Download eBooks Free for Everyone: Jun 12, 2009

Love is Like Fire

Friday, June 12, 2009

Peter Riedemann (1506-1556) wrote this confession as a 23-year-old while imprisoned in Austria on account of his faith. At the time, the Anabaptists were being drowned, beheaded, and burned at the stake as heretics by the thousand for their commitment to baptism of believers, economic sharing, nonviolence, and the restoration of a New Testament Christianity free from state control and institutional hierarchy.
In addition to the confession are two important supplements: How We Should Build the House of God and The Seven Pillars of This House. These meditations, like the confession, are of a deeply spiritual character.

From the book:

Love is like fire –
When it is first kindled in a man,
small troubles and temptations smother
and hinder it; but when it really burns,
having kindled the man’s eagerness for God,
the more temptations and tribulations meet it,
the more it flares, until it overcomes and consumes
all injustice and wickedness.
Dr. Franklin H. Littell

Much of the teaching of the Roman Catholic and Protestant theologians of the sixteenth century is today unreal and irrelevant, but what the Anabaptists taught about mutual aid, peace, discipline, religious liberty, and lay witness is as fresh and important as it was fifteen generations ago.

Wes Harrison, Alderson-Broaddus College
For Riedemann, Christian discipleship was an incendiary fellowship between the believer and his Lord. Love like a fire burned within him… Love begets love, it must “show itself in active work, serving all men and doing good.

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Cries from the Heart

Cries from the Heart answers a specific hunger millions share - a longing for a personal connection to the divine. In times of crisis, all of us reach for someone,or something, greater than ourselves. Some call it prayer. Others just do it. For many, it’s often like talking to a wall. People are looking for assurance that someone hears them when they cry out in their despair, loneliness, or frustration. The last thing they need is another book telling them how to pray or what to say, holding out religion like a good-luck charm.

So instead of theorizing or preaching, Johann Christoph Arnold tells stories about real men and real women dealing with adversity. Their difficulties - which range from extreme to quite ordinary and universal - resonate with readers, offering a challenge, but also comfort and encouragement. People will see themselves in these glimpses of anguish, triumph, and peace.

Bo Lozoff, Director, The Human Kindness Foundation
Even in the worst imaginable circumstances, each of us can choose to turn to God in sincere prayer and suffer together with Him rather than alone. Arnold does not pander to our desire to escape suffering, but rather helps us to mine the spiritual gold within the depths of it.

Most Rev. Alex J. Brunett, Archbishop of Seattle
Cries from the Heart offers the reader a wonderful insight into the compassion and sensitivity that are the hallmarks of the Christian faith tradition. Many of the anecdotal materials discovered in the book will find an echo in the hearts of its readers.

Roy Bourgeois, S.O.A Watch
An excellent resource to inspire us all as we work for peace and justice in our world and in our hearts.

Rev. Donna Schaper, author, Shelter for the Spiritually Homeless
Cries from the Heart is written by someone who knows heartache—and what life is like on the other side. By teaching us to pray, and how to trust prayer, Arnold embraces our despair and restores our confidence.

John Dear, Fellowship of Reconciliation
Cries from the Heart takes us deep into the inner recesses of life the spiritual struggle of prayer and faith.

Ernest Preate
Arnold chronicles the humanity and the divinity in each of us with stories of real people who have experienced the gamut of life’s challenges. He allows their own words to fully describe their journey and how they, through faith in God and prayer, persevered to reach an inner peace.

Diane Komp, M.D., author, Breakfast for the Heart
I love a riveting story that won’t go away. That’s exactly the type of word picture that Johann Arnold paints, from dark to light, from despair to courage, from pain to joy, from doubt to faith. But always—ALWAYS—Arnold points our crying to the light.

Richard John Neuhaus, First Things
Arnold’s message is demanding and exhilarating, which is what disciples of Jesus should expect.

Houston Chronicle
Arnold is thought-provoking and soul-challenging…He writes with an eye-opening simplicity that zings the heart.

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Be Not Afraid

In Be Not Afraid, Arnold addresses fears that every person faces - fear of illness, aging, death and loss, fear of vulnerability, and fear of suffering.

A pastor who has worked with the dying for three decades, Arnold knows that each of us must meet death in our own unique way. Yet through stories of people he has known and counseled as a pastor, relative, or friend, he shows how all suffering can be given meaning, and despair overcome. These real-life stories offer sure proof that even today, in our culture of isolation and death, there is reason for hope.

Based on his popular 1997 book I Tell You a Mystery, this new version has been broadened in scope to include discussion of contemporary issues such as AIDS, suicide, and euthanasia.

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Inner Words

These passages were selected by Emmy

Arnold, drawing from the writings of her husband Eberhard Arnold, as well as those of Augustine, Blumhardt, Bodelschwingh, Deitrich Bonhoeffer, Meister Eckhart, Hermann Loens, Martin Luther, Thomas a Kempis, Hudson Taylor and others.

As Emmy Arnold writes, “We need voices of our time which speak to people’s hearts. It has been important to me in choosing these words that they come from people who have not only expressed their faith in words, but who have actually lived what they thought and wrote and believed.”

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