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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Jesus continues to breathe His gifts on His beloved. He continues to breathe absolution upon sinners like me and you, He continues to fill us with the Holy Spirit and all His comfort.
I rededicated my life as many times as I could when the guilt was unbearable. I would read my Bible more and pray more, yet I still struggled. I knew deep down, I was breaking God’s heart with my failure at being his child.
Both Hus and Luther arrived at the same conclusion: neither councils nor the pope had final authority in the church. Headship in the church belongs solely to Christ.
In our attempts to conform the Gospel of Jesus Christ to material, therapeutic, and mystical standards of religion and spirituality we've arrested, inhibited, distorted, and handicapped God's Word and gifts of salvation.
By basing our assurance on the promises of God, which we not only hope for in the future but live in now, the Christian can finally rest in the comfort that they are both saved and not responsible for their own salvation.
God not only unites us to himself by the death and resurrection of his Son; he unites us, the church, together and to himself under Christ as his children.
If our churches are split along generational lines it's because we've turned our backs to the cross. We've shut our ears to the Good News about Jesus Christ, who judges the world with equity.
Ever since the tragedy of the Garden, God’s plan of redemption has been in motion. His movement upon this world has never ceased, and it never will.
God's Word reveals the truth about us. We don't much care for God's Word. We prefer the yes and no of our personal taste buds.
Ultimately, you are not your problems. You are not your weaknesses. You are not your sins. You are sanctified. You are the recipient of God’s abundant, forgiving, amazing grace.
When the direction of preaching is dictated by the hashtag issues of the day, the pulpit becomes the perpetual servant of CNN and Fox News. The news and social media cycle, with its chameleonic alterations from this all-important issue (this week) to that next-all-important issue (next week), does not create a rhythmic dance for the church but a sort of frenzied whack-a-mole worship. Now smack your homiletical hand down on this…now that…now this…now that. We need something better.
At the foot of Mt. Sinai, God told Israel how to celebrate Pentecost once they reached the holy land. Generations later, on the day of this Old Testament festival, Christ poured out his Spirit in Jerusalem. What made Pentecost the ideal day for this gift to be given?