Podcast: Gospel Amnesiacs Need Everyday Reminders (Paul Tripp)

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

Looking Back at a Celebrated Devotional and Ahead to a New One

In this episode, Paul Tripp talks about his new book Everyday Gospel, compares it to his book New Morning Mercies, and shares how he’s praying for God to use it in the hearts of those who read it.

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

• Ten Years of Gospel Impact
• The Everyday Gospel Devotional
• The ESV Everyday Gospel Bible
• Reading the Bible like an Archaeologist
• A Devotional Thought from Zechariah
• Is It Possible to Overemphasize the Gospel?
• Where Would We Be Without God’s Word?

01:00 - Ten Years of Gospel Impact

Matt Tully
Paul, thanks again for joining us on The Crossway Podcast today.

Paul Tripp
It’s my honor to do so. I love the times when we talk.

Matt Tully
Yes, absolutely. Today we’re going to talk about another new book that you’ve written for Crossway. But before we do that, I wanted to actually talk about an old book of yours—one that does have a connection to this new book. In 2014, ten years ago, you published New Morning Mercies, a 365 day devotional with Crossway. And because 2024 is this ten year anniversary of the book, I thought it could be appropriate to start there and just reflect back on the impact that New Morning Mercies has had. I was looking this morning, and it’s now sold over a million copies over the past ten years. As I say that number and as you think back about that book, I’m just curious to hear what you make of that. What do you make of that number of people who have gotten a copy of that book and read that book over these last ten years?

Paul Tripp
I have a couple of responses. I think one of the things I would like to say, and this is a mantra for us as a ministry, is every analytic of reach is a story of grace. Those numbers are a picture of God’s love for his people and his desire that his people know him and know his grace. I’m very aware that I just put words on a page and God has to do everything else. Publishers are not typically super excited about devotionals because so many of them come out and often they don’t do very well. And so I think the story of New Morning Mercies and its reach and the fact that it’s still going strong is an amazing picture of how much God loves his church. I always think that my success in writing is not for me; God gives me the ability to display his gospel for his people because he loves his people. And that’s what I think about this book. It’s amazing, and we really believe that the life of that devotional has just begun. So it’s exciting. Ten years. Wow.

Matt Tully
When you were writing New Morning Mercies, Paul, did you ever imagine it would have the impact it has or that it would take off like it did? What did you think you were creating when you were working on that book?

Paul Tripp
Well, to be honest, I wrote it for me. I wrote it because it’s so easy for me to become a gospel amnesiac—in the busyness of the situations and relationships of everyday life, to lose sense of who I am in Christ and what I’ve been given in Christ. And when you do that, you don’t live in light of the power of the grace of God for you, and you’re seduced by the world. And since I don’t want that to happen to me, I understand that I need the gospel every day of my life. So it was written for me. As I presented to Crossway, I surely had no idea that this book would have the reach that it has. I always think if two or three people are helped by a book and their life is transformed, it’s worth the writing. But this has had literally a global spread and global influence. I was at a conference maybe three weeks ago in Dallas and we asked how many people had read New Morning Mercies. There were 2,000 people in the audience, and I would say three quarters of the hands went up, which was amazing to me.

Matt Tully
When you were last here visiting us at Crossway, you and I had a little bit of time together and you shared some stories from people around the world who have read that book and just the impact and these little glimpses into how God has used the book—and really the gospel that you’re retelling in so many ways in that book—in people’s lives. Do any of those stories come to mind for you right now, and would you be able to share one or two examples?

Paul Tripp
Well, there’s a new one. I just spent some time with a young family whose twenty-year-old son was murdered in a random act of violence. He was just walking down the street. The father talked about how valuable in this experience for him, as a person walking with God, the devotional has been. And he said, being very honest, he said, “Sometimes I don’t anticipate the next page because you’re such a surgeon. You just get into my heart. But it’s just been such a valuable experience for me.” Now, there’s a dad facing the unthinkable, and they’ll never live beyond that experience. It’ll be with them forever. But they have a gospel resource to run to that every day reminds them that they are not alone in this tragedy, that their Savior is with them and gives them everything they need. My team tells me there are stories that come in daily. I hear some of them. I don’t hear all of them. But yeah, it’s amazing.

06:34 - The *Everyday Gospel* Devotional

Matt Tully
Paul, a decade after the release of New Morning Mercies, which as you said, is still going strong and people are still finding that book for the first time and they’re giving it to their friends and neighbors as a wonderful gift for them, but now a decade later, you’ve written another book. It’s something of a follow up, I would say, to New Morning Mercies, and it’s called Everyday Gospel. And so I wonder if you could start by telling us the ways in which this is similar to New Morning Mercies, and then we’ll get to some key ways that it’s different.

Paul Tripp
Well, it’s similar in that it’s a daily devotional. It will look similar because it has my little tweet at the top—a little phrase that summarizes what the devotional is going to be about. And it’s the gospel every day. What’s different about this and what I really love about this devotional is these devotions are written out of particular passages of Scripture. So what this devotional does that’s unique and different than New Morning Mercies and is exciting to me is it starts you in Genesis and by the end of the year you’re in Revelation. And so when you open the devotional and you turn to a particular devotion, if you start in the beginning, I believe January 1 is Genesis 1–3. Now, the best way to use this devotional is to read Genesis 1–3 and then read my devotion that was written out of that. So I have to say it’s pretty intimidating when someone asks you to write devotionals on the entire Bible. But that’s what I did. So there’s 365 devotionals. They’re attached to daily Bible reading. And the devotionals pull the gospel out of that particular reading. Who is God? Who is his Son? What is sin? All those themes are there, but they come right out of a particular passage of Scripture, which I think is just exciting.

08:36 - The *ESV Everyday Gospel Bible*

Matt Tully
Yeah, absolutely. And that is a good segue into the fact that we have a book that we’re releasing that has all your devotions—a very similar, as you said, format to New Morning Mercies. But because of the close connection between the devotions that you’ve written and God’s word, we’re also releasing the ESV Everyday Gospel Bible. I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about that and why that could be a helpful resource for a Christian.

Paul Tripp
Well, the Bible rendition actually looks like a Bible. It goes from Genesis to Revelation, but it does have that daily Bible reading in it. So if you open this Bible and you start in Genesis, when you get to the end of Genesis 3, there’s a devotional by me. But there are a couple of other things that I’m really excited about. I wrote gospel introductions to every book of the Bible. What is the gospel chord that goes through this particular book of the Bible? People mistakenly think the gospel begins in Matthew when the gospel actually begins in Genesis. Genesis introduces you to Jesus because Jesus is the Creator. And then there are 124 marginal notes that point out something particular, interesting, clarify something for you, or apply something to your life. So it’s just packed with additional information. You get the devotionals in the Bible, you get the gospel summaries of every book of the Bible, and you get all those 124 notes there. So it’s a wonderful package, and I’m so glad that Crossway decided to do that. I think that Bible is a keeper. And I want to say this—I don’t mean this arrogantly—but there’s nothing out there like this Bible. Most Bibles are study Bibles with additional notes, textual clarifications, or those kinds of things. This is meant to be a devotional Bible that connects the transforming power of Scripture to your daily life. I really endeavored not to write on all the well-known, popular passages because I think there are treasures in the word of God that we miss. And one of the things I try to do—and since I have done this project, I encourage people to do—is when you come across something that doesn’t seem like it’s helpful or you don’t understand why it’s there, don’t skip over it. Dig into it. Can I give you an example? In John’s telling and recording of the death of Jesus on the cross, when Jesus is thirsty, he mentions that the soldiers took a hyssop branch and dipped it in sour wine and gave Jesus a drink. Now, why did John tell me what kind of branch? Who cares? Well, the reason is that the last time a hyssop branch was prominent is when God was delivering the Israelites from Egypt and the angel of death was going to pass over. The Israelites were told to dip the branch into the lamb’s blood and paint it on their doorposts. John wants you to know that Jesus is the final sacrificial lamb, that he’s the fulfillment of the Passover. And he does that just by pointing you to the particular branch. So if you don’t stop and say, “Why do I need to know it’s a hyssop branch?” you would miss this glorious connection and the fact that John is identifying Jesus as the final sacrificial lamb. So throughout this devotional, I tried to find those places, ask the questions that you may ask, but answer them for you and connect you to the gospel that you could miss if you just jump over it.

12:30 - Reading the Bible like an Archaeologist

Matt Tully
It’s such a wonderful pairing of resources that do help us as Christians, like you said, make those connections, especially in the Old Testament, where sometimes we can wonder, What is going on? Why is this relevant? And actually, I want to take an example of that in just a minute from the devotion for today, September 23rd, the date that this is releasing. But before we get to that, tell us a little bit about what the writing process was like. I’d imagine that for many of us, just reading the whole Bible in a year is a lot to think about, not to mention actually writing devotions on the entire Bible like that. How did you go about doing that work?

Paul Tripp
I had to ask myself first what I wanted to be the result in the lives of the reader. And it immediately was clear to me that I wanted people to love God’s word more and to, because of that, love Jesus more. And so I understood that often for people there are major sections of the Old Testament particularly that are dark and dusty and just seem hard to understand. And so I wanted people to really get ahold of what Timothy says and what Paul says to Timothy that everything in the word of God is profitable. All Scripture is profitable. There’s no wasted words. There’s no illustration that doesn’t need to be given. There’s no detail that shouldn’t be there. It’s all profitable. And so my writing process was what I would do is I would read ahead fifteen days of the daily readings. That would be somewhere between sixty and ninety chapters. And as I was reading, I would be asking myself the question, Where is the gospel evident? Where is God revealing himself? Where is a detail that people would miss that points to Jesus? And so I would take notes. And what I would do is I would arrive at the particular set of verses that I was going to write the devotional about. Then, I could just get up in the morning for fifteen days (or for however long it would take) and just write devotionals, because I’d done the research ahead of time. When I got done with writing those fifteen devotionals, I’d go back and read ahead again, and that’s how the process worked.

Matt Tully
So you worked in bigger chunks so you could kind of have a bigger chunk of Scripture in mind as you wrote.

Paul Tripp
Yeah, a bigger flow, but I was making the choice along the way of the particular thing that I was going to write about in those chapters. I have never had a time in my life where I was more excited to get up in the morning and write, because I sort of knew what was coming and I’d get so excited about what I was going to write next. Never have I felt so privileged to do a project in my life. That I got to write devotionals all the way through the word of God is just—no one will be more blessed by this than I have been. And it really has changed the way that I read Scripture.

Matt Tully
How would you describe that? In what ways?

Paul Tripp
I absolutely read more as an archaeologist, asking myself questions. When you come across the bone when you’re an archaeologist, you don’t get out a big shovel and get it out of the way. You get out small brushes and you pull the dirt away and you expose it, and then you pull it up and look at it. And it’s just changed the way I read Scripture. I read looking for those diamonds so I don’t miss them because I just know they’re everywhere.

16:22 - A Devotional Thought from Zechariah

Matt Tully
That’s a great segue to actually talk about one example devotional—one, like you mentioned, that is from the dusty parts of Scripture that maybe we haven’t opened up very much recently. And one of those would have to be the beginning of the book of Zechariah, Zechariah 1–3. And that’s that’s the passage for today, September 23rd, today’s devotion. And I wanted just to have you not read that devotion, not even summarize it completely, but just to kind of help us get a sense for how you go about doing this in your book. So I just want to read the opening summary line that you have for that devotion.You write, “In his infinite patience, God holds back his judgment and gives us room to confess and repent once again.” And then you go on to pull on an example from your own life, from your own parenting of your kids, that helps to illustrate this idea. So I wonder if you could just start there. How do you see this example from your own life of parenting as helpful for this passage?

Paul Tripp
Well, I immediately thought of parenting when I read the Zechariah passage, because God has brought his rebellious children back from captivity. The exile of God’s children was not final condemnation; it was fatherly discipline. He had always intended to bring them back, even though they were rebels, and to show them once again his mercy. It’s just mind blowing to me. Here we are in the final book of the Old Testament, and God’s people still need his mercy because they still have wandering hearts. And so it reminded me again that as a parent, I had to learn that parenting is profoundly more than just a set of rules and commensurate punishments. The law is a good guide for life, and it does a great job of exposing sin, but it can’t rescue and transform the lives of my children. Parenting requires two things: that I represent God’s patience and God’s grace. Because apart from God’s patience, we’re doomed. And apart from his grace, we have no hope of change. And I just think the end of the Old Testament couldn’t be sweeter because here’s God, after all these years, and after prophet after prophet—how many times is he going to have to say the same thing? How many warnings is he going to have to give? He’s still doing it. They’ve come back, but he still has to extend to them his mercy. And Zechariah reminds me that I’ll never become a grace graduate. There’ll never be a time when I’m free from the need for God’s grace. It reminds me that no matter how long you walk with the Lord, you need his grace today as much as the first day you believed. What a way to end the Old Testament. It’s beautiful. And I just think we can never ever get to the point where we allow ourselves to be bored with the message of the gospel. And Scripture doesn’t allow us to. If you stay in the word of God, you’re just going to get that message over and over again because God’s patient and kind, and he loves us so much that he’s willing to repeat himself.

19:57 - Is It Possible to Overemphasize the Gospel?

Matt Tully
And that’s something that those who have read your books before will know, and even if they’ve heard our conversations before, will know that you really are, in so many ways, laser focused on the gospel. The title for this book, Everyday Gospel, is a good title for what you’re trying to do in this book. But I could see some people listening right now who might think to themselves, Yeah, I know the gospel is important. I know it’s foundational and central for our lives. But isn’t there more to the Christian life than just the gospel? Is it possible to overemphasize the gospel in how we think about our lives as Christians? I just wonder how you would respond to a question like that.

Paul Tripp
I really understand that. And I do think that sometimes we throw out the word gospel, and it doesn’t really have any meaning; it’s just something Christians say. But I want you to think with me. Between the already of my conversion and the not yet of my home going, the gospel is three things to me. First, the gospel is my identity. Paul says, “I’ve been crucified with Christ and it’s no longer I who live but Christ lives in me. And the life I live, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” The fundamental way and the most important way for Paul Tripp to think about himself is I am in Christ. And so all of the benefits of what that means are mine. I need to understand what that means. The gospel is an identity. Second, the gospel is a lifestyle. In the beginning of the fourth chapter of Ephesians, after Paul is laid out the gospel, he says, “Live in a way that’s worthy of the gospel.” What he means is now take this gospel—its way of looking at you, its way of looking at God, its way of looking at what you need, its way of looking at the causes and cures of the spiritual condition—and apply it to everything in your life. And that’s what Paul does. Ephesians 4–6 applies the gospel to marriage, to money, to communication, to parenting, to anger—the list just goes on. So the gospel is an identity. The gospel is a lifestyle that changes everything in the way that I approach my life and my relationships. And third, the gospel is a lens. It’s like a pair of glasses that I look through and say, “How does the gospel help me understand, in a new and different way, this thing that I’m looking at?” That’s what I do with every book. I take something like sex or like money or parenting, and I look at it through the lens of the gospel. How would that look if I looked at it through the gospel? The best interpreter of human life is the gospel of Jesus Christ. If you really want to understand who you are and understand what you need, it’s the gospel. So the gospel is an identity, the gospel is a lifestyle, the gospel is a lens. And because it’s those three things, I’ll never stop studying the gospel and I’ll never stop talking about it.

23:11 - Where Would We Be Without God’s Word?

Matt Tully
That’s good. Paul, Everyday Gospel connects to a very fundamental thing that we talk a lot about as Christians—the idea of spending time in God’s word each and every day. Daily devotions. A daily quiet time. But that’s also a topic that I think can tend to feel a bit discouraging for some people as we think about our own failure to do that, our own inconsistency in that. We can look at our own commitment to God’s word and being in there regularly as something that maybe we just don’t think we’re quite doing what we should be doing. What would you say to the person who’s feeling like that right now? They’re excited, they have a desire to be in the word, and they’re even excited about a resource like this. But if they were honest, they just feel like that’s something that they just don’t do very well.

Paul Tripp
Well, my first response is God’s kind and patient and understanding. He is not disgusted by our weaknesses, but he meets us in our weaknesses with his grace. But I think if you approach your daily reading of the word of God as a duty, you’ve missed the point. Other than the gift of his son, between the already of my conversion and not yet of my home going, one of God’s most precious gifts to me is his word. God loves me and he wants me to know him. He wants me to thrive. He wants me to know how to live life. He wants me to understand life. He wants me to be able to understand where danger exists. He wants me to know my heart. He wants me to know his plan of purpose for relationships and for sexuality and for money and for government and all those things in life. The Bible is this glorious welcome to know and understand. I need to know God; know myself; know my world; know the danger of sin; know the protecting, guiding gift of his grace; be able to know right from wrong; know the destiny that’s ahead of me, and so he gives me His word. It’s a welcome. Imagine a father sitting down with his thirteen-year-old boy, with a book in his hand, and he says, “Son, I love you. And in this book is everything you need for life. Take it.” That’s what God has done. He’s handed us a book that literally gives life. Why wouldn’t I want to be in it? And Matt, I can say this: I read and study God’s word every day because I’m afraid not to. Because I’m afraid of where my mind can go. I’m afraid of all Satan’s lies. I’m afraid of the seduction of the world that’s around me. And so I want to be in God’s word because I know it protects me and it empowers me and it illuminates the world to me. I can’t imagine living without it. If I could say this: I can’t tell you the hundreds of times Luella, my dear wife, and I have looked at one another in the midst of something going on in our life and say, “Where would we be without the word of God?”

Matt Tully
Paul, maybe as a final question, what would be your prayer for those who pick up a copy of this new book, Everyday Gospel or the Bible, and start to read it every day? What would be your hope and your prayer for that person?

Paul Tripp
Well, the first thing I would say is look for Jesus, that your reading would be a search for and a celebration for God’s grace. I love in Scripture how God writes history to reveal himself, to reveal his love, to reveal his mercy, to reveal his patience. Don’t read just to know Bible history and Bible content. Read to know your Savior. Read to have an encounter with God. Read to remember again his magnificent, inexhaustible mercy. Look for God in Scripture.

Matt Tully
Paul, thank you for writing this new book and for ministering to so many of us over the years with New Morning Mercies. We are excited to see what God does through Everyday Gospel.

Paul Tripp
Thank you. I’m excited too and greatly privileged that God’s called me to do what I do.

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