It's not a bad thing to want to please others. So when do we cross a line into sinful people pleasing? Jasmine Holmes puts it succinctly: "It's when your identity is founded on other people's perception of you."

On this episode of Let's Talk, Jasmine, Jackie, and Melissa all confess to people-pleasing tendencies that can become sin, though each faces different temptations. It's helpful to understand how your personality and gifting may bring with them a related temptation. Melissa shares that, in her own life, she has learned that it's possible to be nice to people in a way that isn't actually kind. The hosts also talk about how people pleasing affects parenting, and what they hope for their kids as they grown in independence.

Related Resources

• 6 Ways to Smash the Approval Idol
• How Can I Be a Workplace Servant But Not a Doormat?
• Personality Tests Don’t Excuse Your Sin
• Exchanging Fear for Fear

This season of Let’s Talk is sponsored by RTS Global, the online program at Reformed Theological Seminary. Learn more at rts.edu/online.

Is our country ever going to be the same? Will I give my parents COVID? Are my children spending too much time in front of screens? Most likely, these questions, or others like them, have run through your mind in the past year. We live in an anxious age. If you sometimes feel like fear and anxiety are your roommates, you aren't alone! But we don't have to give fear and anxiety dominion over our lives or our minds.

In this episode of Let's Talk, Jasmine, Jackie, and Melissa talk about coping with anxiety and how to be honest about what is frightening—without living in fear. Jasmine says that when she's anxious, she turns to Psalm 16 because "the opposite of anxiety, for me, is joy." She says, "my prayer when I'm feeling anxious is, 'bring me closer to your presence. Bring me into your presence, because I know that this anxiety can't exist there.'"  

Mentioned in this episode:

• Why Am I Feeling Like This?: A Teen's Guide to Freedom from Anxiety and Depression by David Murray

Related content:

• Fear the One Who Is Greater
• How Anxiety Has Grown My Faith
• Ask TGC: Is Anxiety a Sin?
• 7 Reasons Not to Worry

This season of Let’s Talk is sponsored by RTS Global, the online program at Reformed Theological Seminary. Learn more at rts.edu/online.

Do we want to see the holiness of God? The answer might be more complicated than it seems. A glimpse of God's holiness immediately makes us aware of our own sin. But it's also the thing that empowers our obedience and gives us hope that all that is wrong with the world will be made right.

In this episode of Let's Talk, Jackie Hill Perry, Jasmine Holmes, and Melissa Kruger talk about our complicated relationship with holiness. If we fail to appreciate God's holiness, we fail to know God as he really is. Jackie warns, "We live in a society that continues to frame and shape God around its own cultural ideas, which means you have a God that's always changing. He's always becoming like whatever decade you live in, when he doesn't exist like that. I want a God who is not mutable like me, so that I can actually stand on something that's solid, for eternity."

Mentioned in this Episode

• Dwell Bible App
• Holier Than Thou: How God’s Holiness Helps Us Trust Him (forthcoming) by Jackie Hill Perry
• Machete Season

Related Resources

• Holiness of God (TGC Essay)
• How to Be Unholy as You Pursue Holiness
• Why It's Good that God Is Different from You
• How to Become Holy

This season of Let’s Talk is sponsored by RTS Global, the online program at Reformed Theological Seminary. Learn more at rts.edu/online.

Who shaped your spiritual life?

In this first episode of season two of Let's Talk, Jasmine Holmes, Jackie Hill Perry, and Melissa Kruger consider the men and women, both living and dead, who have been their spiritual role models. They talk about historical figures as well as people they have known personally. They discuss about how to grapple with the flaws of our heroes, and why we might overlook some sins but not others.

Melissa notes that when we look at the "cloud of witnesses" who have withstood hardship, it helps us say, by the Spirit, "I can withstand, too."

Books mentioned in this episode:

• The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom
• Becoming Elisabeth Elliot by Ellen Vaughan
• The Autobiography of Malcolm X

Related content:

• Favorite Books: What’s Your Favorite Christian Biography?
• When Our Heroes Don't Live Up to Their Theology
• How I Process the Moral Failures of My Historical Heroes

This season of Let’s Talk is sponsored by RTS Global, the online program at Reformed Theological Seminary. Learn more at rts.edu/online.

Let's Talk returns for a second season of conversations with Jasmine Holmes, Jackie Hill Perry, and Melissa Kruger. Subscribe to Let's Talk and look for new episodes every Friday, starting January 29. 

This season of Let’s Talk is sponsored by RTS Global, the online program at Reformed Theological Seminary. Learn more at rts.edu/online.

As 2020 finally ends, it feels appropriate to look back on what we've learned and ultimately celebrate what God has done, even in the midst of one of the most difficult years ever collectively experienced.

In this special bonus episode of Let's Talk, Collin Hansen is joined by TGC colleague Melissa Kruger, who co-hosts the Let's Talk podcast. They discuss big trends and stories from 2020, share their hopes for 2021, and reflect on God's faithfulness displayed through TGC and many other areas of life.

To hear the full conversation, head over to the episode "The Hardest Year and the Hope That Never Fails", originally released on Gospelbound.

In this bonus episode of Let's Talk, Jasmine Holmes, Jackie Hill Perry, and Melissa Kruger update each other on life over the past eight months of lockdowns, schooling disruptions, online church, and family life in close quarters. They talk about the difficulties of lockdown as well as the unexpected blessings.

Jackie notes that the pandemic has been like a light that exposes both good and bad. One thing it has exposed is our inability to make and keep plans in our own power, something addressed in James 4:13–16. The lack of control we feel in a pandemic can also create greater dependency on God. Jackie says, "I think that's a blessing, honestly, to have to need God in a way that I've always needed him, but to actually recognize it."

We plan to be back with Season 2 of Let's Talk in early 2021. Subscribe today to receive new episodes when they are released!

Books mentioned in this episode:

• Nannie Helen Burroughs: A Documentary Portrait of an Early Civil Rights Pioneer, 1900–1959
• Delighting in the Trinity by Michael Reeves
• Gay Girl: Good God by Jackie Hill Perry
• Mother to Son by Jasmine Holmes
• Keeping the Heart by John Flavel
• The Warmth of Other Sons by Isabel Wilkerson
• The Harry Potter Series by J. K. Rowling

Related content:

• Normal Again, Thanks to COVID-19
• We Never Had Control
• The Coronavirus and the Pony
• How Can I Handle School Anxiety this Fall?

This episode of Let’s Talk is sponsored by LifeWay, publisher of Jackie Hill Perry's first Bible study, Jude: Contending for the Faith in Today's Culture. Over seven sessions, you'll study the Book of Jude verse-by-verse, dive into themes of being called, loved, and kept, and learn how to point others to Jesus in grace and truth. While often overlooked, the Book of Jude remains as relevant today as the time it was written. Get your copy of Jude wherever books are sold or at LifeWay.com/Jude

In this final episode of the first season of Let's Talk, Jasmine Holmes, Jackie Hill Perry, and Melissa Kruger talk about taming the tongue—both in face-to-face life and online. We may dismiss sins of speech, from gossip to complaining to tearing someone down, as minor. But James compares the damage our words can do to a blazing forest fire lit by just a spark (3:5).

Jackie points out that Christians often say online what they would not say to someone's face. But if we truly fear God, we would honor him with our online speech. Melissa talks about how gossip breeds false intimacy in the moment, but ultimately destroys trust in a friendship. And Jasmine recommends safeguards to avoid rash speech online so that we don't get carried away and have to publicly apologize later.

Related content:

• How Do You Keep a Rein on Your Tongue?
• 3 (Evangelistic) Reasons to Keep Complaining
• How to Resist the Allure of Gossip

Today’s episode of Let’s Talk is brought to you in part by International Justice Mission. IJM is a global nonprofit working to end slavery and violence around the world. To get an idea of what this work looks like, take this story from South Asia: Several families living in slavery were being brutally abused, poorly fed, and forced to sleep outside in make-shift tents. When IJM and local authorities heard about the abuse, they planned a rescue operation to set these families free—and that operation took place in March of this year, setting 50 people free. You can help make this kind of restoration possible by becoming a Freedom Partner and sending IJM to rescue others. Freedom Partners give a monthly gift to IJM, so IJM teams can show up month after month to rescue people from slavery and walk with survivors as they heal. Visit IJM.org/LetsTalk to join today.

On this episode of Let's Talk, Jasmine Holmes, Jackie Hill Perry, and Melissa Kruger talk about building and cultivating friendships with people who aren’t just like you. This may mean someone of a different race, different life stage, different socio-economic class, or who simply has a different personality than you do. Building these friendships often requires overcoming insecurity, more communication, and a willingness to show grace over perceived slights or offenses.

It's easy to be friends with people who are just like us, but when we put time and effort into friendships with people who are different from us, rich spiritual blessings result.

Related content:

• The Unique Witness of Unlikely Friendships
• How to Reach Across the Racial Divide
• How to Be the Friend You've Always Wanted

Books Mentioned as Favorite Things

• A Chance to Die: The Life and Legacy of Amy Carmichael by Elisabeth Elliot (recommended by Melissa Kruger)
• Knowing God by J. I. Packer (recommended by Melissa Kruger)
• Desiring God by John Piper (recommended by Jackie Hill Perry)
• The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom (recommended by Jasmine Holmes)
• A Sure Guide to Heaven by Joseph Alleine

Today’s episode of Let’s Talk is brought to you in part by International Justice Mission. IJM is a global nonprofit working to end slavery and violence around the world. To get an idea of what this work looks like, take this story from South Asia: Several families living in slavery were being brutally abused, poorly fed, and forced to sleep outside in make-shift tents. When IJM and local authorities heard about the abuse, they planned a rescue operation to set these families free—and that operation took place in March of this year, setting 50 people free. You can help make this kind of restoration possible by becoming a Freedom Partner and sending IJM to rescue others. Freedom Partners give a monthly gift to IJM, so IJM teams can show up month after month to rescue people from slavery and walk with survivors as they heal. Visit IJM.org/LetsTalk to join today.

A mentor is someone who "puts flesh on the Christian life," who helps you understand how to live what the Bible teaches. On today's episode of Let's Talk, Jasmine Holmes, Jackie Hill Perry, and Melissa Kruger talk about the people who have mentored them and why being a mentor shouldn't be intimidating. They give practical advice on how to find a mentor and on how to be a mentor. For example it's important to communicate your expectations of the relationship, to decide how long the mentoring is going to last, and how formal or informal it will be.

Sometimes mentoring is intimidating because we fear we will be failures if the person we are mentoring doesn't grow, but Melissa points out that mentors are not meant to replace God in your life. Only he can make you grow. But a mentor can come alongside you and encourage you to listen to and live by God's Word.

Related content:

• Growing Together: Taking Mentoring beyond Small Talk and Prayer Requests
• Needed: Women Disciplers
• When Mentoring Gets Messy

Today’s episode of Let’s Talk is brought to you in part by International Justice Mission. IJM is a global nonprofit working to end slavery and violence around the world. To get an idea of what this work looks like, take this story from South Asia: Several families living in slavery were being brutally abused, poorly fed, and forced to sleep outside in make-shift tents. When IJM and local authorities heard about the abuse, they planned a rescue operation to set these families free—and that operation took place in March of this year, setting 50 people free. You can help make this kind of restoration possible by becoming a Freedom Partner and sending IJM to rescue others. Freedom Partners give a monthly gift to IJM, so IJM teams can show up month after month to rescue people from slavery and walk with survivors as they heal. Visit IJM.org/LetsTalk to join today.