SPECIAL REPORT: There’s a New BUT in Town!
We interrupt your regularly scheduled programming to bring you this important announcement.
A new, completely rewritten edition of Big Buts of the Bible is now available on Amazon in paperback and Kindle editions.
Its title? Big Buts of the Bible: Where Broken Stories Meet God’s Grace.
And while the title may sound familiar, readers should be advised, this is not simply the old book wearing a new cover. There’s considerably more to this story.
Time Can Change a Fellow
It was many years ago that I published a book called Big Buts of the Bible: A Revealing Look at Jesus Christ.
I was proud of that book. Still am, in many respects. It represented years of studying Scripture, teaching, preaching, and discovering the remarkable ways one little three-letter word could change the direction of a biblical story.
That discovery hasn’t changed.
Throughout Scripture, we encounter moments when circumstances seem to be moving toward an inevitable conclusion. Trouble is mounting. Hope is fading. Someone has failed. Someone is hurting. Someone has been pushed aside.
But… Suddenly, with this marvelous little conjunction, the story takes a turn.
Sometimes this little word introduces a promise. Sometimes a warning. Sometimes a surprising act of mercy. And sometimes it reveals something about God we might otherwise have missed.
I loved those discoveries years ago. I still do.
But I’m not quite the same person who wrote that first book.
I’ve lived more life, and not all of it has been easy. I’ve experienced disappointments, uncertainties, struggles, and heartaches that once seemed easier to explain from the other side of a pulpit. I’ve walked through seasons when answers weren’t nearly as clear as I wanted them to be, and faith didn’t fit quite so neatly into the outlines I’d spent years preparing.
I’ve also listened to more stories. I’ve watched people I love walk through things I wouldn’t wish on anyone. I’ve seen lives turned upside down, hopes disappointed, and people struggling to hold on to what they believed when life no longer looked anything like they’d expected.
Some of those experiences were theirs. Some were mine. And some we walked through together.
Along the way, I’ve become considerably less impressed with my ability to have an answer for everything.
There was a time when I approached certain passages of Scripture primarily asking, What does this teach us? That’s still an important question. But these days, I find myself asking another one just as often:
What does this reveal about the heart of God toward the person standing in the middle of this story?
Especially when that person is frightened, ashamed, exhausted, or uncertain whether there’s still a place for them.
That question has changed the way I read Scripture. And it’s changed the way I write about it.
Discovering Jesus in Technicolor
Here’s something else that has happened over those years. I’ve become increasingly captivated by the Jesus I meet in the Gospels.
That may sound odd coming from someone who spent twenty-one years in pastoral ministry. After all, I’ve been reading, studying, preaching, and teaching about Jesus for most of my adult life. But I’m discovering that familiarity doesn’t necessarily mean we’ve noticed everything.
Sometimes the Jesus we encounter in our preaching and teaching seems almost black and white. We emphasize his declarations, commands, teachings, and confrontations. We organize his words into doctrines, principles, and lessons. We explain what he meant, what he expected, and what people should do in response. And those things matter.
But then I return to the Gospels, and I find Jesus in Technicolor.
I see him noticing people others overlook. Listening to questions others dismiss. Welcoming people others keep at a distance. Touching those nobody wants to touch. Sitting at tables with people whose reputations would make respectable religious folks uncomfortable.
I see him responding to individuals, not merely to categories of people. Sometimes he challenges or corrects. Sometimes he asks a question instead of providing an answer. Sometimes he praises the faith of someone nobody expected to get it right. Sometimes he recognizes something beautiful in a person everyone else has already written off.
And sometimes he simply stops, listens, and gives someone the dignity of being seen.
It’s not that his teachings have become less important to me. It’s that I’ve become more attentive to the way he lived them—the compassion, the unexpected affirmations, the patience, and the remarkable willingness to engage people whose lives were complicated and whose stories were far from tidy.
The more I notice these encounters, the more I realize how much of Jesus we can miss when we reduce the Gospel to a collection of statements about what people should believe and how they should behave.
There’s so much more happening in those stories. And I’m finding myself drawn to it more than ever.
A Different Bedside Manner
For much of my life, my work involved explaining Scripture, teaching its truths, and helping people understand what the Bible says. I still believe those things matter. But the years have taught me something else: People don’t always come to Scripture looking for an explanation. Sometimes they come looking for a reason to keep going.
Sometimes they’re carrying grief that won’t fit into a tidy paragraph. Sometimes they’re battling circumstances they never imagined facing. Sometimes they’re trying to make sense of a faith bruised by the very people who were supposed to help nurture it. And sometimes they’re simply wondering whether God could possibly have room for someone like them. I know, because I’ve been there too.
I’ve spent much of the past decade writing alongside mental health professionals and becoming more attentive to the experiences of people navigating emotional pain, addiction, recovery, and the struggles of everyday life. That work, combined with my own experiences, hasn’t diminished my appreciation for biblical truth. It’s deepened my appreciation for the people who need to hear it—and who need to encounter the real Jesus.
If the younger version of me sometimes approached Scripture like a teacher standing at a lectern, the older version is more inclined to pull up a chair.
Perhaps that’s what I mean by a different bedside manner.
I’m less interested in winning an argument and more interested in helping someone recognize the grace of God right where they are. Less interested in pointing out all the ways people fall short and more interested in showing them the Jesus who came looking for people who had fallen. Less interested in making every biblical story resolve into a perfectly packaged lesson and more willing to sit with the questions, uncertainties, and remarkable tenderness we find along the way.
Not because truth matters less, but because people matter so much.
Same Bible. A Different Book.
When I began revisiting Big Buts of the Bible, I originally imagined refreshing the old manuscript. A little polishing here, some updating there, perhaps a few new observations. That plan didn’t last long.
The more I worked, the more I realized I wasn’t simply revising a book. I was writing a different one.
The new book still journeys through Matthew’s Gospel. It still celebrates those fascinating little turning points and explores the surprising ways a single word can open a window into something wonderful.
But the perspective has shifted.
I’m more interested now in the people Jesus encountered. The ones who came with questions. The ones who made mistakes. The ones who had been told they didn’t belong. The ones who needed healing, forgiveness, encouragement, or simply someone willing to see them.
And I’m interested in what their stories might mean for ours.
Because the Bible isn’t merely a collection of ancient accounts about people who lived a very long time ago. It’s the unfolding story of God’s relationship with humanity.
And somehow, remarkably, it’s the story we find ourselves in.
Our disappointments. Our doubts. Our hopes. Our failures. Our longing to be known and loved. All of it meets a God whose grace is often far more generous than we expected.
That’s the book I wanted to write this time. Not a book that pretends life is simple or faith is always easy, but one that invites readers to discover the presence of Jesus in the middle of complicated, imperfect, sometimes painfully broken stories. Including their own.
Where Broken Stories Meet God’s Grace
That subtitle wasn’t chosen casually. It reflects what I’ve come to appreciate most about Matthew’s Gospel and, increasingly, about the whole of Scripture.
God has a remarkable way of meeting people in the middle of stories that haven’t gone according to plan. He doesn’t always erase the consequences, resolve the questions on our preferred timetable, or take the story in the direction we would have chosen.
But he doesn’t abandon the people in it.
If you’ve ever wondered whether your story has become too complicated, too painful, or too far removed from what you once imagined, I hope you’ll find something in these pages that speaks to you.
Perhaps you’ll discover a familiar passage in a new light or meet a biblical character who seems surprisingly familiar. Perhaps you’ll encounter a little but you’ve read a hundred times without noticing what comes after it. And perhaps you’ll find yourself considering the possibility that God’s grace has been present in your own story in ways you hadn’t recognized.
That’s my hope for this book.
Big Buts of the Bible: Where Broken Stories Meet God’s Grace is now available on Amazon in both paperback and Kindle editions.
If you’ve followed this website, enjoyed our weekly explorations of Scripture, or wondered what all this fuss about a three-letter conjunction is about, I’d love for you to take a look.
And if you know someone who could use a fresh reminder that their story isn’t beyond the reach of God’s grace, perhaps you’ll consider sharing it with them.
There’s a new BUT in town. And I can’t wait for you to meet it.
— Darin Michael Shaw [Explore the new Big Buts of the Bible on Amazon]
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