de-stigmatizing addiction 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 me, Dr. Mark Shaw.

He's a pastor of counseling at the Nockety campus of First Baptist Church in Jacksonville, Florida.

He's the founder of the Addiction Connection, a nonprofit equipping ministry for addiction for biblical counselors.

He's the author of 28 publications, including the heart

of addiction and the latest one, which we're going to talk about today, called De-Stigmatizing

Addiction, Hope Through the Gospel. His passion is to see local church offer compassionate biblical

counseling to hurting souls. Mark, you're familiar to many of our listeners. So glad that you're

with us to talk about this important booklet that you've released. And welcome to the podcast today.

Thanks, Dale. Grateful to be here. Now, we could go a lot of different directions as we think about

stigma. If we were to just talk on a plain secular level, Mark, and have this conversation,

stigmas are probably the one great problem.

Well, there are lots of problems in the mental health world, but one of the primary problems

that the mental health world knows they've created and they don't know how to get rid of it.

Because at some point that you say that someone is abnormal, you create some level of

stigmatization. I want us to dive in because you're

pinpointing this area in terms of addiction. You do a lot of addiction ministry. And so I want us to

explore this idea of stigmatization. What do we mean? Let's start by describing it this way.

God actually, I would say, hates this idea of

stigma, in part because people are made in his image. So describe in the booklet how you unpack

...