Jesus Christ is relentless. He does not give up. And with him comes the certainty of redemption.
Below is the Thinking Fellows Essential Reading List with contributions from each of the Thinking Fellows hosts.
This is an excerpt from Chapter 7 of Junk Drawer Jesus written by Matt Popovits (1517 Publishing, 2024). Available today!

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God will give you more than you can handle. But he doesn’t leave you alone. Not at all.
It isn’t that God struggles to believe our repeated cries of “wolf.” Rather, we struggle to believe God when he repeatedly comes to us with forgiveness and mercy on his lips.
The Church is where God has instituted the office of the preacher of the gospel. And if you are let-down, the gospel is what you need to hear.
Ascertaining the what and how of the Church greatly factor into the very purpose of the Church, that is, they essentially answer the question why the Church?
We do not have to endure the pain and suffering of this fallen existence forever, just for a little while.
Questions of our purpose and significance as a church abound with fewer and fewer people in the pews.
While baptism is a “once and for all” event that should not be repeated in the Christian’s life, the effects of baptism continue throughout the life of the believer.
Our leaders, our pastors, our priests, our teachers, all have feet of clay, just as leaders in Israel did. We do not put our faith in them, even in the ones—perhaps *especially* the ones—in whom we are inclined to have great expectations. They preach the Messiah but are not the Messiah.
Take away the communal aspect, take away the communal gathering around Christ’s body and blood, and the Christian will begin to suffer a malnutrition of faith.
The story of Juneteenth is one of living between proclamation and emancipation, and the story of the Christian faith is one of living in that same tension.
This is an edited excerpt from “The Pastoral Prophet: Meditations on the Book of Jeremiah” written by Steve Kruschel (1517 Publishing, 2019).
This article comes to us from 1517 guest contributor, Karen Stenberg.