Books
Smile at your future. Embrace aging fearlessly. Grow grand, not old.
Have you noticed lines on your face replaced yesterday’s smooth skin? Does your figure seem to be shifting? Most women fear aging. This book confronts that fear head-on. Choose Now to Growing Grand, Not Old dispels notions of uselessness, isolation, and fading beauty by introducing you to several grand women. Teri Gasser shows how some of her elderly friends and relatives provide hope that we can live vital lives and finish well.
Teri explains how choice trumps circumstances in character development. And through these grand-women, she’s discovered several character traits worth growing.
Glean a harvest of insights on the challenges and choices common to all women. Walk through the lives of over a dozen women in their eighties and nineties. Witness the ripened fruit of their choices—some sweet and juicy, others dry and gone to seed. Their examples challenge us to grow grand, not old—for the glory of God.
Bible Study Series
(Teri’s personal faith convictions align with those of the church of which she’s a member. Follow this link to read the statement of faith of Grace Baptist Church Manhattan, Kansas https://gracebchurch.org/values-and-beliefs.)
New release!
RUTH: A Redemptive Stitch in Time
In the book of Ruth discover eight keys that unlock the truth of our redemption. Witness how God wove the lives of three ordinary people, as common as cotton, into a remarkable thread. And mended a fraying nation, Israel, with one redemptive stitch in time.
Through this inductive Bible Study, you’ll also explore important topics like death and chastening. Did you know Lot is connected with the story of Ruth? How does the book of Ruth tie the stories of the three women named in Messiah’s genealogy (Matthew 1:1-5)? And most importantly, what does all this have to do with us and our salvation in Christ? Discover the answers as you steep in the truth with teri Gasser.
This Bible study was used at Grace Baptist Church in three different groups. Listen to what these women said:
WIP: My Works in Progress
Are you wondering what the next S.I.T. Bible Study will be?
Matthew: Good News! The Better King David is Here!
When will it be released? I’ll answer that when I know the answer.
I'm also working on a handbook of spiritual warfare for creative Christian moms who live in full nests! I want to unlock God's arsenal and arm you to defeat the lies you're being fed.
I covet your prayers on this project!
My Library
If you enjoy books as much as I do, then you’re always on the look out for a good read. Here are a few of my top recommendations.
(These Amazon links are not affiliated but may become so in the future.)
Many of the books listed below are old (some may be out of print). However, these books impart timeless wisdom and that’s why I want to bring them to your attention.
Spiritual Formation
Anything by A.W. Tozer stretches my faith. If you’ve never read Tozer here’s one of my favorites. Do take time to browse his author page on Amazon.
Here’s a little taste, “To be specific the self-sins are these: self-righteousness, self-pity, self-confidence, . . . self- love and a host of others like them. . . . The grosser manifestations of these sins, egotism, exhibitionism, self-promotion are strangely tolerated in Christian leaders even in circles of impeccable orthodoxy. . . . Promoting self under the guise of promoting Christ is currently so common as to excite little notice.”
Christians plead for revival. Yet, so little seems to come. Maybe we’re asking for revival in the wrong place. We want to see revival in the fallen world around us but we’re blind the the spiritual poverty in our hearts. Roy Hession confronts us with the truth of our need for humility.
Listen to this author’s challenge, “But dying to self is not a thing we do once for all. . . .It will mean a constant yeiding to those around us,for our yieldeness to God is measured by our yieldeness to man.”
Has the audacity of God’s extravagance ever taken your breath away?
If not, this book is for you. Timothy Keller reveals who to true prodigal is in the Jesus parable of two rebellious sons. His deduction will surprise you.
“Jesus’s teaching consistently attracted the irreligious while offending the Bible-believing, religious people of his day. However, in the main, our churches today do not have this effect. The kind of outsiders Jesus attracted are not attracted to contemporary churches, even our most avant-garde ones. We tend to draw conservative, buttoned-down, moralistic people. The licentious and liberated or the broken and marginal avoid church. That can only mean one thing. If the preaching of our ministers and the practice of our parishioners do not have the same effect on people that Jesus had, then we must not be declaring the same message that Jesus did.”
A friend gave me a copy of this book when I was a new born in Christ. It nurtured my faith like premium fertilizer, accelerating my spiritual growth by leaps and bounds.
“God . . . doesn’t intend to help us live the Christian life. Immaturity considers the Lord Jesus a Helper. Maturity knows Him to be life itself.”
The impact this book made on both mine and my husband’s life makes it one of our frequent recommendations to new believers and those whose faith needs stretching.
When racial unrest erupted into violence in the summer of 2020, I sought out books to find solutions. This was the best. Irwyn L. Ince Jr. addressed the problem in a Biblically, calling Christians to foresake our “ghetto living” and get with God’s plan to build a “beautiful community” from every tribe, tongue and nation.
He speaks in terms of minority and majority cultures making this a timeless cross cultural gem. The principles he teaches applied as much to ancient Israel as they do to Hitler’s natzi Germany or our modern day America.
I think every Christ follower in every nation should read this book.
Women's Concerns
This classic, first published as three separate volumes (the first book in 1977), holds valuable insights on Biblical womanhood. It’s still one of my favorites on this topic.
Anne Ortlund mentored me through the pages of this book. She challenged me to rethink family priorities and claim my identity in Christ apart from those relationships.
“Don’t think of yourself first as wife or a single person or a mother or a worker in some field; you will someday stand before God all by yourself.”
“Take a good look at your life. . . have you got your priorities in order? Are you building a life of eternal consequences?
This book also contains some lovely poetry, including one I pray often.
The demand of housekeeping quickly takes the wind out of a young homemaker’s sails. Delight of home turns to drudger and duty. In this delightful volum Miriam restores the soul of a homemaker by opening her eyes to the beauty around us and the assurance that homemaking plays a vital role in God’s kingdom.
This is the only book that Rockness wrote. However she is best known for reviving the legacy of artist and missionary, Lilas Trotter. Miriam”s extensive research led not only to sereavl books of this missionaries journal enteries but also to the documentary film Many Beautiful Things.
Miriam Huffman Rockness will help you recapture an eye for the beauty of your home.
Edith Schaeffer, wife of the renown author and Christian philosopher Francis Schaeffer, shares her experiences and strategies in creating the inviting atmosphere of L’Abri (the couples outreach youth hostile in Switzerland in the 1970s).
“I would define ‘hidden art’ as the art found in the ordinary areas of everyday life. Each person has, I believe, some talent that is unfulfilled . . . a talent which could be expressed and developed.”
“There needs to be a homemaker exercising some measure of skill, imagination, creativity, desire to fulfill needs and give pleasure to others in the family. How precious a thing is the human family. It it not worth some sacrifice in time, energy, safety, discomfort, work? Does anything come forth without work?”
This book shatters our hospitality optional church culture. Radical Christian hospitality invites the world in and transforms it.
Through telling her conversion story in a candid manner, Rosaria Butterfield challenges us to care about our neighbors in life changing ways.
“Let God use your home, apartment, dorm room, front yard, community gymnasium, or garden for the purpose of making strangers into neighbors and neighbors into family. Because that is the point—building the church and living like a family, the family of God.”
I provide each of the Women’s Bible study leaders I serve at Grace with a copy of this book.
Jen Wilkin shares my theologian’s heart beat. I enjoy all of her work but this is a must read for women serious about their walk with the Living Word.
“If we want to feel deeply about God, we must learn to think deeply about God.”
“It has been said that we become what we behold. I believe there is nothing more transformative to our lives than beholding God in his word. After all, how can we conform to the image of a God we have not beheld?”
For Pastor's Wives
Maybe you’re thinking, “I’m not a pastor’s wife” but chances are your pastor is married. She will appreciate this candid and encouraging perspective from Gail MacDonald.
I did not grow up in church. So when I married a man going into pastoral ministry, I had no idea what that would require of me. Gail equipped me as a very young woman for the vital role I play as my husband’s helpmeet.
I reread this book after over thirty years in ministry and I loved it more the second time. It’s a book I plan to read at least every ten years!
She says of her marriage, “What we were to form was not simply his ministry, a kind of bandwagon for me to jump upon. Instead, it was the merger of two ministries independently commissioned by the Christ of the inner fire.”
“The fact is God is trusting us with the privledge of sharing the most intimate moments of people’s lives. . . A pastor and his wife must not resent a privledge like that.”