastrous shipwreck—yet every person aboard was saved by grasping broken pieces of wood.

In Shake Free, Samuel Rodriguez issues a powerful call for you to shake off your problems. He writes, “When the storm breaks in your life, you will be driven by: 
• the past or the future
• the pathetic or the prophetic
• problems or promises
• nightmares or dreams
• the flesh or the Spirit
• Google searches or godly churches
• the drama of the storm or God’s destiny for your life.”

Rather than merely surviving circumstances, you can discover how to navigate through life’s challenges to truer wholeness and bigger victories from God.

“Shake Free…will help you break free of emotional, mental, and spiritual burdens.… This book is necessary for all those who are ready to take back control of their lives!”
—DeVon Franklin, producer and New York Times bestselling author

“In Shake Free Samuel Rodriguez explains that God’s way is not just the best way; it’s the only way.… This book…will change your life!”
—Robert Morris, founding senior pastor of Gateway Church and best-selling author of The Blessed Life and The God I Never Knew

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Samuel Rodriguez is the president of NHCLC/Conela, an international organization of more than 500,000 evangelical churches. He is a sought-after voice in White House and congressional meetings and is regularly featured on CNN, Fox News, NBC Telemundo, and other major news outlets. The author of The Lamb's Agenda, Rodriguez is the senior pastor of New Seasons Christian Worship Center in Sacramento, California, where he resides with his wife, Eva, and their three children.

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1

On Your Way

In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost.

—Dante Alighieri, The Inferno

I couldn’t believe where I was and what I was doing.

Although I had stood at many different podiums around the world and offered many prayers, both silently in the pew as well as publicly from the pulpit, this time was different. This time the eyes of the world were upon me as I took center stage on the platform only a few feet away from the president-elect just moments before he would become our nation’s leader. A vast sea of faces from the hundreds of thousands in attendance at the inauguration looked up at me beneath luminous pewter-colored clouds. As I made my way to the podium on this mild, damp January morning, I shivered despite my gray overcoat, more from being nervous than from the weather.

Taking a deep breath, I paused to celebrate all that God had done in my life to bring me to that moment. There I was—a Puerto Rican computer geek from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania—standing before millions of viewers in the very spot where Chief Justice John Roberts would soon swear in the president of the United States. Back in high school I was more concerned with the next Star Trek movie than anything to do with ministry. Never in a million years would I ever have imagined myself a pastor, let alone one about to deliver a prayer for our nation’s new president at his inauguration!

Although I had been involved in several nonpartisan meetings with previous presidents, I was about to make history as the first Hispanic evangelical pastor to pray at this historic and prestigious event. Humbled to be there, I delivered the prayer derived from Scripture that God had placed on my heart and knew this moment was as monumental for me as for our new leader. Months, if not years, had led to where we each stood. After a grueling campaign and divisive election, the president would now move forward to unite us as one nation under God.

My route had also been a long, arduous journey, filled with more ups and downs than any roller coaster ride. (I’ll tell you more about some of those later.) But then, isn’t that true for all of us on our journeys of faith? Some days it feels as if we take one step forward and two steps back before we experience God’s guidance toward the destination where he wants to take us. Sometimes we may even wonder whether we’re going the right direction or whether we’ll ever get where we believe we’re supposed to be. We feel overwhelmed by and underequipped for life’s storms and struggle to push through one obstacle, only to discover another larger one looming before us.

In other words, we feel just like the apostle Paul boarding a ship.

Getting There

“Are we there yet?”

Like most parents, if I had a dollar for every time one of my kids asked that inevitable question while traveling, I’d have a pile of money. But children aren’t the only ones who get impatient. Every time I board a plane, I check my watch and wonder whether my flight will be on time—the first of many such calculations. When delays leave me sitting on the tarmac along with dozens of other frustrated, impatient passengers, I try to remember the journey Paul took in order to get to Rome.

As we will see, this trip was anything but simple. And even if Paul didn’t expect smooth sailing, I doubt he imagined anything like what actually occurred on his epic journey. Filled with an arrest, a trial, a life-threatening storm, a shipwreck, and a snakebite, Paul’s path to Rome featured more drama than a reality TV show. Surely there were times when he had to wonder whether he would ever reach the capital of the Roman Empire. Maybe he questioned whether he had misunderstood what God wanted him to do or how God wanted him to do it or whether he had lost his sense of direction somewhere along the way.

Perhaps Paul’s commitment to walking by faith despite his circumstances resulted from the dramatic upheaval he experienced in his life after encountering Christ. You see, Paul had once been known as Saul before he ran into Jesus while traveling on the road to Damascus. Raised in a strict Jewish home, Saul believed a person’s righteousness could be achieved only by strictly following God’s law. Consequently, Saul thought he and other Jews like him were the only ones worthy of God’s favor because of how hard they worked to follow every commandment and obey every rule.

But Jesus came to fulfill the law and deliver all people—including you and me—from their sins once and for all. His gospel message of grace ran counter to virtually everything Saul, a strict Jew, had been taught and practiced his entire life. This explains why Saul persecuted the early followers of Jesus; he considered them heretics because they were going around telling everyone about grace and forgiveness in the name of Jesus Christ.

After his personal encounter with Jesus, however, Saul began doing the very thing he had once so violently opposed: spreading the good news beyond Israel by traveling and preaching to Gentiles in foreign lands. Along the way, he also began going by the Roman version of his name, Paul, both to show the change in his identity and to escape his reputation as a persecutor of Christians. Throughout his travels, Paul often wrote letters to the communities of believers in these distant locations, and many of these divinely inspired messages became part of what we call the New Testament.

We also know a lot about Paul’s life from the narrative we find in the book of Acts, which most scholars believe was written by the same author as the gospel of Luke. Consequently, Paul emerges as a superhero of the Christian faith who continues to instruct us, inspire us, and ignite our hearts toward God today. As we will discover throughout these pages, Paul faced more pulse-pounding, life-or-death, cliff-hanger situations than Indiana Jones and Jason Bourne combined! From angry mobs eager to kill him to shipwrecks and jail cells, Paul faced each new trial with patience and faith.

When in Rome

Throughout all these twists and turns, however, Paul knew he would eventually get to Rome because that’s where God wanted him to be. Far from being a vacation destination, the center of the Roman Empire was probably one of the most dangerous places in the world for Paul. Now known as the Eternal City because of its ties to ancient history and its timeless works of art and architecture, in Paul’s day Rome was not only the capital but also the center of the most powerful military empire on the planet.

Consequently, Rome served as the United Nations of the early first century because of its diverse population, a result of the expansive conquests of so many tribes and nations. England, Spain, Syria, Israel, and much of what we now know as Western Europe and North Africa all belonged within Rome’s grasp. At the time, all roads literally led to Rome.

Paul was on his way to Rome for a much more unusual reason than most of the international travelers of his day. He was en route to Rome because God wanted him to have a larger platform to amplify the narrative of this new faith known as “The Way,” the early name for the beliefs of those following Jesus. But Paul was not going under the best of circumstances. In fact, on the surface they look like the worst of circumstances.

He wasn’t going on vacation aboard a Royal Caribbean cruise ship or enjoying sunset views of the Mediterranean from the deck of a yacht or even a fishing boat. No, Paul sailed for Rome as an inmate on a prison ship! Arrested for...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: PRH Christian Publishing
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2019
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1601428219
• ISBN 13: 9781601428219
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 224
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland