
A Look Ahead to 2025
Writing is the easiest thing to summarise, because I hope this summer will see me complete the draft for a new book on happiness, provisionally entitled Enjoy and published by Crossway. I have always loved teaching on joy, and in this book I am looking at the subject using six questions: why we can be joyful, what happiness is, who we are, when happiness comes, where it lives, and how we can pursue it. After finishing that, my next project might well be a popular commentary on Deuteronomy (in the same series as my 1 Corinthians For You), but we shall have to see. I’ve also got a book proposal on 1968 percolating, but that really is gazing into the crystal ball.
As for reading, I expect I will spend at least half the year in Christopher Ash’s Psalms: A Christ-Centred Commentary, which I have just begun, taking a Psalm a day in my devotional times. Other devotional reads I can see coming are Brevard Childs on Isaiah, the second half of Michael Morales’s new Numbers commentary, and Simon Gathercole’s The Pre-existent Son. (Gathercole is a brilliant scholar whose books have wonderfully devotional application, so I’m really looking forward to this one.) I don’t plan my history or fiction reads that far ahead, but three books I have bought and can’t wait to get into are Iain Pears’s An Instance of the Fingerpost, Frederic Morton’s A Nervous Splendour: Vienna 1888-1889 and Tania Brannigan’s Red Memory: The Afterlives of China’s Cultural Revolution.
My schedule for preaching and teaching is clearer. As a local church we will be doing a series called Technology: What We Make of the World, then a series on the cross from Romans, and then an expository series from Daniel after Easter. The THINK conference will be on Isaiah in July (I can’t wait), so the major prophets will be quite a theme this year. I’m also really looking forward to speaking at The Gospel Coalition’s conference in Indianapolis in April - I’ve been given Ephesians 4:1-16, which is pretty great! - and visiting my friend Simon Murphy and Redemption Hill Church in Singapore for a week in February, to speak on all sorts of different things. The second half of the year will be quieter on the travel front, but the Newfrontiers Global conference in October is always a highlight, and I’m also hoping to be at Christ Central’s Devoted event at the end of August.
Of course, many of the most exciting and uplifting things that happen in a year are unplanned (as indeed are the challenges and tragedies). So this is certainly not a summary of the year to come, or a prediction of what the most important things in 2025 will be. But for those who are interested it will give you an idea of what I’m hoping to get up to. Happy New Year.