Biblical friendship on this edition of Truth and Love.

I'm Dale Johnson, 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.

I am thrilled today to have Dr. Kevin Carson here with us, a long time and faithful brother

in the movement of biblical counseling. He is a professor of biblical counseling at the Baptist

Bible College and Theological Seminary in Springfield, Missouri.

He's also a pastor at Sunrise Church in Ozark, Missouri. And Kevin, we're so grateful that

you're here to spend a little bit of time with us today. Thank you for the invitation. It's a joy to be

with you and certainly to serve ACBC. Can you just explain for us this idea of what it means to be friends,

what it means to have biblical friendships and true biblical accountability?

My thumbnail definition of a friend is someone who walks through life together in wisdom, essentially.

It's someone who is there when days are good,

when days are bad. It's someone who helps you. It's just an individual who loves you enough

and cares for you enough to just walk with you. And I think there are key friendships I've had

over the last 40 years that have served me well. And there are times friends that haven't

served me well, right? There's the good and the bad of friendships. And as you and I both know,

as you watch the headlines, there's a number of pastors, biblical counselors, and just people,

Christians in general, who needed friends. And when someone needed to speak to him, no one was talking.

And so it's certainly a concern I have that as brothers and sisters in Christ, we learn the

value of friendships. Yeah, I mean, that's so true when we think about how important our friends

are. The scriptures talk so much about even the things that we hear from other people and the

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