Posts Tagged ‘Publisher Letter’

Eternal Hope: A Letter from Our Publisher

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Eternal Hope

A Letter from Our Publisher

Love Him Anyway

In this life, we are not promised that trials will never come. Instead, we are promised that when they come, we will never be alone. We will always have our Heavenly Father in the middle of the storm. We have this hope to help see us through the darkest of nights.

Abby Banks experienced the ultimate storm when her son, Wyatt, unexpectedly became paralyzed due to an autoimmune disease that attacked his spinal cord. Ultimately, she came to realize that often, our pain serves a purpose in our lives. She wrote about her experience and what she learned in her book Love Him Anyway: Finding Hope in the Hardest Places. I have chosen exerts from Abby’s book that show the purpose of pain and hope.

“I wish I could put a pretty ribbon on suffering and tell you that it is easy to rejoice, but I can’t. It was hard the day Wyatt was diagnosed, and it was hard this morning when I strapped him into his wheelchair and watched him roll into school. Rejoicing can be hard, but it is healing. Rejoicing points us to the One who is bigger than our hurt. Rejoicing is not a superficial happiness that pretends the hard doesn’t hurt.”
“I don’t believe that rejoicing has to look the same for everyone. For me, rejoicing begins with thanksgiving. It begins with an acknowledgment of the blessings before me. Thanksgiving leads me to praise my Maker, and it moves my soul closer to my Father in heaven. It takes my mind off the things in life that I cannot control, and it reminds me of the One who is in control of it all.”

“As much as I hate to admit it, pain serves a function in our lives. It is not wasted if we address it. It can protect us from destroying ourselves, and it should spur us to correct what ails us. It should cause us to seek out the source of our pain in order to stop it. If our pain is physical, we go to the doctor looking for answers, but sometimes we find it more difficult to see the purpose of the emotional pain that destroys us from the inside out. It’s hard to cry out to God when we don’t know why we are in the darkness. It’s hard to accept that God has allowed pain in any form to find us. It can cause us to doubt His goodness and sovereignty.

“I don’t know your struggle. I don’t know if you are in the middle of a raging storm being tossed by ferocious waves or wading in calm, crystal waters, but I do know that Christ longs to be near you in either place. He is the same on the top of the mountain and in the valley. If you are a child of the Risen King and God hasn’t pulled you from the darkness, He has a purpose for it. You have not been forgotten, my friend. Call out to God and ask Him to show you His goodness and rejoice in the fact that our hope extends beyond the life we are living. Even if God doesn’t bring the healing we crave in this life, eternity beckons. This life is not the end.

“If you haven’t met Jesus yet, He is calling you in the middle of the darkness. He is calling you in the middle of the calm waters. He is calling you wherever you are to live a life that is filled with the hope that only He can provide. Open your ears. Open your heart. He is calling. He is calling you through a little boy in an orange chair.

“It’s hard to reconcile suffering with the goodness of God. It is a battle that I will never completely understand. There are still days when I get angry, confused, and bitter, but I choose to focus on what I know to be true. God loves me anyway. And He loves you. And that is where my hope will rest, not in medicine or healing, but in the unfailing love of a Savior. Who sees me. Who knows me. And who loves me in spite of it all. Anyway.”

To learn more about Abby and Wyatt and Love Him Anyway, visit HERE.

Best News Ever: Letter from the Publisher

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Best News Ever

Letter from the Publisher

 

This month, as we observe the Easter season, let us remember our Lord and Saviour and the true reason for celebration: the passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Without the sacrifice Jesus made by dying on the cross, we would have no reason to celebrate. Through His resurrected life, we have new life.

Every spring, we see the evidence of different plants coming up, sprouting, and blossoming all around us creating something that wasn’t there before. The regeneration and awakening of nature after a long winter reminds us of the sin we left behind and the new life we have been given with Christ through His victory over sin, death, and the grave.

It is for this reason that I have chosen an excerpt from Jacob Taggart’s book, Theology from the Spring. Jacob amplifies, through his expertise and analysis, the best news ever: that of Jesus Christ through his death on the cross and resurrection from the grave.

“The work of Jesus is very simply His life and death – as prophesied by prophets of old that the vicarious death of the Savior would bear the wrath of God against the sins of His people. And that is just what Jesus did. Jesus lived the perfect life we could not live, satisfied God’s perfect Law we could not satisfy, and yet suffered the sacrificial death that we should have received. In what I call ‘the Divine exchange,’ Jesus stood in our place, gorily crucified on a cross, where God the Father placed our sin and punishment upon Him, in order to transfer His perfect righteousness to us (2 Cor. 5:21). Only by this righteousness imputed, not infused, to the account of our souls, are we able to stand before God without fear of our just condemnation. Rather, we can now stand before God with the righteousness of Jesus. The genius of the atonement’s redemptive plan speaks to its Divine origin, as it provides something no other world religion can: a solution for our guilt and need for righteousness.

Fortunately, the work of Jesus did not end with His sacrificial death on a cross. Death could not defeat Him, so, as the Bible tells us, ‘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’ (1 Cor. 15:3b-4). After His resurrection, Jesus ascended into Heaven, seated next to the Father’s right hand, ruling and making intercession for His people. Therefore, Jesus did for us what we could not possibly do for ourselves. Such is the beauty of the Gospel. When humanity’s most natural inclination is to say, ‘Give me the rules, so I can follow them; I can work to be good enough to save myself,’ the Gospel says, ‘No, you can’t . . . but God, rich in mercy, has done it for you.’ When the world says, ‘Peace and contentment can be found if you will just validate yourself to all,’ the Gospel says, ‘Everlasting joy and comfort is yours because you no longer have to validate yourself to God, other people, or your pride.’ The Gospel is the ultimate metanarrative of humanity, bookended with contrasts: by one man, universal sin and universal guilt entered the world. But by another came infinite righteousness, so that sin may reign no more . . . ”

“This is the Gospel, the Good News that God saves sinners, doing for us what we could never do for ourselves, in spite of ourselves. It is a Gospel of contrasts – where simple meets profound, where good news meets bad news, where wrath meets love, where grace meets justice, where self-sufficiency meets self-surrender, where death meets life, and where God meets us – yet without compromising His holy character. This is the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the best news you could ever hear. This is the Gospel with a Foundation you can stand on.”

May we all seek to remember the Foundation Jesus laid through His sacrifice and resurrection this Easter season.