Biblical Counseling: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

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Hi, this is Justin. Today on Theocast, we talk about biblical counseling.

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We have a conversation about some of the downfalls of the biblical counseling movement, in particular its tendencies toward quietism and hyper -introspection, and then we consider how counseling can be done well from a confessional and Christ -centered perspective.

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We consider how things like counseling centers can be used well for outreach so that people can hear the gospel and also can be used to funnel people to the local church, which is the real place where counseling and ongoing soul care occurs.

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And then in the members' podcast, we talk a little bit about our particular areas and our visions for these kinds of things, even stuff that's already going on in the cities where we're located.

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And then we talk some about sanctification in the church and how a perspective that emphasizes and obsesses on sanctification actually hinders our ongoing

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Christian life and our growth in the faith. We hope the conversation is helpful, clarifying, and encouraging for you.

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Stay tuned. Welcome to Theocast, encouraging weary pilgrims to rest in Christ, conversations about the

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Christian life from a Reformed perspective. Our hosts today are John Moffitt, pastor of Grace Reformed Church in Spring Hill, Tennessee, Jimmy Buhler, pastor of Christ Community Church in Wilmer, Minnesota, and myself,

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Justin Perdue, pastor of Covenant Baptist Church in Asheville, North Carolina. Brothers, it's good to be around the microphones with you again today.

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After a week off, we are back to podcasting. How are you guys doing?

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In particular, Jimmy, I'm interested in how you're doing because you have our cultural update for today. Well, I'm actually going to take over this cultural update and say the reason why we didn't record.

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The reason we didn't record last week is I lost power for three days, so that's why

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We literally just decided who was going to do a cultural update, and now John just usurped it. He jumped in and took it.

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He did. You have to. I feel very dethroned at the moment,

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John. Okay, it's back to you, Jimmy. I just wanted everybody to know my pain that I didn't have power for three days, so I want everybody to feel sorry for me.

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That is real. In the midst of COVID -19, no power.

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We'll counsel on that later. Anyway, so yeah, I'm glad to do the cultural update.

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Good to see you guys again. We're approaching the end of the school year here in Minnesota, so I don't know how school works in y 'all's neck of the woods, but we typically do not start school until after Labor Day, and then we end around Memorial Day, which

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I feel like is just normal. But in Ohio, where I grew up, we started in August and went through June almost.

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That's how it is in North Carolina. Yeah, see? Well, there you go. It's impressive. So I'm just looking forward to, yeah, a lot of the listeners know that I'm bivocational, and so I'm just looking forward to having a little bit more time to spend on church -related things throughout the summer.

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We've got some fun things planned with the family. We feel like we've reached a really fun age with our children.

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So we are seven -five, and then our daughter just turned three this past weekend.

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She is adorable. She is very cute. And we are officially out of diapers in our house.

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Yay! So we do not have diapers. That's a big deal. Bro, that is huge, especially for JP.

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Yeah. Thank you for that, John. Yeah, right. So we are just so...

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We feel like we're... Do you have two in diapers? Yeah. I think he does. I think he does. Do you have two in diapers?

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We have one in diapers, one in pull -ups for nap and bedtime.

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All right. There you go. There you go. Yeah. So we're also in that age where we're no longer dominated by our children's nap schedule.

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We can go out in the mid -afternoon again, which is just...

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It is this really neat place to be as a family. We feel like our... And our two older boys, like my oldest son, we can hold mature conversation with him over an extended period of time.

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And so, yeah. We're just... We're looking forward to summer. It's remarkable when that happens. It is. It's crazy.

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So you know what the next stage is, Jimmy? The next stage that's going to blow your world is when your children can be watched by your oldest and you and your wife can have like two dates a week.

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It's amazing. That's... We already... That would be something. We already are talking to our oldest child about that and he's only six and a half.

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And we're like, look, dude, there's going to come a time when you're going to be in charge.

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Like mom and I are going to go out and leave you in charge. He's already talking about it. He's excited. So it's like, we're just trying to sow the seeds right now.

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And we're close to where you are, Jimmy. Our youngest just turned two. And so we're thinking, yeah, like life's already getting better.

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And man, in another year, this is going to be real. Like when... When there's less diaper...

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Like nobody's in diapers. And like you said, there's no longer the tyranny of the nap schedule. It just... Yeah. It's a thing.

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It's a thing. Well, funny story. I know we got to get into our topic. Funny story real quick. We... My wife and I wanted to go on a date.

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We hadn't been on a forever and we didn't really want to let the kids at home. They're at that age where we could, but not for like 30 minutes is fine, not for two hours.

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So this is back when they... There wasn't like a lot of home security cameras that were affordable. So there was this doggie app

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I downloaded on the iPad. And if there was motion in front of the app, it would come on. And so we set that up by the front door and I said, all right, kids, you got to sit here and watch

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TV. And if you get up and leave, we'll get notified. And like every five minutes, my wife is checking the app to see if they're okay.

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Which it wasn't a very relaxing dinner, but it was like our first test of leaving the kids home alone. And now it's like, you can have like a constant video feed of what your kids are doing for like nothing.

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So anyways. Well, now that we both have just piled in on Jimmy's cultural update. That's fine. And he's tweeting about something right now anyway, so it doesn't matter.

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He is. Yeah. He is. He's tweeting and then some tweeting and... I'm just waiting. There are so many parents that have been listening to this who are depressed and we're probably going to need counseling now because they're not in the place where Jimmy's at and where I'm at.

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So they're just sitting here going, you know, I've got kids in diapers. I can't go on dates. I'm just less of a

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Christian now. So I could, yeah, I could commiserate with them and maybe, maybe offer some, some common sense or some counsel.

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Absolutely. Yeah. So John Moffitt, brother, director of Theocast, why don't you help us transition just seamlessly and painlessly to our topic for today?

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I don't know if that's ever been publicly announced that I'm the director. So there you go. Well, do we need to edit that out?

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No, no, it's totally fine. It's, you know, it sounds so official like we're some big ministry.

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It's not really anything. So anyways, the subject we have for today is one that is very near and dear to my own heart.

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It is something that has plagued a lot of churches, has plagued me in the past with dealing with the

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Christian life. So we're going to talk about the movement of what we call biblical counseling.

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And we had the longest conversation I think we've ever had prior to our podcast this morning, just making sure that we do not come across, and this is not a deconstructionist episode where we're only here just to pull apart everything that we find wrong.

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But there are some areas where we want to help the church think through the role of counseling from the

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Bible, from a confessional biblical perspective. And there are a lot of movements out there, and some of them are helpful and a lot of them are not.

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And this is where we're going to try and explain to you why we think that they can be actually more damaging than maybe helpful.

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And all three of us have had positive experiences when it comes to biblical counseling, and some of us have had horrible experiences when it comes to it.

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So just by way of starting, when we say biblical counseling, it is giving someone directive to their life.

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So normally you don't go into counseling unless there is a problem, right? You have some kind of problem that you need to be directed in that you cannot find that directive on your own.

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So that's why people go to counseling. I mean, that's pretty obvious, right? And then we put the word biblical in front of it.

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So you're not just getting secular idealism where it's human behaviorism.

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What you're looking for is to receive counsel from a power that's above you that comes from a trusted source that you know is truth.

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A lot of counseling is theory. So in theory, this will work to help your marriage be better.

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In theory, this could help because it's not necessarily founded upon rock solid.

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You can't just stamp it and say this absolutely will work. When it comes to the word of God, biblical counseling is trusting its source with scripture.

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So you're going to the word of God to say these are truths that we know that we can absolutely trust because they are founded upon the inerrant word of God.

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That's the background behind biblical counseling. The unfortunate side of biblical counseling, what we want to talk about in the beginning, and then we're going to move to how we think you should perceive and use counseling, or if you want to call it biblical counseling, the unfortunate side is that we have people who walk into biblical counseling centers or any kind of a

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Christian center, and they typically are walking in with a sin issue or something that's been done to them.

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So they're not necessarily in sin, but they are battling the sin of someone else or they're battling depression.

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It may not even be a sin issue, and what they're handed is not necessarily biblical truth.

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What they're handed is behaviorism and therapy, which the solutions that are provided to them, if you do this and you do this, then your behavior will change.

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That's behaviorism. So they're trying to improve your moral behavior, and they're going to use scripture either as proof that you need to improve your moral behavior or as motivation.

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When I was in seminary, the first verse that you took people to was a

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Proverbs where it says, the way of the sinner is hard. So the first thing you need to understand to motivate people is that the longer you stay in sin, the harder it will be.

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And then there are motivations for it. You immediately go negative because you don't want them to stay in sin.

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So you begin to have them question, do you truly love God? Do you want to get this? And unfortunately, you start messing with their assurance in the model that I was taught.

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And then it was basically, do these things, read your Bible more, pray more, read these books, discipline yourself, and that's going to improve your behavior.

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So guys, that's kind of where we're going to start. And I know that we have quite a few things to add here.

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So, JP, what are some of your thoughts on this? Yeah, I want to pick up on some of the things that you've said and frame it maybe in my own way to depict the kind of understanding of biblical counseling that we would not advocate.

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Because biblical counseling is a very broad term and not everybody means the same thing when they use the phrase.

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And so it's important for us to understand at least a little bit in terms of where some of this comes from.

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In the 1970s and 80s, the church, I think, looked at the secular, for lack of a better way to describe it, the secular therapeutic model.

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The church looked at that and thought, we can actually do that better than the world does it because we have

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Scripture and we have the Holy Spirit. And so what ended up happening, interestingly enough, in the church is there began to be, as John has already referred to, a perspective and a methodology that resulted that was effectively a cognitive behaviorism in the church with kind of a

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Christian label slapped on it. And again, by cognitive behaviorism, what we mean is if you can change somebody's thinking and recalibrate somebody's thinking, in this case, according to Scripture, then you can change their behavior.

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And that becomes the entire goal and project of the approach. And it becomes the

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M .O. that drives everything is we need to transform behavior by changing and recalibrating thinking.

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And so what this ends up doing, if we're not careful, is we end up turning the

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Bible into something that it really is not. We turn the Bible into essentially a handbook for mental and emotional health.

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And that's not at all what Scripture is. The Scripture is an account of redemptive history.

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It's God's plan of redemption accomplished through Christ that unfolds through time and space and history. It's not some sort of handbook for your life.

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And also, we turn the Bible into a kind of medicine cabinet where we go to it, depending on the problem, we go to it to find the solution, the cure, the elixir that's going to make this better.

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Oh, you're depressed. Well, here are your verses for that. You're struggling with lust. Well, here are your verses for that. Or maybe it's anger.

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And here are your verses for that. And if you take these verses and you call me next Tuesday, I'm sure you're going to be doing much better.

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And that's an unhelpful perspective that is often sadly common,

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I think, in biblical counseling sometimes today. And so those are the kinds of things that we want to talk about and really discourage is this approach to counseling that is focused almost exclusively on transforming behavior.

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Whereas what we want to point people to is something very different. And we want to use Scripture the way that we think it should be used.

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And we want to talk about counseling really as a subset of the Christian life in the church and point people to a more corporate reality and what we think is more in line with not only the

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Bible's revelation, but then also what we would understand to be a confessional and reform perspective on the

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Christian life and theology. So a few thoughts from me. I know you guys are chomping at the bit. Yeah.

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So one of the things that I've noticed over the years, primarily in myself as well as in those around me, is that we as people, we are very much pain averse.

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We don't want to experience pain, whether it be on a physical level and certainly not on an emotional and spiritual level.

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And so I think a lot of what that can lead to is sort of quick fixes.

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And just sort of like a behavior modification approach, I think, offers that.

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I think it gives people that quick fix that as long as I can rid myself of this behavior, I'm going to feel better tomorrow.

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And the issue with that is that it's almost like eating junk food.

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Like it feels really good in that moment and it's even, dare I say, satisfying.

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But the issue is once that hunger comes back or once that feeling comes down, you can almost feel worse than you did before.

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Because when you're aiming at primarily a behavior modification approach and then that behavior returns, your lows become all the more lower because something that you were trying to rid yourself of has returned with a vengeance and it can turn the sinner more in on themselves and make them feel worse than they did before.

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Yeah, I think that's exactly what the issue with biblical counseling is, is that you end up turning your—it's introspective, mostly.

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And we're going to get to—so to be clear, and just to back up what Justin is saying, we're not taking a nuke to biblical counseling, but what has developed over time,

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I'm definitely going to take a nuke to, just like I would to any church model or preaching model, that is not going to help the believer truly find rest.

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And my biggest beef is that the believer cannot find rest in Christ in the midst of struggling with sin and their own depravity when they're turned in on themselves, and Jimmy's right.

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Most biblical counseling is a quick fix, and these are the things you can do to overcome these sins, and as you do that, you're pointed into yourself, which is a direct opposition to Colossians chapter two.

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So, the danger of most biblical counseling is introspective. Here's how you fix you.

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Exactly. And introspective, by definition, is pietistic. That's stuff we talk about all the time on Theocast.

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So, what we really—if we wanted to boil this down, what we are aiming at today or what we have in our crosshairs today is what we might call pietistic biblical counseling that we find to be completely unhelpful versus what we're going to offer as a more confessional perspective on counseling.

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And so, a pietistic perspective on counseling is everything that you've said, John. It's introspective. It's pointing the

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Christian back in on him or herself. It's pointing the Christian to his or her performance or obedience or disciplines, and will honestly point the

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Christian to those things as the method to overcome said struggle. Now, of course, there is acknowledgment of God and the

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Holy Spirit and grace and all these things, but really where the rubber meets the road is, are you going to be diligent enough and vigilant enough, and are you going to be disciplined enough in your application of these things in order to see yourself delivered?

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You know, and that's problematic from our perspective on a number of levels. We do believe in the transformation of life, but we understand that to be something that the

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Holy Spirit of God does over the course of a long time, you know, as ordinary means ministry is applied, which we'll get to in just a minute.

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We're excited to announce that we have a new free e -book available at our website called Faith vs.

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Faithfulness, a Primer on Rest, and we, the hosts, put this together to explain the difference between emphasizing one's faith in Christ versus emphasizing one's faithfulness to Christ, and how one leads to rest and how the other often to a lack of assurance.

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And you can get this at theocast .org slash Primer. And if you've been encouraged by what you've been hearing at Theocast, we'd ask you to help partner with us.

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You can do that by joining our Total Access membership. That's our monthly membership that gives you access to all of our material that we've produced over the last four years, or simply by donating to our ministry.

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And you can do that by going to our website, theocast .org. We hope that you enjoy the rest of the conversation.

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One of the things we need to think about is helping the church recalibrate themselves when it comes to problems.

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When I have this all the time, it happened to me Sunday, someone contacted us through Facebook asking for counseling.

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And that's kind of how they view the church. The church is there to fix my problem, fix my issue.

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And then even those who are in the church, when they find themselves really trapped in sin, their solution is, well,

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I guess I just need counseling. And so they think, I'm going to need to meet with somebody for six to 10 weeks in order to walk me through this.

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And the issue with this is that is unfortunately not how the church handled sin and struggles with sin historically.

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And even biblically, when we look at how Paul didn't have a therapeutic model set in place to where do such and such, and you overcome such and such, that's just not how he described the church growing with sin.

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Because what that sounds like is you have a problem separated outside of the church when really you have a problem inside the church.

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Yeah. And so I do want to give like a positive take on this because as somebody who has received counseling at a professional level,

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I myself had a positive experience with counseling, and let me just explain what was positive about that experience.

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So one, I wasn't divorced from the local church, and so I was active in the church.

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I was actively receiving help from trusted sources within that church, was open with the things that I was struggling with.

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And because my issues, in my own opinion and in others' opinions, were just very complex, the counseling that I received was in addition to the care

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I was already receiving at my local church. And so my counseling experience,

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I was telling you guys before we got on, before we started recording, was actually a vital step in my journey towards greater reformational theology, and here is why.

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My counselor was very fixed on not just applying scripture verses out of context.

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He was more so fixed on helping me focus on the objective and declarative realities of the gospel in my life, and getting me out of this introspective, morbid, navel -gazing posture that I had built over time, very much like a puritanical approach to the

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Christian life. And he was very good and skilled at pulling me out of myself and helping me to fix my eyes upon Christ, that regardless of the sin that was so much weighing me down in my life, my counselor, and shout out to him, my counselor was very much helpful at pointing me to the outside -of -myself realities.

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And so we want to be clear that, and I know we've said this already, that we are not saying that there is no time and there is no space for counseling at any level, but what we're trying to say is, what kind of counseling is helpful?

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Is that which is pointing the sinner, the struggler, the weary saint outside of themselves unto

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Jesus? Justin Perdue Agree, Jimmy. I think it's helpful for a counselor to look at somebody and tell them, okay, you've come to meet with me, obviously, because you have this struggle or this problem in your life.

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Well, let me be the first or maybe the second, third, tenth of many to tell you that you may very well struggle with this for the rest of your days.

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So if you coming to me, if your approach in this is, well, let me go get counseling and I'll be better.

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Let me go get counseling and I'll be fixed. I don't think that this is for you. But in coming to counseling, the goal would be what you've described,

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Jimmy, that the counselor is a tool that the Lord uses to point the

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Christian to Christ and to point the Christian outside of him or herself to the objective realities of the gospel and what

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Jesus has done for them in conjunction. This is critical, in conjunction with the local church. And so your experience was a good one because you had a counselor who pointed you outside of yourself and because your counselor was caring for you in conjunction with the care that you were receiving in your local church.

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And those are two critical pieces. I know that all three of us would advocate. We want the objective realities, the confessional realities of the faith held out to people in counseling, and it must be done in the context of the local church and in conjunction with the local church, even if we're seeking counseling outside of maybe the elders of our church.

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And so I think a good thought with this is that what we want to see is that when anybody is going to get counseling, biblical counseling outside of the church, that counseling entity is funneling people back into the local church for their ongoing care and for the ongoing practice of just living the

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Christian life. The counseling center is not, or the counselor is not, the entity that's going to do the heavy lifting and the sustaining work for this person in their following of Jesus.

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The local church is going to do that. And that's a critical piece here. Quick shout out, you gave a shout out to your counselor, a quick shout out to an entity here in our city that one of our members has started,

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Restoration Counseling Center of Asheville, is seeking to do this very same work in not only pointing people to Jesus, but also pointing people to the local church in terms of what they need in an ongoing basis to live the

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Christian life. The counseling piece in and of itself is at best a supplemental aspect. It is not going to be the thing that's going to do it.

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I think that's what's missing, sadly, for so many people, those two pieces. You're pointing people in on themselves, that's unhelpful.

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And you're acting like the counselor or the counseling center is going to be the instrument that the Lord is going to use. And I think it's going to be the local church, guys, if we look at the

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New Testament. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And there are great counseling ministries out there.

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I had a good conversation with someone last night who was trying to start a podcast, and I was kind of helping them with, we were talking through counseling and biblical counseling, and I'm excited for their podcast and excited for their ministry.

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And we need more people who are willing to get down in the mire with people and love on them and funnel them out of the community who are not in church and use counseling to funnel them into what we'd say an ordinary means context.

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Most Christians don't know what ordinary means context looks like, to where you strive, struggle, and love underneath the means that God has provided, which is

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His word and fellowship and the sacraments and baptism. And once you learn to live in that context, it changes how you see your struggles and what you need counseling for.

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Now, there are times when the Bible is very clear that you need, if you get so trapped and engulfed in sin that you're not coming out of it, you need to sit down with someone who's wise and confess these problems so that they can maybe speak into your life and say, hey, this is why you continue to struggle in these areas, and let me give you some counsel here.

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Now, there are some extreme examples that I've personally been involved in where I've had to go with this person and admit them into a hospital because they were so psychologically messed up that they could not even have a logical conversation with me and the fellow elder

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I was with. And this is a different church context, just for some of my church members that are listening. I have a smaller church now, so this is at a different church, a former church.

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We had to admit them, and they were there for two weeks just because we couldn't even have a logical conversation.

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And they were meeting with psychologists to try and figure out what was going on. And he had fallen into such a deep depression that he couldn't even have a logical conversation.

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So I need to be very clear here that I am not even opposing psychology on certain levels.

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There's a lot of horrible stuff that's out there, but on certain levels or even secular counseling, because I've also had sexual cases where some of the stuff that they are dealing with,

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I can't even give biblical church -driven counsel to because we can't even have a normal conversation until we've been able to kind of regain some ground just on a level that I am not trained in.

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We're not talking at a spiritual level right now. We're talking at a physical level. So I grew up in a biblical counseling world where any type of psychology or any type of medication was unbiblical, and you need to get off of it and stay away from it because it hinders your work of the

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Holy Spirit. And I'm just not there, and I would heartily push back against that, which we did in our depression episode.

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Yeah, and that kind of pushes me where I wanted to take this in that perhaps something we can discuss, guys, is that there's also kind of the other side of this coin where people can hear what we're saying and they can think that what we're saying is you don't need to ever seek professional help.

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You only need the local church, and that is not what we are saying. There's very much a healthy marriage that needs to occur.

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However, let's go to the other extreme. What about those who would say, well, the

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Bible is sufficient, right? You have, I believe it's 2 Peter 1, in Peter's introduction,

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God has given us all things that pertain to life and godliness, and then you also have

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Paul's letters to Timothy where he talks about the sufficiency of scripture, and you can go on the other extreme where people can say, well, you don't need any sort of professional care because the

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Bible is sufficient for all of your needs. The Bible is sufficient for all of the complex realities and emotions and psychological things that you are facing.

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And so, wondering if you guys can speak to that a little bit in terms of what do we say to those who have heard that?

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That you only need the Bible. The Bible can speak to everything. Well, certainly the three of us do agree that the

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Bible is sufficient, right, for all matters of faith and practice. We believe that, but we need to be clear about what we understand the sufficiency of scripture to mean and be.

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So, the way that we use scripture in this conversation is critical. Like, if we misuse the

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Bible and turn it into something that it isn't, we really do damage to people. I alluded to this a little bit earlier.

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Whenever we view the Bible in its sufficiency as some sort of medicine cabinet or as some sort of handbook for mental and emotional health, that's bad.

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What we need to do with scripture is understand what it's about. And we talk all the time about the redemptive historical framework of the

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Bible, that it's about redemption accomplished through Christ. It's about God's utter faithfulness to us in spite of our faithlessness to Him.

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And so, that's what we use scripture for. Whenever we take people to scripture, we're pointing them over and over and over again to the utter faithfulness of God in the face of their suffering.

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And we're pointing them over and over and over again to the perfect, sufficient, adequate work of Jesus Christ that stands outside of them, that's unshakable and unmovable in spite of their sin and struggle and failure.

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And so, that's the main application of the Bible when it comes to any kind of counseling.

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And so, of course, the scripture is sufficient. But then we have to ask the question, how does change in the

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Christian life happen? I would say it happens. So, it will happen.

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It's certain. It happens over the course of a long time. And it happens at different rates at different times for different people.

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So, we have to be very clear about all of that stuff. And it's going to happen in the context, we've said this already, it's going to happen in the context of the local church through the ordinary means over the course of years and decades.

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And it's when people take their eyes off of their own navel and put their gaze on Christ and concern themselves with loving their brothers and sisters that real growth and transformation happen.

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And so, that's what we're really trying to do in counseling is liberate people with the truth of the gospel and with this kind of change in perspective that will then set them free to trust

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Christ even in the midst of their struggle and their battle with sin. So, we harp this phrase all the time.

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We are always talking about what it means to live status forward. And so, when people are coming to receive care, when people are coming to find balm for their soul, we're reminding them of what

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God says in his gospel, that they are declared righteous by grace alone, through faith alone, on account of Christ alone, that these realities exist extra nos, or outside of themselves.

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And so, that's where we're pointing people. And I wanted to give a small illustration.

33:57

We joked about, in my cultural update that John bombed earlier, that we are in this place right now with our children, where we are finally getting out of diapers.

34:09

Yeah, that's right. Update bomb. And if you were to talk to me three, four years ago, where all three of them were experiencing going to the bathroom in various ways and fashions, we were so inundated with those things that it was hard to look beyond them.

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And so, JP, when you talk about kind of keeping your head down, keeping your eyes upon Christ, and just allowing

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God's goodness and kindness and sovereignty to inundate our lives over the course of years and decades, it's similar when it comes to the little years with your children.

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They will come to an end, right? You will not be dominated by diapers and nap schedule for the rest of your life.

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But in that moment, those words of comfort may not feel good.

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It's all you can see, but it will come to an end. And similarly, when we are talking about walking with people with sin, in their sin, as they struggle with their own frame and their flesh and the different things that have happened to them, we have to have a certain level of patience that these people may be walking through these things over years and decades.

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And so quickly, we can say, you need to drop this sin now. And if you don't drop this sin now, well, it's saying something about the greater state of your heart.

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And it's like, well, wait a minute. Let's just be a little bit more patient with people as they struggle.

35:39

So I just wanted to throw that in there. John, I know that you wanted to come in quick. Well, JP, I'll let you get a comment because I'm about to change this a little bit.

35:48

No, I, Jimmy asked about the sufficiency of scripture. And one other thing that I had jotted down on my whiteboard, but I overlooked in our kind of frenzy was just to believe in the sufficiency of scripture does not mean that we jettison and abandon common grace means that God has given us.

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And so we uphold both, that scripture is sufficient for what it was intended to be sufficient for.

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And at the same time, God has made us in his image with the ability to develop common grace means that are helpful to people, which would include wisdom that exists in the world that God has made.

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And it would include even medication in some cases. John, you referenced this already. There are certain instances where people have real medical problems that need to be addressed medically, if we're going to really be of much help to people, just like we don't try to reason or counsel the alcoholic when he's drunk or the addict when he's high, we wouldn't want to try to do, but so much work with somebody that is in the throes of a real medical issue.

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And so sometimes the best thing we can do is point people to a medical professional and then resume the work of ongoing care.

36:55

So yeah, that's just a common sense observation maybe, but it matters. Well, and I'll speak to that on a different level, maybe a negative level in that I've had people come to my church and they're assuming that I'm going as their pastor to be their new counselor and that they're just going to have these ongoing meetings with me.

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And what I'm doing is pushing them back into the context of the church because they don't have any life -threatening issue.

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It's kind of like, hey, look, you're struggling like the rest of us. And the solution is learn how to function as a body member, which that's not what they wanted.

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They wanted a personal relationship with me that was ongoing, therapeutic, where I'd meet with them and listen to them and then give them something to work on.

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And I'm just like, look, I gave you something to work on. You don't want to do it. And I can't, you know, we're not going to go on and on and on.

37:40

You know, I had a conversation recently and it gave me, I'd love to throw this at you guys. This is the time of the podcast where we're about to go into the members podcast and I throw you a hopper, you know, a grounder.

37:50

Here it comes. Yeah, it's an easy one though. What's interesting is on a word count basis, how much does the

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Bible say about marriage and parenting on a word count basis, specifically to that topic?

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Very little. Yeah, you can count maybe like five verses, you know, and now you can apply all verses that speak to your neighbor because your wife is your first neighbor, right, and your kids are your neighbors.

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So all of those verses apply. But when it comes down to marital advice or even sexual advice, that's just not there.

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There's just not a lot. And where there can be men who have a lot of common sense instruction and, hey, look, this is what

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I'm finding is that guys that are in their twenties and thirties getting married today lack common sense when it comes to how to care for your wife.

38:44

I mean, forget biblical counseling. I'm just talking about, hey, this is called common sense care.

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This is how you take care of someone you're married to. Well, right. Like if you need me to open

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Proverbs to convince you that what you're doing right now is foolish, then we've got another conversation to have.

39:02

You know, like, exactly. But John, what about all those sermon series on marriage and parenting?

39:08

Right. And I have books that I recommend and we have with marriage and parenting, and people say, well, why can't you just show me from the

39:18

Bible? Because I'll say the Bible does not contain, like, for instance, if you want knowledge and wisdom on how to buy a house,

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I'm not going to go to scripture other than make sure you're not, one, buying a house you can't afford.

39:31

And number two, you're not doing this out of envy. But after that, you need to talk about budgeting.

39:37

You need to talk about market. You need to talk about loans. That's not going to be in the

39:42

Bible. Okay. That's counseling. You're going to need to go get from, like, a real estate agent or somebody that does this for a living.

39:51

To your point, John, marriage is a great example, or parenting too. If you were to only go to the passages in scripture that exclusively mention marriage or parenting, you would miss, like, 99 .9

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% of what the scripture actually says to you that's going to be relevant for your marriage or for your parenting. Because the vast majority, it's high -level truths of the gospel, the work of Christ, the reality of who you are in Adam, and what it looks like to love neighbor.

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And so, I mean, I preached a marriage sermon series, a four -part marriage sermon series a couple years ago at CBC, and I was very clear from the outset that I will not be looking at any of the typical marriage texts.

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I mean, first of all, I think they're often abused and ripped out of context, but then the point was what the

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Bible says to this reality has more to do with who you are, your struggles as a sinner, and the sufficiency of Christ and His work in the gospel than it has to do with anything else.

40:51

And then let's just talk about common sense, about how we struggle with each other because we're sinners. I mean, that's how we do, and that's really how we counsel, and it doesn't matter what the subject matter is.

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And that's how we use scripture, back to what we were talking about before, is we use scripture as I think it was intended to be used.

41:07

Yeah. Well, we're going to move over to our members podcast, and before we do,

41:13

I want to kind of just get it ready and tee it up here. So, we've done a lot of deconstruction, done a little bit of reconstruction here, and what

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I would love for us to do is see how I think biblical counseling or counseling in general can be a wonderful outreach into your community.

41:29

It's something that I personally am starting to do now where I have a lot of people who grew up in the

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South, who grew up around Christianity, and they blow up their life for marriage or parenting. And then they say, well, now

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I need counseling. And I would love to give some wise counsel to those people and then say what you really need is soul care, and let me show you what that looks like.

41:50

So, we'll speak to that a little bit in the members podcast.

41:56

And then we're going to also just talk about how we need to learn to be counselors as body members.

42:05

So, let's just forget the word counseling because it has this weird psychological connection to a one -on -one basis, but every person in the body is responsible for the soul care of each other.

42:16

So, let's put biblical counseling in the proper perspective and let's put, as Justin just ended, let's put where actual growth and maintenance should happen back in on the church.

42:28

So, we'll speak to that and on a more practical level in the members podcast. So, gentlemen, unless you have any parting shots, we're going to go ahead and move over there, and we just want to thank you guys for listening.

42:41

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43:14

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43:29

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