Answers to your counseling questions part two 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.

Last week on the podcast, we spent some time answering your questions about counseling-related

issues, and we didn't get to very many of them at all.

And so this week on the podcast, I invited Sean Perron to come back.

Sean is the operations director at ACBC. He makes the trains run on time here. And Sean,

we're glad to have you back with us to pose more counseling questions from our listeners. So what are we

doing this week? Last week we talked about getting to heart issues

towards the beginning of a case, and we talked about ending a counseling case and what to do

when a counselor is not doing their homework. You talk about giving hope as one of your sessions in

the fundamentals track. Tell us, how can a counselor give hope? and should they give hope? Is it crucial to the counseling

task? Yes, we talk about hope in biblical counseling because it is crucial to give hope.

By the time somebody comes for a counseling conversation, they need hope,

even if they don't know they need hope. Because it is the nature of a counseling conversation

to try to solve a problem, and it is the nature of problems in our life to drain hope out of our

lives. And so it is a crucial task for a biblical

counselor, whether that biblical counselor is a paid professional, whether they are doing ministry

in the context of the local church, whether it is a friend talking with a heartbroken other friend

across a living room table. It is crucial to give

hope. One of the things we want to say, though, if we're going to give biblical hope, is that the

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