Biblical Counseling with ACBC Trainer Chris Chumita

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

All right, well, welcome to another Apologetics Live. We are here with you on Thursday nights to answer your apologetics questions. We can answer any question you have about God and the Bible, but tonight we're gonna have a focus on biblical counseling.

We have a special guest that's gonna come in with us, joining us, talking about biblical counseling. What is biblical counseling? You're about to find out. What is the difference between that and secular counseling?

Well, you're about to find out. With that, let me first bring in no one other than the one, the only, Dr. Anthony Silvestro. How are you, sir? I'm doing well, how are you? I'm doing better than I deserve.

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

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

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

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

So there you go.

So somehow Josiah heard it in the womb then and came up with it, and then you're Yeah, I stole it. And this is evolutionist logic. Somehow, yours can't be right, so any other story has to be.

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

It's kind of like that whole thing. So Mike Riddle, who 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. He says, tell me what three plus one is, but you can't say the word four, 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.

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

Well, I like how Jim Wallace puts it, because what he'll do is say, and he's a cold case detective, right? 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 gotta find the suspect, but he's not black.

So it limits what you can do, right? You just can't, you're not able to find it. So, oh, we got someone new here. Hello, just heard about the show from the Matt Slick radio show. Well, Matt Slick is a friend of ours.

And the last time he was on the show, he did a dirty deed. I'm just saying, he did something wicked.

He did. Yeah, he finally pulled one over on you and bought dinner. And he was bragged for years about Matt not being able to buy him dinner. Nine years old, a door dash delivery of probably $150 worth of sushi that shows up your door.

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.

I will admit that. Oh, it was great when you showed it. Somewhere there's a really good sushi place by me and I gotta find it. But he did get me back after nine years. So I deserved it.

Well, 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.

Yeah, I wanna make two announcements real quick. 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. 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 trillion deal. They just, all the liberal states that mishandled their finances, they've just been paid. Thank you. That's what you get for 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 Dr. Silvestro, myself, Pastor Justin Pierce, Pastor Justin Peters in Israel, time is running out.

So if you wanna join Striving Fraternity, Justin Peters Ministries in Israel, go to israeltour2021 .com. We are limited on space. We actually have only two spots left for you to get where it is the, where flights are included.

After that, we have a couple of slots, maybe five left, where you're able to get the land only. So you'd have to fly yourself out there. And after that, we're gonna take, basically put people on a reserve list.

The reserve list will be first come, first serve. And the thing with that is, remember prices go up end of this month. It goes up by $100 at the end of this month. And so I'm encouraging you to register now, go to israeltour2021 .com.

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. 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. And you're gonna wanna go to Israel just for this. Dr. Silvestro is gonna be speaking at the Sea of Galilee and he only has seven minutes to do a devotion.

We're gonna see if he could do it. There will be no Anthony time. Invoke Anthony time. Wow, seven minutes. Seven minutes, we're gonna see if he can do it. So, but I really wanna encourage you, if you haven't been to Israel, I do believe, 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.

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

But, 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. KT is saying, Anthony, seven minutes, question mark? I can't get done in two hours.

Yeah, they're gonna have to come to Israel with us to see that Anthony can actually do a devotion in seven minutes on the Sea of Galilee. By the way, this was the reason that I chose Capernaum instead of the Sea of Galilee, just cause I knew there was the seven minute window.

Now, granted, Anthony just picked it, you know, just saying. 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. And so, but I wanted to invite everyone to join us in Israel.

Time is running out if you wanna join that. 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.

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.

So look forward to seeing you guys all in Israel. So with that, Anthony, I'll see you later. Have a good night. And hello and goodbye. Yes. Well, that was a better switch. Got rid of Andrew, brought in Justin.

Good. Yeah, there you go.

What are you saying? What? What? I thought he was gone already. Yeah, handsome. So all joking aside, we do love Andrew and we enjoy him being on, enjoy his company in person. Of course too. 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. 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. And he, well, I would say butchered the few texts that he used.

And so we went through that sermon and I had one guy who reached out to me, Matt Bale 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.

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 is trying to get him to talk to me, refused to do that, didn't wanna come on the show to talk about the sermon.

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. So we talked about it. What's interesting about this email is there's 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.

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. So I don't use that degree to fool anybody whatsoever.

It's just part of my title, I guess. Having said that, that has nothing to do with whether a pastor is giving a good sermon or not. It has nothing to do with whether a pastor is correctly expositing text or not.

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

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.

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. 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.

And so how dare you?

Yeah. And the thing is, is we did not take anything out of context in his sermon. We played video clips. Some of them were a minute long, some were almost two minutes long. The entirety of the sermon, anybody can go watch.

To make sure that we didn't take anything out of context. 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.

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

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. But having said all that, I do want to bring in our guest now.

So I'm gonna add him to the stream. 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. So for the audience, here's Chris.

Chris Chimita is a certified counselor with the Association of Certified Biblical Counselors and is currently working toward an MA in theological studies at Covenant Baptist Theological Seminary. He is a member of Olmstead Falls Bible Church.

Chris's wife, Rachel, reside in Elyria, Ohio. So Olmstead Falls Bible Church sounds kind of familiar. So yes, that is my church as well. And we've been going there for seven plus years. Chris, you guys have been going a little over two, right?

Almost two. Almost two. Yeah, so Chris is a fellow brother and church member and recently just came out with a book. He and a co-author came out with this book called Light Through the Spectrum on Biblical Counseling.

And the parts of the book I've read so far are fantastic, as I know I told you earlier. And so we want to kind of get into the book tonight and just get into anything you want to talk about through biblical counseling.

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 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.

That's like many steps up. Right.

So. Yeah, the training 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.

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?

Yes, right now we're kind of in the very beginning stages of rolling out a biblical counseling ministry in our church. 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, as since I'm a certified counselor of helping people with life dominating sins.

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 IBCD, Institute of Biblical Counseling Discipleship.

What's online, but I'll help facilitate it where we'll meet routinely, I'll answer questions and just help keep people on track.

Yeah, that's really cool. So let me see if I can add Justin back in. He's somehow got removed. There you are, Justin. Yeah, I hit the wrong button. Okay, no problem. Yeah, I hit the wrong button. Glad you're alive, glad you're back.

So I think I'm gonna start off, Chris, by reading a small section of the opening to your book on page two, what is biblical counseling? 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. It holds that the scriptures are the ultimate authority in counseling, and that authentic change can only be affected by the work of the Holy Spirit.

This view of counseling is based upon a variety of biblical passages, including 2 Timothy 3, 16 and 17, and 1 Peter 1, 20 to 21. Until recently, it was referred to as euthetic counseling. The word euthetic is based on the Greek words euthesis and eutheto.

According to Adams, the word comes from the Greek New Testament. It has within it three elements, concern, confrontation, and change. 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 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?

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

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

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

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. 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.

But you really can't do that because all psychology begins on a presubstitution. That's wrong. Their anthropology or their doctrine of man is faulty. Yep.

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

Yes, I just used a chicken reference for a cluck commander who's gonna come in the show here in a little bit. Hopefully you got your pet chickens around. So I often talk about how everybody, or how every doctrine in the Bible always goes back to Genesis, right?

And so I loved this section of your book. 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. 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. 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. The book of Genesis teaches us that man was created by God and we were made in his image. What book was that?

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 Christian.

Common theme coming out of you tonight.

The issue is that you only seem to think that Genesis, you seem to think that Genesis is the only book of the Bible, okay? That's all. I just see the 65 other books in the Bible and I can preach on those too.

You must have also given the Emancipation Proclamation before Abraham Lincoln did. No, I didn't. I'm not as old as you look. Oh boy, okay. So Genesis establishes,. I thought he was taking a break tonight.

He just couldn't help but listen in. Oh, he's got you.

You called my name and here I am.

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

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.

The Old Testament is foundational to understanding sin and how it entered the world. Since sin entered the world through Adam's transgression, Genesis three, the entire world and everything in it is affected by sin.

And this to me is the key verse coming up. Therefore, in some way, every problem that a counselee faces are the result of sin or the result of living in a fallen world. The counselee's problem may be due to his sin or he may be the victim of someone else's sin.

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

And I remember for a large portion of it, picking your brain on biblical counseling, because this was the first time I could get somebody privately to be able to really work through some of these concepts.

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

With psychology, you really have to say, it depends on which method you're looking at. They're all at their different faults. And of course, I'm gonna generalize a complicated subject right now. But the most popular type of psychology you see 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.

So that type of counseling, they try to draw the answer out of the person. But we know that man is a fallen creature, we've fallen into sin, and our hearts are deceitfully wicked. So that philosophy can't be integrated in.

Guys like Adler sees man as an animal. Since we say we're Imago Dei, that really doesn't fit. 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, and that's why you feel convicted.

So his answer is to do it more so you no longer feel convicted. We know the Bible gives us a set standards of what's right and wrong that we need to guide our life by. 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 an error.

Where when you look at biblical counseling, it's rooted that we know that God created us, and as a result, we are his inferiors, he's over us, and anything he says is authoritative to us, 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.

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?

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

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

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. I do wanna bring in, what. Commander John. So, John wanted to ask you a question. John's a friend of the show, and love having him on, especially when he has his pet chickens running around.

But yes, he has pet chickens, but I'd be eating them. I wouldn't have any pet chickens. 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. Yeah, by the way, hello. Hello. I just wanna say, yeah, thanks for coming on to the show and all.

So, I'll say this about my experience with new aesthetic counseling, is that basically, I was really striving or really struggling with depression for many, many years, chronic depression. I mean, I was, I can recall back, clear back to probably early junior high, where I just had constant suicidal thoughts, or that I had just continual, you know, depression all the time.

I was so sad. And it wasn't until like many, many years later, where I finally just talked to a doctor about it. And I was like, you know, I just, this is something I've been struggling with for so long.

And so, one of the people I actually talked to one time was a new aesthetic counselor or a biblical counselor in a particular church that I was going to many, many years ago. And basically, the issue was, is what I took, what I took against it was basically, they equate everything with sin.

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

Something, there was an imbalance of neotransmitters between the nerve cells in the brain, okay? 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, I can hear Pastor Justin and Anthony's thoughts on this too.

Am I in sin because I take Zoloft?

Okay, you brought up a lot of stuff, so let me

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

That's the waiver right there, that's Yeah, so when we say, when there are just, and I'm not even gonna condemn the New Theta Council you talked to, but just in general, just like with anything, you have good counselors and bad counselors.

Mm-hmm, yep. And as a biblical counselor, when I say that everything is related to sin, it could be a sin on my end is why 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 I responding to it correctly?

Or it could be the result of living in a sin-fallen world where we have disease and other bad things that happen. 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 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.

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? So that's kind of, it's still a theory in psychology, but to get specifically a medication question, I would say no.

ACBC does take a strong stance on medications of what we can and cannot say to people. 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, 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. 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.

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. 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.

It's incredibly difficult to get off of, sertraline or Zoloft. 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, 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. So that's how we would approach a 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, and work it through them.

And then as a counselor, I work with you on my end, working together in that manner. But no, you cannot make a blanket statement of, is a person who takes psychiatric medication in sin? 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. And I'm not saying that's what you're doing, but to speak in general, some people just say, hey, 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, Chris, is that we're all on medication, cause we know Anthony, and we have to take medication just to deal with Anthony. It's funny, I'm not on anything.

I'm joking, I'm joking. Problem's all with you guys. Chickens are my medication, I don't know about you guys. Well, that's why everybody wants to see one every once in a while. I'm gonna agree with Chris on this.

One thing that Jay Adams, that he talks about in his, he did a, I posted a thing on here, a recommended reading for the Practical Encyclopedia of Christian Counseling, is Jay Adams talks about this issue of depression.

And first off, he says, that there is no evidence that depression has an organic base. And he's not denying it. All he's saying is, the scientific evidence is so varied in this field, 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? 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.

And there's all types of different things going on with that.

I agree And this is for men. It's even more complicated when it's females. 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? I don't have a PhD or a doctorate in the medical field. I don't know how these medications work.

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. As a former police officer, I've seen people do that.

They go off medication and they lose their minds, right? And they literally do, and they lash out at everybody around them because they can't handle it. I'm gonna say, like Chris said, let the medical professionals deal with that side.

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 try to even pull that out like that. But maybe someone has a depression issue because they've stopped trying to deal with their responsibilities.

Maybe they've stopped trying to deal with life. Maybe they've gotten bogged down by everything going on in their life, and so they just say, I give up. Well, that's gonna create a spiritual depression.

It's gonna create hardship in your life. It's gonna create these things going on in your life that's going to affect you spiritually, and that's going to come out physically. And so you need to do something about that, and that's what a biblical counselor is geared towards doing.

But the world's counselor is gonna say, you know, 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. 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 young man that goes to seminary or goes to a psychology field, becomes, gets his doctorate, becomes proficient in counseling, 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? Oh, it went great, Dad. I think you've heard about this probably, Chris. Oh, it went great, Dad.

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