No one understands the relationship between joy and suffering better than the Son of Man. My God became human, his love insisting that I not be alone in my struggles. When I hurt, he knows.

Note from Randy [Alcorn]:  I have the greatest appreciation and respect for Joni Eareckson Tada. With her warm-hearted exaltation of God’s sovereign love, she has profoundly impacted my life and Nanci’s life, along with that of countless others. She’s a living example of Psalm 119:71, which says: “My suffering was good for me, for it taught me to pay attention to your decrees.”
In this touching article, Joni writes, “Resilient joy makes hope come alive, so much so that we can be ‘sorrowful, yet always rejoicing’ (2 Corinthians 6:10).” This sister is pure gold. She lives what she writes. As you read her words, sit at her feet and learn what it means to trust in Jesus and find great joy, even when life is hard and painful.
(Joni was recently on Alisa Childers’s podcast, talking about her new book Practicing the Presence of Jesus and the nearness of Christ in 50 years of suffering. It’s a touching interview.)
I Sing My Way Through Pain: Three Lessons in Resilient Joy
Joy is found in the strangest places. Take this parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up. Then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field” (Matthew 13:44). When we read this, we may assume the field is attractive, something we would love to purchase anyway: a sun-drenched meadow dappled with wildflowers, or a garden plot with rich soil ready for tilling.
But life is not like that. We can see the field in this parable as representing what God would have us embrace for the sake of our joy. His lot for you may not be attractive; it may resemble a sandlot with broken bottles, rusty oil cans, and old tires scattered around. It may be a bleak field, with nothing about it even hinting of wealth.
Until you discover it hides a treasure. Then the scrap of hard dirt and weeds suddenly brims with possibilities. Once you know great riches are concealed there, you’re ready to sell everything to buy it. It’s what happened to me.
Striking Gold
Early on in my paralysis—and almost by accident—I unearthed an unexpected treasure. I opened the word of God and discovered a mine shaft. I dug my paralyzed fingers into a weight of incomprehensible glory, a sweetness with Jesus that made my paralysis pale in comparison.
In my great joy, I went out and sold everything, trading in my resentment and self-pity to buy the ugly field nobody else would want. And I struck gold.
After decades of using the pick and shovel of prayer and Scripture, my field has yielded the riches of the kingdom of heaven. I have found a God who is thunderous, full-throttled joy spilling over. His Son swims in his own bottomless ocean of elation, and he is positively, absolutely driven to share it with us. Why? As he puts it, “[so] that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full” (John 15:11). Jesus is after nothing less than our full joy.
But deep in the bedrock of Scripture, my shovel hit something hard and unyielding. God is nobody’s water boy. As the solemn Monarch of everything and everyone, he shares his joy on his own terms. And those terms call for us to suffer—and to suffer, in some measure, as his beloved Son did when he walked on earth (2 Timothy 2:12).
Rejoice in Hope
No one understands the relationship between joy and suffering better than the Son of Man. My God became human, his love insisting that I not be alone in my struggles. When I hurt, he knows. But Jesus does not merely sympathize with me; he’s done something about it. Through his death and resurrection, he has freed me from sin’s power and, in part, from the suffering that results from it. And he will free me fully in the age to come.
That coming age is my joyous hope! It’s hope that sees Jesus on his throne with his kingdom filling every corner of the cosmos. Hope that envisions sorrow and sighing erased from the face of the universe. Hope that eagerly awaits the moment when pain and tears will be banished and evil punished.
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Written by William E. Boyce and K. J. Drake |
Saturday, February 18, 2023
The pew Bible has a valuable place. It is a celebration of the gospel, the triumph of the early church, and the spirit of the Reformation. And for a generation of digital burnouts, the pew Bible helps us connect with a crucial truth: that salvation is physical, tangible, earthly, and available for all.

Do pew Bibles matter? Churches of all styles have had to ask this question in recent years. The increase of church plants using secular spaces for worship means that church planters must contemplate the extra weight, hassle, and expense of providing Bibles for their congregants each Sunday. The rise of technology means that many congregants come to church with merely their phone for a Bible. On top of those societal factors, the pandemic forced most churches to remove pew Bibles for a season, leaving room to reevaluate their utility in worship.
But these questions are not just theoretical; they can be profoundly personal and pastoral. Recently, I (Billy) had the opportunity to worship in the pews with my kids. As a pastor, my preaching schedule rarely affords me the opportunity to spend the entire service with my family. So it was a special treat to watch my kids interact, not only with the liturgy, but with the liturgical tools around them. What grabbed my attention most was this: at some point, each of my four kids (ages 5.5 through 11.5), took out a pew Bible for personal use.
So, we must ask: in this post-COVID, post-modern, post-literate, technological, consumer society, do pew Bibles matter? Does the connection between the Word and the form of accessing the Word matter? Is something lost when we depend on digital media for our Scripture consumption? Is projecting the Scripture passage onto the screen adequate for whole-person and whole-church discipleship and mission, or can a case be made that pew Bibles are an essential part of making God’s Word accessible for all?
Part 1: The Accessible Word: Christian History
The physicality and accessibility of the Word of God is a continual theme across Christian history. From the Scriptures themselves through the Early Church and Reformation, there has been a constant mandate for spiritual leaders: make God’s Word physically accessible. God’s people are a people of the book.
In Deuteronomy 17, for example, Moses makes an odd requirement for Israel’s future king: “he shall write for himself in a book a copy of the law … it shall be with him, and he shall read in it all the days of his life, that he may learn to fear the LORD by keeping all the words of this law and these statutes, and doing them.” (Deut 17:18-19) Such a bookishness was unknown as a requirement of the Ancient Near East ruling class, and yet before all things — military power, courtly procedure, or administration — the king ought to write by his own hand the Law of God. For the king, the Word was to be accessible.This theme recurs throughout Scripture. The biblical authors presume that meditating on the Law, which is the precursor to actually obeying it, requires the external composition of a literary work. Oral culture was not enough; God’s spoken Word needed to be written and re-written as a whole, in order to be absorbed (e.g. Deut 6:9; Jer 30:2).
This focus on the written text has been a prominent feature of Christianity throughout the centuries. One of the key characteristics of early Christianity, according to scholar Larry Hurtado, was its unusual bookishness. The early Christians were committed to making God’s Word physically accessible for others, going so far as to eschew dominant forms of producing texts by using the codex, rather than bookrolls or scrolls. Says Hurtado,
The bookroll was the prestige bookform of the day, and so, if Christians wanted to commend their texts to the wider culture, especially the texts that they read as scripture, it would seem an odd and counterintuitive choice to prefer the codex bookform for these texts. Indeed, it would seem like a deliberately countercultural move. … It certainly had the effect of distinguishing early Christian books physically, especially Christian copies of their sacred books.[1]
This shift had several advantages. First, because of the cheaper production of the codex, more physical copies of Scripture could be produced. The codex made the sacred Scriptures more physically available to the people of God. Second, the codex form allowed for greater ease of study and cross reference as opposed to the cumbersome nature of the scroll. In God’s providence, this widespread availability of the codex empowered later Christians to more accurately translate and further propagate God’s Word. Indeed, the widespread historical attestation of Scripture — far more than any other classical text — owes to the early church’s commitment to the accessible Word.
This emphasis on the availability of the Bible is shot through the Reformation as well.
As Luther was hiding in the Wartburg, avoiding the wrath of the emperor and pope, he turned his attention to translating the New Testament in German, which would definitively shape the national tongue. Luther’s motivation was to make the very words of the Lord accessible to Christians: “Neither have I sought my own honor by it; God, my Lord, knows this. Rather I have done it as a service to the dear Christians and to the honor of One who sitteth above, who blesses me so much.”[2] William Tyndale, the famed English Bible translator, is said to have aspired, according to John Foxe, “If God spared him life, ere many years he would cause a boy that driveth the plough to know more of the Scripture than [a learned Catholic theologian] did.”[3] As these few examples show, the Church has a historical commitment to making Scripture available in written form. The accessibility of Bibles is a venerable part of Christian history.
Part 2: The Accessible Word: Phenomenology
At the same time, pew Bibles make a valuable contribution to the experience of worship. Without pew Bibles, something is tangibly missing from our liturgical space. As we see constantly in the Old Testament, and reaffirmed through the Reformation, liturgical space has a catechetical effect. The physical things in our worship space teach us about God and about the anticipated experience of worship.
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Tuesday, April 26, 2022
When the intellectual elites of our culture allow sentiment to supplant reason, then the discourse of public life is in grave trouble. We should know this from seeing what happens when sentiment comes to dominate other branches of our culture. Art becomes kitsch. And ethics becomes a matter of responding to the latest sob story and the immediate appetites of the moment without reflection on broader social needs, goods, or consequences.

Today, as in the days of Plato, rhetoric is what moves the crowd. But as Plato knew, truth, not rhetoric, is the task of philosophy and philosophers. That is why the latter are so important. Sadly, many in today’s philosopher class—the intellectuals—seem to have forgotten Plato. They now find rhetoric more attractive than truth. Last week provided yet another example of this when a number of British religious leaders signed a letter to the prime minister, Boris Johnson, calling for transgender people to receive the same protection from “conversion therapy” as other LGBTQ+ individuals.
The letter is a good example of how sentimental mush has come to replace careful moral reasoning in the minds of so many. The usual therapeutic patois is on full display. The language of becoming whole, of safe place, of affirmation, is strewn throughout the piece, and the postmodern ethicist’s empty-but-persuasive word of choice, “journey,” appears twice, once even qualified with the adjective “sacred.”
The letter is light on actual theology but does make peculiar comment on conversion therapy and prayer: “To allow those discerning this journey to be subject to coercive or undermining practices is to make prayer a means of one person manipulating another.”
The logic of this sentence seems to imply that to pray for a transgender person to become comfortable with his biological sex is a form of “conversion therapy.” As such, prayer is to be equated with coercion and bullying. Do these religious leaders think that prayer changes nothing and that any claim otherwise makes it simply a tool for exercising psychological power over another? Or do they think that the only petitions that should be made on behalf of trans people are those that confirm their self-diagnosis? If the former, then why bother praying for anything at all? If the latter, what about the growing number of de-transitioners, many of whom would no doubt have been grateful if somebody had prayed for them and also intervened in some other way before they permanently mutilated their bodies?
Yet as confused as that sentence is, it is not the most disturbing aspect of the letter. That honor must be given to the presence of Rowan Williams’s signature.
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