By the time David Garrett was eight years old he was studying
violin with the world’s finest teachers, practicing seven hours a day, and making
solo appearances with legendary orchestras, including the London Philharmonic.
As an adolescent, he studied at the Juilliard School in New York City.
In 2003, for the price of one million dollars, Garrett
purchased a Guadagnini, a rare 236-year-old violin made by a student of
Stradivarius. But on December 27, 2007, after a brilliant performance at the
Barbican in London, David Garrett tripped, fell down a flight of stairs, and
landed on the valuable instrument. Though still in its case, the violin was smashed,
sustaining damage to the body, neck, and soundpost. Restoration was predicted
to take eight months and cost more than $120,000. Experts doubted the finely
crafted instrument would ever sound the same.
Garrett’s unfortunate accident and crushed violin recall a
darker tragedy—the Fall of Man and the devastation that followed. We live in
the rubble of the world’s resulting brokenness. Pain, sickness, suffering, sin,
crime, violence, war, alienation from God, shattered relationships, disease,
natural disaster, and death are on every side, the ruins of our broken world.
Can it all be made right? Is restoration possible?
Scripture teaches that restoration is not only possible, but
a certain reality, secured by God himself through the redeeming death and
resurrection of his Son and realized in our lives by the power of his Spirit.
The gospel is about nothing less than the redemption of fallen human beings and
the perfect, complete restoration of our broken world. As Christ himself says
in the closing pages of Scripture, “Behold I am making all things new” (Rev.
21:5).
Restoration through the gospel is the hope of all Christians.
But the practicality of the good news for personal transformation here and now sometimes escapes us. Someday, everything that is wrong with
the world will be made right forever. God will wipe away every tear from our
eyes; mourning, crying, pain, and death will be no more (Rev. 21:4). But is
genuine change in my life possible now? And if so, how does it happen?
I believe transformation is possible. This goal of this book
is to explain how. More than that, I hope to bring together various aspects of
the Christian life in a way that is somewhat unusual in Christian books. As I
mentioned in the Introduction, many books do a wonderful job of clearly
presenting the content of the gospel
so that we might clearly understand what Christ did for us, or helping us grasp
the practical significance of the
gospel for daily life, or offering us fresh
motivation for the Christian life in God’s purpose to glorify himself and satisfy
our souls, or teaching us to embrace the various means of grace—such as spiritual disciplines, suffering, and
community—by which God matures us in the faith. This book attempts to bring all
these approaches together, presenting a single, unified vision for how to
change.
To best understand and fully experience the transforming
power of the gospel, we must begin with the end in mind. What is God’s ultimate
goal in saving and changing us? To answer this we need to grasp why God created
us in the first place, what has been lost by human sin, and what God through
Christ and the Spirit has done and is doing about it. In other words, we need
to frame our concerns about personal change in the larger story of God’s saving
work: the story of creation, fall, redemption, and restoration.
See the complete Table of Contents, or the author's Introduction.
