We are called to love the Lord with all of our heart, soul, mind, strength. And my prayer is that the Beholding Christ book and Bible will help readers to do just that. I’m praying that as this resource brings out something organic from every passage that enables us to see the person and work of Christ, our need for Christ, the blessings we have in Christ, that beholding him day by day, perhaps in ways we haven’t seen before will cause our hearts to beat with greater love for Christ.

I pray that will generate greater allegiance and commitment to Christ in the souls of those who work through it.

I think a lot of people seek to read through the Bible and check off that they have read the passage, but have no real sense of what is happening in the passage—they don’t understand why characters are saying or doing what they say or do, they’re unfamiliar with the significance of people, names, places, certain cultural conventions, implications of the time of year. They find it challenging to grasp why the Bible includes certain events and details and why it ignores other things completely. They find it challenging to

trace the arguments being made by bible writers and to grasp unfamiliar genres of literature. The Bible is clear in its central message, but it is not simplistic. It does demand things of us as readers. This is where loving the Lord with our mind comes in. Over the course of our lives we want to grow in understanding what we’re reading. We want to make fresh discoveries and have a deepening sense that we are really getting what the human author and the divine author intends for us to know and understand.

Finally we want to love the Lord with all our strength. I think in this world of so many distractions, so many screens, we have to be determined if we’re going to devote ourselves to taking the time and giving our attention to God’s word. We often start out with good intensions to read through the whole of this book that we say is the most important book in our lives, but somewhere along the way give up because we’re struggling to understand and engage with what we’re reading. My prayer is that what I’m providing in the Beholding Christ book and Bible will make the time readers spend reading the introductions and then in the text profitable and fruitful, strengthening their love and commitment to Christ. I pray that it will increase not only their understanding as they go but increase their joy so that as they work their way through it, they will be strengthened to persevere.

Beholding Christ

A Daily Guide to Seeing Jesus in All of Scripture

In Beholding Christ, Nancy Guthrie provides 365 daily reading introductions. Each day’s reading is designed to be read before you read or listen to that day’s passage of Scripture, to provide insight that will aid your understanding of how that passage fits into the larger storyline and message of the Bible. It will also help you to see the person and work of Christ shadowed or shown in every day’s passage. Each day begins with a statement about Christ that arises organically from that passage, though it may not be immediately on the surface, and ends with several hints of what to look or listen for while reading as well as encouragements in how to respond in prayer, personal examination, meditation, and worship.

Beholding Christ is available as a stand-alone book that includes the 365 daily reading introduction. It is also available as the ESV Beholding Christ Bible in which the same 365 reading introductions are interspersed with the ESV text. The Bible also includes fresh introductions for each book of the Bible that focus on how to behold Christ in that book.