The ESV Global Study Bible

It has been a lot of fun working with Christian leaders from all over the world along with my dear colleagues here at my favorite publishing house to create the Global Study Bible, available October 31. If I could assess it objectively (which I can't), I'd say this is a unique, category-defying resource for the worldwide church.

You plop down pretty much anywhere in the Psalms and find a call for the nations to know and rejoice in Yahweh. That call fuels this project.

We created an all-new set of essays in the back by church leaders from around the world--Conrad Mbewe in Zambia, James Kombo in Kenya, Michael Oh in Japan, In Whan Kim in South Korea, Ajith Fernando in Sri Lanka, Ben Intan in Indonesia, Chee-Chiew Lee in Singapore, and others. One of the most strategic elements of this Bible is a two-page spread for each Bible book, written by international Bible scholars, explaining the global message of that book of the Bible. The GSB also adapts the study notes of the ESV Study Bible, lightly reworked for a global audience. And of course maps, charts, etc. And it will all be available in digital format for those who prefer to utilize the content that way.

That's content. The other thing is cost. We want this Bible to be as widely accessible as we can possibly make it. For that reason we created a paperback edition for $19.99. A study Bible for twenty bucks. You kidding me? We are also launching a Buy One, Give One campaign that will help send the content in the GSB to many people in the neediest parts of the world, at no cost to them.

Here's the website for the GSB. And here's a video Crossway produced with Francis Chan introducing it. Francis articulates our own heart for this resource exactly.

That's What the Promise Is For

Waiting

The Psychology of Resentment

Are you resentful? 

You need not experience extraordinary suffering or be wronged in an unusually grievous way to feel the strong, seemingly unstoppable pull toward resentment. All you need to do is live a little in this fallen world. Before long you're given a good solid reason to resent someone. Often someone quite close to you. Family member, spouse, parent, long-time friend, etc. It feels impossible to love that person.

What causes such bitterness? Why are our hearts so immovably deadened toward that person?

Well, they wronged you, so you resent them. They hurt you. They did what they should never have done. Or didn’t do what they should have done. And you bear the wounds.

Yes—but what’s the reason beneath the reason?

The fundamental reason is your God-given sense of justice—itself a good thing. You have been wronged, and you, created in God’s image and therefore with a rightly functioning sense of justice, of fairness, cry out that justice be done. The playing field must be leveled. Fairness demands it.

The trouble is that as a law-abiding citizen you know you can’t do something physically to them, as you may wish to (let’s just be honest here shall we?). And as a Christian you know you can’t verbally or publicly do something to them (perhaps simply because you would rather keep your reputation and leave them alone than exact revenge and lose your reputation; the greater idol outweighs the lesser).

So what happens? Where does a gospel-vacuous heart go in such a case? Here is what happens: instead of doing something externally to harm them you do something internally to harm them. You harbor bitterness. This is the psychology of resentment. You exercise emotional punishment toward them internally when actual punishment can’t be exercised externally. You set up a law-court in your heart since an actual law-court is unfeasible.

But here’s what happens. The bitterness you harbor, the emotional punishment you exact in your heart, has precisely the opposite effect, over time, than you think. Bitterness does nothing to the offender, while it quietly destroys the offended. Resentment kills, hollows out, the resenter, not the resented.

How then do we conquer bitterness?

By soaking in two realities.

One, God is the judge. He has a law court. A real law-court. And one day every person on the face of the earth who is not in Christ will be the defendant. The Bible even says that Christians one day will themselves assist God in judging the world, even judging the angels (1 Cor 6:2–3). Eventual fairness, justice, righting of wrongs, is gloriously inevitable. Your day of judging your offender is coming. But it is not today. You will take up the gavel. Just not today. If you seek to exact premature judgment, you destroy yourself.

Two, and most crucially, you yourself have offended God. And continue to offend him, in a hundred ways you are conscious of and a thousand you are not, every day. But he didn’t harbor bitterness against you. He didn’t resent you. He sent his Son for you. God decided to lay down every reason to resent you. Having been forgiven this, how in the world could we resent another?

Here's C. S. Lewis, 'On Forgiveness'--

To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable, because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you. This is hard. It is perhaps not so hard to forgive a single person great injury. But to forgive the incessant provocations of daily life--to keep on forgiving the bossy mother-in-law, the bullying husband, the nagging wife, the selfish daughter, the deceitful son--how can we do it? Only, I think, by remembering where we stand, by meaning our words when we say our prayers each night 'forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those that trespass against us.' We are offered forgiveness on no other terms. To refuse is to refuse God's mercy for ourselves.

Was C. S. Lewis a Calvinist?