Thinking Carefully About Disorders & Biblical Counseling | Deepak Reju

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Welcome to another episode of the Room for Nuance podcast. I'm Sean DeMars with my guest

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Deepak Reju. That's right. Thank you, Sean. Oh, I like the voice.

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Oh, by the way, you get us started with prayer. Yeah, let's pray together. Lord, in your kindness, you've given us today to be able to not only get up but to worship you with everything that you've given us today.

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So give us strength, wisdom, hope, joy, patience, and love.

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Not because there's anything good within us because there isn't, but because of what

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Christ has done and not only dying on the cross but being raised three days later so we can live a life for him and not for ourself anymore.

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We pray this all in your son's name. Amen. Amen. So, Deepak, we first met when

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I was a member of a church where you pastor, Capitol Hill Baptist Church. I was there just as a member in 2011, and me and my wife were going through not anything crazy, but there was one little tricky thing in our marriage.

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We hadn't been discipled. It was a little embarrassing. Set up an appointment with you to get some counseling, and brother, you served us so well.

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It was so useful, and it was just one meeting. And then I came back to CHBC in 2016,

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I think, and we had a standing appointment every Friday with you as an intern, and that was so helpful.

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It was so useful. And then also during that time, I just got to see you shepherd the flock. I got to see you train up a small army of biblical counselors within the church, some paid, some not paid, and I just thought like, man, this is a guy that I need to pay attention to because he's serving the church in the way that I hope to serve the church one day as a pastor, whether or not

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I have all the same giftings and talents that you have. So brother, I'm just really honored that you're here with us, and we just finished up a conversation with a bunch of local pastors because I didn't want it to just be us.

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I wanted you to meet with them and talk with them and serve them, and I think that they feel pretty well served as well.

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So can you just introduce to our audience who you are, and maybe why we're having this conversation?

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Yeah. Thank you for the invite. It's a pleasure to be here. Delightful to have the time with you and to be back here with you and Decatur.

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Decatur where it's greater. Where it's definitely greater. Definitely greater, yeah. Deepak Raju, I am a pastor in Washington DC.

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I have been on the staff for 16 years, but I've been around the church since 1991, so I've been around it for 30 years.

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Wow. And yeah, I love being a pastor. This is what

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I wanna do with my life. I hope to do this until I die, and then even if I have to retire at some point,

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I'm not gonna retire. I'm just gonna keep discipling, shepherding, teaching. You might even try to come back and haunt people as a pastor.

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Well, I don't know, that's me. Just like, I have a word from the Lord for you. I have five kids, ages 18 down to 10, two boys, three girls, married to Sarah, who

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I met at the church 22 years ago. She's been a faithful and diligent partner for many years, and we love being there.

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DC has been our home. Our kids have grown up there. We know what it's like to live in the city.

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And aside from the five kids and my wife and having a chance to pastor, the church gives us the privilege of writing and teaching other places, going out and trying to equip other churches.

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But then in my own personal life, I love reading. I love coaching my kids, so I'm typically on a soccer field every

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Saturday. I love really good pizza dough. Really good pizza dough? Oh, yeah, man.

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I'm on a quest for the best pizza on the planet. Oh, man, okay. So the

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Northeasterner in me, growing up in a small town where the grandmother from Italy was the one cooking in the back kitchen.

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And when I got to high school, it was her two sons who took over the kitchen. Classic family -style

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Italian restaurant. Oh, dude, if I would have known that, I could have just taken you to Sbarro's for lunch. I don't think so.

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Domino's? No, I don't think so. Nice try. Going in the wrong direction. Nice try. But yeah,

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I mean, the Lord has been very kind, and I'm really grateful for the life that he's given us.

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Yeah. Praise God, brother. Hey, you are apparently a pizza aficionado.

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I didn't know that. But you are, in my mind, kind of like the biblical counseling guru, right?

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You probably wouldn't take that title for yourself. Although as you age, it's almost like your body is taking that identity on its own.

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But I mean, even just like we had a really tough counseling situation here at Sixth Avenue, and I just called you because I was like, man, this is a brother who

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I trust. I want another set of eyes on this. I think it'll be helpful. But I mean, how did you find your way into...

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Into this? Yeah, because some pastors tend to focus more on missions and evangelism. How did you...

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Yeah. Yeah. Great question. There were early signs, like when I was in college, we would go down to Florida to do evangelism projects.

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You'd be two cars of us, and people would rotate in and out of my car to tell me their life stories.

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Oh, wow. Or I would go with friends. The college I went to, a lot of people came from Connecticut, New York, New Jersey.

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And so I would find rides back home with friends who were heading up to the Northeast. And then

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I'd sit down and this was just me. I would say, we got four hours in the car together.

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Why don't you go ahead and tell me your life story, and I'll ask you questions along the way. And people at the end would often say, actually, you probably know more about me than a lot of other people in my entire life, because I just sat and listened and listened to them tell about their life.

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One of my mentors would do this on a plane all the time, and I really learned it from him, where on a plane, he would just take an interest in the person next to him and ask them questions about their life and take an interest in who they are, what the

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Lord has made them to be, what they're trying to do with their life, what their suffering is.

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So it's just come natural. I'm a people person. I like spending my days with people.

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I like getting into their life. If I ever have a sabbatical, the thing

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I hunger or crave for is to sit down in front of someone and get into their heart. So there's a place for small talk and everybody needs to do small talk.

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That's what helps us grow in relationships. But what I really want is I want to know your heart. I want to know what you worship, what you desire, what you hate, what you're fearful of, what gets you up in the morning.

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What sun does your planets revolve around? That's the thing that I'm going after.

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And you're always like that. That's just your natural... That's just my disposition. If I'm going to be with someone,

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I just want an opportunity to really get to know you. And if it takes me time, because I can be patient.

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One brother who I did premarital counseling for 16 years ago, we've been meeting once a month for 16 years.

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And he's a dear friend. He's grown a ton in his faith over the last decade and a half, and has been much more the church than me.

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But yeah, I mean, I love being a part of his life. So basically there was this natural disposition that I'm assuming other older, wiser brothers in your life saw and said, yeah, you're a good preacher and you're a good

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Sunday school teacher, and we think you're going to be a good pastor, but we think you should really emphasize this aspect of your ministry and seek the training to equip you to do that.

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And that was Mark Dever. For me, I came back to CHPC after having done my

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MDiv at Southern Seminary. I worked as a personal assistant for a year, and also the smaller church, so I'm the staff manager that year also.

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So you changed the ice and restocked the fridge. Well, and wiped, cleaned up the kitchen, took out his garbage, everything else you expect.

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But halfway through the year, he said to me, I think your gifts are in counseling.

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Because at that point, were you thinking more preaching? I actually didn't know. I'd been having dozens of conversations with him about what direction do

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I go with my life? I'd done my MDiv, how best could I be used for the kingdom? So Mark was the first one who deliberately said,

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I think this is the place you should focus your time and energy. So you had already gone to Southern, you were back in DC, and now he's basically saying,

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I think you should go back to Southern. Well, that's where it ended. It ended with him saying, why don't you go back to Southern and get a degree in counseling?

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What I wasn't expecting is then he said, and then come back around, and then why don't you work alongside of me?

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And that would help balance our team. But I wasn't sure, so there was two more key conversations.

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Second one was with Matt Schmucker, who I'd been meeting with pretty regularly.

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He'd been discipling me that year. He said, I see a lot of different things in you, but this area, it seems like you could swing different bats, but this is a place you could swing a really big bat.

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And if you're gonna go up to home plate, you wanna swing a really big bat for the sake of the kingdom.

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Well, that clicked. It just made sense for me. Like, okay, well, I could suddenly begin to see all the things like the car rides and people telling me their stories, and my natural interest in people.

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Okay, well, this seemed to be a good way to use my life. Plus, I'm first child,

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I'm Asian -American, high difference for authority, so godly men speak up.

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I didn't resist at all. I just thought, well, this makes sense. Why wouldn't

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I follow their counsel? Why wouldn't I try this out? The third conversation was then

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Mark arranged for me to sit down with the late David Paulson, who I'd never met before.

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So I drove up to CCF, and basically, if I was gonna enter into counseling, I just had a lot of questions.

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How does this work? How do you think through it? What's the relationship between scripture and what

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I do? Just really basic questions. So I took an hour and a half appointment, asked him every question

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I could ever imagine to just figure out what it is. And I remember an hour and a half,

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I'm squirming in my chair, thinking my time's up. And David, as the kind of grandfather figure he was, just kindly said,

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I'm enjoying myself. You wanna keep going, let's just keep talking. And we talked for hours.

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Oh, praise God. Typical of him. He cares about the person, not the schedule.

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And I would say that was... That's just tough in ministry. It is, but that conversation was a trajectory -setting conversation for me, because I had to have someone who knew what he was thinking and what he was doing, and had a theological background, give me some basic parameters early in the game, so I knew what

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I was doing. And there was a lot more that had to grow, but I just needed somebody to point me in the right direction, and then

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I could start running. And that's what I think all three of those conversations helped me to do.

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Mark helped me figure out what I should focus on, Matt helped me own it, and then

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David pointed me in the right direction in figuring out what ended up being like,

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I really wanna know how the Bible helps me come alongside troubled souls.

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That's the summary. I wanna build a bridge from the text of Scripture to adultery, pornography, suicide, eating disorders, you just go on down the list.

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Does the Bible have something to say? And that's what I'm doing. I just wanna make this text of Scripture come alive in the hardest things in the

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Christian life. Well, brother, speaking of counseling, one of the first books that I wanna talk about that you've written is a book that you wrote with Jeremy Pierre, a friend of yours from Southern.

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He teaches there, yes? He's the chairman of the counseling department. He's a professor of counseling. Gotcha. And you wrote

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The Pastor in Counseling, The Basics of Shepherding Members in Need. Give us the lowdown on this.

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Yeah, the typical book I'd give anyone who's interested in counseling is Paul Tripp's excellent primer,

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Instruments in the Redeemer's Hands. The blessing of it is it's a wonderful overview of what we're trying to do.

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The difficulty is it's a beast, it's 300 plus pages. And in my line of work with all the pastors who

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I've got relationships with throughout the country, especially former interns, former staff from our church, will call up and say,

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I'm about to do my first hard case. They're showing up maybe tomorrow morning.

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What do I do? And I wrote this with Jeremy with an eye towards, if you have two hours, we can give you a feel for what you need to do in the room.

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But unlike other counseling books, which lay out a lot of principles and stories, what we go for is process.

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From the first point in which you have contact to the first counseling meeting to the point where you know actually you can wrap things up.

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When do you make the decision? What are the parameters to decide, actually, we can end this counseling process?

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I wanna work through that process with you from beginning to end. And for it to be a short, readable, clear primer, that's gospel centered.

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That is very ambitious of you. You're trying to accomplish a lot in a little bit of space.

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It's been out for how long now? I think around 10 years or so.

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And what kind of feedback have you received? Do you think you basically achieved what you set out to do? Yeah. We've actually received a ton of feedback from pastors grateful for this being something they read to help orient them.

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Plus a lot of professors have used it in classes. That's where I've actually heard about it a lot more of students who read it while they were in seminary.

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So yeah, I think it's accomplishing what we're looking for, which is giving pastors a basic primer.

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Though Mark Dever, in our pulpit, when he gives away books, when he gave it out to our congregation, he said, if you're ever gonna do counseling, this is actually gonna be useful for you too, because it's gonna help you figure out what you need and what to look for to get everything you can out of the process.

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So he said, it's not just for pastors, though the title communicates the primary audience.

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Sure, because pastors will probably be doing this most often, most intensely. Yeah. All right, two questions about this book.

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Number one, now that it's been out for 10 years, what's something that you wish you could change or add to the book that maybe you left out?

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Yeah, wow, what a good question. I think there's...

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I hadn't thought through abusive marriages to the degree that I've had to work through over the last few years in just simply getting in the trenches, reading, thinking, getting training on it.

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I didn't have that when I first started. And so, for example, if I'm convinced that I'm dealing with an abusive husband,

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I stop marital counseling, because the abusive husband is gonna manipulate the process, and there's no way a wife living under his tyranny can be honest in the counseling room with us.

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So then you divide and go... So we divide until we're convinced that he's genuinely repentant, and that's gonna take a while.

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It's gonna take a long time. Yeah. I didn't have that when I wrote the book. That's something

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I've come to learn in the trenches through making tons of mistakes, and beginning to figure this out with the team, getting training and other things like that.

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So do you think a second edition, maybe add an appendix on that? Certainly. I mean, certainly there's a...

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As now I formally teach marital counseling, I have a whole section on this where I...

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Where do you teach that? Oh, well, I mean, anytime somebody asks me to teach how to do marriage counseling,

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I've got a morning seminar on it, like a three -hour thing. Plus then

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I now have what you heard in May, a one -hour session, especially on abusive marriages to tag on.

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Are you gonna publish that somewhere or do something with it? No, I mean, that's... Well, I mean, project number two, three, four, and five for Jeremy, Pierre, and I is actually...

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We're working right now on a series of marriage counseling books. Okay. So we're writing the primer for a marriage counseling book, which we're...

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He's in chapter two, I'm working on chapter four, even as we speak. And that's book one of a four -book set, of which book then two, three, and four are primers...

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Sorry, they're small paperbacks about specific troubled marriages.

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So one's gonna be on adultery, one's on the marriage, which has an angry spouse, third on the marriage that has a severely depressed spouse.

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And if that goes well, then we'll do the abusive marriage, we'll do... Gotcha. So you're gonna test the waters.

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We're gonna test... Well, the publisher's gonna see if it sells or if just you and my mom buy copies.

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Right. Well, I mean, I know all two dozen of our listeners and viewers will go buy a copy of...

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Hey, is that gonna be like the length of like a little CCEF booklet or like a non -Marx church questions booklet?

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The primer will probably be like 150, 200 page book overview of counseling.

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And it's the same thing. We don't go for principles and stories, we go for process. First time a troubled couple walks in to the very end when the process ends, what does it look like?

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But then the paperbacks are meant to be soft cover, 100 pages basically to hand to the couple who's in that troubled situation.

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So if the husband comes in with his wife and she just committed adultery,

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I need to hand them something at the end of that first meeting that would begin the journey with them that first month in knowing how to begin to work through that.

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That's what we're trying to write. Gotcha. Adultery, anger, depression, just resources that the pastor or the counselor can hand over to the troubled couple.

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Yeah, that's so useful. So useful. Second question in relation to this book, if...

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So this is kind of nuts and bolts, step one, step two, step three. What would be...

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If you could... Let's say that there's a conference for pastors, Crossway very generously says, hey, this is gonna be a conference for pastors who are seeking to grow in their counseling abilities.

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We wanna give them this book and one other book, and we're gonna give these two books away to every person in attendance.

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Deepak, what book do you think we should give away with your book? What do you think? Wow, what a good question. I mean, if we're looking general counseling, it's

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Instruments of the Redeemer's Hands, because that's the more expansive version of what we talked about.

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Plus it gives... Just like we do, we try and give a theological backbone, but then very practical.

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And same thing, he gives a good theological backbone, practical. But I just work through Darby Strickland's, Is It Abuse?

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And it was so helpful in thinking through very specific categories.

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And right now, it's really common to ask about, what about emotional abuse? Because everybody gets the tyranny of physical abuse.

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Physical, sexual, even spiritual, it seems... Physical, sexual, spiritual, but emotional...

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It's tricky. It's tricky, and not many people know what to do with it. That's one. The other one, which she brought out, which

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I thought was really helpful was financial abuse. So the husband who...

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The wife has no idea what the finances are, and he manipulates the finances in a way that he demonstrates his tyranny by...

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He gives her a little allowance, nothing more. Or in the worst situations, the husband refuses to pay for basic essentials.

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Yeah. Yep, seen that before. And so all the ways that a husband can manipulate the finances to carry out his tyranny, she was so helpful in dropping down into each one of those specific categories and giving live examples.

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So you don't just hear the principle, you get a feel for what... Case studies. You get a feel for what it is.

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That one, I feel like that book was really transformative for me in just beginning to understand dynamics that I knew, but I needed some help with.

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That's good, brother. Let's pause the book tour, one book in, and talk a little bit about abuse.

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Yeah. I think one of the main questions from pastors in this climate is...

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It has to do with trying to figure out when something has crossed the line from being a jerk, being harsh, being mean, to being abusive.

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Jonathan Lehman is going to talk about this in his new book, but he said recently, I thought it was really helpful.

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We live in an age where anytime someone misuses their authority, it's called abuse of authority.

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But to have authority and to be a fallen human being is to guarantee you're gonna misuse it, right?

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And so I've heard you, brother, share about this spectrum. Now, you did this in terms of marriage stuff, but I think it applies more generally, right?

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So if there are pastors listening to this, or even church members listening to this, and they're thinking through a really tricky situation, what's that spectrum you would give them?

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What we're describing, what Darby spends her life working with is marriages where you have a textbook abuser, a guy who's a tyrant, controlling, manipulative.

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The wife lives under years of oppression. She's, in every sense of what we're describing, a true victim under his abuse of tyranny.

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But what I wanna leave room for is a guy who I'm just gonna call a jerk.

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He's immature, he's young in his faith, he might have been a

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Christian for a while, but he just has not grown, and it's demonstrated in the way he lives.

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He screams, he does stupid things, he might even...

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He just does things that, unfortunately, many of us as young husbands have made mistakes and done.

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But I don't want to quickly throw him in the bucket of abuse.

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And by abuse, I'm describing a Pharisee and a tyrant who, in using his authority, the wife, literally, her image bearing qualities degrade in front of us over the course of years.

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So she becomes a faint image of what she used to be. And the word picture that I use is if you picture that husband taking a sledgehammer to a car and beating the car, and eventually the frame of the car begins to break down, it's a systematic breakdown of a person's personhood.

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So in contrast to that, the jerk would be the guy who does some cosmetic damage to the car, right? Knocks a windshield off.

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Yeah, and he does stupid things. In our current climate, he can quickly be thrown into the bucket of abusive.

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Whereas if you've worked with these guys over years, what you see is,

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I was an abusive, but I did a lot of dumb things my first few years of marriage.

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And I have no business of being self -righteous on these young guys, and that's what gives me a lot of mercy for them.

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I can tell the difference between a young guy because he's willing to follow my lead. He is repentant.

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He's here regularly. He's in the word, but he's not a tyrant.

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I can take him under my wing and say, that was stupid. Why did you do that?

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I love you, and we're going to change this, and he's going to follow my lead. And it may take some time, and he may make mistakes, and he might do it again, but a year or two years or three years from now, he's actually going to look different.

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Five and 10, 15 years from now, he might actually be an elder. That's a great time horizon.

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I think people expect three counseling sessions, and if he's changed, no. Think in five -year chunks.

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I described to you some of the guys I've been discipling. 16 years with that guy. 16 years. And there's quite a few of those guys

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I've been discipling. None of them are elders, but I'm going to disciple them for years, whether they ever become an elder or not, because I see deliberate and slow incremental growth, and we're moving in the right direction.

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And so long as these guys are moving in the right direction, I'm willing to be in the trench with them and help them out.

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And so what I ask for the wife, if I think he's immature, foolish, and he's just got to grow up, both emotionally and spiritually, then

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I ask, let me get in the trench with both of you. Let me care for you and him, and let's work at this together and give it time.

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So I had a couple who showed up. They came to our church.

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They were commuting from further away, and the husband, about two or three Sundays in, approached me after an evening service and said, our marriage is terrible, and we need help.

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So I got in the trench with them, and for a year, I met with them every week. And it took a good year to turn the whole ship.

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But I don't know how many meetings that is, but it was a lot of work.

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But once we got to year two, did I stop? No. We didn't meet as often.

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We started spacing, and I was a pastor, so we started meeting twice a month. But I still met with him for another year, because now

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I'm shifting out of him making tons of mistakes and doing really mature things to now he's following my lead.

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He is actually starting to make better decisions. She's beginning to feel his leadership change, and yet now he needs discipling.

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I can't let him go yet. Now I need to help him begin to understand what those key decisions are, how to lead in the mundane, and as they became pregnant for the first time, how to become a parent.

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And then it was the beginning of the third year where they were actually... They had made a pretty significant turn that they finally confessed to me, hey, we didn't wanna admit this early on, but we had dreamed of one day becoming missionaries.

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And I was like, are you... At first, I was like, okay. I'm glad you didn't say it early on, because I wouldn't have been able to see it at the beginning.

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There's no way I could have said yes, but now I see the possibility. But I said to them,

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I need you to not rush yet. I'm like, you're on the right trajectory.

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We need to keep doing work. And so we did. We did. And by God's grace, they've been out on the mission field now a few years now.

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Oh, wow. Oh, praise God. It was a sweet end to the story. But what I love is at the end of the process, as they were engaging now our elder board and the chairman of the elders, an organization that was very interested in them came in and said, let's get you on the field now.

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And we said... I said to the chairman, and the chairman backed me up, and we worked with that organization.

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We said, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. They're almost there, but there are a few more things.

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And if you throw them on the field right now under the stress and pressure, as you know, from having been on the field, they could implode.

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And one of the staff members of our organization like fought back really hard and even said to our chairman, like, why are you guys in the way?

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And I love that the husband said, because they asked him, don't you feel controlled by these elders?

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He said, I don't feel it as control. I feel like it's an act of love. Yeah. Because you guys weren't saying, at the end of the day, we can control you.

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We're just telling you, yeah, this is what we would counsel you. Well, and now I was saying, like, I want to make 100 % sure that you guys are going to be ready.

31:28

Yeah. We want you to go to the field and succeed. Yes. Exactly. We can get you there faster, but you may come home sooner.

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Yeah. And so in that sense, like they stayed, we worked a few more months, and then we were all on board.

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We were all like, you're ready. Go. And they did. And they've been on the field many years and they're doing really well.

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And they come back for check -ins when they're on the stateside. So yeah, I mean, that's the kind of investment, like I want a deep investment.

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I want to care for guys who they might be in, their marriage might be horrific and they might be making really dumb decisions, but that's different than a textbook abuser.

32:06

Right. And I just want that category under the current culture. Yeah. I mean, you can get online and read all kinds of stuff related to abuse and then throw people in that bucket, which is why

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I just kind of created that continuum. It's like saying, there's a difference. Okay. So I had a pastor recently say this to me, you tell me how it sounds to you.

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He said, in our church, our elders recently have felt like we are simultaneously trying to protect women and children, but let's just say women from abuse.

32:41

But also we strangely for the first time are trying to protect men from accusations of abuse, which in many ways can destroy their lives just as much as a woman's life can be destroyed by being abusive.

32:55

Thoughts on that? Yeah. I mean, in the current culture, accusations can come quickly and fast, and I'll make some caveats, like rightfully so in the sense of lots of churches have been incompetent, have been reckless, have treated victims poorly, have shunned them and shamed them.

33:17

And so it feels like we're barely beginning to figure this out in a way we should have years ago.

33:24

Sure. So there's still a significant problem with churches mishandling how they deal with abuse.

33:30

Yeah. Now, understand that I'm 100 % there and realizing and recognizing and fighting for us handling it better as churches.

33:41

Right. And hence, I've put things in writing, I've talked about this to just help the church do better.

33:47

Yeah. With that being said, in the current cultural climate, accusations can come quickly, and if we're careless, you can ruin a man's whole reputation and pull him out of ministry.

34:00

Yeah. And especially in an online... In an internet world where everyone is their own self publisher, you can put anything and everything out there quickly.

34:10

Yeah. So if you're in pastoral ministry, you'll get plenty of people who won't like you because you gotta make leadership decisions and people will oppose you and go against you.

34:23

And you may be the target of a discernment blog series. Yeah. Well, okay. So when I first started pastoral ministry, you would get nasty letters.

34:32

Now, you get people who will write about you on Twitter... Yeah. Who will post things about you. That's a part of the current culture.

34:40

There may be a very tricky situation in your church that is very complicated, and the elders are working together with these people to try to handle it with as much balance and nuance as possible.

34:54

And someone may decide to do a big blog post or make a video on the internet, and then they have 20 ,000 people who have an opinion about it that have this much information that the elders have.

35:09

How do you respond to that? Do you just keep your head down and say, like, we're just accountable to the

35:14

Lord and our congregation? But sometimes even when stuff like that goes public, it affects the way the congregation handles things, right?

35:20

Because the congregation can read those blog posts or watch those videos. I mean, you probably haven't dealt with that, but I mean, any thoughts on that?

35:28

Oh yeah. I mean, well, at this point in my career, I've had people who have clearly expressed their frustrations, who go after you, do things like that.

35:44

But ultimately, I'm accountable to the Lord, I'm accountable to my wife, and I'm accountable to the congregation.

35:54

And the elder board. So if I'm being irresponsible, if I've done something wrong, then the church, my own local church, needs to hold me to account.

36:07

And if I've done something that disqualifies me, they need to fire me. They need to evaluate it.

36:14

But in the church that I'm in, you know, a part of the beauty of pastoral ministry is if you get into the trench with people, they get to know the real you, including all of your mistakes.

36:31

And I said this the other day to someone who has been there for all the years I've been there, who knew me through some hard things early on in pastoral ministry, and we were helping out people together.

36:44

And years later, we're both helping someone else out. I made a comment about a mistake

36:49

I made a decade ago. And she was delighted. She said, I mean,

36:55

I really appreciate you saying that was a mistake. Because I look back now, and I recognize mistakes we made as a church.

37:03

I said, yeah, I'm completely there. I mean, we will make mistakes.

37:10

I'm a fallen human being. Pastors will mess up on these abuse situations.

37:16

But there's a difference between a good guy who loves the Lord, who is trying to follow the

37:24

Word, who wants the gospel out there, who just hasn't been trained and is trying to figure it out and is making mistakes.

37:34

And you give him some training, he's got the right heart, he wants to do the right thing. And pastors who have egos, who are all about the pulpit, but really don't care about shepherding and wanna make ugly situations be brushed under the rug or go away.

37:52

And I've got... I mean, I've run into enough of those situations where I realized that ruins their gospel witness.

38:01

But I don't want to discredit the guy who... The faithful pastor who wants to do the right thing, and he needs help figuring it out.

38:14

So that's why I appreciate... We had afternoon with local pastors here, we had time over lunch, we talked about the topic.

38:21

It provoked a lot of good questions and a lot of good conversations. How are the pastors gonna figure this out if we don't begin to equip them?

38:30

Amen, brother. One more question about abuse before we move on to other books. Did you read

38:36

Jeremy Pierre's When Home Hurts? I haven't finished it. Okay. So we worked through it as elders just to make sure we were all on the same page when it comes to domestic abuse stuff.

38:47

I found a lot of it to be very helpful. One thing that we kind of struggled with was...

38:53

And you know Jeremy very well, so maybe you can help me think through this. When he talked about someone who had been the victim of domestic abuse, he made it seem like in order to minister to that person faithfully, you have to have a cadre of specialists in tow.

39:11

And listen, for some churches, that may be totally doable and not a problem. But we were in Decatur, Alabama, these three different kinds of specialists that we could potentially team up with.

39:23

We probably just don't have that. And it comes to the question of sufficiency of Scripture, sufficiency of the local church.

39:32

As I was reading that list, I just thought like, man, for 2 ,000 years, churches haven't had these three specialized kind of guys or girls to bring in to help with a victim of domestic abuse.

39:44

So this, in some sense, touches on the subject of the sufficiency of Scripture.

39:49

It also kind of touches on common grace gifts and secular psychology and counseling.

39:57

So what would you say to me? Let's say that we as a church have someone who has been the victim of domestic abuse, and we see that recommendation.

40:07

We're not opposed to it, we're also kind of like, we don't have that. We just have the congregation, the Holy Spirit, the

40:13

Bible, and the elders. Yeah. Okay, here's where I go. I do two things. I'd flip it around and say, number one, yes,

40:20

I think the gospel resources that are there are there to help that person go through the things that we're talking about.

40:29

But by God's common grace, there are a number of the resources that you and I have in 2023 that are available that wasn't available 50 or 100 years ago.

40:41

And though there are plenty of communities that are under -resourced and so don't have the kind of specialists you described, one of the few advantages of a pandemic is that many of those resources became available online, and specialists developed online ministries in a way that you could be anywhere within the world, and there are trauma specialists that are willing to reach out to you now and do work, though they can't be there in person, they're willing to do everything online and provide things for you in a way that you couldn't.

41:19

And like I did in training for our network, I could host something that everybody could show up on, but instead,

41:28

I went ahead and hosted something and said, if you're willing to get on Zoom at this day, at this time, and put as many of your wives and lay elders on there, then let's do it.

41:40

And we ended up having over 200 people Zoom in from different churches across the country and the world for us to do that kind of training.

41:49

Well, okay, so an online world makes resources available that you just didn't have before, that if you got the internet, you can actually get to, and there are now specialists who are gearing their life towards reaching churches that are under -resourced, or creating online formats that can reach out wider than what they would have done in their own local community.

42:13

Okay, so I agree with that. Now let me rephrase it. The year is 1960.

42:20

Well, okay, can I push on one thing? Sure. The other thing is, also, there are things like, because seminary only gives you one class, and I've had to learn -

42:31

One class on what? Oh, sorry, one class on counseling. Oh, really? Yeah. Typical MDiv degree gives you one class on the whole curriculum.

42:39

You're learning all about German higher criticism. You get to your local church, nobody gives a crap about Schleiermacher.

42:45

You have to counsel people day in and day out, and they give you one. Yeah, the typical MDiv gives you one class and a 9D credit an hour degree.

42:52

You have to ask for extra classes in order to get more training. And so a lot of pastors don't know what to do with trauma.

43:05

They haven't personally experienced it. They don't know the ins and outs of it.

43:11

They just don't know where the Bible even bridges into that. The same thing when it comes to pervasive addiction, when it comes to suicidality.

43:23

And like I said at the beginning, my goal was to bridge a gap into that from Scripture, but there are people who spend their life doing it.

43:31

So in the same way, I could have a conversation with a New Testament professor, and he's got insight because he's dedicated his life to it, and he's got insights into the text because he spent hundreds of hours figuring out the

43:46

New Testament in a way I haven't. He's a specialist, you're a generalist. Yeah, I'm a generalist when it comes to a lot of these pastoral care issues, and I want to utilize the specialists who have spent 100 hours looking at particular problems that could help me be quickly equipped to do it.

44:05

So that's the other reason why I would say, oh no, it's not that sufficiency is undermined because all these specialists are believers, and I'm working with gospel centered people who love the word, who are helping me understand both the intricacies of particular problems that they've encountered from years of experience of dealing with it in a way that I just don't know all the nuances, because I haven't spent the hundreds of hours.

44:38

And so I wanna learn that quickly because I gotta get into the trench because the problems are right in front of me.

44:44

Right. I guess the thing that I wanna protect is, so if someone were to say, hey, listen, if you have access to a

44:54

Christian gospel centered trauma specialist, and you can use them in your local church, by all means, take advantage of that grace in your life, but that's not really the way it's often talked about.

45:06

Now, not what Jeremy Pierre said in his book, but just in general, it's kind of like, if you don't do this, if you don't have these specialists, then you're not really caring for these people.

45:15

And I'm just thinking like, 100 years ago, there was no such thing as a trauma specialist, and wouldn't you know it, the Lord has been leading and loving his church for 2000 years through pastors who didn't have any of this specialized training, and we've made it.

45:28

So I guess it's just the tone and the way in which people say things like that. If you were to say happily, suggestively, even forcefully, great, but what's often kind of feels like smuggled in is, if you don't do this, you're not actually serving your...

45:42

Yeah, and so my language is like, there are partners with us in our local church gospel ministry that can help us to build even more robustness in our pastoral care and our shepherding.

45:57

That's good. And that's where I'm looking, I'm looking for that partnership. In the same way that you would partner with, for example, if there was child abuse, you'd cooperate with CPS or the police, because we understand from Romans 13 that the government is given the power of the sword, and to exercise that on behalf of the people of that country.

46:21

Well, I'm looking for all kinds of partnerships to help with what

46:27

I'm trying to do in the local church. That's good, brother. Moving on, because there is not enough time for all the books you've written.

46:34

You did a short little 31 -day devotional, and by the way, are you the editor of the series? I'm the editor for the series.

46:40

What's the name of the series by PNR Publishing? Yeah, 31 Days for Life.

46:46

I did not know you were a Presbyterian. I will cooperate with any gospel -minded person who wants to put my stuff in print.

46:55

Amen, brother. All right, so how many of these are there out there right now? There's 22 in print, and there's several more coming out over the next two years, so I just finished editing one by Heather Nelson on rest, and right before that, we finished

47:17

Stuart Scott's on a primer for parents of prodigal children.

47:24

It's not for the prodigal children, it's to minister to the parents. I bet that's gonna be so useful. Well, and Stuart has had a huge ministry in this, and so had a real burden to put something in print, so we worked with him to get a devotional written.

47:38

When is that coming out? Well, it should be out by the spring, and then

47:45

Ed Welch is finishing his devotional on depression, but we have chronic illness, addiction, grief.

47:54

You just go on, we have a lot in the series. So how do you... I wasn't planning on asking this question, but how do you decide what to do a booklet on, a devotional on?

48:07

Is it just like pastoral stuff comes up and you're like, yep, we gotta do one on that too? Well, we started with the target list of problems.

48:13

If we could get these problems in the series, it would be ideal. Like a core 10, 15, 20?

48:19

Yeah, yeah. We had a core list of things that we wanna deal with, and then just like a college football coach,

48:26

I went out and did the recruiting, and I got plenty of no's, but I got a few recruits, and I got a couple of freshmen, but I got plenty of veterans who wanted to join in, and that's where it all started.

48:39

The publisher approached me with the idea and said, we think you're the guy to help us get this off the ground, and I said, no,

48:48

I'm not. I'm a pastor, I've written some stuff, but I'm pretty busy, there's no way

48:53

I could get this done. And then I prayed about it, and my wife said, it's a really good opportunity, and you're disciplined, you can figure this out.

49:03

And as always, she was right. Classic. And here we are, I think it's about six years later, and we've got 22 in the series.

49:14

Wow. God's been very kind. And it must be doing well for PNR to wanna continue to do it. I mean, they love it.

49:21

I think that we've sold up to about 150 ,000 volumes, when you add up all the ones in series, a couple of bestsellers,

49:30

Megan Hill on contentment, and then Paul Tauchus' volume on anxiety came out just before the pandemic.

49:41

This guy, perfect timing. I mean, the Lord's Providence. Yeah. And so that one exploded.

49:47

I can't even imagine, yeah. I mean, that sold like hotcakes. I'm glad I know how to pronounce his last name now.

49:54

I've been just... Yeah, yeah. So I mean, there's been a couple of true bestsellers in that series, but all of them have done really well.

50:02

Gotcha. So each one of these is 30 or 31 days, yeah, 31 days.

50:07

Yeah. And you take relevant scriptures... The scripture text at the very top of the page, and there's 600 words of meditating on the text, but the goal is to focus on one particular topic.

50:19

So... 600 is about a page and a half. Yeah, it's a page and a half, and we don't wanna do more than 600, because we want it to be short, really brief.

50:27

And then there's a reflection question and a practical application at the end of most of those days.

50:35

So day 13, fighting for purity, the subject is lying to yourself. The scripture is

50:40

Proverbs 21, 6. And then you have a meditation with some little bullet pointed ideas.

50:48

Ooh, a little chart here, a little graph. And then, yeah, the reflection question, two reflection questions on this day.

50:55

Sometimes you double up. Sometimes you double up. And then what's this act at the end? Act is the practical step you can take.

51:01

Okay. So I think all good theology should also end up being practical.

51:07

Yeah. It just needs... What we believe is gonna work out in how we live. Yeah. And so I wanna make that a reality in everything

51:15

I write. Okay. I don't wanna just live in the ivory tower, I wanna make sure in the trench level, in the day -to -day mundane, you see a connection between what

51:27

I believe and how I'm living. Yeah. And hence, not just reflection questions, but practical outworkings.

51:33

Yeah, I think James said that faith without works is dead, right? Amen. So speaking of fighting for purity,

51:40

I only have one, we gave away the second one. You have two books that go together,

51:46

Rescue Plan, and then what's the other one called? Rescue Skills. Rescue Skills, that it's kind of like the one -stop shop for fighting for purity.

51:56

Can you walk us through Rescue Plan and Rescue Skills and what you were thinking? So there are a lot of very good books on helping the struggler.

52:06

So you had Garrett Kell on the show. And Garrett's Pure in Heart is an excellent primer.

52:12

So that is one of the very first things I give a struggler when he walks in the door to work through a guy or a gal whose life has been overrun with pornography.

52:23

But what was missing was something to help the helper, the pastor, the counselor, the parent of the teenager, the small group leader, the discipler, the best friend, the roommate, all those folks who've gotten into the trench with the young man or the young woman, the older man or the older woman who are wrestling with pornography.

52:54

And so Rescue Plan, the first book, gives really a theology of addictions.

53:01

It lays out four A's, which is a good framework. We talk about atheism, animosity, appetite...

53:18

Apathy? No, actually, flip over to... I'm blanking on the four

53:26

A's chapter. I think this is the Rescue Plan. No, no, it's in this one. Is it here? You find it. The four

53:33

A's framework, which you find in chapter three, is actually the thing that people comment the most about in regards to what's been helpful.

53:45

So access, like what are the ways that you get a hold of the illicit material, and how do you brutally shut that down?

53:55

Anonymity, you don't do this in public. You do this alone behind a closed door.

54:02

Appetite, behind every addiction, is a basic kind of desire and hunger for it.

54:08

That's what drives most addictions. And then atheism, your doubt of God, God's ability to change you, and God's ability to really make a difference in your life.

54:19

And by atheism there, I'm guessing you mean functional atheism, right? Yeah, I don't believe. But my nickname for it is momentary atheism.

54:29

Every Christian goes through those moments where I choose sin over God, and that's my moment of atheism, where I turn my back on God and I say, sin is better than you.

54:42

And that's what pornography is. Every time I look at illicit material, I'm saying to God, actually the sin is better than your promises right now.

54:51

Those four, it's a useful short framework in helping people to understand the dynamics of pornography.

54:58

Then we deal with masturbation, because there's a lot of confusing material out on the internet right now.

55:03

Can we pause and hang out on that? So Mark Driscoll, eminently helpful.

55:10

Now that was sarcasm, folks. No, in a lot of ways, Mark Driscoll was helpful. In a lot of ways, he was really unhelpful.

55:17

His book on marriage was very confusing for a lot of people. He was telling wives, yeah, if your husband thinks it's attractive, get a boob job.

55:24

There's no moral implication there. And one of the things that he talked a lot about was masturbation.

55:29

He says, basically, we don't want to be Pharisees, and the Bible doesn't really have a lot to say about that. And he would even make jokes.

55:37

I forget the scripture, whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your mind. And all the 17 -year -old guys would laugh, and it would be a good time.

55:44

But yeah, I mean, masturbation is kind of tricky because it's not adultery, and you can do it without watching pornography, and it is a sin.

55:56

But in general, contra Mark Driscoll, it does matter. But we also want to place the same weight and emphasis on a sin that scripture does.

56:05

Scripture doesn't seem to talk about it a lot, and really not even super directly. So how should we think about masturbation?

56:13

All points well taken. Because there is a lot of confusing material out there, we just wanted to make a clear statement on it.

56:22

So there's two chapters about both a theology of why we don't think it fits with God's plan, and try and lay out our case.

56:31

The basic idea being it's self -serving, it's self -gratification, it's essentially about my own self -pleasure.

56:40

Which sex is supposed to be the opposite of that. Yeah, and sex is about the deep and precious intimacy that God brings for a man and woman that's not just physical, but emotional and spiritual also.

56:56

And so masturbation doesn't fit with God's plan for sexual desire.

57:02

So you're not proof texting, I'm sure you have some scripture references. No, I'm not, I'm not, but we have plenty of scripture in there, you're right. We're not proof texting, but we're making a theological argument that if this...

57:13

And what I wanna lay out there first is not no, no, no to pornography, what I wanna say is this is

57:18

God's plan. This is the beauty of what he intends with sexuality. If this is what

57:23

God intends, masturbation doesn't fit. And that's the essence of the argument.

57:30

There's a lot more specifics. If masturbation essentially is about you satisfying yourself.

57:36

Yeah. And I wanna make it... I wanna lay that out in a lot more detail. I wanna give a lot more nuance to it.

57:42

I wanna just help people think about it. But then if you agree with us, then

57:47

I wanna help you think about how to fight it and what that looks like. Because I'll make this argument like masturbation, it's the climax in masturbating and the addictive quality of that that can make guys keep going back to it.

58:03

Right. And it often happens after viewing pornography. It's a common part of this issue with pornography.

58:09

But you can masturbate without any pornography in front of you. Right, make me in your heart.

58:15

You can lust in your mind and in your heart, and then you finish it off by masturbating.

58:21

Well, you can get addicted to that whole cycle, let alone the pleasure that comes from it.

58:27

Yeah. And so guess what happens in marriage when your wife's pregnant and atrociously sick, you're not able to be as intimate.

58:35

It's not the panacea you thought it would be when you were single. I'll get married and I won't ever masturbate again.

58:42

Well, yeah. Well, and what happens then, our guys are then in periods where they're not able to be intimate in the way they desire with their wife.

58:50

Or even just when they can be, it's still just not what they thought it was gonna be. They thought, oh,

58:56

I'll be able to have sex more often. I won't struggle with this. Yeah. It doesn't really work like that. And it doesn't. And so you think of the guy who's not able to actually have sex with his wife for whatever reason for a short period of time.

59:07

Well, what's he gonna be tempted to do? Yeah, masturbate. He's gonna be tempted to masturbate. He's gonna have all kinds of things going in like, well,

59:14

I need to get it out somehow, or I feel the pressure, or God will forgive me. Like all the reasons that roll around in your mind, that's one side of it.

59:22

The other side of it is like, well, you're right. Sex is not always the 10 -star experience.

59:28

Sometimes it's like mundane and pretty bland, or it just barely gets the job done. And so in between, if you're feeling like you want to be intimate, and yet your wife's not available, or for any reason you can't, you masturbate.

59:46

Well, I think that's ultimately more about you than it is about your marriage.

59:52

I think it's more about satisfying yourself. And there's all kinds of rationalizations you can make.

59:57

In order to actually go ahead through, and fall through with that, and masturbate, and rationalize that this is perfectly fine, this is part of what

01:00:08

God has designed me for, that my wife can't, and because she can't, then of course I should be able to satisfy myself.

01:00:14

I mean, the line of thinking goes something like that, or similar. Yeah, that's right. So we want to help you, if you agree with us, be able to fight it and fight for purity.

01:00:26

So help me with something pastorally, and then we'll talk a little bit more about fighting. Pastorally, a guy comes to the office, or phone call, text message these days, who knows, maybe they're

01:00:41

Snapchatting me, there are confessions of sin, and they're not watching porn, they're not sleeping around, but like once a month, it's like, hey, messed up again, they're crushed, or maybe they're not crushed, right?

01:00:55

It feels like masturbation is the sin that falls perfectly into the in -between category, right?

01:01:04

What's the tone that I should be striking with members that seem to... Yeah, and we talk about this in Rescue Plan, it's like there's a big difference between a guy who he's watching porn, he's not attending regularly, he's not in the

01:01:18

Word, he's thoroughly addicted, he's just blind and really struggling, versus let's take the guy you described, let's say he's coming to church, he's got accountability, he's in the

01:01:32

Word, he's like meeting up with me regularly, he's fighting every tooth and nail.

01:01:40

All right, well, I've got a more gentle disposition for him, because I know that self -condemnation comes quickly, and beating yourself up comes quickly, and especially if he struggled with pornography for years, or typically pornography or masturbation, guys show up with me and it's not a year or two, for many of them, it's like five, 10, 15, 20 years they've been fighting this, and they haven't found a way to get through this on the other side.

01:02:12

So I'm quick in that guy's case to be able to say like, I love you, and let's fight it together.

01:02:20

And then usually with that kind of tone, he's like, all right, because I'm at this stage with my life and how many years

01:02:27

I've been doing this, I'm now more of a father figure to a lot of guys, and I'm able to say like, buddy,

01:02:33

I love you, and we're gonna get through this, and we're gonna fight together. That's the tone that Ray Ortlund struck really well in his book on fighting porn.

01:02:41

It was like strong, loving, father figure, hey, we're gonna put this thing to death. And when

01:02:47

I read it, I just thought, man, that's the way I gotta be talking to guys. Okay, so I don't wanna steal all the thunder from your book, but you've been helping people fight this stuff for a long time.

01:03:01

What has been like the main thing that you found to be helpful for, I guess, men and women, although I'm certainly certain it's less women, fighting masturbation?

01:03:12

And maybe it's not one thing, but what's the general pattern? Yeah, I think

01:03:17

I'd put two things out there of, first, you've got to be theologically convinced that actually there is a problem, because if you're not convicted, it's so easy to then just mess around.

01:03:33

Yeah, because you can mess around even if you are theologically convinced. Well, yeah. Yeah, there's enough of temptation there, even if you are convinced.

01:03:39

If you're not convinced, and especially if the whole thing is murky to you, then it's easy to just begin to stumble and give in to temptation.

01:03:48

So that's the first part. Second part, be extremely practical.

01:03:53

Okay. So you don't linger in the showers.

01:03:59

You don't linger in bed. Go to bed at the same time as your wife. Yeah, go to bed at the same time as your wife.

01:04:05

Get up with your wife. And when we say practical, it means if you're lingering in bed and then you masturbate because you're able to fantasize about things and you don't have to rush to anything, or you're in the shower and you're taking long showers and you can't resist when soaping yourself up to then go ahead and begin to masturbate, then your accountability needs to know and you need to be having open conversations.

01:04:31

If you need your buddy to text you in the morning after you get up within five minutes and saying, are you up?

01:04:37

Or you need to be writing him and saying, I'm up and I didn't linger today. You need people in the trenches and it needs to be that practical.

01:04:44

People are going to listen to that and just go, really? Are you really going to go that far?

01:04:51

Yes. If you want to stop. Yeah. I'm committed to going as far as we need to if you really want to fight this.

01:05:02

I'm not going to go half -hearted. If we're going to fight this, let's go all in. That's the qualification. You said if you want to fight this.

01:05:09

So you just say something like Covenant Eyes, for example. It only works if you don't want to watch porn.

01:05:17

If you want to watch porn, you can work around Covenant Eyes like that. It's just one barrier. It may seem silly to someone to have their buddy text them at 830 in the morning.

01:05:26

Hey, let's be on guard today. But if you're trying to kill that sin, that may just be the little push you need to get purity and victory that day.

01:05:34

I've had a number of guys who their life was a rack. And the first thing I said in my forays, access.

01:05:41

Let's be brutal about the access. Like if you're half -hearted about this, it's going to win the day.

01:05:48

And something as simple as Covenant Eyes suddenly becomes transformative. Because what is

01:05:54

Covenant Eyes? It's a shame -based tool. It exposes your internet use to others.

01:06:00

And out of the embarrassment of that, it begins to force you to reconfigure how you use the internet.

01:06:08

Somebody's going to hear what you just said, and they're going to complain.

01:06:14

Shame is bad. Grace is good. Shame is bad. Wouldn't you agree, Deepak? Well, okay. Shame is bad.

01:06:22

They're using a part of the fall to help expose you in a place where because sexual sin is secretive, you hide.

01:06:32

And so it's getting you to live in the light. So the other way I could frame that is Ephesians 5. Don't live in the darkness, and don't give in to the deeds of the darkness, as Paul warns us, but be children of the light.

01:06:45

And be willing to expose your life because a part of that battle is transparency.

01:06:51

And if you can't be transparent, then if you're going to hide things from us, we're not going to win.

01:06:56

We're going to lose that battle. The other parts of the book, just to finish it off with masturbation, is the typical conversation is around singleness and marriage.

01:07:04

And so we have chapters on that. We say things about that. The part that we couldn't find material on is what does the girlfriend do when her boyfriend confesses he's struggling with porn?

01:07:16

When I heard that that was a chapter, brother, I just thought, you can tell that this is a book born of pastoral ministry, not written in a classroom, not in the abstract.

01:07:26

This is stuff born of like, you've been through this a hundred times. Well, and that's probably the situation that most birthed the book.

01:07:35

The number of gals who showed up and said, my boyfriend just confessed. What do

01:07:40

I do? Some of my closest friends, like a week before their wedding, the wife was like, or the fiance was like, oh,

01:07:47

I think we're gonna have to call this off. My fiance just confessed this to me. I don't know if I can marry him.

01:07:53

Yeah. Well, and that's where I wanna get out. I wanna get way ahead of it. I don't want it to be a last minute thing like that.

01:08:02

So I'm working towards guys confessing during dating what their issues are and being clear about their sin.

01:08:12

And the basic thing I argue in there is if you are consistently, and that's key, wrestling with an addictive thing like pornography, you're not ready to lead someone else.

01:08:27

If you can't lead yourself, how are you gonna take responsibility for someone else? So I argue if you're consistently addicted to pornography, then you need to break off the relationship and deal with the porn before you go into dating.

01:08:43

And now a lot of guys are gonna panic because they're gonna say like, I've been trapped in this for years, that might mean I'm never married. Well, no, no, no, no, you need to learn to deal with the porn first, and there are ways to defeat this.

01:08:55

If you get the right help, if you're gospel -minded, you're in a good gospel community, you're getting discipling, and then you make some hard decisions, like cutting off access points, you can see things change, but don't bring a girl into this.

01:09:13

Don't bring then children into this if you're genuinely addicted. What do you do if you're with someone who's two years into marriage and it comes out?

01:09:28

Yeah, I mean, at that point, we believe that marriage is not a mistake. We believe God brought that man and woman together.

01:09:34

We've got two fronts to fight. I mean, one, we got to jump into the trench and help the husband deal with it if he's ready.

01:09:41

And always husband? Well, it's a great question.

01:09:47

There is a growing number of women who struggle with it because the current generation and the...

01:09:56

Help me with this. I think it's alpha and Z. Okay. But you're talking about like Gen X, Gen Z, Gen A.

01:10:04

Yeah, they've grown up on the iPhone. So you've got the first generations that are emerging now, teenagers and in their 20s in college, that all they've known is technology.

01:10:14

I've had my first premarital counseling cases where it's actually both the guy and the gal who have a history.

01:10:21

So it's the first indications of the wave that's coming.

01:10:27

So in the book, we did a chapter on women struggling. And then the final chapter is a chapter for parents helping teenagers.

01:10:36

But that's huge. And so what I want is if a husband comes forward and confesses as you just brought up, we work with the husband, but there's a ministry to the wife who the most common term

01:10:48

I get from the wife is betrayal. And so we got to help her with the war in her heart, work through this, and the husband begin to fight it, and in that sense, help them both through this issue.

01:11:04

Man, there's a lot more we can unpack there, but honestly, how would you recommend...

01:11:09

I mean, so there's rescue plan and then rescue skills. Yeah. And skills is just 22 skills, 11 that the discipler, the pastor counselor need to know, and 11 skills that you instill in the person who's struggling.

01:11:21

And so how would you recommend, let's say an elder team, Sixth Avenue Community Church wanted to use these two resources together.

01:11:28

How would you recommend we use it to train our elders to lead better? Yeah. I think the first thing is the elder board just reads through it together to think through the issue together to make sure they're all on the same page.

01:11:41

Yeah. And just become the sounding board to make sure they agree on how to handle it. We have, yeah, common DNA, common language.

01:11:47

We can point back. We all know this is what the book says. This is what we're going to do. Yeah. And then when you drop down into the specific categories, singleness, marriage, teenagers, women, then you start to think about how does our church minister in these categories?

01:12:03

Where are we doing well? Where do we need to grow? Yeah. Because a lot of churches have been thinking about singleness and marriage, but they haven't thought that much about dating, and they're not ready for the emerging tidal wave of women that are going to show up.

01:12:19

Yeah. So in order to get ready, they need to think through that. So we had... It's just a practical example of...

01:12:25

I had a great conversation with a group of pastors, of which one of the guys in the group from our network,

01:12:31

Mark Redfern, gave us examples of how to adjust your preaching when you talk about sex so that women don't feel like they're left out of this topic.

01:12:44

Interesting. And he gave us really practical examples that a group of pastors looked at where he had to talk about sex because it was coming right out of the text, but how he addressed both men and women who are struggling.

01:12:57

Yeah. Because they don't typically struggle in the same way. They don't, and how to be sensitive to that, but also not to make a classic mistake from the pulpit being able to say things like, well, if you're a man and you're struggling, well, what does every 22 -year -old girl who's addicted to pornography, young woman who's addicted to pornography, what does she do when even her pastor doesn't have a category for her?

01:13:20

Right. Yeah. So how do you address... What language do you even use in thinking through these?

01:13:26

So an elder board needs to go through it together, think about this together, think about what implication it has for them and their own church.

01:13:34

And then if you wanna take the next step, you don't have to read as a board, though you could, then rescue skills is meant to then think about more specifically, now let's get in the trench and think about the discipling.

01:13:45

What kind of questions do you ask? What do you do with the man or woman who's weary because they've been battling for years?

01:13:52

How do you understand shame and how it affects this topic? What about temptations? How do we understand temptations?

01:13:59

That's all the different skills that we're talking about in that book. Nice. Deepak, a big part of your approach to counseling is to get the congregation involved, right?

01:14:14

If there's abuse, if there's addiction, if there's whatever the case may be,

01:14:20

I think I heard you one time say that the goal of every counseling pastor, whether you use that nomenclature or not, the guy on staff who's doing a lot of the counseling work, is to equip the congregation so that he's basically like working himself out of a job, right?

01:14:35

Because every person who's a member of the church has a ministry, and not just exercises the keys of the kingdom on receiving and excommunicating members, but also in actively discipling and caring for members, speaking the truth to one another in love.

01:14:51

And what I've seen from you at CHPC over the years is that you've built a small army of biblical counselors.

01:14:59

Some of them are certified, and they're paid by the church, and they're like your little cadre of helpers.

01:15:06

Some of them not certified, not paid, but like, you know, if this issue comes up,

01:15:12

I'm passing this person off to you. That's been what, like a 20 -year project for you?

01:15:17

Yeah, I mean, it's 16 years at CHPC right now, working through that. So yeah, help us think through how, because there are a lot of pastors out there right now who feel like they're on the fringe of burning out, right?

01:15:32

And like even this conversation we just had about the 22 -year -old girl who's struggling with porn, and my pastor doesn't even have a category for me.

01:15:40

It feels like every time we turn around, there's a pastor, there's another thing that a pastor feels like, oh,

01:15:46

I gotta figure that out, and I gotta figure that out. And God didn't really design the church to be that way, right?

01:15:51

One of the main things the pastor should be doing is finding people in the church who are gifted, that he can give these things over to them and have them help him in his ministry, right?

01:16:01

So help pastors. How can they think about raising up other biblical counselors in the church? Normally this conversation shows up when a guy is exhausted in the ministry, and he thinks,

01:16:13

I can't keep going like this. What do I do? That's when I get the phone call. So I have a call scheduled later this month with three different pastors who are at that point, who are wanting to have the conversation like, what's the short -term goals and what's the long -term goals?

01:16:28

So I'm playing the long game. I'm trying to look at how do we not just equip a few people, which is what we've done.

01:16:38

So we have a team that is more highly equipped to deal with really hard cases, but how do we not just equip the leadership, which is what we've done.

01:16:48

We've come alongside the elder board, around deacons, about small group leaders to help them understand how to be involved in hard things.

01:16:56

But actually, how does so the DNA in the whole church? So that exactly, you're right, the scenario of if a guy is struggling with porn,

01:17:06

I do have somebody in mind, I can say, hey, I need you to start meeting up with him and be invested in him, and then

01:17:12

I'll check in with you guys once a month. But the other part of it is not just to have these

01:17:19

Navy SEALs available. I understand that every member lives in a fallen world.

01:17:28

And so in living in a fallen world, they're gonna run into significant problems.

01:17:34

So a mom's gonna walk in on her son looking at pornography. Right. A brother is gonna have his sister call, and her marriage is a wreck.

01:17:44

Yeah. Like a cousin is gonna hear about his cousin attempting suicide.

01:17:54

A fellow church member is gonna find out one of his small group leaders, one of the small group members actually is struggling with an eating disorder.

01:18:02

I mean, you just go on down the list. I'm not in the room for the first time they hear that or they have a conversation.

01:18:08

Right. I'm not even at the lunch meeting or the family event or wherever it emerges.

01:18:15

And so they need to know as a Christian what to do. Yeah. They just need to know how to be involved rather than what our culture is, what you brought up earlier, pass it off to the specialist.

01:18:25

Yeah. Like we've got an abundance of specialists in this country. Yeah. Like they know, they've been trained, they've got their degree, let's just hand it off.

01:18:33

This is why we have a pastor. Yeah, exactly. That's like, we've got the professional counselor or the professional pastor.

01:18:38

Right. Let's hand all these problems off to them. Who am I to help this person? Yeah, that's exactly right. But if the

01:18:44

Bible, as the one another text describe, says that as members, we have responsibility to love one another, and not just in regular life, but in the hard things, then you just...

01:19:00

And I'd make the theological argument, I can make it a couple of different ways. Okay. Just in your search engine in the

01:19:06

ESV app, put one another and look up all the verses that trace out the relationship of one

01:19:12

Christian to another. Yeah. You read them together, you begin to see the responsibility that Christians have to each other.

01:19:18

We give that list to everyone when they go through our membership class. Yeah, yeah. And so that's where I start.

01:19:24

No, you have a responsibility to each other. The next step is saying, well, you're gonna face hard things, and you're not always gonna have a specialist available.

01:19:34

That's right. And in fact, because it's a family member or a close friend or your best friend, you're gonna be involved.

01:19:42

Do you wanna know what to do as a Christian? Yeah. And that's where I wanna say, I wanna help you know on the front lines, where do you go in the

01:19:49

Bible? What do you say? What questions do you ask? And hence, my whole life, my whole life has been to help believers understand what it means to bridge a gap from Scripture into the hardest things in the

01:20:04

Christian life, and even begin to understand with practical theological wisdom, what do

01:20:10

I do in that moment? And you don't have to have an M degree, an M Div in counseling to be able to do that.

01:20:16

No, no. And my argument is, I'm not trying to make you a counselor. Yeah. I just want to make you a faithful Christian...

01:20:24

Right. ...who knows what it means to deal with the troubles in life... Yeah. ...and come alongside people who are struggling.

01:20:30

I mean, if you're doing that well, I can't tell you how many times I've heard about something in the life of our church, not saying that I'm doing it perfectly, where I've heard about this member having counseled that member through something that never even got to me.

01:20:44

Yeah. And I was like, whoa, oh, I mean, I'm glad that you guys worked it out. I'm kind of surprised, super happy actually, that it didn't get to me that you guys were able to do it yourselves.

01:20:53

Yeah. Well, and there's a selfish motive in this, because if I am a counseling pastor, you can approach it like,

01:21:01

I need to clean up all the trash. But that would quickly overrun and burn me out, overrun my life and burn me out.

01:21:10

There's no way any pastor should be taking that kind of disposition. But I do think it's

01:21:16

God's design, this is not selfishly motivated, that the congregation should learn to care for one another in the

01:21:22

Word, and that's fundamental. So years ago, we had a young lady who struggled with suicidality and had made multiple attempts on her life, and I got the call as one of the staff pastors, as I typically do, and so I rushed to the hospital to get to her bedside, and it was my delight to see that two single women, no counseling degrees, single women in our church beat me there.

01:21:52

They were both close friends, they had both been deeply involved, they both knew the problems in her life, and so when the word suicide came up and her name, rather than back away, they ran to the hospital because they understood this is what

01:22:11

Christians do. This is my job description. This is what Christians do. We step into the hard things and we actually get involved, and it's not my responsibility, so it's not the responsibility of those two ladies to fix this problem, but it is a responsibility as a

01:22:27

Christian to love people in their suffering. And so that's what they were trying to do. So by the time

01:22:32

I got there, they had not only ministered to her in the Word, prayed over her, but when

01:22:37

I arrived, they were playing card games to lighten her spirits. What a delight that is to me as a pastor to see that the members don't back away when the problems show up, but say,

01:22:51

I want a piece of this. I wanna be involved. And it's not just...

01:22:57

Because you can find all kinds of community in this world, but this is what it means to be supernatural community.

01:23:04

Like, this is what a supernatural community is. We care because we think the gospel makes a difference, and so we step in, and love is not efficient.

01:23:16

It is messy, and it takes time to work through some of those hard things.

01:23:24

So that story represents what I'm fighting for. And there may even be a situation that's less severe.

01:23:31

Let's say it's not someone trying to harm themselves. Maybe someone who's struggling with grief. It shouldn't be like a crazy rare thing that a member never has to come knock on your door just because they're being so well loved by other members in their grief.

01:23:47

You'd be happy to talk to them. I think there are two verses that come to mind when having this discussion.

01:23:54

One is always in Ephesians, I think, chapter four, where it talks about the job of the pastor is to equip the saints for the work of the ministry.

01:24:04

So that doesn't mean that we don't shepherd, but it means that I'm trying to equip the members to serve one another.

01:24:12

And then Romans 15, this is probably my favorite one because it's a deeply rooted confidence.

01:24:22

And I actually send this to members all the time when this member is working with that member on something and they'll hit me up and they'll be like,

01:24:29

I'm afraid, I don't know that I'm going to do it. And then I'll just read this. Romans 15, 14, I find, excuse me,

01:24:36

I myself am satisfied about you, my brothers, that you yourselves are full of goodness, filled with all knowledge and able to instruct one another.

01:24:44

Well, let me build off of the one you just said, Ephesians four at the very end in verse 16. This is a saying talking about, into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, which is with is equipped, because the pastors and evangelists and teachers equip them.

01:25:06

When each part, that's the members of the church, is properly working, makes the body grow so that, and here's the purpose, it builds itself up in love.

01:25:22

It and itself are the members building each other up in love.

01:25:28

That's what I'm fighting for, to equip the saints for the work of the ministry so they can build each other up in love.

01:25:36

And that's what a supernatural community is. So pastor, if you're listening to this and you're struggling and you feel burned out and you feel like,

01:25:45

I don't know the answers to all the problems and there's not enough time in the day to get to every counseling situation, it might be time to change your perspective.

01:25:54

It might be time to think about training and equipping the saints to do the job that the Lord Jesus has given them to do.

01:26:00

Yeah, and a long -term perspective would say, I need to do this counseling case, I need to meet with this couple or this person, but I need to dedicate time to equip people so that five years from now,

01:26:13

I've got members in the room with me. And 10 years from now, I've got actually elders and other ladies who are well -equipped to partner with me.

01:26:23

And 15 years from now, I hear about it, but actually I don't need to be involved because our church has got enough people in the trench that they're taking it on.

01:26:33

That's good, brother. Let's move on to maybe a slightly out of left field topic.

01:26:42

Neurodiversity. So this is the new umbrella term under which all kinds of diagnoses can be placed, right?

01:26:54

So ADD, ADHD, autism, help me out, what else?

01:27:00

Maybe even schizophrenia, things that used to be considered disorders, I think in large part due to the political climate of our day, we don't want to refer to anything.

01:27:12

Being fat is not unhealthy, and if you say that it's unhealthy, it's fat phobia. But I recently had someone who's not a member, but who was a member of our church send me an article on that.

01:27:24

And brother, to be honest with you, I'm struggling how to think through it. A lot of it seems like it's rooted in the world of identity politics, so I'm a little hesitant,

01:27:36

I'm a little suspicious. I think we should be able to call things that are disorders, disorder, because even if a person who has

01:27:48

ADD truly has ADD, that's not normal. There is such a thing as normal. So I want to be able to call something a disorder.

01:27:55

On the other hand, I want to be able to minister to people in the church who may have these disorders, and if this is the language that they're being trained up in, and this is the way that they're learning how to think,

01:28:06

I need to be able to speak that language. I don't really know what I'm saying right now, so I'm just going to pass it off to you and let you say something edifying.

01:28:13

Yeah, okay, so let's think about it. We're in the category of psychiatric diagnosis. The DSM, the

01:28:20

Diagnostic and Statistic Manual, is the Bible for psychiatrists and psychologists.

01:28:26

So all the categories you mentioned, plus many more, are all in there, and they set up parameters.

01:28:33

It's like, what do you have? Doctors and psychologists and nurses doing thousands of hours of work with people, and what are they?

01:28:42

They're categories of sin and suffering that conglomerate around a particular reason, issue, lifestyle, just whatever it is.

01:28:55

So pick one. Let's pick major depressive disorder.

01:29:01

It's going to have a number of criteria tied to major depressive disorder.

01:29:07

So a hypo or hypersomnia, like apathy, lack of motivation, fatigue, overeating, undereating.

01:29:18

These are the criteria that they're going to use, and then a number of other things that help us understand why a doctor would look at you or her and make that diagnosis, but it should be a kind of criteria that if that person got on a plane and flew to California and did an appointment the very next day, the doctor would have the same criteria to make the same kind of diagnosis.

01:29:42

So it's trying to create some kind of standardized system, but the key thing for me is, what are they doing?

01:29:48

They're recognizing categories of sin and suffering. Even if they don't recognize that that's what they're doing.

01:29:55

That's not the language they would ever use, that seem to be common or exist within a fallen world.

01:30:05

Now, if you use that lens, you understand that both a combination of my choices and the way the fall affects me, so my mind, my heart, my will, everything

01:30:21

I choose, but also we're embodied souls, the way my body affects me.

01:30:27

There's a mysterious combination there, and some things are more related to idolatry, and some things are related more to my body.

01:30:38

Physiology. And then physiology can play a bigger piece in that, though my heart and mind are never removed, and I'm never going to fall into what

01:30:46

I'm going to call a disease model. I just can blame my body. But on the other hand,

01:30:52

I can't just choose idolatry all the time and ignore my body. So I'm going to take depression as the example, since we picked that.

01:31:00

I'll just create a spectrum for you. And on one side, I'm going to call it situational depression.

01:31:12

Dog died, lost my job. Well, okay. The example I often give with this situation would be,

01:31:18

I'm Asian -American, type A, first child, was in a performance -driven family, grades, education was all the idolatry of my family culture, both my subcultures in Indian and my own family culture.

01:31:35

So if I worked hard and failed in a class or a grade or an exam,

01:31:41

I would be crushed. But what is that? That's my idolatry of the

01:31:47

A. That depression that would follow for days or even weeks afterwards was tied very closely to my sin.

01:31:55

And that's a moral issue that's more acute because it wouldn't go on for years, but it's hence my nickname, situational depression.

01:32:06

Another example, young guy, he's going to pop the question. He's dating this girl for months, and then she drops him.

01:32:17

He even has the ring. He's crushed, absolutely crushed.

01:32:23

Okay. Why was he crushed? And he spiraled into being suicidal the first few days, thinking like, life's not worth it if I don't get to spend the rest of my life with her.

01:32:34

He's not thinking straight. And I've dealt enough guys in that position to know, in two months, you're going to be okay.

01:32:41

But right now, it's crushing. Well, he put her on a pedestal. He made her into an idol.

01:32:48

And that's why he got crushed underneath that. Okay. There's real idolatry there.

01:32:54

And there's a depression that comes, it's spiritual, it's emotional, it's even biological, that comes out of that idolatry.

01:33:04

Okay. I'm going to go across to the other end of the continuum. This is where I'm going to label it as, my nickname on one side is situational, more acute, more tied to my moral idolatry.

01:33:17

The other is dispositional. If you've ever been in a family that has a history of depression, you can see it intergenerational.

01:33:28

You meet someone who I'm going to nickname as the Eeyore of the family. The downcast personality.

01:33:37

My wife's family, you can see this on the maternal line. As a non -Christian, she struggled with depression, her mother did, her maternal grandfather did.

01:33:49

You can trace it straight through and see the intergenerational. So that points to more a biological side to the depression that's there.

01:34:00

Well, okay, then we have to take seriously the biology. What you see more commonly then is a more chronic disposition.

01:34:09

People who will wrestle with this in and out for years. And it's often exasperated situationally.

01:34:15

Well, it can be. And so let me give an example in terms of seasonal affective disorder, which is the DSM category under mood disorders and depression.

01:34:22

Can we insert the clip from the office where Michael Scott just basically says, I thought we all get sad during the winter.

01:34:30

Okay. So now if you think about seasonal affective disorder, what is it?

01:34:37

Depression kicks in in the winter. That's basically what it is. So I have a guy who comes, severe depression, we start working through it.

01:34:45

Okay. Spring shows up and he leaves me. Next year he shows up again.

01:34:51

I wasn't smart enough to put two and two together. Turns out it was the winter, was severe. Spring, he leaves me.

01:34:58

Third year he shows up, I'm like, oh my gosh, this is seasonal affective because you keep showing up in the winter and you keep leaving me in the spring.

01:35:09

Okay. This guy had wrestled with it for years. Now, are you going to tell me that there was some moral sin that every

01:35:17

December suddenly kicked in? Okay, could be. But if you look at the patterns of life over years, you begin, this is the mystery of my body and actually my spirit working in a fallen world.

01:35:33

And so I just want to have a category for that kind of depression, dispositional, which is more chronic in its nature, and then

01:35:42

I'm going to put under a category of suffering. So in this category, I'm going to put more moral -based sin because it's tied closely to my idolatry.

01:35:51

On this side of the more chronic nature, I'm much more empathetic for the nature of the body working in this situation and how it affects a person, how there's not a moral choice that necessarily triggers this, though there are foolish things

01:36:10

I could do that could trigger a more chronic depression. But my body is this mysterious interworking with my spirit in this situation.

01:36:19

I just want to create a continuum. And David Paulson used this phrase with me years ago, and I really locked into it.

01:36:26

It's like complicated suffering. All of life isn't simplistic.

01:36:31

I can't reduce all of life to my idolatry. Right. See the book of Ecclesiastes and Proverbs and Job.

01:36:37

Yeah. There are situations where the body and the body's relationship with this makes this more complicated.

01:36:44

You think about someone who has a thyroid issue, their anxiety is through the roof. Yeah. Well, and I had a thyroid case.

01:36:49

I had a young lady who came and she presented as a severe depression.

01:36:55

I worked through this with her for months, and then suddenly it slips out one day she had stopped taking her thyroid medication.

01:37:03

Yeah. I was like, you're kidding me. Right. Really? Whenever someone would, I used to be a medic, whenever someone would come into the

01:37:10

ER with suicidality or anything like that, the first thing we would do was check their thyroid. Well, and it turned out like she couldn't afford her thyroid medication.

01:37:19

So we got benevolence money, paid for her thyroid medication. It was like, bam. Done. She was back.

01:37:24

Yeah. And I, you know, I'm glad for all the work I got to do with her. I got all the issues related to suffering and a theology of suffering we work through.

01:37:34

And yet, like, look right there. A clear connection to the embodied experience that affected her heart and her mind.

01:37:44

That's right. Yeah. And so I wanna create this category of dispositional depression versus the situational depression, a chronic depression versus a more acute version of depression, a depression that's more tied closely to my body versus a depression that's closely to my adultery in my heart.

01:38:04

Okay. Well, let's take that and let me let you use me as a case study here, for example.

01:38:10

Yeah. This could be scary. Does anybody have a couch I can lay down on? Grab the tissue. So I have dispositional depression.

01:38:20

Had it my whole life. It's gotten much better since I've become a Christian. It's gotten better with age as well.

01:38:26

I've become more handsome and depression has - That's a lie. D -Fact, you said as soon as you saw me today how good

01:38:33

I was looking. That's another lie. Okay. You got a lot to confess on Sunday. So dispositionally, right?

01:38:41

I'm always struggling and I actually see it a little bit of my eldest daughter, right? But environment impacts that a lot, right?

01:38:48

I grew up in horrendous house full of drug addicts and all that stuff. My daughter doesn't. So when I see her go into Eeyore mode, it's very different than what

01:38:56

I was like at that age. But even now, the reason why I say sometimes they go together is because whatever that disposition is, it means that I'm at a higher risk.

01:39:08

It's easier for me to slip down into the slump. Now, thankfully these days I come out of it faster as well by God's grace, learning how to preach the gospel to myself, take advantage of the means of grace, all that stuff.

01:39:19

But because of my disposition, there are things sometimes surprising things that will situationally cause me to slip into a depression easier than I think they would other people who don't have that disposition.

01:39:30

So I've got categories which I lay out for folks who come in with the more chronic dispositional depression that I lay out for them.

01:39:37

One of them is I'll say called context. And to use the term, for example, a young guy sleeping in a basement apartment, no windows.

01:39:50

Right, no sunlight. No sunlight. And he's only doing that because he's got free rent versus an upstairs room with lots of windows, lots of sunlight, that's actually with a house full of Christians.

01:40:05

Yeah. It's not hard to understand that that first situation, because he struggled with a chronic depression, he's more vulnerable for the depression to be triggered in that first situation.

01:40:21

And so the context matters. And not only does he not have sunlight and living in a basement, but he's having to do that because he's struggling financially, which can also...

01:40:30

Oh yeah, well, financially and also like the roommates make a difference. Yeah. Like having someone who knows he's struggling with depression to be able to walk into his room that morning saying, come on, get up.

01:40:40

We're going to face the day. Yeah, come on. So living in a house, context matters.

01:40:45

Okay, now the thing that's going to apply to all of us, but can be exacerbated if you're careless with the depression, eating, exercise, sleep, and routine.

01:40:57

I put all of those there because we all should care about them. But for example, if you are sleeping five hours a night and you should be sleeping eight hours a night, and I've done a lot of reading on sleep because people in DC chronically have bad sleep habits.

01:41:16

All the experts say you should be fighting for seven to nine hours a night. That's the range you should be shooting for.

01:41:23

And anything less than that, you're actually beginning to do damage to your system. You're going to have a hard time finding health issues, hard time thinking clearly.

01:41:31

It's all the things that are there. So sleep, you need to develop good sleep habits. And there are things you can do to make your sleep better.

01:41:39

Exercise, you need to do that for the sake of beginning to...

01:41:44

It's like a restart of your body. Most depressed people exercise because it engages the embodied part in a way that helps enliven them.

01:41:54

As someone who's struggled with depression and who uses exercise consistently to help fight it, and who has noticed, by the way, when

01:42:01

I don't do it, it's major. There's even a sense in which there's something about taking ownership of your suffering, assuming you work out, not just walking on the treadmill for 20 minutes.

01:42:13

I try to bike multiple times a week. And I go from our house to the

01:42:20

Lincoln and back. So I have a four -mile route and a six -mile route. And I did that last night between nine and 10 o 'clock.

01:42:26

And so there's a sense in which there's almost like, I'm going to put myself through the suffering and come out on the other end.

01:42:32

I'm going to get those endorphins. I'm going to see the fruit of perseverance and endurance. And there's a mental aspect to it that's not just, oh,

01:42:43

I'm doing something physically to my body that helps. There's also something spiritually and mentally that helps.

01:42:48

And then you add in the last category, which is eating. Junk in, junk out.

01:42:54

Good stuff in, good ways in which you enliven your body. These categories, plus I'd add sunlight and community.

01:43:02

So you do context, community, sunlight, and then all these basics of sleep, eating, exercise, routine.

01:43:10

I put this under a bigger label of managing the depression. There are, as image bearers,

01:43:18

I have agency to be able to make choices that can help me fight the chronic nature of the depression.

01:43:25

And it's not all out of control. Now, there are seasons, like seasonal affective disorder, where my body does mysterious things and it causes me to spiral.

01:43:35

But that doesn't mean I have to give in. There are choices I can make, which is

01:43:43

Blake Boylston, who was on our staff, has been very public and has written a lot, has spoken a lot on his chronic battles with depression.

01:43:53

And when Blake was on our staff, he had a month where he spiraled out and his depression got very severe.

01:44:02

What I realized, because I learned a lot from Blake on this, a lot of what I've learned came from my interactions with him and what

01:44:09

I learned from a godly man fighting this, what I came to recognize is a lot of these categories

01:44:15

I just laid out for you, how diligent he was in fighting for those things in order to get out ahead of the depression.

01:44:24

Right. And to stay ahead. And stay ahead of it. That doesn't remove, like he did spiral out with a month where it got much more severe, that in a fallen world...

01:44:34

But a month ain't that bad with severe depression. Compared to years of struggling with it, which is what he had struggled with.

01:44:40

I learned a lot from Blake in some basic things you can do. And I just put it under this label of,

01:44:47

I can fight the depression. There are ways I can begin to manage it if I'm willing to put in the work.

01:44:53

So let's state it positively. If you're attending a healthy gospel preaching Bible believing church, and you're surrounded with loving

01:45:00

Christian friends, and you're basically eating well, and you're exercising, you're out in the sun, and you're doing all these things, it's going to be pretty hard for you to fall into the pit of despair.

01:45:10

Not that it can't happen. Yes. I'll switch the word. Rather than hard, it'll be harder.

01:45:18

Yeah, there you go. Because if I have a chronic depression, I am always vulnerable. Just like you think of an alcoholic, you don't stick an alcoholic in front of a bar.

01:45:27

Yeah. Even if he's been off alcohol for 10 years, because you recognize the vulnerabilities and the temptations that come.

01:45:38

Well, same thing. Even if I've had a good few years, I'm still vulnerable if I make reckless choices.

01:45:46

It's gonna kick in. And I'm still vulnerable because there are things out of my control that could affect my body.

01:45:55

Yeah. But I have power because God's given me ability as an image bearer to fight it.

01:46:02

Amen. And brother, I want to lean into that because sometimes... I caught a lot of flack.

01:46:08

I wrote a review of a book for the ERLC about a pastor and his struggle with depression. And there was something about the way he was talking about it that made it sound like there just wasn't victory.

01:46:20

Not only could he not fight it, but again, I'll just filter this through the lens of my own experience.

01:46:26

Even though I still think I'm always gonna be more inclined towards it, I think by God's grace over the last 17 years of walking with Jesus, my new baseline is so much higher.

01:46:37

So on the one hand, yes, don't put someone who used to be a raging alcoholic in front of the bar. But also, by God's grace, eventually that person should grow in grace enough that they can be at a dinner with people drinking wine and it doesn't bother them at all.

01:46:50

Right? Well, an alcoholic can be a little bit different in that some of them being at that dinner might be too much.

01:46:59

Some of them, yes. Okay. But some of them can be there and they're fine. You're right. What I'm pushing back on is

01:47:05

I grew up in... My grandma was one of the founders of Narcotics Anonymous. So I grew up going to NAA meetings and their whole thing is once an addict, always an addict.

01:47:14

And it's like your permanent identity, there's no victory. And listen, dude, I did a lot of drugs.

01:47:21

I'm not a drug addict. And I was severely addicted. That doesn't mean I'm gonna go hang out with people smoking crack.

01:47:27

Yeah. Right? Okay. Well, so let's go back to the DSM categories on these labels. Okay. One of the typical problems with these labels is people over -identify.

01:47:38

The label becomes their primary identity and supersedes their identity in Christ.

01:47:45

So what should be primary, that I am a treasured possession of the

01:47:50

King of the universe? That should be central. I love

01:47:56

Him and Him being central to my life, Him being foundational to who I am, both how

01:48:02

I think and how I live and what I choose, even what I feel. Him being central to that gets pushed off the throne.

01:48:12

Christ is no longer at the center, and this becomes more fundamental to my identity.

01:48:18

So I had a young guy who was struggling with OCD, had been diagnosed with it, and I'm pressing him to take ownership of things in my life.

01:48:26

And he would keep coming back to me, no, I can't, because I'm OCD. And he would fight me.

01:48:32

No, I can't, because I'm OCD. And though there were things in which that OCD diagnosis was legitimate and things that he had to learn to fight, there were things in which he quickly used...

01:48:46

Let me say it this way. There's a way in which he used the diagnosis as an excuse to remove responsibility, to fight it.

01:48:53

And I'm okay, because what are these categories? They're descriptors of sin and suffering, but they're not prescriptions.

01:49:07

That descriptor doesn't solve the heart issues and the battle in my mind and the battle of my body.

01:49:16

And so I understand that the gospel does, I understand that scripture gives us a lot to learn how to fight these things.

01:49:23

And even common grace wisdom in the world. And even common grace wisdom. There are lots of practical choices that I could make, not live in the basement apartment with no sunlight, with no roommates.

01:49:32

Yeah. Science has told us we need vitamin D. Yeah. And so therefore, there are choices I can make in order to gain more agency and learn to fight these categories of sin and suffering that not only take over my life, but on the other side of it, can ruin my life.

01:49:55

And I am not willing to give in, because I do believe if you're still fighting for breath and you're an image bearer in Christ, by faith, you have a choice to fight.

01:50:10

Amen. We have had a very fruitful discussion about depression, and yet somehow we've gotten away from neurodiversity.

01:50:17

How did that happen? Is this something that like... Like, okay, explain to me what you understand neurodiversity is.

01:50:24

Yeah. So, well, that's part of the problem, I think, is nailing it down. It's an umbrella term for OCD, ADD, things like that, that used to be called disorders, but now in light of, again, identity politics, we can't call it a disorder, right?

01:50:40

We have to say that it's just on the spectrum of human experience. And this may not seem like it's super relevant, but again,

01:50:49

I had someone who's a member of my church send me an article basically saying, we have to do a better job of ministering to people who are neurodiverse.

01:50:58

Yeah. Okay, so let's think about that, because it's a more politically correct way to label sin and suffering.

01:51:06

And so if we get our theology into the conversation, because essentially, neurodiversity is explaining a godless way to deal with problems in a fallen world.

01:51:19

Because if my descriptor of these categories are true, they're conglomerations of sin and suffering that we need to learn how to honestly engage.

01:51:32

And if the descriptors are helpful, because they're descriptors, they help us categorize things that we experience in a fallen world.

01:51:42

In that sense, a label is useful to understand what we're fighting, but it's not the prescription.

01:51:49

Well, okay, if you wanna call it neurodiversity, and you're gonna try in a politically correct way...

01:51:58

You're gonna try to normalize it. Normalize the abnormal. Right. If that's what you're trying to do, there's a sense in which

01:52:05

I'm okay with not putting these people in a bucket where they're no longer image bearers.

01:52:11

Yeah, which I assume no one would say that they're doing. Who have abilities to make choices, who have abilities to grow in faith, to learn to fight things.

01:52:19

So that's where there's a way... There's a sense in which the normalizing the abnormal, which is agreeing with the theological categories that make us all...

01:52:30

Humanity as God intends us to be, which is image bearers, who has abilities. But there's a way in which actually normalizing the abnormal, you're trying to turn down the icky stuff, the sin, the stuff that gives them an identity that could be shameful.

01:52:48

You're trying to make this more politically correct so that the guy who actually committed adultery, or the guy or gal who's been severely addicted, or the alcoholic,

01:53:02

I want them to just feel okay with the rest of us. I feel like they're part of us. If what you're doing is turning down the reality and gravity of sin and the weight of suffering, then you're not doing a good thing.

01:53:19

Yeah, there's even a sense in which... And sorry, I know you didn't come here to have this long of a conversation about it.

01:53:24

I was just... I wanted to pick your brain about it. But the desire to not call it a disorder when it very clearly is a disordering of God's natural, normal creation, it seems like it's trying to tell a lie about the sinfulness of sin.

01:53:40

Not even saying that the person, let's say with ADD, is in sin because they have the

01:53:45

ADD, but it's a result of sin entering into the world that this person has ADD. At some level, it's sin that has caused this disorder, and I wanna call it a disorder because it is a disorder.

01:53:56

I don't wanna try to shape it in positive language. Yeah. Well, and yes, but I'm gonna argue for the two categories.

01:54:03

One, sin, because it is a disorder, it's not what God intends. But what you just said, sin, as it affects all of us, actually turns into suffering.

01:54:14

Of course. So the guy who didn't make an immoral choice, but suddenly his body turns into a storm, which is terrible.

01:54:29

And he's overrun with not only the feelings, but the explosions of the thoughts and the emotions.

01:54:35

It's like his life turns into spirals downwards. He didn't make a choice, but the fall has affected him.

01:54:45

Yeah. I guess what I'm getting at is, so when we talk about racial diversity in the church, we're talking about red, yellow, and everything brown, everything in between, and we're talking about a diversity of very good things, very morally positive things, or maybe we could say morally neutral things, right?

01:55:04

Like someone's age or whatever. When we're talking about neurodiversity, we're taking diversity, and now we're trying to make diversity a spectrum of things that aren't normal and good.

01:55:15

Well, yeah. And then what you're doing is you're putting a positive label on sin and suffering.

01:55:20

That's right. There we go. Yeah. Okay. And you're trying to turn down the temperature of the awkwardness, the shame, all the things that get tied to this topic and make it more palatable, more acceptable, more easier to embrace.

01:55:37

And in a culture where everybody's got a therapist, and it's actually become more popular to do this, and it removes some of the stigma and shame that's been tied to it for years, it's not surprising that the culture is trying to find more ways to make it more acceptable.

01:55:56

Deepak, I guess we're going to do this now, because let's talk about Christians and therapy.

01:56:04

Yeah. So Nietzsche predicted a world in which Christianity was gone, but he knew that humans weren't going to be able to rid themselves of their fundamental religious impulses.

01:56:15

So he imagined that the clergy would be replaced by like a psychological clergy, like a

01:56:21

Freudian priesthood. And I think we're starting to see that in the

01:56:26

West. I mean, I won't say names, but I saw a pastor recently, actually somebody that we both know, who went live on Facebook and was just trying to encourage all the

01:56:37

Christians in his life to go see secular therapists. This is not meant to be a conversation about secular therapists in particular.

01:56:45

I'm sure some of them are great and do a good job. But it seems like if you step back and look at it from like a meta perspective,

01:56:55

Christians are going to therapy a lot more, and they're looking towards secular psychological models for help.

01:57:04

And it's pretty concerning. Do you feel any of that same concern? I mean, it's very concerning, because let's just lay a couple of things out there.

01:57:11

Number one, there is a range of Christians who are out there as therapists, and you've got the range of people who really do believe their

01:57:20

Bible, who love Jesus, who faith is a fundamental part of their work.

01:57:25

But there are tons of people who they carry around the label of Christian, but they have wholeheartedly a psychological framework, and it is secular by nature, and it is godless fundamentally.

01:57:41

And yet, because they have the label of a Christian, Christians show up and get help from them, and yet essentially what they're getting is they're getting secular wisdom...

01:57:52

With a thin veneer... With a thin veneer of Christianity on it. That's atrocious.

01:57:58

What I mean, brother, even worse than that, at least it felt like 10 years ago when people were going to...

01:58:04

The debate between Christian counseling versus biblical counseling, fine, that felt like an intramural conversation, but now

01:58:11

Christians are just saying, they don't have to be Christian at all, just go see your therapist. I mean, this guy who was a pastor basically just said, every

01:58:19

Christian should be going to see a therapist once a month. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So it is common, it's much more popular.

01:58:26

I think, as you keep hearing me say, if you really want to deal with sin and suffering, we've got to find a way to make the

01:58:35

Bible central. Amen. To that conversation. I love that you keep beating that. Yeah. And so what

01:58:41

I'm looking for is, I'm fine for a therapist to be involved, but here's my caveats.

01:58:48

Okay. But here's the caveats. I don't want it to replace the humility and the willingness to follow gospel centered leadership in your own local church.

01:58:58

Yeah. And would you even on that note, would you say, hey, brother, hey, sister, start in the local church?

01:59:04

Oh, yeah. And that's where we're going. It's like, fundamentally, if the church, the local church is supposed to be a part of God's plan, the central place in which you plant your life for spiritual growth and nurturing, it's the central place you should go to get your help for your relationships.

01:59:25

It should be the central place in which you learn to not grow up just spiritually, but emotionally, and build all the connections between work and family and marriage and parenting and just all the things that you learn to do in life.

01:59:39

Well, so I'm okay... Let's give an example where a therapist might be, and again,

01:59:46

I'm gonna go back to my term partner. I don't wanna replace the local church, but I'm okay with partners that come alongside the local church to help.

01:59:56

Okay. So can we pause right there? Yeah. So when I'm thinking about partners, I wanna make sure, and not all partners are morally equivalent in spirit, right?

02:00:06

Yeah, that's right. So if I'm working with someone on depression, and the person that we're partnering with is their physician who's keeping an eye on their blood work related to their thyroid, that's one thing.

02:00:15

It's another thing to partner with someone who's trained in the secular, godless worldview of Freudian psychology, right?

02:00:23

Yeah. And so what I'm looking for, my ideal in terms of partner, a doctor, a counselor, domestic violence shelter, executive director, just across the board, the different kinds of partners we can work with,

02:00:38

I'm looking for someone who's gospel centered, who's got a clear commitment to scripture, who personally has a reformed disposition, and personally, who loves nine marks.

02:00:49

Okay, all right. Let me throw that in there. Yeah, right. If I can get all four... Boom. That's gold, but how often do

02:00:56

I find that? I mean, I'm just looking for, to begin with, I'm looking for a Christian who loves the word.

02:01:02

So what if someone wants the partner to be a non -Christian? Okay, but there are situations where I have to make choices and partner with non -Christians.

02:01:08

Okay, okay. So we'll get to that in just a moment, but I wanna portray my ideal. I wanna keep interrupting you, because I know you miss

02:01:15

Mark. Sorry. So I miss him in more ways than one.

02:01:25

So I want that kind of partner. I can't always get that, especially as we talked about earlier, under -resourced communities.

02:01:32

Yeah. So if I have a member who is severely struggling with depression, and I need to go get a doctor to check out their thyroid,

02:01:41

I don't have any Christian doctors in my community. Right. I have no reluctance to send them to a non -Christian doctor, because their competencies in dealing with the body, they're essentially a doctor of the body.

02:01:52

Yeah. I'm a doctor of the soul. Right. And yet, it's when that secular doctor starts stepping into the categories that overlap with the

02:02:02

Bible that there becomes a competition. Right, right, right. Same thing with the therapist. Okay.

02:02:07

When a secular therapist starts speaking into categories that clearly overlap with the

02:02:13

Bible, like just talk about marriage and parenting, and they give their view like, oh yeah, if you don't like your wife, and it's going bad, you just divorce her.

02:02:23

No. Yeah. No, there are few exceptions, but you can't get out of marriage that quickly.

02:02:30

And a therapist might help you for a while work at your marriage issues, but then be much more open to divorce than we ever would be.

02:02:37

Yeah. Then it becomes a competition between the authority that God has put within a local church to help you sort through these things biblically, and an outside authority figure, a therapist or a doctor who speaks in, many of whom come from ungodly frameworks that now go against the

02:02:59

Bible. But because you've developed a personal relationship and a trust for that authority figure, you now listen to them, and yet you don't recognize how secular some of their wisdom is, and how it doesn't actually line up with what the

02:03:15

Bible says. So I have red lights flashing when my member goes to, say, a secular therapist.

02:03:23

Do you ever tell them not to? Well, yeah. But my goal is actually to be able to provide enough help in our church that's got a high level competency.

02:03:31

You don't ever need to do that. Yeah. You're gonna karate chop through this table, man. I know. My kids say

02:03:38

I do this chopping motion all the time. I like it. I'm here for it, man. I actually kind of hope you do break the table.

02:03:46

So I am out in front of it. If for any reason they have to go see a therapist outside of our circles,

02:03:54

I am fully engaged. I'm a primary care. I'm a generalist.

02:03:59

I'm gonna... A guy's working with me through the church, but...

02:04:04

Because he gets free therapy through his work. He's actually getting some help there. Every session, he's giving me a summary, because if he gets garbage,

02:04:13

I'm gonna get out ahead of that. I'm not gonna let him digest that, because I feel like that's a part of my shepherding responsibility.

02:04:20

If a member's gonna go see a secular therapist that's gonna do damage to them, I'm gonna just tell him, no.

02:04:25

Why are you gonna do that? And I am very... I'm very guarded of our members, of taking in things that are unhelpful for them that are gonna go against what we're trying to do in terms of our gospel ministry.

02:04:41

So yeah, there's a lot of things I'm concerned about in going to secular therapists. Does that mean

02:04:46

I never partner with someone outside of our own local church? No. No, of course not. Yeah. But does that mean

02:04:52

I have great caution about who people go to, because it becomes competition between the voices that are biblically minded within their own local church?

02:05:04

I'm not even talking pastors. No, I get it. Yeah. I'm talking about their best friends who love the Bible, who are trying to speak into their life, and yet the doctor says, or the therapist says something completely godless, and in a weak moment, they can buy into it and think that's the way to go.

02:05:23

Why do you think, maybe you haven't thought about this, why do you think there's been, in the last five to ten years, such an increase in Christians seeking out secular therapy?

02:05:37

Because it seems like there's been a resurgence in biblical counseling. I mean, it seems like seminaries and biblical counseling is more popular than it's,

02:05:46

I shouldn't say ever been, but it seems like it's increasing. So the hope would be that as biblical counseling got better in churches, that we would see less of this, but it seems like it's only increasing.

02:05:56

Yeah. I don't know if... I'm sure there's always a conglomeration of factors, so we can throw a couple of things in.

02:06:03

The sensitivity of our culture to the issue of abuse is probably one factor contributing right now.

02:06:10

The fact that we have problems that other generations haven't faced, like pornography addiction, that's so pervasive.

02:06:20

The pressures of technology and social media, and what it does to people.

02:06:26

I think all of these things can contribute to people recognize that they can't do it on their own, and so they reach out for help.

02:06:36

What's easier to do is to not be honest in your own local church and to go pay a professional friend, which is what a therapist is.

02:06:46

Yeah. He's a professional friend. Somebody you can cut off anytime you want to, if you need to. Yeah, and there are huge dangers of it.

02:06:53

So I dealt with the secular part, like the godless wisdom that you're going and you're submitting yourself to, but there are also concerns like, oh, you know, therapy is an isolated piece of your life that you get to control because you give the frame.

02:07:13

And that's counseling in 1D, versus our executive pastor, as he and I were sitting down with a couple who were trying to wrestle with, should

02:07:21

I go to a therapist outside a church or do counseling here with pastors and other counselors and disciplers within my own local church?

02:07:30

He said, counseling in a local church is like 3D. We get all kinds of bits of information on your life.

02:07:38

There's all kinds of things we see into your life because we're doing it in community. And so there's a fuller expression of this that we get to do, versus there's some dangers in doing counseling outside of your church.

02:07:52

There are blessings, I'm really grateful for people who partner with us, but there are some real dangers because I can go in and convince a therapist of almost anything because of confidentiality.

02:08:05

They can't see into the rest of my life or talk to anybody else. And I've run into that issue a lot when it comes to then members getting therapists on their side and suddenly the professional is arguing their case, yet the professional has no contact with the rest of their life.

02:08:23

And yet I'm open to... Take the scenario that this is most ideal and helpful.

02:08:30

A church planter who's got a small congregation, who doesn't have an elder board, so he doesn't have much of a leadership team, who's overwhelmed, and he has an addiction show up, like a porn addiction, he has an alcoholic show up, he has an adulterer show up, he's quickly overwhelmed.

02:08:52

All right, if he can find Gospel minded partners who won't take things in confidentiality but will cooperate with him and will be completely open with the leadership of that church and work with that church,

02:09:07

I have deep sympathies for that church planter or that brand new pastor or that young immature congregation and green pastor to be able to actually partner with those in their community with the long -term goal

02:09:24

I said earlier. 15 years from now, he wants to have enough people and resources built up in his own church, he doesn't need to do that.

02:09:33

Yeah. But that's where short term, we gotta have a plan, and a lot of guys need to partner with resources in their community, but they stop there.

02:09:43

A long term, if they did both, they work towards changing the nature of their church, building up future elders, actually building up men and women in the church so that they've got a

02:09:56

Gospel community that's willing to embrace the hard things, then we really wanna see both short term sympathy for hard situations, immature churches, new pastors, or even young pastors learning how to fight this, and find those

02:10:11

Gospel partners along with them. That's where I got room, and some smaller communities, they don't have a

02:10:17

Christian counselor. Yeah. But hey, back to what you said earlier, thankful for the pandemic. Yeah.

02:10:23

And so there's online resources. That's right. Now, almost every biblical counseling practice that I know has a staff member that does online counseling.

02:10:32

So there are people out there who are willing to do it, now there's a whole practice, it's just online.

02:10:40

Now there's a whole trauma practice with Gospel -centered people, it's just online.

02:10:46

Would you recommend one... Like if a local church pastor is like, hey, I see the vision,

02:10:51

I wanna train up a small army in my church of everyone feeling competent to counsel, but until then

02:10:57

I need some help, I need to send some people to... Give me one recommendation of a place to send my people. Do you have someone that you guys trust?

02:11:03

Yeah. So HeartSong Counseling is a private practice. Say it slowly. HeartSong Counseling.

02:11:09

HeartSong. One word? One word. HeartSong Counseling is a practice in our area.

02:11:14

Okay. Fieldstone Counseling. One word. A one word.

02:11:20

Fieldstone Counseling would be another example. Okay. Crosscare Counseling.

02:11:27

Yeah. I could go on... That's great. Anchor of Hope. Three, four. I could go on down the list of their different practices in different parts of the country that actually are not just one or two or three counselors, but are actually a whole team working together in that community, and often they have an online counselor.

02:11:47

Great. So they're resources now available if you're in a small under -resourced community, that if you begin to develop partners in your own local community, but now even online, that can be partners with you to help serve and work with you as a pastor.

02:12:07

Yeah. The post -pandemic effect is that they're there. Yeah. That's good, brother.

02:12:14

We've talked a lot about a lot of things today. I think one of reasons why I appreciate you, brother, is that you're such a careful and clear thinker.

02:12:21

We've talked about some pretty thorny issues, and this is kind of the whole point of the podcast, room for nuances.

02:12:29

Some of these issues, people are trying to talk about them in soundbites, you know, in five minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, but you need more time.

02:12:37

You need room to be able to elaborate, to nuance, to qualify your statements. I'm saying this and I'm not saying that, but I am saying kind of this with a couple of caveats.

02:12:49

And brother, I think you've been exemplary for us in how to think well. I know we have a lot more we could have talked about.

02:12:55

We have your book here, Build on Jesus, A Comprehensive Guide to Gospel -Based Children's Ministry.

02:13:01

We have On Guard, a book that you wrote on preventing and responding to child abuse at church. Seems like this is more relevant than ever, more relevant than maybe you even knew when you wrote it.

02:13:10

That's exactly right. Unfortunately. Yes. And so maybe we'll have you back in a few months to do round two and talk more about this stuff.

02:13:18

But brother, we feel well served, and I think this has been really edifying. Well, thank you for the time.

02:13:24

It was a delight to see you and have the time together. Let's pray. Lord Jesus, we ask for your grace at the beginning of this episode, like we do at the beginning of every episode, and it feels like we have received it.

02:13:36

Your Holy Spirit has led us into truth. We pray that if there's been any error spoken during this conversation, that you will protect our hearers, our viewers from it.

02:13:48

And Lord, we pray that however many people tune in to hear this conversation, they will be strengthened and challenged and to have more clear thinking about these matters so that your name will be the church will be built up.

02:14:04

We pray these things in the name of Jesus. Amen. Amen. Let me record my immovable conviction that this is the noblest service in which any human being can spend or be spent.

02:14:36

And that if God gave me back my life to be lived over again,

02:14:43

I would, without one quiver of hesitation, lay it on the altar to Christ that he might use it as before in similar ministries of love, especially amongst those who have never yet heard the name of Jesus.

02:15:03

Right now is appointed in the

02:15:37

Bible to have its unique place. It's one thing. It's called preaching. Do we have a

02:15:43

God who wants to be understood? Who is God enough to communicate in a way so that humans can know him, love him, worship him, and be saved by him?

02:15:55

Can it really be true that a faithful believer can experience all of these things?

02:16:00

And the answer to that question from the scripture very clearly is yes. Why do we come to church?

02:16:06

Why do we hear the word? Why do we read the scriptures? We are looking for God. Are the words of scripture actually what they're meant to be?

02:16:14

We're now at a point in time where people question whether scripture is clear. What we are most accountable for is our handling of the word of God.

02:16:24

We are called to faithfully preach the word. At 10 of those, we want to serve the local church by equipping your church family with great resources that are going to point them to Jesus.

02:16:43

So we'll come and set up a pop -up bookstore in your church. There's no charge. We'll come for your

02:16:48

Sunday services. Maybe you've got a weekend retreat or a conference. We would love to come and then make recommendations.

02:16:57

This is one I've read three times now. It's called Incomparable by Andrew Wilson, and he goes through 60 characteristics of God.

02:17:06

It just wonderfully takes our eyes off the world, off ourselves, and puts them on our

02:17:12

Savior. Now we've got lots of things for families and kids. For parents,

02:17:17

I want to recommend this series. This one is Raising Kids in a Screen -Saturated World. Our passion is to get good books that hold the

02:17:25

Bible read by as many people as possible. We hand -pick our bookstore.

02:17:30

It's curated so we know everything we sell will point to the Lord Jesus. Everything's discounted.

02:17:37

And as we make recommendations, we're seeking to serve your church family so that they may be excited and equipped to read good books.