Is it sin or is it not 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.

This week on the podcast I have with with me Keith Evans. He's assistant professor of biblical counseling

at the Reformed Theological Seminary in Charlotte, North Carolina, and he's also an ordained pastor.

Keith has been teaching at the seminary level since 2018, and he's been in pastoral ministry

since 2011. He's married to Melissa,

and they have four daughters. Currently, Keith is completing his PhD in biblical counseling at the

Southern Baptist Deological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. Keith, welcome today, looking forward to

discussing how we discern whether something is sin or not and how we approach that as biblical

counselors. So welcome today. Thank you so much. Now, this is a constant topic. This has been a topic

since the beginning of our movement in its modern sense, is how do we categorize something, right?

Rather it be sin or not. And I'm interested to see where we're going to take this discussion today. We tend to think about these actions oftentimes as being super straightforward, right? Is, okay, we can categorize this as sin. We know biblically how we're going to approach this. So we're going to categorize this as suffering, so biblically we know how we're going to approach this. Is it that easy, though? Is it that easy and so straightforward in every situation? It's a

valuable question, certainly. It's an essential question, but is that the only type of question we

should be asking when we're considering whether an issue is sin or not? Yeah, those are great

questions. And this is where I was helped in my studies at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, completing my T.H.M and Christian ethics.

In the biblical counseling world, we're always doing ethics.

But I don't know if we think about it in those terms.

And so this is where I was served by studying kind of the philosophy of moral categories and seeing how all of this is brought

the bear on a given action. And so just to introduce some additional categories, like yes,

of course, an action can be sin or it can be a moral good that we ought to do it, or it could

just be an indifferent action.

And the scriptures speak about that, whether we eat meat, sacrifice to idols, right?

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