Dan B. Allender

First published in 1989, Dan Allender's The Wounded Heart has helped hundreds of thousands of people come to terms with sexual abuse in their past. Now, more than twenty-five years later, Allender has written a brand-new book on the subject that takes into account recent discoveries about the lasting physical, emotional, relational, and spiritual ramifications of sexual abuse. With great compassion Allender offers hope for victims of rape, date rape, incest, molestation, sexting, sexual bullying, unwanted advances, pornography, and more, exposing the raw wounds that are left behind and clearing the path toward wholeness and healing. Never minimizing victims' pain or offering pat spiritual answers that don't truly address the problem, he instead calls evil evil and lights the way to renewed joy. Counselors, pastors, and friends of those who have suffered sexual harm will find in this book the deep spiritual guidance they need to effectively minister to the sexually broken around them. Victims themselves will find here a sympathetic friend to walk alongside them on the road to healing.

The Heartache of Sexual Abuse and the Hope of Transformation

Healing the Wounded Heart

Teaches believers to look back at the stories of their own lives and identify the themes that God has written there, allowing them to see how God is leading them into the future. Reprint.

Know Your Story, Shape Your Future

To Be Told

Cathy Loerzel

In this book, renowned psychologist Dr. Dan Allender and counselor Cathy Loerzel present a biblically trustworthy and transformational method for healing from painful memories and emotional trauma, stepping into true freedom, and discovering that your wounds are unlikely guides to inner strength and joy.

How Past Suffering Reveals Our True Calling

Redeeming Heartache

Describes "the dynamics of sexual abuse, with the practical applications of Christian truth."

The Wounded Heart

Turning Your Struggles into Strengths

Leading with a Limp

Tremper Longman, III

Embrace your negative emotions (anger, worry, fear) to reveal truths about God and gain a more intimate relationship with Him.

How Our Emotions Reveal Our Deepest Questions about God

The Cry of the Soul

Steve Call

Every relationship has its highs and lows, but we often don't know what to do with our "lows," or how we ended up there. What is creating friction, exacerbating our pain, and standing in the way of intimacy?

More often than not, it is the stories of our past drifting into the present. But if we are willing to look at them closely, we will be able to write a new story for the future.

With more than seventy years of therapeutic experience combined, Dan Allender and Steve Call demonstrate how God is inviting you and your partner to a wild faith journey with the hope of transformation. With personal stories, key psychological insights, and practical advice, The Deep-Rooted Marriage will help you:

Address past trauma, giving you greater courage and compassion to engage your present struggles.
Disrupt cycles of conflict based on shame, judgment, and resentment.
Create safety when feeling threatened and offer attunement, empathy, and honor toward differences.
Adopt humility, honesty, kindness, curiosity, defiance against what divides, and intention to bless.
Learn practices that cultivate emotional intimacy, generating new goodness between you and beyond you.

Marriage is not about merely getting along or resolving conflict through compromise. It reveals who you are and invites you to who you can become. Marriage offers a space for you to experience what you are made for—honor and delight. And it is the ground from which redemption is meant to grow, where, together, you can reflect God's image more and experience a taste of heaven.

Cultivating Intimacy, Healing, and Delight

The Deep-Rooted Marriage

To rest does not mean to cease all activity. Bestselling author Dan Allender presents an insightful and fascinating look at the origins and purpose of Sabbath. Serving as volume three in The Ancient Practices Series, Sabbath examines the key issues of this oft-misunderstood day of the week. This "day of delight," as instituted by God, has become a dirge for millions of believers. For many, it is simply a break from the busyness of the work week. So, what keeps us from properly understanding, sanctifying and celebrating this important day? Allender looks at not only the history of this discipline, going all the way back to ancient Israel, but also at the modern manifestations and misunderstandings of its practice. Allender bases his premise on the Hebrew word for rest, Menuha, which is best translated as joyous repose, tranquility, or delight. It is through this lens that he resurrects this lost definition of what it really means to rest.

Sabbath

Allendar has produced a book that looks at the deep underlying reasons for the unhappiness many people feel in marriage.

Intimate Allies

Parenting with Humility...We often realize that we learn as much from our children as they learn from us. So why don’t parents approach the task of child-rearing as a learning experience, rather than a mandate to make sure their kids succeed in life? To reduce the pressure and enjoy greater closeness in your family, turn your parenting upside-down by allowing God to use your children to help you grow up. Imagine what would happen if you began to prize what you’re being taught by your children’s quirks, failures, and normal childhood dilemmas, rather than worrying about whether you’re doing everything right as a parent. Now you can let go of the pressure to make sure your children succeed, and instead learn to grow into spiritual maturity by listening to your children.

The Art of Listening to Your Family

How Children Raise Parents

Tremper Longman III

We live in a sexually mad world where God's gift of sex has been distorted through pornography, promiscuity, prostitution, abuse, trafficking, and rape. The church's position on sexual matters has been made clear throughout history: all sexual activity outside the boundaries of Christian marriage is sin. But rarely has the church honestly addressed the true needs of Christians who are struggling with sexual desires they believe to be counter to the Bible. So we hide our struggles and pretend to live above the erotic fray, or else we cozy up to the culture's redefinition of which sins are acceptable. But what does the Bible really say about sexual desire and sexual intimacy? God Loves Sex offers a truly liberating, godly view of holy sensuality by recovering the clear meaning of the Song of Songs as God-sanctioned eroticism. Then it uses that lens to answer questions posed by a fictional new Christian struggling with expectations of sexual purity. It asks provocative questions, such as What does it mean to be both holy and filled with rich sexual desire? and How can our sexual struggles take us deeper into the purposes of God? Pairing psychological insight with sound biblical scholarship, Allender and Longman bring it all out into the open, allowing Christians of any age and any marital status to discover sex the way God meant it to be.

An Honest Conversation about Sexual Desire and Holiness

God Loves Sex

DON'T WASTE YOUR PAIN. None of us escapes the heartache and disappointments of life. To live is to hurt, and we all have the wounds to prove it. Regardless of how we've been hurt, we all face a common question: What should we do with our pain? Should we stoically ignore it? Should we just "get over it?" Should we let it "make us stronger?" Should we optimistically hope that everything will work out in the end? If we fail to respond appropriately to the wounds that life and relationships inflict, our pain will be wasted; it will numb us or destroy us. But suffering doesn't have to mangle our hearts and rob us of the joy of life. It can, instead, lead us to life-if we know the path to healing. Healing is not the resolution of our past; it is the use of our past to draw us into deeper relationship with God and his purposes for our lives. We don't have to be held captive by the hurts of our past. We can move from feelings of powerlessness, betrayal, and ambivalence into faith, hope and love. The Healing Path takes us beyond self-discovery to God-discovery, giving us the tools to excavate the riches that lay beneath the surface of our pain. If you're ready to use the experiences of the past and present to shape a future characterized by love, service, and joy, now is the time to step out onto The Healing Path.

How the Hurts in Your Past Can Lead You to a More Abundant Life

The Healing Path Study Guide

Dan B. Allender and Tremper Longman III have together written this brief, simple and engaging introduction to help couples build healthy and happy marriages. Following the "leave, weave and cleave" imagery of the Bible, they help couples learn how to leave their parents, weave a life together and cleave to each other.

Creating Strength and Beauty in Your Marriage

The Intimate Mystery

God wants to reveal himself through your story. Discover how he has written your life so far, and how he is leading you into the rest of your story. “This is a book worth reading. To make sense of your life. To discover the role God is giving you in his story.”—John Eldredge, bestselling author of Wild at Heart and Get Your Life Back Everyone wants clearer guidance from God on what to do with their future. In this insightful book, therapist and professor Dan Allender shows you how to listen to the stories of your life and identify the themes that God has written there. As you begin to understand both the hope and the heartache, you will gain a clearer sense of the meaning that God has written into every detail of who you are. You’ll also see how he invites you to join him in coauthoring the rest of your story. God is your Author, and he is showing you how to follow him into the future.

Do you know how to listen to your spouse? How can you "give life" to your marriage with your words? Dan B. Allender and Tremper Longman III have together written this inductive Bible study guide to help couples build healthy and happy marriages. Through six study sessions for individuals, couples or groups, they help you explore differences that might hinder communication and learn strategies that can strengthen your marriage. Intimate Marriage Bible studies bring spouses into deeper communion with God and with each other. In marriage a man and a woman are called to leave their families of origin, to weave their individual lives into a unity and to cleave to each other. How can fallen human beings even begin to contemplate this ideal--God's ideal? These studies will help you take small but real steps toward honoring the image of God in each other and living out God's goal for marriage. As you explore and respond to Scripture together, you will discover strength and beauty in your marriage and become even more intimate companions.

Communication

Larry Crabb

Drs. Larry Crabb and Dan Allender answer four key questions hurting people ask with insights into the pros and cons of different counseling models and into the church's untapped potential as a healing agent.

Answers to Four Questions Hurting People Ask

Hope When You're Hurting

Tremper III Longman

A compelling, inspirational guide to healing from old wounds shows readers how to channel the painful energy of past hurts into a meaningful, fruitful life. Original.

The Healing Path

Lawrence J. Crabb

Encouragement. It's more than a compliment or a pat on the back. According to Drs. Larry Crabb and Dan Allender, it is the most basic form of counseling -- a skill that can be mastered by laypeople as well as counselors. What must we know in order to fulfill the biblical exhortation to 'encourage one another'? Encouragement: The Key to Caring tells you. Part one deals with understanding encouragement, and part two explores the process of encouragement, including such practical how-tos as - developing a careful selection of encouraging words - cultivating active listening skills - using biblical fellowship to move beyond superficial smiles and shallow greetings - recognizing subtle opportunities for encouragement -- Without the encouragement of a caring community, biblical truth taught in church tends to just thicken people's defense layers. But authenticity, freedom, and greater love for God and others are the fruit of encouragement, and evidence of the tremendous power God invests in individuals and churches who practice it.

The Key to Caring

Encouragement

Put your flawed foot forward. Pick up most leadership books and you’ll find strategies for leveraging your power and minimizing your areas of weakness. But think about the leaders whose names have gone down in history. Most of them were so messed up that, if they were looking for work today, no executive placement service would give them the time of day. God’s criteria for choosing leaders runs counter to the conventional wisdom. Our culture equates strength with effectiveness, but God favors leaders who know the value of brokenness. In Leading With a Limp, you’ll discover what makes flawed leaders so successful. They’re not preoccupied with protecting their image, they are undaunted by chaos and complexity, they are ready to risk failure in moving an organization from what is to what should be. God chooses leaders who aren’t deceived by the myths of power and control, but who realize that God’s power is found in brokenness. If you are a leader–or if you have been making excuses to avoid leading–find out how you can take full advantage of your weakness. A limping leader is the person God uses to accomplish amazing things. To go deeper, check out the Leading With a Limp Workbook.

Dan B. Allender

About

Books

Join the club