Fall Supporter Update 2022

Media Gratiae End-of-Year Update and Ministry Overview

Welcome to the end-of-the-year update for Media Gratiae. We wanted to let you know what the Lord's been doing over the last year and some exciting things that are in the works for the coming year. I'm John Snyder.

I'm the director of this small ministry. We do publications for churches, Bible studies and other multimedia resources that we hope will help the churches, particularly in the area of experiential Christianity.

Translation Updates for Behold Your God and New Languages

The first thing we want to give an update on is the translation of Behold Your God, the first two studies, in different languages. A man named Jorge, who is the head of a Spanish ministry called Legado Bautista Confesional.

Jorge has contacted us. He's had the first and the second Behold Your God study in his hands for a couple of months now. He has a team of translators that work for a number of Reformed ministries. They are updating the first Behold Your God, which we translated into Spanish many years ago, but he felt it needed some touching up, so we certainly trust him to do that.

They are finishing that up and then they'll be working on the second study. Those will both be made available throughout South America. And we're looking forward to doing that also with the other languages that the Behold Your God material has been translated into.

That's Dutch and German and Russian. We were contacted recently by Russian-speaking evangelicals in the USA, and they mentioned the fact that there is a large community of them, and they wondered how they could get that book for themselves.

And so we realized that there are different pockets of folks who speak their native languages still, and we want to be able to make those available for them. So we'll be getting those on our website, and they'll be available as a downloadable PDF.

Judges Mini-Study and the Need for Biblical Themes in a Drifting Church

You know that the Judges mini-study has been released a few months ago, and we're grateful to hear that it has been beneficial to people as they've gone through it in small groups. You may not have seen that.

You can go to our website and find that. The Book of Judges can be a strange book when you read through it quickly. It seems unnerving in some ways. The behavior, not of the ungodly, but of the godly.

You think of leaders like Samson, whose choices are so confusing. Does he love the Lord or does he not love the Lord? Judges has so much to say that we felt it was imperative to make its themes available in a study like this to the Western church as our culture goes spiraling down, but more alarming as the evangelical church culture seems to be adrift.

We felt that these things were things that, by the grace of God, might be helpful for us as we look at them. The lessons that God teaches about Himself and about how we are to live with Him. These are things that we find helpful here.

A New Mini-Study on the Glory of Christ in the Church

We have a new mini-study in the works, Jordan Thomas. If you have done the Behold Your God studies, you'll know that Jordan is one of the contributors who shows up at the end of each of the lessons. He's also a church planter in downtown Memphis, Tennessee.

Jordan was also led to the Lord by the same gentleman that led me to the Lord. He discipled both of us. Jordan and I have been friends for a number of years. We really appreciate Jordan's ministry with the other men there in Memphis and are always glad to have him come down to Little New Albany to preach here.

Jordan has written a mini-study on the glory of Christ in the church. Now the filming is complete and in the stage of post-production. The book is written, and we are coming to the final steps of editing now.

So we look forward to releasing that in the first quarter of the next year as funds are available. We have a new book at the printers, and it is a collection of sermons from the Behold Your God, Rethinking God Biblically study.

It is with the printer now, as I said, and so we hope to make it available for pre-order on November 8th. We're waiting to hear back from our printer to make sure that that is a viable date. We hope to have those available to be shipped in time for Christmas.

We're grateful for how the Lord has used that study over the past 10 years, but we realize that those who might benefit most from that study and its themes would look at a study that requires a 12-week commitment and feel that that's more than they're ready to commit to.

And so this book is an attempt to get kind of the heart of that study, the sermons, into their hands in a way that is in a more manageable size, particularly if you're wanting to give that to someone, hoping that they would read the sermons and maybe be willing then to turn and look at the study, which really fills out those themes in a more significant way.

Children's Curriculum Based on Behold Your God: Seeking Him Early

Also, Behold Your God, Seeking Him Early. This is a six-month children's curriculum adapted from the first two Behold Your God studies. We've mentioned this a number of times because it is quite a large project and it's taken longer than we expected.

It's been nearly three years in the making, but it is making progress. It may not feel like it sometimes. To us, it doesn't feel like it sometimes. But when you're dealing with children's material, the process is to take all the 24 weeks of those two studies and to boil them down into six months of children's curriculum.

And so once the content is finished, then we send that to an editor. And when the editor is finished, then we have to proofread the editors. And that goes back and forth for a while. And then when we're satisfied with that, you send it to a typesetter.

And you have an artist because it's children's work with student workbooks and handouts and material. So we have the artist at work and then a typesetter. And when the typesetter is finished, they send it back to us.

We have multiple proofreaders go through it again. That takes quite a long time. And then there are always mistakes. It just happens. And so you go back and forth with typesetters. We really want it to be done well.

We've invested a lot in the artists. And we are very happy with the product so far. All three ages are in the hands of a typesetter right now, the oldest age. We've gotten the material back from the typesetter.

But there were a number of things that we wanted to adjust or correct. And so that is going back to the typesetter again. We hope that all three ages will finally be available in the first quarter, by the end of the first quarter of next year.

And they would be available for digital release. From the Heart of Spurgeon, the podcast that Jeremy Walker has been working on has reached its 100th episode. That happens November 11th of this year. And we are going to do a special giveaway, which we're quite excited about.

It's a neat old book. And when it was suggested to me recently, I decided that I probably should receive this. But nobody else voted for that. So somebody else was going to receive it. We'll make that available.

So if you just keep your eyes open with the emails or however you follow us, we'll give more information on that. The Whole Council podcast. We are glad that God continues to use that. As I have chances to travel and preach, it used to be that it would only be one of the Behold Your God studies or maybe Logic on Fire or Puritan documentary.

These things people would say, well, we've watched that and we've appreciated that. And I'm always glad to hear that. But in the last year, really, a lot of people have said, well, actually, it was the podcast.

And so that's encouraging because we do all of our podcasts in this little room. And it's hard to know how the Lord is using that in other people's lives. And so we've begun to get a lot of feedback. Teddy has reported that we have passed 465 ,000 downloads now.

And so we're very grateful for that. And the other social media platforms through one of our new employees, Sarah. The Twitter and Facebook and YouTube and Instagram platforms have all been growing. And so we're grateful for that as well.

New Distribution Through ChristianBooks.com and Gratitude for Support

We are also going to start selling through a new distributor, and that is Christian Books of ChristianBooks .com. Now, if you're like me and you've been buying Christian Books for a couple of decades or more, Christian Books used to be called Christian Book Distributors, CBD .com.

And they send out a magazine a couple of times a year, and then they have their own website. But Christian Books has decided that they'll just shorten their name to Christian Books. So you'll see if you get their magazine or if you look at their website in the coming months, you'll see our material available on there.

We really are grateful for the support we received all of last year. There were times where the finances were very low, you know, kind of pack up shop kind of low. And the Lord has at each crisis come through, and through many of you, individuals or churches, there have been gifts that have allowed us to continue to work.

And we are grateful for that, and we want to say thank you. We don't take that for granted. But we want to be a bit greedy and ask you if you could do something more. And what I'm talking about is earnest prayer.

Obviously, it takes finances to publish anything. Publishing has become even more expensive post-COVID with paper shortages. So everything's slowed down. Everything's a little more expensive. But that's across the board, so that's to be expected.

Christian Ambition and Pleasing the Lord

But really, praying, I find, is more expensive than giving. And we are asking that you would pray that we would have our hearts set in this coming year with one great ambition. Recently, as a team, we were meeting together, and we looked at the theme of Christian ambition.

And ambition is often a word, in my mind, when it's used in the Christian context, it's often a word that's negative. I think of an ambitious person in the ministry. And you tend to think of a person who maybe is using God as a platform to display their abilities, their ministry.

And really, it kind of is all about self-fulfillment. So when we think of ambition, we tend to think of it negatively. But there is an ambition that is essential to pleasing the Lord. And without that ambition, a ministry or a church, a family, an individual is lacking.

And that's the ambition that Paul talked about in 2 Corinthians 5 9. He's talking about whether he is absent or at home. That is, whether he is here in this body, laboring as he was at that time, or whether the Lord allows him to be a martyr and he goes to be with Christ.

Wherever he's at, his ambition was unchanged. He wanted to be pleasing to the Lord. He talks about that when he talks to young pastors like Timothy in 2 Timothy 2. He talks about Timothy living the life of a soldier engaged in active service.

He's not on the base back home, he's on the front lines. And he said every soldier in active service guards himself so as not to be entangled in the affairs of everyday life. So as a minister, he warns Timothy, make sure that the normal stuff of life doesn't inhibit your service in the kingdom.

And then he says this, because every soldier desires to please the one who enlisted him. There is a captain of our army, a general. We belong to him and we want to please him. But it's not just for Paul or for pastors like Timothy.

He writes to the Ephesians in Ephesians 5, and there's just this wonderful statement there. In Ephesians 5, he starts the chapter by basically saying that we want to imitate the Lord Jesus, who lived his life as this wonderful, perfect sacrifice, obedient, loving, and it was like an aroma, a perfume that rose up to the Father and pleased him.

And that's what we want to be, a living sacrifice, a life that is aromatic. But then he says to do that, you're going to have to make sure that you guard yourself from ever going back to the old life, the old self-centeredness, the old unbelief and pride, the greed.

And he gives a list of sins that we all recognize as ugly. And then he says, that's the way you used to be. You were children of darkness. You were darkness, but now you are light. Quite a statement for people like us.

In Christ, he says, you're light. So walk as children of the light. What is the light? Well, walking in the light, he says, it's just walking in righteousness and truth. But then he says this in verse 10, walk as children of the light, trying to figure out, to understand what is pleasing to the Lord.

So laboring to know day by day, what is it that pleases my King? We know that God is at work within every believer. Paul tells us in Philippians 2, giving us both the desire and the ability to do his goodwill.

And so we work out, we work outward into every area of the life. This new life that God has placed within us. So the rule of Christ spreading ever further until we see him face to face. So we have the desire and we have the ability by God's grace constantly at work in us.

But we also need to know the path. And that's what we would pray. We ask that you would plead on our behalf, that God would make it clear, what is the path of obedience for us? Not just as individuals or as spouses or as members of churches or as teachers, but as a ministry to know exactly what the Lord would have us to do with our small group.

We have very limited hours of manpower. We have limited capital. And we want to know what does God want us to invest that in? So we ask that you would pray for that. And we trust that the Lord will make it clear to us.

And as we have opportunities to do new studies, to be able to know which one is the appropriate one to invest ourselves in, that God would certainly provide day by day everything we need to walk that path of pleasing him.

Or as Colossians 1 says in the Greek, to the meeting of all his wishes. That's the way one Greek scholar translates that prayer in chapter 1 of Colossians from Paul. So thank you again for the way you have supported us.

Do pray for us. We hope that you have a good holiday season. I'm wearing my flannel shirt today. It is symbolic of the fact that I have survived another cruel Mississippi summer. I look forward to the cold weather.

We hope that over the holidays, you will be able to walk very close to our Lord and that he will give you many opportunities to speak to co-workers, neighbors, to family members of the glory that belongs to him.