Most of our team has been at ICRS (International Christian Retail Show) all week. On Monday morning, our sales team gave away 100 free copies of the NLT Study Bible — they went really quickly! I barely got my own first copy, but the marketing manager did manage to scrape up a copy in bonded leather black (my favorite “color”). I love it! Everything about it is beautiful. I am especially thankful for Tim Botts’ exquisite interior design.

I spent Tuesday and Wednesday at the Tyndale booth talking with owners of Christian bookstores about the NLT Study Bible. It was fun talking with these folks about the distinctives of the NLT Study Bible and have them ask insightful questions about it. There seemed to be genuine enthusiasm for the product at the show — one group of retailers was asked (not by Tyndale people), “What is the most exciting thing at the show this year for you?” Several of them answered, “The NLT Study Bible.” Our sales team is also catching the vision, and they are beginning to tell me about the store owners “getting it.”

Getting what? What really is so special about the NLT Study Bible? I think it’s a combination of things, but if I had to put it in one sentence, it would be this: The NLT Study Bible focuses on making the meaning of the text clear in its original historical context, so that readers today can understand it, as much as possible, just as the human writers and first readers did. This focus on clear meaning in context guided everything we did.