Every Believer’s Biography Is Every Believer’s Biography
A few years ago I started to get to know Will Dobbie. At the time, he pastored a church plant in a suburb of London. He has since moved with his family to the US to work with another church plant.
Will is a guy who can do a lot of different things: lead an army into battle, pastor a church, and play classical piano music. He can also write. That’s actually part of what connected us in the first place—his writing and a common friendship with another pastor.
A few days ago, Christian Focus published Will’s first book, From Everlasting to Everlasting: Every Believer’s Biography. The book is a 30-day devotional exploring God’s plan of salvation for every believer. I thought Will had a winning book idea when he first told me about the concept a few years ago. And he did.
Will was kind to ask me to write the foreword for the book. I’m sharing it below. We’d love for you to buy his book on Amazon.
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We lost my younger brother at the beach—just a toddler and learning to walk, he snuck away in a sea of people. Although I was his older brother, I was still too young to be either culpable for losing him or much help in finding him. Our family had just moved to England, where we would spend the next three years, and my mother wanted to take her sons on an outing to make memories adventuring in a new country. A couple of hours later, we found him holding the hand of an elderly woman as she walked up and down the beach looking for what she rightly assumed would be a frantic mother. That day my mother certainly made memories.
A similar incident happened to my family one summer at a water park, except this time I was the parent with the lost child—a father old enough to be more than culpable, yet still struggling to be any help in finding my daughter. She was only lost a dozen minutes or so, but it felt much longer. We found her near the lazy river.
I suspect most parents have a similar version of the same story, whether the child wandered off at a beach or amusement park, a sporting event or concert. Thankfully, almost all lost-child stories have happy endings that, in hindsight, parents can laugh about with their grown-up children.
As I read the Bible, I learn that not only does God save His people from their sins, but He also intends for Christians to understand their salvation: to understand that they were lost but now are found. Our practiced belief in God’s eternal plan to save us, to make us more like Him, and to one day make every wrong right, provides so much of a Christian’s peace and joy in a world full of angst. This is not to say that when we are confused about aspects of our salvation we are necessarily any less saved, but it is to say that when we lack understanding of the riches of God’s redemption, we will lack joy and, probably also, obedience.
This is why I was excited when Will first told me about his idea for a book that would trace the story of a believer’s redemption from beginning to end. Now that Will has finished the book, I’m only more excited. The Christian world needs devotional material with both warm-hearted prose and theologically rich truth, not simply one or the other. Will’s book From Everlasting to Everlasting has both.
As a pastor of a local church, I have another reason to long for others to read this book. In our day so many issues conspire to divide local churches that Christians need constant reminders of the one story that binds us irrevocably together. Just as a group of parents could share a meal together and bond as they tell each other stories of the common experience of losing and finding a child—the panic, the relief, the thanksgiving—so also I believe a church will bond together when we understand that every believer’s biography is indeed every believer’s biography.
In other words, I can, and should, preach to my church about the need for Christians to pursue the unity we already have in Christ, but my pleas for unity will accomplish little if, deep down, those in my church believe that which makes us different carries more weight than that which makes us the same. Biblically speaking, the opposite is true of Christians: the deep story of our sin and salvation, of Christ’s cross and consummation, carries more weight than our lesser identities in gender, ethnicity, or any social status. “How can I relate to her?” I might be tempted to think. “We have nothing in common.” Except that when we have Christ in common, we have everything in common. As Paul writes in Galatians, “For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:27–28). From Everlasting to Everlasting reminds us that Christians share common, gospel bedrock, a unity deeper and sturdier than mere affinities.
Your tour guide on this panorama of God’s salvation knows all this too. And he’s found a way to share it with you in thirty daily excursions through the vistas of our redemption. Some of the concepts Will writes about may be new to you, while you may have heard others many times before. Regardless, my prayer for you is that God would use these words to pour fresh peace and joy into your life—that you would know in your inmost being, as Paul writes in Ephesians, “what is the breadth and length and height and depth . . . [of] the love of Christ” (Eph. 3:18–19). I pray that this knowledge that we once were lost but now are found would bind us together, that we would unite over the common experience of the panic and the relief and the thanksgiving that comes when God washes our sins as white as snow.
Benjamin Vrbicek
Community Evangelical Free Church
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
* Photo by Xavier Mouton Photographie on Unsplash