Reflection & Gratitude for 2022: Celebrating a decade of God's faithfulness

Hi, I'm Jon Snider with Media Gratia and this is our end of the year review. We want to kind of just take a moment with you to look at things that the

Lord has helped us to do in the past year and to look at some things that are coming up in 2023.

In the past year, obviously, if you follow our podcast, we have moved our studio. We're actually in Christchurch, New Albany, and we have been able to put out in the last six months two new publications.

One is Judges Living with the Living God, and that's a multimedia study.

It is reduced. We call these our mini -studies, so they only last eight weeks and the homework required each week is reduced.

We hope that will make it accessible for those who can commit to eight weeks but maybe feel a bit overwhelmed with the 12 -week and the five -day lessons in the larger studies.

We also have been able to print our Rethinking God Biblically sermons from the first study, and that's for those who would like to go back and to be able to read those sermons and you don't want to have to go back and re -watch the videos.

Also we find it helpful to be able to have something smaller to give to someone that you think that the sermons would benefit, but they are not ready to do a 12 -week study.

2022 marks this December and January. It marks our 10th anniversary for our first study for Behold Your God, Rethinking God Biblically, and we are grateful to see how the

Lord continues to send that study and the second study, Behold Your God, the Weight of Majesty, throughout the world and North America.

In the last year it's continued to go out in other languages and other countries, the Netherlands, Germany, Russia, and in South America.

Our podcast, The Whole Council, is right at the half -million downloads mark, and so we're very grateful for that.

When you do the podcast you just sit in this room and, you know, you talk with each other and you hope that it benefits people, so we're thankful that God is using it.

Now in 2023 there are a few things that we're working on. The first is the

Behold Your God, Seeking Him Early study, and we've mentioned this over the last couple of years.

It is a large project that has many moving parts, and because it's children's material, artists are involved, and editors, and then there's typesetters, and then there's proofreaders, and return everything to the typesetters.

There are three age groups in this curriculum, and it's based on the first two Behold Your God studies brought down to children's level.

All of our children's workbooks are in the hands of the typesetters now, and the other elements are waiting for those to be finished.

The sermons of Behold Your God, The Weight of Majesty, we hope to put those together in a book like we did with the first study this year.

Also, a mini -study by Jordan Thomas, and Jordan's topic is

Treasuring Christ Together as Churches, and that's been filmed, and the film is now being edited by Teddy, and the book has been written, and it's in the hands of editors, and will soon go to our typesetters.

So we hope that that will be out soon in the next year. And finally, another mini -study written by me on Psalm 119.

How does the believer live the Christian life? An open book in your hand, your feet on a very definite path, and the face lifted to the

Lord. And finally, in 2023, we are adding something to our podcast. It's called

Navigating the Classics. What we want to do is quarterly, we have a panel discussion where a group of men get a classic that has impacted the church significantly.

But this is a classic that is older, perhaps, than the Puritans. So not the kind of book that you can just go to Banner's website and get and read in an updated version, but maybe a book that is so old, you've heard of it, and you know that it was significant in some way, but you're not sure really what it was about, and you're not sure of the context of its being written.

Or maybe an older book like that that is so large that you think,

I'm not sure that I really can devote the time to that. We have already filmed the first, and it will be released in January, and it is

Athanasius's little book on the Incarnation. It is really a wonderful book, a wonderful book to follow our

Christmas season. You may think it's all about the birth of Christ. It is not. It's shocking what a wonderfully complete book this is on the person of Jesus Christ.

It is so interesting that Athanasius did not write this book for the great theologians of his day, who might be discussing secondary or tertiary issues of the deity and the humanity of Christ, but he wrote it for a young convert.

So it really just summarizes who this person, Jesus, is, and how do we answer those, whether Jewish or pagan, who doubt our claims.

We found it a real joy to work through that book. We also hope to do, in this coming year,

Augustine's Confessions and his book, The City of God, among others.

These are books that we want to walk through. These episodes are different. They're two, two and a half hour long special episodes where we kind of just survey the entire book and the impact of that book on the

Christian church. Well, we are very grateful for all of you that gave big and small this year, and really, by the kindness of the

Lord and through your gifts, we've been able to continue to do these things and to prepare for next year's projects.

So please do continue to pray for us that we will have wisdom to know how to spend our time and resources, and that God would continue to supply everything we need to do his will.

Now before we leave, I thought we might just consider spiritual inventory.

It's a good time at the end of the year to take spiritual inventory. I remember reading John Newton, the famous hymnist, but also quite an effective pastor in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

Newton would, at the end of each year, take time to review his spiritual journal over the year, and at the end of every 10 years, he would take time to review the last 10 years of his journal entries, and Newton would write, at the turn of the year, a new hymn for his church to sing.

Quite a talented man. At one of those points where it was a 10 -year anniversary,

Newton read over his 10 years his accounts of the faithfulness of the Lord, and, you know, when we think about spiritual inventory, generally we think about how we're doing, and I want us to think about that, but let's not start there.

Let's start with a spiritual inventory of God's faithfulness. Have you slowed down in this

Christmas season to just look over what the Lord has done, how

He's provided, how He's taken you and walked with you through perhaps some very dark times, or allowed you to have, you know, those spring times of the soul, where it, you know, the joys just accumulate one after the next?

Newton, at that 10 -year anniversary, wrote the hymn that we now call Amazing Grace, and so even though you may not be a poet like Newton or a musician, you can slow down and look, or like Rutherford, who from prison said that at the end of the year, we ought to have new tales to tell of Christ.

So it's a good question. Have I walked with the Lord in such a way? Have I thrown myself upon Him repeatedly throughout the year?

Did I have new tales to tell of my Lord and His faithfulness?

But there's also the personal inventory. Have you gained ground spiritually?

Have you lost ground? Have you moved forward in earnestness, in, you know, in that sweet simplicity of a single -minded devotion to Christ?

Or would you say over the last year you are afraid that your heart has become more fragmented?

Two verses that have helped me this year, and I want to give them to you as we close, as verses that might help you this year, are both from Psalm 119.

And the first is verse 12, where there's this great fact stated. The psalmist writes,

Blessed are you, O Lord, and then the request, teach me your statutes. Of all the 176 verses of Psalm 119, that may be my favorite, but of course, if you ask me next week,

I may have a different favorite. But I think it's so foundational, because it is the fact that God is the blessed

God. What does that mean? What is it about God that causes the psalmist to plead that he would teach him his statutes?

When we say that God is blessed, or the blessed one, we mean that God is in himself, without the addition of any other thing outside of himself, without anything else in creation.

God is, and has always been, and will always be, infinitely satisfied, infinitely whole, infinitely complete, infinitely joyful.

And so, when we talk about a person being blessed by God, though we use that in many ways in our culture, if we're being biblically careful, what we're talking about is a person being brought to God through the finished work of his

Son, and being united to Christ, and Christ, now our life, we look to the

Father as our Father. And he then pours from that infinite happiness, he pours from his completeness all that we need to be happy in him.

So that's why the psalmist pleads, teach me. You are the ultimate source of all that is good.

Who else would I want to be my teacher in the coming year? But then in verse 10, just two verses before that, he says this,

With all my heart I have sought you. Do not let me wander from your commandments.

And that's the final thought I want to leave with you. A simple question. How much of your heart have you brought to the

Word? To prayer, to the work of the ministry, to the service of other

Christians, to the gathering and worship of God? How much heart have you been bringing this past year?

And if it is not wholehearted, will you plead with the Lord to deliver you from that indifference that creeps in from that half -heartedness, which is such a plague, such a destroyer of the good things in the

Christian life? Will you plead with the Lord to help you in 2023 to bring a whole heart to all that he is and gives and commands?

Well, we hope that you have a good year and pray that God will grant all of us grace to walk very near to him in 2023.