David Zahl. The Big Relief: The Urgency of Grace for a Worn-Out World. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2025. $26.99, 176 pp.
It is difficult to be human in the year 2025. Headlines bombard us, confirming that we are more anxious, depressed, furious, and lonely than ever before. Not that we needed those headlines to alert us to this fact, for we can sense the overwhelming discord. We feel the fracturing of society and the restlessness in our souls. Some blame smartphones, others pornography, and still others a broken education system. Whatever ails us, it is certain we need relief.
Enter David Zahl, founder of Mockingbird Ministries and the author of Seculosity and Low Anthropology. He is on a personal mission to bring light into the present dark time. His new book, The Big Relief: The Urgency of Grace for a Worn-Out World, aims to provide just that: a balm for our restless souls. The relief we truly need, according to Zahl, is not more mindfulness, spa days, or money in our 401(k). Humankind needs grace more than anything—specifically, the grace of God revealed in Scripture.
Zahl is so convinced of this, he has stated that if Christianity were a burning building and he could only save one thing, it would be grace. Why? Because “grace is the most important, most urgent, and most radical contribution Christianity has to make to the life of the world—to your life and mine!”
He defines grace as “one-way love,” “a gift with no strings attached,” “noncontingent, compassionate alliance,” and “unmerited favor.” This is relief by means of freedom from the condemnation of God’s law, but also freedom from the unmerited condemnation of ourselves and others: “The Big Relief announces that the high-wire game of proving ourselves is finished. By grace, the lingering threat of judgment has been removed. By grace, all that remains is unended action. This is less an invitation to a do-nothing existence of insipid frivolity than an invitation to creative and joyful risk-taking.”
Zahl draws on John M.G. Barclay’s book Paul and the Gift to identify four key aspects of biblical grace:
All of this means that there is nothing we contribute toward our salvation: God’s grace is fully free. “The work of a Christian, then, to the extent it can be called work, is to empty one’s hands so they are open to receive grace.”
Each chapter of The Big Relief focuses on one burden from which God relieves us: deserving (via grace), regret (via forgiveness), rejection (via favor), control (via surrender), guilt (via atonement), status anxiety (via imputation), keeping up (via rest), productivity (via play), and captivity/death (via rescue). In the process, Zahl touches on many aspects of what it is to be a human being in 2025, needing relief from social media, changing economy, political rancor, parenting wars, and more.
A recurring theme is that those who most readily welcome relief are those who believe they are in the worst shape. By contrast, our society’s top echelons cling to the illusion of personal control. “To those in need, forgiveness comes as a relief,” Zahl observes. “To others it comes as an affront.”
Fortunately, God does not wait for us to be ready to receive grace. It comes as a blessed surprise, interrupting our efforts to get ahead. “Grace is a relief to the lonely and rejected because it doesn’t wait for us to drop our own walls. Grace breaks down, with love, the barriers we’ve erected to keep us safe in our isolation.” God makes the first move, declaring us righteous based on the work of Christ, not our own. This means that “you and I are not loved by God because we are special. We are special because we are loved by God. The attribution is external; it depends on God, not us.”
Zahl’s book offers few completely novel ideas, and I say this in the best sense possible. His true talent is as a cultural and theological curator. He operates according to the conviction that the most important message—the gospel of Jesus Christ—has already been delivered to humanity, and the job of believers now is to point people to grace wherever it exists. And so, he quotes from writers as varied as Jonathan Haidt, Naomi Osaka, Brian Wilson, and the Surgeon General, while also referencing the works of Philip Melanchthon and Martin Luther. Examples from films, music, sermons, and commencement speeches are interspersed with anecdotes from his own life.
This work of curating is intended to help different types of readers connect to what is clearly a universal message: the never-changing grace of God is always relevant. The gospel is for all people in all eras, thence the need to continually repeat it. The older I get, the less impressed I am with theological novelty, and the more I long for the old, old story. That is what one finds in The Big Relief.
This book is theological from beginning to end and promotes classic doctrines such as substitutionary atonement, imputed righteousness, and the reality of heaven and hell. Yet Zahl employs a light touch throughout. His goal is not merely to reach Christians, but also those outside the Church—or, for that matter, Christians who may feel burned by the Church. This is an eminently accessible and readable volume appropriate for anyone who needs to hear the old, old story again, or those who need to hear it for the first time.
While the grace of God may save us from many things in this earthly life—social media scrutiny, addictions, the rat race of parenting—it is fundamentally about freeing us from that greatest captivity: our sinful nature and our eternal condemnation. In other words, “Rescue from sin and death—this is undoubtedly the biggest aspect of the Big Relief.”