December 2025 Update
For Unto You is Born this Day … a Saviour
At home in Nazareth she would have been making the best preparations she could for the birth, when the census demands had put all her plans awry. To have to take a journey, and stay in a public hotel at such a time was bad enough. Imagine her distress when she got there and found all the rooms were taken. Their house in Nazareth was not a palace; but Joseph was a master builder and doubtless they had reasonable comfort. Now she would have to give birth in some makeshift quarters, half in public. And where could she put the child when it was born? Her first baby! And God's Son! How could she put God's Son in a rough manger?
And then the shepherds arrived enquiring where the baby was. When asked how they knew where to come they replied that an angel of the Lord had told them that the Saviour, Christ the Lord, had been born this very night in the city of David.
With this, if not before, things must have begun to make sense to Mary. Gabriel had told her that her child should have the throne of his father David; and here was an angel sending these shepherds to David's city. She and Joseph had not intended to come to Bethlehem, but Augustus, or so it had seemed at the time, had compelled them to come to David's city. Now she saw what plan it was that lay behind Augustus and his administration, and had shepherded her and Joseph to Bethlehem. But there was another question. Perhaps, with the sudden increase in the population caused by the census, there might have been more than one baby born in David's city that night. How did the shepherds know that Mary's baby was the right one? The answer was simple: the angel had given them a sign: they would find the right baby lying in, of all places, a manger.
Ordinary women in Bethlehem did not put their firstborn infants in mangers, we may be sure, at least not if they could help it. For Mary it must have been unspeakably distressing to have to do so. Yet here were these shepherds, and according to them angels knew that the Son of God was lying in a manger, and were glad of the fact: they could use it as a sign to guide humble shepherds to where they might find the Saviour. Since then, of course, uncounted millions have been grateful for this sign, for at the higher level of meaning the birth in a manger has guided them more surely to the recognition of Jesus as God's Son and as Saviour of the world than birth in a palace would have done. Mary, of course, could not have foreseen that; but this much surely she saw: if angels were glad to use the manger as a sign for shepherds, another shepherd must have guided her and Joseph and the child to the manger in the first place. All, then, was well and would be well: the responsibility for shepherding the infant Son of God was in higher hands than hers.
— David Gooding, According to Luke
Myrtlefield House
Listening to God Speak His Word
Our vision is of a world convinced that God still speaks today through the Bible. And to help towards that, we produce books and other media resources for understanding the Bible’s thought flow and design, to deepen confidence in God’s word and love for its author
Our mission is to produce these resources at different levels and distribute them around the world in every language where we can meet a need. We aim to stir up a lasting desire to read, study and teach God’s word by encouraging a deeper understanding of the way he inspired it to be written. We do this primarily through the teaching legacy of David Gooding. His ministry has helped countless people appreciate the significance of how God has ordered the structure, pattern and thought flow of each book of the Bible in order to communicate himself to the people he has created. And that ministry has equipped generations of Bible teachers to go on teaching others to hear God speaking his word to them as well.
New Releases
False Religion
Revelation 17: Mystery Babylon
What happens when religion turns away from truth and becomes a counterfeit of God’s design? In this lecture, David Gooding explores Revelation 17’s portrayal of ‘Mystery Babylon’, exposing the dangers of false religion, deceptive unity, and compromise within Christendom. Studying Revelation 17 will help believers sharpen their discernment to distinguish genuine faith from imitation and remain steadfast in devotion to Christ.
Future Releases
Seeing the Big Picture
Titus: God’s Way of Making Beautiful People
Ruth: How Love’s Redeeming Work is Done
In 2026, we plan to release a series of short books (10,000 - 15,000 words each) that present David Gooding's overview of individual books of the Bible. These will complement our podcast series (Book by Book: Bible Intros with David Gooding) and provide Bible students with 'the big picture in a little frame'. We hope that these books will be a help in grasping the big idea of what God is saying in specific books, help others to rekindle their love for God's word as they see the wisdom and beauty of his revelation, and also to introduce a younger audience to the legacy of Dr Gooding's teaching. We are starting with Titus, Ruth and Colossians.
From Symbol to Reality: The Journeys of the Son of God in John’s Gospel
The material on John 9 is now completely drafted, and work is progressing through Dr Gooding’s sermon transcripts and unpublished manuscripts on John 10. Your prayers (and patience) are much appreciated!
[Excerpt] Taking our bearings
Before moving into chapter 10, let’s just remind ourselves of the emphases so far in this third journey. In chapter 7, the call is to use your moral judgment to judge Christ’s teaching, that is, whether it is of God or not. In chapter 8, the call again concerns using moral judgment, but now it is to stand in the light of Christ and his word ourselves, and in so doing to discover our sinfulness. Then here in chapter 9 we have had the call to trust Christ in order to receive the new faculty of sight. The story is first of all a miracle; the man who did what the Lord said received his sight immediately when he washed in the pool of Siloam. But that process took some time.
Before he washed he had to make decisions. Christ came and spat on the ground and made clay and told the man to go and wash in the pool of Siloam. Would you have done it? We have seen what trust the man was willing to exercise in Christ even before his eyes were opened to see who Christ really was. Trusting Christ and conducting the experiment that Christ laid down for him, the man found the experiment worked, and he received his physical sight.
Does that mean that he saw that Jesus was the Son of God immediately? No! Just as there had been a process by which he had recovered his physical sight, so there was a process by which he came to see fully and without reserve that Jesus was the Son of God.
Sometimes we expect instantaneous conversions. Sometimes people are converted instantaneously, but very often there is a whole process they have to go through before (or after) conversion until the fullness of Christ’s glory dawns upon them. And what those processes are, and the experiments that people can conduct is a matter of very practical concern; particularly in our witness for the Lord and our dealings with unconverted people and our attempts to bring them to Christ.
These chapters follow a logical order in dealing with the human soul. The order of our Lord’s approach is governed by what he diagnoses to be the need of people, and where, therefore, is a good place to start. It points out what kinds of experiments you can suggest to an unconverted person. And it helps us to see how they will come to a full-grown knowledge of the Son of God.
Now in chapter 10 we will hear his call to believe Christ’s works first, if unable to believe him, so as to get to know him, and to come to know that he is the true shepherd as distinguished from the false.
New Myrtlefield Office
We are still waiting for the completion of the sale of 89 Wellington Park, but we recently got in for another look around. The plan is to do some repair and improvement work before we move in.
David Gooding Answers … 5 More Questions!
Prayer Points
Ongoing translation work in Arabic, Mandarin, Russian, Spanish, Dutch and Albanian; as well as wisdom for possible openings in Central Asia.
Final legalities to be completed soon so that we can begin renovation work on the building.
Wisdom for our trustees as they guide the work of Myrtlefield.
The right ideas, and people to implement them, as we seek to reach more of the world and younger generations, with resources that help people to understand what God is saying in his word.
Rejoice and give thanks with us over another year of the Lord's faithfulness to his word.