The Gospel Coalition on LinkedIn: On My Shelf: Life and Books with Joshua Chatraw (2024)

"For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers,nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord." - Romans 8:38-39 (ESV)

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For months a room may have looked fine. Everything seemed sufficiently neat and tidy until, dust cloth in hand, spring-cleaning begins. Suddenly, the dirt accumulated over winter seems unending. The more I look for dirt, the more I find. That’s what makes deep cleaning so exhausting. (And why it’s easier just to put it off.)The pursuit of ideal mental health can be the same. Every fleeting disappointment, frustrating moment, or sad feeling becomes a possible symptom of underlying dysfunction. Efforts to discover the roots of that dysfunction reveal more blemishes that need resolution.In Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up, Abigail Shrier takes a journalistic dive into the decline in mental health among young people in the West. Through reviews of clinical research and interviews of parents, children, and experts in various fields, Shrier makes her case that the growing ubiquity of therapy and therapeutic language is, in large part, to blame for the decline in mental health among teens over the past few decades, which is both a contributing cause and a result of the extension of adolescence. When we look for problems in our teens, we’ll find them in spades.Read our review in the article below.

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At 28 years old, Massimo Gei was a wreck.He’d been using drugs since high school. In college, he began helping friends find drugs too. Around the same time, he met a girl. They dated for six years before getting married, but seven months later, she left him to date other men. Massimo’s employer also let him go—probably because he was hooked on meth.“I was depressive and suicidal,” Massimo said. “I thought everyone was conspiring against me. I was just surviving day by day.”One night, he and a Christian friend named Dawn were driving around Kuala Lumpur, where they both lived. Massimo asked, “Do you think if I go looking for God, I’ll find him?”“Of course,” she told him.Massimo pressed her: “How about we make a bet? I’ll go looking for God. If you’re right, great. But if you’re wrong and I don’t find him, then I’m going to kill myself.”“Deal,” she told him, using one of the world’s least recommended evangelistic strategies. “But I get to define what it means to ‘look for God.’”Dawn’s instructions were clear: move back home, go to church, read the Bible, and pray. He did, and over the course of a year, Massimo came face to face with his sin.“That transformed everything,” he said. Read the incredible story of Massimo Gei in the article below.

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Collin Hansen: In some of our most tumultuous times, God gives us our greatest thinkers. Consider Augustine writing his City of God during the collapse of the Roman Empire in the fifth century. Consider C. S. Lewis writing in the middle of the Battle of Britain during the Second World War.And consider Jonathan Edwards, writing in the early Enlightenment as colonial America erupted in revival and began to consolidate into what would a few decades later become the United States of America.More than 20 years ago, George Marsden gave us the definitive biography Jonathan Edwards: A Life. The book released at a formative time for me, just as I was graduating college as a history major and headed to work at Christian History & Biography magazine. Almost every book I’ve written or edited since then has been inspired by Edwards and explicitly credits him. So I owe Marsden a great deal. You can see why I was excited about the publication of his new book, An Infinite Fountain of Light: Jonathan Edwards for the Twenty-First Century (IVP Academic).Marsden, professor emeritus at the University of Notre Dame, says we need Edwards’s carefully balanced analysis as much today as any other time in nearly three centuries of what he calls “sometimes anarchical evangelicalism.” Edwards straddled the worlds of Puritan New England and the British Enlightenment. This combination produces theological richness with contemporary relevance.Marsden summarizes Edwards in ways that capture his unique insight. He writes, “The primary purpose for which the mighty God has created this universe is so that creatures might live in the infinite pleasure of the joy of God’s love.” And then, “The greatest beauty that we can perceive is God’s redemptive love in Christ.”Marsden joined me on Gospelbound to discuss changes in Edwards studies, Benjamin Franklin, secular moral judgments, and Edwards’s greatest sermon, among other subjects. Watch the full interview or listen in the Gospelbound podcast, available wherever you get your podcasts.

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Not long ago, I sat across from a pastor of a church known for its attractional (church growth) ministry philosophy. We discussed the methods common to seeker-sensitive megachurches in the 1990s and early 2000s—the attempt to find points of connection with the culture through sermon series based on popular movies or TV shows, the edginess of starting a service with a secular song to demonstrate cultural IQ (and how rocking the worship band was!), and the strict policing of language that could come across too “churchy” or off-putting to the newcomer.Many of these well-intentioned efforts were built on showing how “relevant” or “in touch” the church was with the world around it. Today, these methods are cringeworthy. Young people who visit a church expect to experience, well, whatever church is. The strangeness is the appeal. Now that fewer people have any family background in church, no one hears a worship band cover an Imagine Dragons song and thinks, “Wow! This isn’t my Grandma’s church!”—in part because Grandma is in her 60s and never darkened the door either.Listen to Gen Z churchgoers today and you’ll hear conversations about powerful worship songs that facilitate an experience with God, about the realness of the preacher who just “tells it like it is” from the Bible, and about the beauty of church architecture and older traditions and recitations.When young people accept the invitation to visit a church, they’ve already committed to experiencing something unusual. Attempts at being overly accommodating or making the church seem “cool” come off as desperate and insecure. If your ministry is seeker-sensitive and attractional today, remember that the churchiness of church is a draw, not a turnoff. Learn why in the article below.

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Last Tuesday, I met as usual with my church community group for Bible study, fellowship, and prayer. It’s a joyful, rowdy, diverse consortium, featuring people born on five continents and across five decades. Some are married; others are single. Several (like me) would identify as LGBT+ if we weren’t Christians, and several have a history of same-sex sexual relationships. One of our members came to Christ last year and has multiple tattoos of naked women on her body.According to some who affirm same-sex marriage for Christians, believing that Scripture forbids same-sex sexual relationships means excluding people who identify as LGBT+ from God’s mercy. If we saw the big picture of Scripture, they suggest, we’d realize our mistake. Just as Gentiles were included in the early church, so we should include groups of people who were once outsiders.I want to make the opposite case: rather than opening the door for same-sex marriage, Gentile inclusion is the reason we have multiple New Testament texts condemning same-sex sexual relationships. And far from placing anyone beyond God’s mercy, these texts help us see that every human is invited into Jesus’s kingdom on the same basis.Here are four reasons Gentile inclusion does not justify same-sex marriage. Read more in the article below.

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If you’re a church member planning a Sunday school class or Bible study, a pastor getting ready for a new sermon series, or a seminarian looking to build your biblical studies library, you may be seeking a reliable commentary. Which one should you pick up? Which commentaries are biblically faithful and suitable for your study and teaching needs? If that’s a question you’ve asked recently, The Gospel Coalition’s Carson Center for Theological Renewal is pleased to announce a new series of recommendations pages designed to serve you.In the spirit of Don Carson’s New Testament Commentary Survey, TGC Council members, staff, and expert writers have worked together to compile an annotated list of the best commentaries on each Bible book. This project leverages the collective wisdom of scholars and church leaders who have devoted years to training the next generation in biblical scholarship and expositional preaching. Our goal has been to serve you—pastors, ministry leaders, and laypeople in local churches—by pointing you to the best resources available.Learn more in the article below.

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"Simply put, God’s will for your life is that you be holy. That you live a life of set-apartness. That, by the power of the Holy Spirit, you strive for utter purity of character (Heb. 12:14). Every admonition contained in all of Scripture can be reduced to this. Every warning, every law, every encouragement bows to this overarching purpose. Every story of every figure in every corner of every book of the Bible is chanting this call. Be holy, for he is holy." - Jen Wilkin

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I recently lost a dear friend to cancer. She’d struggled with treatments and recurrence for years, and when her doctor finally said the heavy word “hospice,” she and her family were neither surprised nor despairing. As Christians, they drew comfort from the assurance she’d be with the Lord after she took her last breath (Rom. 14:8; 2 Cor. 4:17–18).And yet, although my friend embarked on her hospice journey with full acceptance, none of her family was prepared for the tumult of emotions her final days incited. They trembled and choked back tears when she bolted upright in agitation. When she no longer responded to their voices, they nursed the ache of loss. Throughout, they struggled to reconcile the grim realities of death with the mother, sister, and wife they so cherished.Families with loved ones in hospice all too frequently weather such storms. As the wages of our sin (Rom. 6:23), death is by nature harrowing, even when anticipated. We weren’t meant for death, and those of us who encounter it often struggle with lingering grief, confusion, and regret afterward, especially when it steals away someone we dearly love.With a million and a half people in the U.S. receiving hospice care annually, many families will walk this troubling road, suffering doubts and heartache along the way. How do we shepherd caregivers and families as they aim to love the dying? How do we walk with them through the valley of the shadow of death, reminding them all the while of the Good Shepherd whose love covers them when the light dwindles (Ps. 23:4)?Read more in the article below.

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