The following resource is from desiring God.org.

I feel honored and humbled and vulnerable and exposed

and exposed to speak to the American Association of Christian Counselors. I don't think I could think of any other audience that would be more likely to see straight through a speaker

than you would. And I take that to be a good thing. It puts hypocrisy on the

table immediately. It makes true horizontally what we all know is true vertically all the time

namely God knows totally all the time whether any speaker is a fraud or a hypocrite so you may as

well know as well if he knows.

It's a wake-up call to speak to people like you. I've never done anything like this before.

A wake-up call to the realities of pretense in my life, suspecting that any attempt at

schmoozing would be known right away?

So I thought I would spare you the analysis and just go ahead and tell you up front that I'm a sinner. And I'm a man who, to be more specific, must crucify the love of praise every day.

A man who struggles with the same 15 year old adolescent fears at

age 63, namely the fear of looking foolish.

A man who is prone to self-pity

and who feels it quickly when he doesn't get loved the way he wants to be loved,

who's almost never sure of the way he uses his time and therefore pretty regularly is all dealing with guilt

feelings. A man who is short on compassion and long on critical analysis, a man who is prone to

freeze up emotionally when he's tired and then feels instinctively justified in

blaming it on somebody else. A man who loves to praise God in the great assembly and feels a constraint on my spirit in my own living room, a man who has loved his wife for over

40 years imperfectly and spent three of those years with a Christian counselor trying to learn how to be Christ and the church

to each other, a man who never feel sure of his motives, including the ones I feel right now about why I'm doing this.

And you're a very strange audience because I totally did not expect laughter and I'm

...