Steve Murrell's Blog, page 3

Confidence in God’s Faithfulness

Spiritual leaders must remain confident in God’s faithfulness in times of affliction, wickedness, and limitations. To do so, we must remember that God’s word is forever firmly fixed.

May we remember that God’s faithfulness endures to all generations, regardless of our situation.

Leadership Lessons from Stephen’s Life & Ministry

Today, I want to look at the life of Stephen and the profound leadership lessons we can learn from his brief ministry. Acts 6 and 7 describe Stephen as:

Full of faith and the Holy SpiritFull of grace and powerFull of the Holy Spirit

 As spiritual leaders, I hope that others would describe us in the same way—full of faith, grace, power, and the Holy Spirit.

Here with Us by Victory Worship

Enjoy this Christmas album from Victory Worship. Maligayang Pasko!

2025 Prayer & Fasting Playlist

Our Every Nation Music team has created an official playlist for our annual week of prayer, fasting, and consecration. I hope these songs from our Every Nation churches will encourage you as we focus on our 2025 global theme of The Cross: And What It Means for Fallen Humanity.

You can find charts for these songs on our Every Nation Music website.

The Christmas Mission

As we continue into this Advent season, I want to reshare a video about the Christmas mission.

The Christmas message, from the very beginning, is proclaimed as good news of great joy for all people. Our mission is to spread this good news to the ends of the earth.

May the great joy of knowing him not just fill your home but spread to your cities, campuses, and every nation.

My Top 10 Books of 2024

For the dozens who look forward to my annual book list, the wait is over. Here are some of my previous Top 10 Books lists: 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016.

These are not necessarily the most enjoyable books I read in 2024, but the 10 books that had the greatest impact on me. Often books that impact me the most also make me miserable in the process, and thus are not always so enjoyable. Also, this is not a list of the best books I read in 2024. There are better books that did not make the cut because, while well written, for whatever reason, they did not have the impact of these 10.

Here they are, the 10 books that had the greatest impact on my life and ministry in 2024, in totally random order.

1. What Is the Mission of the Church?: Making Sense of Social Justice, Shalom, and the Great Commissionby Kevin DeYoung and Greg Gilbert

I love the local church, and I love the global mission. I doubly love a book that connects the two. This book articulated so much of what I have always believed and attempted to do—build a local church that accomplishes a global mission.

View book here →

2. Rembrandt Is in the Wind: Learning to Love Art through the Eyes of Faithby Russ Ramsey

If you enjoyed Makoto Fujimura’s Art + Faith (see my 2021 list), you will love this book. And, If you have even the slightest interest in old or new masters like Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Caravaggio, or Van Gogh, this book was written for you. The subtitle says it all: “Learning to Love Art through the Eyes of Faith.” (This book was impactful and enjoyable!)

View book here →

3. Pleasing God: The Greatest Joy and Highest Honorby R. T. Kendall

Pleasing God has been my lifelong passion. Sometimes, I succeed. Other times, not so much. Paul exhorted the Ephesian church to “Find out what pleases God.” As always with an R. T. Kendall book, this one is a masterful mix of robust theology, biblical depth, and personal application.

View book here →

4. Why Evangelical Theology Needs the Global Churchby Stephen Pardue

Raised in the Philippines as a missionary kid, educated in the US, and now back in the Philippines as a professor/scholar, Dr. Pardue is the right person to bring biblical balance, theological boundaries, and missional passion to the sometimes controversial ideas of “contextual theology.” This is an important book for all who are interested in cross-cultural global missions and historically sound theology.

View book here →

5. Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Upby Abigail Shrier

Every pastor, campus missionary, school teacher, and parent (who is paying attention) knows that while Gen Z has had more mental health awareness and help than any previous generation, they also have the most fragile mental health in history. Shrier puts her investigative journalism skills to work to expose the problem and suggest an answer.

View book here →

6. Monsignor Quixoteby Graham Greene

Brilliantly funny, deeply insightful, and theologically rich, Greene pays homage to Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes’s 17th-century classic. Whether or not you have read or enjoyed Cervantes, this book is worth the time. It caused me to ponder my life, calling, values, friendships, and purpose, all while laughing at the bumbling adventures of Green’s fictitious Catholic priest and communist mayor.

View book here →

7. When Crickets Cryby Charles Martin

I first read this novel almost 20 years ago. I read it again about 10 years ago. I read it for the third time this past summer. It has never failed to remind me to pursue my calling, no matter the disappointments along the way. It seems I am on a once-every-10-year roll, so it will probably be on my 2034 list.

View book here →

8. Faith Challenge: Living out God’s Word Every Dayby Juray Mora

Many of us have been encouraging (and pleading with) Bishop Juray to write this book for several years. Buy it and read it and you will know why me and others knew this book needed to be published. It is without a doubt the most helpful and impactful devotional book I have ever used, and I have gone through a lot of devotional books over the decades. Thank you Juray for making this available.

9. Missionary Monks: An Introduction to the History and Theology of Missionary Monasticismby Edward Smither

Highly recommended! I wish I could buy each and every one of you a copy of this book and force you to read it very slowly. Church heroes have evolved over the centuries from early church martyrs to post-Constantine monks to post-Reformation missionaries. (And now we have modern-day media celebrities as heroes. God help us.) May this book deliver us from our social media heroes as we gain a better appreciation of martyrs, monks, and missionaries.

View book here →

10. Fatherless No More: Understanding Who We Are When We Know Who the Father Isby Tim Johnson with Max Davis

This book captures the life story and life message of my friend and ministry colleague. Warning: When you read the first page, you will not be able to put this book down, so set aside a few hours before you even open this book. Well done, Pastor Tim!

View book here →

SNUBS: Five books I read in 2024 that didn’t crack my top 10, but some of you might find interesting.

Timothy Keller: His Spiritual and Intellectual Formation by Collin Hansen 

View book here →

Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison by Michel Foucault

View book here →

What Was God Doing on the Cross? by Alister E. McGrath

View book here →

The Loom of Time: Between Empire and Anarchy, from the Mediterranean to China by Robert Kaplan

View book here →

Remaking the World: How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West by Andrew Wilson

View book here →

Joy Is Here by Grace Covenant Worship

Grace Covenant Church recently released their new Christmas EP. Enjoy.

Fatherless No More by Tim Johnson

Pastor Tim Johnson’s new book, Fatherless No More, is now available to order. I encourage every leader to buy, read, and share his book.

View book here →

Waiting on God’s Promise

After 40 years of praying and believing for a building for Victory U-Belt and seeing and experiencing God answer that prayer, I thought about how long it takes for the promise of God to happen.

In Bishop Juray Mora’s new book, Faith Challenge, I read his devotional about Psalm 23. Here’s what Juray wrote:

In life, we face one battle after another. What is most important is not when the battle will end but who is with us.

This is at the heart of how we must think as spiritual leaders. We will have battles that are unavoidable. But we shouldn’t focus on when it’ll be over but on who is with us.

As you think like a spiritual leader, I encourage you to experience God’s presence, hold on to his promise, believe for his provision, and trust in his providence.

Mere Orthodoxy Magazine

Mere Orthodoxy describes itself as “media for faithful, reflective, and patient Christian renewal.”

I’ve been reading Mere Orthodoxy for years and highly recommend it to pastors and vocational ministers. Our Academic Dean gives an MO subscription to all of our Every Nation Seminary professors each year. Much of what we do as ministers is practical, feet-on-the-ground stuff. That’s the opposite of what we get from MO. Feet-on-the-ground is good for a pastor, but we also need to go deeper than the surface ground. MO always challenges me to think deeper.

View magazine here →