Ministry to Abusers 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.

It is Monday, January 1st, 2018, and I am thrilled that this year at our ACBC annual conference

in October, we are going to focus on one of the most important topics that Christians can be

concerned about,

and that is the topic of abuse. I want to invite you to attend that conference on October 1st,

second, and third in Fort Worth, Texas, and we are going to show you what the Bible says

about how to care for those who are afflicted with the plague of abuse. We're calling the conference

Light in the Darkness, Biblical Counseling and Abuse. And I am thrilled that this week on the podcast,

we have one of the speakers at that conference joining us. He is Dr. Dale Johnson. He is the

assistant professor of biblical counseling at Southwestern Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas.

He is a member of the Association of Certified Biblical Counselors,

and he is going to be speaking to us at the conference on the importance of ministry to abusers.

We are glad you're with us, Dr. Johnson.

Thank you, Dr. Lambert. It's great to be here.

One of the things that is interesting to me is when we think about the topic of abuse, we almost always think about doing ministry with those who have been abused.

And we absolutely want to do that. We want to draw near to people who have

been hurt by domestic, physical, sexual violence. We want to draw near to them with the love and the

care and the truth and the comfort of Jesus Christ. But as Christians, when we think about doing

ministry in the context of abuse, we cannot only think about those who have been abused.

We have to think about doing ministry to those who are the victimizers, those who have done the abuse.

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