The Ultimate Back to School Prayer Guide: Includes BONUS 4-Week Bible Study

Chuck Swindoll Shares the Topic He'd Preach if He Had 1 Final Sermon

Followers of Jesus are called to be salt and light to the world, proclaiming the excellencies of his salvation to the nations. But how are we to speak this message to an accelerated world that’s moving too fast to hear anything? German sociologist Hartmut Rosa laments how the force of increasing technological and societal advances pushes us downward at every moment. The result, Rosa says, is that we must run ever faster upward to maintain our relative place. The consequence of such acceleration is a faulty mode of relating to the world. We’ve adopted a posture of aggression toward creation, attempting to expand our share of it. This is only reinforced by society’s structures, leading to what Rosa calls the “structurally induced muting of the world”—the world we seek to master no longer speaks to us. The symptoms of this muting—chronic stress, depression, anxiety, and burnout-related disorders—are now commonplace. This psychological crisis poses unique challenges for the church. In an age of distorted relation to the world and others, how is the church supposed to bear witness to the Creator of a muted creation? Our evangelism must help people recover attentiveness to God’s world, where creation still witnesses to its Creator and exposes our alienation from him. Resonance and Revelation Rosa’s proposed solution to our misguided relation to the world is what he calls resonance—a state of being in tune with others and the world. Rosa likens resonance to the vibrations of a tuning fork. One fork’s vibrations cause another to vibrate. The two relate to one another, being affected by the other (and in some ways, transformed) while maintaining their distinctiveness. Our evangelism must help people recover attentiveness to God’s world, where creation still witnesses to its Creator and exposes our alienation from him. However, our attempts to control the world put us in danger of losing the very “pathways” to such resonance. God’s world speaks, yet we’ve placed a finger over creation’s mouth as it pronounces the glory of God with hushed declarations. This atrophied ability to resonate with the world threatens to further cut us off from a transcendent story of salvation. Herman Bavinck argues that without general revelation (God speaking via his creation), special revelation (the transcendent story of salvation) loses its connectedness with the whole cosmic existence and life. General and special revelation are distinct but inseparable, both originating in God’s gracious self-disclosure: the Word as Creator in general revelation, the Word as Redeemer in special revelation. While special revelation alone has the divine capacity to convict and convert sinners, it’s given within the created order. Bavinck emphasizes that special revelation is built on the foundation of general revelation—general revelation is the “preamble of faith.” General revelation, then, provides the lived and intelligible context in which special revelation is received. Psalm 19 beautifully displays the essential interplay between these two “books”: the book of nature and the book of Scripture. General revelation builds the tangible theatre in which the story of salvation unfolds—a story in which we’re moving too fast to notice. In the rush of world-muting acceleration, our evangelistic efforts must seek to cultivate a resonant attentiveness to the created order in those who not only speed past it but suppress its truth. We must invite them to slow down and enter the theatre. Pathways for Evangelism Practically, our evangelism should reflect what Rosa calls “establishing axes of resonance”––pathways where we increase the likelihood of resonant encounters. Rosa identifies three axes for resonating with the world and others which can provide helpful insights for our evangelistic practices. The first axis is horizontal and concerns our relationships. Obviously, to resonate with others, we must be with others. However, we must learn how to actually be present. Rosa says nothing severs a resonant pathway quite like looking past someone to a clock or looking down at a phone. We must recover the art of holy presence. The second axis is vertical and relates to meaning. Shared encounters around art or history––whether visiting a museum or historical site or seeing a film or reading poetry together––widen our perspective to stories beyond ourselves. We’re confronted with themes of courage, sacrifice, justice, and reconciliation, which pave the way for deeper conversation. The third axis is diagonal and deals with objects. We should expose ourselves to the tangibility of the world with others. Taking a walk through the woods together or cooking a meal brings us into contact with the givenness of creation. The sights, scents, and sounds of created things oppose our obsession with control, especially in a digital age. No actions taken along these axes are substitutes for clear gospel proclamation. Rather, they’re simply practices that situate us in contexts where, in God’s created order, the human heart is confronted with realities it cannot fully mute. Each of these axes “vibrates” precisely because God has so ordered his creation and the human heart to resonate along these points of relationship, objects, and meaning. Bavinck points out that the beauty of nature could not give people pleasure (i.e., resonate) unless they have a feeling for beauty in their bosom, placed there by God. Rosa is describing realities that Christians confess are features of a Creator-made world. Rosa is describing realities that Christians confess are features of a Creator-made world. Resonant Lord Rather than being an evangelistic cop-out, done creatively these axes can become evangelistic starting points that require great intentionality. Rosa says cultivating these axes is inherently time-intensive. For the Christian, this work cannot be relegated to an evening on the ministry calendar or checked off a daily to-do list––we must embody lives of resonant hospitality. But again, these are just starting points. Our priority in relating to people along these axes of resonance must be connecting them to the deeper, divine subtext exposed. This requires not only significant time but also relational skills of attention and inquiry. We must be ready to give an answer for the resonant hope within us (1 Pet. 3:15)—a hope echoed in the world around us, and one answered in the person and work of Jesus Christ. Jesus answers Rosa’s axes of resonance. John’s Gospel opens with a vision of Jesus as the resonant Lord. On the axis of relationships, Jesus the Word came to make a relationship with God possible by grace through faith, welcoming us into God’s family as children (1:12). On the axis of meaning, Jesus is the Word of God (v. 1). John uses the Greek logos, meaning “reason” or “word.” Jesus entered the world as meaning itself. And on the axis of objects, Jesus is the Word made flesh (v. 14). He became incarnate, taking on tangible flesh, sharing meals with friends and giving his physical body for us. Hospitality, then, provides the setting for discovering these axes in community. Noncompetitive Hospitality However, if we’re to have resonant encounters with others, we must cease relating to them in aggressively competitive ways––which, in the digital age, has become the default. Rosa points out that competition is fundamentally based on outperforming another and thus produces losers and leads to alienation. We’ll never show gospel affection and attentive care to those we’re seeking to outperform––glory in competition is a zero-sum game. To resonate with another, we must suspend competition. It must be said, too, that while gospel proclamation remains our priority, hospitality isn’t merely a technique to that end. Technique is defined by efficiency. Whatever skill or giftedness we cultivate for hospitality and for drawing out others is aimed at serving another, not optimizing ourselves. Inviting others into our lives and helping them connect resonance with revelation is therefore not technique but an application of gospel affection. We’ll never show gospel affection and attentive care to those we’re seeking to outperform. Jesus gives us the model for such affection in John 13. While the disciples consistently bickered about who was the best, seeking primacy with empty bravado, Jesus emptied himself. Rather than outperforming his disciples, Jesus assumed the posture of a servant, washing their feet. In this lowly act of service, he set a precedent for noncompetitive, anti-optimized hospitality: “You also should do just as I have done to you” (v. 15). For Rosa, to truly flourish we must recover a resonant connection with the world and its inhabitants. For the church to flourish in an age trained to mute creation, we must first restore attentiveness to general revelation. The heavens declare God’s glory; they’re an invitation to divine resonance. Christians are called to join creation in this declaration, pointing to the excellencies of the creating Word who has come as the redeeming Word.

Perched on the edge of a marsh, the bookstore was tiny. Gray shingled walls chronicled years of brackish weather. It smelled of seawater and paperbacks, espresso and honeysuckle. Like the other three bookstores we’d visited, this one had a shelf dedicated to the current bestsellers. But unlike the other three, it had several copies of the book in spot number one. Ink-blue handwriting scrawled across a neon orange sticky note affixed to the cover: “IT’S HEREEEE!!!!!!” I didn’t buy it then, instead checking my local library for a copy. “Congratulations!” The pop-up notification told me. “Hold successfully placed. You are: 138th in line. Your estimated wait time is: nine months.” I can’t remember the last time I heard about a book with this much hubbub. I wondered what proved so intriguing, specifically to my generation (Gen Z), that it would skyrocket to the top of the bestseller list mere weeks after its April release. Then I met Natalie Heller Mills: “A flawless Christian woman. The manic pixie American dream girl of this nation’s deepest, darkest fantasies. The mother every woman wanted to be, and the wife every man wanted to come home to . . . perfect at being alive” (4). Thus spoke the protagonist of Caro Claire Burke’s debut novel, Yesteryear. Intriguing Concept Set in the mountains of rural Idaho, Yesteryear Ranch is home to Natalie and Caleb Mills and their gaggle of children. Natalie’s days are filled with baking sourdough bread; collecting eggs with her daughters; giggling at her husband; and posting, always posting, every little minute of it online. She wears organic cotton and walks across planks of imported Brazilian hardwood. She’s easily, always pregnant. She prays and quotes Scripture to herself. To fund their simple lifestyle, Natalie is a stay-at-home mom. At least, that’s what her millions of Instagram followers think. She glosses over the fact that her farm began with a small loan of $5 million from her father-in-law, the spearhead of a growing political dynasty. She hides the barrels of pesticide, the hired nannies, the video producers. She passes out NDAs and avoids public interviews. In doing so, she keeps up appearances. And her followers eat it up. Then one day, her perfect life nosedives when she wakes up in the year 1855, in the crude reality of the world she so carefully curated. She thinks at first it’s a reality TV stunt. Maybe it’s time-travel. Or maybe, she concludes, it’s a test from God. Tale of Two Pitfalls This book, with its f-bombs and sexually explicit scenes, isn’t worth the time it takes to turn the pages. But the truth is, women all around us are turning the pages. And their view of Christian womanhood is being shaped by the story. The book’s premise is to take a cutting, satirical look at the “tradwife social media influencer” and her evil twin, the working woman ground to the bone at the expense of family and happiness. To get these points across, Burke gives us an unreliable, unlikable narrator, presented as a Christian wife and mother. When crafting Natalie, Burke sought to explore the “fascinating social experiment [where] many women force and contort themselves to try to fit into a lifestyle that is fundamentally unnatural, even though it is billed as fundamentally natural.” Yesteryear isn’t the only place she dissects this “fundamentally natural” lifestyle. Whether on a late-night show or on her podcast, Diabolical Lies, she throws punch after punch at what she understands Christian marriage and womanhood to be. At her baptism, Natalie wonders with dismay if Anyone is really out there at all, if Anyone is coming to save her. In her motherhood, she’s filled with a sense of doom. She thinks her children are evil joy-suckers and is immensely relieved when the nannies are hired and she “never has to be alone with them again” (264). When she is alone with them, she thinks her daughter is God incarnate (234). Her marriage oscillates between gender-confused and physically abusive. But the whole book hangs on her faith. In tight italic lines, we see the inner workings of Natalie’s brain: the prayers she whispers, the Scripture she quotes. Like a mirror cracked from side to side, the whole of it seems familiar until you peer closer and find the reflection distorted, the individual pieces jagged and sharp. What’s the Point? Reading the book as a young Christian wife and mother is a bit like sitting in Sylvia Plath’s Bell Jar, like being stuck in the snaking, smoggy lines of La La Land traffic. Every few pages, I needed to come up for air. Natalie is some sort of ambiguously Protestant woman, or maybe Mormon (a la Ballerina Farm), or maybe Catholic, or maybe Orthodox Jew. Who knows? Not the reader, and maybe not even the author. Nor does she understand just what she’s taking potshots at. I’m not the only one to feel this way; another reviewer describes the work as a “clever premise wearing the skin of a novel.” The attempt at satire is evident throughout Yesteryear, but good satire requires enough of a grasp to know what you’re making fun of. Burke doesn’t. Submission. That’s part of what she’s rallying against. The patriarchy! A general sense of subservience, the understanding that the woman stays home, out of finances, out of any real contribution to her family and country, God help her. Burke’s feminism and wit tumble like a dirty little snowball, hurtling with increasing speed toward the end of the plot. Natalie’s 1855 experience? After sexually assaulting her female producer, she has a mental breakdown and retreats to the far corners of her farm, completely out of touch with reality. Natalie is eventually arrested for child abuse, and so the book concludes with a thud. Important Critique With a film still on the way—Amazon MGM Studios picked up the rights before the book’s release, with Anne Hathaway set to star as Natalie—Christians should be aware of what the book is communicating, especially to my generation. We grew up in a world where our algorithms latch on to what we’re interested in and feed us that content until we’re engorged. The algorithm dangles carrots: buy this dress, adopt this 10-step routine, and you too could have the happiness this 30-second video captures. Gen Z has a nostalgia for a life we’ve never lived. There’s a generation-wide desire to do what Paul exhorts: live quietly and work with our hands (1 Thess. 4:11). We want to build analog habits and unplug our phones, unfollow the influencers—once we let them teach us how. Credit where credit is due: Burke rightly recognizes that the tradwife social media influencer movement isn’t as transparent as it claims to be. She also rightly identifies that the alternative on the other end of the spectrum isn’t any better: give up a family to work until you die. Missed Target But Burke lies to us, too, and it’s brazen: Be a married Christian mother who aspires to build her home and follow the Lord, and you’re doomed to a psychotic breakdown eventually. It’s implicit in the book and explicit in her interview with NPR: “I think a little bit of what I was thinking about when I was writing the novel is almost like pushing a theory to its final conclusions. . . . Let’s carry it out all the way and see what happens when we get to the end.” There’s a generation-wide desire to do what Paul exhorts: live quietly and work with our hands. We want to build analog habits and unplug our phones, unfollow the influencers—once we let them teach us how. This would be an interesting premise and an even more interesting read if it had any grounding in reality. Instead, Burke’s characters are caricatures, her social commentary socially unaware. Another reviewer asserts that it’s “painfully obvious that Burke has never once meaningfully interacted with the sort of person she means to satirize.” Burke also seems unable to decide whether women lean toward tradition because they are hypocrites or because they really believe what they say they do. At times she portrays Natalie as a charlatan whose husband dances to her tune. At other times, she portrays her as a naive true believer, and thus worthy of disdain. In any case, we’re supposed to dislike her and all she stands for. If Burke wanted to meaningfully interact with whom she meant to satirize, all she had to do was put down her phone and go to church. That’s where real Christian wives and mothers live and love. If Burke and Gen-Z women are hungry for a picture of a different kind of life (and, apparently, they are, with more than half a million copies of Yesteryear sold already), they’d get the truest picture every Sunday morning. Instead of pews lined with people who spend their lives curating their online ones to perfection, Burke would see sinners in need of a Savior. And in their repentance and forgiveness, she’d be pointed to him too.

Only a couple years out of college, I told my coworkers that I looked forward to being old. They weren’t just dismissive of that comment. They were indignant. On one level, I know why. I understood little to nothing at age 23 about the hardships of aging and caring for the dying. I hadn’t yet suffered many of life’s inevitable pains. At the same time, I looked forward to greater wisdom, maybe even the defeat of some sins and temptations. I was excited about all I could learn if the Lord granted me years. Maybe I even had a couple Bible verses in my head, like Proverbs 16:31: “Gray hair is a crown of glory; it is gained in a righteous life.” Or Job 12:12: “Wisdom is with the aged, and understanding in length of days.” Both those verses are cited by Jen Wilkin in her excellent new book, Dust to Dust: Aging Wisely in an Anti-Aging World (Crossway). If you take my youthful naivete at its best, I was recognizing what Jen distinguishes in her book: The world says to age is to diminish. But the Bible says to age is to deepen. Now in middle age, however, I experience the good and bad: The invisibility because no one would possibly notice my appearance. But also the freedom because I have that middle-aged dad’s superpower of not caring what other people think of my appearance. I didn’t realize how much I needed Jen’s book, and I was eager to ask a whole bunch of questions on Gospelbound. In This Episode 00:00 – Jen Wilkin reflects on her mother’s death and the symmetry of life 00:49 – Why Collin has long looked forward to old age 01:20 – Introducing Dust to Dust and the contrast between cultural decline and biblical deepening 02:31 – Why modern culture values youth over old age 03:55 – Jen’s first moments of realizing she was aging 05:46 – How aging feels different for men and women 07:49 – Why many people fear becoming a burden 10:08 – Assisted suicide, dependency, and surprising cultural opposition 14:47 – The “chiasm of life” and how beginning and end mirror each other 21:02 – Why midlife offers a unique vantage point for perspective and wisdom 24:50 – Caring simultaneously for children and aging parents 29:12 – Why caregiving isn’t a season but a default setting of life 32:10 – How modern longevity has changed the experience of family and aging 36:25 – “You will not surely die”: the anti-gospel of age denial 37:52 – How suffering narrows our priorities 40:34 – Honoring parents and the fuller meaning of the fifth commandment 45:44 – Retirement, crystallized knowledge, and later-life vocation 50:46 – A theology of aging before a debate about anti-aging practices 55:33 – Jen’s regrets, sanctification, and learning to honor parents well 1:00:26 – Final reflections on aging, family, and hope 1:01:07 – Outro Resources Mentioned: Dust to Dust by Jen Wilkin From Strength to Strength by Arthur C. Brooks The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis SIGN UP for my newsletter, Unseen Things. Help The Gospel Coalition renew and unify the contemporary church in the ancient gospel: Donate today. Don’t miss an episode of Gospelbound with Collin Hansen: Apple Podcasts Spotify YouTube TGC Updates