Excerpts of Christian Wisdom: Ancient and New: 52 Devotional Meditations
About this ebook
Long before the Council of Nicaea, men and women were reading the Gospels and the letters that later became the corpus of the New Testament, wrestling with doctrine, defending the faith, and calling believers to deeper devotion. Their words have survived. And they sound like they were written yesterday.
Excerpts of Christian Wisdom: Ancient and New brings 52 of those voices into your hands — one for each week of the year. Each meditation opens with a brief portrait of an early church writer, grounds you in related Scripture, then offers a carefully chosen excerpt from their writings alongside commentary that draws a direct line from their world to yours.
The result is a devotional that does something most devotionals cannot: it hands you evidence. Evidence that the faith you hold was not invented, not assembled by committee, not handed down through institutional convenience. It was alive and deep and recognizable from the very beginning.
After two decades of studying the mostly forgotten writers of the early church — alongside Matthew Henry, John Wesley, and extrabiblical texts reaching back to the second century BC — Jeff Thompson has curated a collection that will stop you mid-page. Not because the language is archaic, but because it isn't. Because Tertullian in 200 AD will say something that makes you think: I have never seen it that way before. And yet I know it is true.
That is the experience this book delivers, week after week.
Stand on ground two thousand years deep.
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About the author
Jeff Thompson accepted Jesus at the age of six at Indian Springs Holiness Campmeeting. Growing up as a preacher’s kid, he went on to graduate college as an English teacher. Thompson holds a bachelor’s degree from Asbury University, a master’s degree from the University of Salamanca in Spain, and a Specialist degree. He taught English abroad in Costa Rica, South Korea, and Spain before spending 30 years teaching English to non-native speakers in the Georgia public school system. An avid reader, Jeffrey has spent decades studying early Christian writers. His previous work includes a historical exploration of a second-century Christian’s journey from Egypt to India, tracing the early spread of Christianity. Years of studying the early church have also culminated in Excerpts of Christian Wisdom, a carefully curated collection of reflections from Christianity’s earliest writers. Jeffrey Thompson resides in Jackson, Georgia.
