Alistair Begg on an Imperishable Inheritance

Dear Friend,

Warmest Christian greetings to you for a happy and blessed new year.

Thank you for your generous response to our year-end appeal. Your prayerful and financial partnership has made it possible for us to begin 2026 in good heart. Together, we can all enter the new year encouraged by Peter’s words to the scattered believers of his day:

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who by God’s power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time (1 Peter 1:3-5).

Ours is a hope that is anchored in the past because Jesus rose, it remains in the present because Jesus lives, and it will be completed in the future because Jesus is coming!

This is one of the distinguishing features of genuine, living, Christian faith. Paul reminded his readers that until they had been “made … alive together with Christ” (Eph. 2:5), they were “strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world” (v. 12).

From time to time, someone’s life provides a striking but sad illustration of a sense of unqualified hopelessness. Ninety-year-old award-winning photojournalist Don McCullin gave an interview to The Times of London recently in which he told of how many of the photos he took of the Vietnam War continue to haunt him. Any hopes he may have had that his photographs would make a difference have been metaphorically buried in Gaza and Ukraine, leaving him with “no faith in humanity” and viewing his life’s work as “a waste of time.”

The author of Ecclesiastes makes it clear that such purposelessness is not unique to the twenty-first century. Writing in an ancient time, he observes how any attempt to make sense of the world and one’s place within it while denying God’s existence and disobeying His commands is futile and meaningless, like chasing the wind.

Our verse-by-verse Bible study through the book of Ecclesiastes, newly released this month, will guide you and a friend, colleague, or your Bible study group to consider what Scripture has to say along these lines. Our ability to do so presupposes that we read our Bibles daily. If that’s not the case, our other book selection this month will provide a timely kickstart.

The time is always now to affirm with the apostle Paul that we are not ashamed of the Gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes. We are hugely encouraged by your enthusiastic desire to share the Gospel by way of the 134,000 copies of The Man on the Middle Cross and 50,000 copies of our new Gospel tract distributed in the closing months of the year! We pray that these resources will lead many who were once far off to be brought near by the blood of Christ.

Perhaps you will recall the scene in 2 Kings 7 when the four men found the treasure. Tempted as they were to keep it to themselves, they decided that would not be right because it was “a day of good news” that should be shared. 2026 opens before us, and the treasure of the Gospel has been entrusted to us—old clay pots. So let us resolve to live by the power of God, that by our lives and our lips we might put the good news on display and, by God’s grace, see others come to trust in Christ. Then it will be a happy new year!

With my love in the Lord Jesus,

Alistair