When Secular Counseling succeeds 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. This week on the podcast, we want to answer one of the questions that we have

received from some of you who listen to the podcast. And the question that we're talking about this

week goes along the lines of, I believe in biblical counseling. I believe that the Bible is sufficient for biblical

counseling. And I believe that what people really need when they need help is Jesus and the Word.

And yet, I'm aware of these stories, and then you could fill in the blank with the story,

where secular counseling has succeeded. And what do we do when we see people who are committed to secular

therapy and their councilees get better? Well, that's what we're going to talk about this week.

And first of all, as I answer the question, I think we need to describe the dilemma.

On the one hand, we must acknowledge as Christians that God gave us his word and his son to

address our problems. That's the reason that we have the Bible. That's the reason that we know of

the grace in Jesus is to address our problems. And the fact of the matter is that as human beings,

we were not created to solve our problems

in any other way, apart from the Bible, and apart from the grace of Jesus.

And so that is the fact that every Christian must confess.

On the other hand, we are aware that secular therapeutic techniques that do not depend on Jesus and do not depend on the Bible often help people improve with a specific problem.

And we could multiply examples here.

I have shared on this podcast, the story of my mother who came to quit drinking through the intervention of Alcoholics Anonymous. We could talk about

the effectiveness of cognitive behavioral therapy, which has been verified both anecdotally and

empirically across all kinds of studies. And so if we want to find evidence that secular therapy

...