Is someone you love suicidal 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.

Life is precious. God makes human beings in his image and gives them souls that never die.

Each life, because of that theological and biblical truth, is of inestimable worth and should be honored as such.

But in a fallen world, we disregard life.

We disregard life at what's called at the edges of life, with abortion, with euthanasia.

But we also disregard life sometimes in our very own lives as people

who are struggling with difficulty seek to end their own life. And what we want to talk about

on the podcast this week is how we would recognize whether someone we love, someone we know is at risk of suicide. This is an

important issue to observe for a couple of different reasons, not the least of which, is because

everybody, all of us, will be sad at some point or another. Discouragement is a common malady of the soul. We all go through times of

darkness and difficulty. And yet not every period of darkness and difficulty is a period where

someone is at risk of the kind of despair that would result in them ending their life. And so as we interact with our loved

ones and our body of believers, in our family, in our circle of friends, we as Christians

have a responsibility to recognize when someone has crossed the line from what we might call a

normal or an understandable or even an acceptable level of

discouragement to a kind of despair that could lead to them taking their own life. As we try to

understand the warning signs of suicide, I want to pay attention to scripture and see how we

ought to recognize a suicide risk in biblical categories.

We read about a number of suicides in Scripture. We read about Abimelech in Judges 954,

who had a stone dropped on his head, and his shame at having a report of being killed by a woman. To avoid that, he ordered

that he would be put to death. And so he was run through at his own command. We read about

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