CrossTalk

Your friend just left his wife. Someone in your Life Group is depressed.  A relative has been diagnosed with an incurable disease.  How on earth can you offer real hope and help from God's Word?  How can you offer real, life giving water and not simply platitudes? 

I've just finished reading CrossTalk by Michael Emlet and I would highly recommend it.  The subtitle of the book is "Where Life and Scripture Meet" and it's all about how we can faithfully apply the bible to the lives of those people we're sometimes called to minister to.

You might meet a friend for coffee and they share stuff with you - a loss, anxiety, hurt, fear, grievance, sin..... What do you say?   How can you bring something from God's Word to bear with next to no time to look passages up?   Perhaps someone wants to meet with you and you've got advanced warning of the fact that they are going to ask for help with a problem but, again, how do you prepare for that in the scarce time you have?  And how do you avoid just resorting to only ever using a dozen "proof texts" whilst ignoring 98% of the rest of the bible?

CrossTalk shows in a practical and relevant way how you can use any passage, perhaps from your reading that morning or the message you heard in a sermon, to help bring gospel-oriented counsel to another person.  Emlet explains how to first "read the bible", looking for the original context and then the expanded context and then how to "read the person" as saint, sufferer and sinner.  He then shows, in carefully worked examples, how to apply the scripture legitimately to an individual whether you have a few minutes to prepare or longer.

Highly recommended for all those who want to speak God's Word in the power of the Spirit to others.