Before His Face

What if God's purpose for your life is not first a plan to discover, but a Person to receive?

Romans 8:28 is one of Christianity's most beloved promises: "all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose." But what is that purpose? And what is the "good" toward which all things are working?

In Before His Face, Slayder Betts follows those questions from Romans 8 into an unexpected biblical landscape: the Greek word prothesis, the Bread of the Presence set continually before God, the priests who were invited to partake of it, and ultimately Jesus Christ-the true Bread from heaven.

What emerges challenges the familiar Christian pursuit of "purpose." God's eternal purpose is greater than discovering a career, ministry, assignment, platform, or personal destiny. His purpose existed before sin, before our failures, and before anything needed to be repaired. Scripture reveals its destination in Romans 8:29: to be conformed to the image of His Son.

Through the imagery of the Table, daily bread, manna, abiding, and priestly communion, Before His Face explores what it means not merely to believe truths about Christ, but to continually receive His life-to come, believe, abide, hear, obey, and know Him. Even the circumstances we would never have chosen become places where God exposes our rival sources of life and trains us into the likeness of His Son.

Along the way, Betts also confronts the temptation toward a prosthetic Christianity-religious additions that attempt to substitute activity for communion, information for life, formulas for trust, or titles for identity. The answer to lifeless Christianity is not a better prosthesis. It is a return to the Prothesis: the Son whom God has set before us.

This is not an invitation to go discover your purpose.

The invitation is to come.

The meal is Christ.

The good is conformity to the Son.

The destination is life before His face.

The Bread has been set before you.

Come and eat.