Critical issues in biblical 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 to the problems that people face.

Today on the podcast I have with me, Dr. Ernie Baker. He's a fellow with ACBC and the senior adult pastor at First Baptist Church in Jacksonville, Florida. And he also serves as a director of

training with overseas instruction in counseling. And he's the chairman of the undergraduate

degree program in biblical counseling at the Masters University. He's married to Rose, and they have six children, five of which are married,

and they have 14 grandchildren. He's the author of a number of books and articles,

including being the editor of the new critical issues in biblical counseling series by Shepard

Press, which is exactly what we're going to talk about today, Ernie. I'm so grateful for you, brother, and looking forward to the rest of this series coming out and looking forward to our conversation today. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you, Dale. I always appreciate the opportunity to talk with you. Yeah, really looking forward to our discussion today. I've been excited about the two books that have come out so far in this series, and you've worked tirelessly on these things. You have written one, and Heath has written another. And there are a few more to come out that I'm excited about. Talk just for a second about the motivation of these books and a particular need to have discussion that these

books will address? Well, we all know that there are discussions going on in the broader

biblical counseling world about what we believe. And we have been concerned for a while about

how to address these in ways that especially people in

ACBC training can understand. And we'll talk more about the target audience, but I was really

motivated to help people in our phase two training understand the issues and be discerning. And then we all know that the mental

health world in the United States is in question. There's a lot of questions being raised.

And so we wanted to help people understand what are the issues. And I think another thing I would add is people are on the line.

It's all about people.

Everybody wants to help people.

So the two great commandments, how do we love God and how do we love others?

And it's really a deep motivation of my soul to glorify the Lord.

So I hope and pray that the whole series glorifies the Lord.

It would be hard to explain to you how many times I've committed the series to the Lord and said,

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