The scope and scale of the suicide epidemic is unbelievably scary, especially to parents.

There's a growing number of suicide, suicidal thoughts, what's called deaths from despair that inflicts our culture.

And all we seem to be doing is treating symptoms. Our culture says that the problem is the lack of support,

so that our government,

schools, even some churches, the institutions that are supposed to weave the strong fabrics for our communities

are throwing caution to the wind and doing anything to help students feel better.

Some tell students to change their gender identity or to look inside and be whoever they want to be

or to abandon their communities, even families,

in order to cope with their depression. In other words, we're just a culture grasping for answers.

My friend Matthew Sleith has been researching the issue of suicide in our culture, as well as what

the scripture teaches on suicide from the beginning to the end. He gave a very important

and impactful talk at the World War Force weekend last month. Today on the Breakpoint podcast,

you'll hear a portion of that talk. Here's my friend Matthew Sleith. I'm going to be talking to

you about a topic nobody wants to talk about, and I'm going to bring two streams of thought to that.

One is I'm a physician, and I used to run an emergency department,

and I'll bring that aspect to it.

And at age 47, my life got turned upside down because I met the Lord. A lot of bad things were going.

Pretty unusual, married to a Jewish wife. A lot of bad things happened. Her brother drowned

in front of my kids and she got depressed and someone stalked me to kill me and

in the midst of all those bad things I picked up a book one day that didn't belong to me

in the hospital and said holy Bible and I said holy cow I've never read this and we don't have one

at home so I stole it.

...