At the risk of doing the same thing, I will have a longer-than-normal introduction to this post. Maybe you won’t care about it. That’s fine. Just scroll down to the list. Scrolling doesn’t cost too much energy these days. (I even made it easier to find where you should pick up by including a line before the list.)

For the rest of you, I want to share how I choose what to read. Of making many books there is no end (Ecclesiastes 12:12), so how can one choose what to read among endless options? Here are a few considerations.

• Genre. Much of this is mood-based but can also be interest-driven or work-related. I read several books at the same time because my mood shifts daily. In the morning, I am clearer-headed to read more difficult works. At night, I need to relax with an easy read that doesn’t require too much of my brain. On the weekend, I might want an escape with a good work of fiction. Sometimes, when the jazz music that serves as my reading soundtrack strikes me the right way, I’ll pick up some poetry and pretend I’m more cultured than I am.

• Author. Some people are just worth reading. If you’ve followed my “Books I Read” posts for a few years, you’ll notice some authors always make “The Best” lists. That’s because some authors just know how to write, and part of my criteria for a “best” book I read that year is based on how well-written the book is. Some authors are great thinkers, and while the writing is usually good (I struggle with a poorly written book, even if it is thought-provoking), their logic is what attracts me. I heard someone once say to a group of incoming students, “Take teachers, not classes.” In other words, a class with a great teacher on a subject you aren’t necessarily interested in is better than a subject you’re thoroughly interested in with a bad teacher. So it is with books. This criterion differs for fiction and nonfiction.

• Nonfiction

• The author is an expert on the subject matter.

• The author is a good writer/thinker; therefore, the subject matters less.

• Fiction

• The author is a great writer.

• The book won a respectable award.

• The book or author was recommended by a trusted source, often a friend or public figure who knows what they’re talking about.

• Reputation. Some books don’t qualify for the above criteria for one reason or another, but they have a reputation of excellence. This would be like a movie that was a critical success but won no awards and didn’t do well at the box office. It’s still worth watching. A book like that is still worth reading.

• Subject. Perhaps the most boring of considerations, sometimes subject trumps all. This is especially true when one needs to read a book for one’s vocation, research a topic for a talk, paper, training, etc.

• Length. The shallowest of considerations but a necessary one, nonetheless. We all have limited time. Some big books just won’t be read because we simply don’t have the time to commit to it—at least not yet. I don’t shy away from books due to their size, but I do have to plan better to finish them.

• Medium. We live in a day where books can be consumed by more than eyes on a page. We can listen to books on our commute to work, doing chores around the hours, walking the dog. Some books must be read the old-fashioned way, but some are just fine being listened to. Such non-listenable genres for me are theology, poetry, and most fiction (I find it too hard to keep up with characters and small details that make the story what it is). Older works are also often unlistenable due to their style. History, biography, sports, Christian living, essays, and some fiction (the more pop-lit type) are great for listening to.

• Availability. If you can’t get it, you can’t read it. Most of my books are purchased second-hand. I live for the local library book sales and used bookstores. If it is for sale at a deep discount, I’m more likely to own it and, therefore, to read it. But, of course, there are other ways to get one’s hands on a book. If not owned, can I check it out at the library? Is it included in an audiobook subscription service I already use? Does a friend have a copy I could borrow? When it comes down to it, the books nearest at hand are the books most easily read. That is one reason I am a proponent of a large library.

• Mood. I mentioned this along with genre above, but mood plays a role in everything I’ve mentioned so far. It is, overall, the largest determining factor in what I read if no other forces push me in one direction (i.e., I’m not preparing to teach, preach, or write on a topic). Like food, what you’re in the mood for drives you to the restaurant.

• Personal taste. I read some books simply because I’m interested in the subject, author, genre, etc., though I would understand why others would not be. I love books on baseball. That’s because I love baseball, history, and biography, and baseball has the best history and some of the most interesting personalities. We like what we like. I don’t let what I should be reading interfere with what I want to read. Just find time for both! Like exercise, the more you do it, the more you like it. Do you want to read that book you know you should read but lack motivation? Reading begets reading. Pick up a book you know you’ll like first and leave the more daunting book for after the appetite is whetted.

The List

A few notes before you get started:

• The list isn’t in any ranking. I look at what I read in chronological order and then put it in either the best or the rest category and list it here. So the last of the best is not the worst, just the last I read.

• My reading is a bit eclectic, as I think everyone’s should be. You’ll find works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and theology. You’ll find different thinkers and influences. It’s the way I like to read.

• I separate the list into “The Best” and “The Rest". By no means do I intend to communicate that “The Rest” are not good—quite the opposite. I try to be discerning about what I read. Life is too short not to be. But some books rise above the others. Maybe I leave some out of my best list that you would include. That’s what makes these lists so fun.

• “The Best” means the books I enjoyed the most this year. It doesn’t include re-reads, and some classics I read for the first time don’t make it. If they’re a classic, they should probably be on the list, but whatever. I reserve the right to like what I like, just as you do.

• Some of “The Rest” were re-reads, and many likely were on “The Best” lists of prior years. But since it’s not a new read for me, I don’t include them in “The Best.” So if you see one that you would think I would put in “The Best” section, it’s probably a re-read.

• If you have some book recommendations for me this year, leave a comment. I’m always on the lookout for a good read.

• All the links are Amazon affiliate links, so if you buy it from that link, I get some money from the purchase. 

Now, on to the list!

The Best

We live in an age of technology and convenience. Our digital lives take up so much time and space that we often skip across the surface on the way to the next thing. But what do we miss if we don’t engage with others as deeply as we could? What if we actually knew someone? What if our deep need to be known was commonplace? David Brooks asks similar questions. What should we ask when in conversation with others? What should we pay attention to? Lean into? Learn from? Knowing how to know people takes some work, especially these days. What if we spent the next year learning how to get to know others and, in turn, letting people get to know us? What would our future look like? This book could help with that. And, as an added bonus, which even Brooks doesn’t fully realize, this is exactly the kind of life God intends for us!

Oh, I adore a good baseball book. If that good baseball book is written by a great writer, well, that’s about as good as a book gets. Roger Kahn is a great writer, and he knows baseball. The Boys of Summer is Kahn’s classic book about the Brooklyn Dodgers of the 1950s, written by a man who loved the team and the players. He covered them early in his career, and as they all grew and separated, Kahn reconnected with each of them to see how life turned out. It contains nostalgic recollections, life advice, baseball glory, and post-baseball struggles. From Jackie Robinson’s breaking of the color barrier to the classic 1955 World Series win against the mighty Yankees, this book will take you deep into mid-century baseball—baseball as it is in every boy’s memory, whether you lived through those years or not. Oh, how i wish the Dodgers were still in Brooklyn, and Ebbets field was still standing!

Piper’s book is part of the Love Your Church series published by The Good Book Company. I think it’s the best of the series. I have the privilege of knowing Barnabas. He is one of my pastors at Immanuel Church. I don’t think my knowing him influences this book’s position on my list other than the fact that I feel its truths deeper for knowing him. It is true, nonetheless. Immanuel Church, where Piper serves, is the best church I know for experiencing Christian belonging. We call it gospel culture. If you want to taste what that is, this book is for you. Who doesn’t need a greater sense of belonging? That deep desire can be satisfied, and this book can help you.

Here is a book on many “Best of” lists this year, and rightly so. Jonathan Haidt sounds the alarm on what is happening with our children. Technology is a great gift and creates many wonderful opportunities, but we can’t let it rule us. The consequences are dire. Mental health among children and teens nose-dived in the early 2010s—right around the rise of social media and smartphone usage among that same group. Play-based childhoods are fading, and technology is filling the gaps. Children are more distracted, less rested, and more connected, but they are more troubled than ever. Anxiety is at a high point. Haidt offers not only the data supporting his thesis but also some potential solutions. This is a book well worth your consideration.

Here’s a good rule to live by: if Leif Enger writes it, you should read it. Enger has the ability to combine intriguing adventure and profound emotion together in ways few authors can. I Cheerfully Refuse is a story of a man who has loved and lost much refusing to fall into the pit of despair.

Enger’s writing is beautiful. His stories are gripping. Again, if he writes it, read it. I think every book I’ve read by him ends up on my best of list.

Here is a book that qualifies in the category of “great author, regardless of the subject.” I’ve read Goodwin on presidents, the Brooklyn Dodgers, and now on her marriage to Dick Goodwin. Dick was on JFK’s team as he prepared for a presidential run. His speechwriting was monumental during the 1960s, and this book is largely a history. It was written by someone who was not only heavily involved in the major political lives at the time but was married to someone who was also. It’s a story of a marriage that lasted more than 40 years, written based on letters and diaries revisited long after their writing—a time filled in with wise and profound reflection that can only come by age.

Another baseball book. This time, on the greatest baseball player to ever live. Sure, you can argue other players have come along with equal talent, but I’m not sure I can buy an argument that anyone surpasses Ruth. Part of that is because of the way he changed the game, ushering in the live ball era where home runs ruled the game, but part of it is the personality behind the bat. Ruth was an all-time great with a personal and professional life that has kept him in the American consciousness for over 100 years. If, after that long, others in your field are still compared to you, you know you’ve reached the top.

Biographies abound on Ruth, and this book isn’t novel in that regard. But Leavy's writing always feels fresh. She centers the story on a point in time and writes around it, bringing in the full history. That approach helps us feel as if we are at dinner with the subject, listening to old stories over the course of the evening, drawing us into the personality behind the lore.

It wouldn’t be a best-of-list without Jared making an appearance. Here is a book for writers about writing by one of the best writers around. What makes Jared’s books so good is not just what he writes about (mostly Jesus) but how he writes. There is a craft to it. Every word matters. The style says something about the subject. Good writing adorns the gospel, and no one does it better than Jared.

One of the great joys of 2024 was getting to know Gavin and his family. In doing so, I got an up-close look at the brilliance that is Gavin Ortlund. I don’t know anyone else who is doing what he does. His YouTube channel, Truth Unites, is outstanding. He defends Protestantism so well, with courage, intelligence, and great care. This book is a distillation of a lot of his YouTube content. It’s a heady read but a really great one.

Another Ortlund book! Ray and Jani were our dear friends when my wife and I were newly married. We learned so much from them about what a marriage should look like. We missed out on their parenting days with kids in the house, but we heard stories, and we saw the lives their children now live. We were impressed. This book is their attempt at coaching us parents on how to think about our family through the gospel lens. Your family matters to God. It is a divine strategy for blessing. Lean into it, and let this book help you.

Another great joy of 2024 was spending more time with my friend Sam. I don’t know anyone who uses illustrations to explain the gospel as well as he does. In this book, he helps us understand what it means to be united with Christ—a biblical reality that sits above all other realities in our relationship with God. Let Sam teach you what it means to be one with God, and rejoice in that glorious truth.

The NFL is the biggest sports league in the country. Nothing compares to it in terms of revenue earned, influence produced, and eyeballs attracted. How did it get that way? This book tells the story. If you want to know how the NFL grew from a cute little league barely making it to the behemoth it is today, this is it.

Speaking of football, Jos Posnanski takes that great American game and tells us stories about it in this wonderful book of memories and recollections. Posnanski is just like us—a fan. He happens to also be a great writer. You might have other moments you would include, but you can’t argue with the ones he highlights in this book.

Twenty-five years after The Tipping Point, Gladwell revisits the idea of social epidemics and why things become what they become, why places turn into what they are, and why people end up where they do, with a look at the darker side of tipping points. I listened to this one and would highly recommend that experience.

Maybe this is just a more professional attempt at fan fiction, but this book was fantastic. Percival Everett retells the story of Huck Finn through the eyes of Jim, the slave. It includes all the elements that made Twain’s original so good—all the adventure and comedy, but with a sober look at slavery. It’s more than just a straight retread from different eyes. It adds to and expands the story.

Vanhoozer’s latest is just excellent. It takes some focused attention, as all his works do, but it rewards. The premise is simple enough: essential principles for reading the Bible as Scripture everywhere, at all times, and by all Christians. His proposal is “mere” in that way. The impact is far from mere, however. If we read the Bible incorrectly, we make a major mistake. We need to right lens to see the light of the Bible. Vanhoozer helps us put those lenses on in this great book—my favorite book of theology this year.

I love to look at year-end book lists. This one showed up on NPR’s Books We Loved list, and it drew me in. I listened to this one. It’s short enough to listen to relatively quickly, and easier to keep up with the characters because there are so few. It’s a story, ultimately, of friendship between a man about to lose his house and land and the one sent to take it from him.

Here is a book I would normally never pick up. It’s a graphic novel, which isn’t my cup of tea. But this one is different. For one thing, it’s about two of my favorite authors: C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. Hendrix tells the story of their friendship from the early days of the first meeting to the Inklings and eventually to the strain their relationship faced near the end. It’s a wonderful story that keeps you turning the pages. It’s also beautifully written and illustrated. And I promise, especially for Lewis and Tolkien fans, the final chapter is worth the journey.

This little book helped me revel afresh in the genius of Jesus, who doesn’t often get the credit he deserves for being the smartest man to ever live. Using the story of the prodigal son, Williams explains how Jesus’s brilliance is on full display in a relatively short story about two sons and their father. If you liked how Tim Keller expounded and applied the parable in his great book The Prodigal God, this book will help you dive even deeper into the glory of that story.

Hisham Matar won a Pulitzer Prize for his book The Return in 2017. He’s back now with a new novel about a man named Khaled who leaves his home country of Libya to go to school in London. While there, he and a fellow countryman make a decision to attend a protest that changes their lives forever. Through a series of friendships, Khaled learns to live his unexpected life away from his family but close to friends he wouldn’t otherwise have had. Matar shows us what friendship can do and how it can create in us a good life even when the life we imagined is lost forever.

Another truism: if Fredrik Backman writes it, read it. That’s what I do. While waiting for his forthcoming novel in 2025, the great people at Amazon published this short story about how a frying pan changed a person’s life. It’s short, funny, moving, and well worth the little time it takes to read it.

Here is a true story that is stranger than fiction. It’s one of those fun reads that just boggles the mind. Here is the description from Amazon.

Stéphane Bréitwieser is the most prolific art thief of all time.

He pulled off more than 200 heists, often in crowded museums in broad daylight.

His girlfriend served as his accomplice.

His collection was worth an estimated $2 billion.

He never sold a piece, displaying his stolen art in his attic bedroom.

He felt like a king.

Until everything came to a shocking end.

The Rest

Mostly, I worry about everything. I wake up worrying, and I go to sleep worrying, and in between, I worry some more. I even worry about worrying about the right things. What if I forget something and my family doesn’t have what they need when the time comes? What if, by my failure to worry, I lead us straight into hardship? What if I fail them?

It’s a miserable way to live, honestly. But it’s my way.

I know it’s not the way I’m meant to live. I worry about that as well. I need to change, but it’s hard. In this kind of world, how can one not be a little anxious all the time?

Who can save me from this body of death?

THE CURE FOR ANXIETY 

The Bible, of course, isn’t silent in the face of anxiety. It’s well known that the most repeated command in scripture is “Do not fear.”

There is a whole section in the most famous sermon ever preached, the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus addresses this issue. I’ve read it a thousand times. Maybe you have, too. But, if you wouldn’t mind, I’d like to point out something that has changed my life. I don’t mean to be hyperbolic (that’s an anxiety trait, I know), but it has made a bigger difference in my mental health than anything else ever has. And the thing is, it’s been there for thousands of years.

The key verse in this whole thing for me is Matthew 6:26. The ESV heading for this little section is “Do Not Be Anxious,” which, honestly, gives me anxiety. I like the CSB heading better: “The Cure for Anxiety.” That’s much less anxiety-inducing. Maybe the cure will work. Maybe it won’t. But that’s not up to me. So, let’s try it out, shall we?

CONSIDER THE BIRDS

Matthew 6:26 is such a simple verse. “Consider the birds of the sky: They don’t sow or reap or gather into barns, yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Aren’t you worth more than they?”

Tim Keller used to say that good preaching connects an intellectual truth to a sensory experience. Jesus was a good preacher, of course, so he knew this too. That’s what he did in this verse. We are anxious people, constantly worrying about provision. Will we have enough tomorrow? Will we be okay? The intellectual truth that God will care for us takes us only so far. We need some sensory experience to help us actually believe it.

In fly the birds. I imagine it like a Disney movie. Right on cue, a bird or two flitters in and perches beside the crowd. They turn their heads from side to side, as birds do. They tweet (but not the annoying hot-take kind). They look again to the side and toward the ground, hop off their perch, grab a seed, and fly off with a chirp. Illustration complete.

They didn’t sow or reap or gather into barns. God fed them. They had all they needed.

AREN’T YOU WORTH MORE? 

This is a classic “from lesser to greater” illustration. Since God cares for the lesser thing, he will, of course, care for the greater thing. If the birds (the lesser thing) are cared for by God, won’t you (the greater thing) be cared for as well?

God loves using this kind of logic. If the blood of goats and bulls sanctify, how much more will the blood of Christ (Heb. 9:13-14)? If evil parents know how to give their children good gifts, how much more does God (Matt. 7:11)? If God did not spare his own Son, will he not with him freely give us all things (Rom. 8:32)?

The logical move from lesser to greater is the kind of thing that helps us see how secure we are in Christ. God is not letting us fall through the cracks.

BACK TO THE BIRDS

Back to the birds for a minute. Do you know how many birds there are in the world? I asked myself that question the other day. So, I Googled it. National Geographic is the first result with my answer, and it’s quite a doozy. “New research estimates there are between 50 billion and 430 billion birds on Earth.”[1]

That’s quite an estimate. There’s a massive difference between those two numbers. But for the sake of our article here, let’s just go with the lowest number. 50 billion birds.

The thing about big numbers like that is that our brains can’t properly recognize them. What I mean is that we don’t see how big they truly are. We reduce them. So, let’s put the numbers on another scale. How many years are 50 billion seconds? Answer: 1,585 years. If you wanted to count to a billion, it would take you a little over 95 years to do so. So, counting to 50 billion would be something that my Excel document wouldn’t even show the full number for. Stack a billion dollars on top of one another, and you reach the lower portion of the troposphere, one of the outer layers of the Earth’s atmosphere. That’s about 68 miles. I guess 50 billion takes you into a galaxy far, far away.

Do you see the point? 50 billion birds are a lot of birds. And that’s the low estimate.

YOUR HEAVENLY FATHER

Why are there 50 billion birds in the world? Partly because that gives us 50 billion reasons to trust God with our lives. That’s Jesus’s point in Matthew 6:26. We do not have a meager amount of care. We have millenniums worth. We have galaxies worth.

The next time you step outside, look for the birds. You don’t even have to look. You can listen for them. They’re out there flying around, making music, gathering sticks for nests, poking at the ground for worms. They’re doing just fine, and they always will be because God loves them.

And he loves me. He loves you.

He wants us to know that way deep down. He wants us to trust him with our lives. He wants us to know that he cares for us today, tomorrow, and into eternity.

We do not have a cold, distant deity sitting idly by, watching us worry and work. We have a heavenly Father who loves us more than he loves the birds, who cares for us more deeply than we do even for ourselves, and who wants us to know how deep his love is.

So, he gave us the birds.

The next time you are anxious, consider them, and through them, remember your Father who loves you.

[1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/how-many-birds-are-there-in-the-world-science-estimates

It’s funny to me that this annual list is among my most popular posts each year. You people like to know what I read!

Looking over this year’s list, I notice a few things. I added in some new interests, like science. I think that’s related to watching the entire series of The Big Bang Theory, which is a hilarious show. I also re-read several books from years past. Some of my reading was influenced by what I was working on at the time. I taught several seminars during the summer months, so I read several books on the topics. It’s neat to go back and remember what was going on in my life at the time. I also read more “big books” than normal. If you told my high school self that I would grow up and read things like this, my Sparknotes-For-Every-Assigned-Reading self would not have believed you.

Anyway, I hope you find some new things to read in this list. I have a rule with my personal library that you can borrow any book you want, but when you return it, you have to discuss the book with me. Maybe I’ll do the same with this list. If you read something off of it, let me know. I’d love to discuss it when you’re finished.

Now, a few notes before you get started:

• The list isn’t in any ranking. I look at what I read in chronological order and then put it in either the best or the rest category and list it here. So the last of the best is not the worst, just the last I read.

• My reading is a bit eclectic, as I think everyone’s should be. You’ll find works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and theology. You’ll find different thinkers and influences. It’s the way I like to read.

• I separate the list into “The Best” and “The Rest". By no means do I intend to communicate that “The Rest” aren’t good—quite the opposite. I try to be discerning about what I read. Life is too short not to be. But some books rise above the others. Maybe I leave some out of my best list that you would include. That’s what makes these lists so fun.

• “The Best” means the books I enjoyed the most this year. It doesn’t include re-reads, and some classics I read for the first time don’t make it. If they’re a classic, they should probably be on the list, but whatever. I reserve the right to like what I like, just as you do.

• Some of “The Rest” were re-reads, and many likely were on “The Best” lists of prior years. But since it’s not a new read for me, I don’t include them in “The Best.” So if you see one that you would think I would put in “The Best” section, it’s probably a re-read.

• If you have some book recommendations for me this year, leave a comment. I’m always on the lookout for a good read.

• All the links are Amazon affiliate links, so if you buy it from that link, I get some money from the purchase.

Now, on to the list!

The Best

I love Westerns. My family laughs at that. I make them watch old John Wayne movies with me. Taylor Sheridan’s Yellowstone and all the spin-offs are so entertaining to me. Surprisingly, my four-year-old daughter is the child who shares this interest the most. She loves to watch “the bad guys” receive their outlaw justice.

I don’t have a cowboy hat because, living in Nashville, I couldn’t wear one and not look like a tourist, but if I lived almost anywhere else, I’d wear one regularly. My family owns a 350-acre farm with about a hundred head of cattle. We have a farm hand who looks after them and, honestly, he has my dream job.

Instead, I read and watch Westerns. Thankfully, the Western has had a long, glorious run as a genre, and I don’t think it’ll die anytime soon.

The Sisters Brothers was one of the first books I read in 2023, and it was one of my favorites. It’s not a typical Western. It includes far more humor than most. The story is 100% Western, though. It’s plenty violent. It has the good guys and the bad guys, and it’s hard to tell who is who most of the time. If you’re looking for an entertaining novel, Western or not, this one will scratch that itch.

Christopher Watkin’s Biblical Critical Theory is the best book I read this year. I’ve recommended it to several people, and I plan to revisit it often. It’s a big book, but it doesn’t feel like it to me. Reading it, I didn’t want it to end. I wished it kept on exegeting our modern culture for a thousand more pages.

A lot of people might be turned off by the title, thinking it’s some woke thing. It’s not. Watkin helps us see that what we think we know about modern life and culture finds its grounding and reality in the Bible. The scriptures help us understand everything, and with Watkin’s guidance, we can start to understand that in new ways.

If you’re looking for a book that helps you understand our world through the eyes of the Bible, this is the book for you. Don’t be intimidated by its size or title. Instead, dive in head first. You’ll come out wiser than before.

There isn’t enough space to write about Tim Keller’s influence on me. I wrote a little about it on the day he died.

I was really looking forward to Colin Hansen’s “biography” of Keller since I first heard about it some time last year. I put biography in quotes because it’s not the kind of biography you’re used to. Yes, it tells the story of Keller’s life, but it is, fittingly, not Keller-centric. Rather than focusing on Keller himself, we learn about the people who influenced him. We see how he became who he was and how he was formed spiritually and intellectually.

It’s a brilliant idea. To understand a person, you have to understand the people that shaped them. From C.S. Lewis to Richard Lovelace to Edmond Clowney to Barbara Boyd, you get to see the minds that shaped the mind that touched the hearts of so many of us.

Rick Rubin’s career is a long list of greatest hits. He’s worked with everyone cool, Johnny Cash being, by far, the coolest. His creative instincts are matchless. So, when I saw he wrote a book about creativity, I knew I had to read it.

The book is broken into chapters by what Rubin calls “78 Rules of Thought.” He aims to get inside the internal dialogue of the creator where self-doubt and insecurity run rampant. If you’re a creator (which Rubin says we all are), you will enjoy this book.

When I picked this book up, I thought, “What a great idea for a book!” Generations are a bit difficult to pin down. Where does one end and another begin? I’m on the front edge of Millennials, but i don’t seem to resonate with those of my generation that came after me. Does that mean I’m not one of them?

Twenge helps us understand the differences between the generations. Starting with the Silent Generation, she takes us all the way up to babies today. Each generation has its own quirks. Each has a reaction to the ones before them. Some of these things are obvious. Some are more subtle. And for people like me, kind of in the middle between the boomers and the babies, this book helps me understand that large gap of people. Of course, not everyone falls into the stereotypical generational buckets, and Twenge knows that. But she helps us understand the cultural aspects that, in part, define each group. She takes us inside their thought life, their dreams and fears, their mindset and approach to life.

If you want to better understand the people around you, this is a book that will get you there.

If it wins a Pulitzer, it’s probably a pretty good book. Kingsolver’s novel Demon Copperhead is worthy of the prize. It’s the story of an Appalachian boy born into poverty in a culture addicted to opioids. His life is representative of so many like him. There are hopes and dreams that lift and inspire, and then there is the hard reality of life in the real world that brings you back down.

Piggybacking off Charles Dickens, Kingsolver transports the Victorian novel to the American South, showing that times haven’t changed much, even if many years have passed. It’s a story that sticks with you, as all great novels should.

Taxi. Cheers. Frasier. Friends. Will and Grace. Those are classic TV shows. Those were all directed by James Burrows. To direct one of those would make a career. Burrows did all those and more.

Sometimes, you just need a nice, light read about show business. I do, anyway. I like to sprinkle one in every now and then. I’m currently reading a book about The Big Bang Theory, which, as it just so happens, Burrows directed both pilots for (yes, there were two pilots, and they are vastly different from one another).

Burrows tells his story of becoming a director and stumbling into all these great shows. Part of his luck was the right place, right time kind of thing working in the golden ages of television. Nowadays, with so many streaming options, it’s hard to imagine a show reaching the heights of any of Burrows’s greatest hits. That makes this book part nostalgia for those of us who remember those golden ages, and it’s a trip down memory lane told by someone on the inside that makes this book so wonderful.

I’m sure you watched at least one of his shows. Who didn’t in the 80s and 90s? So, I’ll go out on a limb and say you’ll probably find something enjoyable in these pages.

If anything plagues our times, depression and anxiety do. It’s been well documented. I don’t know many people who don’t struggle with one or both to some degree. So what should a Christian think about it? There have been a few books written on the topic, and I’ve read several of them, but this one was the most helpful to me, perhaps because it does not come from our times. Sometimes, it’s yesterday that can speak life into today.

Richard Baxter is best known for his book The Reformed Pastor. He was an insightful pastor himself who knew how to help the suffering. The collected wisdom of this book will help your soul sort things out if you suffer from depression or anxiety. It helped me.

Russell Moore is a gift to the Church. He’s been through the wringer, too. As a lifelong Southern Baptist pastor and convention leader, he was at the forefront of some of the toughest times the denomination ever faced. And he faced it as a Christian should, with full integrity and faith.

But that doesn’t mean it was easy. It wasn’t at all, as he explains in this book. In his own voice, Moore helps us see the problems evangelical America faces and the path forward by God’s grace.

If you feel a bit denominationally lost, this book will help you find your way. If you worry about the state of evangelicalism, this book will both affirm and comfort your worries. If you need a shot of reality, this book will give you the proper dose. It’s honest and real, and that’s what we need right now. Like an altar call, Moore invites us into a new life with God.

Some books are best described as a tome. This is one of those books. It is 600 pages, which, in a way, doesn’t sound like a lot, but I promise it’s a lot. Holland takes us through history, all the way back to Jesus, and shows us how thoroughly Christian our Western world is. Yes, perhaps we are secularizing in some big ways, but the light of Christianity still illuminates our thinking. The Christian ethic deeply shapes us. Where else did our modern ideas of justice, equality, science, and liberalism come from? Christianity has done more to influence, and still does more to influence, our modern world than anything else. This book explains why that’s true.

If you want to understand our world better, read this book and Christopher Watkin’s Biblical Critical Theory alongside it.

I didn’t read all this book this year. I finished this book this year. I actually started it in 2020, reading alongside a friend of mine. We would read a chapter and then discuss it over a Zoom call over lunch. Those were weird times, weren’t they?

But now that I’ve finished the book, it can finally go on the list. Here’s the best endorsement I can give of it. It’s the single best one-volume systematic theology ever written. Okay, I haven’t read all of them, but I’d read plenty, and even if I hadn’t, it would be hard to imagine a better one.

Why not buy this book and read a little each day? I promise you won’t regret it.

I don’t know how Gavin produces as much as he does, but now that he lives near me, I’m going to ask him. Maybe I’ll go watch him work because it has to be something to behold. Not only does he write a ton, but he also has a great YouTube channel with videos packed with information and insight that I couldn’t produce in a year.

I always love finding a single book to recommend on a topic. On the topic of Humility, this is the book. Every Christian should buy a copy and read it, and then buy a copy and hand it out.

You have likely heard about people leaving the church. Who are they? Jim Davis and Michael Graham, with the research help of Ryan Burge, tell us who they are. By looking at certain nuanced stereotypes and using real data to extrapolate across a wider spectrum, they show us how certain types of people view the church today. Many are leaving, yes, but not all hope is lost. It turns out that those who have left would come back if one thing happened. What is that thing? Read the book to find out.

Just kidding, it wouldn’t hold that back. The one thing is so simple it’s almost insulting to our intelligence. Most of those people would return to church if someone they knew invited them. Isn’t that amazing? You don’t need all the answers to our culture’s hot topics. You don’t need to be a great apologist. You just need to be kind and welcoming.

But, as with everything, being prepared certainly helps. This book will prepare you and equip you. It will help you understand and motivate you to make a difference. In a day when the church is losing people all the time, what if we took 2024 as the year to invite them back in?

Here’s another big book. It’s one you should have on your shelf. In his classic style, Piper dives deep into the waters of God’s providence, bringing the Bible with him. Perhaps the thing that strikes you the most as you read is how many scripture passages help us see God’s providence. If you want to understand how God works, this book will help you. It’s not one man’s opinion. It’s grounded in the Bible. Piper serves as our tour guide, pointing out all the ways we can find God’s wonderful work in this world and our lives.

Another Western. This one is different from The Sisters Brothers. First, it’s older. Second, it’s not funny. It’s the story of a famous gunman nearing the end of his life. He has cancer, and there is nothing the doctors can do. So he goes to El Paso to the one man he thinks can help and lives the rest of his days there, with enemy after enemy coming to try and do him in now that he’s weak. But he outwits them all, determining how his life ends.

It’s a classic Western story. If you like the genre, you’ll like this book.

The great thing about Jared’s writing is that there is at least one book a year, and they always make this list. Full disclosure: Jared is one of my best friends. We’ve known each other since before his first book was published. But his books don’t make my best-of lists each year because of his friendship. They make them because they deserve them.

Jared is a great writer, which undersells him quite a bit. He’s the best. And his books are always the best because they come from a heart that loves Jesus and knows him well. In this book, Jared writes about his friend Jesus and helps us revel in the glory of knowing him as our friend.

Some of us feel beat up by life. Some of us wonder if Jesus even likes us. But in the Bible, Jesus calls us his friends. If you want to know what that means, this book is for you.

If there is one man who is transforming our world more than anyone else today, it is Elon Musk. He’s an odd guy, which I think you have to be to do what he does. He’s super-smart. He takes incredible risks. He uses all he has to do what he thinks is best for the world. He’s as innovative as anyone in history, if not more so. From Tesla to SpaceX to X, formerly known as Twitter, Musk has his hands in a lot of different areas.

How did he get there? This book by the great biographer Walter Isaacson shows us how. He tells us the amazing parts, the good parts, and the bad parts. It’s an honest biography, which is all we can really ask for.

Musk is a transformative figure, and knowing those transformative figures is important, I think. So, if you’re looking for a biography to read in the new year, why not pick this one up? I don’t think you’ll regret it.

The wide variety of books that exist never ceases to amaze me. There are books on topics I’ve never even considered. This is one of those books. Amanda Ripley defines High Conflict as what happens when conflict goes from mere disagreement to us vs. them, good vs. evil thinking. Basically, it is what we see in modern politics. What we find on cable news. What we overhear in our local coffee shop, where the conservatives hang out with the conservatives and the liberals hang out with the liberals.

But it’s more than high-brow politics. It reaches across cultures. It affects street gangs. It affects how Jews in New York and conservative communities in Michigan interact (yes, that’s a real example used in the book).

If you want to understand the high conflict of our age, this is the book to explain it. I found it fascinating, and I think you will too.

I have a rule in reading. If Greg Lukianoff writes it, I read it. I don’t agree with everything he says or thinks. I don’t agree with anyone 100%. That would be too boring. But Lukianoff understands our culture better than almost anyone. He researches it. He thinks about it. He looks at it honestly and assesses it with clear eyes.

In this book, he dives into the cancel culture plaguing today's society. He shows the danger it poses and how it affects people all along the political spectrum. Conservatives are as prone to it as liberals. It’s a shocking reality that feels too common.

If you are concerned about cancel culture and want to explore how we can get out of it, this book is for you.

Have you ever read a book about math? Forget your school days. I’m talking about as an adult not taking a math class. I hadn’t until this one. I work with math all day at work. I don’t even really like math. So why would I read a book about math? Because this one is fun and entertaining and teaches you something all at the same time, and i like books like that.

The bad drawings are just a gimmick. The drawings aren’t that bad. They stem from Orlin’s teaching days where he would use his bad drawing to communicate the mathematical concepts to his students. It lightened things. It engaged them. And he’s turned that into a series of popular books and blogs on math. Fascinating.

Orlin explores why the triangle is the strongest shape and how that impacts everything we use every day, like our houses. He explains why we can’t trust statistics. He talks about Ted Wiliams, the last man to hit .400 in a season. He talks about probability and insurance and the lottery and all kinds of other things that are mathematical, even though we don’t think of them simply in those terms.

I don’t know who this book is for. I didn’t think it would be for me. So, if you’re just looking for something interesting, why not give this a try? I really think you’ll like it.

Over Thanksgiving, my friend Kelsey asked to borrow a memoir. I found the one she wanted on my shelves and gave it to her, and then she asked if I’d read Esau McCaulley’s latest book. I hadn’t, though it was on my to-read list. She told me I had to move it up the list. So I did. I listen to Kelsey. She’s wise and smart and insightful and one of my favorite people in this world.

Her recommendation did not disappoint. Esau is a great writer, and his story is one that I’m glad he told. Writing about one's life can’t be easy. There is always so much pain and sorrow, even if it’s a good life with a lot of happy moments. But those who share in a hopeful, Christ-centered way help us see that, in many profound ways, we’re all alike. We all sin. We all are sinned against. We all need Jesus, and he offers himself to everyone.

His experience as a black man in America is not my experience. He faced things I will never face. I hurt for him in those experiences. But he also shares my common humanity. He wrestles with what it means not to be defined by what we do but by who God says we are. We all have a family history that is complicated and wonderful at the same time, and it takes some people a lifetime to come to terms with it all, if they ever do. Esau shows us how we can do it.

If you want to read a great memoir this year, this is the one I recommend. Listen to Kelsey. She knows what she’s talking about.

“Today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.“

“The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!”

“Here’s the pitch by Downing. Swinging. Here’s a drive into left center field. That ball is gonna be … outta here! It’s gone! It’s 715! There’s a new home run champion of all time, and it’s Henry Aaron.”

Baseball is the best. There’s just no way I won’t ever believe that. Baseball has given me more joy than any other sport ever has, and there isn’t a close second. Baseball has also given me more pain than any other sport ever has, and there isn’t a close second. I’m a Braves fan, after all.

But let’s forget about the pain. Let’s talk about the great moments. That’s what Posnanski does in this wonderful book. (Though it is ironic that the best moments are also someone else’s worst moments, but let’s not think about that right now.)

The title promises 50 great moments, but there are actually 108. Posnanski can’t help himself, and I love him for that. I wish this book were twice as long. To relive some of these moments was great. Some I never knew. Some I wasn’t born for. Some I remember like they were yesterday.

If you are a baseball fan, this book belongs on your shelf. You’ll love it. I sure did.

The Rest

Human life is absolutely significant; every fleeting thought, every choice, and every experience matter. This God calls you to faith, obedience, and responsibility. Because his purposes will not be thwarted, you can leap to the call, learning to be courageous, optimistic, persevering in love through troubles. His purposes sustain you through it all. His rule establishes the significance of our choices. Any other view would be absurd—human life counts, God’s will controls. His will of control (Eph. 1:11) is to be trusted as the frame of reference behind every experience; his will of command (5:17; 6:6) is to be obeyed with all our heart.

The supremacy of God’s purposes is not a debating point. It is the foundation of indestructible confidence and ravishing delight. God is in control, and you can bend all your energies to your calling, trusting that God’s plans are working out.

— David Powlison, Seeing with New Eyes, page 47.

      It all comes out in the penultimate episode. Rebecca is weighed down with guilt, and at the prompting of her friend, Keeley, she goes into Ted’s office and confesses everything. Here was, finally, the climax of the first season. At first, Ted looks hurt and angry. Then, he does something that shocks Rebecca and the audience. He stands, comes close to her, looks into her eyes, and says, “I forgive you.” Rebecca doesn’t understand. Forgiveness was the one thing she didn’t expect.

      Ted reasons that divorce makes people do crazy things. He was enduring his own throughout the first season. He knows what it can do to people. So, he forgives her. Shocking.

      I remember watching the episode while walking on our treadmill, and I couldn’t get over how profound the scene was. It wasn’t overly emotional. It wasn’t dragged out too long. It was just another moment in another day in the life of Ted Lasso. His heart was ready to forgive. It was prone to forgiveness. That went against the grain of every viewer's expectation. Why? Because we live in a culture whose heart is not prone to forgiveness, where forgiveness is rarely if ever granted. And if it is, it certainly doesn’t come that easily. Ted Lasso was suddenly a prophetic voice to a hurting society.

      The thing that makes Ted Lasso tick as a show is the kindness of the community. Ted is the driving force of it, bringing out the best in everyone around him. It is fitting, then, that in the most pivotal moment, Ted leads the way in cultivating the community. It could have all fallen apart, but it didn’t because Ted forgave.

      One lesson we can draw from this is that a true community cannot exist without forgiveness. The entirety of the show is filled with kindness and love amid the difficulties each character experiences. Ted is the leader of that compelling community. It would have been understandable if Ted had not forgiven, but we would never really understand him unless he forgave. When Rebecca’s sin threatened to destroy the community that had been built, Ted’s forgiveness assured it wouldn’t break. Forgiveness has that kind of power. His extension of forgiveness revealed his true heart, what he valued most. It’s the same with us. If we want true community, we need to be ready to forgive and ask for forgiveness. We cannot have any relationship without it.

      In a time when social media was filled with anger, blame, and outrage, here was a TV show capturing hearts with what is possible in this world. Shouldn’t the church be even more compelling? Shouldn’t the world expect at least the same kind of reaction from Christians?

      Forgiveness does not seem to us to be a missional strategy, but it is. It always has been. The felt forgiveness we experience from God should flow out through us to others. When we forgive rather than take offense, when our words are gracious and merciful instead of bitter and angry, when we go in for a hug when a punch is deserved, we put on display the kind of God we have.

THE PATH OF FORGIVENESS

      In a make-believe world like Ted Lasso, perhaps forgiveness comes easy. But in real life, it’s hardly so simple. That doesn’t mean, however, that it is impossible. There is a path of forgiveness that helps our hearts prepare to forgive. It flows from the forgiving heart of God. We start there. God, in Christ, forgives us of all our many trespasses against him. He does not ask for atonement from us. He accomplished that himself at the cross of Christ.

      From God’s forgiveness flows our forgiveness. Life in this world gets painful real fast, and we find ourselves faced with the need to forgive. We must forgive others as God has forgiven us, but how can we do that?

      Tim Keller wrote a book on forgiveness, and in it, he laid out the four elements of forgiveness.

      To forgive, then, is first to name the trespass truthfully as wrong and punishable, rather than merely excusing it. Second, it is to identify with the perpetrator as a fellow sinner rather than thinking how different from you he or she is. It is to will their good. Third, it is to release the wrongdoer from liability by absorbing the debt oneself rather than seeking revenge and paying them back. Finally, it is to aim for reconciliation rather than breaking off the relationship forever. If you omit any one of these four actions, you are not engaging in real forgiveness.[1]

      Corrie Ten Boom tells a story of her life that captures this idea so vividly. She lived in Nazi-occupied land during World War II. She and her family were sent to a concentration camp for hiding Jews in their home. Her father was killed. Her sister, Betsie, died in the camp. Corrie survived. One day after the war, she spoke on forgiveness at a church, and afterward, a former guard at the concentration camp came forward to greet her. Here’s what she said about that day.

It was in a church in Munich that I saw him, a balding heavyset man in a gray overcoat, a brown felt hat clutched between his hands. People were filing out of the basement room where I had just spoken, moving along the rows of wooden chairs to the door at the rear.

It was 1947 and I had come from Holland to defeated Germany with the message that God forgives.

It was the truth they needed most to hear in that bitter, bombed-out land, and I gave them my favorite mental picture. Maybe because the sea is never far from a Hollander’s mind, I liked to think that that’s where forgiven sins were thrown.

“When we confess our sins,” I said, “God casts them into the deepest ocean, gone forever.”

The solemn faces stared back at me, not quite daring to believe. There were never questions after a talk in Germany in 1947. People stood up in silence, in silence collected their wraps, in silence left the room.

And that’s when I saw him, working his way forward against the others. One moment I saw the overcoat and the brown hat; the next, a blue uniform and a visored cap with its skull and crossbones.

It came back with a rush: the huge room with its harsh overhead lights, the pathetic pile of dresses and shoes in the center of the floor, the shame of walking naked past this man. I could see my sister’s frail form ahead of me, ribs sharp beneath the parchment skin. Betsie, how thin you were!

Betsie and I had been arrested for concealing Jews in our home during the Nazi occupation of Holland; this man had been a guard at Ravensbrück concentration camp where we were sent.

Now he was in front of me, hand thrust out: “A fine message, fräulein! How good it is to know that, as you say, all our sins are at the bottom of the sea!”

And I, who had spoken so glibly of forgiveness, fumbled in my pocketbook rather than take that hand. He would not remember me, of course–how could he remember one prisoner among those thousands of women?

But I remembered him and the leather crop swinging from his belt. It was the first time since my release that I had been face to face with one of my captors and my blood seemed to freeze.

“You mentioned Ravensbrück in your talk,” he was saying. “I was a guard in there.” No, he did not remember me.

“But since that time,” he went on, “I have become a Christian. I know that God has forgiven me for the cruel things I did there, but I would like to hear it from your lips as well. Fräulein”–again the hand came out–“will you forgive me?”

And I stood there–I whose sins had every day to be forgiven–and could not. Betsie had died in that place–could he erase her slow terrible death simply for the asking?

It could not have been many seconds that he stood there, hand held out, but to me it seemed hours as I wrestled with the most difficult thing I had ever had to do.

For I had to do it–I knew that. The message that God forgives has a prior condition: that we forgive those who have injured us. “If you do not forgive men their trespasses,” Jesus says, “neither will your Father in heaven forgive your trespasses.”

I knew it not only as a commandment of God, but as a daily experience. Since the end of the war I had had a home in Holland for victims of Nazi brutality.

Those who were able to forgive their former enemies were able also to return to the outside world and rebuild their lives, no matter what the physical scars. Those who nursed their bitterness remained invalids. It was as simple and as horrible as that.

And still I stood there with the coldness clutching my heart. But forgiveness is not an emotion–I knew that too. Forgiveness is an act of the will, and the will can function regardless of the temperature of the heart.

“Jesus, help me!” I prayed silently. “I can lift my hand. I can do that much. You supply the feeling.”

And so woodenly, mechanically, I thrust my hand into the one stretched out to me. And as I did, an incredible thing took place. The current started in my shoulder, raced down my arm, sprang into our joined hands. And then this healing warmth seemed to flood my whole being, bringing tears to my eyes.

“I forgive you, brother!” I cried. “With all my heart!”

For a long moment we grasped each other’s hands, the former guard and the former prisoner. I had never known God’s love so intensely as I did then.

And having thus learned to forgive in this hardest of situations, I never again had difficulty in forgiving: I wish I could say it! I wish I could say that merciful and charitable thoughts just naturally flowed from me from then on. But they didn’t.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned at 80 years of age, it’s that I can’t store up good feelings and behavior–but only draw them fresh from God each day.[2]

Forgiveness isn’t easy for any of us. But if Corrie Ten Boom can do it under those circumstances, can’t we follow in her footsteps? If God can do it in his holiness, can his power by the Spirit not enable us to forgive far less?

Forgiveness can change the world. So let’s go and be world-changers.

[1] Tim Keller, Forgive: Why Should I and How Can I?, pages 9-10.

[2] Corrie Ten Boom, “Guideposts Classics: Corrie ten Boom on Forgiveness” https://guideposts.org/positive-living/guideposts-classics-corrie-ten-boom-forgiveness/

It is unarguable that we are a people with a multitude of sins. We hurt one another. We offend one another. We live in a world where it is common to close doors instead of opening them. We huddle with like-minded allies, and we define ourselves by enemies as much as our friends. Whom we fight against tells the story of what we believe. Person X believes that, so I believe this. We see this attitude most clearly in politics, where issues are defined in black and white, Republican and Democrat, but it appears nearly everywhere today. We increasingly live in an environment of what Amanda Ripley, in her book by the name, calls “high conflict.”

High conflict is different from the useful friction of healthy conflict. That’s what I like to call good conflict, in homage to what the civil rights leader John Lewis called “good trouble.” Good conflict is a force that pushes us to be better people. Good conflict is not the same thing as forgiveness. It has nothing to do with surrender. It can be stressful and heated, but our dignity remains intact. Good conflict can lead to radical change, tectonic shifts in how societies operate. But it does not collapse into caricature. We remain open to the reality that none of us has all the answers. To everything all the time, and that we are all connected. We need healthy conflict in order to defend ourselves, to understand each other and to improve. These days, we need much more of it, not less.

High conflict, by contrast, is what happens when conflict clarifies into a good-versus-evil kind of feud, the kind with an us and a them.

In high conflict, the normal rules of engagement no longer apply. In this state, each encounter with the other side, whether literal or virtual, becomes more charged. The brain behaves differently. We feel increasingly certain of our own superiority and, at the same time, more and more mystified by the other side. When we encounter them, in person or on a cable news channel, we might feel a tightening in our chest, a dread mixed with rage, as we listen to whatever insane, misguided, dangerous thing the other side says. The conflict feels like an existential threat, even if it isn’t. [1]

Throughout her book, Ripley explains through the lives of real people and real events how we get into high conflict and how we can get out of it. There are some surprises along the way. One of the most baffling of examples is Gary Friedman.

Friedman was a lawyer. One day, two friends approached him to be their lawyer in their divorce. Both of them wanted his representation. No way could happen, he told them. But then he started wondering, why couldn’t he help both of them? So, he started the now common practice of mediation. For years, he honed his craft and introduced the concept to the world. What is now a common practice started that day with Friedman and two friends.

It’s hard to imagine a scenario rife with more high conflict than a divorce. If there was anyone who seemed able to avoid the perils of conflict, it was Friedman. But then, he ran for local government in his small California coastal town.

Perhaps there is just something about politics that incites our high-conflict personalities. But Ripley proves that government isn’t the only hotbed. It can happen at home, too. Think Hatfields and McCoys or, to put a single name and face on it, Curtis Toler, a former gang member in Chicago.

Toler’s story includes the typical gang member story. A young boy caught up in neighborhood us-versus-them rivalries that easily escalate into violence. Toler’s downward spiral came after his childhood hero, Benji Wilson, was murdered on the streets. Toler—and everyone else—assumed it was a rival gang. He set off on a search for the killer. But Toler didn’t even know Wilson. He just assumed he was a brother gang member. After years of gang activity, a few stints in prison, and an awakening to a new life later, Toler finally meets the man who killed Wilson. His story is vastly different from Toler’s imagination. It wasn’t gang activity at all. It was just street violence born out of fear and youth.

Toler’s motivation throughout much of his life was born of a misconception of the truth. People were hurt because of a phantom us and them.

How can this happen? That’s what Ripley seeks to answer. Along the way, she finds four conditions that can act as fire starters in any conflict.

1. Group identities (us versus them)

2. Conflict entrepreneurs (those who delight in conflict and fan the flames)

3. Humiliation (an often-overlooked root cause of conflict)

4. Corruption (organizational influences that start the fires and can’t put them out. 

Understanding the categories goes a long way to preventing high conflict, but it is no guarantee we won’t fall into it. To prevent it, we need to be much more diligent at a very personal level, which isn’t easy for any of us. We have to truly understand the story and realize the truth is more nuanced and complicated than our binary us-versus-them mentality. We have to push the fire starters to the edges where the oxygen level is too low to maintain a blaze. We need to make space for others.[2]

THE CHURCH’S ANSWER

What can the church learn from this research?

If I could boil down Ripley’s insights into a one-word answer to the problem of high conflict, it would be hospitality. Hospitality is what making space for others looks like.

The Bible calls us to a life of hospitality. Romans 12:13 says, “Seek to show hospitality.” Seeking means working toward it. It’s not automatic.

1 Peter 4:9 commands us to show hospitality without grumbling. We’re prone to grumble because hospitality puts us directly in each other’s path. It’s not easy.

So, to some degree, we narrow the responsibility to those like us. But Hebrews 13:2 says we must show hospitality to strangers. In the context of the ancient world, where hotels were not common, that likely means travelers to our cities. However, appropriating it to our modern definition of strangers is not entirely wrong. Unlike the relatively smaller towns of the ancient world, many of us do not even know our neighbors. Nearly everyone around us all the time is a stranger.

And, to lift the matter to even more importance, in two places, we are told that hospitality is a requirement for those in church leadership (1 Tim. 3:1-2, Titus 1:7-8).

God’s call on our lives to practice hospitality is an unignorable command throughout the New Testament. We cannot overlook this. If we want to be obedient to God’s word and a faithful presence as witnesses for Christ in our day, our only option is to learn how to do hospitality well.

One problem today is that our modern sense of self is fragile and competitive. We aren’t sure exactly who we are, so we use other people to prove our worth. No wonder we struggle with hospitality.[3]

With such an impure mindset toward others, we cannot be welcoming, especially to those unlike us. But recovering the Christian practice of hospitality can speak a powerful word to our world. Listen to author Rosaria Butterfield’s exhortation on what she calls “radically ordinary hospitality.”

Engaging in radically ordinary hospitality means we provide the time necessary to build strong relationships with people who think differently than we do as well as build strong relationships from within the family of God. It means we know that only hypocrites and cowards let their words be stronger than their relationships, making sneaky raids into culture on social media or behaving like moralizing social prigs in the neighborhood. Radically ordinary hospitality shows this skeptical, post-Christian world what authentic Christianity looks like.[4]

This kind of ordinary hospitality is something we can all do. But, of course, there are ways we can do it that feel more like duty than delight. Pastor Michael Keller believes that the way to fight against the weakening cultural bonds and fragmentation we experience is to invest more deeply in joyful hospitality.

A church that celebrates, a church that does meals for those inside the church, but also those outside the church becomes a curious space. Christians should be the best at hosting parties and celebrating others as we have every reason in the world to have joy about the coming kingdom, including present “wins” whether they are simple birthdays that highlight the created-ness of others, or milestones of our neighbors’ achievements.[5]

Hospitality is one thing we can all do to reduce the high conflict culture we all live in and hate. It is not a pathway to no conflict but to the good kind, where we can all be changed as we learn to love one another for Jesus’s sake. Avoiding all conflict is only realistic if we refuse to open our doors. But the answer to high conflict, bad conflict, is the good conflict of everyday life where sinners interact with sinners in all the small things of life that make relationships grow and develop and lead to a joy that this world longs to experience. All it takes is a willingness to open the door.

Our world is filled with high conflict. It’s everywhere we turn. People make a lot of money off creating and sustaining it. But everyone longs deep down inside for a kind of hospitality that cuts through the tension and creates a place where people of all stripes can come as they are and be who they are. It’s why the theme song of Cheers is so great. You wanna go where people know, people are all the same. You wanna go where everybody knows your name.

IT'S NOT EASY, BUT WE CAN DO THIS

God’s people should be the most hospitable people in all the world. Only when the Church outshines the local bar as the most welcoming and honest place in town will we start to experience the kind of biblical hospitality on a wide scale that heaven is made of. If we want to make heaven on earth, there isn’t a much better place to start than with true, biblical hospitality. It’s not easy, but we can do this.

We can move from high conflict to good conflict. We can move from making assumptions about others to being curious about others. We can cut off our monologues and create dialogs. We can seek solutions to our problems together rather than sizing our fists for the right boxing gloves. We can stop rejoicing in “their” losses and learn to rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep (Rom. 12:15).[6]

In her book, The Gospel Comes with a House Key, Rosaria Butterfield devotes a chapter to the kindness of hospitality in our post-Christian world. I will list the main points of that chapter and add some additional commentary of my own drawn from her insights.

1. Respect the reality of your neighbors’ lives and households.

We can respect and even accept others even if we do not approve of their views or lifestyle. If we are to bring people inside, unbelievers must see genuine acceptance and genuine love. Our acceptance is not approval. It is an invitation to a relationship. Hospitality means opening the door to people as they are before offering the hope of Jesus that shows them who they could be.

 2. Pray that you will be a safe person to hear the burdens of your neighbor’s hearts.

We live in a culture where safe places outside of one’s home are almost nonexistent, and for many, the home isn’t even a soft place to land. Our modern world is so fast-paced and self-focused that many don’t have any deep relationships. Loneliness is an epidemic.

To be hospitable people, we must be willing to invest in others for the long haul. People will only share their burdens if they sense we will bear the load. As Butterfield says, “Invest in your neighbors for the long haul, the hundreds of conversations that make up a neighborhood, and stop thinking of conversations with neighbors as sneaky evangelistic raids into their sinful lives. Maybe our own lives are actually more sinful. Is it not more sinful to openly sin while claiming Christ’s lordship than to sin while claiming false rights to self-autonomy? Stop treating your neighbor as a caricature of an alien worldview.”[7]

3.     Understand the biblical difference between holiness and goodness and don’t be afraid to celebrate the goodness of your unbelieving neighbors.

Jesus said God makes the sun shine on the righteous and the unrighteous (Matt. 5:45). Many good things happen in and through the lives of unbelievers because of God’s common grace. You might be surprised at how nice and decent unbelieving people are.

Perhaps one practical step you could take to reach out to your neighbors is to get to know them well enough that you can throw a party for their next win—when they get a promotion at work, when they pay off their car loan, when they finish the big project, when their kid does something great. Goodness should be celebrated where it is found. This takes getting very close to those around you. Close enough to share in their joys.

4.     Don’t accuse of ill will people who hold to a different theology.

We’re not talking about the difference between Calvinists and Arminians or Presbyterians and Pentecostals. Theology is much more nuanced than that and spills over into all kinds of places in our lives. In today’s world, it takes almost no time to find out if someone is a Republican or Democrat. The politicization of everything makes it obvious almost immediately. If your neighbor won’t shop at Target anymore because of their support for the LGBTQ community, don’t cut them off because of that. Don’t think less of them just because of that. Keep engaging them. Don’t make them your enemy—endeavor to make them your friend. Politics will come and go, but relationships can last the long haul.

5.     Know why it matters most that we are made in God’s image.

We must rest in our identity in Christ for ourselves. Only there can we find the grace to press into hard and, at times, uncomfortable relationships. But we also must remember that those who don’t believe are made in God's image, even if they derive their identity from somewhere else. The more we recognize our common heritage, the easier it will be to live together. Unbelievers may be offensive to us. But we must remember we are likely offensive to them too. Perhaps the greatest gift we can give to our neighbors in today’s modern world is the ability to remain truly hospitable even when our feelings get hurt. Hear Butterfield’s exhortation.

Practicing hospitality in our post-Christian world means that you develop thick sin. The hospitable meet people as strangers and invite them to become neighbors, and, by God’s grace, many will go on to become part of the family of God. This transition from strange to neighbor to family does not happen naturally but only with intent and grit and sacrifice and God’s blessing.[8]

6.     Start somewhere. Start today.

Butterfield says, “One logical place to start is at the end of your driveway.”[9] We tend to overcomplicate mission. We look for something formal. We wait for the church to start a new program. But what if we all just went to the edge of our driveway and started talking to our neighbors for no other reason than to love them for Jesus’s sake? You can do that today. It’s not much, but it’s something, and we know what Jesus can do with a little something.

In our high conflict world, Christians ought to be the most reasonable, the most open, the most willing to admit weakness and wrongness. We ought to be those who walk through the world like Jesus, with eyes open to the weak and wounded, seeking to make friends with sinners, because we know we will find common ground with them. After all, we are sinners ourselves. Our only saving grace is the grace of God, and his grace will help us welcome others as he has welcomed us (Rom. 15:7).

[1] Amanda Ripley, High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out, pages 3-4.

[2] Ripley explains each of these ideas in Appendix III of her book.

[3] This insight came from James Eglinton, “Lemonade on the Porch – Why and How to Build Porches: The Gospel in a Post-Christendom Society,” https://quarterly.gospelinlife.com/lemonade-on-the-porch-part-2/

[4] Rosaria Butterfield, The Gospel Comes with A House Key, page 13.

[5] Michael Keller, “Lemonade on the Porch: Redeemer Pastors Suggestions,” https://rpc-download.s3.amazonaws.com/Lemonade_on_the_Porch_Redeemer_Pastors_Suggestions.pdf

[6] These insights are drawn from page 286 of Amanda Ripley’s High Conflict.

[7] Rosaria Butterfield, The Gospel Comes with a House Key, page 54.

[8] Rosaria Butterfield, The Gospel Comes with a House Key, page 62.

[9] Rosaria Butterfield, The Gospel Comes with a House Key, page 62.

— J.I. Packer, “Saved by His Precious Blood: An Introduction to John Owen’s The Death of Death in the Death of Christ,” in A Quest for Godliness: The Puritan Vision of the Christian Life, page 130.

      We live at a peculiar moment in history when our culture’s assumptions and values retain a deeply Christian imprint but when the teachings of the Bible are largely unknown, misunderstood, or condemned. This makes for a strange and at times amusing situation in which society increasingly sets itself against Christianity but does so by using distinctively Christian arguments and assumptions.[3]

      Apologist Glen Scrivener argues that the Western world has been so deeply shaped by the Christian worldview that it is simply the air we breathe, though many have no idea their values spring from Christ.[4] Values such as equality, justice, compassion, consent, freedom, and even individuality find their basis in Christianity. But without the Christian understanding combined with expressive individualism, we end up with unequal equality, unjust justice, uncompassionate compassion, nonconsensual consent, and unfree freedom. Everything separated from God eventually becomes its opposite.

      Post-Christianity combined with expressive individualism makes for a very complex and paradoxical world in which you can have someone deeply devoted to the idea of sexual consent as a fundamental value but also very affirming of others’ freedom to express themselves sexually any way they want. So, on the one hand, they firmly believe certain sexual relationships are off-limits because they are fundamentally non-consensual, such as situations in which one party is influenced by the power dynamic of the relationship, compromising willing consent. On the other hand, they are firmly committed to individual expressive sexual freedom. But you can’t have both. Suppose you rightly hold to the importance of consent. In that case, you must denounce some sexual activity, but if you confirm expressive individualism, how can you deny that person’s right to express themself? There is a dissonance.

      It’s worth asking where this person got their idea of consent in the first place. It came from Christianity. In the first century, a man had total power over women. But when the Christian sexual ethic flooded the world, Paul said things like 1 Corinthians 7:4, “Likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does.” Historian Kyle Harper comments. “The social assumptions of pre-Christian sexual morality, such as the casual exploitation of the bodies of [powerless] non-persons, seem incomprehensible [to us today] precisely because the Christian revolution so completely swept away that old order.”[5] The modern person deeply believes in consent but has no idea that value was born of God.

      This goes for a value like justice as well. Without the biblical social ethic, there is no modern understanding of justice. Leviticus 19:15 says: “You shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great, but in righteousness shall you judge your neighbor.” Deuteronomy 16:19 says: “You shall not show partiality, and you shall not accept a bribe, for a bribe blinds the eyes of the wise and subverts the cause of the righteous.” Jesus showed up and went after the powerful religious leaders, cleansing the temple they defiled with their injustice. His brother told us in James 2 not to show partiality or favoritism. Justice is a biblical idea.

      But you cannot simply say to many people, “Justice is a Christian value.” They won’t believe you. The Church, of course, hasn’t helped with this. The Church has carried out many injustices throughout history. Even today, we see so many inside the church pushing against the idea of social justice, claiming it is a Marxist ideology. What was once an obvious connection between a Christian value and a publicly shared value is now severed. People can no longer connect the dots. With no shared language for God and no obviously Christian influence, many people find it difficult to understand what we are talking about when we talk about Christianity. To many, it’s just another religion they are ready to lop off, not understanding in many significant ways that it is the branch they are sitting on.

How Can We Help?

      So, how can we help? Tim Keller asked this question in an article written a couple of months before his death called “Lemonade on the Porch – The Gospel in a Post-Christendom Society.” I will discuss it in detail because it is the most compelling discussion I’ve read on the topic, and I believe it needs more attention.

      Keller combined two similar ideas. First was the idea of the front porch. Many of us don’t even have front porches today, but historically, the front porch served as the meeting place between the home and the street. You could invite a neighbor up to the porch for a glass of lemonade and get to know them. It was a good halfway point. Not in the house, but not on the street either. The second idea was drawn from the Dutch theologian Abraham Kuyper. In the early 1900s, Kuyper discussed the European relationship between Christianity and culture.

      Kuyper argued that for centuries, the cultural institutions of European countries had a “Christianizing” effect on most people in the population. General beliefs in a heaven and hell, in a personal creator God, the authority of the Bible, the need for forgiveness of our sins, sexual fidelity within marriage—all these and more were instilled in the general populations. Genuine, born-again Christians were only a fraction of any European society at the time, but Kuyper in no way despised the nominal Christians who constituted the majority. When nominal Christians came into church to hear the gospel preached, they had been prepared for it all their lives. The message did not sound completely, utterly confusing, or radically contradictory to their moral sensibilities because they had been “on the porch” of Christianity.

      European culture was, to use Kuyper’s metaphor, a “forecourt” or porch for the church. It was a half-way place between complete unbelief on the one hand (the “street”) and fervent, heart-faith on the other (the “sanctuary”). On the porch were people friendly and respectful toward Christianity.[6]

      Kuyper went on to point out that the culture was changing. The church’s forecourt, or porch, was disappearing. “The large number of people in western societies who were unconverted but who nonetheless had traditional values and a respect for Christianity were melting away.”[7] Years after Kuyper wrote this about Europe, the United States seemed to be proving an exception. But as Keller saw in New York City, in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, Kuyper’s observations about a post-Christian Europe began to show up in America. New York is typically ahead of places like Nashville, but that gap is closing. Nashville is growing into a major city in this nation, and along with all the good that means, it also means we will experience more of the big city ethos that we see in places such as New York.

      What is the impact of this shift? Keller explains.

      Suddenly, especially in the minds of younger Americans, Christians were the immoral ones, the cruel ones, the enemies of democracy, freedom, and compassion. In most parts of the country, church growth and church planting became far more difficult. Christians found themselves public targets of criticism for their views, especially on sex and gender. Then the pandemic emptied the churches. And since public services began again, most churches to this day have not yet recovered their former congregations. The American forecourt was emptying; Kuyper’s prediction was coming true even in the United States.[8]

      That means we live in a culture that is increasingly losing our Christian language, and, therefore, most unconverted people lack the fundamentals for hearing and responding to the traditional gospel presentation. Keller explains those fundamental beliefs:

      1) there is a personal God who created us and who judges us, 2) there is some kind of objective moral standard by which we are judged, 3) no one lives up to that standard perfectly and so we need forgiveness, 4) there is an afterlife, a heaven and hell.

      Those are the basic building blocks of evangelism. “If you think for a moment of these beliefs as ‘dots,’” Keller says, “then evangelism for centuries in the West has consisted of simply connecting the dots.”[9] Unfortunately, the post-Christian world can no longer connect the dots because they lack a fundamental Christian understanding. Our work just got much harder. Keller presents the problem.

      Most non-believers cannot quickly hear a gospel presentation and be asked if they want to receive Christ. Rather, like the early church and the church throughout the non-western world, congregations in the West must learn to create their own porches or forecourts where people can enter a relational process and be prepared to hear and understand and perhaps embrace the gospel… The vast majority of churches continue to reflexively work as if there was still a cultural forecourt. Their ministries and messages implicitly still assume that non-believers will be brought by friends or will simply show up in church and understand what is being preached. Some may, but this will increasingly not be so. This is a lethal kind of spiritual blindness and is a contributing factor to the decline in the church that we are seeing now in the U.S.[10]

      The punch line is this: Churches can no longer rely on the culture to provide the front porch. We must build our own. How do we do that? Keller offers some advice.

      On porches people are regularly exposed to Christianity in at least three ways: (1) They are enabled to see it. This happens when it is modeled in the lives of individual Christians, but it may also consist of visible expressions of Christianity, whether it be a service in the community (such as caring for the poor), art (such as literature, music, or theater) or in education (such as a Christian school). (2) They must be encouraged to question it. This happens when Christians in the space listen intently, patiently, and with great respect to non-believers’ doubts and questions, and respond with humility and thoughtfulness. Of course the questioning goes both ways. On porches, the powerful and unquestioned cultural narratives—“we are only intolerant of intolerance” and “you always have to be true to yourself” are patiently interrogated. (3) Finally, they must be enabled to hear it. This happens when Christianity is presented in their own language and vocabulary (instead of Christians’ insider jargon), and as answers to the questions that are most on their hearts, fulfilling their greatest aspirations and hopes better than their own intuitions and beliefs.

      Keller ended his article by teasing a second part that would include practical tips on building porches. Unfortunately, Keller didn’t live to write the second installment of the article. However, Keller’s conversation partner on this topic, James Eglinton, attempted to flesh out three practical ways to help in the follow-up article, “Lemonade on the Porch – Why and How to Build Porches: The Gospel in a Post-Christendom Society.”[11] He proposed three things: hospitality, cultural apologetics, and forgiveness (to which I will add repentance). I agree with all three, and I will discuss each one, but first, I want to add another one that is the foundation upon which the others are built.

Personal Reality with Christ

      The only way to avoid the despair of our modern age is to deeply accept the gospel identity Jesus can give us. That includes not only a proclamation over you but also the offer of reality with Christ within you.

      To help others in any way, we must have a vibrant personal life with Jesus. He must be more than a theory for us. He must be more than a talking point, more than an argument, more than an approach to society's ills. He must be our personal Lord and Savior, deepest Friend, and nearest Companion. If we are not cultivating our relationship with Jesus, we will not be much help to our hurting and lost culture. How could we? We will draw our identity from the same wells as the world. We will suffer the same despair. We will adopt the same talking points. We will draw lines between “us” and “them.” The only way we can truly help is if we are personally walking with Jesus—if we experience reality with him moment by moment, by his grace.

Hospitality

      We live in a world where it is common to close doors instead of opening them. We define ourselves by enemies as much as our friends. Whom we fight against tells the story of what we believe. Person X believes that, so I believe this. We see this attitude most clearly in politics, where issues are defined in black and white, Republican and Democrat, but it appears nearly everywhere today. It’s impossible to be hospitable with that attitude.

      Modern identities are fragile and competitive, and so they struggle with hospitality.[12] Our mindset isn’t pure. We aren’t welcoming, especially to those unlike us. But recovering the Christian practice of hospitality can speak a powerful word to our world. Listen to author Rosaria Butterfield’s exhortation on what she calls “radically ordinary hospitality.”

      Engaging in radically ordinary hospitality means we provide the time necessary to build strong relationships with people who think differently than we do as well as build strong relationships from within the family of God. It means we know that only hypocrites and cowards let their words be stronger than their relationships, making sneaky raids into culture on social media or behaving like moralizing social prigs in the neighborhood. Radically ordinary hospitality shows this skeptical, post-Christian world what authentic Christianity looks like.[13]

      Pastor Michael Keller believes that the way to fight against the weakening cultural bonds and fragmentation we experience is to invest more deeply in joyful hospitality.

      A church that celebrates, a church that does meals for those inside the church, but also those outside the church becomes a curious space. Christians should be the best at hosting parties and celebrating others as we have every reason in the world to have joy about the coming kingdom, including present “wins” whether they are simple birthdays that highlight the created-ness of others, or milestones of our neighbors’ achievements.[14]

      Hospitality is one thing we can all do to build porches. All it takes is willingness to open the door.          

Cultural Apologetics

      According to The Gospel Coalition’s Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics, “We’re living amid the largest religious transformation in American history. Forty million Americans have left the church in the last 25 years. Many other Western countries have already seen similar declines. But that’s not the only challenge. After the fall of Christendom, believers in Western countries now face a strange mixture of apathy and antagonism toward the gospel. Many of our neighbors view Christianity as yesterday’s news but also as the source of today’s problems.”

      Hospitality is good. It can show unbelievers what Christianity looks like. But despite what you may have heard, we cannot preach the gospel at all times through deeds and only use words if necessary.[15] We must use words. But which words? Eglinton, again, is helpful. “Cultural apologetics deals with explaining the history, workings, and shortcomings of secular modernity to the people who depend on it most but think about it least: secular Westerners.”[16] Collin Hansen defines cultural apologetics as apologetics that “helps unbelievers want the gospel to be true even before they may fully understand this good news. We offer the beauty of the lordship of Christ as opposed to the ugliness of the lordship of the principalities and powers (Eph. 6:12).”[17] Ted Turnau says, “The job of apologetics is to build a bridge between hope and the non-Christian.”[18]

      Cultural apologetics proposes engagement with unbelievers using their own language and values (their culture) to show them how Christianity is the true truth, the spring from which it all flows, and to show them how it fulfills human longings. Both the Bible and church history are filled with this type of cultural engagement. Jesus used illustrations from every day life that made sense to his hearers. Peter at Pentecost and Paul on Mars Hill speak to their specific audiences in their cultural languages. Justin Martyr’s First Apology and St. Augustine’s City of God spoke to the Roman empire in their specific cultural moments. Cultural apologetics understands that every culture expresses itself in ways that lead to an opening to Jesus and his gospel. Our job is to help unbelievers connect the dots.

      Dan Strange calls this “subversive fulfillment.”[19] Keller explains it this way.

      When the gospel is rightly preached, it not only confronts but attracts. It not only appeals and compels, it offends. It says, “the plot-lines of your life will only come to a happy ending in Jesus Christ.” Subversive fulfillment is both affirming and contradicting. It challenges people, but on their own terms. And it means offering them, on gospel terms, what all human hearts rightly need—a meaning that suffering can’t take away, a satisfaction not based on circumstances, a freedom that doesn’t destroy love and community, an identity that doesn’t elude you, crush you, or lead you to exclude others, a basis for justice that doesn’t turn you into a new oppressor, a relief from shame and guilt without resorting to relativism, and a hope that can enable you to face anything with poise, even death.

      This means, first, that on the church porch we are seeking to win the respect of non-believers and to affirm some of their beliefs. We are not merely saying, “We are right and you are wrong.” Rather, we affirm some of their beliefs and reason in this way, “If you believe (rightly) this – then why do you inconsistently believe that?” And then we attract them by showing how the things they seek can only be found in Christ.[20]

Repentance and Forgiveness

      Eglinton points out that hospitality needs to be accompanied by cultural apologetics, and forgiveness holds the two together.

      The existential power of forgiveness holds together the porches of hospitality and cultural apologetics. If we have no capacity to forgive, hospitality is impossible. Forgiveness is hospitality’s constant assumption—and when hospitality has to give an apologetic for its own existence, sooner or later, it will have to talk about forgiveness. But forgiveness also has to provide its own apologetic: why forgive, rather than be indifferent to wrongs, or bear grudges, or mete out your own revenge?[21]

      In a cancel-culture world, we have lost the ability to forgive. We have lost, in many instances, even the possibility of forgiveness. We not only withhold it, but we heap condemnation on top of condemnation. The transgressor is not simply wrong; they are evil. There are no mistakes, only evil hearts proving themselves.  

      The Bible has something to say about that, doesn’t it? No one is good, not even one (Rom. 3:10-12). Yet the God of the Bible does not leave us in that hell. He brings heaven down in his Son to offer forgiveness freely and fully. That vertical reality affects our horizontal relationships. Christians must show that to the world. Other things may bring people onto the porch, but the doctrine and practice of forgiveness will get them in the house.

      The precursor to forgiveness is repentance, and that starts with us too. We will sin, and when we do, we must repent and ask for forgiveness. Instead of doubling down, we need to humble ourselves. In his book Losing Our Religion, Russell Moore says, “As the prophet Ezekiel was told to dramatically enact carrying “exile’s baggage” as a way of showing Israel their coming judgment (Ezek. 12:1-16), maybe what the church is most called to do in this moment is not, first, to preach repentance but to embody what repentance looks like so that a culture seeking forgiveness will know what the words even mean.”[22]

Conclusion 

      We live in a complex world. There are no easy answers. The goal is not to find the silver bullet answer. The goal is to be formed by Christ to live for him in this world. The goal is to let him work through us, and that begins by humbling ourselves, acknowledging our weaknesses, and trusting him for the grace to help.

      We will end with James Eglinton’s exhortation.

      The goal of the forecourt is to offer something that secular Westerners need as human beings (made in the image of God), and to an extent still partially intuit (in the confused heritage of post-Christendom), but that they cannot get to on their own.[23]

      We have news to share. We have a Savior to invite them to know. We have salvation to offer.

            There is much to do, and it may feel, at times, impossible. But with God, all things are possible, especially with the God that will step out of heaven to find us. The Church is his house, and he has welcomed us in. Now, in response, will we go out to the porch and invite others in?

[1] Tim Keller, How to Reach the West Again, page 7.

[2] See Eglinton’s talk “The Church and Society,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5SGaIt0-GE

[3] Christopher Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory, page 15.

[4] Glen Scrivener, The Air We Breathe, page 12.

[5] Kyle Harper, “The First Sexual Revolution”, https://www.firstthings.com/article/2018/01/the-first-sexual-revolution

[6] Tim Keller, “Lemonade on the Porch (Part 1): The Gospel in a Post-Christendom Society,” https://quarterly.gospelinlife.com/gospel-in-a-post-christendom-society/

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid.

[11] James Eglinton, “Lemonade on the Porch – Why and How to Build Porches: The Gospel in a Post-Christendom Society,” https://quarterly.gospelinlife.com/lemonade-on-the-porch-part-2/

[12] Ibid.

[13] Rosaria Butterfield, The Gospel Comes with A House Key, page 13.

[14] Michael Keller, “Lemonade on the Porch: Redeemer Pastors Suggestions,” https://rpc-download.s3.amazonaws.com/Lemonade_on_the_Porch_Redeemer_Pastors_Suggestions.pdf

[15] A quote often (wrongly) attributed to St. Francis of Assisi.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Collin Hansen, “What is Cultural Apologetics?” https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/what-cultural-apologetics/

[18] Ted Turnau, Popologetics.

[19] See Daniel Strange, “For Their Rock Is Not as Our Rock: The Gospel as the ‘Subversive Fulfillment’ of the Religious Other.” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 56/2 (2013) 379–95.  https://www.etsjets.org/files/JETS-PDFs/56/56-2/JETS_56-2_379-395_Strange.pdf

[20] Tim Keller, “Lemonade on the Porch (Part 1): The Gospel in a Post-Christendom Society,” https://quarterly.gospelinlife.com/gospel-in-a-post-christendom-society/

[21] James Eglinton, “Lemonade on the Porch – Why and How to Build Porches: The Gospel in a Post-Christendom Society,” https://quarterly.gospelinlife.com/lemonade-on-the-porch-part-2/

[22] Russell Moore, Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America, page 201.

[23] Ibid.

In John 8:10, Jesus stood, looked at the woman, and said to her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?”

Commentator Colin Kruse points out that this is the first time in the whole episode that anyone addressed the woman. They dragged her in, accused her of adultery, and demanded her death, but until then, no one spoke anything to her.

Jesus did not start with her sin. He started with her accusers. Isn’t that interesting—and just like him? When she answered that none of them condemned her, Jesus said something amazing in response. “Neither do I condemn you; go, and from now on sin no more.”

How can Jesus say this? Well, in a way, he could say it because now that everyone is gone, there is no real case against her. The charges are dropped, as it were. But there’s a more puzzling question. The scribes and Pharisees weren’t totally wrong. If the law is violated, doesn’t that demand punishment? Shouldn’t Jesus act justly? Is he ignoring the law?

Well, notice what he doesn’t say. He doesn’t say, “You aren’t guilty.” The last thing he tells her is to sin no more. He’s not saying she’s innocent. But he doesn’t condemn her. Isn’t that interesting? Jesus is the most holy person that exists. He can’t overlook sin because if God overlooks sin, that is a real problem. How can there be any justice in the world if God overlooks sin?

Here’s where we get straight to the very heart of Christianity. Christianity says that we are guilty, but we aren’t condemned. How can that be? If we are guilty, we must be condemned. Justice demands it. If we are truly guilty, there is no way around it. Try telling parents whose child is murdered that there is no condemnation for the murderer. They would be outraged, and rightly so. So, how can Jesus say this? How can we be guilty but not condemned?

Perhaps the most amazing verse in the Bible, Romans 8:1, says, “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” Here’s how we can be guilty but not condemned. Only if we’re in Christ. It can only be true if Jesus takes our guilt for us. It only works if 2 Corinthians 5:21 is true. “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” Only if Jesus takes our guilt and our sin and pays the price for us can we not be condemned. It’s only true if Jesus is condemned for us. The guilt and sin don’t just disappear. The penalty must be paid. Someone must pay it.

We can only be guilty but not condemned by the law if Jesus upholds the law for us. Jesus can only not condemn this woman now if he’s going to be condemned for her later, and that’s exactly what he will do. Jesus knows she should be stoned. He wrote that law! As God, he does demand perfect holiness from his people. But as Savior, he knows that cannot come apart from himself. Instead of throwing the first stone, he will let stones be thrown at him. Instead of her being crushed beneath the weight of their blows, he will suffocate upon the cross under God’s wrath for her sin. Jesus didn’t condemn her then because he would be condemned for her later. That’s why Paul says in Romans 3:26 that God is both just and the justifier—he is just, and no sin will go unpunished, but for his people, he is also the justifier, the one who sets things right on the cross. That’s the only way this works. He can only forgive because he will pay the penalty himself. That’s the heart of Christianity.

Left before Jesus, the only one who really could condemn her, she finds a rock she didn’t expect to receive—the rock that will be struck for her, the cornerstone that becomes a new foundation for her life. If she found that, you can too. This is not a one-off story. One of the things that makes this so powerful is that this is the normative way Jesus works. We don’t see this only here in John 8. We see it throughout his interactions in the Bible.

Throughout the gospels, we see Jesus moving toward sinners and sufferers in ways that shock and surprise us. Jesus shows us that God’s heart isn’t trigger-happy to condemn. In Luke 7, When the woman of the city (likely a prostitute) poured ointment on Jesus’s feet, and wiped them with her hair, and kissed them, the Pharisees were repulsed, but Jesus welcomed and forgave her for her many sins. In Luke 19, Jesus ate with Zacchaeus the tax collector. When the friends of the paralytic brought their suffering friend to Jesus in Matthew 9, Jesus didn’t even wait for them to speak. When he “saw” their faith, he told the paralytic, “Take heart, my son; your sins are forgiven,” and the paralytic got up and walked out. As Jesus traveled and saw the crowds, he had compassion on them. He taught them from God’s law but bent down and healed their diseases (Matt. 9). Jesus stood outside Jerusalem and wept over them. Throughout his ministry, we find the truth of Isaiah 42:3, “A bruised reed he will not break; a smoking wick he will not put out, till he brings forth judgment to victory.” He brought forth judgment to victory on the cross. He will not break us. He will not put us out. He was broken for us. He was put out for us.

The thing that pours out most naturally from Jesus’s heart is compassion for the undeserving. In his book Gentle and Lowly, Dane Ortlund says it this way: “Time and again it is the morally disgusting, the socially reviled, the inexcusable and undeserving, who do not simply receive Christ’s mercy but to whom Christ most naturally gravitates. He is, by his enemies’ testimony, the ‘friend of sinners’ (Luke 7:34).”

When you come to Jesus “caught in the act,” you expect the full weight of the law to crash into you. It’s what you deserve. But with Jesus, you get what you don’t deserve. You are guilty but not condemned because he was condemned for you. All you have to do to receive that is receive that. Just open your empty hands of faith and accept his cleansing blood. That’s the scandalous grace of the gospel.

Jesus comforted her by not condemning her, but he didn’t stop there. Verse 11 says, “Go, and from now on sin no more.”

We must remember this. Jesus did not merely say, “I don’t condemn you.” He also said, “Sin no more.” True Christianity is both the full grace and forgiveness found in Christ and a call to deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow him. It includes both melting before his grace and stepping into the obedience he calls us to. He forgives, and he challenges. But notice the order. It’s so important to remember the order. He could have said, “I won’t condemn you if you don’t sin anymore.” But he didn’t say that, did he? His grace comes first, and that grace empowers obedience.

This is how we know Jesus really loved that woman and how we know he loves us, too. If he only forgives and doesn’t care how we then go and live, does he really care about us at all? If he only sends us back into the same lifestyle that got us dragged into accusation, pain, and potential death, would he send us back after forgiving us? Is that what you would do to someone you love? Of course not. Real love is loving someone enough to help them change into who you know they can be. Jesus loves like that. That’s why he calls us to obedience. He wants us to be like him; we can’t do that unless we obey him. But we can’t obey him—not truly—until we’ve been changed by his grace and mercy. Don’t mistake the order, and don’t mistake his love for you. Real grace forgives us completely, and real love calls us higher. Only in Christianity do sinners become saints. Heaven will be filled not with the deserving but with the undeserving.

 Two Applications

Now, how does this passage help us? I think in two ways—personally and corporately.

First, personally.

Perhaps no sins result in as much shame as sexual sins. It’s not just what we act out, it’s also the thoughts we have. When Jesus added insight to the law in his Sermon on the Mount, he said, “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” (Matt. 5:27-28). Are any of us not adulterers? We are more like this woman than we want to believe. Who among us is qualified to throw stones? We ought to be stoned. Many of us feel so broken, unworthy, and even sometimes repulsive to God. We might even wonder if we’re even Christians.

Well, when your heart condemns you, God is greater than your heart, and he knows everything (1 John 3:20). You are not repulsive to Jesus. You do not shock him. Jesus came to save people like you. He wants you to know that. He wants you to experience the cleansing he can give.

Hebrews 4:14-16 says we have a great high priest who is able to sympathize with our weaknesses, who in every respect has been tempted as we are yet without sin. He calls us to draw near to the throne of grace, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.

Here’s what that means. It means that if Jesus is really a savior—if he’s not just a mentor, or a self-help guru, or an example, or just a judge—if he’s really a savior, he will get down in the mess with you, and save you in time of need because he perfectly understands you. He will be there in the grossness, the desperation, the deepest temptation, and the hottest part of the battle. He is not just a counselor for the after-party when the high has worn off. He’s the hero running into the war with you. His throne is not the bench to approach to pay your fine after the infraction. His throne is a wartime walkie-talkie that you can call when the battle gets hot. He’s there for the dark moments, the moments you don’t even like to think about. He’s there with grace and mercy. He is not aloof to your real life, your real sins, the real you.

Jesus was tempted as we are but remains perfect and sinless, so he knows the real cost of holiness. And his perfection is not a platform from which he condemns but from which he saves. As Romans 8:34 says, “Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died—more than that, who was raised—who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us.” When you are caught in the act, he won’t condemn you because he was condemned for you.

Your most desperate need when you are most desperate is not to get your act together so you can come to him; it is to simply come to him and receive from his deep wells of grace upon grace. Only then will you even have a chance at getting your act together. Don’t take your problems to the law; take them to the gospel. If you go to the law, you will get justice, which will crush you. That’s its job. But if you go to Jesus, you will find that the law has been fulfilled on your behalf in him, and, therefore, you can find, from his fullness, grace upon grace (John 1:16).

Second, here’s how this helps us corporately.

If the only person who had the moral perfection to throw stones at the woman didn’t, let’s be very careful about picking up any rocks. Sin is serious, but it is no match for Jesus’s cleansing blood. Let’s always remember the heart of Jesus for sinners and sufferers. If we are to make an impact at all in this judging and condemning world, we are going to do it by stepping into the grace of Jesus together. We are going to do it by laying aside our weapons—stones or otherwise—and coming together to find the mercy of Christ for us. I don’t know about you, but I have enough of my own sins. I don’t need to go looking at yours. I have enough need of the cleansing blood of Jesus for myself to keep me on my knees for a while. Don’t you?

We have two options. We can become a community that radiates the beauty of Christ so profoundly that condemnation is only something we know we’ve been saved from, not something we’re looking to bring upon others, or we can become a community that is so hard to please even Jesus himself wouldn’t be welcome. What kind of community do we want?

By God’s grace, we can cultivate a gospel culture where Jesus is our greatest love. Where sin isn’t safe, but sinners are. Where we take each other to the gospel and not the law. Where we together boldly approach the throne of grace to find the help we need. Where we treat no sin too lightly nor too heavily because Jesus commands real obedience, but he forgives the worst we can do because he paid the price. And because he paid the price, we don’t have to. Let’s not ever make anyone pay for what Jesus already paid for. Let’s love him together, and let’s see what only he can do.

Let’s consider those verses, phrase by phrase.

“My sheep hear my voice.”

Later in John’s gospel, we see Mary Magdalene standing outside the tomb weeping on the morning of his resurrection. Two angels appear and ask, “Why are you weeping?” She said to them, “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.” She looked in the tomb; he was gone, and her heart broke again. Jesus was dead, and now even his body was missing. Her life was already shattered, this only added to the pain. But then, she turned around and saw someone she thought was the gardener. She said, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” She’s just dying to find Jesus. Then, this amazing thing happens. The man she thought was the gardener was actually Jesus, but she couldn’t see him yet. Not until Jesus said her name. “Mary” (John 20:11-18).

That first Easter morning, Mary heard her Shepherd’s voice. He spoke directly to her heart in a way no one else could. Not even the angels could make her feel better, but when Jesus spoke, she instantly knew it was him. Her tears went from sadness to joy. With one word, he changed everything for her.

If you are in Christ, you know something of this voice, don’t you? He speaks to the deep places of our hearts. He uses our name in a way no one else can. Why? Because of the next phrase in verse 28.

“And I know them.”

When he speaks, you hear because he’s speaking personally. You are not a nameless person among the crowd. Jesus knows you intimately. You are his. He knows you totally. He knows exactly what you need. He knows what’s going on in your life. He knows the difficulties. He knows the joys. He knows the uncertainty you feel. He knows the depression and the anxiety. He knows the hopes and dreams. He knows the longings and hopings. He knows the sins and failures. He hears the prayers and even prays himself on your behalf.

Remember when Nathaniel met Jesus back in Chapter 1? When Jesus saw him, he said, “Behold, an Israelite indeed, in whom there is no deceit!” Nathaniel said to him, “How do you know me?” Jesus answered him, “Before Philip called you, when you were under the fig tree, I saw you.” That did it for Nathaniel. “Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!” (John 1:47-49).

We have no idea what Nathaniel was doing under the fig tree. That’s not for us to know. It’s only for Nathaniel and Jesus to know. But Jesus knew it, and that convinced Nathaniel of his deity. Maybe Nathaniel was doing something he shouldn’t have been doing. Maybe he was sitting there longing for God and praying. We don’t know. Whatever it was, it was the thing that made Nathaniel know that Jesus knew him.

Jesus knows you like that too. He really, truly, deeply knows you.

“And they follow me.”

What else are you going to do if someone speaks to your heart so deeply? Who else knows you like him? Why would you not follow him? It’s the natural outflow of his grace.

Your only calling in this life is to follow Jesus wherever he goes (Rev. 14:4). I can’t say where all the paths he might lead you down. Psalm 23 comes to mind. There might be some valleys of the shadow of death, but he will bring you out the other side. You just have to trust him. The destination is glorious. It’s worth the wait. It’s worth the hardship. It’s worth all the fears and doubts and uncertainties. He will bring you all the way home to be with him in a restored and redeemed world where you have unhindered access to him for eternity. He is leading you into green pastures and beside still waters.

“I give them eternal life.”

The other day, two of my boys were talking to my young daughter in the backseat of the car. They mentioned how everyone would die. My precious daughter asked, “Daddy, will everyone die?” This was news to her. I told her that her brothers were right. Everyone would die one day. She said, “But I don’t want to die.” So I told her that if she loves Jesus, death is nothing to fear because he gives eternal life. That seemed to settle her. Oh, how it should settle us! Death? Where’s his sting? Jesus has conquered him. He is utterly defeated.

Hebrews 2:15 says Jesus defeated death by going through it. He destroyed the devil and delivered all those who, through fear of death, were subject to lifelong slavery. The fear of death enslaves us, but if we have Jesus, the chains are broken. We can truly live now because we will truly live forever.

If you are in Christ, you have this promise in black and white: I give them eternal life. In verse 10, which we saw last week, he already said the life he gives is abundant life. Now, added to that abundance is eternality. Oh man, think about this. The life your heart most longs for. The life that is so fulfilling that you can’t wait to get up in the morning to go and live. The life that is so deep and rich and meaningful. The life that is literally the ideal, perfect life is yours forever in Christ. It’s better than you can even imagine it to be.

So, okay, this life we currently live might not be the best. Jesus never said we were going to live our best life here. But there is another life to come—an eternal one, an abundant one. And you know what? Knowing that life is out ahead actually changes our life here today, doesn’t it? It’s like knowing vacation is coming. We can endure another day. We can even be excited about it.

“And they will never perish.”

The corollary to eternal life is the promise that you will never perish. You won’t wear out. You will last forever with God. You will never perish because Jesus will never perish. You are as secure as he is. He lives for you. Sticks and stones may break your bones and even kill you, but Jesus will forever save you.

“And no one will snatch them out of my hand.”

I challenge you to show me a more assuring sentence. I’m so glad this is in the Bible. No wolf can sneak in and capture. No thief can come through the back door and steal. Satan cannot snatch you away. You can’t even ruin yourself. In Jesus’s mighty hand, you are safe and secure. You have a rock-solid assurance that you will never be lost because Jesus has found you.

As if that wasn’t enough, Jesus said more in verses 29-30 to reinforce these already comforting words. “My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father’s hand. I and the Father are one.” The Father himself stands behind Jesus’s words. If we doubt Jesus can hold us tight, we also have the Father’s grip. If we doubt Jesus’s words are true, we also have the Father’s words. If we doubt that Jesus is working in concert with the Father, we can rest assured he is not. The Father and the Son, and the Spirit, are united in mission to seek and save the lost and to keep and provide for the sheep. Whatever Jesus does only reveals to us the heart of the Father. And what does Jesus reveal about his heart? That the Father himself loves you. There is no greater comfort than this.

Jesus is the shepherd we’re all looking for—the one who can care for us powerfully, relentlessly, and everlastingly.

The Pharisees were the most diligent Bible readers the world has ever seen, but Jesus said they missed the entire point because they didn’t see him. That means it is possible to read the Bible and miss what it says.

How can that happen? It’s not as hard as you might think. We do it all the time. Preachers even do it all the time. Any time we take a passage of scripture and read it isolated from the grand story of the gospel of Jesus, we miss the point. Any time we make something the main thing that isn’t Jesus and his gospel, we miss the point. That is not to say we cannot and should not also glean other things from the Scripture, but we must be careful what we live our life on from our reading. Anything other than Jesus is sinking sand.

I want to highlight just two ways we can miss Jesus. There are certainly more, but I think these are two main ways.

Missing Jesus in the Law

The easiest place to miss Jesus is in God’s law. The Pharisees were famous for their piety. They obeyed God’s law better than anyone. The Apostle Paul, himself a former Pharisee, talks about the rigidness of his former obedience in Philippians 3:4-6. “If anyone else thinks he has reason for confidence in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless.” Later, after his conversion to Christianity, he realized his folly. He counted all that past righteousness as nothing at all and clung to a righteousness not his own that came from the law but that which came through faith in Christ (Phil. 3:9). Once, all he cared about what seeing the law. Later, all he could see—even in the law—was Jesus.

Paul realized later on that the law was not given to show him how to obtain righteousness but to show him how far from it he really was (Gal. 3:24-27). The law was a pointer to our failure, not a ladder to our inheritance. The proper response is to fall on our knees, not rise on wings of self-righteousness.

Why, then, the law? We needed to understand sin. “It was added because of transgressions.” Paul explains this in more detail in Romans. “Through the law comes knowledge of sin” (Romans 3:20). “Where there is no law there is no transgression” (Romans 4:15). “If it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin” (Romans 7:7). Romans 5:20 says, “The law was added so that the trespass might increase.” Timothy George comments on this.

In Romans the word for “added” means literally “came in by a side road.” The main road is the covenant of promise—inviolate, irrevocable. The law has the character of something additional, a side road intended to carry extra traffic and excess baggage and, if we may anticipate Paul’s argument, designed not to lead to a separate destination but to point its travelers back to the main road.[1]

In his grace, God gave the law to show us how far we’ve fallen. But what God gave as a view into the fallen heart, we tend to construct into a ladder to God. We seek to prove ourselves holy when God intends to prove us needy. Therefore, how we understand the law determines how we understand grace and, ultimately, how we understand the gospel. What is good about the news of salvation if you believe you can attain it on your own?

Under the strict watch of the law, our failure is highlighted, which prepares us for grace. Martin Luther said, “The principal point of the law is to make men not better but worse; that is to say, it shows their sin, that by the knowledge thereof they may be humbled, terrified, bruised and broken, and by this means may be driven to seek grace, and so to come to that blessed Seed.”[2]

Missing Jesus in the Stories

The other place we can miss Jesus is in the stories. Ed Clowney said, “It is possible to know Bible stories, yet miss the Bible story.”[3]

If we aren’t careful, we can get caught up in the Bible’s stories without connecting each story to the big story of Jesus and his gospel. We can focus on the characters and the events, and even the places and times. We can get fascinated by the little things that seem like big things and miss the truly big thing, which is Jesus.

Every story whispers Jesus’s name, as Sally Lloyd-Jones says.[4] No matter how great the story, it always points to someone greater. There is a danger with the narrative portions of scripture to make the characters the main point. Joseph running away from Potiphar’s wife is an example of running away from our lusts. David slaying Goliath is our example of facing our fears. Jonah’s prayer in the belly of the whale is our example of repentance. We may be able to draw some very important lessons from each of those stories, but they are not the main point. Jesus is the true Joseph who always avoided sin but was cast into the real dungeon and rose again to save his brothers. Jesus is the true David who fought for his people to save them. Jesus is the true Jonah who entered the belly of the earth for three days and rose again, taking our sins into the ground and leaving them there.

We can do this even in the New Testament stories. We can read about Jesus without really seeing him. We can use him as an example instead of beholding him as a savior. We can look at Paul’s faith instead of rejoicing in his savior. We can get caught up in John’s images in Revelation and miss the Lamb worthy to open the seals.

In one of the end notes in his book on preaching, Tim Keller discusses how to “get to Jesus” and make Jesus the hero from harder parts of scripture. One way to do that is to develop the narrative tension of what we’re reading.[5]

For example, there may be some conflict in the passage that we can’t figure out how to resolve. Perhaps, as Keller points out, God is acting complexly or inexplicably. How can God be both just and loving? Only Jesus can hold both together. For all who trust him, God pours out the fullness of his wrath on Jesus at the cross and saves them by his substitutionary death. For those who reject him, there is a final judgment to come. Both just and loving.

Are the covenants conditional or unconditional? Only Jesus can answer that question. There are blessings and curses in God’s law based on obedience. But we fail to obey. Yet God also promises his everlasting love and faithfulness. How can both be true? Because Jesus lived the perfect life for us and fulfilled every condition, and by his substitutionary death, gives us his righteousness as he takes our sin upon himself (2 Cor. 5:21).

Another tension is a prophecy, promise, blessing, or human longing that seems impossible to fulfill. Until we see Jesus is the fulfillment of every prophecy (Luke 4:21), of every promise (2 Cor. 1:2), of every blessing (Acts 3:25-26), of every longing (Rom. 8:31-39), we will not understand how God can say such things.

If every story truly whispers his name, let’s not let the louder parts tune him out. Let’s amplify the name of Jesus because he alone is worthy of all our praise. He alone can change us. He alone can bear the weight of being the one main thing of every story.

[1] George, Timothy, Galatians: The Christian Standard Commentary.

[2] Luther, Martin, Galatians, Crossway Classic Commentaries, page 176.

[3] Clowney, Edmund P., The Unfolding Mystery, page 11.

[4] Lloyd-Jones, Sally, The Jesus Storybook Bible: Every story whispers his name, pages 14-17.

[5] Keller, Timothy J. Preaching: Communicating Faith in an Age of Skepticism, pages 259-260.

Many of us feel guilt when we think about reading the Bible. We remember all the failed starts. We regret all the mornings we couldn’t get out of bed to spend a little time with God. Maybe we even tried at night and found ourselves asleep before the end of the first chapter. We know we should do better, but we just can’t. Maybe something is wrong with us.

Or maybe we’re completely normal.

Remember the guy who fell out of the window while Paul was preaching (Acts 20:9)? How do you think that guy felt?

If thinking about Bible reading stirs up guilt, here’s what you can do right now. By faith, you can read this verse from Philippians 3:13-14 and dare to believe it. “One thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on…”

Every one of your past failures has only served to bring you right here, right now. It’s a low place. A humble place. And there is no better place to start again with God. Forget what lies behind. You failed. Ok. I have too. But God still loves you. Jesus’s blood still cleanses you. The Holy Spirit still indwells you. His word is still there. It hasn’t disappeared. So press on. Strain forward. Start today.

But before you start, do something maybe you haven’t done before. Ask God for a new desire. Ask him to help you. Why would he say no to that prayer? He won’t!

Then, sit down and open your Bible and ask God for light. Ask him to help you read it. Ask him to engage with you through it. Ask him to be with you in every word. Why would he say no to that prayer? He won’t!

You can read the Bible. And you can start right now. So why not?

Now, Get a Plan

I don’t know about you, but my life works best when I have a plan. Nothing is set in stone. I’m not ultimately in control of my life, and you’re not ultimately in control of your life. But a plan sure helps to get me going. It probably helps you too.

One thing you might not realize is how achievable it actually is to read the Bible. For example, Justin Taylor once posted this on his blog. “There are about 775,000 words in the Bible. Divided by 365, that’s 2,123 words a day. The average person reads 200 to 250 words per minute. So 2,123 words/day divided by 225 words/minute equals 9.4 minutes a day.”[1]

Reading the Bible in a year takes less than 10 minutes a day. You can do that!

To help you, there are more Bible reading plans than I can list here. Google is your friend. Use it. Find one that works for you.[2] There are no rules. The point is not to get the “right” plan but the “right now” plan. Our lives change. Our time frees up or freezes up, depending on our circumstances. Parents with young kids do not have the free time that empty nesters have. Find something that works for you.

The best plan in the world is the plan that helps you. So find one that does that. You might need to experiment a little bit. That’s okay!

When the Going Gets Tough

Maybe you’ve been down this road before and are ready to start again, but you know what’s up ahead. You know, at some point, it’s going to get hard.

How do we continue when it gets hard? Like anything in life, there will be some tough times. You may, for example, start a Bible reading plan that puts you in Genesis, then Exodus, then, gulp, Leviticus. And you hit Leviticus with absolute determination to plow through, but you get so bogged down in all the laws that seem so detailed and meaningless today.

Well, let me comfort you. You’re not the first person to think that. Not even close.

Now, let me encourage you. The investment is worth it. If you pay close attention to the laws of Leviticus, the rest of the Old Testament will make much more sense. When you get to the gospels, you will understand the Pharisees better. When you reach the end of the New Testament, you will appreciate the book of Hebrews, especially chapters 8-10, and not many people understand those chapters very well!

But more than that, Jesus is there deep in the pages of Leviticus. He’s there in the sacrificial system. He’s there in the ceremonial laws. He’s there in the rules and regulations that set a nation apart to himself. He’s the One who will fulfill every bit of it, so you don’t have to. If you read it that way, asking God for help through each chapter, you’ll be surprised at how relevant it suddenly feels.

But maybe you don’t have a problem reading even the “boring” parts. Your problem is consistency. Okay. I get that too. Life is busy, and sometimes we don’t have time. You missed a day of your plan. Then another day. Then a week. And you sit down, and it’s something like ten chapters to catch up on. Well, here’s an idea. Just skip those chapters. Go back to them later when you do have time. Don’t let yesterday’s absence impact today’s reading. Press on. Strain forward.

After all, if you don’t read your Bible daily, do you know how many of God’s laws you’re breaking?

One?

Two?

Nope.

Zero.

Let’s not make our Bible reading into a new law by which we measure our standing with God. God never tells us we must read his word every day. For most of history, the world was populated by people who couldn’t read or didn’t have access to a Bible. God is not a hard taskmaster. We live in an age blessed to have the Bible in multiple formats readily available. That’s a gift that we should cherish. But we are not failing his law if we miss reading for a day. Relieve yourself of that guilt. Guilt does not compel us to pick up and read. Grace does. And there is more than enough of that deep in God’s heart for you.

Grace for the Journey

The gospel of Jesus Christ proclaims grace and mercy over the entirety of your life. What Jesus accomplished in his life, death, and resurrection is the total salvation of your total self. It is the complete forgiveness of every single one of your sins—past, present, and future. It is the warm hug of love for every moment of your life.

You are not your failures; you are Jesus’s treasure.

You are not your sins; you have his victory.

You are not your weaknesses; the joy of the Lord is your strength.

You are not a mess-up; you are a child of the King.

You are not a disappointment; you are hidden in Christ with God.

You are totally free, totally loved, and totally secure in Jesus, your Savior.

Now, what if you lived out of that sense of acceptance? What if you woke up each morning preaching this gospel to yourself? What if, when you sinned, you looked to God for forgiveness, accepted it, and moved on? What if you approached all your life with faith in this Jesus? You can. And it will change you.

You need that kind of grace for the journey of life. You need it for the journey of Bible reading, too, because the Bible is the kind of book that will mess with you. When you read it, you’ll confront some tough things about yourself. God’s word is living and active. It cuts deep. It slices you open and exposes the parts of your heart you’d rather keep under cover. But God will take his scalpel and perform his surgery on you, and when that happens, you need to know it’s the hand of a loving physician. It’s a healing effort. He’s remaking you into the image of Christ. Let him.

[1] Taylor, Justin, Reading the Whole Bible in 2016: An FAQ, https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/justin-taylor/reading-the-whole-bible-in-2016-an-faq/

[2] Here is one great place to find a plan: https://www.ligonier.org/posts/bible-reading-plans

“The word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.” – Hebrews 4:12

The Bible is worth more than all the gold in the world. It is alive and active. It can enrich our lives immensely. The great English bishop of the 19th century, J.C. Ryle, said, “Happy is the man who possesses the Bible! Happier still is he who reads it!”[1] It is our food (Jer. 15:16), our life (Deut. 32:46–47), our comfort (Ps. 119:50), our strength (Ps. 119:28), our guidance (Ps. 119:105), our desire (Ps. 119:20), our hope (Ps. 130:5), our love (Ps. 119:97), our joy (John 15:11), and our treasure (Ps. 119:72).[2]

There is nothing like the Bible. It’s perennially the world’s best-selling book. It has transformed every culture it has encountered and has given a framework for living, especially in the Western world. We treasure it as God’s very word, as his gift to us so that we might know him.

The Bible is something we never truly master, even if we read it all day, every day of our lives. It’s deeper than any other book, with more to discover about who God is, who we are, and what this world is than any other book could ever offer. As the 19th-century English pastor Charles Spurgeon once said, “Nobody ever outgrows Scripture; the book widens and deepens with our years…The deeper you dig into Scripture, the more you find that it is a great abyss of truth. The beginner learns four or five points of orthodoxy, and says, ‘I understand the gospel, I have grasped all the Bible.’ Wait a bit, and when his soul grows and knows more of Christ, he will confess, ‘Thy commandment is exceeding broad, I have only begun to understand it.’”[3]

Reading the Bible is a life-long pursuit. For some of us, it’s still a very daunting book. Maybe you’ve tried to read it several times and can’t seem to make it through. Perhaps you’ve read it multiple times all the way through, yet you sense there is still more to learn.

No matter where you fall on that spectrum, I want to highlight some things that make the Bible unique among all the other books in the world. My hope and prayer is that these encourage you to take up and read.

Big

First of all, it’s a big book, and in our bite-sized publication era, where Tweets and Facebook posts are the newspapers of our day, we struggle with long-form reading. I fall into that category too. I love to read, but this modern world has trained my brain to take in small doses of information at a time. Reading the Bible takes far more effort than scrolling social media or the Apple News app.

How can we overcome this problem? It helps to break it down. Rome wasn’t built in a day, as they say. If you’ve never read through the whole Bible before, it will be hard to pick it up and go right through without a plan. Thankfully, there are many reading plans that you can use to guide you. Google is your friend here.[4] Take it in reasonable bits. Maybe that means a few chapters a day for you over a year. For some, it might mean bigger chunks over a shorter period.

Don’t let the size of the Bible intimidate you. Just start reading and ask God for help to continue.

Ancient

The Bible is an ancient book. As Michael Bird says, “Even though the Bible is for us, it was not written to us, nor was it written about us. When we read the Bible, we are entering into a historically and culturally distant world and we must ‘mind the gap’ as they say on the London Tube.”[5]

Thankfully, we already have a good bit of practice in this kind of world-shifting. For example, we naturally do this when we turn on a TV show. Of course, the images help, but our brain can put us in a particular time and place. A Western is a different context from Star Trek. Some things only make sense when you understand the world where the events occur. We must do a similar orienting exercise when we come to the Bible. If we don’t, we might misunderstand and misapply what we read. A letter is a different type of literature than a narrative. It helps to know what you are about to read.

A good study Bible will serve you well here. The ESV Study Bible is one great resource. It includes an introduction to each book of the Bible with information on the author, date, place of writing, theme, purpose, occasion, and background. It even highlights the literary features of each book, providing even further orientation.

Complex

The Bible is also a complex book. It is a collection of 66 books written in three languages (Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek) by dozens of authors over more than 1,500 years. Nevertheless, it tells one story of God’s grace in Jesus Christ. It’s truly a remarkable accomplishment.

To complicate it more, these 66 books are in different genres. The Bible includes history, narrative, poetry, wisdom, prophecy, gospels, letters, and apocalyptic literature. Knowing which genre you are reading is vital to reading the Bible correctly.

You often hear people say they take the Bible literally. Literally, that can’t be true because the Bible includes all kinds of literature that, if it were to be taken literally, would be terribly confusing and unhelpful. Sometimes it’s telling us mere facts. But other times, it uses imagery to get the point across. Jesus did this all the time. Think of all the images he uses of himself in John’s gospel. For example, he refers to himself as the “door” (John 10:9). Are we supposed to think of him as a literal door—wooden, about seven feet high, with hinges and a doorknob? Surely not. That makes no sense at all. Instead, he is a door in the sense that he is the entryway into God’s kingdom.

No one reads the Bible literally because it just makes no sense to do that. Instead, we are to read each part according to the type of literature it is, taking the words seriously and looking for the true meaning behind each one. Again, a good study Bible is of great assistance in this regard.

Inerrant

Second Timothy 3:16 says, “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.” In other words, the Bible is inerrant.

The inerrancy of the Bible has been hotly debated for centuries. At various times, it has been misused, misdefined, and misunderstood.[6] Without getting too far into the various topics, the classical orthodox Christian view is put simply as this: the authors spoke the truth in all their affirmations, and the original text of the Bible is without error or mistake. The doctrine of inerrancy means that you can trust your Bible while reading it. God does not lie.

Complete and Sufficient

The Bible doesn’t tell us everything we wish we knew. Wouldn’t it be nice if God spent more time on Genesis 1 and 2 explaining exactly how the world came to be? What about the dinosaurs?

The Bible also doesn’t answer all our tough questions about how some things work. Divine sovereignty and human responsibility, for example. How can both be true? We cannot ultimately answer that because the Bible doesn’t. There is tension in the scriptures. God is presented as entirely sovereign, and we are held responsible for all our actions. When the Bible holds something like that in tension, we must learn to be okay with that.

Though the Bible doesn’t tell us everything we wish to know, it does tell us everything we need to know. We are not saved by knowing the details of the world's creation. Old Earthers and New Earthers are saved only by faith in Jesus Christ. Arminians and Calvinists are saved only by faith in Jesus Christ.

What do we need to know? We need to know the gospel. We need to know that we are sinful and unable to save ourselves, but God sent his Son to live the life we should have lived and die the guilty death we deserved to save us from the wrath of God that we were owed. Three days later, he was raised from the grave in a glorious resurrection, and all who turn from their sin and put their faith in him and his work, trusting him for salvation, will live forever with God in a renewed and restored universe upon Jesus’s return.

The Bible doesn’t tell us all we wish it did, but it tells us enough. It is complete and sufficient in its message of repentance and grace.

Divinely Inspired

The Bible is a divinely inspired book. This is where we depart from what the world would recognize about the Bible. Here, we step into Christianity. The Bible is not just any old historical book. It is God’s gift to us. It’s his very word. It’s his message to us. It’s his revelation of himself. As Paul says in 2 Timothy 3:16, “All scripture is God-breathed.”

Though human hands wrote the Bible, those men wrote words from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit (2 Pet. 1:21). God did not take over their bodies and make the authors serve as mere scribes. Instead, God inspired them by his Spirit and worked through their personalities and circumstances to create the Bible. And what a gift this is to us! We have God’s words in our human language!

Authoritative

Because of its divine inspiration, the Bible can never be wrong. If it were wrong, that would mean God would be wrong, and he can’t be (Num. 23:19; 1 Sam. 15:29; Heb. 6:18; Ps. 89:35). Now, the problem with that is that sinners like us will look at parts of the Bible and think, “Huh, I disagree with that.” I would go so far as to say that if you never disagree with the Bible, you probably haven’t understood what you’ve read. The Bible should confront our thinking. It should bother us. As Tim Keller said, “Only if your god can outrage and challenge you will you know that you worship the real God and not a figment of your imagination…If your god never disagrees with you, you might just be worshiping an idealized version of yourself.”[7]

Though we may disagree, we must bend our thoughts to God’s. We cannot “agree to disagree” with the Bible. We must change our thinking to match what God has said. Because of the holiness of the Word, we have no right to deviate from it. Saint Augustin put it plainly. “The Scriptures are holy, they are truthful, they are blameless.… So we have no grounds at all for blaming Scripture if we happen to deviate in any way, because we haven’t understood it. When we do understand it, we are right. But when we are wrong because we haven’t understood it, we leave it in the right. When we have gone wrong, we don’t make out Scripture to be wrong, but it continues to stand up straight and right, so that we may return to it for correction.”[8]

Lest that discourage us, view this as a great gift instead. We live in an age in which truth is a very malleable thing. It’s something everyone gets to define for themselves. But truth that changes with the times is not truth at all.

The Bible stands outside of our time and engages and informs our time. It does that not only for us but for every age. This is incredibly helpful and comforting. The problem with looking to our age for answers is that while we may have come to some view on something that is true, we still have our blind spots. No era is infallible. But God’s word is. If you want to truly be a counter-cultural influencer that lives on the razor edge, stand on God’s word.

For example, we live in a day when there is a strong (and right) emphasis on justice and equality. But divorced from scripture, our culture either takes those good and right ideas to improper ends or dead ends.

In the LGBTQ+ discussion, there is much talk of justice and equality, using similar language used in the Civil Rights era. While we should treat every person with dignity and respect, we cannot begin redefining basic ideas of personhood to fit an ever-shifting culture. A man and a woman are not malleable things. They are biological truths. Using the biblical concepts of justice and equality apart from the biblical definitions of personhood only takes us to an improper end, missing the actual point God is making about the dignity of each man and woman created in the image of God. We are not our sexual identities. We are God’s good creation. Only he can define us.

On the other end of the spectrum, our culture can take the good and right ideas of justice and equality to a dead end where no one can win. Divorced from scripture, if anyone fails the culture's definition of justice or equality, the game is over. There is no forgiveness or mercy for the offender.

Only the Bible strikes the right balance between upholding justice and equality, the proper definitions, and the opportunity of experiencing forgiveness and mercy when we fail. Not only that, but the Bible also gives us the power to forgive others when they have wronged us. It is a way out of cancel culture and into real community. That’s life on the razor edge. It’s surprising. It’s counter-cultural.

In his book The City of God, Saint Augustine told a better story of Rome than Rome could tell of itself because he looked through a biblical lens. The Bible knows us better than we know ourselves. It tells a better story of us than we can tell of ourselves because the Bible sees outside and beyond us, and we can only see ourselves for whomever we might be at any given moment. We can’t see the fullness of our lives at any given moment. The Bible, however, does. And that story of ourselves is founded in a more profound love than we have for ourselves. It’s a story steeped in the mercy and grace of Jesus.

We need this more than we realize. Without God setting the tone, we cannot truly know ourselves. To know ourselves, we need to know God. John Calvin said this about knowledge in his classic book The Institutes of the Christian Religion. “The whole sum of our wisdom—wisdom, that is, which deserves to be called true and assured—broadly consists of two parts, knowledge of God and knowledge of ourselves…The purpose of the first of these is to show not only that there is one God whom all must worship and honor, but also that he is the fount of all truth, wisdom, goodness, righteousness, judgment, mercy, power, and holiness…The purpose of the second is to show us our weakness, misery, vanity and vileness, to fill us with despair, distrust and hatred of ourselves, and then to kindle in us the desire to seek God, for in him is found all that is good and of which we ourselves are empty and deprived.”[9]

When we come to the Bible, we are coming to a book that shows us who God is and who we are, but we are not the main attraction. God is. And that revelation of God helps us understand him and ourselves because everything in this world is understood in the context of God. He gives meaning to it all because he is the Creator of all.

[1] Ryle, J.C., Practical Religion

[2] Smethurst, Matt, 8 Things Your Bible Says About Itself,  https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/bible-says-about-itself/

[3] Spurgeon, C.H., The Sermons of Charles Spurgeon, vol. 2, n.d.

[4] Here is one great place to find a plan: https://www.ligonier.org/posts/bible-reading-plans

[5] Bird, Michael F., Seven Things I Wish Christians Knew about the Bible, page 95.

[6] For a more detailed analysis, see Matthew Barrett’s essay for The Gospel Coalition entitled “The Authority and Inerrancy of Scripture.” https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/essay/authority-inerrancy-scripture/

[7] Keller, Timothy J., The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism

[8] Augustine, Colossians, 1–2 Thessalonians, 1–2 Timothy, Titus, Philemon, Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, page 269.

[9] Calvin, John, The Institutes of the Christian Religion, page 1.

— Richard Lovelace, Renewal as a Way of Life, page 137.

      What is the gospel? 1 Corinthians 15:3-5 says, “For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.”

      The gospel is the news of God’s redemption in his Son Jesus Christ, who, through his perfect life, substitute’s death, and glorious resurrection, saves his people from their sins, taking the wrath of God upon himself and making atonement with God by his blood. Now, all who receive Christ’s redemptive work have a promise of everlasting life in a renewed and restored creation.

      No matter where we are in the Bible, this gospel message can be found. (See Appendix G.) In fact, it must be found to understand it properly. In his book The Unfolding Mystery, Ed Clowney said, “If you tell a particular Bible story without putting it into the Bible story about Christ, you actually change the meaning of the particular story…Because the story becomes a moralistic exhortation to try harder to live up to the example of the person in the story instead of a call to live by faith in Christ.”[1]

      Think about David and Goliath. What is the story about? David, representing Israel, fights Goliath, representing the Philistines. Whoever wins that battle wins it for his nation. Goliath is much bigger than David. He’s stronger and better armed. Goliath is a professional soldier. David is a little shepherd boy. But David wins, and through him, Israel wins.

      Now, what can we apply from that story? We could say, “We shouldn’t be afraid, but have faith like David in the face of our fears.” But is that where we need to stop? What if we can’t muster up that faith? Where does that leave us?

      So, let’s dig a bit deeper. Where are we to find ourselves in the story? Are we really David? Or are we more like the Israelites cowering in fear on the sidelines, waiting for a savior? Is God calling us onto the battlefield to face the giant? Or is he showing us how the giant has already been slain on our behalf? Is David an example or a savior?

      Now, put this story into the larger story. Factor Jesus into it. Who is David? David is like Jesus. Jesus faced a giant too, but it was much scarier. And he faced it not for himself but on behalf of his people. If he won, they won. David faced Goliath, and Goliath could kill him, but Jesus faced sin, and he let it kill him. Jesus didn’t just risk his life; he gave his life. As Tim Keller said, “Jesus is the true and better David whose victory becomes his people’s victory, though they never lifted a stone to accomplish it themselves.”[2]

      The main application is not to “be like David” but to receive the victory won for you. Yes, we should be brave by faith in the face of our own giants, but doing that isn’t what saves us. We need to receive and believe the gospel. We need someone to fight for us because we all have giants we can’t fight and win. And if we can’t win, then what hope do we have? But if someone fought the only things that can really kill us—sin and death—and won the battle for us, that makes all the difference. If Jesus loved us and died for us to save us from all that can truly destroy us, what now do we need to fear?

That insight changes how we apply the Bible. It’s not just an intellectual pursuit that hits our heads but not our hearts, which could make us prideful of our knowledge. It’s not just a devotional pursuit that hits our hearts but not our heads, which could make us slaves to our circumstances. It’s not just a pragmatic pursuit that reaches only our will to change, which could lead to self-righteousness.[3] It’s far deeper than that. It reaches all the way down. We are all weak and broken and in need of a savior, and the gospel is the only solution that gets down to the very bedrock of our souls. Everything else is ancillary to that one main thing.

[1] Clowney, Edmund P., The Unfolding Mystery.

[2] Keller, Timothy J., “The Bible is Not About You”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lq1kJLN-izE

[3] I owe these insights to Tim Keller and Ed Clowney in their seminary class at Reformed Theological Seminary, “Preaching Christ in a Postmodern World,” https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/course/preaching-christ-postmodern-world/#introduction-to-the-course

      John 1:16 says, “For from his fullness we have all received grace upon grace.” Ephesians 2:8 says, “For by grace you have been saved through faith.” Romans 5:20 says, “Now the law came in to increase the trespass, but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more.” Hebrews 4:15-16 tells us about the “throne of grace” that we can approach to “receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.” James 4:6 says Jesus gives “more grace.” Romans 6:14 declares we are “not under law but under grace.”          

      Matthew 11:28-30 is the one place in the Bible where Jesus speaks of his own heart. What does he say? “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” That’s grace.

      But, you say, that’s all in the New Testament. What about the Old Testament?

      After the fall of Adam and Eve, what did God do? He clothed them (Gen. 3:21) and promised them a savior was coming (Gen. 3:15). When Israel was in slavery, what did God do? “God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. God saw the people of Israel—and God knew.”

      When God gave the Ten Commandments, where did he begin? On terms of grace. Exodus 20:1-2, “And God spoke all these words, saying, ‘I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.’”

      Isaiah 55:1 says, “Come, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and he who has no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.”

      Psalm 86:15 says, “But you, O Lord, are a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.”

      Lamentations 3:22 says, “The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases; his mercies never come to an end.”

      Time fails me to mention all the times we see God’s people fail and deserve death, and instead, God saves them and redeems them. Grace permeates the Bible, covering it like the waters cover the ocean.

      The Princeton Seminary stalwart and New Testament scholar J. Gresham Machen said, “The very center and core of the whole Bible is the doctrine of the grace of God—the grace of God which depends not one whit upon anything that is in man, but is absolutely undeserved, resistless and sovereign. The theologians of the Church can be placed in an ascending scale according as they have grasped with less or greater clearness that one great central doctrine, that doctrine that gives consistency to all the rest; and Christian experience also depends for its depth and for its power upon the way in which that blessed doctrine is cherished in the depths of the heart. The center of the Bible, and the center of Christianity, is found in the grace of God; and the necessary corollary of the grace of God is salvation through faith alone.”[1]

      Isn’t this amazing? Think of all the books that exist in the world. Of all the guides that show us where to go and what to do. Of all the self-help books that motivate us to become the best versions of ourselves. Of all the other religious texts in the world that heap demands upon us. The Bible stands above them all with a message of grace for the undeserving. God wrote a book, and the thing he wanted to get across more than anything else is the reality that he is “a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin” (Ex. 34:6-7).

      Understanding that grace is the theme of the Bible changes the way we receive the Bible. If we don’t understand the terms of grace the Bible offers us, we will make it into a rule book. We will make it into something we strive to live up to. We will make it a merit contest. That will do one of two things. It will either make us incredibly prideful and self-righteous, or it will absolutely destroy us in guilt and shame. But if we understand the terms of grace upon which the Bible is offered to us, we will receive it as the gift that it is. We will enjoy it more. We will experience the love of God in it. We will see some ugly things about ourselves. We will see that we deserve judgment and hell. But we will also see that, in Christ, we can receive forgiveness and heaven.

      This understanding of grace will also ensure we read what the Bible actually says, not what we think it says. Here’s what I mean. We tend to approach the Bible like we do so much of the rest of our lives. If you want a job, get qualified. If you want love, make yourself lovable. If you want to run a marathon, start running. So, we naturally think if you want God’s love, earn it. We are all legalists at heart. But that thinking is anti-biblical. Nowhere in the Bible do we see God ask us to earn his love. Instead, repeatedly, we see him offering it freely on terms of grace.

      The logic of the Bible is different from the logic of the world, and that takes some getting used to. Theologians use two words for the concept: indicatives and imperatives. Indicatives are what God does. Imperatives are what we do. The Dutch theologian Herman Ridderbos put it this way. “Every imperative of Scripture (what we are to do for God) rests on the indicative (who we are in our relationship with God), and the order is not reversible.”[2]

      How often do we go to the Bible, read a passage or verse, and think, “I am not _____. I should be _____. So, I need to do or be _____.”[3] But that’s not the logic of the Bible.

      Listen to what Paul says, for example, in Romans 6:18-19. “Having been set free from sin, you have become slaves of righteousness [indicative (who we are in our relationship to God)], therefore now present your members as slaves of righteousness leading to sanctification [imperative (what we are to do for God)].” See the logic? Since you’ve been set free…present your members. Not the other way around.

      Ephesians 2:10 provides another example. “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.” We are created…that we should walk in them. Not walk then created.

      If we don’t approach the Bible with the understanding that grace is the main theme, we will naturally reverse the order of God’s own words. We will think it says one thing while it actually says another because we are all legalists at heart. And, worse still, we will talk to others about what we read in the Bible and place law upon them instead of the gospel. We must never forget that what we do does not define who we are in Christ. Who we are in Christ defines what we do.

      Understanding that grace is the main theme of the Bible changes our entire approach to it. It motivates us to seek it out, frees us to receive God’s words—even the hard ones—and motivates us to live for him in all aspects of our life. Only grace truly motivates because only grace truly frees. And grace—praise be to God—is the theme of the Bible!

[1] Machen, J. Gresham, What is Faith?, pages 173–74

[2] Ridderbos, Herman, Paul: An Outline of His Theology, page 253.

[3] I’m indebted to Justin Taylor for this insight from this blog post: https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/justin-taylor/imperatives-indicatives-impossibilities/

      The Pharisees weren’t the only ones missing the point. Jesus’s disciples did too. After Jesus’s resurrection, Luke 24:13-27 tells the story of two disciples on the Emmaus Road. Jesus approached them, unrecognized, and asked them what they were discussing. They said, “Well, we thought Jesus was the Messiah, but he was crucified, so I guess we were wrong.” Jesus responded with a reprimand, saying, “O foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?” Then he does something amazing. “And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.”

The Bible is one big, unified story about Jesus. Remove him, and you have nothing left.

I’m arguing for a Christocentric reading of the Bible because I think that’s what the Bible itself argues for.

Now, here’s what I’m not saying. I am not saying you can see Jesus’s name in every verse. You can’t even see it in every chapter. You can’t even see it in every book of the Bible. Esther doesn’t mention God’s name. But think of it like a trajectory. The tension builds with every story.

A Christocentric view of the New Testament isn’t as difficult because Jesus is mentioned by name so often. But what about the Old Testament? Though he is not named, we see Jesus everywhere. We find the pattern of Jesus—a Savior rising to redeem God’s people. We hear the promise of Jesus—one to come that will undo the curse and bring the blessing. We feel the presence of Jesus—divine help amid God’s people in all their struggles and sins.[2]

As Tim Keller famously summarized it, Jesus is the true and better everything.

Jesus is the true and better Adam who passed the test in the garden and whose obedience is imputed to us.

Jesus is the true and better Abel who, though innocently slain, has blood now that cries out, not for our condemnation, but for acquittal.

Jesus is the true and better Abraham who answered the call of God to leave all the comfortable and familiar and go out into the void not knowing wither he went to create a new people of God.

Jesus is the true and better Isaac who was not just offered up by his father on the mount but was truly sacrificed for us. And when God said to Abraham, “Now I know you love me because you did not withhold your son, your only son whom you love from me,” now we can look at God taking his son up the mountain and sacrificing him and say, “Now we know that you love us because you did not withhold your son, your only son, whom you love from us.”

Jesus is the true and better Jacob who wrestled and took the blow of justice we deserved, so we, like Jacob, only receive the wounds of grace to wake us up and discipline us.

Jesus is the true and better Joseph who, at the right hand of the king, forgives those who betrayed and sold him and uses his new power to save them.

Jesus is the true and better Moses who stands in the gap between the people and the Lord and who mediates a new covenant.

Jesus is the true and better Rock of Moses who, struck with the rod of God’s justice, now gives us water in the desert.

Jesus is the true and better Job, the truly innocent sufferer, who then intercedes for and saves his stupid friends.

Jesus is the true and better David whose victory becomes his people’s victory, though they never lifted a stone to accomplish it themselves.

Jesus is the true and better Esther who didn’t just risk leaving an earthly palace but lost the ultimate and heavenly one, who didn’t just risk his life, but gave his life to save his people.

Jesus is the true and better Jonah who was cast out into the storm so that we could be brought in.

Jesus is the real Passover Lamb, innocent, perfect, helpless, slain so the angel of death will pass over us. He’s the true temple, the true prophet, the true priest, the true king, the true sacrifice, the true lamb, the true light, the true bread.[3]

No wonder, then, that when Paul was in Thessalonica in Acts 17:2-3, he entered the synagogue, “and on three Sabbath days he reasoned with them from the Scriptures, explaining and proving that it was necessary for the Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead, and saying, ‘This Jesus, whom I proclaim to you, is the Christ.’” No wonder Paul wrote in 2 Corinthians 1:20, “All the promises of God find their Yes in him.”

Jesus is everywhere in the Bible. He is the meaning and purpose of every word, every story, every book, every genre, every section, every theme, every figure, every image, and every storyline. When you realize that, the Bible becomes like the movie, The Sixth Sense. Once you know the ending, you can’t help but see the clues all along the way. You see it everywhere. We need to develop a sixth sense for Jesus.

Perhaps no one has said it better than Sally Lloyd-Jones in her children’s book The Jesus Storybook Bible.

Now, some people think the Bible is a book of rules, telling you what you should and shouldn’t do. The Bible certainly does have some rules in it. They show you how life works best. But the Bible isn’t mainly about you and what you should be doing. It’s about God and what he has done.

Other people think the Bible is a book of heroes, showing you people you should copy. The Bible does have some heroes in it, but most of the people in the Bible aren’t heroes at all. They make some big mistakes (sometimes on purpose). They get afraid and run away. At times they are downright mean.

No, the Bible isn’t a book of rules, or a book of heroes. The Bible is most of all a Story. It’s an adventure story about a young Hero who comes from a far country to win back his lost treasure. It’s a love story about a brave Prince who leaves his palace, his throne—everything—to rescue the one he loves. It’s like the most wonderful of fairy tales that has come true in real life!

You see, the best thing about this Story is—it’s true.

There are lots of stories in the Bible, but all the stories are telling one Big Story. The Story of how God loves his children and comes to rescue them.

It takes the whole Bible to tell this Story. And at the center of the Story, there is a baby. Every Story in the Bible whispers his name. He is like the missing piece in a puzzle—the piece that makes all the other pieces fit together, and suddenly you can see a beautiful picture.[4]

Jesus is the main character of the Bible. Miss that, and you misunderstand the Bible. Get that, and it all suddenly starts making more sense.

Reading the Bible this way takes some practice. For many of us, it requires quite a bit of unlearning. We tend to read the Bible as piecemeal bits of information, like pearls on a necklace. It’s all connected, but it’s not unified. We have the Old Testament law, the prophets, the Psalms, etc. And we have the New Testament gospels and letters. But how do they hold together? Who knows. We read a portion, find the pearl we need for the day, and move on. But to read the Bible through the Jesus lens is to recognize that it isn’t made up of pearls on a necklace but links in a chain. It’s all connected to the one big story of Jesus.

This type of reading doesn’t ignore the other points the passage may be making. It only helps us find our way through them. C.S. Lewis said, “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen, not only because I see it but because by it, I see everything else.”[5] A Christocentric reading of the Bible is like that. It’s by Jesus that we see everything else. Reading the Bible without Jesus at the center is like reading in a dark room. Jesus turns the lights on. Jesus is the organizing principle. Jesus is the point of the whole thing. Jesus is the key to opening the truth of every part of the Bible.

Some of us don't read the Bible much because we haven't yet learned to see Jesus in it. The Bible is just a history book, and history is boring for most people. But once we start to see Jesus in all the Bible and understand that every story is part of the larger story of Jesus, it becomes vastly more interesting, and we actually want to read it. Every page suddenly becomes an adventure. It's something living and active (Heb. 4:12) that still surprises, confronts, and comforts us today because Jesus speaks to us about himself.

Learning to read the Bible this way takes a little more thought than we often give to our quiet times, but this is where we gain real traction in our Christian lives. When we start to see Jesus as the answer to everything, the Bible comes alive in our hearts, and we desire to read it more. He’s the light that shines on it all, and we start seeing things we never saw before. That’s the glory shining through, and who doesn’t want more glory in their life?

[1] Luther, Martin, The Bondage of the Will, page 71.

[2] For more on this idea, see Glen Scrivener’s article “Where is Jesus in the Old Testament” on the Desiring God website: https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/where-is-jesus-in-the-old-testament

[3] Keller, Timothy J., “The Bible is Not About You”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lq1kJLN-izE

[4] Lloyd-Jones, Sally, The Jesus Storybook Bible: Every story whispers his name, pages 14-17.

[5] Lewis, C.S., “Is Theology Poetry”, The Weight of Glory

We have a friend at court that speaks a good word for us, and is following our cause in heaven; let this animate and encourage us in prayer. Do we think it too much boldness for such sinners as we to come for pardon, and that we shall be denied? Surely this is a sinful modesty. Did we indeed come in our own name in prayer it were presumption, but Christ intercedes for us in the force of his blood. To be afraid to come to God in prayer is a dishonor to Christ’s intercession.

Christ is at work for you in heaven; he makes intercession for you.

Oh! But I am afraid Christ does not intercede for me. I am a sinner; and for whom does Christ intercede?

“He made intercession for the transgressors” Isa. 53:12. Did Christ open his sides for thee, and will he not open his mouth to plead for thee?

But I have offended my High Priest, by distrusting his blood, abusing his love, grieving his Spirit; and will he ever pray for me?

Which of us may not say so? But, Christian, dost thou mourn for unbelief? Be not discouraged, thou mayest have a part in Christ’s prayer. “The congregation murmured against Aaron.” But though they had sinned against their high priest, Aaron ran in with his censer, and “stood between the dead and the living.” Num. 16:41,48. If so much bowels in Aaron, who was but a type of Christ, how much more bowels are in Christ, who will pray for them who have sinned against their High Priest! Did he not pray for them that crucified him, “Father, forgive them”?

But I am unworthy; what am I, that Christ should intercede for me?

The work of Christ’s intercession is a work of free grace. Christ’s praying for us is from his pitying us. He looks not at our worthiness, but our wants.

But I am followed with sad temptations.

But though Satan tempts, Christ prays, and Satan shall be vanquished. Thou mayest lose a single battle, but not the victory. Christ prays that thy faith fail not; therefore, Christian, say, “Why art thou cast down, O my soul?” Christ intercedes. It is man that sins, it is God that prays. The Greek word for advocate signifies comforter. It is a sovereign comfort that Christ makes intercession.

-          A Body of Divinity, pages 182, 186.

William Symington (1795-1862)

      Intercession is the correlate of atonement. It is not, therefore, to be wondered at, that those who deny the doctrine of Christ's atonement, should have maintained the position that his intercession is only figurative. This is the view taken of the subject by Socinians, who resolve the intercession of Christ into his kingly office, understanding by it nothing more than the exercise of his regal power in communicating to men the blessings of his mediation. That the Saviour possesses and exerts such a power, is not by any means denied, but that it is the same thing as his intercession, and is all that is meant by this part of his work, may fairly be disputed on the most satisfactory grounds.

      The relation which intercession bears to atonement has just been remarked. They are correlate ideas. They stand to each other in much the same character as do the ideas of creation and providence. The providence of God consists in upholding all things, or maintaining in being the creatures he has made; it is best conceived of as a continued putting forth of the creative energy. So the intercession of Christ is the continued efficacy of his expiatory merit; on which account it has been spoken of by some of the ancient writers as a perpetual oblation. If the providence of God were suspended all created being must be annihilated; and if Jesus were not to make intercession, the merit of his atonement would prove utterly unavailing. The arguments by which the reality of atonement has been established, thus support the reality of intercession. Admit the necessity and truth of Christ's atoning sacrifice, and the certainty and prevalence of his intercession within the vail naturally and irrefragably follow.

      Christ's intercession is, indeed, essential to the fulfillment of the covenant of grace. As "mediator of the covenant" everything which he performs as a priest has a relation to this divine economy. The sacerdotal functions of oblation and intercession have regard respectively to the condition and the administration of the covenant. The stipulated condition of the covenant is, that satisfaction shall be made to the law and justice of God for the sins of those who are redeemed; and this is done by the sacrifice of Christ. The administration of the covenant comprehends whatever is concerned with putting and maintaining the covenant children in possession of the blessings of redemption: and this takes its rise directly and immediately from the intercession of Christ. True it is, the agency of the Spirit and the instrumentality of means are concerned in this object; but, in the economy of man's salvation, the intercession of the Mediator is necessary alike to the operation of the one, and to the efficacy of the other. It is so arranged by infinite wisdom that all the good done to the souls of men, in connection with the covenant of grace, shall be begun, carried forward, completed, and maintained through eternity, in relation to Christ's intercession.

-          The Atonement & Intercession of Jesus Christ, pages 256-257.

Herman Bavinck (1854-1921)

      To be able to fulfill this high-priestly office, he had to be the Son, who, as “the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being,” creates, upholds, and inherits all things (Heb. 1:1–3; 4:14; 5:5; 9:14). In his human nature, moreover, he needed through suffering and trials to learn obedience and so be “perfected,” be fully prepared, for his high-priestly ministry in heaven (2:10f.; 4:15; 5:7–10; 7:28). After thus bringing his one, perfect sacrifice and so effecting purification for our sins (1:3; 7:27; 9:12; etc.), he as high priest entered the heavenly sanctuary foreshadowed in the holy of holies of the Old Testament tabernacle (6:20; 9:12, 24)—not with the blood of goats and calves but by the power of his own blood (9:12–14), through the tent of his body (9:11), the curtain of his flesh (10:20), in order to appear there on our behalf in the presence of God and to pray for those who through him draw near to God (7:25; 9:24).

-          Reformed Dogmatics: Sin and Salvation in Christ, vol. 3, page 476.

      Christ was high priest already on earth (7:27; 9:11, 14, 25, 28; 10:10; 13:12), but he was that not in the way of Aaron’s high priesthood, but according to the order of Melchizedek, eternal and unchanging. It is for this reason, however, that the Letter to the Hebrews so strongly stresses Christ’s entry into the true sanctuary. He entered it by the power of his own blood, not to sacrifice himself again in a different manner, for he did that once for all, and by that sacrifice acquired all the benefits of the covenant of grace (9:26–28; 10:12, 14; etc.). He entered it now to be, in the full and true sense, the high priest of the good things to come (9:11), a high priest seated at the right hand of the throne of majesty on high (1:3; 3:1; 4:14; 6:20; 8:1). We have a perfect high priest, one who learned obedience, who perfected himself, who became like us, who can have compassion with us, who once for all offered himself through the eternal Spirit, but who in that way also secured the right to sit at the right hand of God. He is a high priest who, like Melchizedek, is at the same time king, king of righteousness and king of peace, an eternal, spiritual, and heavenly king; a high priest who acquired, possesses, and distributes the heavenly goods to come, who can appear in heaven before the face of God for our benefit, pray for us, and save us completely (7:25; 9:24). And this describes the priestly activity that Christ still performs even now. He no longer sacrifices himself there, for he did that once for all and completely on the cross. In heaven there is no repetition, no renewal, no reproduction of the sacrifice of the cross. For in the innermost and true sanctuary, there is no room for an altar.

-          Reformed Dogmatics: Sin and Salvation in Christ, vol. 3, page 478.

John Bunyan (1628-1688)

      Are those that are already justified by the blood of Christ, yet such as have need of being saved by his intercession? Then hence I infer, that Christ is not only the beginner, but the completer of our salvation.

He is, as the Holy Ghost calls him, the author and finisher of our faith; or, as he calls him again, the author of our eternal salvation; of salvation throughout, from the beginning to the end, from first to last. His hands have laid the foundation of it, in his own blood; and his hands shall finish it, by his intercession. As he has laid the beginning fastly, so he shall bring forth the head stone with shoutings; and we shall cry, Grace, grace! At the last; salvation belongs only to the Lord!

      Many there be that begin with grace, and end with works, and think that this is the only way. Indeed works will save from temporal punishments, when their imperfections are purged from them by the intercession of Christ; but to 17 ' be saved and brought to glory, to be carried through this dangerous world, from my first moving after Christ, until I set my foot within the gates of paradise, this is the work of my mediator, of my high priest and intercessor. It is he that fetches us again when we are run away; it is he that lifts us up when the devil and sin have thrown us down; it is he that quickens us when we grow cold; it is he that comforts us when we despair; it is he that obtains fresh pardon when we have contracted sin; and he that purges our consciences when they are loaded with guilt.

      I know also that rewards do wait for them in heaven that do believe in Christ and shall do well on earth; but this is not a reward of merit, but of grace. We are saved by Christ; brought to glory by Christ; and all our works are no otherways made acceptable to God, but by the person and personal excellences and works of Christ. Therefore, whatever the jewels are, and the bracelets, and the pearls, that you shall be adorned with as a reward of services done for God in the world, for them you must thank Christ, and before all, confess that he was the meritorious cause thereof.

      He saves us and saves our services too. They would be all cast back as dung in our faces were they not rinsed and washed in the blood, were they not sweetened and perfumed in the

incense, and conveyed to God himself through the white hand of Jesus Christ: for that is his golden censer; from thence alone ascends the smoke that is in the nostrils of God

of such a sweet savour.

-          Christ, A Complete Savior, pages 52-54

John Owen (1616-1683)

The perpetuity of the priesthood of Christ, as unchangeably exercised in his own person, is a principal part of the glory of that office.—His discharge of this office for the church in his own person, throughout all generations, is the glory of it. 1. Hereon depends the church’s preservation and stability. There is neither a ceasing nor any the least intermission of that care and providence, of that interposition with God on its behalf, which are required thereunto. Our high priest in continually ready to appear and put in for us on all occasions. And his abiding for ever manifests the continuance of the same care and love for us that he ever had. The same love wherewith, as our high priest, he laid down his life for us, doth still continue in him. And every one may with the same confidence go unto him with all their concerns, as poor, diseased, and distempered persons went unto him when he was upon earth; when he never showed greater displeasure than unto those who forbade any to come unto him, whatever their pretences were. 2. Hereon depend the union and communion of the church with itself in all successive generations. For whereas he is their head and high priest, in whom they all centre as unto their union and communion, and hath all their graces and duties in his hand, to present them unto God, they have a relation unto each other, and a concernment in one another. We that are alive in this generation have communion with all those that died in the faith before us; as shall be declared, if God will, on chap. 12:22–24. And they were concerned in us, as we are also in the generations that are to come. For all the prayers of the church from first to last are lodged in the hand of the same high priest, who abides for ever; and he returns the prayers of one generation unto another. We enjoy the fruits of the prayers, obedience, and blood of those that went before us; and if we are faithful in our generation, serving the will of God, those shall enjoy the fruits of ours who shall come after us. Our joint interest in this our abiding priest gives a line of communication unto all believers, in all generations. And, 3. The consolation of the church also depends hereon. Do we meet with troubles, trials, difficulties, temptations, and distresses? hath not the church done so in former ages? What do we think of those days wherein prisons, tortures, swords, and flames, were the portion of the church all the world over? But did any of them miscarry? was any one true believer lost for ever? and did not the whole church prove victorious in the end? Did not Satan rage and the world gnash their teeth to see themselves conquered and their power broken, by the faith, patience, and suffering, of them whom they hated and despised? And was it by their own wisdom and courage that they were so preserved? did they overcome merely by their own blood? or were they delivered by their own power? No; but all their preservation and success, their deliverance and eternal salvation, depended merely on the care and power of their merciful high priest. It was through his blood, “the blood of the Lamb,” or the efficacy of his sacrifice, that they “overcame” their adversaries, Rev. 12:11. By the same blood were “their robes washed, and made white,” chap. 7:14. From thence had they their righteousness in all their sufferings. And by him had the church its triumphant issue out of all its trials. Now, is he not the same that he ever was, vested with the same office? and hath he not the same qualifications of love, compassion, care, and power, for the discharge of it, as he always had? Whence, then, can any just cause of despondence in any trials or temptations arise? We have the same high priest to take care of us, to assist and help us, as they had, who were all of them finally victorious. 4. This gives perpetual efficacy unto his sacrifice, etc.

-          An Exposition of the Epistle to the Hebrews, pages 520-521

Tim Keller (1950-2023)

According to the Bible, according to the book of Hebrews, Jesus Christ is the ultimate Advocate. He stands as your representative before the ultimate throne, the ultimate bench in the ultimate trial before the court, which is the only one that counts. Jesus is your Advocate. How does this work?

When I first became a Christian, when I was a new Christian, a young Christian, I heard of this idea that Jesus Christ intercedes for us before the Father, and it was of no comfort to me at all. One of the reasons was it sounded bizarre. It was also of no comfort to me partly because I think of some of the ways in which some high-profile lawyers actually operate in court. Because of what I saw in some of those high-profile trials, I really misunderstood what this was all about. Here’s what I thought was really happening, and here’s why it wasn’t any comfort to me.

I figured every day Jesus came before the Father with a kind of caseload. He’d pull out a folder: “Keller.” He looks up and he says, “Ah, yes, Father. All these promises he has made to change, and he’s doing it again anyway. Please give him a break, for my sake. Give him one more chance. I know he means well. This one more time could be it, and you owe me. I went to earth and all those things. Pretty please, I ask for mercy for my client. I throw myself on the mercy of the court.”

I expected, I guess, the Father would say, “Well, all right.” Here’s the reason why that was of no comfort to me. Because I understood what Jesus was doing, if that’s the intercessory work of Jesus Christ, spinning to get mercy out of the Father, I thought to myself, “How long can he keep that up?” There’s no particular reason why the Father one day couldn’t just say, “Look, he’s a minister now. It’s too late. I’ve had it. He can’t keep doing things like this.”

That’s not at all the kind of advocate Jesus is. An effective attorney doesn’t just wheedle and cajole and emotionally manipulate the jury and the judge. Sometimes that might work, but frankly, that’s right. How long can you keep that up? An effective attorney has a case, and according to this passage Jesus Christ is not up there asking for mercy. When you ask for mercy, that means you’ve lost the case.

Do you know what he’s up there doing? Look at [Hebrews 7:27 and 28.] “Unlike the other high priests, he does not need to offer sacrifices day after day, first for his own sins, and then for the sins of the people. He sacrificed for their sins once for all when he offered himself.” This is what Jesus is saying, as it were. It’s metaphorical, but I’ll get to that in a second.

He’s saying, “Father, you demand justice. You are a just God, and my friends here, the people on whose behalf I’m speaking, are guilty. I have made payment. There is my blood, and it would be unjust to get two payments for the same debt. Therefore, because I’ve made payments for this debt, I am not here asking for mercy for my brothers and sisters. I am not here asking for mercy. I demand justice. Your very justice, your very righteousness, demands your complete embrace and acceptance of them throughout all eternity.”

That’s an infallible case. The book of Isaiah says the divine justice and righteousness of God is as inexorable so the mountains are like dust in the scales by comparison. How dare you think you can every day when you sense …? Whether you’re a believer or not, whether you believe in God or not, as Arthur Miller pointed out, every day you’re trying to prove yourself.

Every day you’re making arguments. Every day you’re saying, “Well, I do this, and I’m okay like this.” You’re dealing with yourself to try to bolster your self-image, to try to deal with your conscience every day. What are you pointing to? “I’m a good mother. I’m a good father. I love my parents. I try my best. I work harder than most of the other people in my department.” What’s that compared to this?

What this is saying is … In 1 John 1:9, do you notice that little place where John says, “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins …”? It doesn’t say he’s faithful and merciful. Do you know what that’s saying? The intercessory work of Jesus Christ, the high priesthood of Jesus Christ, the substitution of Jesus Christ, who lived the life you should’ve lived and died the death you should’ve died in your place, has changed things forever so now the very law and justice and righteousness of God demands your acceptance.

To be in him is to have that kind of confidence. Do you know there’s that place where God comes to Cain after he has killed Abel? He says to Cain, “The blood of your brother Abel cries out to me from the ground for vengeance,” but there’s a better Abel, Jesus Christ, whose blood cries out from the ground for grace. It’s an infallible case. Jesus Christ is the ultimate Advocate. He’s the ultimate Attorney. If it’s the ultimate case, then to be in him is to have that kind of confidence.

-          “The Advocate.” The Timothy Keller Sermon Archive.

Joel Beeke (1952 - )

The intercession of Christ is a holy intercession. It's a perpetual intercession. It's an authoritative intercession. It's a loyal intercession. It's a legal intercession. It's a personal intercession. It's a particular intercession. It's a complete intercession. It's a compassionate intercession. It's all of that perfectly. I think the biggest misconception is not to grasp the fulsomeness of it all. As complete as we see Jesus's justification through his death and being, and as complete as we see his resurrection guaranteeing our blessed resurrection, so complete we ought to see his intercession—that he will keep us and bring us into the Father's presence, and will not rest until he can say, Here am I, Father, and all those whom Thou hast given me. There won't be one empty chair in heaven, as one of the Puritans put it. His work will be complete. His intercession will be totally victorious. So praise God for the intercession of Jesus!

-          https://www.crossway.org/articles/podcast-do-you-know-that-jesus-is-praying-for-you-joel-beeke

Application 4: Christ’s intercession protects and watches over us.

      We never need to concern ourselves that God is not for us nor with us. His exalted status in heaven is to our great benefit. No matter what we face in this world, God is there above it all. As we wake in the morning, our Kingly High Priest is upon his throne just as the dew is upon the grass. Just as the sun shines forth its rays to warm the air, so our Savior warms our hearts with his gospel. There is never a second in which he is not upholding the world by the word of his power (Heb 1.3). Whatever our days hold, we can be sure that Jesus is in them and over them, interceding on our behalf during them. He knows what’s really going on, and he’s interceding on our behalf even when we aren’t mindful of him. Even when we forget to factor Jesus into our lives, he never forgets to mention us in his prayers. His high and holy status only gives him all the more power to care for little me and you. As Ray Ortlund said, “God is not too great to notice you; God is too great to overlook you.”[1]

Application 5: Christ’s intercession affirms that nothing can ultimately keep us from God.

      We may think our sins will eventually become too much, but there is no end to his saving grace. He saves not in part but in whole. His blood is effective for the worst of sins, the greatest number of sins, the most egregious of sins, the most abhorrent of sins, the most preposterous of sins, the most condemnable of sins. Whatever your sins are, fear not. You can draw near to God through Christ’s intercessory work to receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need (Heb. 4:16). Nothing can undo that open invitation because the blood of Christ purchased it, and the same Christ who died for you lives for you now.

      With our intercessor in heaven, nothing in this world can keep us from God. He overcomes every enemy. He forgives every sin. He constantly renews our faith. He will bring us all the way home.

Application 6: Christ’s intercession comforts us that we are not left to ourselves.

      Though we are fully justified by faith in Christ’s atoning work on the cross, we still struggle with ongoing sin. We will until we are with the Lord in glory in the next life. God’s plan to help us is Christ’s intercession. Jesus is looking out for us. He is praying for us. He is sending help from his throne of grace to us in our times of need. We are not left to figure out the Christian life on our own. We are helped by the interceding Christ moment by moment.

      If one Christian intercedes for another, that is a good and right thing. We should pray for one another in the name of Jesus for all his efficacious power. But there is a difference between our prayers and his. His intercession is even more profound. Williams Symington says, “We can never be said to plead with all our heart; he never pleads in any other way.”[2] Puritan John Flavel puts it this way. Jesus’s intercession “is an intercession with God for us, in his own name, and upon the account of his own proper merit; the one is a private act of charity, the other a public act of office.”[3] We have God himself interceding on our behalf. (Heb. 9:28). We are not left to ourselves, and we are not left in another’s hands equal in status to ourselves. We are in the hands of God almighty, and if God himself asks, how can he say no? God cannot deny himself (2 Tim. 2:13).

      We also find the Holy Spirit prays on our behalf. Part of his intercessory work is sending of his Spirit to help us (John 15:26-27). The Puritan Thomas Goodwin said, “The Spirit prays in you, because Christ prays for you.”[4] We are then doubly secured by prayer through both the Spirit and the Son, all part of the gracious gifts of the Father.

Application 7: Christ’s intercession frees our conscience.

      Hebrews 9:13-14 says, “For if the blood of goats and bulls, and the sprinkling of defiled persons with the ashes of a heifer, sanctify for the purification of the flesh, how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living God.”

      We can work out of our salvation instead of for our salvation. We can experience the joy of serving God in a way we never could apart from Christ’s intercessory work. We can go forth, doing our best, looking to him by faith, trusting that when we fail, he will uphold. When we sin, he will forgive us. When we don’t know what we need, he will intercede.

Application 8: Christ’s intercession preaches the gospel to us.

      We are deeply held in Christ’s mighty arms. His intercession proclaims his gospel—that his life, death, and resurrection are sufficient to save us. As Gavin Ortlund put it, “The infinitely sweet benefits of Jesus’ atoning work on the cross can be freshly communicated to us at every instant of our lives. The intercession of Christ provides a mediating link from the accomplishment of Christ in his Friday afternoon agony to any other point in history where it is received by faith. As often as we draw near to God, he washes and cleanses us afresh (Hebrews 10:22). The grace of God is not a flash flood after which we have to try to retain the water that is left over. It's a continuous waterfall, flowing unto eternity.”[5]

      Our lives are a series of struggles to find peace and acceptance. The intercession of Christ assures we have it today, tomorrow, and on into eternity. The blood of Christ was effective to forgive sins past, present, and future. We do not need to justify ourselves. We have all the justification we will ever need in Christ. God will not demand that we pay for sins he already paid for. If we are in Christ, we are completely, unchangeably, unendingly safe and secure, and if we ever doubt that fact, all we must do is look at this doctrine to see how profoundly God is for us. Jesus lives for this (Heb. 7:25).

[1] Though this is written in his commentary on Isaiah, I prefer to hear it from him on the Immanuel Church Worship album Volume One: The Love of Christ, track 4.

[2] William Symington, The Atonement & Intercession of Jesus Christ, page 290.

[3] John Flavel, The Fountain of Life.

[4] Thomas Goodwin, The Heart of Christ, page 37.

[5] Gavin Ortlund, https://gavinortlund.com/2010/04/29/christs-intercession-application/