After reading One Forever this next read was going to be hard to top. Both are so easy to read yet so insightful inspiring and challenging. Do yourself a favour and read these books.

The publisher gave me Rory Shiner's book, “Forgiven Forever”, to review. It is a short but profound read exploring how Jesus’ death on the cross should infiltrate and transform our lives. He begins by stepping through the events leading to the crucifixion: the Passover meal, the Garden, the cross itself and highlights their significance. He examines how Jesus is the perfect high priest and sacrifice, not shying away from the OT sacrificial system, using Hebrews as a guidebook to Leviticus. He moves on to how it impacts us today, looking at topics such as guilt, shame, the Lord’s Supper, and spiritual warfare.

The brilliance of Shiner is his ability to take complex theological concepts, put them in understandable language, and combine them with a memorable illustration. I appreciate that he doesn’t leave you with intellectual concepts but helps you land in reality. Some topics like the nature of church and Christian leadership I didn’t expect but appreciated them, nevertheless. It would be a lot to ask, but it would have been good to have a chapter on how God's forgiveness impacts our earthly forgiveness, but I suspect he’d need another whole book!

This book is accessible for new believers, helpfully modelling how to look to the Scriptures to understand gospel truths and then apply them to our lives. However, it is not elementary but refreshing for the seasoned believer to look again at the cross and its transformative power and reassess living in the death of Jesus.

In "Forgiven Forever", Rory Shiner suggests that for Bible believing Christians, the cross is not under taught, but under lived. As Christians, we sing and are thankful for the cross, but are there roadblocks in our hearts and minds that deter the cross from infiltrating every part of our lives?

Framed heavily by Gospel eyewitness accounts and broader context scripture provides, the reader is taken on a guided tour of the events leading up to, during and after crucifixion of Jesus. It then passes through a series of checkpoints to allow time to reflect on what it means for us today. Doing so it talks to cross related challenges faced by the early church as well as nuanced issues that the Apostles didn't have the opportunity to respond to on their (yet to be invented) social media accounts.

To avoid diluting the cross's theological significance, the book doesn't shy away from complex issues such as the sacrificial system, high priests, and penal substitutionary atonement. Rather, Rory's conversational style addresses them head on with simple language and memorable stories that inform a curious reader.

Forgiven Forever looks to scripture to provide meaning to the cross and guide the reader's understanding to see that the cross changes everything - not our effort, circumstance or worry. Like a travel guide to the cross; its worth reading and keeping in your back-pack to reference through your faith journey, even when the pages start to fall out or curl up at the corners.