Spirit Empowered Counseling 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.

And known by many of you, I'm excited that Scott Mel is here with us today. He's an elder at

Cornerstone Community Church out in California. He's been there 15 years, and he's an ACBC certified

member. He's also the author of Loving, Messy People. And I'm excited to announce that

IBCD, one of our certified training centers, is working with Scott to turn that book into a

curriculum, a small group curriculum that's going to be helpful that released in October.

And so we're excited to announce that here on the podcast. Scott also teaches biblical counseling at Eternity Bible College in Simi Valley. And so, Scott, we're so grateful that you're here, brother, and to talk about this very important, some people assume this topic, but a very important topic that we need to continue to keep fresh in our mind. So thank you for being here. Absolutely. It's great to be here. Great, great to see you, Dale. Now, as we think about biblical counseling, I just mentioned that all of us would respond to say, yes, of course, we should do spirit empowered counseling. But the more and more we do this, Scott, you and I both know that how easy it is to think, you know,

somehow that maybe we're doing this on our own, or we start to utilize different things

that are out there that sort of move us away ever so slightly from a dependence upon the

spirit. I mean, if we talk about biblical counseling, we would assume this ought to be

spirit empowered, but sometimes it's not. So it's not all biblical counseling, we would assume this ought to be spirit empowered,

but sometimes it's not. So is not all biblical counseling supposed to be spirit empowered?

Yeah. And, you know, I think that's such a great, this is such a great question because I think that

we assume a lot of things. And when we assume that it's included, right, when we assume,

really, when we assume anything that is ultimately biblical,

ultimately God honoring about our biblical counseling, we, we're in danger of forgetting and engendering it in our counseling. This is true simply about biblical counseling, right?

All counseling, if you're a Christian, all counseling should be biblical.

But we've needed to clarify to say, wait, counseling needs to be biblical in its content.

And so we also, I think, need to clarify and make sure that we're talking about how, if counseling is biblical in its content, it also needs to be spirit led,

spirit empowered, spirit filled, because the word of God, not empowered by the spirit of God,

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