What is and is not Biblical Counseling

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

Well, hello. No, I am not Andrew Rappaport. I am a much better looking

Andrew. It is I, Drew, you know me, from Matter of Theology, and of course, the

Dead Guy Reader Society, which is our podcast within a podcast, but we're not talking about that tonight.

I do want to welcome you to Apologetics Live, a podcast ministry put on by Striving for Eternity, where we seek to answer your tough biblical questions.

You doubt that? Come on in. Just go to ApologeticsLive .com, click the duck, make sure that your audio and video is set up, and we will bring you in.

And let me say this, make sure your camera's on, because that's how we know that you're connected and ready to go.

Now, I'm going to bring in, oh, oh, wait, there is, and he's in an airport.

It is Andrew Rappaport, our fearless leader. Yeah, hoping to get on my flight.

We will see. It's been delayed, delayed, delayed, but hoping to get to Indianapolis.

I've got a family conference in Idaho. Sorry? Let me think where it's at.

Indianapolis. Montoon. No, I land in Indianapolis. Montoon, Illinois.

There we go. Wait, you're landing in Indianapolis and then going to Illinois?

But then driving to, yeah, not too far. So Melissa's asking if I'm going to G3.

No, I'm not, because I will be at a men's conference next week with John Harris, the

Overcoming Evil Men's Retreat. So that's where I'll be next week.

So I won't be at G3. I won't be at G3 either, but I will be at the

OSA Operation Save America rally on Wednesday, where we're going to be gathering at an abortion mill.

There's going to be several, several speakers. I am one of the prayer leaders. So Darren asked me to be one of the prayer leaders and lead us in prayer for our elected officials.

So that's my task that I get to do. So that's about as close as G3 to G3 I'm going to get though.

Well, Greg Moore is asking, I'm here for his itinerary.

I hope to see him in February at Jeffrey Rice's open air theology conference.

So I hope he's going to be there. That'll be good. I got to meet him there. That was great. So, yeah, but I'm looking forward to tonight, although I will have to listen after I land.

Yeah, you will. To the event, but I know we got Aaron backstage.

Yeah, let me bring him in real quick. He is one of our speakers. So Aaron, one of our speakers at Striving for Eternity.

I always joke because he outranks me in my martial arts.

He's a black belt in several, several different disciplines, but he's a actual ninja.

Just saying. So be careful with him, Drew, in case you decide to mess with him.

I'm still trying to get Andrew to refer to me as Master Brewster, but he just won't do it. That's what you should have changed your name to.

I'm going to start boarding now. So I'll talk to you guys later. All right. Have a safe flight.

Thankfully he's not flying. I mean, if he were actually like flying, there's no guarantee, but they should be okay.

Yeah. I mean, he's, you know, he's not like Kenneth Copeland where he has his own plane and flies it around, you know, it's, you know, it's probably safer that way.

Probably safer that way. Of course if he did, he'd be asking for a lot more money all the time. That's right.

That's right. But Aaron Brewster, Aaron Brewster, welcome to the show.

I know that you're, you know, our crowd is probably familiar with you, but go ahead and tell a little bit about yourself for those new listeners that we might have.

Yeah. So I actually was invited by Andrew to be part of the

Christian podcast community with the podcasts that I had two of them. And one was called

Truth, Love, Parent. The other one's called Celebration of God. And he and I got to know each other.

And over time and multiple years being in that format, talking on the phone, also having the opportunity to, excuse me,

I'm drinking tea. I'm getting all, I don't know, all choked up here. Also doing the theology throw downs.

And he and I had known each other for, you know, interacted in that way for quite some time. And we had the opportunity this past year, actually earlier this year, to do a family conference in Northern Indiana together.

And it was weird, like we met each other for the first time in person. And it was kind of like,

I know this guy, we've interacted and talked so much, but here we are. And it's weird. And then he graciously invited me to kind of join the

Striving for Eternity stable of speakers. He didn't refer to it that way. I don't know why

I did, but had the opportunity to travel and speak and present the ministry.

But also I work with my original ministry called Evermind Ministries.

And Evermind Ministries is a family of ministries that has a number of different sub ministries because the big mission is to keep

God's truth at the center of the human experience. And our lives are very multifaceted. You were before the show, you're telling me about your little ones.

So you're a husband, you're a dad, you're a podcaster, you are a friend and a brother and fellow church member.

And we want to help people keep God's truth at the center of all of those. So the different ministries that are part of Evermind Ministries really attempts to do that via curriculum, via speaking, via podcasts.

So if anyone were interested in learning more about Evermind Ministries, I've been sending them to evermindministries .com.

And we have an app, Evermind app that they can learn all about the cool stuff that we're doing.

That's great. Great. Yeah. Andrew has not invited me to be one of the Striving for Eternity speakers.

He's heard me preach, you know, I don't know. Oh, he's missing out.

But, you know, he's got you doing this stuff. That's true. This is the test. Right.

You know, I'm glad you say that because how well I handle this could open up those future opportunities.

Kick the doors open like the Old West. That's right. That's right. What I'm trying not to do is grab him and throw him out of here and just take over.

Right. But before we get into today's topic, let's do a little bit of in the news.

And Andrew actually sent me this story. Can I say something before you get to the story?

Yeah. He told me he said, you know, you're going to come be on the show tonight. And we were talking a little bit about the topic.

And then he said that Drew is going to share this new story and I'm not going to tell you what it is.

And I was like, well, why not? And he said, no, I just want to hear. I want to hear it.

When you when you hear it fresh and I want to hear your responses to it. I'm like, OK, not a little concerned.

What is this new story? So I'm on pins. I don't know about anybody else, but I am. OK, OK, OK. So this is out of Jefferson, Alabama.

A six year old boy received a level three suspension from school because at recess he was playing cops and robbers and using finger guns.

That's why he was suspended. Now, get this, get this. Had he not used finger guns, but actually use his fist and punched another kid in the nose, he would have only received a level two suspension.

But because he used his fingers as guns, he received a level three.

So very interesting. Doing two things here at once. I wanted to. Hey, what's up, dude?

I wanted to join the the chat, but I realized apparently

I needed to have, you know, I don't know. Like I had to log in. So I was typing that in when you came to the end of sharing that.

And I'm like, oh, I got it. OK, let me let me stop trying to log in here and kind of respond to that.

I mean, I don't I don't think there's anyone listening right now who is surprised. I think we've gotten past the shock.

We hear stuff like that. We've almost in a very sad and potentially scary way.

We're becoming very desensitized to the insanity. Yes. But it's not it's not surprising because our world is is falling apart when it comes to stuff like that.

The inconsistencies, the foolishness. And I don't know. I don't know which direction you want to go when you want to attack this or you want to you want to talk about it.

But there's there is so much wrong. There are so many ways to. To try to address something like this, but the concern, the fear is that barring an act of God, none of it's going to matter because literally,

I mean, the insanity of that story speaks to the fact that, I mean, what are you going to apply to this to fix that problem?

Right. How are you going to convince them? Yeah, let's I mean, let's open it up. Let's attack it because a from from the story that Andrew sent me, apparently a level three suspension for this kid at six years old would go on his permanent record.

And it would affect him the rest of his life. And the school has has has said that he displays behavior of growing up to being a violent person.

Because of this one incident, not because of anything else. That's right. Because of this one incident.

And now the gun owners of America out of out of Alabama, that the area there where I guess their branch that's in Alabama has actually come to defend this child, their lawyers.

And they've they've told him they've said, look, we're going to make sure this is not on your record, that this does not have any effect on you.

And because the other little boy that was playing cops and robbers as well, he was suspended also.

Wow. So when I hear something like that, my mind immediately goes to.

I was actually just talking with a friend of mine this morning and we were talking about the idea that hyperbole reveals hypocrisy.

Hyperbole reveals hypocrisy. And what I mean by that when I say that is that it's really easy in this little facet to come to a conclusion, to say, you know, this boy needs to be suspended because of these reasons, whatever else.

But if that if that philosophy of that idea cannot be consistently applied to a situation over here, it reveals the hypocrisy of the situation.

And you even did that. You started to do that when you said that had he actually had actually physically accosted somebody, bloodied somebody's face with his fist, the punishment consequence wouldn't have been as great.

Right. And the inconsistency just starts to be revealed in the tiniest step away.

And we're not even over here using real hyperbole at this moment. We're just pointing out simple, logical facts that show that this this this ruling on their part makes no sense whatsoever.

Right. And I've been using the word insanity, you know, since since we started talking about this.

It is my firm conviction that we as Christians need to get back to a biblical definition of insanity.

You know, the world is talking today about a lot of mental illness, you know, even even conservatives, you know, in the gun debates, talk about how we need to keep guns out of the hand of the people who are mentally ill and so on and so forth.

And that's a really interesting conversation. But from a biblical perspective, we know that the issue is not mental illness.

But what's funny is if you step back and you take what the scriptures say about sin, sin is self destructive.

Sin is delusional. Sin is lying to ourselves and accomplishing wicked things under the guise that this is good and healthy.

OK, when you describe it that way, that's how the world describes, you know, mental illness or they try to stay away from words like insane.

Nowadays, crazy things like that. But that's basically the definition of an insane person.

Somebody who is who is convinced that this thing is good. And as they do it, they're hurting themselves.

They're hurting everyone else around them. There's no fact. There's no logic. That's insanity.

But that that's exactly what sin is. Sin is insanity.

Now, I'm not please understand. And we're going to get into this with the other topics we want to talk about today. I am not suggesting that that sin is a mental disorder.

I'm not suggesting that sin is a disease. That's right. We are a victim of sin. I'm saying that we need when we recognize these things, we need to see it for what it is, a product of sinfulness, delusional thinking, not grounded in theological reality, because that's exactly what this is.

That's exactly what this and this this is a very, you know, it's a pretty subtle.

It's a pretty low key and very, you know, of all the news topics out there.

This one isn't as big of a deal as all the other craziness that we see. Right. But regardless of the fact, it still is evident of the fact that people are not thinking straight.

And it's man, we're hurting ourselves and everyone else because. Yeah. D says.

So he basically got suspended for using his imagination. Yeah. Like Andrew said,

Andrew Graham, he says, if he'd been a girl, he would have been offered testosterone. He would have said, oh, this little girl, she's she's actually just a boy and we need to help her.

Yeah. Yeah. Right. That's right. That's right. All right. I wouldn't have been surprised, like, had he not even used his finger guns the moment you said that he was playing cops and robbers.

I thought to myself, oh, he's probably in trouble just because he was playing cops and robbers. Right. Yeah. They probably would have called him a racist or something.

Yeah. No doubt. Or, you know, like, yeah, defund the police or whatever else. Right. All right.

Now, we do have a question for you from John Elvin. I saw that and I was hoping we keep scrolling and it wouldn't come up.

I'm just getting it out of the way. I'm going to answer the question, but I get to say what

I want to say before I answer the question. OK, this is apologetics live. Right. So obviously, you know, those those types of questions come up.

And I'm sure who said that that was that was John. That's right. I'm sure John is not the type of person to do what what what other people have done.

Right. So our goal today, one of the things we want to talk about is what is and is not biblical counseling.

A hugely important topic, especially in light of this, this this thing that you this news item that you brought up and so on and so forth.

So really important topic. And but people ask questions like that. And if they don't get the answer they want or they're expecting whatever else, they pretty much discredit everything else the individual is going to say.

Like, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if he's if he's preaching truth or doesn't. Well, he's this.

He's that. So we're not going to listen to him. But John would not do that. I would not do that. And I'm sure nobody on here would do that.

So I'll just say that I have I have grown up in the Baptist tradition and consider myself to be pre -millennial.

And but at the same time, I think in my my age and my my my sage experience, that's definitely not a hill

I'm going to die on. Right. I think that a lot of really fantastic, godly men have disagreed on this for for many reasons, for many years.

And I think I would be a fool to say that I know what nobody else knows.

But that that has been my my my belief. He heard that.

He's like, get off the show. We're done with him. Well, I don't think he would do that because I'm pretty much the only post mill here.

And and Andrew still allows me to come and look at that. But I guess

Andrew just wanted to show us that he was finally on the plane. Praise God for that. He's on the plane.

Yeah. So now let's get into. Our topic tonight, what is and is not biblical counseling, because we see when we look at counseling, right, we see, especially in the in the

Christian worldview, we would see secular counseling. But then we see

Christian counseling. But then there's also what we would call biblical counseling.

And the Christian counseling and the biblical counseling, they're not the same. True. Yeah.

Well, OK, I don't have to throw in a caveat here. Just like everything, every other term, we have to be very careful because there is a there's a vocabulary slide that happens over time.

I'm not sure if you know this, but there are some atheist groups that have have usurped or trying to use the terms born again to their own purposes.

Really? Yeah. I have not heard that. Yeah, it's a small group. But this is what this is what

Satan tries to do. He tries to take what is God's meaning. Right. The best example of that is the word love.

I'm such an powerful. Oh, yeah. Eternally important concept throughout the scriptures. And I mean, it it doesn't mean anything nowadays.

And it means everything it shouldn't. So to that end, I will say that whereas before there used to be a very clear spectrum, it's less clear now.

And you'll have people in different places on the spectrum who are calling themselves names that that they would not have called themselves 10, 20 years ago.

Generally speaking, though, in the beginning, you had a spectrum with one side. You had the secular psych psychologists, secular psychiatrists on the other side.

So he just said, how do you become a born again atheist? Fantastic question. I don't even want to know because that would be worse than the story we heard about the right.

But you had the you had the secular psychiatrists and psychologists who basically they're approaching man's problems from a what we would call biological perspective.

They look at man. And what's funny is that even though the psychology basically means the study of the soul, most most psychologists and psychiatrists nowadays reject the concept of the soul, the immaterial to any degree.

And they believe everything is a biological problem, which is why nowadays so much of that has turned toward medication and the things that have an impact on our biological bodies.

Right. On the other side of the spectrum, it started in the 70s, really with J.

Adams. Now, that's unfair. The term the movement started with J. Adams ish.

But really, the concept has been ever since, ever since, ever since the very first sin and God dealing with it.

The concepts have been there. Biblical counseling and biblical counseling looks at it from the perspective that mankind has two main parts.

For those of you who are going to ask, yes, I'm a dichotomous. I'm not a trichotomous. We have we have two parts of us.

We have a body and we have a soul, a spirit. I would say I say body spirit and put the two together and you get a soul. But and so the

Bible is very clear that there are biological, physical problems and there are spiritual problems and you don't ever want to treat one with the other.

And what's interesting is that, you know, in heresy and in cults and things like that, you find exactly that.

You've got Scientology and other health and wealth gospels that say, like, if you're physically sick, that is a result of your your lack of faith or sin or something like that.

But then you have other groups who say that, well, what God calls sin is actually just a biological problem.

Right. So, of course, Satan's always trying to cross the wires. So that's the spectrum. And traditionally, the the

Christian counselor, the Christian psychiatrist was kind of landing somewhere in the middle.

And a term that was often used or is still often used of individuals like this would be integrationists, because they are taking the ideas from both sides and they're integrating them into their own their own position.

And you can have them on lots of different places on this spectrum.

Generally speaking, most of the ones with whom I interact and hear about tend to fall closer to this side.

They are Christians who just flat out practice human and human psychology, humanistic psychology, or they are professing

Christians who, you know, they they use verses and things like that if their counselee professes to be a

Christian or religious. But still, even in those senses, a lot of these people tend to believe that the real fix, the real help is going to come from these biological means from the humanistic perspective.

So that's kind of the the spectrum that we're on. And as a biblical counselor, I would say that I'm I'm all the way over here.

But before somebody, you know, get on here and say, well, so you just you just ignore biological problems.

Well, no, at the very beginning, I was very clear. The biblical counselor recognizes that there are two parts of us and we need to identify what part needs the treating.

And if there is a legitimate biological issue, you deal with it. But if it's a spiritual issue, you don't treat it like it's a biological one.

Yeah. Right. So so how would we if someone's coming to to biblical counseling, right, and you're counseling someone, what's kind of the first steps you kind of go through in engaging someone?

So the counselee is approaching? Yeah. So, you know, so tell me about your life.

You know, is that kind of how you start or to kind of get a feel for someone to kind of see what kind of direction you're supposed to go?

Well, I can speak specifically for Evermind Ministries. Each of our ministries has a counseling arm.

Our main counseling arm is Faith Tree Biblical Counseling and Discipleship.

And so we're somebody to reach out to us either in person or virtually and to say, you know,

I need help. We have a couple of different things that we do. And generally speaking, it's referred to in the biblical counseling realm as collecting fruit.

Right. We're pulling fruit off of this tree to see what's going on. So that's everything from, you know, basic information about this person, who they are and where they live and everything to what they believe is the main problem.

Just trying to gather as much information as possible and a lot of paperwork and a lot of session time can be taken with that because, you know, the more you know, the more you can you can help.

And so there's there's there's a big part of that. However, one of the key things that a biblical counselor is trying to identify as soon as possible is whether or not this individual is truly born again, if they actually have a relationship with Jesus Christ.

And the reason that's that's important is the fact that you can't counsel an unbeliever to the same degree that you can't really disciple an unbeliever.

Right. Because they're not a disciple. And biblically speaking, you're not going to find really you're not going to find the idea that the counselor in the sense that we're using it in the scriptures to the same degree.

Yes, you know, we know that God is a counselor and so on and so forth. But in the way that we're using it in the modern context, you're not going to find a lot of these concepts in there.

But you see an awful lot about teaching and discipling and so on and so forth, because this concept of biblical counselor really is that it is discipleship.

And in the same way that we want somebody we want to use evangelism to bring somebody to the knowledge and who

God is in relationship with him and then disciple him. Now, will

I meet with somebody who is not born again and will I spend a number of sessions with them?

I will. I will do so explaining to them that, you know, I'm here for them and I want to be whatever service

I can be. However, there's going to be a disconnect because what I believe they need to overcome their problems and have victory is something that they don't believe in.

And as long as this person gives me the opportunity to within the over the course of counseling to to be evangelizing them, to be sharing the gospel with them and drawing them to that truth,

I will generally continue as long as they're willing to hear it. Generally speaking, in those situations, at some point, they're just like, this isn't working for me.

And I get it. But once we've established to the best of our ability, obviously,

Nancy is the outward appearance, but God sees the heart that this person actually has a relationship with God, then,

OK, this is this is encouraging, because then we know that they can change to the power of the

Holy Spirit. They can become who God wants them to be and to pursue, pursue change in a lasting, genuine way.

OK, yeah. So, you know, it's interesting that you say you talk about, you know, one of the first things you're trying to find is if this person is a is truly a believer, if they're not a believer, because like you said, if you're if you're trying to counsel a nonbeliever through biblical counseling, there is going to be that disconnect.

And is that disconnect something kind of like,

I believe I've heard Bodie Bauckham say, you know, modern psychology and counseling is someone trying to tell you all the everything outside of you is the problem.

And then biblical counseling is revealing that there's a sin issue inside of you, and that's the problem that you must change.

So would you see kind of the same way? I do. And I think generally speaking, that's an accurate observation.

However, I think there are also, by God's common grace, individuals in the secular psychology realm who who do recognize and it's not super popular.

It is. I take that back. I guess I'll clarify. The people in the secular psychology realm who identify the fact that, no, you really are your worst enemy.

What's funny is that that that mantra, that ideology is actually far more popular in the self -help mentorship life coaching realm.

Right. The people who don't have the letters behind their name, they're the ones those those trainers.

Right. Who are like, do it. Don't give up. Don't be a quitter. You know, those guys who they're latching on to a really significant truth.

And I do believe that there are secular psychologists out there who realize that, who are honest enough with their counselees to say, no, you're being self -destructive.

You're making very bad choices here. But for the most part in the world in which we live, again, the average individual isn't interested in hearing that.

Just like an unbeliever doesn't want to hear what I have to say about God and their problems. The average person going for counseling really just wants to hear what they want to hear.

In fact, there is a type of counseling. It's it's not as I guess it's not as popular nowadays.

But this this form of counseling basically would just sit there. And the only thing the counselor would say is he would just speak back to the individual, whatever they said.

Like, I'm having troubles with my dad. He makes me so mad. So your dad makes you mad.

Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. And he basically just gives him back because the whole idea was your answer can only be found in you.

Nobody can tell you what your problem is or how to fix it. So, yeah. And because our society as a whole is starting to embrace that methodology more and more.

That idea that, you know, you're just going to come in here and I'm just going to tell you more of what you want to hear. Or, you know, like with our little itching ears, we just find that that echo channel.

We find that person who believes the way we do. Like, right. Yeah. It validates what they already thought.

Right. Right. Now, we do have a question that came in from Julie Abernathy.

She says, I just started watching. I'm wondering what you think about using cognitive therapy along with biblical counseling.

So there are probably going to be a lot of questions that come up like this. And this question is by nature an integrative type of a question.

It's, well, what if we take this idea from over here and we mix it with this idea from over here?

Does that work? I'm just going to say, generally speaking, across the board, the answer that I'm going to give is no.

And the reason I'm going to give that answer is this. Cognitive therapy has a has an understanding, has a meaning, was designed with function and with purpose.

OK. God's word promises that it has everything we need for life and godliness.

All right. Now, I don't want to attach myself to this over here because the perfect example is

Black Lives Matter. Do I believe that black lives matter? Yes, I do. Do I want to attach myself to that organization?

No, I don't. Right. Cognitive therapy has is in its nature humanistic.

OK, it is. It was a concept that is that was developed from a secular perspective to fix man's problems outside of the scriptures.

And but people might say, well, but there's this thing that, you know, it works. OK, well, what's working?

You know, why is it working? Is that working going to continue? Is it going to have a lasting spiritual effect?

Is that item that's working necessary within a biblical worldview? And sometimes what you find is that from a biblical perspective, that thing,

God, God has been teaching us to do that for thousands of years. And by God's common grace, some secular psychologist was like, hey, this works when

I talk to people. I'm going to call it fill in the blank. So but I say we don't need those labels.

We don't need to associate ourselves with that. We don't need to to potentially give people the wrong impression.

You know, if somebody knows what cognitive therapy is and I tell them that I use cognitive therapy, then they're filling in all of this meaning for what it is

I'm going to do when in actuality I'm not. I'm actually just using and there are some other there are some biblical counseling. I'm not going to name them because I'm hoping that this is this is this is a fad and it's going to change and they'll get back to their roots.

But there's a biblical counseling organization who has always been really solid. But they've started adopting secular terminology to describe the biblical things that they're doing.

And I think it's backfiring. I really do. I don't think it's benefiting them because as people hear them talking, they're hearing the people who know about the psychological jargon are hearing that and they're not hearing the scriptures.

And it sounds like integration. So I try not to do that. I try to if the if the

Bible speaks on this and the Bible teaches us what to say and how to say it, then that's all we need is

God's people. There's a lot more that can be said on that, but that's generally my position. People ask me, what do you think about Enneagram?

What do you think about cognitive therapy? What do you think about shock therapy or whatever it is? That's that's generally where I just kind of my caveat cover up.

But I will say this. Psychologists as a whole are really good at observing.

They do. I mean, they watch people over these long term studies and they track things like,

OK, well, we found that people in this scenario tend to do this. They're fantastic observers, but they're awful prescribers because they prescribe because they don't recognize what the real issue is.

Oftentimes they're prescribing from their biological humanistic perspective. Their observations are accurate, but their prescriptions aren't helpful.

So there are observational tools that I like to use. One of them is actually one of my my intake things, one of the very first documents that people get.

They get they get this PDI, a personal data inventory, all this information about them, the situation, whatever else.

But then there's also a questionnaire. And I'll just tell you, this questionnaire is just a basic Myers -Briggs personality test.

And the only reason I use it is the fact that I'm meeting this person for the first time.

And generally speaking, when you take 100 people and you ask them a question and they give them an

A or B answer. Right. Those people are going to fall generally into four different categories. And you can get a little bit of insight into how this person thinks or how they do certain things just from strictly a personality standpoint.

And I'll say the Bible has a lot to say about personality. Sure. Well, I mean, basically is what you do and why you do it, you know, so it's helpful.

Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, I'm not a huge fan of personality tests in terms of planning out for the future.

Right. Because because the personality test is only good for that moment, because over time

I'm going to grow and I'm going to change. And, you know, hopefully my thinking changes and it matures.

Right. So so I understand taking having someone come in and take that test at that moment.

It gives you a spectrum as to where they are right now when you're seeing them.

Yeah. I'll give you a perfect example. I don't remember exactly the questions on this particular test that describe it.

But there there are certain types of people who, again, secular psychologists and doing all of their research and whatever else, have have come to find that certain people who respond to certain things in certain ways tend to be easily swayable, specifically by cults, by by personalities and things like that.

So when I see somebody come in and I'm just glancing, by the way, I mean, really, the personality test, we rarely even discuss it in counseling.

It's that's not a big deal. It's really just a thumbnail sketch for me, because if this person is like that.

Right. And this person has heard my podcast and they've been listening for years and they finally reach out.

And I'm seeing here that this is the type of person who maybe maybe not could be easily swayed for superficial reasons.

Then as I work with them, I kind of I'll work with them from a slightly different way to to to not accidentally, you know, encourage them to accept the things

I'm saying for the wrong reasons. I'm very careful. I always try to be very careful, but little things like that can be helpful.

Sometimes this, you know, again, a personality test is is neither here nor there really in the long run.

But sometimes I've been able to look back. There'll be a strange thing that will happen during a session and I'll look back and it'll be it'll be like that.

Oh, people who think like this, people like this tend to have such and such reactions to so -and -so. It's like, oh, yes.

OK, there it was. It happened. But, you know, I completely agree with you.

Like personality tests are not a diagnosis or not a prescription of, you know, some future decisions that I should make.

It's just oftentimes just a mirror, an interesting window through which

I can see how what I'm doing right here, right now. But even but even secular psychologists acknowledge the fact that if you were to take like the

Myers -Briggs or something similar personality test, that there are less mature versions of that individual and there are more mature versions of that individual.

And the secular psychiatrist is going to say, well, this is this is their personality. This is who they are. We can't change that.

Right. That's that's kind of their focus. But we can help them to be the more high functioning, mature version of themselves.

Right. And that's by common grace. That's the person, you know, those individuals recognizing the fact that that growth is still necessary.

But definitely we can our personality really is designed to be conformed to the image of Christ.

What we say, what we do, why we say it, why we do it, how we say it, how we do it is really supposed to be from one degree of glory to another being transformed into his image.

So our personality in many ways, not all of them. I'm not saying that we're all going to be like cookie cutters.

Right. But in many ways, our personality needs to change from what it used to be. Yeah. And that kind of brings it back to what you were saying about biblical counseling and what you're doing.

The role of discipleship in there. Right. It's because discipleship, if I'm discipling someone, it should be helping them grow in their sanctification to become more like the image, image of Christ.

Yeah. Yeah. So somebody, a couple of people actually here are bringing up the Enneagram.

What I think about that. There are people who say that is just a personality test.

And from that standpoint, my personal opinion is that it's not really as quality of a personality test.

But I think there's there's something more to it. The Enneagram was was not created by a secular humanist who was coming at it from a biological perspective.

It was created by somebody who had a heretical religious quasi spiritual belief that the

Enneagram was revealed and communicated information about spirituality and mystic mysticism.

And so I think that that makes it inherently less useful because not only is it not really a high quality, detailed tool, but the foundation of its creation was even more,

I'll say, dangerous than just a tool that was that came just from because really they're all religions.

Right. They're all right. Right. It's a false religion. Right. But when we.

When we say generally when we can we can acknowledge the fact that this person is a pagan, they deny the existence of God.

We they're not super trustworthy. Right. The conclusions are going to come to about life. But this person here says they're spiritual.

They have faith. They believe in God. OK, well, I'm a little bit more interested in listening to what you have to say.

But what does all that mean? Right. Right. Right. Coming from. And the Enneagram is is not coming from a solid base.

Right now in in your counseling, have you ever had someone come in where they have said, well, you know,

I took the Enneagram test and, you know, just just to let you know up front,

I'm I'm an E7 or whatever, you know, whatever they would say. I don't know the numbers and letters and stuff.

Pi squared. Yeah. Yeah. Early on,

I'm I'm doing the best that I can to to collect information.

I actually have a workshop that I do when I'm teaching counselors called How Much Do You Let a

Counselee Talk During a Session? Everything from not at all to the whole time.

Right. How did how do you know like what is it just kind of an organic thing that you feel your way through or is there biblical truth that helps us to determine, you know, what talking is valuable?

We'll talk is not. But early on, it's like I want to be as quiet as possible, let them talk as much as possible, because even them telling me that reveals certain things about how they view the world, what they believe about themselves, what they believe about the

Enneagram, what they believe about self -help, what they believe about all of those things. So that information is really valuable for me because I just get a better picture of who they are.

I'm picking that fruit to kind of see you see who they are. My actually my favorite. And the one that I I try the hardest to bite my my my cheek so I don't smile when they're talking about is actually when they start getting into their love languages.

This comes up a little counseling. They want to share with me their love languages and how their husband or wife doesn't understand.

And that's that's the whole point. It's a little bit more difficult for me to sit there and be like, that's very interesting.

But, yeah, if you haven't caught on yet, obviously, Drew, you got this. But if you're watching this young guy and yet the love languages is not really a biblical thing.

Again, that is a secular humanistic approach to things. And what's really funny and I love this.

I love saying this to every person who really buys into the love languages. I tell them, well, the scripture actually tells us about one really significant love language that was left off the list.

Do you know what it is? And I'm like, no, I don't. Well, God says multiple times in the scriptures that he chastens those whom he loves.

And, you know, I've never met somebody with the chastening love language. I've never met a single person who's like,

I know I'm loved when I'm chastened. When my parents, when my friends, my brothers and sisters in Christ come to me and rebuke me and reprove me.

That's my love language. That's actually one of the biblical ones. That's funny.

Yeah. Yeah. I can just see it. It's, you know, well, what's your love language? The one that they're not doing.

That's the one that they're not showing me. That's my love language. Love languages are really great. They're convenient because it's the one that we like the most.

And don't get me wrong, like they exist from the perspective that there are people who would rather be physically touched.

My wife would fall under that category. She the physical touch is really important to her.

There are other people who would rather spend meaningful time together. Right. That's just what they enjoy more.

Right. The problem isn't in the observation that people fall into those categories. The problem is in the observation that because they fall into the category, that's the best way that they should be.

And that's what we need to do for them. And there's no there's no realization. Well, that maybe this is harmful.

Like maybe. Maybe it's really offensive and a slap in the face that they don't interpret all of this very loving stuff that I do for them day in and day out.

That's exactly what it is. God breathes love being poured out.

It's not love if I'm not getting this thing that I want. That sounds really selfish.

That sounds really, you know, unfair because we're we're choosing to define love.

And again, a very, very tight little area there. Do I live with my wife according to knowledge?

Yes. As I love her, do I engage with her physically to show her that love? Yes. But I've been on a writing retreat.

This is not my home. I'm actually a house sitting for a friend and I've been getting some writing done and I have not been around.

But you know what? My wife doesn't feel any less loved. Right. In my absence, she's not questioning my love because I haven't been there.

In fact, when I went home today, because we're actually not that far from where I live. When I went home today to pick something up,

I refused to kiss her on the way out because she hasn't been feeling well recently. And I said,

I don't want your amoebas. I said, wait for me. I'll talk to you later. I can't afford to get sick right now.

But yeah, she she still recognizes that she's loved because there's so many other things

I do that are really a blessing. Right now in in your sessions, what role does the gospel play?

Right. How do you take someone from coming in that where you're gathering fruit, right?

You're collecting fruit and then you and then you're kind of bringing them along, discipling them in your sessions to the gospel.

Like, how do you get them to the gospel and that recognition of who Christ is? Now we're talking about somebody who professes to be born again and seems to be someone who's not someone who is.

Yeah. So a lot of my counseling is

I try to pattern it after what Jesus did. He used he uses a lot of parables, a lot of metaphor, a lot of stories because we we connect with that in our own struggle.

We don't like to see the answer, but in someone else's struggle, we see it. This is why. Right. You know,

I just totally I want to say Samuel, but it wasn't Samuel. Nathan, Nathan, the prophet goes to David and he uses a parable about a man and stealing sheep.

And David saw the problem. Right. He saw it. It had Nathan just come to him and say, you're doing wrong.

He would have made excuses. Right. So. So I use a lot of metaphor. I tend to use calculated hyperbole in an attempt to because, again, everything's clearer when we view it in extremes.

I do a lot of I've done in the past a lot of graphic design work. And, you know, in Photoshop and things like that, you'll have all these little sliders that do all of these things.

Right. And you have these you move it by a couple of degrees. It's like, well, what did it do? You can't really see it, but you slide it to one extreme.

You slide it to the other. Like, OK, that's the effect. That's what it's trying to accomplish. And the same thing is true when we look at our struggles, when we look at our lives, you know, when we when we see that,

I see it in hyperbole. The answer is so clear. But in the nuanced little section of life that we're in, it's like, well,

I don't know. And I do all of that to help the person come to one conclusion and one conclusion only.

God's word has the answer. Do you believe that? I did a parenting podcast called

Parenting Episode called the point of nearly in parentheses, the point of nearly every conversation.

It's we do a lot of teaching. We say a lot of things. We make a lot of statements. But we rarely ever ask our kids, do you really believe that if they believe it?

They have to live accordingly. You can't believe something and not live accordingly. Sort of to draw somebody to that.

OK, do you actually believe this is true? No, Aaron, I don't. OK, well, then I don't know how much

I can help you because God's word has the answers for you. If you don't believe it has it. I can tell you it all day long, but it's not going to change anything.

Or they say, yes, Aaron, I do believe that. OK, awesome. Let's see what God has to say about this.

Because if we can at least start from that standpoint, that God's word is sufficient to answer their deepest questions and to help them with their their most difficult struggles.

Well, now we can go somewhere. Yeah, yeah. Now we had a question come in.

Leslie, she says, I'm getting OCD therapy from a mostly secular online company.

Most of the suggestions are not contradictory to the Bible, but there's one that seems a little iffy.

What should I do? So obsessive compulsive disorder, again, is is something that is a terminology that was created by the world.

Right. To explain something that's happening. I'm not saying that the actions themselves don't exist and it was just made up.

But that's just the terminology that was used to describe individuals who do certain things. I want

Leslie to know, and also a bond servant for Jesus, because she was asked about this, too, that growing up.

Thankfully, I was growing up in the early 80s and back before kids were being medicated for all sorts of things.

And I I had what would have been described as OCD, obsessive compulsive disorder, to the degree that if I were as a child, a very young child, if I were walking someplace or sitting in a room and I looked over to the right hand side because something caught my eye and I looked back here to see, you know, whatever

I was doing originally reading a book or watching TV, I had this deep urge, this driving, ferocious hunger in me that I just felt off kilter because I looked at that direction.

In order to feel that balance, I had I had to look at this direction to the equal degree.

And once I had done that and come back to center, I felt

OK to look this way, though, just back to center. It was I was like it was so uncomfortable.

I just found myself having to do this. And that's a that's a very similar way that a lot of people who get diagnosed

OCD, they feel like I don't do this thing. If I don't touch this thing, if I don't wash my hands, if I don't double check this thing, if I don't obsessively compulsively do this thing,

I am just I'm freaking out. I can't sleep. I know all this stuff.

And that's a very real thing that people do. But unfortunately, and this is where it gets uncomfortable and I come to this place in counseling every single time where today's the day we're revealing what the

Bible has to say about this, this issue, this question that they have. And it's really going to test whether or not that person really believes that God's word has the answer for them.

Now, this question has just been asked, and we I haven't been talking with this individual.

I don't know them. I don't know their struggle. We haven't laid this foundation. We haven't come to this place.

I'm going to answer the question about what should I do? I'm going to answer that momentarily. But we haven't answered this. And I but I will say that the vast majority of the time, the

OCD cases that I've worked with, friends who have worked with and even secular counselor friends who have worked with, generally speaking, the biggest issue is not a biological issue.

Are there drugs that can kind of kind of take off that edge that I feel when life is not balanced or when something isn't the way

I like it? Yeah, there are drugs that can do that. There are drugs that cannot be completely unconscious. Of course, there are.

But is that the fix? Generally speaking, what the

Bible teaches us is that mankind wants to be in control. Mankind is a self worshiper.

I want to be satisfied. I want to feel safe. I want to be comfortable.

And we push back against discomfort, whether that be physical discomfort or emotional discomfort.

We push back against those things if we don't see the value in it. We embrace them like working out.

But I value it. So I embrace it. Right. But if it's something that I don't like or I don't see the value in it,

I push it away. And as a child, there was this discomfort in me.

And so I just did the most natural thing to try to overcome that discomfort until one day.

And this was a vivid in my mind has been etched into my brain. I was about eight years old and I was in a supermarket grocery store with my with my mom.

And I remember she was pushing the basket and I was about, I don't know, five, six paces behind her.

And something caught my eye down an aisle. Then I looked at it and I turned back and I was following my mom.

And two things happened. Number one, that normal. Oh, I'm uncomfortable. I need to look in the other direction was riling up inside of me.

But there was a second layer that threw me for a loop because let's just say it was aisle five.

I don't remember the aisle number. It's not that much of my brain. Let's say it was aisle five. I had looked to the right to aisle five.

I had turned back to the center and I had kept walking. And now we're on aisle six. And I'm feeling that.

Oh, I've got to look. And now I'm moving into aisle seven and I can go ahead and look, but it's not aisle five.

Right. I didn't look the other way down aisle five. And I remember this moment in my head where these are the words

I said, I said, Aaron, stop being stupid. Now, I'm not saying this to anyone asking me any

OCD questions. This was me talking to me as an eight year old. Right. I said, Aaron, don't be stupid.

You don't have to look to the left. And I remember making a concerted effort to just follow after to stare at my mom and to follow after her, neither looking to the right nor to the left.

And there was that inside of me. But that was the first step.

And that wasn't that wasn't biblical counseling. It wasn't me recognizing truths from scriptures.

That was just me realizing that this this thing that I felt wasn't necessary. Right. And and I fought it in my flesh.

I fought it. And it wasn't long, a couple of years. I mean, it was a process. It was really difficult early on.

I had lots of times where I failed and I fell back into it, but I still pulled myself up by my bootstraps. I'm not going to do this.

And by God's grace, I overcame that that tendency. And I don't feel that way anymore.

And that was just an eight year old, nine year old, 10 year old little boy going, this is dumb.

Why am I doing this now? God's word puts it in lots of different ways, but it still comes down to the same basic things.

Why do you feel this way? What does God's word say? Do you really need that in order to be at peace?

Because when God talks about peace and joy and contentment and gratitude, he talks about those things oftentimes in really uncomfortable, really awful situations that people still have this.

Right. Despite the fact that their world is falling apart. I wanted to read something here. Yeah. And Leslie, I'm reading what you're saying and I'm not going to I'm not going to read it out loud.

But it is we each need help. Leslie's basically saying, you know, you, you know, praise

God, you were able to kind of talk yourself through that. But what about those of us who are still struggling with it? And the reality is that we need to identify, is there an actual physiological issue?

And it's another thing in the onboarding. I was going to say that earlier in the onboarding process. I take

I want to find out about this person's health. If they're not getting the sleep they need, if they're drinking alcohol, alcohol or caffeine all the time, they're eating poorly, if they're overweight, if they're on a ton of medication, that person,

I compare it to a backpack. You know, you go out to a to play soccer, right?

Or to play like some pickup softball game at church or whatever. And you're out there playing.

You're having a great time. You give that same person a backpack with 50 pounds of bricks in it and you're not having fun for very long.

Right. And we're not taking care of ourselves physically. We're adding bricks to our backpack that make functioning in life a whole lot more difficult.

I'm going to start getting, you know, it's not an excuse, but if I'm trying to play ultimate Frisbee with this backpack,

I'm going to start feeling aggravated and agitated and impatient with people. Does the backpack excuse my simple responses?

No, it doesn't. But it definitely brings them to light. It definitely is. The Jim Berg, a professor of mine, used to say, you know, we're like teabags.

You drop us into hot water and what's inside comes out. Hot water isn't the problem. It's what's coming out of the teabag.

That's the problem. So we want to identify. Is there an actual physical problem here that needs to be dealt with in a truly biological way?

And or because sometimes it can be the two working together. Am I having a negative spiritual response to a legitimate physical problem or is it not a physical problem at all?

And I'm just having this is growing out of a spiritual struggle. And a secular psychologist can't answer that for you because everything to them is physical.

Biblical counselor, though, who is going to see a person from a biblical, spiritual or biological, spiritual perspective is going to do everything they can to diagnose what

God says. We never want to call sin that which is not a sin. Right. We don't want to say that something that Bible does call a sin isn't a sin.

Right. Those are both super dangerous. So to answer the question, you've been seeing a secular counselor.

A lot of the things they're telling you have been helping. Good. But they've they've said something now that is that seems iffy, you said.

So what do you do? Well, you. We if it doesn't line up with God's truth.

We don't have any room for it in our lives. Right. We've got to take it. We've got to say, OK, is this is this by God's common grace, is this counselor telling me something that actually is.

True. Or are they contradicting it? Because if they're contradicting it. Well, you know,

I'll take their advice to the point where, you know, it's accurate. That's right. Agree with the scriptures. But I'm going to stop where it's not.

It's that same idea of, you know, Peter saying, you know, you have to obey God rather than that.

Right. It's nice that you're telling me that. But, you know, it's not true. Right now, I have another question.

And this one actually came from my wife. She wanted to know about postpartum depression therapy because that's now

I. After we had our first I did,

I didn't really think postpartum depression in women was like a thing until I saw it.

And then after our second, I saw it. Right. And so she's she's she's wondering about postpartum depression therapy.

Yeah. Well, the therapy term is one I I struggle with just because, again, therapy kind of means something.

What do you mean by therapy? You know, is it is it is a talk therapy is a drug therapy. You know, what is it?

Postpartum depression is a biological thing. You know, right. We are we are chemical beings. And you get an injection.

I have I injected you with a syringe of adrenaline. You would start acting very differently.

Right. Because that's the effect it has on our bodies. We have to be careful when we start talking about a chemical imbalance.

OK. The reason I say that I don't want to get too deep into the weeds, but most chemicals, no doctor can actually tell you what a balanced chemical would be, what those numbers would be or anything like that.

They just look at it and they say, well, this person's acting as if they had gotten a syringe full of adrenaline pumped into them.

They must have a chemical imbalance. But is that actually true? Oftentimes they're not doing any tests to see if the person has a chemical imbalance.

It's just an assumption based off of what they're seeing off their observation and the prescription isn't correct. But postpartum depression,

I mean, everything, all the changes that a woman's body goes through during that time and after that time are significant.

You know, I think every man whose wife has given birth to a child can attest to the fact that our wives were absolutely certain.

We have to throw away all of my old clothes. I'll never fit in them again. And so on and so forth. But we have to say, well, that's not realistic.

You know, it's a hormonal time for them. But whether it's postpartum depression, whether it's an actual biological, a different kind of biological cause that could be playing into depressed feelings.

The question always has to come back to how does God want me to respond to this? Right. So as a biblical counselor,

I believe that we need to treat the body. If there is, again, an actual physical problem, then that needs to be addressed.

However, we don't excuse sin because the person is suffering from postpartum depression to the exact same degree.

We don't. I mean, if some guy's cussing and throwing stuff at his nurses. Right. And well, what's his problem?

Well, he has cancer. OK, well, cancer is a bad thing. We all recognize that.

And those of us who know people who have significant cancer diagnoses, we know that it can have an emotional effect on people.

It can mess with their systems or whatever else. But for the most part, you know, some guy's a broken arm.

That doesn't excuse his anger. Some person has cancer or whatever else. You have

COVID. You know, you don't get to you don't get to talk to people that way just because you have COVID. Right. But when the moment we say whatever depression, like, oh, well, that's understandable.

But is it is that person's word? Is that person's thinking? Is what that person's doing acceptable?

Yes. They feel terrible. I chopped off and chop off a type of probably

I can't even see it very well. I took off a pretty significant chunk of my thumb. I was over the kitchen.

I was slicing through a bag with a steak knife and scissors, you know, and the bag twisted on me.

And in a split second, the bag twisted, the knife moved. There's a piece of my thumb that was gone. And, you know, in that moment,

I was tempted to a lot of stuff. Right. None of it was was appropriate just because I cut my finger.

Like, it makes sense that there's that rush of adrenaline. You're you're frustrated yourself. You're annoying me.

People would do all sorts of things. Some people would cut something with people, punch stuff, throw the knife, you know, all sorts of responses.

But are those biblically acceptable just because you cut your thumb? And when we come face to face with the scriptures, we recognize the fact, no, it's not right.

And even with even you're by yourself. Right. And that happens not even in a group of people.

Right. So even by yourself, that response is still not acceptable. Yep. Oh, definitely.

Totally not. I don't just get to cuss, you know, to the heavens just because no one's going to hear me.

I used to work at a boys home for at -risk teens called Victory Academy in northern Wisconsin. And the boys, you know,

I'd always come up with like, what's wrong with this? What's wrong with that? And people would always ask, what's wrong with swearing?

And the reality is that really words are just words. OK, there are words that, you know, when

I cut my thumb, I got all bloody. Well, the word bloody in England means something very different. Right. It would be considered offensive to some people.

I can just say a sound. Right. And somebody can choose to be offended by it. The reality is, though, that even if I said something that would be appropriate and I always use,

I always said, you know, I hit my thumb with a hammer. I'm like purple polka dotted ponies. Right. If I said that out of anger, out of discontentment.

I hate the fact that God allowed this to happen. This shouldn't have happened. This is stupid. I hate it. I'm mad. I'm you know, but I said purple polka dotted ponies.

That's no more appropriate than if I let out what we consider to be the worst expletives.

Interesting. Because it comes from the same book is what comes out of our mouths, comes from our hearts. Right. It's the same anger.

Yeah. The same rejection of God's sovereignty. The same discontentment, lack of joy. Same. All of that.

So so that's going back to the postpartum depression question. That's where where these individuals, these ladies need.

I need help. We want to help you deal with the emotional turmoil.

It's a very real thing. But we also, as brothers and sisters in Christ, want to come alongside you and help you realize that God always provides a way to escape temptation.

No, you don't get to snap at your kids. You don't get to get to give your husband a cold shoulder because you feel the way you do.

You're going to be tempted to. It's like a 50, 100 pound backpack. It's going to be hard. But God gives the grace to overcome this.

And then digging into the scriptures to see the promises he gives us to see in Philippians chapter four, how we need to be thinking rightly.

If we're going to be living rightly and working through that process so that we can have victory through the struggle instead of just saying, well, this is the struggle.

If you go to the Evermind app, you can see a session that I did called

Suffering Well. And that session was done for a group of men who all had aggressive forms of cancer, life threatening cancer.

And the reality was that suffering is inevitable in this world. God promises it.

So the question is not how to avoid suffering. It's not to just say, well,

I'm suffering and make excuses for my life. It's how do I glorify God in my suffering? Right.

And that's something that he demands that we do. We don't just get a pass because we're suffering. That's right.

That's right. Well, I think this is a good time to bring in one of our sponsors.

Sponsor time. MyPillow. I don't know. Do you have a

MyPillow? You know, I've been so tempted. I really have been. Andrew's been talking his up and I've been less and less happy with mine.

So I haven't I haven't pulled the trigger yet, but I have been really tempted. I've read good things about it.

Yeah. Look, I love mine when I get to use it. See, see first.

First, I was gifted one by Andrew and I used it and I loved it.

He gave you a MyPillow. I probably shouldn't have said that. Remember what you were complaining about earlier?

I would have taken the pillow. It was a.

Actually, I think it was I think it was a pity gift because I was on here basically debating with Jim Osmond about eschatology.

So it was it was probably a pity gift like here. Nice try, Drew. You know, you're going up against Jim, but but I got it.

I loved it. And then my wife started using it and so I didn't get to use it anymore.

And so I got her one. I got her her own. And and now my son steals it because we do we do one of the one of the worst things we could possibly do, which is co -sleep.

I know it. I know. And no, not no. And, you know, he's always taking my pillow.

He's taking my my pillow. And, you know, now I'm going to have to get him his own.

Yes, I know. But we're doing a new thing where we we actually brought in his mattress, his twin mattress, put it on the floor to get him used to sleeping in his own bed and not in ours.

It's a good step. I mean, if you've been doing co -sleeping, the transition can be rough that you're habituating them to the older they get, the more used to it they are.

Yeah. You do want to take steps like that to wean them off of it. Yeah. And so so we do that and it goes pretty well until about three o 'clock in the morning when he realizes he's not in our bed and then he climbs back in.

But if you want to my pillow, go to mypillow .com. We really need to get the the

Web address up here instead of the phone number. There's no one who calls 1 -800 numbers anymore. No one.

OK, so go to mypillow .com, type in the promo code SFE. You'll get a you'll get a discount.

Also, Logos Bible software. Do you use Logos? I have in the past.

I stopped. I had all of these. I got it in seminary, all these old disks on my old

PC. I switched over to Apple and I just never made the transition.

And I had a wonderful, huge library and now I've got like no access to it. And it's sad to my soul.

But here again, I'm like, yes, I would love to be back on using Logos. Yeah, yeah.

I was. So one of the first times that I hosted guest hosted for Andrew, I was doing this.

Did they give it to you for free? No, I wish.

Actually, actually, I've already had Logos. But, you know, if Andrew could help me, you know, just increase my library, that'd be great.

But someone I basically said how

I how I have it, but I don't use it a lot. And then a listener basically called me out and was like, look, you need to just use it more.

Like, how dare you not use it? And then I started using it more. And it has been such a help in developing like small

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type in the promo code SFE again and get yourself, you know, a discount on Logos.

Now, let me see if we've had any more questions come up. I don't see any, but I do.

So people saying they love my pillow. Yeah, yeah, I do see that a lot of my pillow on there.

Now, in in your biblical counseling. Now, I don't know if you've seen coming out of the

NAR, the New Apostolic Reformation, places like Bethel. They do they kind of have their own form of counseling.

And it's basically like so they call it so healing. And have you heard of it?

Have you heard of that? That is not familiar to me. No. OK, so and I only know about this because I had a friend at one time that did this.

They went out to they went out to one of these centers that was sponsored by Bethel.

I think it was like in Utah or something like that. And basically, they sit down with this counselor.

And the counselor somehow gets them to understand that they have all of these unresolved traumas in their life.

Trauma is a big keyword today, for sure. Right. And so so in talking to this friend, once they came back, they said, you know, this it was really great because this person just helped me help me understand that I have like 120 unresolved traumas just all the way from my childhood to now.

And and I've got to really resolve these things, you know, me. So so just hearing me say that, you know, what do you what do you make of things like that as a biblical counselor?

Yeah, well, there's Satan would never have tricked

Eve had he just come out and said something that was 100 percent false.

Everyone's like, you know, Satan lies, Satan lied. And he did lie. I believe that for sure. He was very deceptive, but he actually didn't necessarily say anything that was not true.

And there is the. There is oftentimes a modicum of truth that gets woven into these theories that our experience and so on and so forth says, yeah, well, duh, of course.

Right. We're talking about your son. Right. And not to kind of put you on the spot, but he's having experiences that are that are defining his identity, defining where he feels safe and where he doesn't feel safe, what he wants and what he doesn't want.

And that's just at this very young time of his life. Right. We have experiences that are formative depending on how we respond to them.

We had the same experience to respond to it one way and have to be formative in this way or formative in that way. So is it true that these experiences from my past can have a huge effect on how

I view the world today? One hundred percent. Does it legitimize my sin and make me a victim of my bad choices?

No, I am not a victim of my circumstances. I am a product of my bad choices.

But again, that puts it back on me. I'm a product of my bad choices. I don't have to sin.

God gives me a way to escape every single temptation when I don't do that. And that's another thing, too, about temptation. Temptation comes from the outside.

But that's not the temptation we have to worry about. It's the temptation in here. I mean, a guy can offer me drugs all day long.

I'm just going to say, no, I've got no desire. But there are lots of other things that people could tempt me with that Aaron Brewster inside here really wants that.

And as they tempt me with it. And so I give in to sin because of this. I didn't take

God's faithful way of escape. I gave into my own loss. It can save a broad course in death. So.

So, yeah, I was you know, I I have experienced in my life what could be called

PTSD. Having experienced my own plethora of church hurt.

I was I was in the new church, actually a church I'm in right now. And the pastor and I had decided to get together and talk about something.

It was actually about biblical counseling. The topic of the conversation was positive and good. It was it was this great chance for him and he and I to sit down and to have this awesome conversation.

But it's just a couple of months removed from a really long out years long process of this church situation in my prior church.

That had really was still pretty fresh. It was within the year fresh. And I'm driving to the church to meet with my pastor.

And I start feeling this anxiety. This is unlike what's going on. People who know my story.

I have lots of stories about I'm very open with my my struggles that the world would diagnose in certain ways.

I'm feeling this anxiety. I pulled into the church parking lot and I'm just like, I'm freaking out.

I'm like visibly you couldn't have told. But for me, I'm freaking out. And I just I just praying.

I was like, well, I don't know what's wrong. Like, I know what I'm about to go in there and talk about. And it's like, you know, I shouldn't be feeling this way,

Lord. I want you to keep him in perfect peace. It's my estate on you. And if I want to have peace,

I need to love you and love others. And I need to take my anxieties to you and prayer Thanksgiving. I need to think right. I need to do what you told me to do.

So, Lord, here I go. Holy Spirit, give me the power. And I stepped in and we had a great conversation. It wasn't until later that my wife told me that as I was going out to have this conversation at the church with the pastor, she had this.

This weird anxiety response. It was talking about it after the fact that we were like, you know what?

For the past year or so, every single time I drove off to go talk with the deacons, it was ugly.

It was bad. It was not Christ honoring. It wasn't what it should have been at all. It was a terrible, awful situation.

So here I am driving to a church to have a one -on -one conversation with the pastor.

And I've got this subconscious thing kicking in and my body's responding.

It was getting ready for that fight or flight that this is not going to be a good thing.

Even though I recognized that I wasn't even thinking about that. So I recognize that certain things like that do happen.

We have traumatic events in our lives, which if we don't respond to them correctly, we don't deal with them in Christ honoring ways, can be formative.

Is it wise to do that? Yes, it is. Can we use those experiences of our past to excuse wrong choices now?

Definitely not. Wow. Yeah, that's huge.

That's huge. Now, it seems like there's a lot of, in this sidebar here, a lot of debate going on.

Yeah, we have an individual who is claiming that it is impossible for Christians to sin.

And it's a lively debate. I think it's a good one. I think that needs to be discussed because the idea that it is impossible for Christians to sin is a misunderstanding of what

John was saying in 1 John. And that's an unfortunate misinterpretation.

I would love to talk with that individual. I don't have their name, but the love of the truth. It would be interesting. We can take a sidebar.

We can take a detour that way. I'm pretty sure a couple well -placed questions would reveal that this individual, male or female,

I don't know, does sin. I'm not passing total condemnation.

Obviously, sin is sin, and it's wrong and shouldn't be done. This side of heaven will never be sinless.

But as a good friend of mine used to say, by God's grace, we can, as we grow, sin less and less.

That's the goal of sanctification. And as we grow, we become more sensitive to that.

Yeah, definitely, for sure. That needs to happen. If we're supposedly a Christian and we're still sinning in all the ways that we used to sin before, with no change, no growth, no maturity whatsoever, that's actually an indication of the fact that we're not born again.

But the suggestion that it is impossible for believers to commit a sin, it stems from a misunderstanding of the first John passage where it says, and actually quoted,

I don't have my Bible open at the moment. I'm dealing with a really small screen. Whosoever is born of God, he hath not committed sin.

Yeah, I'll bring it up later. He cannot sin because he is born of God. In the

Greek, and this is consistent all throughout Scripture, this concept he was talking about, it was a consistency thing.

It was a persevering in sin. It's that idea of not changing, not growing, that unrepentant perpetuation of rebellious sin.

Obviously, a Christian can't do that. We just established that before. That doesn't mean that it's impossible to sin in totality.

So the idea—and I was going to go someplace else before I decided to read that.

There's another passage that oftentimes there's a misunderstanding because a superficial understanding of the passage kind of gets us wrong, but it just went out of my brain.

But we need to make certain that we're careful to allow the Scriptures to interpret the Scriptures.

We get in trouble when we take something, latch onto it out of context, and we don't allow—that doesn't agree with what everything else the

Scriptures have said. There are very few people in the Scriptures who were true followers of Christ, who the

Scriptures say nothing about things that they did that were sinful. But there are many others, true born -again believers, who it's recorded that they sinned.

That doesn't excuse it. It's wrong, but it was a reality. And if we tell people—because you lead someone to the

Lord, and they're a baby Christian, and they find themselves slipping back into the old sins that they used to commit before, they lose hope.

They're doubting their salvation. We have to be careful with that. And I just remembered the other thing that confuses some people.

Positionally, when we're born again, we are in Christ. We have His righteousness imputed to us.

Positionally, He's taken our sin, and we've taken His righteousness. But practically, that is not the case.

I can still choose to sin right here, right now. And that would be on me and not on Him.

Not to say that I'm not forgiven from that, and I'll show it to eternity when I die.

Right, but I mean even Paul reveals that about himself, right? I do the things I don't want to do, and the things

I want to do, I don't do. Oh, the love of the truth actually said something about Paul not sinning.

And somebody in the chat did actually just ask him. Really? What about these passages?

And I don't say this. I'm sorry. I don't want to sound condescending in any way, shape, or form. We all lie to ourselves.

Remember, sin is delusion. Sin is insanity. In that moment that I sin,

I am saying – and as a Christian who knows God's word, right? Most of my sin is a high -handed sin.

Like I know what I should be doing, and I choose not to do it. And that is an attack against God that is saying he doesn't know.

God, you're wrong. You lied. This thing that you said is best, it's not best. I need to be angry in this moment.

It's okay for me to think about her that way. It's all right for me to say these things. That's why I do it because I believe it's best in this moment.

I call God a liar. I attack his character, and I do these things I shouldn't do, which is absolute insanity.

It is really easy for us to, if we're not careful, to latch on to an idea and to really buy into that idea wholeheartedly and kind of be blinded to the fact that that idea is not really biblical.

Right, right. Absolutely. Now here's a question from earlier when

Andrew mentioned that you have multiple black belts. We have a question from Dee.

Okay. She said, but can he beat up Jeff Durbin? Now Dee said later that that was a joke.

Right. Yeah, yeah. But I realize as I'm typing things on here, it's so obvious that I'm typing things on here.

And for the life of me, I could not remember who Jeff Durbin was, and I was going to look it up.

Oh, he's the pastor elder. Pastor elder, Apologia Church in Tampa. So is he a martial artist?

Yeah, yeah. So he's a black belt martial artist. He used to run his own dojo, and he was

Johnny Cage in the Mortal Kombat traveling show, and then he was two of the

CGI Ninja Turtles from 2008 or something like that. I'm his biggest fan then.

I love, if it's the Ninja Turtles I'm thinking of, like the good one. Those guys were awesome. And when they had, I want to say when

MTV, when they had their show, The Final Foo, I think it was, where they had all these martial artists coming and battling against one another,

I think he was on there as well. Okay, okay. So yeah, he is a martial artist.

Which turtle did he play? I think he played two. I think he did Donatello and Michelangelo maybe.

Oh, the best. Those guys, I love them. But those were the CGI ones from like 2008.

Oh, from the remake. Yeah. Well, it was like the cartoon type deal. Oh, I thought, for a second there,

I thought we were talking about the guys in the costumes from that. Those are the guys. Those guys, what they did in those ridiculous costumes was amazing.

So that's what people are talking about. Which ones were which colors? Yes, Donatello was the one in purple.

I have no idea who would win. I had one instructor who told me that people always argue about which style is the best, but the reality is you put a different martial artist from every different style in a room and the guy who wins is not going to win because he was the best.

There are so many different things that go into this. I'm just going to give it to Jeff Durbin and say he wins.

He was a Ninja Turtle. I'm going to let him win. I'm not going to, of course, obviously he's going to win.

I mean, come on. I do have, I do have a black belt in Tang Soo Do. I have a fifth degree black belt in a, a third degree black belt in a more traditional form of ninjutsu and a fifth degree black belt in a more modern form of ninjutsu.

I've studied about 10 different arts to various degrees or another.

So I have been around the block a couple of times in regard to that. I do, I had to have my own school, but I was never a

Ninja Turtle. So I just don't get the time. I had this, I had this youth pastor friend of mine, Daniel Minton, and he used to be a missionary in Africa.

And this guy's tall, he's six, four, long story short, swimming in a river in Africa and he gets bit by a crocodile.

Now he's tall and he got rolled. He was down, he was getting rolled.

He was swimming like this and the thing came in like this. He said in that moment, he had this thing pop into his mind where he remembered the one little scene he saw from the old alligator hunter.

Right, right, right, right. What's his name? Jeff Irwin or Steve Irwin. Steve Irwin, yeah.

That, you know, they have this flimsy little thing in their, in their, in their throats. And if you can get your hand down their throat and you can feel around, you can grab, you can pop it.

He did that. He reached into the throat. He grabbed this, what he felt, he pulled, he felt a pop thing, let go of him.

Well, he has scars on his body from like up here to down way lower on his thigh.

The guy's like six, four. Okay. Wow. And they, they measured the width of this bite and they try to extrapolate out how big this thing must have been.

And they were talking like up to 18 feet. Wow. And I said to him,

I said, it doesn't matter how many black belts I have. It doesn't matter how many tournaments

I've won. You barehanded killed a 18 foot crocodile that was actively trying to kill you.

You win. You are the man. You win. I got nothing. I'm not that tough.

You know, Jeff Durbin was a Ninja turtle. I got nothing. All right.

So, so back to biblical counseling. That was a fun little segue there.

Back to biblical counseling. How would someone go about wanting to become a biblical counselor?

Great question. So I am a member of the association of certified biblical counselors, better known as ACBC.

And yes, the ACDC jokes come every single time, but ACBC is a certifying organization.

And the reason it's really valuable ACBC is so fantastic is that yes, there's a certifying organization.

So when a third party organization, you know, has put their stamp of approval on an individual, it does give somebody some, some sense of confidence that this person knows what they're doing, but really the better part of it is that individuals can go into who don't know anything and can work through the training to become a biblical counselor.

Now I have my master's degree in biblical counseling, and I had that before being certified through ACBC.

And yeah, it made that process a whole lot easier to have that. But most of the people I would say who get their training through ACBC have had no prior training.

And so they make it really easy. I mean, it's a, it's a process and it should be, it needs to be, it's a learning process.

It's a lot to learn. But the three steps that they lay out makes it really fantastic.

And there are, there are certified training centers, all of the United, all of the world, really who you can do things online.

You can be in person and you can see the seminars. I'm going to be in Santa Clarita, California in the first week of October.

And I'm going to be at the ACBC annual conference speaking on emotion coaching,

John Gottman's emotion coaching and critiquing it from a biblical perspective. And those annual conferences are so fantastic.

They are a wealth of information. There's always so incredibly amazing going to those, but that's what the, all the other training is like, it's just these, it's just God's word opened.

And it's this flood of amazing information, but I would say, you know, whether, you know, a lot of people, well,

I'm not really interested in being a biblical counselor. I want to, I want to lend a machete to that theological thicket for a second to quote

Jack Sparrow, to say that I don't really want to be a biblical counselor, or I don't think that's

God's will for my life is to misunderstand what biblical counseling is. Earlier in the show,

I made the observation that biblical counseling and discipleship. Concepts.

In fact, I would go so far as to say biblical counseling, discipleship, parenting, one, another, identical contexts that happened within different relationships.

It's the process of discipleship, sharpening one another, and doing the work of the ministry.

So his life to which we have all been called. So if biblical counseling really is just discipleship, then all of God's people need to get better at it.

Right. In fact, when I train, we have truth, love family is one of the ministries of evermind ministries.

And when I, when I work with families, what the parents don't know is that I'm actually giving them, biblical counseling, truth, truth, right from God's word that you would learn in any biblical counseling scenario.

But I'm, I'm making it about parenting and I'm developing a curriculum that because we'd like to be faith, true biblical counseling, discipleship would like to become a certified training center.

And there's a process for that. And we're kind of working through that process, but I want to develop this curriculum. That's for parents.

That's all about parenting, a parenting masterclass. Right. And when it's all said and done, if the parents wanted to, they could take step two and step that, cause that'd be step one.

They could go into step two and step three of ACBC and they could get there. They could become certified biblical counselors.

Everything that they would learn in this biblical parenting class is identical to what a biblical counselor is going to be learning.

Right. And the same thing's true for anybody, pastor, teachers, small group worker, youth worker.

It doesn't matter. These concepts are things that we're going to, in fact, I chose to do biblical counseling as a major, not really for a very good reason.

It wasn't like a super thought out deep thing. I actually found myself graduated from college, not kind of where I wanted to be in my life.

Didn't have any prospects for marriage. Didn't have any prospects set up for a job or ministry. And I'm like, well, maybe

I'll just get my master's degree. But as I was thinking through what I was going to do, I, I did by God's grace and some good counsel come to the conclusion.

Well, even though I didn't have a clear goal of where I was going to end up, I recognize one reality.

Biblical counseling is something that I would need regardless of where I went and what I did. And as a dad, as a friend, as a brother, as somebody just in the church, as somebody just meeting individuals on the side of the road,

I have used what I've learned in my biblical counseling studies in every area. So I would challenge everyone.

I'm not saying that you all have to sign up, you know, for some biblical counseling training through ACBC. But I would say that I want to be put out of a job outside of my local church.

I want to stop working with the people from your church. I'm not saying that in your church, but you know,

I'm working with people who have low, I require that they be attending a local body of believers or assembling with them.

I want to stop meeting with them because the people in their church should be doing this. Right.

And the only reason they're meeting with me is that there's no one in their church who's willing to be able to do it. Yes. I need to be doing this with people in my church.

You need to be doing this with people in your church. And that's not just my opinion. That's God's calling in our lives. Yeah. Ephesians four 15 and on.

That is exactly what the work of the ministry is. And our pastors are supposed to be equipping us to do.

Yeah. So we all need to take it more seriously. Yeah. So, so I have kind of a two parter here.

The first is a question. Should, cause part of being a pastor is that counseling aspect.

Right. So should a pastor be certified as an

ACBC? Should he go ahead and get that? Is that the first part?

Yeah. Cause the second part is, is, is part of a story. Okay. I don't want to,

I don't want to discourage pastors from reaching out to me. Okay. I have pastors who reach out to me on a regular, pretty regular basis,

Aaron. I don't know what to do either. Hey, what should I do? And I do, I like, I love working with pastors and church leaders and equipping them to do this in their churches.

I love that. I'm so passionate about that. But sometimes it's like, you know,

I really am not in the space right now where I can deal with this, with everything going on.

Cause to, to assume that your pastor is going to be the sole biblical counselor in your church is ridiculous. Unless you have like a church of five.

Okay. So, but so they legitimately say, you know, will you take this on? Sure. But I have had pastors come to me saying, you know, you know, there's this family who has this kid who's really rebellious.

And I just don't know. I just don't know what to tell him. And I stop and I go, you know, I'm thinking to myself,

I'm just, I mean, the Bible has so much to say about that. What, what is it? Do you really not know what to tell them?

Or do you not realize that what the Bible says about this is exactly what you need to tell them.

Like, cause a lot of our pastors are gunshot, you know, they're people in their church or, you know, are convinced that the pastor doesn't get to speak into this kind of stuff or that he can't or he shouldn't.

Right. Right. So the question about, it's almost like, it's almost like, well, my pastor has never been divorced.

So he can't speak into my divorce. Yeah. Or he's not a psychiatrist. He can't help me with my mental, my mental issues.

It's like, well, the pastor's like, um, so should he get biblical counseling training?

Well, if he's a pastor, he should have already gotten it, or he better not be a pastor.

Like, I mean, if he's actually been trained, you know, to one degree, you know, like called by a church and ordained and entrusted to be the pastor, shepherd, teacher of a congregation, then we've recognized the fact that he already.

Is equipped to one degree or another. I mean, J Adams, you know, groundbreaking work, competent to counsel, argues the fact that any believer with the

Bible is competent to counsel. So from that perspective, um, no, like.

He should already have it and should already be doing it. However, from the other perspective, we live in an age where we have so many resources that we can

Sharpen ourselves in the way before, before we connected, we were talking about your, your, uh, your dead guys, reader society.

Um, you know, these dead guys that you're talking about, they, they gave their lives to this and they wrote all of those volumes and tones and compendium of work.

Um, so that. The people who couldn't dedicate their time to that. Could have, you know, could, could have had this stuff that they could learn from piece by piece.

But nowadays we've got all of this information. And in many ways we're fools. Don't take advantage of it.

So yeah. Anything that does sharpen you, anything that can make you better at discipling? Well, of course, again, just, just like we're supposed to be growing away from sin toward righteousness.

You should be growing from a. Less mature. Counseling with the word to a more mature counseling with the word.

We all have something to learn. So I definitely would encourage. Um, everyone pastors and lay people alike.

Um, to, to be growing in your knowledge of God, to be growing in your submission to him.

And, but also to be growing in how to help other people. No God. And submit to him.

Right. Yeah. And so the next part is it has to do more with, uh, what you were saying about how.

Uh, you kind of want to work yourself out of a job. Because, because pastors should be.

Uh, counseling their own people. Well, the congregation should be to everyone in the church.

Right. Right. Um, because pastors can't do it all. And I grew up in the nineties and eighties and nineties where the expectation was the only person in the church who does that as the pastor.

And that's very wrong. Right. Right. Um, and, and I mean, and, and as we look at, uh, you know, kind of the biblical model, you have, uh, a plurality of elders.

So, so, so we shouldn't have just one soul pastor, um, who's trying to take on all this load, but yeah, the congregation should also be helping out, which is part of the purpose of the body of Christ, to be able to lean on one another and help hold each other up and pray for one another and intercede for one another and, and, uh, help, uh, each other bear under the burdens.

Uh, but, uh, you know, I heard a pastor, um, that actually sat under one time saying, basically he was saying,

I don't do the counseling. I do the preaching. Uh, you know, he, he said, uh, if, if you got a problem at, at 2 a .m.

don't call me. I'm cause you call me, I'm going to say, who's your small group leader. You know, he was basically, he was basically taking a part of that role of pastor and kicking it, uh, to a small group leader rather than, uh, you know, kind of being almost,

I want to say a first point of contact, but, but also just saying that's not my responsibility. Sure.

I'm going to, I'm going to be a middleman on this one. I don't know this guy. I don't know, you know, it's possible that he really was engaged in a, in counseling like ministries with certain individuals in the church.

In fact, I'm going to give a scenario where if point for point, he was doing what

I'm about to present that he was really doing it the right way. Okay. Um, Jesus had the 12, he had the three, the one, the three, the 12, the hundreds.

Right. And when he sent the disciples out, you know, obviously

Jesus didn't stop doing what he was doing, but he also didn't go where they went. Right. He, he trained these to go do that.

Um, that is very, that is very important. I think Jesus was a really good example to us, even though Jesus pushed himself way harder than most of us do more than, more than I do, um, to my own shame.

Um, he is a good example of, of resting. He is a good example of not having to do it all, preparing other people to go and to do it, even though he, if any guy in the universe and human flesh was limited, uh, from the perspective of, you know, the omnipotent

God in, in, in, in, in single limited space, man, how does that even work? We don't know.

Um, but he, he chose to do that and he sent out his, his, his people. So when a pastor, um, is intimately preparing, working with this group of individuals, training them to do what he's doing for them in the life of these people and these people, and these people, that's a very biblical model.

Um, now if he's, you know, yeah, if I'm a, if I'm a shepherd and I have thousands of sheep,

I'm going to hire a guy to fix broken legs. Right. But if I have a sheet who has a broken leg and I really love my sheep and I value my sheep,

I'm going to take interest in that. And that's just an animal. Right. But if I have a human being under my care, who calls me up at two in the morning,

I'm going to have a conversation with them. Of course. But depending on the size of my church time

I've spent with this individual, I haven't been able to collect as much fruit as their small group leader has who

I know because I've worked with a small group leader is equipped to help this individual in ways that I can't, because that person has more information about the situation is already actively in playing this part.

So yeah, to give the, you know, don't talk to me, that sends the wrong message. Sure. But for that pastor to have that hour long conversation from two to three, and then to say, all right, you know what you and Jim and I are going to get together on Friday.

And we're going to talk about what God wants to use this season of your life to do in you and the best way to move forward and have that look like the pastor equipping

Jim and sending them off to do this thing is really fantastic. And it needs to be done more often.

I would argue. So I'm not, I'm not disagreeing with you. Sure. Yeah. Well, no, it's just because,

I mean, when I first heard it, my thought was, I don't know if that's the right answer because, you know, because I should be able to go to my pastor and say,

Hey, I'm struggling with this. Right. And I should be able to have these conversations rather and not be kind of pushed off and say, well, you know,

I almost like, well, I don't have time for this. Go over to, but does he.

Because you're right. You should. And so should your wife. And so should your friends and his wives and them and the other 200 people, 400 people in your church.

But at what point then you said, well, Aaron, that doesn't happen. I get it. But I also know from a pastor, from a counseling perspective, just how many people do, how many conversations you find yourself in.

And the next thing, you know, I was just talking to a gentleman, a bill Hill, a friend of mine. He's a equipping nationals worldwide.

And he's a biblical counselor with ACBC. And he and I were talking about an opportunity in the area. And this, this came up in conversation, you know, really what

I would love to be doing is to just be working at a counseling ministry church.

And really volunteering a lot of my time to do that. I think that would be fantastic, obviously.

And yet the counseling that happens as a part of my ministry, is paid and it has to be because if, if it were free,

I'd have people coming all of the time, asking questions and expecting answers. And at some point

I can't work my job to, to care for my family.

Right. You know, we've called them in the pastors, had the deacons start serving in acts, you know, start serving the widows and start sitting at tables and start doing these types of things.

Because they were devoting themselves to study into prayer. Right. So that they could get up on Sunday and preach. so again,

I mean, having, I think you you're younger than I am, but having grown up in a similar setting, we've really set our pastors up on a pedestal and expected of them.

You know, every person who's in the hospital, the pastor's got to go see them. We don't feel like we have to go see him, but the pastor's got to go see him.

Pastor's got to go door to door. You know, this is not what I grew up in every Wednesday. He's got to go door to door.

We have all the, I was actually, I was actually interviewing with the church as a potential candidate for pastor.

And I, it was like their, their expectations for the pastor just came right out of 1987. It was just like, like nobody in the church was expected to do anything, but the pastor had to do it all.

So I'm beating a dead horse, but yeah, I think that there are legitimate limitations where the pastor has to guard that has to be very careful.

Were I a pastor of a church, it would be my passion and my desire to have every single one of those people over to my house.

But if I had, if I took every weekday to have a different family over to my house, how long would it be before I wrapped back around to having your family over in my house?

It's going to be time and I'm not gonna be able to get to know you really the way I would want to. And this is why some people argue for having more smaller churches than fewer big churches.

Right. Right. Right. And I love the, though I am definitely a, I believe there needs to be a senior pastor.

I definitely for there being many pastors and many elders and subdividing the work.

I think that's a powerful thing to do too. Yeah. You know, cause I'm reminded of a base or really two examples.

If we take John MacArthur's church, right. Thousands of people go there and John probably doesn't know most of them.

Well, I don't know because he's on like the third and fourth generation of people in that church that,

I mean, he's married, he's like basically married them probably been there while they were born or something like prayed over.

I do have friends who grew up going to his church. Okay. And so their, their insider information's a little helpful, but I mean, yes, obviously you would hope that yes, of course he knows about them for sure.

Yeah. Right. Right. And that's one of the things that's kind of where I'm getting at because John MacArthur, his church is huge, but he can't individually pastor everyone on the personal one -to -one level, like you were talking about.

And so they, they Grace has a lot of elders that are kind of over groups of people, like a small group would be.

And so those people would kind of go to that elder, but then you're talking about no of them because you know, there's, there's just countless stories of, of someone getting hurt in the church and having to go to the hospital.

And before they even get there, John and his wife were already waiting for them, you know, because he understands that person's a part of my flock and I need to go check on them and make sure they're there.

Right. So, so, so there's that knowing of even if he doesn't know them on that more intimate level as some others, you know, he, he still knows of them and he's, he's trying to care for them as best they can.

But then another example is Richard Baxter, who wrote the reformed pastor.

And basically the reformed pastor is kind of how he would, I guess the, then maybe the journal,

I guess is the best way to say of how he would pastor, because he was a pastor of about 800 people in his congregation and he would go to a couple of families every day and he would, he would meet with them.

He would catechize them and he would pray with them. And what was the timeframe that I don't know that I don't know.

Cause Richard Baxter, I mean, we're talking about you're talking about Puritans. Yeah. Yeah. Hundreds of years ago. Yeah. And see, part of that ends up being the issue too.

I mean, there was a simplicity to life back then. We think that our lives are more simple because all this technology we have, and it's not, we've complicated things.

We've segmented our lives. I mean, communities back then lived together to have people into your house.

And that kind of stuff was just a normal thing that is not normal nowadays. And that's not right. It shouldn't be that way.

So I will say. Sorry. I mean, I'm sorry. It just popped in my head. You know, that's why now if you visit a church, it used to be the pastor, maybe one of the elders and some ladies from that church would come to your house and to meet you.

They don't do that anymore. No, they don't know who was, I don't know. I should know this. It was a guy who's famous for his pastoral letters to his people.

Robert McShane. Yes. Yes. Yes. McShane. Yeah. Yeah. In fact, it's biblical counseling circles. They're used quite frequently because he really was pastoral counselor.

Yeah. Yeah. Pastors aren't doing that. They're not even writing emails to her kind.

I mean, they're, they're writing a bulk email that gets sent out to everybody. Right. So we've created a busyness in our world that I think steals from that intimacy in a really bad way.

Like I understand why pastors aren't doing it because we've created an environment where it's impossible for them to really do it to the glory of God and be productive.

But that doesn't, but that doesn't mean that what we created this, this atmosphere we create is actually healthy for us.

Right. That's a whole nother topic I think is we could go on forever about, but we need to really reevaluate the pace at which we live, lie our lives and how we view human interaction.

I mean, one of the reasons that discipleship isn't happening in the church is that we're not doing life together. Right. We are, we go to church.

We have a folder that we've been a little file system. We have a folder of things that we talk about at church and church is just long enough and that I have just enough stuff in that folder that I can get through that.

And then I close up that file and I go live my life and we don't really interact with these people. And there's the huge detriment.

I mean, the modern church is what it is today because people long for connection.

They were created for connection. And since they're not finding it in the church, they're finding it in all the wrong places.

Well, can I push back against that a little bit? I mean, cause it's not, that's not helping happening in the good, healthy churches for sure.

But yeah. Right. So, so cause I've always had to take that. The reason that discipleship isn't happening in the church is because people have confused fellowship with discipleship.

Oh, that's also very true. So, so they're, so they get together and they do things that aren't church related.

They're not talking scripture. They're not talking theology. They're not helping each other grow. They're just hanging out and they're calling it discipleship.

Yeah. Very true. We have a Friday night game night at our house and everyone's invited, but we really, it's a very, it's an open invitation, but we have our regulars who come frequently and not everyone is from our church.

We sometimes have individuals who it's great. Like somebody who comes to our game night, we'll show up with just some stranger that they met and got into a conversation and they realize this is an opportunity to shine light into this person's life.

Hey, you like playing games and they'll bring them over to our house. And yeah, it's great. But one of the things

I love about our game nights, which sometimes are movie nights, most of the time are game nights or like, you know we always have a dinner and people can come and get great.

And we, or we do a bonfire or whatever else. But I would say, man,

I don't want to over exaggerate it, but I would say a large percentage of the conversation inevitably is going to be deep and significant.

I mean, we have had, we've had game nights where we didn't play a single game at all because I'm sitting at the table with a young couple who's asking in this very crowded room.

We don't have a very large house. We live with my parents. And they're, they're talking about this really significant issue in their lives.

And while my wife is over on the couch talking with somebody who is going through, you know,

I've been real health issues. My wife has a, has some significant chronic health issues.

She has genetic degenerative issues and whatever else. So people oftentimes talk about her and we are just,

I mean, it is biblical counseling is discipleship. It is, it is that Friday night game night. Where not a single game was played.

And I love that about that. And you're right. That's how it, that's really how it should be. But we just say, well,

I'm in a room with a bunch of other Christians. This is fellowship. This is discipleship. This is glorifying God. But I always ask the question.

If what you did with all of those. Christians. If you had done it with a bunch of unbelievers wouldn't have looked any different.

Then what was it? Right. That's not discipleship. Right. Right. Well, I think this has been a great show.

I wonder what Andrew thinks. I do. Well, yeah. Andrew thinks a lot of things.

And sometimes I don't know that I want to know the answer. But you got a pillow out of it.

I did get a pillow out of it. Yeah, that's right. So bond servant for Jesus says, where are you from?

Well, Oh, I'm not from anywhere. I'm from all over the place. I currently live in Brevard, North Carolina, which is in the

Southwestern part of the state. But this is my 22nd move. So I've kind of been around mostly.

Northern north and Midwest. Primarily it's kind of been where I've, I've done my circuit over the years.

But yeah, that's where I am currently located. That's wherever my ministries is located. And that's where I do a lot of land.

All my in -person counseling happens around here, but then I do virtual counseling. On multiple continents.

And let me tell you what, when you're counseling a family in the Philippines or in South Korea or something like that, it is hard to make your times match up.

Or as we were talking before the show in Australia, it's easy to mess up that one. Yeah. But yeah,

I thankful for technology because it gives me the opportunity to connect like with this audience and with other people.

And I think that's really cool that we get to redeem the technology this way. That's right. Yes. Jason cave.

You're right. Providing North Carolina. That's the spot. Now. Before we get out of here,

I just want to say, you know, you were mentioning Robert Murray McShane, his letters, you know, they're widely used in a biblical counseling circles.

I actually learned about them through listening to Dr. John Snyder.

Who's a pastor out in a new Albany, Mississippi. And he uses

McShane's letters in counseling his church members. So depending on the situation, like say he has someone who is, they're struggling with their assurance of faith, right?

They're kind of, they're an anxious believer. And so he'll kind of break out these letters, six letters that McShane wrote to a believer or to a lady in, in his church.

That was kind of the, an anxious seeker. And he would give them, give them one a week and say, here,

I want you to read this letter, read over it every day, take notes, make observations. And then we're just going to talk about it.

You know, what, what did you notice? What did you like? What did you dislike? You know, and kind of work their way through all six letters with the goal of having them not be anxious anymore, but to have assurance in the

Jesus who, who McShane says in letter number one is a friend to sinners.

You know, he receives them. And so there's no need for you to be anxious, but, but come rest in, in, in this

Christ. So I heard that and I was like, I need to get these letters from McShane.

Cause they seem like great tools. And so it's funny you said that, that they're widely used in, in biblical counseling circles.

Yep. They are. And I think that's a great way for that past to use it because there's nothing new under the sun. And when we're honest with our struggles and we look to the scriptures and we look to how men and women have historically dealt with these issues, there is so much commonality.

I don't want to be overly pay with the too broad of a brush, but the reality is that every single one of my counseling counselees, all of their struggles, all of the answers to their questions are going to go back to the exact same thing every single time.

Now how it's applied in their life and how they live it out is going to be very different. But the biblical truth is going to be the same in every single one of them.

So that's a, it seems like a really cool way to utilize those letters. Yeah. Yeah. I thought it was brilliant.

And so I said, I'm going to steal that. And whenever I'm serving in church and I'm asked to minister to someone who is in that kind of situation,

I am going to use that. That means you need to know them well enough. Exactly. which letter was that?

Right. Well, and the thing is, is so the right.

So they, they read the letter and of course, right. I have to know the letter. So I have to have my own notes set for the letter.

And what makes you continuing your education. That's right. Training and learning. Yep. That's right.

Right. But the thing is, is you don't give them all six letters at once. Right.

Because then they're just tempted to read through all the letters. So you just give them one a week. And it, and it lasts for about six weeks.

It's so that they can work through it. They can have that, that they can examine their self.

They can examine, you know, what sin is it that's possibly holding me back or, or causing me to be anxious and, and doubt

Christ's ability to save. And, and to save me, you know, what is it that's keeping me from enjoying the beauty of Christ?

So, so I just thought, wow, that is brilliant. And I'm going to steal that, but all right, as we get, as we wrap up,

I think we should leave with a word from Andrew, a gospel message from Andrew.

But before we get there, I want to thank Aaron for coming on, spending a couple hours with us, talking about biblical counseling and, you know, some martial arts stuff,

Ninja Turtles and things like that. I'm sorry. I was being really distracted here. Somebody was asking about the, somebody asking in the chat and I got distracted trying to answer that, but yes, thank you so much for having me here.

I'm super excited to have this opportunity every time I praise

God for this ministry. And it's a great conversation and the chat so lively. It is, it is our chat.

I think our chat is the best of any live show because they, the range of topics is all over the place a lot of times.

And, but also in our chat, I mean, we've got our list, our audience is sharp.

I mean, every single one of them, like someone's coming in here and they're just, putting out

Bible verses out of context, giving wrong teaching and our audience is jumping on it and correcting them, right?

Our audience knows the Bible and that's always just encouraging to see when, when you're doing a live ministry like this and you have a, have an audience that, that tunes in every week and then they're applying those very things.

The, the, the biblical principle, right? They're applying hermeneutics. They're, they're taking someone and they're going, no, this is the context of what that means.

Let me help you out here. And it's very encouraging.

And so I love, I love this audience and it's one of the reasons that I always even just came back before I was even helping host.

It's one of the reasons I would always come to the show is, is for the comments.

Speaking of comments, I was trying to put something in there and apparently there is something you're not allowed to put in the comments. Apparently you're not allowed to put links in the comments.

People were asking questions about ACBC and I kept twice. I've tried to put it in there, biblicalcounseling .com.

That's their, their website. And both times I tried to put it in, it wouldn't let me send it out.

So maybe, maybe links aren't allowed, but for those of you interested, biblicalcounseling .com is where to get with them.

A couple of people were asking, and I'm glad you're going to end with the gospel. I think that's so fantastic.

One person particularly asked about my presenting the gospel. I did have the opportunity. Oh, well, well,

Jason. Yeah. Jason came right here. Cause usually right on the show, we end with a gospel presentation, whether it's me or somebody else.

And so what Jason's doing is he's wanting you to give the gospel presentation for the show.

Well, I will say that I had the opportunity to do that. The second time I was on the show, I had the opportunity.

It was, it was, it was tossed at me. And then generally when they toss it at somebody, it's not prepared.

Right. It was, it was fantastic. I had a great opportunity, but what were you going to show? Oh, it's just a video that someone sent to Andrew.

That's just basically the gospel presentation. Gotcha. Gotcha. And it's usually when it doesn't kind of make it into the show, you know, kind of naturally.

So we can just say, well, you know, we don't want to leave you without the gospel. So there's this video.

And I will say that elements of the gospel, if I could kind of go back to the very beginning of the show and kind of tie, kind of pick out the elements of the gospel that were there and string them all together, like pearls on a string, we started talking about the fact that sin is insanity.

That sin is destructive. Sin is lethal. That because of sin, people cannot have a relationship with God and will be separated from him for all eternity as the wages of that sin, what they, what they deserve for rebelling against God.

So we talked about that. We also talked about when it comes to biblical counseling, that a person can't ever really hope to change if they don't have new life in Christ.

And now the, the blanks between that sin being insanity and new life in Christ is desperately important.

What does that mean? The reality is that again, we can't save ourselves or something that we can do to have that relationship with God, but God loves us.

God deserves to have our worship, knowing that we are incapable of worshiping him without his help.

He's done everything necessary to enable us to have that relationship with him, to be able to be, to worship him.

Jesus Christ came and paid that penalty for sin on the cross that we, it would take us an eternity in hell to pay.

Jesus was able to pay that once and for all. And those who put their trust,

I think it's funny. We've gotten used to saying, put your faith and trust in Jesus Christ. But the reality is those are the exact same thing.

When we believe him and have faith in him, trust him. We put our trust in Jesus Christ and say, I cannot do this.

The gospel is beautifully presented in Matthew chapter five in the Beatitudes. We recognize that we are spiritually destitute.

We are grieved over what that means. Not that I'm on my way to help. That's a negative consequence.

It's a very real consequence of my sin, but I'm grieved by the fact that I'm not giving God what he deserves.

And so that's going to produce a response where I meekly, humbly go to him and say, God, I can't do this. I need you.

I can't save myself. And when he regenerates us, we are now capable of hungering and thirsting after righteousness and being pure and being peacemakers and rejoicing in trouble.

So it's a beautiful picture and that's what Christ does for us. And then that's not where salvation stops.

That's not where the gospel stops. And I think that that's, man, I think too many of us get stuck on justification.

We forget the fact that sanctification, progressive sanctification is salvation that continues.

Yes. Justification is a one -time thing. Sanctification is going to continue the rest of our lives. It's us cooperating with the

Holy spirit. It's that discipleship process, working with one another, growing being transformed into the image of Christ from one degree of glory to another.

It is that process that this whole counseling thing is dealing with. If you truly are born again and you're struggling in this area.

And the question is, how do we help you in your sanctification? How do we help you in the gospel?

How do we help you in your salvation? Not gaining your salvation, which has been given freely through Jesus Christ and justification, but growing in that.

And then we all look forward to the day when the local counselors won't be necessary anymore because we will be with Christ glorified for all eternity.

Sinless for the, for the first time in all human history, born again, believers will be sinless when he glorifies us in eternity and we look forward to that day.

But until then we shine the light of Christ. We are salt and light in this world and we are leading people to Christ through evangelism.

And when they come to him, we are discipling them, helping them to grow in their sanctification until the day they die or Christ comes again.

Amen. Amen. I think that's a good, good word to end on right there.

Well, Aaron, I want to thank you for coming on. I want to thank our listeners and our viewers for, for tuning in.

Sorry. It couldn't be Andrew this week. And guess what? It might be me next week again.

So you might get, I think I might be back next week too. Really? I think so.

I think you and I are actually supposed to hang out after the show to talk about what we're talking about next week. All right.

I'm down with that. Maybe that means no one will come back. Maybe it means everyone will come back.

Maybe it means we'll just double, we'll double our audience. I don't know more

Ninja turtles. That's right. All right. Well, we need to go plan. We need to plan this out. So thank you for tuning in strive to make every day an eternal day for the glory of God.

And we will see you next week. If I can hit the button.