2026 Christmas Gift Guide
2026 Christmas Gift Guide
Celebrating 25 Years of the English Standard Version
This article is part of the ESV 25th Anniversary series.
Love for God’s Word
I am happy to celebrate the publication of the English Standard Version of the Bible mainly because I love the Bible. If we love God, we love the voice of God, and if we love the voice of God, we love the God-inspired word of God, the Bible. Nothing, under God, is more precious to us than the Bible. We come from a long line of Christians who felt this way.
The English Puritan preacher John Rogers, who died in 1636, prayed before his congregation, “Lord, whatever thou dost to us, take not thy Bible from us; kill our children, burn our houses, destroy our goods; only spare us the Bible, take not away thy Bible.”
That’s my spiritual ancestry. That’s the DNA in my spiritual bones. Take away anything before you take away the words of God. More to be desired are they than gold. Sweeter also than honey and drippings from the honeycomb. I’ve treasured the words of your mouth more than my portion of food. Man does not live by bread alone. Our life hangs on every word from the mouth of God. Where else shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. Everything else perishes. But your word will never pass away.
Ten thousand benefits flow from the influence of this book that we’re not even aware of. And the preaching of this word in tens of thousands of pulpits across America and around the world is more important than every media outlet in the world.
Celebrating the 25th Anniversary of the ESV
As we commemorate the 25th anniversary of the ESV Bible and the 500th anniversary of William Tyndale’s New Testament, Crossway gives thanks for God’s faithfulness in preserving his Word across the centuries and for generations to come.
So, as I celebrate with joy the publication of the English Standard Version of the Bible, let me make crystal clear: I would rather have people read any translation of the Bible, no matter how weak, than to read no translation of the Bible. If there could be only one translation in English, I would rather have it be my least favorite than that there would be none. God was able to speak through Balaam’s donkey, and he is able to speak through the strongest and the weakest of English translations.
But that does not mean I am indifferent to what translation I use and what translation I encourage others to use. I have been a happy advocate for the English Standard Version since before it even existed. Here’s a bit of that story. When I was 15 in 1961, my parents gave me a beautiful leather-bound copy of the King James Version. I still have it and I love to look at the markings that I made as a teenager. By the time I was a freshman in college, I wanted to read the Bible in ordinary English, without the seventeenth century thees and thous and with the benefits of the best manuscripts discovered since Erasmus gave us our first printed Greek Testament in 1516, which is what the KJV was based on.
I settled on the Revised Standard Version and bought my first copy in the fall of 1964. For decades I read and studied and memorized and taught from the RSV. Then it was allowed to go out of print in 1990. I was adrift. Other modern versions that were available were either too loose with their paraphrasing and interpretation or they were too awkwardly literal. They had their place. Many found them useful. But for my meditation, my memorizing, my preaching, my family devotions and children’s ministry, and my pastoral work, I needed a different balance between literal and readable.
So, I called Lane Dennis, the head of Crossway Books, and said, “Why don’t you try to get the copyright for the old RSV and do a light revision and publish it?” And that’s what happened. The upshot is that the ESV captures, better than any other English translation I know, that balance between essentially literal and what I want to call reverential readability. I’m tempted to use the word “dignified,” but that sounds stuffy to a lot of people. But it’s not stuffy. I’m tempted to use the word “serious,” but that sounds dull or gloomy to a lot of people. And it is anything but dull.
But who can deny that the Bible, even in its most thrilling parts, has a weight, a gravity, and an earnestness to it? And in that weightiness there is a spiritual beauty that presses its way into the beauty of language. It’s not beauty for the sake of art, but for the sake of the very nature of God and his ways.
If we love God, we love the voice of God, and if we love the voice of God, we love the God-inspired word of God, the Bible.
One of the amazing reasons that the ESV succeeds in this difficult balance between literal and beautiful is because it contains a precious inheritance of compelling wording that goes back 500 years to William Tyndale. Tyndale’s 1526 English translation of the New Testament, for which he was martyred, was so compelling that, according to David Daniell, the 1611 King James Version took over 90 percent of it. That legacy of reverential readability came over into the RSV in 1952 and over into the ESV in 2001.
For twenty-five years the ESV has been a great blessing across ages, across ethnicities, across denominations. I believe it has been a means of strengthening faithful expository preaching, because it’s harder to do faithful exposition when you’re working from a translation that tends to do a lot of paraphrasing.
I believe it’s been a blessing to families and children and individuals in efforts to memorize the Scripture because its cadences are so compelling.
I believe it’s been a great asset in rigorous teaching of theology because it avoids solving theological problems by tendentious translations and leaves the reader to work it out. For example, in 1 Peter 1:20 it translates, “he was foreknown before the foundation of the world.” But another modern version translates it, “He was chosen before the creation of the world.” Foreknown is literal and leaves it to the reader to decide whether it means chosen.
But in the end, what we want for ourselves and our families and our churches is not that we would be fixated on the form of language but on the reality to which the language points. The word G-O-D is not the living God. The word C-H-R-I-S-T is not the risen Christ.
What we want is to take up our Bible every day and be strengthened in our faith, because faith comes by the word of God. We want the power of the Holy Spirit to flow. And it flows through the hearing of the word of God. We want deep spiritual life, and these are the words of life. We want freedom from every kind of bondage, and Jesus said, “You will know the truth and the truth will set you free,” and, “Your word, O God, is truth.” We want to defeat the devil, and Jesus defeated him by the word of God. And we want joy—everlasting, invincible joy. And where does the righteous man turn? “His delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night.”
And God has been pleased for twenty-five years for many of us to make the English Standard Version of the Bible the place that happens.
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The Enduring Word: From William Tyndale to the English Standard Version
Twenty-five years have passed since the ESV was first published in 2001, and, remarkably, the ESV has become, perhaps, the most widely distributed Bible in the world.
Reflections on the ESV After 25 Years
What an amazing gift we have—God’s inspired words written down and providentially preserved, carefully translated into a language that more than a billion people can understand.
Introducing the ‘William Tyndale New Testament, 500-Year Anniversary Edition’
Celebrate the 500th anniversary of the Tyndale Bible with this New Testament edition.
This Day in History: the Death of William Tyndale
What did it cost William Tyndale under hostile circumstances to stay faithful to his calling as a translator of the Bible and a writer of the Reformed faith?
