Biblical Counseling with ACBC Trainer Chris Chumita

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00:07

This is Apologetics Live. To answer your questions, your host, from Striving for Eternity Ministries, Andrew Rappaport.

00:22

All right, well, welcome to another Apologetics Live. We are here with you on Thursday nights to answer your apologetics questions.

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We can answer any question you have about God and the Bible, but tonight we're gonna have a focus on biblical counseling.

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We have a special guest that's gonna come in with us, joining us, talking about biblical counseling.

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What is biblical counseling? You're about to find out. What is the difference between that and secular counseling?

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Well, you're about to find out. With that, let me first bring in no one other than the one, the only,

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Dr. Anthony Silvestro. How are you, sir? I'm doing well, how are you? I'm doing better than I deserve.

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And that's not your sign. Getting to Isaiah's line. Not, I've been using it longer than, I've probably been using it longer than he's been alive.

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Actually, that's kind of depressing. You heard it from Isaiah first, it's his. So, well,

01:15

Andrew, I think you have an announcement to make tonight. You obviously don't listen to Voice of Reason Radio because Richard Story uses that.

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Dave Ramsey uses that, but Dave Ramsey doesn't, he actually does not like open air preachers. I don't know if I ever shared this with you.

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Michael Coghlan, a friend of ours, was doing open air preaching at the Super Bowl, and he saw

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David Ramsey, and he called out to David Ramsey, and David Ramsey wouldn't even acknowledge him, and then went on to his show at the next show and was blasting the open air preachers because they're so, he just doesn't like what they do.

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And so, yeah, ever since then I've decided I'm not gonna listen to Dave Ramsey. But I've gotten that line from my seminary, the founder of my seminary.

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We affectionately called him Chief, but his name is E .R. Jordan, and so I've been using that line for 30 years.

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So, there you go. So somehow Josiah heard it in the womb then and came up with it, and then you're.

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Yeah, I stole it, and this is evolutionist logic. Somehow yours can't be right, so any other story has to be.

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Look, if we can't even figure out what the difference is between a boy and a girl, I mean, yeah, anything makes sense.

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Yeah, right. I mean, come on. It's kind of like that whole thing, so Mike Riddle, who

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I do a lot of teaching with, and I think you heard him do this when Mike and I taught the class at your church back in November.

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He says, tell me what three plus one is, but you can't say the word for, you can't give it to me in a different language, you can't show me the number of fingers, don't take off your socks and shoes to show me the number of toes.

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And he goes on and on and on to exclude every other way possible to give the number four.

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And then he goes around, and he'll eventually get people to say, well, seven, that's right, nine, that's right, 31, that's right, the whole point, meaning that if you just exclude the truth, just pretend whatever the truth is.

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Well, I like how Jim Wallace puts it, because what he'll do is say, and he's a cold case detective, right?

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So he's a detective, and he goes, so you walk into a room, and you see that a guy's been murdered, and you're told, we got to find the suspect, but he's not black.

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So what it limits what you can do, right? You can't, you just can't, you're not able to find it.

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So, oh, we got a new, someone new here. Hello, just heard about the show from the Matt Slick radio show.

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Well, Matt Slick is a friend of ours. And the last time he was on the show, he did a dirty deed,

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I'm just saying. He did something wicked, he did. Yeah, he finally pulled one over on you and bought dinner.

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And he was bragged for years about not, about Matt not being able to buy him dinner. Nine years old, door dash delivery of probably $150 worth of sushi shows up your door.

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I wanted to hop in my car, drive six and a half hours, and go share it with you. Yeah, it was some good sushi,

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I will admit that. Oh, it was great. Because somewhere there's a really good sushi place by me, and I couldn't find it.

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But he did get me back after nine years. So, I deserved it. Yeah, well,

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I know, Andrew, you're only gonna be on the show for a short period of time tonight, but I know you have an announcement you wanted to make, so. Yeah, I wanna make two announcements real quick.

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Last week, I mentioned that HR1 passed the house, and I was wrong. That was actually the stimulus package, which really isn't a stimulus.

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It's like this COVID relief package, that only 10 % of it goes to COVID relief. New York's deficit was just cleared out, thanks to this $1 .9

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trillion deal. They just, you know, all the liberal states that mishandled their finances, they've just been paid.

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Thank you. That's what you get for, you know, voting. You knew it was gonna happen. Yeah, so, but the other announcement that I have to make is to let you guys know that we do want to let you know, if you'd like to join

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Dr. Silvestro, myself, Pastor Justin Pierce, Pastor Justin Peters in Israel, time is running out.

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So if you wanna join Striving Fraternity, Justin Peters Ministries in Israel, go to israeltour2021 .com.

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We are limited on space. We actually have only two spots left for you to get where flights are included.

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After that, we have a couple of slots, maybe five left, where you're able to get the land only.

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So you'd have to fly yourself out there. And after that, we're gonna take, basically put people on a reserve list.

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The reserve list will be first come, first serve. And the thing with that is, remember prices go up end of this month.

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It goes up by $100 at the end of this month. And so I'm encouraging you to register now, go to israeltour2021 .com.

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And I do gotta mention that if you don't actually put a deposit, you don't reserve a spot. There's a bunch of people that thought that just putting their name in, they reserved a spot.

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We just worked this week on all the devotions we're gonna do. We have a lot of devotions and we're gonna actually do a test.

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And you're gonna wanna go to Israel just for this. Dr. Silvestro is gonna be speaking at the

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Sea of Galilee and he only has seven minutes to do a devotion. We're gonna see if he can do it.

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There will be no Anthony time. Invoke Anthony time. Wow, seven minutes.

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Seven minutes, we're gonna see if he can do it. But I really wanna encourage you, if you haven't been to Israel, I do believe,

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I've been told that after, because we booked this early with COVID and whatnot, that the prices are going up for the next year.

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I know that there's some other churches that are planning some trips for 2022. Prices are going up very much.

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And I actually think just with the way the world is, this may be the last chance we get into Israel before, well, the world already has gone crazy.

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So I really wanna encourage you, if you guys have ever wanted to go to Israel, if you've ever wanted to do this, see, look at this.

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KT is saying, Anthony, seven minutes, question mark? I can't get it done in two hours. Yeah, they are gonna have to come to Israel with us to see that Anthony can actually do a devotion in seven minutes on the

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Sea of Galilee. By the way, this was the reason that I chose Capernaum instead of the

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Sea of Galilee, just because I knew there was the seven minute window. Now granted, Anthony just picked it, you know, just saying.

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It'll be fun. So I just wanted to, I know that I'm gonna take the night off and I'm gonna let you take over.

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And so, but I wanted to invite everyone to join us in Israel. Time is running out if you wanna join that.

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So before the end of this month, please register. We do expect that there's gonna be people, if you're on the waiting list, we expect that people are gonna end up canceling.

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So I won't be surprised with that. So if you're, you know, if you are on that wait list, that there's a good chance that if you're early on that wait list, there's a good chance you're still gonna be going.

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So look forward to seeing you guys all in Israel. So with that, Anthony, I'll see you later.

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Have a good night. And hello and goodbye. Yes. Well, that was a better switch.

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Got rid of Andrew, brought in Justin. Good. Yeah, there you go. What are you saying? What? What? I thought he was gone already.

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Yeah. So all joking aside, we do love

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Andrew and we enjoy him being on, enjoy his company in person, of course, too.

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So tonight we have a really special guest and we're gonna get to him in just a minute. I do wanna address one thing.

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So we did a special show two weeks ago on a Sunday night and it was regarding a Pastor Dave Gustafson sermon that he did at his church in New Jersey, large church.

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And he, well, I would say butchered the few texts that he used.

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And so we went through that sermon and I had one guy who reached out to me, Matt Bayle Pena is his name, hyphenated last name, and said he agreed with some things that I had said, disagreed with most of it, and was pretty upset that we use this platform to speak on the sermon.

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Well, I will say to our audience here who didn't watch that yet, is that we reached out to the pastor multiple times, screenshots of texts between the member of his church and him, between them who know each other really well, was trying to get him to talk to me, refused to do that, didn't wanna come on the show to talk about the sermon.

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And so I felt like we needed to actually talk about the sermon. It was really dangerous the way that some of the texts were being used.

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So we talked about it. What's interesting about this email is there is four paragraphs that are nothing but red herrings, accusing me of using my doctor and misleading people that I'm a dentist and not a doctor of something else.

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Everybody on this show knows I'm a dentist. Everybody in the streets knows I'm a dentist and I don't even tell them that, it's other people telling them that.

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So I don't use that degree to fool anybody whatsoever. It's just part of my title,

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I guess. Having said that, that has nothing to do with whether a pastor is giving a good sermon or not.

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It has nothing to do with whether a pastor is correctly expositing text or not.

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It has nothing to do with a pastor who is going way overboard in terms of how he's trying to exposit

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Psalm 19, so much so thinking that there's two truths in life, the book of truth of scripture and the book of truth of nature, downright dangerous.

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One thing to think about too, Anthony, is that most people when they look to have a straw man that they're gonna build up, they generally wanna burn it down.

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And if you think about it, when people come into churches or when people come into any form of platform and they want to burn down your straw man, the straw man that they build up about you, one thing they're really gonna do a lot is belittle you or the pastor or the teacher, whoever they're trying to characterize.

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They wanna make sure that they are really doing their very dead level best to belittle you to the point where you're actually not an authority, you actually have no credentials, you have no character about yourself.

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So it's obvious that because you're Dr. Anthony Silvestro, that you're a liar, you're misrepresenting yourself, you're a phony, you've done all these things, you evil man you.

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And now on top of that, you're going after this person who's maybe teaching something in error or falsely or whatever that you're trying to talk about.

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And so how dare you? Yeah. And the thing is, is we did not take anything out of context in his sermon.

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We played video clips. Some of them were a minute long, some were almost two minutes long.

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The entirety of the sermon, anybody can go watch to make sure that we didn't take anything out of context.

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We were very careful to make sure that everything that we talked about was exactly the way the pastor intended it to be heard and what he was intending to teach his congregation.

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Having said all that, I'm not gonna talk about this email anymore. If you wanna come on Matt at any point, you're more than welcome to come on and discuss that with us further.

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Pastor, if you wanna come on and talk further, maybe you just misspoke on some things and you've walked it back.

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Hey, that's cool. Come on, we can talk about that too. No problem with that. We get it. Things can come out of our mouths that aren't quite right at times.

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But having said all that, I do want to bring in our guest now. So I'm gonna add him to the stream.

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How are you, Chris? Very good. How are you guys tonight? We're good. So I'm gonna read a little introduction of you in your book.

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So for the audience, here's Chris. Chris Chimita is a certified counselor with the

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Association of Certified Biblical Counselors and is currently working toward an MA in theological studies at Covenant Baptist Theological Seminary.

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He is a member of Olmstead Falls Bible Church. Chris's wife, Rachel, reside in Elyria, Ohio.

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So Olmstead Falls Bible Church sounds kind of familiar. So yes, that is my church as well.

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And we've been going there for seven plus years. Chris, you guys have been going a little over two, right?

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Almost two. Almost two, yeah. So yeah, so Chris is a fellow brother and church member and recently just came out with a book.

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He and a co -author came out with this book called Light Through the Spectrum on Biblical Counseling.

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And the parts of the book I've read so far are fantastic, as I know I told you earlier.

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And so we wanna kind of get into the book tonight and just get into anything you wanna talk about through biblical counseling.

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As Andrew said, there's a lot of people who are really interested in this topic and to hear it from you. It's funny, when

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I talk to people about you, I say, not only is he a certified biblical counselor, but he trains other people to be certified biblical counselors.

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That's like many steps up. Right. The training

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I do is not certifying, it's not through ACBC, so it doesn't help certify you, but I've been helping, having some people sit in and helping equip them as they begin that journey in the process of getting certified.

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Yeah, which is really cool. And I think we're gonna be starting one of those, our church at some point here in the near future, right?

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Yes, right now, we're kind of in the very beginning stages of rolling out a biblical counseling ministry in our church.

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So the first step is gonna be equipping all the church members to counsel each other. Then for the times where it's like a life -dominating sin, where they need some extra help, that's where we're gonna focus on Pastor Chris and myself for right now, since I'm a certified counselor, of helping people with life -dominating sins.

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But down the road, we do wanna help equip more people to get certified. And we'll be doing that through an organization, what more than likely called

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IBCD, Institute of Biblical Counseling Discipleship. What's online, but I'll help facilitate it where we'll meet routinely,

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I'll answer questions and just help keep people on track. Yeah, that's really cool. So let me see if I can add

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Justin back in. He's somehow got removed. There you are, Justin. Yeah, I hit the wrong button.

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Okay, no problem. Yeah, I hit the wrong button. Glad you're alive, glad you're back. So I think

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I'm gonna start off, Chris, by reading a small section of the opening to your book on page two, what is biblical counseling?

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So I'm just gonna read a couple of paragraphs on that. It says, what is biblical counseling? True biblical counseling is a methodology that openly affirms the sufficiency of the scripture for the counseling task.

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It holds that the scriptures are the ultimate authority in counseling, and that authentic change can only be affected by the work of the

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Holy Spirit. This view of counseling is based upon a variety of biblical passages, including 2

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Timothy 3, 16 and 17, and 1 Peter 1, 20 to 21. Until recently, it was referred to as euthetic counseling.

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The word euthetic is based on the Greek words, euthesis and eutheto. According to Adams, the word comes from the

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Greek New Testament. It has within it three elements, concern, confrontation, and change.

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Euthetic counseling is counseling that involves face -to -face confrontation by one person to another out of loving concern for him in order to bring about the changes

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God desires in his life. So I thought that did a nice job of just giving a very quick overview, but I don't know if you wanna expound on that a little bit on biblical counseling, and kind of the goal is to, how do we differentiate it from what's out there?

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Because in my estimation, what I see, and I know we've talked about this at length at times, is you've got what you would call true biblical counseling on one side of the spectrum.

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You have on the other side of the spectrum, pure psychology, secular worldview type stuff, which we'll talk about a little bit later.

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And then somewhere in between, there's this middle ground that a lot of people think exists where they call them biblical counselors, where it's really all psychology, and they just try to pepper some

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Bible verses into it. So can you kind of explain through that a little bit for us? I think the first thing we have to kind of make clear is we threw out euthetic counseling and biblical counseling, and they're really just two sides of the same coin.

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When Jay Adams in the late 60s to early 70s started coming out with biblical counseling through Westminster Seminary, he called it euthetic counseling.

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And it wasn't till the very near future there was a big push to change his name to biblical counseling.

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One reason behind that was they got tired of explaining what euthetic meant. And as the movement kind of grew, the theology behind it, some of the methods kind of grew, changed, and refined itself.

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So some of the later pioneers in biblical counseling wanted to kind of show a slight difference, but in reality, it's the same methods, just fine -tuned a little bit.

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Where it's different is, what you were talking about was referred to as integrated Christian counseling, where they try to take all the principles from psychology and psychiatry and mix it into Christian counseling.

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But you really can't do that because all psychology begins on a presubstition.

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That's wrong. Their anthropology or their doctrine of man is faulty.

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Okay, okay. So you're gonna make me read this section of your book now too. I was gonna wait till later, but of course it's gonna come up now.

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Okay, so this is where Andrew and I enjoy pecking at each other a little bit.

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Yes, I just used a chicken reference for a cluck commander who's gonna come in the show here in a little bit.

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Hopefully you got your pet chickens around. So I often talk about how everybody, or how every doctrine in the

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Bible always goes back to Genesis, right? And so I loved this section of your book.

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I'm gonna read this here right now. The Old Testament is foundational to the understanding of what man is and his relationship to God.

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Well, actually I'll back up a little bit. It says a biblical counselor must have a solid understanding of the Old Testament in order to provide biblical counsel.

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And then it goes on, the Old Testament is foundational to the understanding of what man is and his relationship to God. It has been said that if you get your anthropology wrong, you will get your counseling wrong.

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The book of Genesis teaches us that man was created by God and we were made in his image.

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Genesis, the first book of the Bible, the best book. Just for the record, I've been saying that longer than you've been a

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Christian. Common theme coming out of you tonight. The issue is that you only seem to think that Genesis, you think that Genesis is the only book of the

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Bible, okay? That's all. I just see the 65 other books in the

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Bible and I can preach on those too. You must have also given the Emancipation Proclamation before Abraham Lincoln did.

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No, I didn't. I'm not as old as you look. Oh boy, okay.

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So Genesis establishes, I thought he was taking a break tonight. He just couldn't help but listen in.

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Oh, he's got you. You called my name and here I am. What is, you know?

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I'm sure your wife would like a partner on the couch. I know, but she's not downstairs yet, so. That's why you're still here with us, okay.

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Now it makes sense. So Genesis establishes the fact that man is subservient and inferior to God since man's very existence is dependent on God.

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Also, the fact that man is made in the image of God separates man from animals. Therefore, any secular counseling methodologies that have an evolutionary presupposition must be rejected and should not be integrated into biblical counseling.

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The Old Testament is foundational to understanding sin and how it entered the world. Since sin entered the world through Adam's transgression,

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Genesis 3, the entire world and everything in it is affected by sin. And this to me is the key verse coming up.

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Therefore, in some way, every problem that a counselee faces are the result of sin or the result of living in a fallen world.

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The counselee's problem may be due to his sin or he may be the victim of someone else's sin.

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That to me was a foundational thing. I remember when you and I, getting to know each other a little bit more, we took a trip down to see

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James White speaking at your seminary down in Kentucky. So we had eight hours there, eight hours back.

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And I remember for a large portion of it, picking your brain on biblical counseling.

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Cause this was a first time I could get somebody privately to be able to really work through some of these concepts.

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And I understood it really, really well after we got done talking. They made a complete believer out of me at that point.

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But so you were talking about anthropology and the beginning. So explain to the audience the difference between why it must be rooted in Genesis and a foundational understanding versus what secular psychology does.

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Cause they're complete opposites. Okay. With psychology, you really have to say, it depends on which method you're looking at.

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They're all at their different faults. And of course, I'm gonna generalize a complicated subject right now.

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But the most popular type of psychology that they try to integrate with Christian psychology comes from Carl Rogers, who he basically teaches that man is inherently good and all the answers are within himself.

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So that type of counseling, they try to draw the answer out of the person. But we know that man is a fallen creature.

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We've fallen into sin and our hearts are deceitfully wicked. So that philosophy can't be integrated in.

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Guys like Adler sees man as an animal. Since we say we're a Mago day, that really doesn't fit.

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Sigmund Freud says the reason why you might feel guilty or convicted about something is because your parents, the church, some type of authority structure put that pressure and teaching on you.

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And that's why you feel convicted. So his answer is to do it more so you no longer feel convicted. But we know the

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Bible gives us a set standards of what's right and wrong that we need to guide our life by.

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So that's just a brief overview of the more popular methods and why we can't. They were starting such a faulty premise that anything that comes from them is gonna be in error.

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Where when you look at biblical counseling, it's rooted that we know that God created us.

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And as a result, we are his inferiors, he's over us. And anything he says is authoritative to us.

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And he's giving us that word in the Bible. And because we have a God who's good, holy, trustworthy, we have a moral standard that we can guide our lives by, which in secular psychology, you don't.

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Would you say that with the secular psychologists, it's more along the lines of making you feel good or feel appropriate about your role in society and not so much as a conviction of sin and a put on, put off principle?

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Yeah, exactly. There are some methods like Jay Adams studied under a guy named Maurer for a short period of time, who was a very confrontational type psychologist, who didn't allow people to make excuses.

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So he did push that there is a standard of right and wrong, but he had no such, what is his standard based upon?

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Yeah, he didn't have a standard authority that he didn't look to God or any type of absolute standard.

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Correct, and if I recall correctly, he was a pretty adamant atheist. Atheist, yeah. Yeah, I'll talk about that here in a few minutes as I did some research on some of these guys.

26:44

I do wanna bring in what Commander John. So John wanted to ask you a question.

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John's a friend of the show and love having him on, especially when he has his pet chickens running around.

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But yes, he has pet chickens, but I'd be eating them. I wouldn't have any pet chickens.

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It'll be in my belly at this point. But I know, John, you had a question. It's actually dealing with kind of what we're talking about right now.

27:15

Yeah, by the way, hello. Hello. I just wanna say, yeah, thanks for coming on to the show and all.

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So I'll say this about my experience with new aesthetic counseling is that basically,

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I was really striving or really struggling with depression for many, many years, chronic depression.

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I mean, I can recall back, clear back to probably early junior high where I just had constant suicidal thoughts or that I had just continual depression all the time,

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I was so sad. And it wasn't until like many, many years later where I finally just talked to a doctor about it.

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And I was like, you know, I just, this is something I've been struggling with for so long.

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And so one of the people I actually talked to at one time was a new aesthetic counselor or a biblical counselor in a particular church that I was going to many, many years ago.

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And basically the issue was, is what I took, what

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I took against it was basically they equate everything with sin.

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And so basically they were saying, in other words, to put it simply, you're depressed because you're sinning.

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And that was something I didn't entirely agree with because I thought depression was just simply because you lacked a certain chemical in the brain, insufficient levels of like serotonin or dopamine, okay?

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Something, there was an imbalance of neotransmitters between the nerve cells in the brain, okay?

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The scientific part of it, okay, we're talking about. So I wanna know if, let me just ask you plainly then, and maybe you guys,

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I can hear Pastor Justin and Anthony's thoughts on this too. Am I in sin because I take

29:27

Zoloft? Okay, you brought up a lot of stuff. So let me - I know, yeah.

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That was a loaded question. Yeah, so let me answer a couple of things before we get to the medication part. Then if I don't get to it, just remind me.

29:39

Okay. And of course I can't speak to your specific situation since I don't have enough time to talk to you.

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Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the waiver right there. Yeah, so when we say, when there are just, and I'm not even gonna condemn the

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New Theta Council you talked to, but just in general, just like with anything, you have good counselors and bad counselors. Yep.

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And as a biblical counselor, when I say that everything is related to sin, it could be a sin on my end is why

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I have my problems. That needs to be repented of and rebuked. I might be the victim of someone else's sin, which means then we have to look, am

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I responding to it correctly? Or it could be the results of living in a sin fallen world where we have disease and other bad things that happen.

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So that's the sin -related issue. When it comes to depression, say if the first time you came to me and these are new symptoms you have, the first thing

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I'm gonna recommend is for you to get a doctor's physical. Because things like thyroid issues, cancer, diabetes, it's undiagnosed, not treated, can't give you depression -related symptoms.

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You treat those symptoms, they go away. When it comes to chemical imbalances, even within psychology, they're not in agreement of, is it actually caused by chemical imbalances?

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So that's kind of, it's still a theory in psychology. But to get specifically a medication question,

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I would say no. ACBC does take a strong stance on medications of what we can and cannot say to people.

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And of course, I'm not speaking for ACBC today. But if you would come to me for counseling for depression, you're on medication,

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I'm not gonna tell you to get off of it. I might ask you why you're on it, just to make sure you're not looking for sanctification through medication.

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And then from there, that's pretty much all we're gonna talk about on it. But I will warn you that if you're on a medication, the worst thing you can do is quit cold turkey.

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No, I know, especially Zoloft. I don't know if you know, but yeah, you get brain zaps when you try to diminish, or even trying to even tone it down a little bit.

31:44

Even if you try to shave off, or try to get rid of it at a progression, you still get like these, literally these brain shocks in your head.

31:56

It's incredibly difficult to get off of sertraline or Zoloft.

32:03

I've tried to see if I can taper down to try to get out, to stop myself from taking them again, but I couldn't.

32:12

It was just too harsh. And that's one of the problems with some of the psychiatric meds, of once a person gets on them, it's very hard to even wean a person off of.

32:23

So that's how we would approach medication. That if you'd say that you wanna try to get off of them, my first thing would be suggest for you, you must do it with your doctor.

32:31

Yeah. And work it through them. And then as a counselor, I work with you on my end, working together in that manner.

32:38

But no, you cannot make a blanket statement of, is a person who takes psychiatric medication in sin?

32:44

You can't say automatically no or yes. Where it could be a sin is if you're taking it to avoid dealing with your issues though.

32:53

Yeah. And I'm not saying that's what you're doing, but just speak in general. Some people just say, hey,

32:58

I could just take this medication, then I don't have to do the hard work to deal with my other issues. Well, one thing we'll tell you,

33:05

Chris, is that we're all on medication because we know Anthony. And we have to take medication just to deal with Anthony.

33:12

It's funny, I'm not on anything. I'm joking, I'm joking. Problems all with you guys. Chickens are my medication,

33:19

I don't know about you guys. Well, that's why everybody wants to see one every once in a while. I know.

33:24

I'm gonna agree with Chris on this. You know, one thing that Jay Adams, that he talks about in his, he did a,

33:31

I posted a thing on here, a recommended reading for the Practical Encyclopedia of Christian Counseling, is

33:38

Jay Adams talks about this issue of depression. And first off, he says that there is no evidence that depression has an organic base.

33:49

And he's not denying it. All he's saying is the scientific evidence is so varied in this field.

33:56

And you have to think about it. When it comes to medication, there are medications that work and we just don't know why they work, right?

34:03

And so just because Zoloft may work for you, there may not be a reason to understand exactly mentally why because the brain is a computer that's so complex that nobody will ever match it.

34:21

And there's all types of different things going on with that. I agree with that. And this is for men. It's even more complicated when it's females.

34:28

Yeah, no kidding. But see, I completely agree with what Chris was saying here because number one, I would never counsel somebody to go off medication because I'm not a doctor, okay?

34:38

I don't have a PhD or a doctorate in the medical field. I don't know how these medications work.

34:46

And if I were to do that, you could get in so much harm. It could kill you, you know, or you could kill someone else by going off of this medication.

34:55

As a former police officer, I've seen people do that. They go off medication and they lose their minds, right?

35:00

And they literally do. And they, you know, they lash out at everybody around them because they can't handle it.

35:07

I'm gonna say, like Chris said, let the medical professionals deal with that side.

35:14

You know, maybe you do have depression and I'm not talking John, I'm talking about anybody. We know John, John's a great brother and I wouldn't, you know, try to even pull that out like that.

35:23

But, you know, maybe someone has a depression issue because they've stopped trying to, you know, deal with their responsibilities.

35:32

Maybe they've stopped trying to deal with life. Maybe they've gotten bogged down by everything going on in their life.

35:39

And so they just say, I give up. Well, that's gonna create a spiritual depression. It's gonna create hardship in your life.

35:46

It's gonna create these things going on in your life that's going to affect you spiritually.

35:51

And that's going to come out physically. And so you need to do something about that.

35:57

And that's what a biblical counselor is geared towards doing. But the world's counselor is gonna say, you know,

36:04

I hate to say it like this, but, well, how do you feel about that? Let's make you feel better about your situation, not overcome it.

36:13

Jay Adams actually talks about this in one of his books. And I can't remember which one it is, where he actually talks about the fact that there was a, a young man that goes to seminary or goes to a psychology field, becomes, gets his doctorate, becomes, you know, proficient in counseling.

36:33

And then he goes to work for his father. His dad goes off to Florida with his wife for two weeks, comes back and he's like, how'd things go, son?

36:42

Oh, it went great, dad. I think you've heard about this probably, Chris. Oh, it went great, dad.

36:48

I fixed so -and -so and like seven or eight different people. I solved all their problems. He goes, what are you talking about?

36:54

He says, what are you talking about? Yeah, I fixed all their problems. What do you mean? Yeah, she's off this and she's off that.

37:00

I put you through college by having all these people come for all these years because their idea is not to actually fix you, but to get you to be able to live through the process while they're getting some money.

37:13

And I'm not saying all of them are that way, but the mentality is different, right? And if I could make a suggestion for you, this is of course, just speaking in general terms, there's a great book that I recommend to a lot of people who are struggling with depression is

37:26

Out of the Blues by Wayne Mack. Yeah, okay. That's an excellent book. And during those times when you're very down and you're very depressed, spend some time praying through the songs of lament.

37:39

There's multiple throughout the Bible and just make those your friend during those times. And you will find a lot of comfort in those.

37:47

So Wayne Mack is, Wayne Mack is, he's still over at MacArthur Seminary.

37:56

He was actually the guy they brought in to help transition over from integrated to biblical counseling, but he's since retired and he's in South Africa, last

38:04

I heard, with his son, helping start biblical counseling in South Africa in his 80s.

38:11

Wow. Yeah, he's incredible. He is incredible. He's got great insight.

38:17

Yeah, wow. So Bonserm for Jesus asked, this is the book Light Through the

38:23

Spectrum and it's by Michael, it's Burgess? Yeah.

38:29

Michael Burgess and then Chris Chameed, our guest tonight. So, and I will say, one of the things

38:36

I appreciate about certain books is when they are not only well -written, but also easy to read, not using tough language or anything.

38:45

This is really easy to read. So it's a great book for people to start off with and just getting understanding of biblical counseling.

38:53

Yeah, then the one thing with the definition of biblical counseling we didn't have a chance to get into is since we say that secular psychology is based on something faulty, we need something that's 100 % true and that's the

39:06

Bible. And we hold firm to the idea that it's errant, you know, no errors, infallible, incapable of error.

39:13

And we say it's sufficient, but we say it's only sufficient for what it says it's sufficient for, which is life and godliness, training, rebuke and correction.

39:25

And we say that's the only book we really need for counseling. But you don't approach it as just saying, okay, you have this problem, read this verse and all your problems will go away.

39:39

No, not at all. I know that's kind of the stereotype. Yeah. Well, and see the problem with that is, the problem with that is that's what everybody hears is like when you said earlier, the reason they changed from new thetic counseling to biblical counseling was every single time you talk to somebody.

39:57

Now, what does that mean again? What does that mean again? Nobody understands it. And when you say biblical, you know, new theo is the idea it's from the word from God.

40:07

It's new theo comes from the understanding of God. It's the word. And so why not just call it biblical counseling, which is what they've changed to.

40:18

And, you know, it makes it easier. It gets over that hurdle. But then there has to be the,

40:25

I think there has to be the understanding that like you said earlier, Chris, not all new thetic or biblical counselors, or at least professing new thetic and biblical counselors, number one, they're not all biblical.

40:37

They don't all trust the inerrant word of God. And they're bad at giving advice, just like the psychologist.

40:47

Just because somebody gets their PhD in psychology doesn't mean that they can think their way out of a wet paper bag. And when we look at a biblical counseling is there's two types of ministry of the word of God.

40:59

We have the public ministry, which is your preaching. That's like when a pastor, Justin, Sunday morning, he gets up and he preaches.

41:06

Counseling is just intensive discipleship. It's the private ministry of the word to people.

41:13

And a real life example of this, I had someone who had really good theology.

41:19

Say, you know what? I know what the Bible says about marriage. I know it commands me to love my wife. I know what it tells me to do to love my wife, but I hate her and I despise her.

41:29

I don't know what to do. I know what I'm supposed to do, but how am I supposed to do it when

41:34

I can't stand her? So that's where counseling comes in, where you take the word of God and show them how to apply it to its life.

41:42

It's very practical. Votie Bauckham has some great stuff on that too.

41:47

He says, you know, if you say you hate your wife, well, the Bible says, love your wife. Bible says hate your enemies.

41:53

Or if you say you hate your enemies, Bible says love your enemies. It's a great, great, funny answer for that.

41:59

Okay, question. So humbled clay. I love biblical counseling, but question how does biblical counseling deal with people with pathological issues or those affected by said person?

42:13

When they say pathological issues, they're meaning like organic? I don't know.

42:19

So humbled clay, I'm assuming you're still listening. Do you want to give a clarifying comment or just come into the show and ask live?

42:27

We can do that too. Yeah, I'm not sure what that means.

42:33

I would need a clarification to give an exact answer. But while we would disagree with some psychological labels, we think some of those labels might be good for helping describe the patterns behaviors we see, but we don't see it as an excuse to continue to act that way.

42:51

And I'm speaking broadly because I don't know exactly what they're talking about. So we were trying to counsel that person to find out the root cause of that behavior because you could treat the symptoms all day long and get nowhere.

43:03

We need to dig down deep, get to the root of the issue. And with the work of the Holy Spirit, we fix that.

43:09

Then for the person who's living with a person who could be very difficult to relive with, we help them be able to respond to that person in a biblical way and to deal with the situation because sometimes we're giving situations which might not improve that are very hard.

43:25

So in those cases, we teach them how to lean onto the scriptures, lean onto God in those times and how to comfort themselves when times are tough.

43:34

Yeah, it looks like Humboldt Clay has another counseling comment.

43:40

He says, reformed women make better sandwiches. I think he misspelled sandwiches, it's supposed to be

43:46

S -A -M -M -I -C -H -E -S, isn't it? For sandwiches? Sandwiches. Yeah, sandwiches.

43:53

I'm gonna leave that one alone. I'll let all the complaints and arguments go to Anthony Silvestro at StrivingForEternity .org.

44:03

Actually, if one of our friends, Lisa Engel, would come on the show. So we met her at G3 a couple of years ago.

44:11

And the way we met is she's walking around, she's got this bright red shirt on, it says, proud sandwich maker.

44:18

And so I'm like, I don't know you, you gotta come over here, I need a picture with you. And so Julie and I took a picture with her and we actually became friends after that.

44:29

And so it's one of the funniest shirts I've seen. But, okay. Can I speak to the issue that you're talking about with Humble Clay, talking about the, can you give me what he said again?

44:42

I'm trying to remember exactly what he said. The social path. Right here.

44:49

So I love biblical counseling, but question, how does biblical counseling deal with people with pathological issues or those affected by said person?

44:59

So either somebody who has the pathological issues or the person who's affected by that person, maybe a spouse or brother or sister.

45:06

One thing that's happened in the world is we, as Christians especially, have adopted the world's mentality.

45:18

And we speak in terms of the secularist, the psychologist, the secular language.

45:28

So first thing I'm gonna say is, what do you mean pathological? Are you telling me that there is something in a person that cannot be overcome by the gospel of Jesus Christ?

45:39

That's the first thing I'm gonna say. Because as a Christian, I don't accept that a person's life is pathological.

45:46

I don't accept the Nietzsche, the Freud, all these different ideas of the id and the ego and all of these things that are going on in that secular society that wants to free men from the responsibility of almighty

46:03

God. I want people to know that there is a God in heaven and that he says that sin is sin and it will not be justified by you saying, oh,

46:14

I couldn't help it. I just felt this way. God doesn't say that. God says, stop sinning.

46:20

So the first thing we have to do is we have to stop speaking in terms that Nietzsche, Freud, and all these other people wanted to speak in, the psychological terms and come to biblical terms.

46:37

So what is pathological? Pathological would be somebody that would be a liar by nature or a person that does things by their very nature.

46:47

Well, it depends on what it is. And if it's going to be something that's harmful or that's sinful, we're gonna address that as a sin against almighty

47:01

God and a sin against man. And we're gonna start turning the focus away from I just can't help myself to, but there is a

47:10

God who can help you overcome your sin. Put on, put off. We're gonna go from that perspective.

47:15

Yeah. So, and that's gonna be something we're gonna get into, I think here in a little bit, but here's another question that popped up.

47:22

We need to be good with our questions here and answering them. So Chris, here's another one.

47:28

Do you need to be certified to be a biblical counselor? I would say no, but I'll kind of caveat it.

47:35

The idea of certification kind of helps to show that you know what you're doing.

47:41

And if a church is gonna try to roll out a counseling ministry where they open it up to the public as an outreach event, it's usually a good idea because that's one way to show that your people have been tested and try to show that they know what they're doing.

47:55

But like in the case at our church, I'm certified, our pastor is not, but he is competent to counsel.

48:01

And I would argue that any Christian who's got a good work and knowledge of the scriptures is competent to counsel each other.

48:09

Because we see that in Galatians 6, starting at verse one, how we're supposed to bear each other's burdens.

48:15

And we do that through counseling. And every one of us as a Christian has counseled somebody. When your friend calls you up after they had a fight with their husband, it doesn't know what to do.

48:24

You counseled them. So we just don't call it counseling. Yeah, I agree. So there's some clarification on pathological issues.

48:34

So I'm going through the comments as quickly as I can here. So Humble Clay wrote in, in regards to pathological issues, sociopathy or narcissism.

48:45

I would say that the, I agree with Pastor Justin, the power of the gospel can change those drastically. So we can get

48:51

Andrew to stop his narcissism if we just keep giving him the gospels, what you're saying. Right, yeah. It's going to take a long time, but we're going to get there.

48:59

We're going to get there one of these days. You're just inviting him to interrupt the show again. You know that, right?

49:04

He's sleeping on the couch. No, actually, you know, one thing

49:10

I'm going to say on this is, if you don't mind, I would like to say that, that we have this mandate in scripture that we're supposed to be trying to build each other up and try to outdo one another and try to, you know, and love and good works.

49:25

We're supposed to be coming to one another with sin and trying to address that and help people to do that.

49:32

And that is counsel. You know, one thing that, Chris, I just love that you said that. Everybody's a counselor and, you know,

49:40

Jay Adams actually wrote a book about this and says that we are all biblical counselors from the moment that God saves us.

49:48

Because the first thing, Anthony, I don't know how often you do this, but the first thing we do as Christians is we go out into the world and we counsel sinners that they need to be made right with a holy

50:01

God. That's the very first place we start, you know? And that's what a biblical counselor is gonna do is our main focus is, and I tell everybody this, you know, in our church and everywhere else,

50:15

I tell everybody this, either you're a Christian who needs to repent of some sin or you're not a

50:22

Christian and you need to repent of your sin. But there's always a sin going on, a pride issue, of something that's going on in our lives that we need to be counseled by others.

50:33

And that's just an act of humility is that we humbly come to one another in love and we humbly accept that correction and counsel from one another in love, hopefully.

50:44

So here's the - Oh, sorry, go on. I'm sorry. Here's some two examples that humbled Clay throughout. It was a little while ago, my wife and I were watching

50:50

TV and there was a documentary on the son of Sam. I don't remember the name of the documentary. If you guys remember, he was that serial killer in New York City that killed several people.

51:00

And if you saw the pictures from when he was arrested, he looked possessed, just like a wild man. Well, he got converted while in prison.

51:09

And if you see him now, he looks like a totally different guy. He's leading Bible studies. He actually turns down his hearings to get parole because he said it would be too painful on the family.

51:19

And even the guards that seen him say, he's a totally changed person. So we can see how the power of the gospel can work in someone like the son of Sam from all the evidence that we do have, looks like he was truly converted and he's not using it as an excuse to get out of jail.

51:35

Right. Yeah. I was going to point out also, Anthony just brought up bond servant for Jesus, Melissa.

51:42

She actually mentioned about David Woods. If you're familiar with David Woods, with his

51:47

Acts 17 apologetics. Yeah. So he was basically a murderer.

51:56

He literally killed. And now he's a renowned apologist, a

52:06

Christian apologist. If you ever get a chance to listen to his or watch his video on his conversion, it's impacting.

52:15

It's pretty amazing. Really good with Muslims. Yes. Yeah. He's got a twisted type of humor.

52:24

So it doesn't appeal to everybody. I think he's funny, but very good at apologist when it comes to that.

52:32

So here's another really good question that came up is, and this for you, Chris, as well, and Justin and John, if you want to pop in as well.

52:40

How do you go about counseling an unbelieving individual that is willing to meet for counseling, but refuses to repent and come to faith in Christ?

52:51

Okay. That becomes a tough one because in order to provide true counsel, they need the counselor in them, which is the

52:58

Holy Spirit. Amen. So while you might meet and you might give them some stuff to help them along so they're not driving their wife crazy, they have a little bit better of a marriage, it's going to be a gospel focus on every session.

53:12

So does that mean that you continue to give the gospel, point out, call them out on their sin, but you still will give them biblical truth, biblical nuggets throughout these counseling sessions?

53:23

Because at least you can get some of that word into them. Yes. Okay. Yeah, but those could, and realistically those only go on so long because if they're an unbeliever, they're not going to stay around for too long.

53:36

You should get two or three sessions. Yeah. And that's what I was going to say too, is usually you're going to get a couple of discussions in that avenue and that's about it because if they don't want to repent, they don't want to confess that they're in sin when they're watching pornography, they're in sin when they're doing drugs or they're beating their wife or they're beating their husband or whatever the thing is that's causing them to come to you.

54:07

If they don't want to admit that they're in sin there, then what are you counseling? The only focus that you have is the gospel because even if you fix all of their problems,

54:17

I mean, you go around the list and you make them the most moral and perfect pagan or atheist or whatever, and you make them the most moral person alive, what happens when they die?

54:31

Yeah, I mean, that's your main focus, because the one warning here is you're not going to find a perfect person you're going to find flawed sinners saved by grace and you're going to find flawed sinners that are not saved by grace.

54:46

And in both cases, we need grace, and that's got to be recognized.

54:53

Yeah, amen to that. I don't know if Pastor Justin's experience is the same as mine, but it's pretty rare to have someone who comes in and says,

55:01

I'm an unbeliever and I want counsel. A lot of times when I encounter unbelievers, it's false converts.

55:07

Yeah. And that becomes very tricky. And the thing is, is when you're talking false converts,

55:13

I got to bring Ken. Are you wanting to come in? I don't know if Ken's wanting to come in or not, but. Ken doesn't show up unless Ken wants to come in.

55:20

I got to bring Ken in. Ken, I hope you don't mind me putting you on here, brother, but man, I'm glad to see you.

55:25

Ken, how's it going? Good guys, how you doing? Love to see you representing the Ohio State, the

55:31

Ohio State University. What can I say, man, I like winners. Hold on a minute, hold on a minute.

55:37

Anyway. Yeah, your Tennessee volunteers have been doing so hot lately,

55:42

Justin. I've gotten over it. But Chris, you know, as you were talking about, you know, when people come in and they want to talk, especially false converts, when they come into the church, they cause a lot of havoc, a lot of problems.

55:59

They start out really well. They look really good, like that shiny penny. They look really good. But when you start addressing the sin issues, that's when they explode.

56:09

The world, they hate you from the outside, the false converts, they hate you from the inside.

56:14

How dare you tell me that I can't live in my sin or enjoy my sin? Yeah, so we're gonna ask one more question,

56:21

Chris, that popped up in the chat, and then Ken will let you ask your questions or talk.

56:28

So Chris, do you believe that there are people institutionalized that without a miracle are beyond help?

56:35

Yes, I know it's a little extreme. Okay, I believe that for any one of us, repent and believe the gospel is a miracle and that God takes our depraved people like us and changes any of us as a miracle.

56:47

But to more address Humble Clay's question, I would say, no, I don't think that anybody is beyond the help of the gospel.

56:54

But for them to take a heart like any of ours and change it, I think that's one of the biggest miracles we see.

57:01

Amen. Yeah, amen. So Ken, welcome to the show.

57:07

I'm assuming you have a question for us or you just - Well, I was talking with Andrew about something and he goes, you know what you should do is you should go to Apologetics Live and you should put

57:19

Justin on the spot with that. And I said - Me, huh? I said, perfect. I love cold asking my hardest questions to people.

57:28

I just know, Justin, that when I say my hardest questions, this is genuinely one of the hardest questions that I mentally deal with.

57:37

Gotcha. Okay. So a lot of people have been talking about this Ravi Zacharias thing. And so that is the kind of some of the impetus of this.

57:47

This is not a defense of Ravi by any means. But I think it does create some interesting questions, especially around how we as Christians, especially

57:58

Baptists, right? Cause at least the two guys I know who are here are Baptists.

58:03

Andrew's a Baptist. How we deal with men who at the end of their lives or women at the end of their lives suffer from things like dementia or mental decline that leads them to a place where they do actions that are not consistent with the overall pattern of living that they've had.

58:23

Now, on one hand, we would say, well, if we've got the perseverance of the saints and we know that the Lord keeps his own, on the other hand, we know that they went out from us because they were never of us.

58:34

And that they went out so that it may be shown that they never were truly of us, right?

58:39

And I don't know that I think that that deals with this specific issue, especially around things like dementia, where you can have people who their entire personality, beliefs, et cetera, changes as part of that process.

58:55

Well, let's go even further than that. You get into a car accident because I know people that have had this happen where they get into a car accident and they lose all of their motor skills, their functions, their vegetable, or they are impaired and hurt and they, how do

59:14

I say this? Their cognitive skills are in such a defect that they can't focus and think.

59:22

I'll just give you my take on this and from where I see that, because I have thought about this.

59:28

I've dealt with it, actually preached about this issue with salvation issues. I've had a lot of people ask me because their family members have suffered from dementia and whatnot.

59:39

And here's, go ahead. Okay, so before you get into this, I wanna pose - You notice how he just cut me right off as I was trying to get right there?

59:47

It's right in my mind and he just cuts me right, I really thank you. He wanted to get a word in before the next 45 minutes.

59:54

That's right. I wanna make sure I get something before the show ends. We have to have a hard close tonight at 10 o 'clock from what

01:00:01

I understand. Okay, so I'm gonna ask this question. It's gonna dovetail off of Ken's here.

01:00:09

First of all, Melissa Owens, thank you. Baptists rock. I had to put that comment up. So I know

01:00:17

Ken, you and Andrew discussed this topic as you postulated because he asked me about it.

01:00:23

Could it be that Ravi was, could it be that he was suffering some dementia?

01:00:29

Could that explain these actions in the last four or five years? I have my thoughts on that, but I wanna hear

01:00:36

Justin and Chris answer this question. But I wanna preface this more.

01:00:43

So as a dentist - Let's give 10 more caveats. Oh, this is gonna be a good one.

01:00:50

There's, well, okay, we see in nursing homes, lots of crazy things happen.

01:00:56

I mean, from a dental perspective, 80 to 90, the reason why dentures now and partials that are in people's mouths have names scribed into them is because there's been numerous studies done that have shown 80, 90%, sometimes higher, of people in nursing homes don't have the correct dentures in their mouth because of so many

01:01:16

Alzheimer's issues, they just walk around and they pick up a set of teeth, shove it in their mouth, no matter how bad it fits, and they live that way, and then someone else picks up a different set, and before you know it, everybody's got the wrong set in their mouth.

01:01:27

So now there's names on them to help prevent that from happening. There's also phenomenon in nursing homes where you have people that were healthy and fine for life, and then they get dementia, and now all of a sudden, at 80 years old, are sleeping around in nursing homes.

01:01:46

Yep. Right? How do, these are big issues. So Ken, thank you for the question, because how do we deal with this biblically?

01:01:56

Yeah, I think that latter part is really what I wanna focus in on. I think the car accident and the vegetative,

01:02:03

I think that's pretty self -explanatory. Yeah. Right, is, I think that's an easier, a much, much easier question than as Anthony so aptly put that at the end, which is, you know, dementia especially does some very weird things to people.

01:02:20

Similarly, CTE, I think, does some very weird things to people, and how do we as Christians respond and think about gospel issues in light of those health issues that physically impact us?

01:02:40

Well, I'm gonna go ahead and let Chris start, and this is his joke, and with all of those caveats,

01:02:47

I'm gonna let Chris have this one, and I'm gonna sit back and listen. Believe it or not, that's actually not that tough of a question when we look at it from the big picture.

01:02:56

Okay. Rabbi Zacharias, I think we could throw out from the question, because I think if you look, his sin was not just the last couple of years, from all the information coming out shows that it's been a very long time, very orchestrated, very detailed, shows clear, concise thinking, purposeful deceitment that takes a lot of mental effort to do, so I don't,

01:03:17

I wouldn't put him in that category personally, but now we'll take someone who's got a great testimony, they've been a believer for, say, 30, 40 years, real evidence of God working through their lives.

01:03:29

Now they're 70 to get diagnosed with Alzheimer's, now you start seeing that problematic behavior. There's some debate within biblical councils on this, and some good brothers who disagree with me, but I would agree with them that right now, if every one of us got a little project or reprojected what's in our hearts and our minds at certain times, we'd be horrified, wouldn't we?

01:03:53

But we have that filter because of our brain power and the gifts God's giving us with a healthy body to be able to fight that, to renew our minds, to cut off sin.

01:04:03

Once you have the organic damage from Alzheimer's, you no longer have that ability. So while the stuff that we can mortify from the tools

01:04:11

God's given us, we're able to do it now with Alzheimer's, they don't have that anymore. So I think in those cases, you have to look at what is the whole life of the person.

01:04:20

If it's a good godly example, they lived a good Christian life, I would just say that this is the breakdown of the brain.

01:04:27

They don't have the ability to fight against the sin in their life that you and I have now while we're healthy.

01:04:34

But someone who doesn't have that track record, then what's in their heart is still gonna come out, but they never had that filter in the first place.

01:04:42

Does that make any sense or did I just kind of ramble? Well, I think what the struggle with that is you're left unable to differentiate between the two.

01:04:52

Yeah. Right? Is you as a pastor now have to say, well, they appeared from the outside to be just fine.

01:05:03

And so either way, I have to give them a pass? No. No, I'm not gonna say give them a pass.

01:05:10

Is that what you're saying? Let me ask you this. As an infant, do you expect that infant to have the intellectual knowledge to understand?

01:05:20

I say infant, you're talking one -year -old and pre -one -year -old, okay?

01:05:27

Do you expect them to have the intellectual knowledge to understand right from wrong the way that Anthony should, but really obviously doesn't?

01:05:34

No, obviously not. So what you're saying is this adult,

01:05:40

Paul Washer gave us great analogy that if you have an adult who had the mind of, how do you say it?

01:05:49

You have an infant who had the mind of an adult or the body of an adult, right? And the mind of the infant, he would see that gold watch beat you to death for it because he wants it pulled off of you and it wouldn't care.

01:06:02

Well, the same thing going with the Alzheimer's, dementia and all these other things, you've got a person who is cognitively incapable of knowing right from wrong for whatever reason.

01:06:13

Now, if they're just sitting there sinning because it's fun and they're at the nursing home, because look,

01:06:20

I've got family that's been in the nursing home and because it was fun, they did decide to go ahead and do that because it was fun.

01:06:28

And we've had to counsel, hey guys, you're in sin. Yeah, okay, so what? They're all around their nuts and they're doing the things that they shouldn't be doing.

01:06:36

That doesn't mean it's okay for you to do this. You're wrong. But you can have an intellectual conversation and a spiritual conversation with them.

01:06:44

But for the person who has no ability in their mind to cognitively reason right from wrong because of the defect of Alzheimer's, because of the harm that's happened to their mind or whatever,

01:06:57

I'm gonna come from the perspective that this person cannot differentiate right from wrong even though they once were able to.

01:07:07

And so the normative attitude and behavior of their life was that they were above reproach.

01:07:14

They were beyond reproach until a debilitating disorder came upon them that the

01:07:20

Bible makes clear comes from the fall of man and is a product of this world out of sin and a natural product of this world.

01:07:30

It's going to affect Christians as well. I mean, we agree that everybody here agrees that we know somebody that has cancer, right?

01:07:37

Somebody that has whatever mental decline, we're going to die of something.

01:07:44

And if it's mental decline, that doesn't strip away your Christianity. But what that does do is it says that we need to love, we need to show grace and mercy, and we need to understand that this person didn't have a

01:07:55

Christian walk pre -Alzheimer's dementia. And I'm not speaking from, excuse me,

01:08:04

I'm not speaking from a ivory tower here. We have family members that have went through this very thing, and we've had to determine is this person truly a

01:08:15

Christian who has slipped into dementia? Well, think about it this way,

01:08:22

Ken. You're, and I'm not, I don't know that you're talking about somebody specifically in your family, but I'm just saying.

01:08:28

I'm not, I'm not. It's - Okay. Well, let's just say you go and you visit your mom and she's in the nursing home, okay?

01:08:36

She's been a devout Christian for 58 years, 60 years. She has been the shining example.

01:08:44

She's the one that led you to Christ. She was the one that cared for you. And she has pointed you and your family to Christ all her life.

01:08:52

And then she goes through the worst possible things of Alzheimer's and she loses her cognitive ability.

01:09:01

And you walk in there with your kids and you sit before her and you say, hi, mom. And she's sitting there shaking and she's cussing.

01:09:11

And she's just out of her mind and incapable of understanding. She didn't even know her kids are there.

01:09:16

She doesn't know her grandkids are there. Was, is that, is that who she truly is? No, no.

01:09:23

And how dare any of us try to condemn somebody who is actually having that type of problem, right?

01:09:33

I mean, I would never want to say to someone who's actually having that type of mental problem, oh, they're in sin, they're not a

01:09:43

Christian. I wouldn't want to, I wouldn't want to stand before almighty God and put that on somebody because I think that hurts me just to even talk about it like that.

01:09:53

Because, you know, we know this person, your mom or whoever is, is, has been a biblical

01:09:59

Christian in word and deed all of their lives. And now this bad thing has happened.

01:10:05

So I would, I think it's a great question but I want to make sure that we're clear that as, as Christians, we affirm the gospel of Christ.

01:10:16

Yeah. Does this then, I, I, I hear the answer.

01:10:21

Okay. And, and, and here is the, I think the subsequent hard, hard part.

01:10:28

I knew it was coming. I knew that, I knew that wasn't the hard one. I knew the big one. Doesn't that lead us to a place that ultimately says the smarter or more intelligent or more mentally capable you are, the more culpable you are biblically before God.

01:10:49

I, if I can understand sin better, I can be I should be held more capable of it.

01:10:55

Therefore on judgment day, Anthony is going to be simply by his, his intelligence, far more culpable than I am.

01:11:04

Doesn't lead us to that kind of a place. Yeah. That's a whoa, whoa, whoa. You're really crossing the line right here.

01:11:09

I mean, I know he's only a dentist, but I mean, doesn't it set us up to the, to this place of, of, of saying

01:11:20

Christianity is not about what's in here and, and thus what comes out, but it's rather about how well we process things up here.

01:11:29

I think what, what, in this case, with the Alzheimer's and dementia, you're looking at an actual breakdown of the brain or you're losing brain function.

01:11:37

You could do a CAT scan and see that they're actually actual damage, physical damage. I think that's just different than just intelligence level.

01:11:45

Okay. I agree. I agree. Justin said what I was trying to say, in a way more clear way. Okay. Fair enough.

01:11:53

Chris, man, I think you're amazing. I, brother, I love listening to you talking over there. I think it's, I'm just trying to follow on your coattails here.

01:11:59

What are you talking about? So, so there's a book that's a friend of the show,

01:12:04

Kevin Yan. Good to see you, Kevin. I hope your state opens up so we can come visit you on down in New Mexico.

01:12:10

But he says the book Blame It on the Brain by Edward Welch deals with the topic of dementia and Alzheimer's in a biblically balanced way.

01:12:18

Yeah. You're familiar with that one, Chris? Yes. It's a very, very good book. Ed Welch, his earlier stuff's a lot better than his later stuff.

01:12:28

But that's one of his early books. Very good. I would love to see an update to it because it was published a while ago.

01:12:33

So there's been some new challenges that, of course, he didn't try to answer in that book that wasn't around back then, but it's a fantastic book.

01:12:42

Okay, good to know. And then we have this, Joshua James Sedro has this question for you.

01:12:48

May you guys give some useful resources for aspiring biblical counselors? Websites, books, speakers, et cetera.

01:12:57

Can I go first on this one? Sure. Ignore unconditional positive regard.

01:13:03

Take everything that you hear about that and throw it out. That's gotta be your starting point.

01:13:11

You can move forward from there. But if you've got biblical resources that start with unconditional positive regard, you're in the wrong place.

01:13:21

The first book -wise, anything by Jay Adams is very good.

01:13:29

Keep in mind, though, a lot of his earlier stuff, he was the first person really writing on biblical counseling in a field where it was all psychology in hundreds of years.

01:13:38

And some of his stuff was kind of improved over the time. Wayne Mack is phenomenal. Dave Paulson is really good.

01:13:47

Heath Lambert, especially if you know anyone who struggles with pornography, his book, Finally Free, is the best book on the market.

01:13:54

It's worth its weight in gold. I really like John Street from Masters.

01:14:00

Stuart Scott for women. Susan Heck is very good. We've got her in a podcast.

01:14:07

What about Martha Peace? Oh, thank you. Martha Peace, very, very good. My wife,

01:14:14

Julie, loved her video series. She learned a ton. I saw huge growth in her in going through Martha Peace videos.

01:14:23

So yeah, there are some great resources out there. Here's a great comment here.

01:14:30

I like Ken. Now, if you know anyone who struggled with any type of addiction like drugs or alcohol, there's an author named

01:14:39

Mark Shaw. He's got a book called The Heart of Addiction, which is just phenomenal.

01:14:45

He's a go -to person for how to deal with addictions from a biblical perspective. Bookwise, any books from those authors would be very good.

01:14:54

If you look at, Heath Lambert's got a systematic theology and biblical counseling. Yeah, I've got that book. It's great.

01:15:00

Jay Adams got one as well. But if you're very new, Heath Lambert writes at a level that anyone in a church can pick it up, read it, and understand it.

01:15:09

Where Jay Adams, it was written at a higher level. And that's one of the dangers is having people that write for their own ability to pour out information and not for the ability for the reader to understand.

01:15:28

One thing I'll have to say is Susan Heck, by the way, not hack.

01:15:35

Yeah, Paula asked a question, I believe. So one thing I just wanna make sure is that when you're reading,

01:15:44

D .A. Carson has got good stuff. But people like John MacArthur, look, he writes to every man.

01:15:52

And so he's got biblical counseling information and material. And that's why

01:15:57

I was asking you about Mac because he really brought that ministry to the forefront at Master's Seminary.

01:16:07

And you can actually go on RBS, you can go on Master's Seminary, you can go even on the

01:16:15

Covenant Seminary, and you can go and look at the reform, not reform,

01:16:21

I'm sorry, but the biblical counseling section. And there's a lot of free material and videos. You can go through lectures and just audit the lectures for free and learn from these guys.

01:16:33

But I wanna reiterate, you don't have to be a certified biblical counselor.

01:16:39

You are a biblical counselor. Open your Bible up and believe what it says. And when you're dealing with people about the issues, don't look to the psychologists and the sociologists, look to thus saith the

01:16:52

Lord. If you trust the word of God and the God of the word, you can counsel with almost anybody if they will listen.

01:17:02

You can't counsel anybody that won't listen. But if they will listen, you can counsel.

01:17:07

Just go to the word. That's one of the reasons the Bible says that you're to study to show yourself approved.

01:17:15

Yeah. Now, a website says ibcd .org, the

01:17:20

Institute of Biblical Counseling and Discipleship. They have all of their conferences, they have all the audio for free, and you can download all the notes from those for free as well.

01:17:30

And that's a way if you wanna become ACBC certified, I think that's probably one of the best avenues to get it.

01:17:36

It's online. It's cheaper than a lot. Jim Neuheiser is a guy who set it up. He's since moved on.

01:17:42

But that's another great website that gives you a lot of resources. That's great. Thank you for that.

01:17:48

I was gonna recommend one more person that I found on YouTube. He's actually a friend of mine that I've known for many years.

01:17:57

His name, he goes by the name of Patrick Doyle, D -O -Y -L -E.

01:18:03

And you can find it, just do a YouTube search of Patrick Doyle. Dovetv is what he usually shows up on.

01:18:12

And he's a fantastic guy. He's helped me on a lot of things. And yeah, so anyways. That's great.

01:18:18

One thing to be cautious of, if you just Google biblical counseling, one of the drawbacks of when they switch the name from euphetic to biblical, is a lot of people try to get under the umbrella.

01:18:29

So you have a lot of people, integrated counselors. So once you try to mix psychology, who call themselves biblical counselors.

01:18:36

Some of your deliverance ministries, the guys who wanna cast out a demon of anger or things along those lines, may call themselves a biblical counselor.

01:18:43

So you might have to do some investigation to see what they actually believe. So one thing -

01:18:49

Yeah, go on, Justin. I'm sorry. I am posting right now, a YouTube link to an introduction to biblical counseling.

01:19:02

It's from the biblical counseling,

01:19:07

BCDA, the biblical counseling by instructor John Street. It is,

01:19:13

I believe it's a 24 lectures. And they're actually designed to help you to learn the process of biblical counseling.

01:19:24

You actually download four free PDF files from the

01:19:30

YouTube site. You can actually download those. That will take you through a biblical counseling instructor course, where you can learn how to do that.

01:19:39

See, what you gotta understand was a lot of your biblical counseling with ABAC and whatnot, you're sitting at home, you're going through courses, you can do it this way.

01:19:48

You can go through and sit at home, go through these courses, and learn and study and grow right here at home.

01:19:58

And then you go through the biblical counseling, ABAC or whatever,

01:20:05

ACBC, I'm sorry. And you go through some of these different counseling programs, and they will actually take you through the process of certification.

01:20:16

So I just wanna encourage you. There's a lot of avenues that they've opened up because the idea is, every member in the body of Christ can be a minister of the body of Christ and can glorify

01:20:30

God in doing that. Yeah, well, thank you. So Threads of Hope wrote this kind of in the same vein.

01:20:38

My mom was a good Christian woman for most of my life. However, she had Alzheimer's the last 11 years of her life.

01:20:44

She became mean and vicious -tongued. She had the mind of an infant at the end. So this,

01:20:49

I think, is kind of what, one of the situations you'd have been talking about there, Ken. I've seen this numerous times in patients, seen it with a family member.

01:20:58

So it's a pretty real issue. So in light of all this, here's another question that comes by Humbled Clay.

01:21:06

He's full of good questions tonight. Okay, will the gospel help brain damage without a miracle?

01:21:13

Sorry, not trying to be difficult, but iron sharpens iron. You can, well, there is physical damage to the brain.

01:21:21

You can often help the people to walk through the different challenges they have and how to respond in a more biblical way with what they have.

01:21:29

So there's always improvement, I can say. But you would need a miracle from God to actually heal the damage to the brain itself.

01:21:39

But just like you see secular counselors counsel people with brain injuries to help them cope, we can do it biblically, but we use it with biblical principles.

01:21:50

So let me ask, I don't understand exactly what's being asked here.

01:21:55

Are we asking, will the gospel save that person and then because of their salvation, bring them to clarity of mind?

01:22:07

I read that as essentially, if someone has brain damage, can the gospel still be effective for them?

01:22:13

In other words, can they still receive it? That's what I'm thinking. And let me go ahead and answer that. Yes. Look, the gospel can save anyone that God will save.

01:22:24

I'm just gonna say that. I believe in God's absolute sovereignty and we're called to share the gospel with everyone we can, right?

01:22:31

Everyone that we can. And so you may not know, but God does. I'm perfectly content with knowing that my sovereign

01:22:39

God, he absolutely knows exactly what he's doing. If that's the avenue, if that's what's being asked, humble

01:22:48

Clay says no. I don't know. I'm not sure exactly what he's asking there, but yes, the gospel can save anyone that God predestines to save.

01:23:00

Okay. That's something that a lot of Lutherans push on. I mean, that's one of the strengths of Lutheranism is this idea that God's gonna come and save anyone regardless of age or ability.

01:23:14

I think it's much less of a Baptist focus in general, right? I mean, Baptists were the ones who came up with age of accountability and such things, right?

01:23:24

Norminian Baptists, thank you very much. Well, even, I mean, still Baptist. You see how, no, no, no.

01:23:30

I see how you're trying to throw out there. You know, there's no charismatic Presbyterians around, are there? Uh -huh,

01:23:35

I see how you're gonna fly. That's slick. Uh -huh. He's slick. Oh no, he's not charismatic, is he?

01:23:42

No. Depends on how you define those terms,

01:23:47

I suppose. Whether he's Presbyterian or charismatic. I don't know. I don't know. He's either one now.

01:23:54

I mean, I've heard his radio show, Matt. I hope you hear this, Matt. I know you're not charismatic, but maybe you're charismatic.

01:24:02

One of them. I'm not sure. He's either one or the other. So, Chris, I wanna ask you kind of a complicated question, and I've got part of this up here.

01:24:14

I wanted to ask you earlier. So I was doing some research. I mean, it seems like the father of, it looks like Ken dropped out.

01:24:22

Have a good night, Ken. It looks like the father of modern psychology would be blamed, so to speak, on Freud, right?

01:24:29

Like it seems to go through him. Now, one thing I found interesting, I always like looking up people and finding who their influences were.

01:24:37

So when I was doing a lot of the research on the social justice, and I think why we at Striving for Eternity were kind of ahead compared to a lot of people is we did a lot of the research behind who the influences were of the people who were influential in the movement.

01:24:51

And I was able to trace things back several hundred years through different philosophers. And one thing

01:24:57

I found fascinating with social justice is it has its roots going back to the

01:25:04

Enlightenment period of the 1700s, when the age of God that has been around forever starts to change during the 1500s, 1600s, and then 1700s brings out the age of Enlightenment, also known as the age of reason.

01:25:19

So the age of God ends, age of reason comes out. And this is where, for the first time, you have numerous philosophers doing their best to explain away

01:25:29

God out of everything and explain in naturalism or materialism into everything.

01:25:36

And so they did an unbelievable job with economics in leading to the French Revolution and then leading to the wave of philosophers that what later was coined

01:25:47

Marxism. No doubt, at the same time that this trail is happening, we also see a trail in biblical creation being destroyed and Charles Darwin, who wrote his book only a few years away from when

01:26:02

Communist Manifesto was written by Karl Marx.

01:26:07

So we see that trail then take its course throughout the Bible and the world. Well, you go back and you trace back

01:26:15

Sigmund Freud, and I would have bet the house on this that somehow he would be traced back to philosophers of the 1700s.

01:26:27

And guess what? Immanuel Kant and Nietzsche and a number of others.

01:26:33

So he also is literally the product of an anti -God worldview in the age of reason.

01:26:41

So what I find fascinating is that as presuppositional apologists, we would say that there's no neutral ground.

01:26:48

There's God, right? It's the biblical worldview. God exists, he has spoken, which

01:26:54

Andrew stole from me. And then on the other side of it, we have the non -God worldview, and there's no neutral ground, right?

01:27:01

There's no in -between where we can kind of meet halfway. Would you say that that's the same thing with the biblical counseling versus secular psychology, that there's no room for middle ground?

01:27:16

It's literally one worldview versus another? I would say yes, but I'm gonna caveat that in one second though.

01:27:23

Okay, go ahead. Because you see, Jay Adams is actually a very big fan of Van Til, and you see his influence in a lot of his writings.

01:27:30

I would say that there is one useful thing we could get out of psychology, which is the study of observation.

01:27:37

Like we would say that a psychologist that observes what happens to a human and how they respond if they're sleep -depraved.

01:27:44

You know, they can hallucinate, et cetera. We can use that because if you came to me with delusions, the first thing

01:27:50

I'm gonna ask you is how much are you sleeping at night? The problem with psychology is when it gets out of its lane and tries to use what it observed to help people.

01:28:00

And that's when you start getting on the, we don't have any neutral ground. But if psychology just stays in the area of I'm observing and listening what

01:28:10

I see, then we can use some of that information. Okay. Just like children's, they can observe and say, children who are sexually abused tend to respond this way and act in this way.

01:28:21

But then how you help that child, we're gonna be worlds apart in how to help them. Yeah. Okay.

01:28:26

So on one hand, it's useful as a tool in listening, right? It's just the listening skills, which

01:28:31

I would probably argue is really a biblical foundation anyway than secular, but okay. So let me throw a little wrinkle into this because we had another question and this is what

01:28:41

I wanted to lead into from Lana Allen. She says, this is refreshing. It seems like a lot of new age ideology is being crammed on our throats everywhere.

01:28:51

So what do you see in terms of new age being crammed into the biblical counseling realm?

01:28:57

I mean, we see this theologically. I know we've spoken about this. Our pastor just started last night speaking on a new series on Wednesday nights on speaking about people who say

01:29:10

God told me or that still small voice and he's giving an apologetic against this, biblical apologetic against this.

01:29:17

That's mysticism, new age ideology. That's filtered into the church.

01:29:22

So what would you say about that with the biblical counseling side? I think there's other certifying agencies within biblical counseling, but I think with the

01:29:31

ACBC, the Association of Certified Biblical Counselors, they have a lot of safeguards against that within the counselors who get certified through them because like you mentioned, some of the new age or the mystical stuff of hearing the voice of God, you cannot hold to new revelation and get certified by ACBC.

01:29:48

They have a lot more strict statement of faith. Their exams really root out a lot of that new age type thinking.

01:29:56

So within the groups who get certified by ACBC, there's a lot of safeguards. From some of the other organizations, you might see some of the influence where they would start embracing more of the charismatic, hearing the voice of God, new revelation.

01:30:10

Some people who call themselves biblical counselors, but would not be people we would accept as orthodox, get into things like healing memories where you want the person to relive a trauma, but with Jesus with them.

01:30:22

And there's a whole bunch of weird, wacky varieties all over the place. And so that's the stuff that I think

01:30:29

Lana is referencing, right? These are the things that are creeping into the fields in that manner.

01:30:35

Yeah, but if you look out and look for an ACB certified counselor, a lot of that new age stuff should be filtered out.

01:30:44

They do a good job of guarding that. They've since redid the exam and I haven't looked at the new exam, but there was actually one whole question dealt with two or three different of the new age things.

01:30:53

Okay. And address of why they weren't biblical. Yeah. So are we seeing that the new age ideology is increasing in counseling, like we see it in what we thought were good

01:31:07

Christian circles? Like, is this increasing or is this kind of an outlier right now? In my experience, it's not so much the new age influencing counseling.

01:31:16

I think we still struggle with two things. One is integrated Christian counseling is still by far, far more common and in more churches.

01:31:28

Yeah. And the other thing we deal with on the reform side with like us is we put so much emphasis on the power of the

01:31:34

God to change lives from preaching, which is good. There's a lot of pastors who say, well,

01:31:40

I only counsel when I preach, so I don't need to counsel people individually. And I think that's one of the big problems we're seeing more than the new age in our circles at least.

01:31:50

Okay. Where they're only doing the public ministry of the work, but they're not coming alongside the people privately. And I think that's a bigger danger that we're facing, that and still just saying, well,

01:32:01

I can help you with the small problems, but the big problems, you need to go outside of the church. Okay.

01:32:06

Fair enough. Okay. So John just dropped out.

01:32:11

He says he's going to head out. Thanks for having me on. Great to have you on, John, as always.

01:32:17

We had a number of comments of people waiting for your chickens to come back out. So I hope the weather gets nice soon and we see you running around with your chickens again.

01:32:27

Okay. So I want to bring in another guest and another familiar face.

01:32:34

Look at this. Tom, how are you? Another churchgoer at Olmstead Falls Bible Church with Chris and I.

01:32:44

How are you doing tonight? I'm good, guys. How are you doing? Good. So I just wanted to surprise you, bring you on while you're hiding backstage.

01:32:52

I appreciate it. No problem. Okay. So as we're starting to walk through these things,

01:33:06

I want to touch base on something you said earlier, because I know you touched base on this in the book.

01:33:13

What do you say about Pentecostals who think it's a demon that you have, like a demon attached to you of anger or a demon attached to you?

01:33:24

So they want to try to get the devil out of you rather than giving you

01:33:32

Bible. So what do you see with that movement? Number one, it's a thought of your sanctification, because instead of trying to mortify the sin, to put off sin, put on righteousness, they just want to cast out the demon and do a quick fix.

01:33:46

But if you look at throughout scriptures, you don't see demons being cast out for sin -related issues.

01:33:53

You don't see them saying this man's got angry, he's got a demon, and you don't see them cast out that demon. So we don't actually see that practice in the

01:34:01

Bible. And then it becomes also an excuse, saying that the only reason they're acting this way is because they have a demon in them, not what the

01:34:09

Bible says, it says that sin starts in our heart. And let's be honest, if the devil ceased to exist today and every demon ceased to exist, we would still sin, because sin originates in our heart.

01:34:22

Yeah, that's a very good point there. So we've, we're starting, we got 25 minutes left in the show tonight.

01:34:33

And so we have this list of questions and I think we've gotten to like three of them.

01:34:40

I told you, Chris, this is enough questions to get us through like at least a few shows.

01:34:47

Are there any topics, major topics that we have not hit on yet tonight?

01:34:53

We're gonna obviously have to have you back on and get into some more of the nuts and bolts of some of this stuff.

01:34:58

But what other major things do you think that would be helpful to talk about to our audience?

01:35:07

I think one thing we need to talk about is radical amputation.

01:35:15

Good. Because that's an area where I think a lot of people, when they try to kill sin in their lives, they don't do a good job.

01:35:22

Radical amputation is just a term we use based upon the passage in Matthew where Jesus says that if your eye caused you to sin, pluck it out.

01:35:29

If your hand caused you to sin, cut it off. And what that's referring to is as a counselor, if you're coming to me for a sin -related issue, we're gonna talk about what are some of those triggers that can lead you to sin, that tempt you?

01:35:42

I'm gonna look at how can you cut that off? And one way we do that is that, is we look at say if it's pornography, we're gonna put software on your computer.

01:35:53

We're gonna look at what music are you listening to? Because a lot of music is filled with lyrics for sexual things.

01:35:59

If you're listening to the music, you're gonna think about it. So we're gonna say, stop listening to that type of music.

01:36:06

So it's sin -specific, but that's one thing, if you have a major sin issue in your life, you have to look at what are some of the things that are leading you into temptation to fall into that sin, then you cut it off, even if it's radical.

01:36:20

Okay, so let's make sure we clear up concepts for everyone here. When we talk about mortifying sin, we wanna kill off sin.

01:36:33

But it sounds like some of these things are pragmatic things, at least initially.

01:36:41

So does a biblical counseling movement say, hey, it's okay for us to be pragmatic in some ways, that we put software on the computers, that we do whatever,

01:36:52

Billy Graham rule, I don't know, in order to help us mortify the sin?

01:36:59

Yes, but I probably wouldn't phrase it that way. Okay. Because the Bible commands us, make no provision for the flesh.

01:37:06

Don't give the devil a foothold. To radically amputate or cut these things out of your life. So I would say that that's us just being obedient to scripture and practically applying it.

01:37:15

Yeah. But we'll just use pornography again, because I do a lot of counseling related to pornography, is if the person's spending gross in pornography for, and it's often hours a day, every day for years, you do wanna work on that heart change, but you need to give them some breathing room, some relief from seeing it day in, day out.

01:37:36

So some of those more practical steps will help give them that breathing room as you're also working on the heart change.

01:37:42

Yeah. So they kind of go together. Because I see the one question from the one person is how do we mortify sin?

01:37:49

That's part of mortifying sin is the radical amputation and cutting it off. But we can't just stop at cutting sin off.

01:37:57

We have to do what's called vivification, which is the put ons. And that's how you actively work on righteousness in your life.

01:38:05

But we do know that we only get the ability to do and even the ability to desire to be more godly from the

01:38:12

Holy Spirit. So that goes back to in the very beginning when you said you need a believer if you don't biblically counsel.

01:38:19

Yeah, okay. Yeah, and that's what I wanted to kind of work through because I've heard people talk about it's pragmatic to do these things.

01:38:28

And yet, I think you answered it very well there that you're just trying to give some breathing room to somebody in order to get focused on this.

01:38:39

Then I think one thing we should hit on is the idea of calming grace. Because that's a big thing that's thrown out against biblical counseling is, well, because of calming grace and the

01:38:49

Noahic covenant, we can go to secular counselors for our problems because because of calming grace, they can help us with those issues.

01:39:00

Face value, that argument might seem good, but we go back to what we said in the beginning. They're starting on that presupposition that where they have a faulty view of man, they have a faulty view of God.

01:39:10

Their counseling system is based on ungodly principles. They have no standard of right and wrong.

01:39:16

So how can they provide biblical counsel or counsel that would fit the biblical requirements if they don't know it?

01:39:25

You've talked to a lot of pastors or other counselors. They often see people who went to secular counselors or even

01:39:31

Christian counselors who were advised to get a divorce when they don't meet the biblical requirements.

01:39:39

And that's just one example of why calming grace, even though God does bless the righteous and the unrighteous, it doesn't give us an excuse to go to someone for counseling where the counsel is not based on the

01:39:52

Bible because they cannot provide biblical counsel to you because they don't know what that counsel is.

01:39:58

You know, I was never even aware of that. That is really a bad, that is a bad way to use calming grace.

01:40:06

I didn't do a real good analysis of that. A while back,

01:40:11

Theology Gals had a guest on, Russ McCrary, I think his name was, and that was one of his main arguments. And my co -author of the book did a very good response video to it where they got into the calming grace.

01:40:24

Then there were response videos back and forth. But if someone really wants to dig into that topic and see the other side, you can find those videos on YouTube.

01:40:33

Yeah, that would be, that'd be cool for, I'm sure, some people to watch. All right, here's a big question.

01:40:38

How much do you charge for biblical counseling? I mean, look, the church that, it took me two years to convince my wife to leave, the same old church

01:40:47

I used to go to as well, Chris, before you woke up. Oh, and by the way, the same old church you used to go to,

01:40:53

Tom, as well before you woke up. I was there for years. There's a common theme in our area with this church that went emergent.

01:41:01

They charge $55 an hour for biblical counseling, and not biblical.

01:41:07

I mean, it's what you would call the mix of the two, trying to take some Bible verses with secular psychology and calling it biblical counseling.

01:41:15

So they charge $55 an hour to go in. Member or not, doesn't matter. So what do you charge as a biblical counselor?

01:41:23

I don't charge anything, because my opinion is biblical counseling is a ministry of the church. So just like we don't charge somebody to come in and listen to a sermon, we shouldn't charge the private ministry of the word.

01:41:34

Wait a minute, you don't what? Yeah. Oh, I thought we were supposed to charge for that, guys. I'm sorry, I'm just kidding.

01:41:40

There are biblical counselors who do charge, but a lot of them, you'll see, they're like in independent counseling centers.

01:41:45

Yeah, I was gonna say, there's two different types of biblical counseling groups. You actually have biblical counseling centers, like you just said, that they do charge a fee, but it's usually much less than the $175 to $250 per session, which is some of the secular counselors charge that.

01:42:08

And that's why I was talking about earlier with the guy that sent his son through college, and he goes off to vacation and comes back and everybody's healed.

01:42:16

And he's like, what are you doing? My business is gone. Well, as a biblical counselor,

01:42:21

I agree with Chris. And I'm not a certified biblical counselor. I mean,

01:42:26

I've been studying and training and whatnot for years, but I'm not even a certified biblical counselor.

01:42:32

But if I'm gonna counsel with somebody, I'm counseling from the word of God as a pastor, and I'm going to have them come in to the church.

01:42:42

Well, this is part of my job. This is what I do as a pastor. And so I'm not gonna charge them.

01:42:48

Now, another group that is, like you said, a biblical counseling group, they may need to charge to keep the lights on.

01:42:58

And with the counseling centers, there's really two types of counseling centers. There's one that's down in the

01:43:03

Mansfield area that's really good. And it's a partnership of a lot of very small churches. And they don't charge, but they don't have enough resources to really set up a counseling ministry on their own.

01:43:15

So they teamed up. But the ones that do charge are more independent and very, very good brothers and sisters are doing those counseling centers.

01:43:24

Their hearts are in the right place. But I think the need for those is because as a church, we have failed to provide the private ministry of the word to our people, which resulting us needing something like that.

01:43:36

I would love to see a day when churches really take seriously the need to minister to their people privately.

01:43:42

So the idea of having a counseling center that charges, that's independent, doesn't exist.

01:43:48

Because when you're independent of the church, you lose the tools of the church to counsel someone.

01:43:54

Yeah. What I find fascinating about this is that, to me, biblical counseling is a specified form or specific form of discipleship, right?

01:44:07

And you would never say, hey, I'm gonna disciple you right now and then charge somebody once a week to disciple them in the word.

01:44:16

And yet biblical counselors have tried to make a living off of discipling people in this little area of discipleship.

01:44:25

So yeah, it's pretty interesting. I wonder how much Joel Osteen's church charges for biblical counseling.

01:44:32

Oh yeah, but the church is so necessary for biblical counseling to be done well, though.

01:44:40

Because especially if you're counseling a church member, church discipline has to be on the table at some point if there's no repentance and it's a sin issue on their end.

01:44:48

If you're independent, you don't have that. If we're a church, we can reach out to the elders or someone else.

01:44:54

We say, you know what, someone else in the congregation struggled with a sin like you. Let's put these two together. This person has already had victory over it.

01:45:02

They might be able to help them. You have a lot of resources you could pull in that you don't if you're independent. Yeah.

01:45:07

So here's a question from one of our friends, John McKeon. So John, he was on our team at a pastor's academy a few years ago.

01:45:15

That's how we met. And we've hung out a few times since then. And John, this is a great time to tell the audience that Pastor Andrew, myself, and Justin Peters will be doing a conference the first Thursday, Friday, actually,

01:45:31

I'm sorry, Friday, Saturday, Sunday of May. It's like the 5th, 6th, 7th, or 6th, 7th, and 8th, whatever that Friday, Saturday, Sunday is.

01:45:40

We will be down there at Bula Baptist Church with Dr., also Pastor Casey Buechner.

01:45:49

And so we're going to be down there. John, you're in the Orlando area. So I'm looking forward to seeing you.

01:45:54

We're going to be down there in May for this conference. And I'm sure we'll hook up at some point and get out to dinner or something.

01:46:01

But John has this question for you, Chris. And this is a question that probably a number of people are asking.

01:46:07

Great, you're in the Cleveland, Ohio area. Benefits myself, benefits Tom, benefits

01:46:12

Pastor Justin if he wants to drive the seven hours north to come up here. But otherwise, how do people find counselors like you that are around the country?

01:46:25

So John's in Orlando. He wants to know how you can find somebody. If you go to biblicalcounseling .com, that's the

01:46:31

ACBC website, they have a search feature where you can look for counselors in your area.

01:46:36

That's one place to start. Then if you have him give you his email, then you can give it to me. I can try to see if I can find somebody as well.

01:46:43

Okay, so there you go, John. If it's okay with you, I'll send your email to Chris and I'll let him contact you on that.

01:46:52

So we can certainly do that. Okay, so having said all that, here's one of the questions you have on your list here.

01:47:05

What role does the Holy Spirit play in biblical counseling? I think you cannot provide biblical counsel without him because we know that he is the counselor and he's the only person who can affect true change in a person.

01:47:18

So Jay Adams kind of has a saying and I don't remember exactly how he phrased it. He says that there's always at least three people in a counseling room, the counselee, the counselor, and the

01:47:28

Holy Spirit. So if the Holy Spirit doesn't affect the change in the person, you just rearrange the chairs in that Titanic.

01:47:36

Yeah, wow. So Jehovah's Witnesses have a problem because they just think it's the force that is sitting there in the room with you.

01:47:47

Yeah, no, great, great on that. So here's another question for you.

01:47:53

What are idols of the heart and how do they motivate behavior? Oh, do we have a whole show for that?

01:48:01

Well, we can save it for another show if that's gonna be a tough one to get to. No, this summarizes,

01:48:08

I think John Kelvin said that the human heart are idol factories and that as soon as we knock one down, another one pops right back up.

01:48:15

So Dave Poulsen in his books did a lot of work on this issue that talks, and so did the Puritans, where they talk, so you look at when you're in a life -dominating sin or a sin that's taken over your life is what is this idol that I built up in my heart?

01:48:32

What am I trying to get from it? And that's what the idol of the heart is. You're trying to expose the root cause of the behavior and it's because something else you're worshiping as God other than God.

01:48:44

And because you're seeking that out over God, depending what that idol is, it results in sinful behavior.

01:48:55

So Pastor Justin, you've been awful quiet for a while. I'm not used to this.

01:49:01

I'm letting Chris have at it, man. He's doing a great job. I mean, we've got the guest on here.

01:49:09

Let him go ahead for it. I'm trying my best to keep my mouth shut. It's, you know how hard that is, so.

01:49:17

Yeah, I know. I just sit back. Thanks a lot. I really appreciate that. Like, you're not the one talking too.

01:49:23

I have my fair share of words, no doubt about that. Okay, so let's get into some church stuff because you talked about church earlier,

01:49:34

Chris. Is what role does the church play in biblical counseling?

01:49:41

I agree with Jay Adams. He says the church is God's counseling center. And I agree with you.

01:49:47

Counseling is just intensive discipleship. So I think the role it plays is we all counsel each other for our normal life's problems.

01:49:58

But sometime during the life of a believer, they might hit a point where they need some extra help. They're, a sin issue they're struggling with is just becoming too much and dominating.

01:50:06

Something horrible happened. Their husband had committed adultery. They lost a child and they're really struggling.

01:50:14

So the counseling at that point becomes more formalized where you can meet with a pastor or someone who's been recognized by the church to help with that counseling ministry.

01:50:23

And that's just basically the one another's. We're bearing each other's burdens. But the church is what

01:50:30

God's given us in order to care for each other, to help sanctify us. Because remember,

01:50:36

Jesus talks about how we're all body. We don't all do the same things. And you need all those individual parts to really care for the souls of people.

01:50:45

A pastor can't do it by himself. He needs the people in the church to help him. So that's why counseling has to be routed in the church.

01:50:52

The little problems that pop up, the people take care of it with other church members. Caring for each other, loving on each other, meeting each other's needs.

01:51:00

If it becomes too much, that's when you have your elders or people they've recognized as being gifted in the area of counseling to help them walk through that.

01:51:09

Then in the cases where a person is in sin and they're non -repentant, then you have the tool of church discipline, which would hopefully bring them to repentance.

01:51:18

But the end of the day is counseling is just one of the arrows in the quiver of the church to help disciple people, to make them more like Jesus in the end.

01:51:27

And you can't do that as a Lone Ranger. Yeah, and obviously there are other people who are struggling with similar sins, right?

01:51:37

That, as you said earlier, that have victory over those specific sins and can help other people within the church body in that way.

01:51:47

This is one of the issues I have with AA. Well, there's multiple issues, but one is they try to match up people who are still struggling with the same sin.

01:51:56

The only time you should match up someone who's struggling with the same sin is if they've had such a very long track record of victory over it and they're a mature

01:52:04

Christian. And then they can relate and say, hey, I went through the struggle just like you.

01:52:09

And they can relate and help walk them through it. But in those cases, you wanna make sure they've had a long track record of victory and they're mature.

01:52:16

Yeah, because Pastor Andrew, if he was on, I'm sure he would share his story. He talks about how he never puts people together that have had similar sin issues, at least in the recent past, because he says he's seen times where somebody who is, say, in pornography and they maybe had a recent victory over it is helping to counsel somebody who's in pornography now.

01:52:39

And what ends up happening is as they're sharing stories, they're literally giving each other ideas on how to circumvent the system more and find more pornography.

01:52:48

I actually, the church that we all came from, they have a program that's like a

01:52:56

Christian 12 -step AA thing. And they do the whole group meeting and then they do the breakout sessions.

01:53:04

And one of the groups is for, they call it men's struggles or something like that, but it's basically, it's for pornography. And I went to that one night and the breakout session was like 12 guys sitting in a circle all talking about their secrets, how they live in their sin and how they hide their porn.

01:53:23

And it's exactly what you were saying. It was like guys that are still struggling with a sin teaching each other how to sin better.

01:53:34

Yeah, well, and of course, the real shame is that at our old church, they were, I feel like I feel bad words, keep bringing it up, but we know a lot of people that were in some of those programs and it was never gospel focused.

01:53:53

Yeah, it was all this kind of stuff, so. Yeah, I think it's the third or fourth chapter in our book,

01:54:01

Michael Burgos did a really great biblical critique of AA and why it's not biblical. Yeah, yeah, that's not one of the chapters

01:54:10

I've read yet and I'm looking forward to that. One of our patients actually, who is a long since recovered alcoholic of 30 plus years being sober, he was telling me about AA, he speaks out against AA because he went through it and he says, you know, this was supposed to be about God, but it's not about God and they believe in just some higher power and he gave me his

01:54:36

Alcoholics Anonymous Bible. Yeah. It's crazy reading through this stuff.

01:54:43

Reminds me of, what's that? I'm sorry, and like even on face value, when you look at AA, what's one of the first things you do?

01:54:50

You stand up, say, hey, I'm Chris, I'm an alcoholic. Well, we know if biblically, 1 Corinthians 6, 9 through 10 talks about as were some of you, there's really no victory over it.

01:55:01

You're always gonna be identified by your sin in that program. Yeah. And there is no concept of overcoming.

01:55:07

Yeah. There's no overcoming the sin when you're in the NA, Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, you're always identified like you just said,

01:55:17

Chris. And it's the problem with that is, is I no longer am identified with the dead man that God killed.

01:55:26

He killed that man on the cross 2 ,000 years ago and he applied that death to my life at a certain point in time.

01:55:34

And now he's telling me to fight, to put on the whole armor of God and be steadfast in the faith and to overcome the devil, to overcome and to fight.

01:55:48

We're in a war and it's a spiritual war. And we gotta realize that one of the problems that we have as Christians and as learning to be

01:55:58

Christian, you're a Christian, you start going through your sanctification process, you quit looking where you're going, you quit looking for the prize, you quit looking for the direction you're heading and you look at the battle right now and you say, oh, it's too much.

01:56:14

You know, I can't handle it so I'm going to get into this thing here. Well, AA says, well, you're always who you were, you never overcome and there is no gospel of an overcoming

01:56:28

God who has pulled you out of the wickedness you used to be in. It's no different than the homosexual movement, right?

01:56:35

Who wants to identify as I'm a gay Christian and some other nonsense that they've spoken of.

01:56:41

So you're right, I go to that 1 Corinthians 6 passage all the time in street ministry.

01:56:48

Okay, so John writes this, what do you guys think about Rick Warren, his addiction 12 -step programs?

01:56:56

Well, I can tell you, if you tell me anything about Rick Warren, I'm going to toss it out the window and burn it, but so Chris, go ahead and answer that.

01:57:08

I'm not as familiar with his, but to my knowledge, it's just a baptized or attempted to baptize version of AA and you still deal with a lot of the same issues.

01:57:18

So I would look, I would actually, when it comes to addiction, look at Mark Shaw's resources. The book,

01:57:25

Heart of Addiction, very, very good. It's a biblical approach addiction. If you're someone who has struggled with addiction, but you're in a period where you're having a lot of victory, he's got like a workbook called

01:57:35

Relapse, which can really help you to stay on that path. He's got a 31 -day devotional for people struggling with addiction to just keep them in front of the word of God to help renew the mind.

01:57:48

So anything with addiction, I would refer you over to Mark Shaw's resources before I would look at anything from Rick Warren or AA.

01:57:56

I mean, Rick Warren could probably put you in touch with the Pope or something to help you out, right? Direct line with God.

01:58:04

So Lana writes this, I was in AA for 19 years. The reason I left was I heard our friend

01:58:10

Matt Slick say Bill W used automatic writing and the occult to come up with the 12 steps.

01:58:17

I don't know if you guys are familiar with that or not. I'm not familiar with that, but I've never really researched the history of it.

01:58:24

Yeah, no problem. So we are approaching 10 o 'clock and if it was up to me,

01:58:32

I would do it. About to roll into Anthony time. I would, but I know that Pastor Justin's in seminary.

01:58:39

He's studying right now. I've got a lot of work to do. I love you guys, but man, I'm like a minute and I've got to get it.

01:58:45

I know you've got work to do. And Chris - Chris has got Greek to do. Yeah, I want to thank you for being on the show.

01:58:51

So Chris mentioned earlier, we mentioned earlier that you're in seminary. Well, you have one class that is standing between you and your degree.

01:59:02

Yes, right. Greek too. So I know that you're anxious to get back and do some studying.

01:59:09

So while I would never let Andrew trump Anthony time, I will have no problem with you in Greek trumping

01:59:16

Anthony time. Yes, 20 days left. Hey Chris, before we hang up, man,

01:59:23

I'm going to tell you personally, I have loved having you on. Please come back on. Will do.

01:59:29

You and Anthony figure out when is a good time because this was fabulous. I think we got through about,

01:59:36

I don't know, maybe 10 of these, I don't know, a thousand and 50 questions or something. So no, we've got plenty of stuff to keep talking about.

01:59:49

And so when we do that show, we'll announce it ahead of time. Whenever we can get you back on Chris, maybe after Greek's done with.

01:59:56

And we'll get you back on. And hopefully we'll have some more questions lined up for you at that point.

02:00:02

I'm going from there. I think what the most amazing part of this show is that even

02:00:08

AMIL guys like Chris can have some good answers for us. Yes.

02:00:14

So I had it, I had it. Yeah. Well, you got to understand Anthony, before we go there, I got to tell you, truth is truth.

02:00:22

Even if the AMIL theology is wrong, there is a good position to be found. It's okay.

02:00:28

It's okay. I got to tell you, Anthony, I'm willing to change my mind in midair. See, I'm all for it.

02:00:38

So no, it's honestly, Chris, it's been a pleasure having you on. It's been a pleasure having you as a good friend of mine as well and whatnot over the years.

02:00:48

But it's been great having you on the show tonight. Tom, thank you for being on. Pastor Justin, as always, thank you for being on.

02:00:56

Andrew, thank you for not being on for a while. Just kidding.

02:01:01

We love you, Andrew. We wish you were on this entire show. So on that, I will end the way

02:01:07

Andrew always does. We hope you continue to strive for eternity, not in a workspace way.

02:01:14

Have a good night. Cool, thanks guys. Yeah, we're not workspace, so there you go. God bless. God bless.