How the Cross Reshapes the Home

In our families and homes we’re most secure and also most vulnerable. We’re most loved and also despised. We experience our greatest joys and sorrows. In that sense family has something in common with the cross, a place of wondrous love and righteous wrath.

In his new book, The Storm-Tossed Family: How the Cross Reshapes the Home, Russell Moore writes, “These families of ours can be filled with joy, but will always make us vulnerable to pain.” Moore, TGC Council member and president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, wants us to know that family is important, but not ultimate. In a summary toward the end of the book he writes:

Family is not the gospel. If you think that family is the source of ultimate meaning in your life, then you will expect your family to make you happy, to live up to your expectations. You will then come to perceive that a dysfunctional family background or a spouse who leaves you or a child who walks away to a far country of rebellion has ruined your life. And, when you fail your family, as you inevitably will, you will spend your life trying to atone for your sins, and you will never find the peace you seek.

Moore joins me on The Gospel Coalition Podcast to discuss how we find that peace only in the cross of Christ. We’ll also talk about wedding vows, church family, fatherly approval, and why young men should look for 75-year-old wives.

Related:

The Too-Small Story of Home (Jen Pollock Michel)
How to Become a Tech-Wise Family (Collin Hansen and Andy Crouch)
What Gospel Parenting Looks Like (Paul Tripp, Courtney Reissig, and Brian Davis)

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Collin Hansen serves as vice president for content and editor in chief of The Gospel Coalition, as well as executive director of The Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics. He hosts the Gospelbound podcast and has written and contributed to many books, most recently Timothy Keller: His Spiritual and Intellectual Formation and Rediscover Church: Why the Body of Christ Is Essential. He has published with the New York Times and the Washington Post and offered commentary for CNN, Fox News, NPR, BBC, ABC News, and PBS NewsHour. He edited Our Secular Age: Ten Years of Reading and Applying Charles Taylor and The New City Catechism Devotional, among other books. He is an adjunct professor at Beeson Divinity School, where he also co-chairs the advisory board.

Russell Moore (MDiv, New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary; PhD, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) public theologian at Christianity Today and director of Christianity Today’s Public Theology Project. He has written many books, including Onward: Engaging the Culture without Losing the Gospel (2015), The Storm-Tossed Family: How the Cross Reshapes the Home (2018), and The Courage to Stand: Facing Your Fear Without Losing Your Soul (2020). He and his wife, Maria, are the parents of five sons.