“Picture this—you’re out going to pick up your lunch and there’s this random guy walking by with a handmade sign. I’m sure like most of us, we’d glance and keep it moving, but I decided to read his sign since I was at a stop light.”

This is how a woman in Jacksonville, Florida, described a recent experience to a local reporter. Here’s what made it newsworthy: The sign read “HAVE A WONDERFUL DAY!!! I LOVE YOU.” The man also held up another sign that read “YOU are RELEVANT.” As the woman snapped a few pictures, the man holding the signs gave her a sunflower. The reporter shared the story with the reminder that the kind messages came during National Suicide Prevention Month.

We need this reminder as much now as ever.

Billy Miller, an actor who played Marcus Specter on Suits and won three Emmy awards for his role in The Young and the Restless, died by suicide last Friday in Austin, Texas, at the age of forty-three. His mother stated that he “surrendered his life” after “a long hard valiant battle with bipolar depression.”

The number of deaths by suicide in the US increased last year to the highest rate ever. Globally, a person dies by suicide every forty seconds. Gallup notes that depression rates in the US have reached their highest levels ever reported.

These facts can seem overwhelming. What can you and I do to make a practical difference in our hurting world? One biblical answer is both counterintuitive and countercultural, but it offers hope we can embrace and share with those who need it most today.

“In its welfare you will find your welfare”

Peter called his fellow believers “sojourners and exiles” (1 Peter 2:11). The former describes someone who is a foreigner or stranger; the latter refers to temporary residents. Taken together, they remind us that this world is not our home and that we are only here for a short time.

How are we to live in this foreign land?

The Lord’s letter to his Jewish exiles in Babylon is instructive (Jeremiah 29). It was preserved in Scripture because it has value not just for its original readers twenty-six centuries ago but for all readers across all times and cultures.

It begins: “Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their produce” (v. 5). This is the opposite of what they might have expected. Rather than finding temporary shelter, they were to construct lasting structures in which to “live” (the Hebrew is literally translated as “sit down and remain”). Creating gardens takes time, but they were not only to plant them but to “eat their produce” in the years to come.

In addition, they were to “take wives and have sons and daughters” to fulfill God’s call that they “multiply there, and do not decrease” (v. 6). Rather than allowing their nation to wither in exile, they were to seek to grow and prosper.

Now comes the most shocking instruction of all: “Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lᴏʀᴅ on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare” (v. 7). “Seek” means to “run diligently after”; the “welfare” of the city refers to its peace, prosperity, health, and success. The exiles were to do all they could to promote the Babylonian city’s welfare and then to “pray to the Lᴏʀᴅ on its behalf” that he might do what they could not.

The reason was simple: “In its welfare you will find your welfare.”

Three ways to “seek the welfare” of our city

One response to the brokenness of our secularized culture is to withdraw into spiritual “huddles” with little concern for those outside our circle. But this ignores our commission to “go therefore and make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:19). And it impoverishes us while denying others the good we can offer them in Christ.

What are some biblical ways we can “seek the welfare” of our broken culture?

One: “Show kindness and mercy to one another” (Zechariah 7:9). As the sign-holding man in Jacksonville reminds us, we cannot know the larger impact of a single act of encouragement and affirmation.

Two: “As each has received a gift, use it to serve one another” (1 Peter 4:10). John Grove argues persuasively in Public Discourse: “We do not need more self-conscious crusaders for the nation or even for Western Civilization, but instead more priests, teachers, businessmen, artists, writers, and parents who perform their own activities faithfully, serving . . . as ‘leaven for the whole lump.’”

Three: “Bring salvation to the ends of the earth” (Acts 13:47). Paul was “not ashamed of the gospel” because it is “the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes” (Romans 1:16). According to Tim Keller, “The gospel is this: We are more sinful and flawed in ourselves than we ever dared believe, yet at the same time we are more loved and accepted in Jesus Christ than we ever dared hope.”

How to love well

Christians have a unique gift for our culture today: we alone can demonstrate the kindness of Christ by offering our best service to hurting souls while sharing the good news of God’s love. But we cannot love well until we embrace the fact that we are well loved.

To that end, let’s close with this intercession from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer: “Help us so to know you that we may truly love you, and so to love you that we may fully serve you, whose service is perfect freedom.”

Will you join me in offering these words from your heart to your Father today?

NOTE: If you or someone you know is struggling with mental health issues, I encourage you to call or text the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988 or go here. For Denison Forum articles on mental health, please go here.

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Auburn University is the second-largest university in Alabama. Known for its football team and fierce cross-state rivalry with the University of Alabama, the school is making news these days for a completely different reason.

Some time ago, five girls began meeting on campus in Neville Arena to pray. Their group grew to two hundred students. Local ministries became involved and sponsored a worship event last week which around five thousand people attended.

Following the service, a student wanted to be baptized. Crowds then began gathering at a nearby lake, where roughly two hundred people gave their lives to Christ and were baptized. Auburn Tigers head football coach Hugh Freeze, a very public Christian, helped with the baptisms. Now other universities are calling to bring similar programs to their campuses.

One student said she had never seen anything like the mass baptism: “Never in my life. I was even talking to adults who were there that were a part of it, and they said that they had never witnessed anything like that.”

“A new spirit I will put within them”

Yesterday, we focused on the urgency of sharing God’s word with a nation that is sliding ever further from biblical morality. Today, let’s discuss the necessity of living in ways that are so different from our fallen culture as to be both distinctive and attractive.

God said of ancient Israel, “You have not walked in my statutes, nor obeyed my rules” (Ezekiel 11:12a). Rather, they “have acted according to the rules of the nations that are around you” (v. 12b). This is a grievous trajectory for God’s people since “what is exalted among men is an abomination in the sight of God” (Luke 16:15).

Tragically, the vast majority of Americans do not believe that God is the Lord who sees and judges sin. If they think of him at all, they view him as benevolent and ambivalent, the object of their subject. But they are the object of his subject. God is not on trial—we are.

His transforming promise is our only hope: “I will give them one heart, and a new spirit I will put within them. I will remove the heart of stone from their flesh and give them a heart of flesh, that they may walk in my statutes and keep my rules and obey them. And they shall be my people, and I will be their God” (Ezekiel 11:19–20). Human words cannot change human hearts, but God’s Spirit, using God’s word as declared by God’s people, can change any heart today.

By contrast, “As for those whose heart goes after their detestable things and their abominations, I will bring their deeds upon their own heads, declares the Lord Gᴏᴅ” (v. 21).

Three practical steps

As you can see, it is vital that God’s people live in a way that is distinctive from our fallen culture and yet attractive to those deceived by its lies. How can we do this?

First, decide that you want to be different.

God said of the sinful Roman Empire, “Come out of her, my people, lest you take part in her sins, lest you share in her plagues; for her sins are heaped high as heaven, and God has remembered her iniquities” (Revelation 18:4–5).

Choose right now to “come out” from your sinfully broken society, whatever the cost.

Second, ask the Spirit to make you more like Christ than you have ever been.

When you asked Jesus to be your Lord, his Spirit took up residency in your life (1 Corinthians 3:16) and you became his “body” in the world (1 Corinthians 12:27). Oswald Chambers thus observed, “In our physical life Jesus has the same setting that he had on earth.” Now we must choose every day to be controlled and empowered by the Spirit (Ephesians 5:18) as he conforms us to the image of Christ (Romans 8:29).

We are exhorted: “If we live by the Spirit, let us also keep in step with the Spirit” (Galatians 5:25).

Third, expose the dark to the light.

Paul told his fellow believers, “At one time you were darkness, but now you are light in the Lord” (Ephesians 5:8a). Consequently, we are to “walk as children of light (for the fruit of light is found in all that is good and right and true), and try to discern what is pleasing to the Lord. Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them” (vv. 8b–11).

Light has always defeated darkness (John 1:5) and always will.

“These words just changed everything for me”

In 2014, Trieste Belmont was struggling with depression and decided to end her life. As she stood atop a high bridge, she says, “I was sobbing and crying and working up the courage to just go through with it.” Then a person in a car behind her shouted, “Don’t jump.”

“Those words just changed everything for me,” she remembered. “Having a stranger care about me in my darkest time made it so that I didn’t jump, and it saved my life.”

She sought support and, with the help of her therapist, family, and friends, her mental health has since greatly improved. But she reflects on that moment as the catalyst for her life moving in an entirely new direction: “Something that I realized is that even if something’s not a huge moment in your life, just the little, small gestures that you can make for other people really do make a difference.”

Now consider the impact of sharing God’s life-giving word in the power of God’s transforming Spirit. And reflect on the urgency of giving this word to a broken culture on the path to moral ruin and divine judgment.

When confronted with this opportunity, Isaiah said to God, “Here I am! Send me” (Isaiah 6:8).

Will you say the same today?

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