evangelism and biblical counseling 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. One of the issues that we address in biblical counseling all of the time is the relationship

of evangelism to biblical counseling. This is an issue that comes up all the time. I have questions

about it literally everywhere I go all over the world, and I have asked the operations director of ACBC to be with us again this week to talk to us about some of the questions you have about evangelism and biblical counseling.

Sean, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks, Heath.

One of the questions that is important is you do mention that these two topics relate to one another. Simple question, how? How do they relate?

Okay, so counseling is a conversation. That's what counseling is. I mean, you can have a much more complicated and technical definition than that. You can

explain it in as complicated a way as you want. Many of us have written books about this conversation.

So I don't mean to say, in calling counseling a conversation, I don't mean to be simplistic in that,

but it is a conversation, a series of conversations between someone who has questions, problems, and trouble,

and another person they believe to have answers, solutions, and help.

And so it is a conversation.

Jesus Christ, the Apostle Paul, the entire corpus of the New Testament canon, demands over and over and over again that Christians use their conversations

to point people to Jesus Christ. If I'm having a conversation as a Christian with another

Christian, then when I use that conversation to point you to Christ as another Christian, then we would put that

under the category of discipleship. If I as a Christian am having a conversation with someone who

is not a Christian, my job is to point you to Christ, but my pointing you to Christ in that context,

we would place under the category of evangelism. And so evangelism and counseling go hand and glove,

because counseling is a conversation, and Jesus intends for us to use all of our conversations,

...