This is the fourth and final installment of my interview with Justin Holcomb, who wrote Rid of My Disgrace with his wife, Lindsey.

Please note: Justin and Crossway (the publisher) are making a chapter of the book available for free to Common Grounds Online readers.

To buy the book, Rid of My Disgrace, click here:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1433515989/commongrounds-20

For Part 1 of the interview:
http://commongroundsonline.org/content/sexual-abuse-and-gospel-interview...

For Part 2 of the interview:
http://commongroundsonline.org/content/sexual-assault-and-gospel-intervi...

For Part 3 of the interview:
http://commongroundsonline.org/content/sexual-assault-and-gospel-intervi...

For more on Justin Holcomb:
http://theresurgence.com/authors/justin-holcomb
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This is Part 3 of my interview with Justin Holcomb, who wrote Rid of My Disgrace with his wife, Lindsey.

Justin earned his PhD at Emory and is a pastor at Mars Hill Church in Seattle. For more about Justin, see here:
http://theresurgence.com/authors/justin-holcomb

To buy the book, Rid of My Disgrace, see here:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1433515989/commongrounds-20

For Part 1 of the interview:
http://commongroundsonline.org/content/sexual-abuse-and-gospel-interview...

For Part 2 of the interview:
http://commongroundsonline.org/content/sexual-assault-and-gospel-intervi...
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GL: In your book you deal with the emotions following the trauma of sexual assault. How does the Gospel bring hope and healing?

JH: We deal with the negative and destructive emotions that result from sexual assault. Emotions are not merely physiological impulses that can be simply ignored, trivialized, or controlled. Our emotions are not just chemicals in our brain and physiological responses to stimuli. Emotions are to be taken seriously and listened to. They reveal what you believe about God, yourself, your experience of sexual assault, others, and the world. What you believe has a huge connection to how you respond to disgrace, violence, denial, shame, guilt, fear, anxiety, bitterness, despair, and so on.

The beliefs that accompany the development, maintenance, and increase of disgrace and distress are directly responsible for generating dysfunctional emotions and their effects for victims. This means that emotions can be fed or fought by the one experiencing them. Grace of God fights against the emotions accompanying your disgrace and nurtures you new emotions.

The gospel of Jesus offers new emotions to victims and how they relate to the current emotions victims experience.

Grace offers to victims the gift of refuting distortions and faulty thinking and replacing their condemning, counterfactual beliefs with more accurate ones that reflect the truths about God, themselves, and God’s grace-filled response to their disgrace.

God’s grace dismantles the beliefs that give disgrace life. Grace re-creates what violence destroyed.Read more

This is Part 2 of my interview with Justin Holcomb, who wrote Rid of My Disgrace with his wife, Lindsey.

To buy a copy of Rid of My Disgrace, click here:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1433515989/commongrounds-20

For Part 1, click here:
http://commongroundsonline.org/content/sexual-abuse-and-gospel-interview...
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GL: How do you define sexual assault?

JH: There are three parts to our definition of sexual assault: 1) any type of sexual behavior or contact 2) where consent is not freely given or obtained and 3) is accomplished through force, intimidation, violence, coercion, manipulation, threat, deception, or abuse of authority.

This definition gets beyond our society’s narrow understanding of the issue and expands the spectrum of actions to be considered sexual assault. A definition that is too narrow can cause some victims of assault and those who should be supporting them to downplay the experience.Read more

Recently, Justin and Lindsey Holcomb published Rid of My Disgrace http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1433515989/commongrounds-20, a book that brings the reader face to face with the helpless horror of sexual abuse. But the Holcombs don't leave readers in despair; they also apply the Gospel to the hurts and shame that survivors experience.

Full disclosure: Justin and I are old friends, going back to our time together at Reformed Theological Seminary-Orlando. He went on to Emory for his PhD in religious studies, and we met up again in Charlottesville at the University of Virginia where I was working on my PhD and he was a post-doctoral fellow. In Charlottesville Justin met Lindsey, who trained in social work and then served sexual abuse survivors in town.

Today Justin and Lindsey are in Seattle, parents of two daughters. Justin is a pastor at Mars Hill Church where he serves the pastors, staff and laity.

Today is the start of a several part interview with Justin about Rid of My Disgrace.
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Against a brooding, wine-dark backdrop, what’s going on in the painting is at first difficult to make out. A spotless white tablecloth rewards an unseen light source, showcasing a meal in the offing. Then you see Christ the Lord, facing you, eyes closed in prayer, hand outstretched, giving thanks over the meal. Then gradually, first one, then another, disciple, and a third, a server, materialize around the Christ. Finally, it dawns on you that all three of them are registering a surprising recognition that is standing everything they thought they knew, including reality itself, on end. One man has spread his arms like an eagle, his fingers like a fan; he looks about to take off. The server has the look of one who is saying, what the heck is going on here? Who is this guy? It takes you a little while to make out Man #3, even though he is closest to you. Gradually you see that he has lurched forward in his chair, gripping its arms while he rivets Jesus’ face in eye-opening recognition.Read more

I am way overdue in posting this interview with Travis Prinzi. I read Prinzi's Harry Potter & Imagination: The Way Between Two Worlds last fall and LOVED it. For those who love all things Potter, in my estimation Prinzi's work is the best book I've read on the subject. Prinzi not only brings a wealth of learning about literature, and particularly fantasy literature, to bear on the J.K. Rowling's Potter oerve, but he also thinks interdependently. He avoids merely splicing quotes and others' insights, but rather he engages other writers and Rowling from his own point of view. The questions Prinzi asks in HP & Imagination kept me riveted, and he writes in a style that is a delight to read.Read more

My mom has a wooden box—scarcely bigger than a jewelry box—which belonged to my grandmother. More than any other possession I can think of, I hope that one day that box will be passed along to me. In it are the neatly folded handwritten letters written over four brightly burning decades of my grandparents’ marriage.

My grandparents married in 1929, only weeks before the great crash that would change everything. Grandpa worked in heavy construction—building cross-state barge canals and roads with heavy machinery like the enormous drag-line that he was using the day it tipped and he was trapped below the waters of Florida’s Crystal River. That was just a few short months before they would have celebrated their fortieth wedding anniversary and years before I was born. Several decades later, my grandmother would follow him into the arms of their Savior after a battle with Alzheimer’s which ravaged her mind from the time I can remember her.

In that box mom keeps are letters about the ordinary days of my grandparents’ lives, passed between life-long sweethearts, laced with tender words. But still they are a treasure to me: a snapshot into the hearts and minds of two people I only wish I had known.

If you wondered what Leigh McLeroy’s book Treasured is all about, it’s like this. It’s a  window to the heart of God through the things that He might have kept in His own treasured wooden box. They are glimpses of His character that He has passed on to us through the Scriptures. The fresh olive sprig which the dove carried to Noah, the dry waterskin which sustained the cast-out Hagar, the well-sharpened knife Abraham raised above his son Isaac—these are just a few of the treasures McLeroy examines. Read more

See my review yesterday of Jared Wilson's Your Jesus Is Too Safe.

Today I'm posting an excerpt from the book in which Jared writes about the Kingdom of God.
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Full disclosure: I chased down Jared four years ago as I read the Thinklings blog and marveled at his wit, intellect and erudition. We met at a Thinklings dinner in Christmas of that year, and later I hired him to work for Docent Research Group. Jared excels at this work! Additionally this year he co-authored/ghostwrote books for Docent clients who are two of the most prominent pastors in the country. He is gold.

Lastly, in this vein of disclosure, he mentioned me in the acknowledgements of Your Jesus Is Too Safe. In truth I did nothing for him or this book other than articulate the envy that seizes me when I read his stuff.

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 Things to love about Your Jesus Is Too Safe, by Jared Wilson:

1. Jared marshals top flight biblical scholarship, owns it, and makes it digestible. 

 2. He slings the slang with the best of 'em.  His paraphrases provoke the mind and make it itch…they compel me to look afresh at biblical texts and living Jesus' teachings in my life today.

 3. Jared is funny. Page after page. Often a chuckle, at times laugh out loud funny.

 4. The focus, intensely, is on Jesus.

 You put all these 'things to love' together, and you get taken for a ride that is at turns illuminating, powerfully challenging, hilarious and inspiring. Read more

I've just read Tullian Tchividjian's new book, Unfashionable, and I enjoyed it immensely. Tchividjian (pronounced cha-vi-jin) is the new pastor of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale, FL.  (Recently Tchividjian's church plant, New City Church, merged with Coral Ridge Presbyterian and the two are now one body.) Tchividjian integrated his training in theology with the works of sophisticated social theorists, and he has poured this sparkling blend of intellectual streams through his personal experience of a being a prodigal redeemed.

The result? In my estimation Tchividjian offers a book that challenges comfortable but diffident Christians first to live vibrantly and joyfully as Christ-followers and, second, to be different for the right reasons so that the Church can make a difference in the world in the right ways.  Unfashionable's sub-title sums up the book well: "making a difference in the world by being different."

Why is Tchividjian's  Unfashionable helpful? In our moment, many American Christians fall on one  side of a divide or the other, and many castigate those on the other side. This divide is a perspective or stance about the Church's role vis-à-vis cultures in the US.  While what follows is much-tread ground, it bears brief mention: many American Christians capitulate to cool, morphing into whatever trends are "hot" in society at the moment. Likewise many other believers pull up the drawbridge and seek hermetically-sealed enclaves away from society. While Tchividjian writes piercing commentary about each side of the divide, he also offers constructive ways of thinking and living that will hopefully entice Christians on both sides of the divide to adjust their ways to a prudential, loving counter-cultural interactions with cultures.

For example…Read more