What makes me the way I am on this edition of Truth and Love?

I'm Heath Lambert and you're listening to Truth and Love, a podcast of the Association of Certified Biblical Counselors,

where we seek to provide biblical solutions for the problems

that people face.

Our guest on the podcast this week is Dr. Jeremy Pierre. He is the dean of students and the

associate professor of biblical counseling at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary

in Louisville, Kentucky. He is an ACBC certified counselor, and he has a new

book out called The Dynamic Heart in Daily Life Connecting Christ to Human Experience.

And we're here this week to talk about an issue that is fundamental to humanity, and that is

the issue of why do we do what we do? Most of us have had moments in

our life, many of them, where a thought has gone through our mind or something has come

out of our mouth or we've done something crazy and we've said, why did I do that? Or why did

I say that? Or why in the world would I think that? Why is it so important, Jeremy, for people to understand why they are who they are, why they do what they do?

Why is this something that we as Christians should be concerned about?

Well, we should be concerned about understanding ourselves and knowing who we are largely because we were created by God

to be stewards of how he made us. So it's interesting because if you read the Genesis

account of creation, God had a conversation with Adam and the topic of that first conversation

was actually not God. It was actually not the world. The topic of that first conversation was

Adam himself. So God told him who he was, how he ought to function in the world that God had

created. And so without that verbal exchange, Adam would not have understood who he was. It's interesting that God didn't preload

Adam with the knowledge he needed to understand who he was. He had to hear God's words in order to

understand it. So when we read the Bible, we don't read it as robots. We don't read it divorced from the context of who we are. We read it as subjects, subjects to a king, subjects who make decisions, who believe certain things, who want certain things. So stewarding who I am

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