Christianity Today’s Book of the Year

Two volumes rose to the head of the class.

Photography by Matt Schwerin for Christianity Today

The CT Book Awards often resemble those viral online images that look completely different to different segments of the population. Gather any group of judges, and their evaluations inevitably land all over the map. We hope the outcomes are defensible, but we won’t pretend they’re bulletproof. If you think we got it wrong, at least some of our judges agree!

Similar caveats apply to our work determining CT’s Book of the Year. Unlike our main awards categories, which enlist the judging acumen of pastors, theologians, apologists, and others with pertinent expertise, our book of the year choice reflects a rough consensus among myself and the staff editors whose comments appear below. No, we didn’t read every eligible Christian book. But we brainstormed a long list of promising candidates, gradually whittled it down, and committed to reading the most promising few in full.

Two volumes rose to the head of the class: Gavin Ortlund’s celebration of our Protestant heritage and Brad East’s affable instructions to callow Christians. In our view, both books pair intellectual depth with generous readability. They converse with cultural currents while staying tethered to enduring truths. Of course, neither offers an infallible word on Christian faith and life. But readers can expect resounding echoes of the Word that already has. —Matt Reynolds, senior books editor

Winner

What It Means to Be Protestant: The Case for an Always-Reforming Church

Gavin Ortlund (Zondervan Reflective)

When God spoke to the prophet Jeremiah, he promised that he would make “my words in your mouth a fire” (Jer. 5:14). Jeremiah saw his words—written out on a scroll—burned up by the hostile ruler. Undeterred, he wrote them all again. The Christianity Today Book of the Year and all of our book awards are not just about recommendations for our readers’ nightstands. They are also a word to those God has called to write—keep going. Words matter. Words shape us. Words can point us to the ultimate Word who gives life and light that no fire can put out. —Russell Moore, editor in chief

*NB: Russell Moore recused himself from the final decision for this award due to his friendship with authors involved.

Before jumping ship to another tradition, like Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy, evangelicals would do well to read Gavin Ortlund’s What it Means to be Protestant. In its careful attention to Scripture, history, and theology, coupled with its generous tone, Ortund shows how the commitment to the semper reformanda of the Protestant Reformers rings true to the Bible. It thus allows Protestants to look unflinchingly where we’ve got things wrong, repent, and change course. I’m hopeful this book will itself spark renewal and clarity amongst its Protestant readers.—Ashley Hales, editorial director for print

Award of Merit

Letters to a Future Saint: Foundations of Faith for the Spiritually Hungry

Brad East (Eerdmans)

If I could wind the clock backward and put Letters to a Future Saint into the hands of my 18-year-old self—even having grown up in the church and in the home of faithful believers—I most certainly would. With its arresting, profound simplicity, East beckoned me—now a long-time saint—to revisit my First Love and rediscover the wonder of my relationship with Jesus. —Joy Allmond, executive director for resources and chief of staff for editorial

Letters to a Future Saint is an unoriginal book—in the best possible sense. It’s a friendly, workmanlike recapitulation of the basics of our faith, presented as 93 short letters to “the bored and the distracted, the skeptical and the curious, the young and the spiritually hungry.” Author Brad East, a regular contributor to CT, is characteristically lively and fluid in his writing here, introducing readers to Scripture, the Nicene Creed, and much more. This is a needed book in our uncatechized age, and I would be delighted if my own children read it a few years hence. —Bonnie Kristian, editorial director of ideas & books

(Read the rest of CT’s Book Awards here.)

This article appeared in the January/February 2025 issue of Christianity Today as "Book of the Year".

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Testimony

I Demolished My Faith for ‘My Best Life.’ It Only Led to Despair.

Caresse Dionne Spencer

Queer love, polyamory, and drugs ruined me. That’s where Jesus found me.

Photography by Ben Rollins for Christianity Today

In 2020, I typed two lethal words: F— God. With that, I resigned from Christianity.

As the world was falling apart from the pandemic, so was my faith. Some call it deconstruction, but for me, it was an all-out demolition.

I wasn’t carefully examining the seams of my faith in community; no, I was feverishly cutting each thread until my faith was no more. I stripped my vocabulary of the term God because it was soaked in the oppression of my past. I wanted no part of that religion, that control, that guilt.

I was angry.

I’d been introduced to ideas, theories, and beliefs that challenged traditional Christianity: Sexuality might be a spectrum. Original sin could be debatable. The Bible contradicts itself. Yet it wasn’t freeing to learn of affirming communities and nontraditional churches. As someone who’d wanted to explore sexuality but had suppressed the desire to do so, I felt like I’d been robbed of pleasure.

The rules I did not agree with but had to follow began to feel like a difficult yoke and a heavy burden.

The desires I had buried deep within me—to experiment, to question, to challenge—all clashed violently with the doctrines I’d preached privately and publicly for the past decade as a writer and youth leader. I was now caught between the God of my faith and the woman I feared I truly was. What if I couldn’t enjoy life and enjoy God? What if I could no longer deny myself for God—what would happen if I instead denied God for myself?

I chose myself.

For the next two years, I embarked on what I can only call a “world tour”—a tour of all that I believed the world had to offer: queer love, polyamory, sex, drugs, and the worship of other gods. I said yes to everything I had once denied myself. And in saying yes, I thought I had found freedom.

For a while, it felt good. There’s a rush that comes with rebellion, a thrill in doing the very things you once feared. No longer restrained by the looming gaze of God, I allowed myself to indulge. All those Friday nights I spent in Bible study instead of at campus parties seemed like a joke now. I had missed out on life, or so I thought, and now I was making up for lost time. I believed I was living my best life.

But soon, the high faded. The freedom that once tasted so sweet became bitter.

The relationship that I thought would be my safe haven began to crumble. Anxiety crept in like an uninvited guest and made itself at home. My mind became a battleground of racing thoughts, doubts, and paranoia, especially after I dabbled in psychedelics that I’d thought would expand my mind but only left me adrift, untethered from reality. The drugs, the sex, the defiance—none of it brought the peace I had been searching for.

Instead, I found myself floating, not on calm waters but in a vast, empty darkness, like outer space. There was nothing solid to hold on to. I looked free from the outside, but I knew the truth: I was lost. I was scared.

And more than that, I didn’t want to live anymore. Life had lost its meaning. What was once pleasurable had become purposeless, and without that pleasure, I saw no reason to exist. I had defined my purpose by my rebellion, and when the rebellion no longer satisfied, I had nothing left. No God, no faith, no love, no peace.

The thought of suicide became a quiet companion, a whisper in the back of my mind that grew louder with each passing day. It seemed logical, even rational, to end it all. If life had no meaning, why continue? I weighed my options: overdose on antidepressants or slip into a warm bath and let go. I prepared myself to vanish, to slip into nonexistence, because living in this confusion, this depression, felt unbearable.

But as I stood on the brink of ending it all, fear gripped me. It was the fear of eternal separation from anything good, anything warm, anything real. I had rejected the God of the Bible, but now, in my deepest despair, I found myself crying out to him.

God, help me! I hadn’t called that name in years, a name I had tried to erase from my memory. But it was the only word that seemed to fit in that moment.

And then, the phone rang.

It was a Christian friend who had kept up with me throughout my world tour. She called at that exact moment, as if she had known. She asked me if I was okay, and I allowed myself to admit the truth for the first time in a long time. No, I was not okay.

I spilled my heart out to her and told her everything I had been carrying. She listened, and her presence on the other end of the line pulled me back from the edge.

When we hung up, I collapsed onto the floor, weeping. What had just happened? I wasn’t supposed to be alive. I didn’t want to be alive. But I was. I had cried out to God—the God I had renounced—and he had heard me. In that moment, he showed up. The God who exists outside of time and space reached into my darkness and pulled me back into life.

Not long after, my sister came home and found me lying on the floor, tears streaming down my face. This was the sister who’d once credited me with helping her grow in faith and who’d watched me walk away from that same faith, all while living under the same roof. She knelt beside me and asked, “Do you want to surrender?”

It was the invitation I’d been waiting for my whole life, and I hadn’t even known it. I said yes.

I said yes to surrendering my pride, my pain, my confusion, my frustration, my rebellion, my emptiness. She prayed over me, and my tears turned to smiles. For the first time, I felt alive.

The following day, everything was different. My life had changed in an instant. The God I had walked away from, the God I thought I had rejected, had never left me. He was there, listening, waiting for me to call on him again, perhaps in a way I never really had.

Since that day, I haven’t stopped talking to God. I tell him everything: my fears, my doubts, my questions, my pleasures, my weaknesses, my aches, my desires. Everything I once tried to hide, I now bring to him. I don’t pretend anymore. Instead, I let him into every part of me, and in return, he gives me peace.

Self-denial sounds oppressive to the self. It seems like saying yes to every thought and every feeling will lead us to discovering our true selves, but that will only lead to the soul’s decay.

I am convinced that I do not know what is best for me. I thought I did, but pursuing happiness apart from God led to disillusionment. I realized that if there is no God, then life has no meaning, so I’d rather opt out.

But God refused to let me die in my disbelief. And because of that, I now know that the only way to find your life is to lose it.

Caresse Dionne Spencer spends her days enjoying God, sharing her story, and breathing life into old things as the owner of an online vintage clothing shop, Revival.

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Ideas

The Book Screwtape Feared Most

SJ Murray

Once a bedrock Christian classic, Boethius’s “Consolation of Philosophy” has been neglected for decades. It’s time for a revival.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Getty

Some 27 letters into his correspondence, Screwtape stages an intervention. At all costs, the senior demon of C. S. Lewis’s classic Screwtape Letters tells his apprentice devil, Wormwood, do not let your human “patient” pray about his wandering mind.

The patient is in love, Screwtape notes, and this presents a perfect opportunity to ensure that he never thinks of God (or, as the devils call him, “the Enemy”). Distraction is hell’s greatest asset, and if the patient had the wherewithal to lay his distraction before the Enemy in prayer, it would inch him along in sanctification.

At least one human author, Screwtape notes, has realized how this works. He’s “let this secret out” and threatened hell’s plans. That author is Boethius, the sixth-century theologian whose works were obscure in Lewis’s day and even less known now. Our modern neglect of his classic book, The Consolation of Philosophy, is a grave loss for the pursuit of Christian wisdom.

As 2024 comes to a close and we find ourselves in the season of Advent, we also mark the end of the 1500th anniversary year of Boethius’s death. In the year 524, Boethius awaited execution in Pavia, Italy, about 500 miles north of Rome.

This was an unexpected end for a man born into an influential patrician house and adopted by another equally powerful family when his father died. Boethius had grown to be a remarkable scholar—possibly the most brilliant mind of his generation. He read Latin and Greek philosophy and poetry with abandon, absorbing the likes of Aristotle, the Stoics, Cicero, Seneca, and Ovid.

But everything changed when he read Plato’s Republic. Boethius realized that the corrupt politics of his society couldn’t improve until people who pursued wisdom and justice involved themselves in affairs of state. So Boethius himself entered public service and quickly rose through the ranks.

By 520, he’d achieved the highest possible honors as master of the offices to the king of Italy, Theodoric the Ostrogoth. Boethius was the second most powerful man on the Italian peninsula and arguably across what was left of the Western Roman Empire. Then, one day, he lost it all.

A friend and a former consul named Albinus was accused of treason, and Boethius rose to his defense. If Albinus was guilty, Boethius said, he himself was as well. Instead of relenting before this act of solidarity, Theodoric sentenced Boethius to death without a trial. Some accounts say he was put to the sword. Others report that a cord was wrapped around his neck, and he was strangled until he was on the edge of consciousness, then bludgeoned to death.

Boethius maintained his innocence until the end. We can’t be certain of the truth, but today historians generally think that if he was guilty of anything that could be perceived as treason, it was probably his decision to write to the Eastern Roman emperor, Justin I, to warn him about Theodoric’s plans to allow Arianism—a heresy that denied the divinity of Christ—to flourish in the West.

It was in prison that Boethius composed The Consolation of Philosophy, a dialogue between himself and Lady Philosophy. She appears out of nowhere in his prison cell to stage an intervention. The problem, she explains, is that Boethius is “distracted” but “not totally undone,” so she has come to guide him home. “I understand the cause of your sickness,” she says. “You have forgotten what you are” and need to be directed “to that true happiness your soul dreams of but cannot see because your sight is distracted by images.”

The source of that forgetfulness, Lady Philosophy reveals, is that Boethius is distracted—by politics and current events, by the corruption in Theodoric’s government, by his loss of honor and high office, by his memory of happier times. Didn’t she teach him better than this?

That distraction, Lady Philosophy continues, has made the prisoner ungrateful. He has lost more worldly goods than some will ever possess and still can boast of his family, including two politically powerful sons. Instead of attending to these goods, Lady Philosophy charges, Boethius is focused on his own misfortune. He has failed to remember how the wheel of fortune always turns, how fleeting are the world’s measures of success.

It may seem, at times, as if wicked people are getting ahead in pursuing those very markers of success, Philosophy concedes. But their lives will be punishment enough, she says, as they turn away from God, the source of all true happiness. The better way, she advises, is to attend to the state of our own souls. Lay all our thoughts, including our distraction itself, before God in prayer. Seek his perspective on the world’s turmoil. And never forget that divine providence—imbued with the same love that rules the sun and stars—rules our mortal hearts as well.

No wonder Screwtape didn’t like this book. He wouldn’t like it any better today, as we too live in an age of distraction. In 2023, the average person consumed more than 13 hours of media per day. More than half of Gen Zers say they’d quit their day jobs to become social media influencers if given the chance. And who can blame them? They’ve grown up in a world of distraction.

At every twist and turn of our day, we rob ourselves of time and attention. An email alert, the buzz of a cell phone, a reminder from our watches that we need to get our steps in—we constantly interrupt ourselves, setting up one obstacle after another to following Lady Philosophy’s advice. Screwtape must be throwing a party, and not least because Consolation is more neglected than he ever could have dreamed.

Lewis believed this masterpiece from Boethius was among the ten most influential books of all time. Six decades after he died and fifteen centuries after Boethius, that influence has sadly faded.

Yet Boethius’s teachings about the trappings and distractions of worldly success ring as true today as they did when he set down his pen to face his executioner. The book he left behind can still challenge us to pray and pursue wisdom as doggedly as he did, to live our lives as if avoiding distraction really matters—because it does.

Advent is a season of waiting, and in waiting we often turn to distractions. But instead of succumbing to that temptation, let us follow the model of Boethius waiting in his cell. When, like him, we manage to tear our minds away from the world’s false promises, we can remember what hell wants us to forget: who we are and the great Love into which we’re called.

SJ Murray is a professor of great texts and creative writing at Baylor University and founder of The Greats Story Lab.

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Church Life

The Event Horizon of Advent

Andrew Menkis

The Christmas season shows us our redeemed past and hopeful future.

Illustration by Sandra Rilova

Read Psalm 110

I ONCE HEARD SOMEONE CLAIM that if you could enter a black hole and reach the event horizon, you would see into the past and future simultaneously. My attempts to wrap my head around this have not yet been successful. I’m no physicist, but I do understand what it is like to stare at my past or to try to see into my future.

Typically, this causes problems. Looking to the past often leads to regret, shame, or depression about what has happened and cannot be changed. Looking to the future often leads to worry, fear, or anxiety about what may happen. The reason for this, I think, is that my gaze is focused solely on myself. In contrast, Christ calls us out of ourselves to look to him. During the Advent season we are invited to look to the past at what Christ has done, even as we look to the future hope of what he will do when he comes again.

David had his eyes set upon Christ when he composed Psalm 110. In the opening lines, God speaks to someone that David calls, “my lord.” In other words, God is talking to King David’s king. This King of Kings is our Savior, Jesus Christ (Acts 2:34–36). The psalm paints a portrait of Christ as victor over God’s enemies, ruler of the nations, powerful, vibrant, and just.

As if this picture wasn’t magnificent enough, the psalm adds another layer to the image: Christ is also a priest after the order of Melchizedek. The author of Hebrews explains why this is significant: “[Melchizedek is] without father or mother, without genealogy, without beginning of days or end of life, resembling the Son of God, he remains a priest forever” (Heb. 7:3). Christ is an eternal priest, unlike the Levitical priests of the Old Testament, a perfect and continuous mediator, intercessor, and advocate between God and his people.

In this poem, David invites us to focus our thoughts, our affections, and our desires on a vision of the priest-king Jesus Christ. As we look into the past and behold the birth, life, suffering, crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension of Christ we are drawn out of our regret, shame, and depression. Christ is king; he has the power to ensure there is nothing that has happened to us, or by us, that God will not use for good (Rom. 8:28). Christ is our priest; all our shame and guilt has been dealt with on the cross.

More than that, Christ has conquered death and the Holy Spirit who brought Christ to life dwells in us, giving us new life and hope for the future. Our worries, our fears, and our anxieties are put into proper perspective when we look to Christ and remember that just as he came once, he will come again to destroy evil, uphold justice, and save his people.

For a psalm so full of violent imagery—enemies made into a footstool, shattered kings, corpses filling the nations—David ends on a surprisingly calm note. In the midst of judging the nations the priest-king stops to take a break. The final portrait David paints for us is of Christ, pausing to take a drink of cool, refreshing water from a brook, then lifting up his head (v. 7). His pause indicates that the end of all things is not yet upon us. We stand in our present moment—the event horizon, if you will—between the first and second coming of Christ. Rather than obsessively staring at our own past or future, through this psalm, Christ invites us to look at him to find forgiveness, identity, peace, security, and hope in what he has done for us in the past, and in what he will do when he returns in the future to establish his reign as priest and king, once and for all.

Andrew Menkis is a theology teacher, with his poetry and prose published in Modern Reformation, Ekstasis, The Gospel Coalition, and Core Christianity.

This article is part of A Time for Wonder, a 4-week devotional to help individuals, small groups, and families journey through the 2024 Advent season. Learn more about this special issue that can be used Advent, or any time of year at http://orderct.com/advent.

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Church Life

Paving the Way For God’s Perfect Plan

Jasmine Jones

John the Baptist reveals the call for preparation.

Illustration by Sandra Rilova

Read Luke 1:14-17

THERE’S SOMETHING about the idea of starting from zero that makes me want to run and hide. As a recovering perfectionist, I like a beautifully constructed plan that articulates all the ins and outs of how things are supposed to go. The thought of being the one to “pave the way” without a guide or rule book is a daunting prospect for me. Have you ever been there? Maybe you’ve been the one who was called to be the “first” in your family. The first to graduate from college; the first to move outside of your hometown; the first to become a Christian.

This is the position John the Baptist found himself in before he was even born. In Luke 1:17, we find the angel of the Lord proclaiming the pioneer that John would be: “And he will go on before the Lord, in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the parents to their children and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous—to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.” John was left with the honorable, and I’m sure unnerving, task of preparing people for Jesus, the promised Messiah. How’s that for paving the way?

And while I know that God equipped John with everything he needed before he was put on this earth, I can’t help but think about the weight and real human emotions that John might have felt and been burdened by. Was he afraid of making a wrong decision? Was he overwhelmed by the idea of authentically articulating who Jesus is? I can’t imagine starting at square one with no books on evangelism, no sinner’s prayer or sermon illustrations.

It’s easy for impostor syndrome to kick in when we look at “paving the way” through the lens of our own abilities. But the beautiful lesson we learn from the life of John the Baptist is that paving the way has nothing to do with our abilities, and everything to do with our availability to God’s call. Being an available vessel grants us the privilege of being in constant collaboration with the Spirit at work within us. And when we are operating from that place of collaboration, there’s no task or call too big for God to accomplish.

He used an old, unlikely couple and their baby as the vessel to spread the good news about the coming of the Savior of the world. Though it will inevitably look different in our own lives, it can be powerful to contemplate what God is inviting us personally to be a vessel for through the Advent season and beyond. It is clear through the lineage of Jesus that God delights in working through our imperfect, unlikely stories to shine his light and love … even if that means you’re one of the “firsts” in your sphere of influence to do so. As Christmas dawns and we consider the life of John the Baptist, paving the way for Jesus and his world-changing work, we can consider the invitation that God has bestowed upon our own lives, and whether we will accept it. It may be that there is a host of people you’re paving the way for.

Jasmine Jones is a mentor and connector, passionate about empowering others to boldly live out their faith through her online community, The Purpose Corner.

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Church Life

The Song of Mary Still Echoes Today

Rich Perez

How the Magnificat speaks to God’s care for the lowly.

Illustration by Sandra Rilova

Read Luke 1:46-55

THE CHRISTMAS STORY is full of surprising celebration, even in the midst of challenging circumstances. Spending time with Mary’s Magnificat brings a unique event to mind: Imagine a small team from Nicaragua reaching the Little League World Series, only for most parents to be unable to attend due to immigration hurdles. Yet, across six states, the Nicaraguan American community rallied, traveling to the games and offering a chorus of support in place of absent parents. This heartwarming display of solidarity that occurred in the summer of 2022 captures for me the essence of Mary’s response to God’s invitation in Luke 1.

Advent, a season of anticipation for Jesus’ arrival, also compels us to examine the backdrop: a world of darkness, poverty, and desperation. Mary and Joseph find themselves on the run, seeking refuge for the birth of their child. Yet, amid the shadows, light arrives and beckons us to embrace its warmth.

The core message? God’s promises often blossom in the most improbable circumstances. Luke 1 paints a vivid picture: The angel Gabriel announces Mary’s pregnancy, and instead of succumbing to fear, Mary bursts into song. Her song isn’t a plea, but a declaration of faith, a melody brimming with comfort for us.

Mary’s song, particularly verse 48, reveals the cornerstone of her faith: “He has been mindful of the humble state of his servant.” The phrase “humble state” signifies poverty, insignificance, and captivity. Mary recognizes her reality as a marginalized woman in a society that often disregarded women and ostracized the poor.

This scene plays out in the marginalized communities today—immigrants, people of color, those struggling on the fringes. Yet, Mary’s song transcends circumstance. It whispers hope, reminding us that God isn’t a distant god, but one who sees us right where we are.

Mary’s song echoes another unlikely heroine—Hannah, an elderly, barren woman ostracized for her childlessness. Yet, God remembered her (1 Sam. 1:19). Hannah’s song, defying the social norms of her time, finds a new voice in Mary. This connection isn’t accidental. Luke draws the connection between these remarkable women, reminding us that God’s favor often rests on those deemed insignificant.

Think of unlikely mothers throughout history—Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel—who birthed pivotal figures in God’s plan. God chooses the seemingly barren, the overlooked, to showcase his power. His promises flourish in the soil of impossibility.

Mary concludes her Magnificat with a powerful declaration: “He has helped his servant Israel, remembering his mercy to Abraham and his descendants forever” (Luke 1:54–55, CSB). This is a testament to God’s unwavering faithfulness. He keeps his promises, fulfilling the prophecy whispered in Genesis 3:15 and the covenant established with Abraham in Genesis 12:3.

The celebration of Jesus’ birth isn’t just about God’s faithfulness, it’s about the fulfillment of our deepest yearning—a Savior who redeems us.

Mary’s encounter with God compels us to action. True gospel enjoyment means solidarity with the margins from which it came. Jesus didn’t just offer salvation; he walked with the ostracized, the hurting.

In moments of doubt, confusion, or despair, the most potent act of faith is to stand with someone else, witnessing the birth of their promise. Just as Mary journeyed to support Elizabeth, we are called to create a community of support, a chorus of encouragement for those on their own difficult journeys. May we, like Mary, find solace in God’s presence. May we seek him in the faces of loved ones and strangers alike. May our hearts burn with the warmth of his love, a beacon of hope in a world yearning for light.

Rich Perez served as a pastor and public speaker for 20 years. Today, he is a filmmaker, crafting narratives for brands and organizations.

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Church Life

The Unexpected Fruit of Barrenness

Alicia Hamilton

How the kingdom of God delights in grand reversals.

Illustration by Sandra Rilova

Read Luke 1:39-45

I SAT ON THE COUCH AND WEPT, still dressed in stiff business casual. I had returned home from the classroom with the realization like a cold stone in my gut—I was not healthy enough to be a teacher. I could not finish my master’s program. I could not spend the hours or energy required to do this one thing I thought God had been leading me toward my whole life. This garden I planted and tended since my childhood, just now springing up, was to die.

So, I gave it up. There was nothing to be done but pray that God would do something beautiful in the uprootedness of it all. I stood in the middle of dead dreams, unsure how—or what—to replant.

While in vastly different times and with different implications, I find a resonance in the story of Jesus’ lineage and the way Elizabeth made her home in the wreckage of her uprooted dream. Her pain of a lost dream was compounded by the dishonor that barrenness brought in the ancient Near East. But in a moment, God reversed her story. “The Lord has done this for me,” she proclaimed. “In these days he has shown his favor and taken away my disgrace among the people” (Luke 1:25). Here was hope, growing soft and green in the darkness of the soil, as surprising as spring. God specializes in epic reversals. Elizabeth would bear not just any son in her old age—she was carrying the child who would prepare the way for the Messiah.

I was still on that couch with crumpled tissues clenched in trembling hands when a wise man, now my husband, helped me sort out what was still growing in the garden: those seeds planted by the hand of God that I had missed. Years later, I’m harvesting different fruit than I thought I would—but it’s better fruit. I consider this my own mini-reversal. God took a dream I thought had been rendered useless and flipped it into a reality of teaching through writing and discipleship, things that fit the contours of my heart better than a classroom could. I’ve made my home in this garden, and I can’t imagine it any other way.

God’s reversals fill the pages of Scripture. Consider the birth of Isaac to an elderly and once seemingly barren Abram and Sarai, Joseph’s rise from slave to ruler, or the way Haman’s plan to destroy the Jews was foiled by two Jews God lifted to positions of power in their place of exile. These stories speak to the way God delights in flipping situations upside down, bringing salvation in the most surprising ways.

All of these foreshadow the most surprising reversal of all. God was born as a baby to usher in the upside-down kingdom of heaven where the last are first. He defeated death and rose from his garden grave as the firstborn in the resurrection, purchasing our eternal life.

This ultimate reversal that flipped the principalities and powers upside down is what Elizabeth’s reversal first points to. Having a child meant that she would no longer be called barren, undoing her earthly shame. But the baby Mary carried would undo Elizabeth’s eternal shame. When Mary’s greeting reached Elizabeth’s ears, “the baby leaped inside her, and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit. Then she exclaimed with a loud cry, ‘Blessed are you among women, and your child will be blessed!’” (Luke 1:41–42, CSB). Elizabeth’s awe of God swelled as the Savior of the world, still in a womb, came through her door in the swollen belly of a virgin. The baby in Elizabeth’s womb leaped, like hope springing up, because Mary’s baby had arrived to save us.

This God is leading us home to the new heaven and earth, a beautiful garden city where death is no more. And until then, he is planting new life in you and me. Our God gives us something better than our earthly dreams. He gives us himself.

Alicia Hamilton authors Bible studies and disciples college students in New Hampshire.

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Church Life

The Surprising Arrival of a Servant

Jonathan Chan

Jesus’ introduction of justice through gentleness.

Illustration by Sandra Rilova

Read Isaiah 42:1-4

MAN OF SORROWS, lamb led to the slaughter. At the time of their recording in Isaiah 53, there was every possibility that these monikers would remain purely abstract. The Israel addressed in Isaiah is to face judgment, exile, and restoration under Assyrian captivity and Babylonian invasion. To a people under duress, Isaiah’s prophecies helped endow a messianic imagination and a vision of a salvific figure.

But the first suggestion that this figure would not take on the form of a military revolutionary, as some might have hoped, lies in the word servant, from the Hebrew word ebed, used throughout Scripture to variously connote a slave, a vassal king, a subject, and a tributary nation. The word foretells a chosen servant who receives the delight of the Lord and the Spirit, and who brings long-awaited justice to the nations.

Meekness, humility, and modesty characterize Christ from the start, who came into this world as flesh and blood, as an infant in full vulnerability. He is close to the hearts of all those who suffer, including those who face the physical corrosion and psychological turmoil of poverty, disaster, and war. Christ was born into a world that had sought to destroy his infant flesh; the slaughter of the Holy Innocents under Herod’s heinous regime is evidence enough of this earthly brokenness. It is, as the poet Czesław Miłosz describes in his poem “Theodicy,” a world that “lies in iniquity,” where “there is pain, and the undeserved torture of creatures.” It is a world to which the servant described by Isaiah must bring justice.

Yet this justice is to come through an exquisite tenderness, a strength that lies precisely in gentleness. A reed that is bruised is so frail as to snap at the slightest touch, yet this servant shall not break it. A wick that burns faintly is close to being snuffed, yet this servant shall fan it back into flame. It is Christ who sees possibility and hope for the bruised, for the weary, for the exhausted.

Theologian Eugene Peterson once explained in Eat This Book that a metaphor is “a word that bears a meaning beyond its naming function; the ‘beyond’ extends and brightens our comprehension rather than confusing it.” The metaphors of the reed and the wick help to illuminate an understanding of human difficulty; the actions taken by the servant illustrate how Christ tends to the lowly. It is, as Dane Ortlund describes in Gentle and Lowly, Christ’s most natural instinct to move toward sin and suffering.

This is the Messiah for whom the world waited amid the silence of God—the one we commemorate in the season of Advent, in which each day is suffused with the dark mystery of anticipation.

At the heart of faith is a contradiction: a Savior born to die, an infant whose being prefaces a demise by the cruelest of tortures. Even under such indescribable physical, emotional, and mental duress, this servant will become neither faint nor discouraged. Justice will roll over the earth, not just from the jagged deserts familiar to the lands of ancient Jerusalem but beyond, to the distant coastlands that reach the waters.

It is a victory, a realization of justice that is achieved by servanthood, an obedience to the point of death (Phil. 2:8). It is an example of William Langland’s Pacientes vincunt—the patient are victorious, or perhaps, those who suffer shall win. Or as the imagined voice of Christ cries out in Shūsaku Endō’s novel Silence, “It was to be trampled on by men that I was born into this world. It was to share men’s pain that I carried my cross.”

Christ comes into the world as an infant, growing in the obedience and servanthood for which he has been called. Advent brings this swell of anticipation—a cradling of hope—for the arrival of the Savior, by whom justice will be established on earth through the humility of servanthood.

Jonathan Chan is a writer and editor. Born in New York, he was raised in Singapore and educated at Cambridge and Yale.

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Church Life

After Disaster, God Draws Near

Aaron Cline Hanbury

How Jeremiah’s prophecy points to Advent’s promise.

Illustration by Sandra Rilova

Read Jeremiah 31:31–34

THE PROPHET JEREMIAH writes from a social, political, and spiritual landscape cramped and dark, like falling into a pit, humid and heavy with the weight of regret. His words, the message from God, match the tone. Read any part of Jeremiah’s prophecy and you’ll see the theme: the failure of God’s people. They couldn’t keep their part of the covenant God made with them, and the young prophet delivers God’s response with unflinching force. Right in the beginning, Jeremiah’s earliest vision establishes what will follow: “From the north disaster will be poured out on all who live in the land” (Jer. 1:14).

Like Moses before him, Jeremiah initially protests the work God has called him to do, proposing his age as a disqualifier (Jer. 1:6). By traditional accounts, Jeremiah heard the call from God around 627 BC, which makes him something like 20 years old when the book opens. For 40 years, he continues warning of a disaster from the north.

Not unlike the time of the judges, God’s people are once again caught in a vicious, self-induced spiral of breaking their commitments to God and seeking vindication and consolation anywhere and everywhere else. Jeremiah delivers news of God’s wrath, and he prophesies about the ways God will respond to the people’s unfaithfulness.

The disaster arrives in 587 BC as Babylon destroys Jerusalem, bringing swift destruction to what had been eroding for centuries. Like a flood, the prophesied pouring-out wipes out God’s dwelling place in the land of Israel—an undoing of creation.

You could fairly assume that for a person like Jeremiah—an Israelite from Benjamin’s tribe—these were times more dire than what we see in Judges. That was before David, before the temple. With the breaking of Jerusalem, David’s kingdom washed away in a flood of Babylonian destruction. Jeremiah occupies this undone space.

Jeremiah hears from God not to take a wife or have children. At this point in history and within this Israelite culture, you’ll find no category for a single, childless man. One Old Testament scholar, Joel R. Soza, even suggests that the concept of a bachelor is so incomprehensible that there exists no word in the Hebrew language to describe it. The idea is that Jeremiah doesn’t just carry news of Israel’s tragedy, he not only occupies that place, but he actually embodies the undoneness of it all. Something laden with potential, now barren.

Jeremiah 31 is a common reading in the Christmas season. The familiarity of the passage might mean we miss the force of its words, and that this message of a new hope passed through chapped lips. Sometimes, those of us on this side of history merely nod at parts of the old stories with which we’d do better to sit. That’s part of the waiting period, of Advent.

This is the prophet who inhabits an unfaithful land, who delivers God’s harshest judgments, who feels them, and who endures long enough to say these words:

“The days are coming,’ declares the Lord, ‘when I will make a new covenant with the people of Israel.’” (Jer. 31:31)

Jeremiah tells a shattered people that, one day, God will again draw near. And this time, his ways will be written on hearts and he will be known beyond instruction. He will forgive and will establish a new covenant, one freed from the actions and inactions of men, one that begins a return to peace and fruitfulness, to Eden. Though dim still, it brightens.

Aaron Cline Hanbury is a writer and editor.

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Church Life

When You’re Ready for Jesus to Return

Karen Stiller

The weariness of trial reveals our priorities.

Illustration by Sandra Rilova

Read Haggai 2:6-9

THERE WAS A MOMENT, in the aftermath of my husband’s premature death, when I thought about Jesus coming back and longed for his return with an urgency I had never before experienced. I always knew we were supposed to long for the return of our King—a kind of obligation of anticipation. But I confess I had previously liked my life too much.

But now, I wanted him to stop all the delays. I imagined the moment arriving and seeing Jesus and thinking, Yes, yes, there you are. Fantastic! And then pushing past him as quickly as politely possible to search for my husband. (Is this what it will be like? A busy airport arrival lounge?)

I imagined throwing myself into his arms once again. (Dear God, please let it be a little bit like that.) I have never known such longing. And I know that this reveals my longings to be out of order. Of course they are. I feel a bit badly about this, but I can confess it to the God who knows us, and who I have discovered made us more resilient than we know and capable of so much love that the vastness of this love’s loss causes grief to feel like an ocean.

Advent isn’t normally about feeling badly about ourselves or our lives. That’s Lent’s job—the party pooper of the Christian liturgical year. Advent is more like that event planner friend who is cooking up a great feast and making all kinds of fantastic plans for the next month. We wait. We mark off days on the calendar. We are impatient as we prepare.

Enter Haggai. His name even means “festival,” so he’s perfect for Advent. He’s also just what the returned exiles of 520 BC needed to get them moving on their temple rebuilding project, which they had been neglecting. The temple had fallen into disrepair during their forced absence. There was government pressure to leave the temple in ruins, and the people had been focusing their efforts on their own houses rather than the work of rebuilding God’s house.

Haggai hears the call to speak into the lives of God’s people. He stirs himself for the task and stirs the pot, prophetically speaking. He urges the people into action. They come to see their priorities have been misaligned and their longings have been in the wrong order. They find their courage. They start to rebuild and repair the temple.

“Work, for I am with you,” says the Lord (2:4). I wonder if there’s a moment in the life of a prophet like Haggai, when they see that the message God gave them to deliver has both landed—hit the mark almost exactly—and they experience a moment of pleasure. A job well done. That is a fine thing to consider.

The sun came up for Haggai and his work crew, and it comes up now for us, each day as the morning turns to afternoon and we turn to work and toil. We sweep. We tidy. We build new temples and patch up the old ones. There is garbage to be taken out and fresh flowers to be put in vases. There is holiness to be seen to, and lived out of and toward, as much as we can muster, while we wait.

And what about our hearts that long? They can also be an offering. Our longings will all be swept up in joy that might feel even more vast than the ocean that grief becomes. We believe, and we wait.

We are in the afternoon of the most promising of days. So much more is to come. “I will shake all nations, and what is desired by all nations will come, and I will fill this house with glory,” says the Lord Almighty (2:7). Come, Lord Jesus. Come.

Karen Stiller is author of Holiness Here, The Minister’s Wife, and other books about the church.

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