What happens when the person singing three rows back on a Sunday is using everything he has just to put his feet on the floor each morning? A man rings his pastor on a Tuesday and says he needs to tell him something, and asks him not to be shocked. He describes two years of mornings that felt like someone had packed his chest with wet sand. He'd been smiling at the church door through all of it, week after week, and nobody had any idea.

In this episode, Graham explores faith, anxiety, and depression through the lens of Scripture, theology, history, and cultural analysis. He shows how honestly the Bible carries mental suffering, from the psalmist asking why his nephesh is cast down, to the deep calling to deep in Psalm 42 where the word is tehom, the chaos waters of Genesis, to Psalm 88 ending in the dark with no resolution and God letting it stand, to Elijah under the broom tree being given sleep and food before anything else, to Jesus in Gethsemane perilypos, his soul surrounded on every side by sorrow. He opens up the Greek merimnaō behind "do not be anxious," and the ancient diagnosis of acedia that Evagrius and John Cassian mapped in the desert centuries before we had our language for it. He tells the story of Charles Spurgeon, the most famous preacher of his age, who knew despair from the inside, and engages with voices like Martin Luther, William Cowper, Julian of Norwich, Kathryn Greene-McCreight, Kelly Kapic, and Walter Brueggemann, alongside the research and reflection of Viktor Frankl, Curt Thompson, Jonathan Haidt, and Andrew Solomon. He's fair to the believers who worry that treatment and medication let us off the hook spiritually, and fair to the young woman with a diagnosis, a prescription, and an app that reminds her to breathe, who told him she'd never felt so managed and so alone at the same time. And he asks what it would take for the church to become a place where people can say the true thing out loud, and be held.

Book recommendations: "Darkness Is My Only Companion: A Christian Response to Mental Illness" by Kathryn Greene-McCreight, "Embodied Hope: A Theological Meditation on Pain and Suffering" by Kelly M. Kapic, and "The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression" by Andrew Solomon.

If you're struggling, please reach out. In Australia, Lifeline is on 13 11 14 and Beyond Blue is on 1300 22 4636, both available twenty-four hours a day. Wherever you are, please talk to your doctor or a trusted person.

Email us at GrahamPodcast@icloud.com

See my Substack with an article related to this episode: https://grahamjosephhill.substack.com/

Podcast links:

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GrahamJosephHillPodcast

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7aqTMTcoYPcvneL4xg4Ohv

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-graham-joseph-hill-podcast/id1890838919

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Boomplay: https://www.boomplaymusic.com/podcasts/143800

What happens when the good life your culture is selling you, the success, the status, the winning, turns out to be the very thing that costs you your soul? A skeptical teenager in the western suburbs of Sydney picks up the four Gospels to close the door on Christianity for good, and meets a Person on a road instead. The first followers of Jesus were called people of "the Way," and forty years later, Graham is still walking it. In this episode, Graham explores the Jesus Way and ten movements that carry us out of self-interest and into radical discipleship through the lens of Scripture, theology, history, and cultural analysis. He walks through all ten: material success to spiritual riches, competition to compassion, power to servanthood, retribution to forgiveness, indifference to justice, conflict to peacemaking, legalism to grace, exclusion to embrace, expressive individualism to community, and frenetic activity to slow discipleship. He traces the Way through Scripture, from Isaiah's highway of holiness in the desert, to the early believers called followers of the hodos in Acts, to Jesus asking in Mark 8 what it profits a person to gain the world and forfeit the psyche, to the self-emptying kenosis of Philippians 2, to the call to abide, to menō, like branches on a vine in John 15. He engages with voices like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Dallas Willard, Eugene Peterson, and Emmanuel Katongole, alongside the research of Robert Bellah, Charles Taylor, and Tim Kasser on individualism, the self, and what a life organized around money and image does to us. And he asks how the church recovers a Way that costs something without turning discipleship into a new performance, what these ten movements look like on an ordinary Tuesday in Sydney, and why the whole thing begins and ends with grace. Book recommendations: "Ten Movements of the Jesus Way" by Graham Joseph Hill, "The Cost of Discipleship" by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and "The Divine Conspiracy" by Dallas Willard. Email us at GrahamPodcast@icloud.com See my Substack with an article related to this episode: https://grahamjosephhill.substack.com/ Podcast links: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GrahamJosephHillPodcast Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7aqTMTcoYPcvneL4xg4Ohv Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-graham-joseph-hill-podcast/id1890838919 Podbean: https://www.podbean.com/pw/pbblog-tsqgs-1534f12 Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/271b0dd3-990d-41e6-b4ba-3fd4bcf78cef iHeartRadio: https://iheart.com/podcast/329136112 Player FM: https://player.fm/series/3726148 Podchaser: https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/the-graham-joseph-hill-podcast-6435212 Boomplay: https://www.boomplaymusic.com/podcasts/143800

What happens when the story that was supposed to bury God starts to run out of road? A lifelong atheist, one of the sharpest people you'll meet, turns his coffee cup in his hands and admits he's begun to wonder whether we threw out something we needed. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, once a leading atheist, announces she's now a Christian, and Richard Dawkins calls himself a cultural Christian. And a culture that spent two centuries sure it had outgrown faith keeps finding the oldest questions surfacing again.

In this episode, Graham explores the surprising rebirth of belief, and whether secularism is actually dying, through the lens of Scripture, theology, history, and cultural analysis. He traces a long thread of Scripture engaging a sceptical world, from Paul at the Areopagus in Acts 17, to "he has set eternity in the human heart" in Ecclesiastes 3, to the Word and the light the darkness has never put out in John 1, to the God of Isaiah who makes a way in the wilderness. He engages with voices like Augustine, Blaise Pascal, C.S. Lewis, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Lesslie Newbigin, alongside the research of sociologists like Peter Berger, Grace Davie, and Rodney Stark on the breakdown of the secularisation thesis. And he asks why the confident modern prediction that we would outgrow God has run into trouble, what kind of belief is being reborn and whether a Christianity valued only for its usefulness can hold, and where the church should look for hope when the decline in the West is real and the headline data is easy to get wrong.

Book recommendations: "The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God" by Justin Brierley, "Dominion" by Tom Holland, and "A Secular Age" by Charles Taylor.

Email us at GrahamPodcast@icloud.com

See my Substack with an article related to this episode: https://grahamjosephhill.substack.com/

Podcast links: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GrahamJosephHillPodcast Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7aqTMTcoYPcvneL4xg4Ohv Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-graham-joseph-hill-podcast/id1890838919 Podbean: https://www.podbean.com/pw/pbblog-tsqgs-1534f12 Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/271b0dd3-990d-41e6-b4ba-3fd4bcf78cef iHeartRadio: https://iheart.com/podcast/329136112 Player FM: https://player.fm/series/3726148 Podchaser: https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/the-graham-joseph-hill-podcast-6435212 Boomplay: https://www.boomplaymusic.com/podcasts/143800