Devotion is actually driven and enhanced by doctrine, and I personally don't think it would be enormously helpful to us to have a long series of devotionals that simply left us feeling better about ourselves. As we approach the end of 2024 and look to the year ahead, many of us are considering questions like, what Bible reading plan will I use in the new year? What devotional will I read? And today, on this special edition of Renewing Your Mind, you'll hear highlights from a conversation I had with Sinclair Ferguson about his popular devotional podcast, Things Unseen, and I'm pleased to announce that Dr. Ferguson's year-long podcast is now available as a hardcover book.
Things Unseen with Sinclair B. Ferguson launched in 2023. Five days a week for a full year, he shared brief, thoughtful reflections on the Christian life. You can follow the podcast by searching for Things Unseen wherever you listen to podcasts. And to further help you to look not to the things that are seen, but to the things that are unseen, this podcast is now available as a hardcover devotional. If you'd like a copy for your devotional reading in 2025, you can request this brand new resource when you give a year-end gift of any amount at renewingyourmind.org or when you call us at 800-435-4343.
This is a one-day only offer, so be quick. When Things Unseen first launched in 2023, I had the opportunity to sit down with Dr. Ferguson and ask him about the name of the podcast and his heart behind this daily devotional. Essentially what I've done as I've begun to prepare these podcasts is to try to take a theme for each week that will enable us to follow through an idea for five days, just for a few minutes every day, and I think hopefully give us pause moments in our lives that we can focus our attention on the things that are unseen that you'll remember Paul says in 2 Corinthians chapter 4.
These are the things that are eternal. And I imagine many listeners will probably be like me. I have a relatively short attention span.
I'm very easily distracted. There are many voices that call for our time and our attention, so much so I think that for some of us it's actually quite difficult to sit down for five or six minutes and to think in spiritual ways. And when that's true of us, I think it's often helpful for us to be drawn to think by what someone else is either writing, or for many of us who prefer, to listen to a voice that's speaking to us about spiritual things and pointing us through all the other voices to the voice of God Himself in His Word. And so that's really my hope for the podcast, but it will be a journey for me to make my way through a whole year reflecting on different aspects of the Christian life, and I hope at least that some people will subscribe to the podcast and follow through the whole year with me. So that's the background from my point of view to the podcast, and I'm very appreciative of the opportunity to do it. If you have not heard Things Unseen yet, here's a preview of an early episode to help reorient our thinking for the new year and the habit of making resolutions.
I was a small boy in Scotland. Each New Year's Eve, Hugman A, as we called it, my parents would tell me to go into my room and write out ten New Year's resolutions for the year to come. I laugh now looking back when I remember how hard I thought it was to find ten ways in which I needed to improve.
I could write them out much more easily today, I suspect. But you know, if you are a Christian, you really need only one New Year resolution, and Paul's will be a great help to you, especially if you're a younger Christian or a younger person, a teenager, or perhaps a student. Few things can be more helpful to you than to understand that this is the way to both simplify and integrate your life.
This is what will give you direction. This is what will help you answer the great question, what am I really for? As one of the older translations puts it, all I care for is to know Christ and the power of His resurrection, to share the fellowship of His sufferings and be made like Him, that one day I may attain to the resurrection.
What a great New Year resolution. This one thing I do, I want to know Christ. That was Sinclair Ferguson from his devotional podcast, Things Unseen, and this is a special episode of Renewing Your Mind as we announce the release of Things Unseen, the hardcover book.
And today only you can request your copy with a donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org. After hearing the preview of that episode, I asked Dr. Ferguson, what does it look like for a Christian to pursue knowing Christ more? Well, I think I probably could put it under two headings, Nathan. The first would be that the way we all get to know Christ is through our reading and study, meditation on the one book in which Christ makes Himself known, namely the Scriptures. So, there is actually no substitute for us than soaking ourselves in the pages of Scripture. And I must say increasingly, I think I've felt how important it is if we're to know Christ, to get to know the Gospels really well. So, I think a great thing for all of us to do would be to pick one of the four Gospels and to say to ourselves, well, I'm going to find some way of reading and rereading and rereading this Gospel.
Because to me, what the author of Hebrews says in Hebrews chapter 13 is a great key to our knowing Christ. Remember when he says that Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever. And I find myself quite often saying we mustn't think that that's just a clever way of saying Jesus is eternal. What the author is saying is that the way Jesus was in what the author of Hebrews calls the days of His flesh, that is the way Jesus was as He's described in the Gospels. He still is today.
That's what He was like in the authors yesterday. And He's saying Jesus is still the same today. And so, we need to get to know Him as we read through the Gospels. And then, of course, the rest of the New Testament and the rest of the Bible helps us to put that in a picture frame and to understand the significance of what we read in the Gospels. So, the whole Bible is important, but I think it would be very helpful for us if we took a focus, in addition to all the other Bible reading we might do, on one of the Gospels to get to know the person of the Lord Jesus there. I think often as Christians, we really develop our taste for Christian doctrine. And I think it's always important to remember that Christian doctrine, in a sense, is just giving us Velcro strips in our thinking to help us to understand who the Jesus of the Gospels really is.
So, that's the first thing. Knowing Christ is personal knowledge of Christ, and we get to know Christ as we become familiar with who He is in the Gospels, because that's who He is for us also today. And then the second thing I think I found this helpful, really from my teenage years, is to think of everything I do as just another way of getting to know Christ. So, you know, I often think about our younger people today that the voices that call for their attention seem to be a multiple of the voices that called for my attention when I was a teenager. But even so, when I was a teenager, somehow or another, I happened on this principle in Paul in Philippians 3, this one thing I do. And I began to realize, instead of all the different things that I did, for example, I was a student and I studied. For example, I had friends and I spent time with them.
For example, in those days, I was a relatively good golfer and I played golf competitively. And these were just some of the many things that I did, like any other teenager. But then to think that each of these things and everything that happened in them would be another way in which the Lord Jesus Christ was teaching me about Himself and training me, almost taking me by the hand and saying, now, this is happening in your life just now. I want you to know me better as a result of this. I want you to know me better because of what I'm doing here, because of how I'm challenging you to be a witness here, because of how I'm putting learning before you that will enable you to grow to be a more useful servant of mine in the future. And so, seeing everything through this lens, this single lens, that in all of life, our great goal is to know Christ better, I think, to me, wonderfully simplifies life. At times, life can become tremendously complex and sometimes very, very complicated.
And we can't see our way through or work out our situation. But when we reflect on the fact that in every situation, the Lord is saying, this is in your life so that you can get to know me better, then in a way, I think that helps us to walk steadily through the difficulties as well as through the joys and grow in grace. And when we do that, then it happens, as the Lord Jesus Himself said, that the more we get to obey Him, the more we get to know Him, the more we come to love Him, the more we discover about Him. And these are two things then that I think are really helpful to any Christian who wants to pursue the knowledge of Christ. Things Unseen is unlike many devotionals that are available in Christian bookstores today.
And that's why I asked Dr. Ferguson, what makes Things Unseen different and why? Well, there is a reason for that. And it's both a personal reason and also, I think, a reason that very much harmonizes with the heartbeat of Ligonier Ministries and certainly with the heartbeat of Dr. Sproul. And that is that devotion is actually driven and enhanced by doctrine. And if we don't grasp that principle, then especially in our own time, I think we tend to become so much flotsam and jetsam on a kind of sea of subjectivity. And the important thing, and I guess this is maybe what you're driving at, the important thing for us is that a devotional should make us feel better, when I think really the purpose of a devotional is to help us to think better, to think more clearly, and as a result of that, to be able to live more clearly.
And especially in a world where, for example, recently in the United Kingdom, I think as the result of a recent census for the first time since they started taking these censuses, apparently less than 50% of British people say that they're Christian. And I personally don't think it would be enormously helpful to us to have a long series of devotionals that simply left us feeling better about ourselves. What we need most of all is for our thinking and our living to be re-centered in God, because that is what will make a difference to our characters. And very often, I think where we are and where we live, it's the kind of character that the Spirit of God produces in us that will make us stand out and I think will cause people to reflect, even if they say they do not like what we believe or even if they hate what we believe, they cannot deny that there is something very different and something actually very right about the way we live and about the way we have family life and about the way we have church. So I have not been thinking about helping people to feel warm and fuzzy, but I do hope there will be days when, like the two disciples at the end of their adventurous walk with the Lord Jesus, that people will be able to listen and on different days for different people may be able to say, you know, my heart was burning within me when I heard about these things. You're listening to Renewing Your Mind, and today you're hearing highlights from a conversation I had with Sinclair Ferguson when we launched his devotional podcast Things Unseen.
And we're featuring this conversation because just in time for 2025, Things Unseen is now a hardcover book and can become part of your daily reading when you request a copy at renewingyourmind.org. Dr. Ferguson said earlier that devotion is enhanced by doctrine. So I asked him, why do some Christians seek to shortcut the diligent study of scripture and theology and instead prefer to search for that still small voice? Here's how he responded.
I think maybe there are several reasons, Nathan. One is that that idea, I think, has been pretty deeply embedded in the evangelical culture over the last, at least the last couple of centuries, in the 19th century and right through the 20th century, that it was, if I can put it this way, it was what happened inside you that was more real and more spiritual than anything that happened outside you. Now actually, if you go back in history, you find that happening right since the time of the Reformation. John Calvin actually wrote an entire book about the problems he felt there were with people in the church who said, now the really important thing is not so much your study of scripture, but what the Spirit says to you. And the fundamental problem with that is that the scriptures themselves make it clear that the way in which the Spirit speaks to us is through the scriptures. And I think one of the things we discover, and I suppose I have often thought about this in terms of Jesus teaching in the upper room in the Farewell Discourse, one of the things that we discover in Jesus teaching is that a very important reason He actually called the apostles and set them apart was to give the church the New Testament. And He says very explicitly, doesn't He, that when the Spirit comes, He will lead the apostles into all truth.
And the important thing to remember there is He wasn't speaking to anybody else. I mean, I've been struck by the number of people who pick up that verse and think Jesus is speaking to them there, but He was speaking only to the apostles. And therefore, the way we are led into all truth is not by the Spirit giving each of us new revelation.
If that were the case, we would each end up writing our own Bibles. The way He leads us into truth is through the truth into which He led the apostles. And it's in that context that Jesus also says that when the Spirit comes, He would remind the apostles of everything that He, Jesus, said. He would show them things that were still to come, and He would lead them into the truth that is into a true understanding of the things that He was revealing to them. And I've often thought and sometimes said, that's about as good a description of the New Testament as you'll find anywhere. The Gospels are the things that Jesus did and said. Most of the rest of the New Testament leads us into a full understanding of who He is and the meaning of what He did. And there are parts of the New Testament that point us to the things that are still to come. So it's actually embedded in biblical Christianity that our one access point to the knowledge of God and to the knowledge of God's will is to be found in the Scriptures and in learning to apply them to the different circumstances of our daily lives. But in the evangelical tradition, even since the time of the Reformation, there's always been this tendency to think that the subjective is more important than the objective.
Then added to that, there is this reason that actually that's easier, isn't it? It doesn't take a lot of discipline to think that God is speaking to you directly from heaven. The only problem is, how do you distinguish the voice of God from the voice of the devil, or from your own voice and your own desires? Studying the Bible is a lifelong process. I was at a Thanksgiving service for an elderly Christian lady who, with her husband, was very kind to me when I was a young student.
She was in her 90s. And my friend Ian Hamilton, who was conducting the service, said that she had said to him recently that one of the things she regretted was she didn't know her Bible better. And I feel that very much indeed myself. I wish I knew my Bible better, because the better you know it, the more sensitive you become to what God wants you to do in every given situation. I think in this way, John Newton uses a lovely illustration. He says, you know, learning to live according to God's will is a bit like somebody learning to play the piano. There's the score and you go over it again and again and again and again until eventually the music becomes part of you.
And when the music becomes part of you, that's when you're able to play it best. And I think the same is true of Scripture. A third thing that I think is worth saying that often people don't notice is that when you depend on God's immediate revelation to you, that almost certainly is going to take priority in your life over what God says to you in His Word.
And again and again, I think in church history and in things I've observed myself, I've seen that in people's lives. So these are reasons for us to give ourselves to the study of God's Word and to do it the way it seems to me the Lord Jesus did. Morning by morning, says the servant in Isaiah.
And ultimately, of course, the servant is the Lord Jesus. Morning by morning, he wakens my ear to hear as those who are taught. And then the passage goes on, doesn't it, to explain that's why he, Jesus, was able to speak so well to others. And I think of that as one of the best descriptions in the Bible of what it means to open the Bible and to pray, Lord, open my ear so that I may hear your voice speaking to me as a father speaking to his son in this living Word. And then as I listen, as I take it in, as it becomes part of me, then I'm going to be surely more and more useful in your service, whatever your calling on my life happens to be. To give Dr. Fergusson the last word, I asked him what he would say to someone considering following the Things Unseen podcast, and I believe he'd give the same answer regarding his new book.
I think what I would say is that when I've been preparing podcast after podcast, I've been talking really to myself and to one other person. And I hope that that one other person will multiply and that we'll become a kind of community who go through the year, yes, as individuals, but as individuals who are listening to the same truth from the same Word of God and putting it into application in our daily lives in a thousand, maybe a hundred thousand different ways so that as individuals, we'll be getting to know Christ better by doing this one thing. But that one thing that we're doing, that each of us is doing in our lives, getting to know Christ better, will be multiplied in many different parts of the world.
I hope it will be a blessing to many other Christians and to some who are not yet Christians too. We've heard from many of you that Things Unseen has been a blessing, and we're thankful that along with Renewing Your Mind, Things Unseen has become a daily listen for Christians around the world. This is the Friday edition of Renewing Your Mind.
I'm your host, Nathan W. Bingham. I encourage you to follow the Things Unseen podcast wherever you listen to podcasts. Episodes are available Monday through Friday, with each episode providing devotional reflections on the Christian life.
And this month, just in time for 2025, Things Unseen has been published as a hardcover book. You can request your copy when you give a year-end donation of any amount in support of Renewing Your Mind and Ligonier Ministries at renewingyourmind.org, or when you call us at 800 435 4343. Each daily meditation on the Christian life in this new hardcover volume brings Sinclair Ferguson's signature warmth and wisdom. We would love to send you a copy as our way of saying thank you for supporting the broadcasting, podcasting, and global outreach of Ligonier Ministries. Use the link in the podcast show notes or visit renewingyourmind.org today. But be quick, as this one-day offer ends at midnight. The Apostle Paul describes the fruit of the Spirit to the church in Galatia, and that's what R.C. Sproul will examine next week, beginning Monday, here on Renewing Your Mind.
