Heaven's Hope 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.

Well, here it is the day that we have had circled on the calendar for about 18 months,

where today is the day of our annual conference and our pre-conference in Memphis, Tennessee,

at Bellevue Baptist Baptist Theological Seminary. And so I'm delighted

today that we're going to talk in our pre-conference about human suffering and heaven's hope.

So I want to spend just a few minutes talking about my goals, my ideas about the pre-conference.

I really want us to focus on heaven's hope. I want us to focus on eternal

hope. I think one of the things that's happened, at least in the world in which we live in,

counseling has taken a shift secularly, no question about that in the early part of the 20th century.

And that shift really took focus on earthly remedies.

So I think it's incumbent upon us in the biblical counseling movement to make sure that we stand

firm in our Christian convictions and that we not allow earthly remedies to satisfy what we pursue

when we try to help people through their human suffering.

I think it's important that we first identify human suffering is real. In a lot of different ways,

in a lot of different forms, sometimes because of the consequences of personal sin, and we all are

unfortunately very familiar with the consequences of our own

personal sin. The strife, the difficulty that increases in our life, the Bible says the way

of the transgressor is hard. All of us are very familiar with that, even experientially,

that our transgressions, our iniquities,

our sins complicate life. They make life more complex. They make life more difficult, more muddy.

...