Living confidently in God 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 to the problems that people face.

And this week on the podcast, I'm delighted to have with us, Pastor John Crock. He is the pastor

of Faith Bible Church in Sharpsburg, Georgia. He's been there for 26 years, and he's married to

his wife, Lynn, of 31 years. He has three daughters and a son. And we probably should not forget the granddaughter

as well, which is a passion of John's heart for sure. And he serves a church that is an ACBC

training center. Listen, I'm so grateful for the work of pastors who continue to foster good, healthy,

biblical soul care within their church and use this as a ministry to minister to

their own people, but then also to those in their community. And it's evident by the work that

they do there. But today I want to talk about a new book that John has released with P&R. It's one of

the 31-day devotionals, and the title is Hope living confidently in God and so John I'm

really excited to talk about this topic I think we we talk about this in much

the same way sometimes the church does the gospel is like okay we got the gospel

I think we're gonna go we're gonna move on to something else like we can never do

that right the gospel is always necessary in everything we do sometimes we have a tendency to talk about hope in the same way in the counseling room. Yes, we're going to give you hope in the first session, and then we're sort of going to move on to more advanced stuff. Well, like, it doesn't get more advanced than hope. We need to anchor ourselves in the hope of Christ. So I'm excited that you've written this book and re-centered

our heart and mind even on this idea of hope. So I want to just ask you, even as a pastor,

what is the importance of hope when we think about it, particularly in counseling?

Well, hope is really only important if you've got problems. And so if everything is going great all the time,

you actually don't need hope, you know, quote unquote, but obviously everyone has problems. And so we need to

have confidence that God is for us and he's got better things for us as we move forward into the future.

This, of course, is especially relevant for those in our counseling ministry.

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