2024 Ministry Report

End-of-Year Ministry Update

Welcome to the Media Gratia end of the year update. I'm John Snyder and I'm the director of the ministry. We are a small not-for-profit ministry that makes multimedia studies for churches. And for those that follow the ministry through the year or pray for us or are able to give to help with the work, we always try at the end of the year to just give an update.

What have we been able to do throughout the year with the materials that God has given us and what are we planning for next year? So first let's talk about 2024. What did we publish? We have two new studies and we're very excited about these.

The first came out in the early part of this year and that is a study by a pastor in Memphis, Tennessee. And if you have done some of our other larger studies, Behold Your God, the first and the second of those, you might remember this name Jordan Thomas.

Jordan has written a book and preached a series of sermons which we filmed and this study is called Christ Our Treasure, Enjoying the Preeminence of Jesus in the local church. And so it's one of our many studies, a smaller study that you can go through in about eight weeks with a church or a small group.

You know you can do this with Christian schools, multiple applications. The study really does help turn our eyes back to the heart of Christianity, Christ, in the midst of all the things that we are to be doing and all the doctrines we are to be living upon.

At the center of all of those is this person and Jordan is such an extraordinary help with that. The other study is a study by a Scottish pastor and educator and he is on the board of directors with the Banner of Truth Trust, Ian Hamilton, and his study is called The Nature and Practice of True-Hearted Discipleship.

And so again it's a multimedia study and you can use it in from individuals to small groups within churches. It's a very simple but deep and gracious, attractive look at the cost of following Christ and it's given by one of the men that's been such an encouragement to our ministry, Dr. Ian Hamilton.

A third study, which I can't show you because it's about to go to the printers, is a study by a man named Stephen Yule, who also has been an educator and a pastor. He serves on the board now with Reformation Heritage Books.

Dr. Yule, in this study, is teaching through the book of Galatians and just looking at the key elements, things that are essential, things that the Galatians have to be reminded of, how to apply Christ.

And Dr. Yule walks us through that in such a clear way. Now I want to say something about all three of these authors. Why are we publishing these authors? Each of the authors has been chosen because of the qualities that God has given them in their ministries and in their lives.

I think that Jordan Thomas sticks out in my mind, and Jordan is one of the authors that I have a friendship with, Jordan sticks out in my mind as a man and as a pastor, a dad, a husband, and a friend whose ministry, perhaps more than any other that I'm personally acquainted with, has maintained a Christ-centric discipline.

He has continued to prune away any focus that does not help his people gaze upon Christ. And it's not just the church and their ministries throughout their community, and they minister in a very difficult area in the city of Memphis, but it's Jordan's life.

You can't sit down with Jordan for any time at all and not eventually hear about Christ. For the other study, Dr. Ian Hamilton. Ian Hamilton is in his 70s, and he is, in my opinion, one of those men that represents the old guard of evangelicalism in Great Britain, in its best form.

Men who were influenced by the ministry of Martin Lloyd-Jones and other men of that day, an extraordinary season of God's kindness from the 1950s forward in the UK. And these older men, like Ian Hamilton, or you might think of Sinclair Ferguson, or Ian Murray, these men seem to carry about with them this depth, this theological clarity and strength, but wed to a gentleness that I find rare.

We had Ian Hamilton on our podcast a couple of times, and I've had many comments from people, and the comments always are generally the same, that this man is the kind of man that I want to be. I want to be gracious like that.

And then, Stephen, I remember reading a book by Stephen Yule on Psalm 119, and it was just a small book, and sometimes when men write small books, and they're quoting from the Puritans or other authors, it's easy just to be an editor.

And especially if you're a very busy person, or you've put out a lot of books that year, you don't really have time to devote to that topic. You're just kind of piecing together, sewing together great quotes from other authors, and so the book doesn't necessarily go very deep.

But I was shocked at the depth and the clarity that Stephen Yule put forth in this simple book on Psalm 119. So we contacted him, and I'd heard a number of good things about him, and he agreed to do a study with us on Galatians.

And I have read his book and watched the videos in preparation for sending it off, and I would say that what sticks out in my mind about Dr. Yule is that he is a crystal-clear teacher. There's no embellishments.

You know, it's not crowded, like I feel like my sermons are often just crowded with too much stuff. It's just what you need. It's not simplistic, but it's clear, and it's said in in such a kind and direct way.

So we hope that you really benefit from these studies, and we're grateful to have been able to work with these men in 2024. By the way, with Stephen Yule's work, it's about to go to the printers, so we hoped, I hope, that it will be out in January.

I'm told that I'm supposed to say the first quarter so as not to over advertise, but I think we'll have it out in January. In 2024, we've also begun to transfer our digital resources over to a new platform, and this platform is much better for us as a ministry, but primarily because it's so much better for the participants or the students.

For those of you who would prefer, whether because of distance, we get a lot of requests from those who, international pastors and missionaries who want to use our material, and the shipping costs in certain places is just far more than the cost of the books themselves.

And so we want this material to be made available, and this is a platform that is much more user-friendly. We'll be talking more about that in the days to come. Also in 2024, in publishing the study by Ian Hamilton, we worked together and partnered with G3 Ministries, and we have not partnered with them before.

We've been to their conferences, and we have friendships with the leaders at G3, but it's been very good to work with them. They've been so easy to work with, very generous, very agreeable in helping us, encouraging us in the making of this study.

If you've never been to their website to read more about that ministry, you can look it up. It's g3min .org. The letter G, the number three, MIN, short for ministry, dot org, g3min .org, and go and look at what they have.

There's a lot of good material there. In 2024, we've continued to do our podcast, the whole Council podcast, surpassed 800 ,000 downloads. In 2024, A Word in Season has nearly a quarter million downloads, our From the Heart of Spurgeon episodes over 100 ,000, our YouTube channel has grown.

We've seen a 100 increase in the views this year, and that really excites us because it's a way for us to get truths out to people that may not have any interest in the ministry or may not know about this ministry.

And while these things are encouraging to us, I want to point out that most of the teaching that we produce throughout the year is not doesn't end up in a small study like this. This takes a long time and a lot of resources and man hours to get published right.

Most of our work is teaching that's put on platforms which are donated to the public. It's free. On top of that, in the past year, a couple of our studies have been translated into other languages. You know, we've told you before that we have had our studies translated into Dutch, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, and now Swahili.

And we have been contacted by a Ukrainian brother who would desire to have the studies put into Ukrainian because while the Ukrainian people speak Russian, obviously it's not a language that they would prefer to read their Bible studies in with the hostilities that they're in the midst of.

We are able to give those things away, again, because of the generosity of donors throughout the year. We don't ever charge for our studies to be sold in foreign languages in international markets. What about 2025?

Well, we're going to launch a new MGO platform, as I mentioned, and we will be talking about that more as we get closer to it, but we hope that that will be something that you find much easier to work with.

We are going to be bringing our foreign language translations and putting those on the MGO, Media Gratia Online, platform as well, so that if you are in the States and you want to be able to use our foreign language material, you can do that.

Also, Teddy and I are presently working on, and we hope in 2025 it would be released, the first of our digital or video-only studies, and the first of these is a study that I've been doing with a group of younger pastors and men who are interested in spiritual leadership or service in the kingdom of Christ, and we've been meeting and talking around the theme of what kind of man does God trust with spiritual leadership in His kingdom.

So with these new studies on MGO, we hope to be able to not only give you the lectures, but to give you some homework that goes along with it, like the homework that the men were given who did the study originally, and then give you an opportunity to ask questions, if you have questions, which are arising out of the study, and then we will have special episodes where we gather together those questions, and when we have enough that we feel questions that are significantly beneficial to the larger audience, then we will try to handle answering those questions.

So you can keep your eye out for that in 2025. We also have some new studies that are scheduled. Conrad Mbewe, who we hoped we would be filming in 2024, and he had to adjust that, so we will be filming him in 2025, and Conrad is going to do a study on the doctrine of justification.

Also Stephen Yule will be returning and doing a study with us on the Sermon on the Mount. I want to say, as we kind of bring our end-of-the-year update to a close, that we are genuinely grateful for those that have supported us with prayer and with encouraging feedback, even with helpful criticisms, and financially, as I mentioned, we just couldn't exist without the Lord raising up people outside of the ministry who would be willing to sacrifice.

When we think of the Christian life, there are often paradoxes, and as I've been in my own quiet time working through some of the Old Testament and seeing how God provided for Israel and the very specific instructions He gave at different times, it just reminded me of the paradoxes that we find in the Christian life with regard to serving, giving, and receiving.

If you think about it, the Christian is the one subject of the one kingdom, of the one God, the child of the one Father who doesn't need anything that we could give Him. God makes it clear in the book of Job that our righteousness does not benefit Him.

God has not made a better, more complete being because we worship Him or give to His kingdom's work, and yet we are commanded to give, to give ourselves, to present, as Paul says in Romans 6, this body, this bodily existence, our abilities, our energy, you know, our faculties, everything that we are, to present it to God daily as instruments for His use.

We are to give of the things that He makes us stewards of, our time, finances. So that's clear that we're to give with regard to the work of the kingdom, to give to the needy as well, and to be thoughtful of other people, to work hard, to be careful with what God gives us, and to be ready to give.

And yet, at the same time, we know that God doesn't need us to give. And I think that the paradox or the apparent contradiction, the mystery in those two realities is solved if we think about the bigger picture of what God is doing.

God is saving people for His namesake so that in the countless millions of years of eternity, when we don't count years any longer, there will be an innumerable multitude of people from every tongue and tribe and nation, men and women and children, gathering around the throne to sing the praises of this God.

People will see the worth of God in the way He saves those who are His enemies, in the way that He loves the unlovely. When we think of that, then we have to realize that if God is to be honored, then we have to be transformed.

We're going to be not just forgiven, but molded into the moral image of the Son, Jesus of Nazareth. And so, day by day, you know, layer by layer, God is dealing with us, and we are being transformed as we gaze intently upon Christ from one glory to the next, from one stage of sanctification to the next.

There's that wonderful maturing that is occurring in us, even when we don't seem to see it ourselves. And part of that maturing includes learning to depend upon God. Can I trust Him as a father to give what I need when I need it in the right way?

And we can, and we have to learn to trust Him. But also, this dynamic of trusting God to provide for us is wed together with this sweet privilege to be a part of God's providing for others through us.

So we can say, like Paul, as amazing as it sounds, we are co-laborers with Him, with God. He doesn't need us, but He allows us to pour out our lives and our resources for those around us, for the sake of His great name, for the sake of their souls.

So that it's not just that we experientially know, and not just reading it on the page, that God is faithful to give us everything we need, and we don't have to worry like the world worries. So the wonderful paradox, we belong to a God that doesn't need us to give.

We belong to a God that we can trust to meet our needs, to give us everything we need to do His will in the present moment. But we also belong to a God who will train us in Christ-likeness, not just by depending upon Him, but by joining Him, and being used by Him, and stewarding carefully what He's given us.

And we are very grateful for those who have been allowed to be a part of helping us put out materials that we hope will bring everlasting honor to God's name. Well, how can you pray for us in 2025? Our content producer, Teddy James, gave me a quote by William Carey.

I think it's probably one that many of you will be familiar with. Let me read it. William Carey, the early Baptist missionary, said, I'm not afraid of failure. I'm afraid of succeeding at things that don't matter.

Mediagrati is a very small team, and with limited resources, we are naturally forced to prune back what do we do. We can't do all the good things that we would like to do, but we can do everything that our King gives us to do.

So, one of our requests of you in 2025 would be that you would plead with the Lord that we would be very wise, that our ears would be clear, and we would be single-minded as we listen to Him amidst all the good voices and the good suggestions people give us.

What does He want us to do? And so, while we are not fearing failure, we would fear, by kind of an undisciplined, unbiblical sense of good intentions, that we would guard ourselves against spreading out our limited resources, doing a lot of things that God has not given us to do.

There are many wonderful ministries that we are supportive of that do good things, and so we want to know, what does the Lord want us to do in the coming days? Thanks.