March 24, 2023 Show with A.M. Brewster on “An Open Forum with a Biblical Counselor”

Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister George Norcross, and sports legend Jim Thorpe, it's Iron Sharpens Iron.

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Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better. It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

And now, here's your host, Chris Arnzen.

Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Friday on this 24th day of March 2023.

Opening with A. M. Brewster and the Open Forum Format

I'm thrilled to have back on the program a recurring guest who is typically now featured on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio twice per month, and I'm thrilled about that. He is such an excellent guest, an insightful guest, and a wise guest.

His name is A .M. Brewster, and he's president of Evermind Ministries, a biblical counselor, author, podcaster, and conference speaker. Today, we are going to be conducting something very unusual on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.

The closest thing that we've done to this was the pastor's roundtable that we used to conduct on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio every Friday when we were broadcasting out of New York on WNYG and WGBB. And I think that it would be a great idea to revive the pastor's roundtable, and what we would do is we'd have three or four pastors on a panel that would answer any questions that were submitted to them from our audience, and it always turned out to be a very fascinating and exciting day for Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.

Today, we are only featuring one guest to field your questions, and as I said already, he is a biblical counselor. His name is A .M. Brewster, and you can submit any question that you'd like in regard to questions you have in your life that would require or at least would be wise to seek a biblical counselor's advice and counsel for, and we are opening up those questions for you today.

Anything that's been burdening you, if it's just a general question about what the Bible has to say about a specific issue, please give your first name, city, and state, and country of residence, but as I would expect, there might be many of you who do not want to reveal your identity because the questions you're asking are very deeply personal, intimate, and private, the kind of questions that you would ask a counselor in the privacy of his study, so you may feel free to remain anonymous if, indeed, your question is personal and private.

But first of all, let me welcome back to the program A .M. Brewster.

Thank you very much, and I have to say that even though this topic or this discussion was kind of my idea, I have to say that it's still a little scary. I know that your listeners are erudite. I know that they are theologically intelligent, and I'm very interested to see what kind of questions we get today.

I have a friend, Andrew Rappaport, I He on the show, Chris?

Oh, Andrew's been on my show several times, and in fact, Andrew, to date, is the only guest I've ever had on Iron Sharp and Zion Radio who turned the tables on me, and he interviewed me. That's awesome.

That's great. In fact, I just spoke to him last night, as a matter of fact.

Nice. Well, the reason I bring him up is that he hosts this show where he says we can answer any question you have about the Bible, but he always stipulates that I don't know is an appropriate answer.

So Lord willing, I won't have too many I-don't-know moments.

I'm glad that you did clarify that, though, because I would ask if Andrew would field questions on humility.

Yeah, yeah. He would, because he'd have to say, I don't know.

Andrew, if you're listening, I'm just kidding. Tell us about Evermind Ministries.

Sure, yeah. If you go to evermindministries .com, you will see four different ministries, and each of those four ministries focuses in on a different facet of our lives. Evermind was created in the early 2000s to keep God's truth at the center of the human experience, and our human experiences really are multifaceted.

So one of the first of the Evermind Ministries that was created, Evermind actually started off as a blog. It was very general, just dealing with what the Scripture says about lots of different stuff, but the first official ministry that was created as a part of Evermind Ministries was Truth, Love, Family, and I really was emphasizing primarily on parenting, and so I had a podcast called Truth, Love, Parent.

I still have a podcast called Truth, Love, Parent, over 500 episodes, and that was the very first of the Evermind Ministries, and again, parenting and family and things like that. And then the next one that was created was called The Year-Long Celebration of God.

That also has a podcast that goes along with it called The Celebration of God, and that is a focus on worship and personal discipleship. Worship being defined as everything that we do in our lives, not just singing songs on a Sunday, and how we can better worship God, better know and understand and submit to Him this year than we did last year.

It uses the low moments, the everyday things that we experience in our lives, as well as the holidays on the Christian calendar to help us to worship God better. The next one that was created was AM Brewster Ministries, that kind of just is the catch-all for my traveling and my speaking.

People have conferences or they invite me to speak to a group of people in their home. Whatever the case may be, that's kind of the ministry that handles that. And then the last one, the newest one to date, is Faith Tree Biblical Counseling and Discipleship.

So each of the other Evermind Ministries has had a counseling ministry as part of it. People have been reaching out to me at TruthLoveParent .com for quite some time now to do biblical counseling with them.

But I realize that, you know, obviously there are a lot more questions and difficulties out there than just parenting and family questions, and so Faith Tree was created to be the go-to place for people who are looking for help in the struggles of their life, whether it's crisis counseling, as we might call it, or just personal discipleship.

Because I have found, and it's sad to say, that the Church, and I'm just going to use that term very broadly, the Church is not discipling as well as it should. I will tell you that many people who come to me for biblical counseling really aren't in crisis.

They're really not looking for help on a specific issue per se, as they are, they want to be discipled. They want to grow as a believer, and they want to have personal accountability in that. And oftentimes, what starts as crisis counseling or starts as kind of this nebulous looking for help ends up turning into discipleship.

And I tell people, I said, you know, the best place to get this is in your local body of believers. You need to be talking to your pastor. You need to be talking to mature men and women. And I say, you know, you don't need to be coming and talking to me unless you don't have those resources in your church.

And I'll tell you, so many people have a very difficult time finding those resources in their church. And so Faith Tree Biblical Counseling and Discipleship is there to help those people who unfortunately don't have those resources available to them.

And those are the four of the Evermind Ministries, part of the family, as it were. And again, if you go to evermindministries .com, you can see it's a growing website. It's growing slowly, but you can learn more about each of those.

And the last thing I'll say is that, as most of your listeners know who've heard me on the show before, our main website was truthloveparent .com. So if you go to truthloveparent .com forward slash iron, you can see not only all of mine and Chris's previous conversations, but you can also see, get a bunch of resources that deal with the topics that we discussed.

So additional resources from me and from other sites that will help you if you'd like to know a little bit more about a topic, or like if we talk about something today, if we answer a question today, I will try my best to get some resources onto that website specific to that question so that you can learn a little bit more about it.

Yeah, and I hope that after this show is over, many of you will go to truthloveparent .com forward slash iron and scroll down to where it says, welcome Iron Sharpens Iron listeners. And there's a whole list of links to click to hear all of the interviews I've conducted with Aaron.

So this is a very quick and easy way. You could do the same thing at my website, but this is easier because it's only including Aaron's interviews. So I hope that you will take advantage of that. Well, I'm going to give our listeners our email address.

It's chrisarnsen at gmail .com. C-H-R-I-S-A-R-N-Z-E-N at gmail .com. As always, give us your first name at least, your city and state and country of residence. And if it's a personal and private matter, you may feel free to remain anonymous.

And in fact, we already have several questions that have come in since the show began. And all of them are anonymous. Fantastic. The first anonymous question says, when it comes to an adult child still living under the roof of his or her parents, when that child meets someone they want to marry, when is it, if ever, correct and appropriate and God-honoring for the child to disobey the parents who may forbid that child from marrying the person that this child intends to marry?

And I'm talking about when there is clear evidence that the reasoning the parents are prohibiting this marriage are not biblical reasons. I think that's a very good question. Yeah, fantastic question.

Lots of layers there. And in fact, the listener didn't mention whether or not the parents were Christian themselves. So that adds to the... The mystique. Yeah, because you may have parents who are bigots, and it might be a white girl who wants to marry a black man who is an outstanding Christian, but because he's black, they don't want to marry him.

You know, it could be a whole host of things like that. Yeah, definitely.

Well, I'd say that I think the easiest way to approach this question, because I get a lot of questions from people, you know, adult children, right, living into my home and so on and so forth, and children of various ages living under my home, and how do we handle all this?

The reality is, is that scripturally speaking, okay, the concept of adult is a mildly subjective one. I'll just start this right off the bat. And I actually, my family, we tend to follow a little bit more of a historically traditional or we could argue maybe a biblical, culturally biblical perspective on adulthood.

Both my children, when they hit the age of 13, had an adulthood ceremony, manhood ceremony for my son, womanhood ceremony for my daughter, historically, over the millennia. There were no teenagers. Young people were considered to be an adult around the ages of 12 or 13.

We see people starting families, ruling countries, having businesses in these teen years. And so I think that we in America have our bar set too low. Oftentimes when people say an adult child, they're talking about somebody older than 18.

But I say all of this to say that it is a subjective concept, okay? It is subjective. Now, you might be able to argue legally within the United States, this person's 18 years old, therefore they legally are allowed to do certain things, and that's fine, okay?

But biblically speaking, I believe that really you have a couple different possibilities for the question of authority. Do I have authority in this person's life, regardless of their age? I'm going to leave the word adult out for a moment, and I'm going to say, regardless of their age, do I as a parent have authority in their life?

I do have, from God, inherent authority as their parent, okay? Because I'm a parent, it doesn't matter whether I'm a good parent or not, a saved parent or not, because I'm a parent, God has given me certain inherent authority in my child's life, and he commands them to obey me, okay?

That's how it goes. Now, obviously, I cannot command my children to disobey, to sin, all right? And anyone who would try to command me to sin, I have to obey God's authority over their authority, and I can say that to them, no, respectfully, lovingly, but no, I'm not going to do that.

That's appropriate in any situation. We obey God rather than men. Other than that, though, my children have to obey me. That's God's expectation for them. Now, there's going to come a time, this questionable time, which is kind of subjective for everyone, is when do I no longer have inherent authority in their lives as their parents?

The easy one that we point to is when a man leaves his father and mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh. It's a clear time when they're no longer under my inherent authority. They are still to honor me as an elder, but no longer do they have to submit to me and obey me as a parent, okay?

So that's a clear one. I also do believe that there's biblical justification for the idea of a parent giving their child a blessing, and to say to them, you are no longer under my inherent authority. I'm giving you permission to go and to start your own life, and so on and so forth.

And I think that, again, there is biblical precedent for that, depending on the child's age. Now, my child is 13. My children are both over the age of 13, and they're functioning as adults. I have not given them that blessing, though, okay?

My son is going to be 16. My daughter actually is still 13, and I have not given them the blessing and is still under my authority. So, okay, so a couple things I've said here. First of all, it doesn't matter their age.

Parents have inherent authority until at what point they release that inherent authority over their child, and that can come at almost any time that the parent deems it worthy. Now, let's just say, hypothetically speaking, because the question came an adult child, right?

The question came in that way, and it says, well, the adult child is still living under the parent's roof, okay? Well, that changes things ever so slightly. It puts them into another category. Let's just be honest.

If I'm renting from a complete stranger, they have every right to dictate to me what I am and am not allowed to do on that rental property within reason. In fact, they can really dictate whatever they want, and if I don't like that, I can move out.

I can not rent there, right? But if they tell me no loud music after 10 p .m., if they tell me, you know, whatever they want to tell me, right? So whether the child is, quote unquote, a child or an adult, I always tell everyone involved in the situation, if you have, speaking to the child, if you have chosen to live in their home, then you are putting themselves under a different form of their inherent authority.

They are the homeowners. They are the landlords. And though they may not be functioning necessarily as your parental inherent authority, they are functioning as your landlord inherent authority. And it would be completely appropriate.

I've told many parents, if you have an unsaved young adult living in your home, it's completely appropriate to require them to go to church. It's completely appropriate to require them to engage in biblical counseling.

It's completely appropriate to require them to be home by a certain time, to not have certain people over to the house, a certain, you know, conduct and whatever else. That is 100 appropriate to expect that it is your home.

You're not just going to invite a bunch of drug dealers to come, you know, slum around in your house if they want to. No, you don't have to invite those people into your home. And just because it's your child and just because they're 18 doesn't mean that they can do whatever they want in your home.

That's completely inappropriate. So therefore, I would say that, yeah, if you're going, if you're the child and you're going to put yourself under the authority of the parent in their home, whether you're paying them rent or not, it's completely appropriate for you to agree to live by their standards for your life.

And if you don't want to do that, you can move out, okay? So I would say that. Now, those are the two main categories so far of looking at this, but there is a third. And the third one is this. Even though a parent may lose their inherent authority at a certain age or by giving it away in a blessing or the person getting married or whatever the case may be, every single born-again believer, and this only applies to born-again believers, excuse me, every single born-again believer has inherited authority from God.

We have all been commanded by God to speak the truth into each other's lives. God's truth and God's love for his glory, okay? That is what we've all been commanded to do. Therefore, even if, let's just say that my son has reached a certain age, he's 18, 21, whatever the case may be, I've given him my blessing to live outside of my home so he's not living in my home anymore, and he's making bad choices.

I have the responsibility from God to go to my son and say, thus saith the Lord. I'm going to rebuke you, admonish you, correct you. I'm going to do whatever is necessary to show you the truth. I'm going to Matthew 18 you, right?

I'm going to James 5, verse 21 you in an attempt to help you to see the truth. And it doesn't matter if you're my child or you're my friend or you're a complete stranger. If you're a Christian and another Christian is coming to you with God's inherited authority saying thus saith the Lord, this is what he requires you to do, you do have the responsibility to submit to that person because that person is only being a voice piece for God.

You're submitting to God based off of the encouragement from that individual. So there's lots of different possibilities for what the questioner was asking to your statement there, Chris. Yeah, I mean, if it's a bigoted, unsaved family who is telling this young lady she's not allowed to marry a man of a different ethnicity, well, there are a couple different things that would apply to that.

One, has she been given the blessing from her parents to be out from underneath their inherited authority? Even if she has been, she's still living underneath their inherited authority in the home. And so there is a lot of reason to argue that the most Christ-honoring thing she can do because God is still sovereign, right?

He turns the heart of the king like he turns the rivers of water to trust the Lord in saying I'm still in this position and I can't say that it's a sin to not marry this man. Yes, we could argue that it's a sin to be racist and all of that, but this person is not telling you to be racist.

This father or this mother is telling you, do not marry this man. And you cannot argue from the scriptures that that is a sinful thing. You may really want to marry him, but you know what? You're under their inherited authority.

That's what you need to do. However, if you're out from under their inherited authority, obviously, like I said, the question was very robust, multi-layered, lots of different possibilities, and I think I've probably already gone too long, but hopefully one of the things that I said has hit on at least how you need to approach the question.

If you are a professing Christian and you are the child, whether you are under their inherent authority or inherited authority, if they're coming to you and they're saying I have significant concerns about whether or not it's going to glorify God for you to marry this person, you have better listen.

There's wisdom in a multitude of counselors. It doesn't make them right, but it makes you humble enough to listen to them. If you are under their inherent authority, either as parents or landlords, well, you know, maybe you need to reevaluate that position, right?

So there are lots of different things to think about. Chris, what do you think?

Well, I can't argue with anything that you said. Obviously, though, I believe that if a person, an adult person, is living on their own, they, as a Christian, have the liberty to disobey an ungodly prohibition from their parents because that is ungodly, to try to prevent a child from marrying someone that they love who is an outstanding Christian, somebody who's giving every evidence that they are submissive to God and even submissive to their local church, their elders, and somebody who is very clearly in love with the Lord and has a life that is marked by godliness and repentance and so on, for them to say, I don't want you marrying that man because he's black or because he's Italian or because he's Latino or, you know...

Or because he's reformed. Well, you know, that is an interesting question and that we could bring up when we return from the first break, that last one, because I recently had a guest, Dr. Joe Moorcraft, and that brings it into a different realm when two people are getting married who are polar opposite in their theology, even within Christianity.

I mean, obviously, if you're both Christians, you're not really polar opposite, but, you know, you have to be real diligent to pray about a marriage where you have a different view of believer only versus infant baptism, whether you believe, you know, in the doctrines of reformed theology or, you know, if you're a five-point Arminian, you know, we could go on and on with the differences.

And that could be a recipe for disaster when you have two different ideologies being represented in a marriage and then you have children to raise. So that actually, even though it was funny that you said that, I think that that's a different element to add into the question.

But everything that you said seems to be very reasonable and biblical to me. And I thank you, Anonymous. And we're going to our first break right now, and let me ask you a question before I go to the break, Aaron.

You did say any question. I received, while we were speaking, a question that is theological in nature, it has nothing to do with what might come up in a biblical counseling session. Is that okay as well for you?

Yeah, we'll hear it out. I believe that everything in the scriptures has practical application and relevance to life, so we'll see what we can do with it.

Okay, Gregory in St. Kitts, West Indies, your question will be asked. And if anybody else has a question, if you want to get in line behind the people who are already waiting, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com.

Chrisarnson at gmail .com. As always, give us your first name at least, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside of the USA. Only remain anonymous if your question involves a person, one private matter.

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That's royaldiadem .com. Royaldiadem .com mention Chris Arnzen of IronTroopensIronRadio. We're now back with A .M. Brewster. He is a biblical counselor and we're discussing today or we're conducting I should say an open forum where you the listener may ask any question you desire and Aaron will answer that question to the best of his ability.

And we before I go to our listener in St. Kitts there were two other anonymous listeners that wrote before he did. One of the anonymous listeners says I know of a church whose minister was forced by his fellow elders to step down because of the sins of his adult daughter who was not living in the household.

I told this person that I disagreed with that completely because of the fact that the person was not living in the pastor's household and the pastor is not responsible anymore to make sure that his children are living godly lives.

What are your thoughts on this?

That's a great question. I think even more important than this question though is that if you were to have a piece of jewelry made with my logo because I live in the south it would probably have to be a belt buckle just saying well I'm sure they'll do that too.

Oh yeah. Great question. I think this is an important one. I had a discussion with my I've moved around a lot, I've moved 22 times in my life. I've had a number of pastors, one of them and I were talking a long time ago about a pastor who's, you know, because you get that typical idea of the pastor's kids, right, often times sometimes seen as being the least well behaved kids in the church.

Whether that's true or not, it has definitely become the stereotype. Makes you wonder. So the question I had for him was what do you do when you've got this really fantastic pastor who's got this loose cannon in his house and what he pointed out was and I took it to heart and I went and I studied it and I could definitely see where it was coming from.

Is the qualifications for a pastor, specifically from 1 Timothy 3 -4 says that that he manages his household well so there's that this idea of managing being to have charge over to rule over the house well and then keeping his children under control which is a very interesting concept we're talking about in the Greek here two different words to give us this idea of being under control.