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conversations.value: Provide a description for a book titled Growing in Christ about Lutheran, Church, Duluth with the genre: Christian Books & Bibles, Churches & Church Leadership.
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conversations.value: the author was the senior pastor of First Lutheran Church in Duluth, Minnesota, when he suddenly passed away while traveling to Namibia. In addition to parish ministry, the author also served for 18 years as university pastor at Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio.
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conversations.value: What could be a title for a book about Adventist, Church, Many with the genre: Christian Books & Bibles, Christian Living?
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conversations.value: A title for this book could be 'Growing in Christ'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide the first four paragraphs for this book.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Growing in Christ
  This seems the natural reading of the scanty evidence (i.e., the three New Testament texts noted above); but Seventh-Day Adventists continue the Saturday sabbath, denying that a change has been made, while many, with Augustine, seeing that the commanded "rest" was typical of our rest of faith in Christ, conclude that, like other Old Testament types, this commandment is now abolished. Then their reason for keeping the Lord's day is the church's traditional practice rather than God's direct command.
  Inferences from these three questions may be disputable, but the underlying principle is clear—namely, that we must honor God not only by our loyalty (first commandment) and thought-life (second commandment) and words (third commandment), but also by our use of time, in a rhythm of toil and rest; six days for work crowned by one day for worship. God's claim on our sabbaths reminds us that all our time is his gift, to be given back to him and used for him. "Take my life" includes "take my moments and my days—take my time, all of it." This is where true obedience to the fourth commandment begins.
  That Christians are stewards of the gifts and money that God gives them is a familiar truth nowadays; that we are stewards of the time we are given is less stressed, but just as true. We can learn this from the Puritans, who often voiced their sense of the preciousness of time, and from Paul, who urges, "Look carefully then how you walk,... making the most of the time, because the days are evil" (Ephesians 5:15ff.; cf. Colossians 4:5). "Time" means "moment" or "opportunity"; "making the most of " is literally "buying up," "redeeming from waste or uselessness"; and the days are still "evil" in Paul's sense, namely full of temptation and opposition from satanic sources (cf. 6:11-17). Satan wants to see every minute misused; it is for us to make every minute count for God.
  How? Not by a frenzied rushing to pack a quart of activity into a pint pot of time (a common present-day error), but by an ordered life-style in which, within the set rhythm of toil and rest, work and worship, due time is allotted to sleep, family, wage-earning, homemaking, prayer, recreation, and so on, so that we master time instead of being mastered by it.
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conversations.value: Provide two more paragraphs.. End with the sentence ' Could "Stop, thief!" be a word that God is speaking to you and me?'.
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conversations.value: No doubt this principle is both clear and commonplace. After all, every law-code everywhere has always protected property, condemned stealing, and required damages—restitution—in the way that Scripture does (cf. Numbers 5:7; Proverbs 6:30ff.). How else could there ever be ordered community life? It might seem that nothing here needs a second thought.
  Perhaps we thought that the words "thou shalt not steal" had no relevance for us in our respectability. Perhaps we need to think again. "Let the thief no longer steal," wrote Paul (Ephesians 4:28). Could "Stop, thief!" be a word that God is speaking to you and me?
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide the last five paragraphs.
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conversations.value: So God's Commandments are in truth cement for society. It is clear that where these values are acknowledged, communities (our own, for instance, in the past) hold together, even in this fallen world; but in proportion as these values are negated, society falls apart. This can be learned both from the paganized world of injustice and revolution which was the northern kingdom of Israel (trace its sad story in 1 Kings 12-2 Kings 17, and the prophecies of Amos and Hosea), and also from the revolutions and counterrevolutions that rack the world today.
  Till recently most Western nations saw themselves as a continuation of medieval Christendom—that is, as social and political entities with corporate Christian commitments and ideals for living which, at least in intention, were controlled and shaped by Scripture. But now this ideal is being displaced by that of the secular state—a community that is officially without any religion or ideology save that of maximizing freedom for citizens to pursue as individuals whatever interests, religious or otherwise, they happen to have.
  The change is gradual, and so the issue it raises is to some extent masked; but it is important to get it clear. Christian civilization, with its concern for the individual's health, welfare, and dignity, for integrity in public administration, and for a family life in which womanhood is honored and children's claims acknowledged, is a distinctively Christian product. Western society today is busily secularizing these concerns—that is, detaching them from their historic rootage in Christian faith, and dismissing that faith as no longer a viable basis for community life. For the moment, Western society seems so caring and compassionate that some view the secular city of today as the modern form of the kingdom of God. But, true as it is that through God's common grace good moral insights are regularly found among fallen men, Christian standards and values cannot last in a society that has corporately apostatized from Christian faith.
  Why is this? Not only because denying the absolutes of faith undercuts moral absolutes too (though indeed it does), but also because moral corruption and the misery it brings are part of God's judgment on apostasy. "Since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a base mind and to improper conduct," says Paul, and continues with a sample catalog of horrors that reads like a summary of the news in this morning's paper (Romans 1:28-31). Our much-vaunted "permissiveness" is actually a matter of divine curse, as was the idiotically cheerful lawlessness of Jeremiah's day. What thoughtful person can look ahead without a shudder?
  What then should we say of the modern secular society? Should we see its emergence as a sign of progress? Is it not rather a sign of decadence, the start of a slide down a slippery slope with a pit at the bottom? When God's values are ignored, and the only community ideal is permissiveness, where will moral capital come from once the Christian legacy is spent? How can national policy ever rise above material self-interest, pragmatic and unprincipled? How can internal collapse be avoided as sectional interests, unrestrained by any sense of national responsibility, cut each other down? How can an overall reduction, indeed destruction, of happiness be avoided, when the revealed way of happiness, the "God first, others next, self last" of the Commandments, is rejected? The prospects are ominous. May God bring us back to himself, and to the social wisdom of his Commandments before it is too late.