Well, we are concluding our course on Biblical Counseling this morning. This is number 30 of the 30-week course. You might recall that the first eight weeks we spent looking at the foundations and methodology of Biblical Counseling. Then we took a few months break and returned to various topics of the elite, you were part of the foundations class of the Buddha Council, so well done. And we're going to conclude on something that might not seem very important, might consider whether you should have gone over to the other room, but we're looking at the topic of homework. Just another announcement, classes are joined and we'll just be doing one class out of there for the year. It'll be one class at a time, not just one class for the entire year. Now that we've laid the foundation of counseling, we'll have a piece of, we'll have some bit of a counseling element each year and I'm going to do counseling through Habakkuk in May. So that'll be our counseling class. We'll begin in John's literature in there. We'll look at 1st through 3rd John and then John's Gospel. We'll do that for the first couple of months together. So, next week don't come into this room. There won't be these chairs, Lord willing. These are the ABF room, big one. So, what I thought we would do is first review biblical counseling what it is, what it does, and then we'll look at the topic of homework. So, I'm going to read Colossians 3, 12 through 17. This is in the context of putting on the new man. You have the Ephesian counterpart in Ephesians 4, the put off and put on. Here we have Colossians 3, 12-17. And above all these, put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. And be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly. teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs with thankfulness in your hearts to God. And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through Him. Let's pray. Our great God, pray that this morning we will see the value of homework, that we will see, be reminded of what we do in biblical counseling, and that this is for not just professionals, but this is for every Christian as we seek to do the one and only ministry that you've called your church to. Help us, Lord, to employ these truths that we're going to learn in God-honoring and Christian-edifying ways. In Jesus' name we pray, amen. Colossians 3 is a very important text that you often see in the context of just laying the foundations for biblical counseling, and I did refer to it, use it in the beginning of the class, but here are a couple points. Just looking at verse 12, put on then as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. Well, I guess the whole thing. I did break it into two sub points, but anyways. So what counseling is, does, and promotes? This is one another ministry. Remember, you cannot counsel another person if the other person's not there. There has to be another person with whom you are dialoguing, whom you're trying to aid. Does anyone recall just the general description of what biblical counseling is? We used the working definition, I guess you could say, that we used at the beginning of the class. You can look back at your notes if you want. I know you keep all 30 sets of notes in front of you. It was a definition provided by Heath Lambert. Counseling, he says, is a conversation where one party with questions, problems, and trouble seeks assistance from someone they believe has answers, solutions, and help. There are many other definitions of counseling, but that's just a good definition we've been using. So counseling is one another conversation. It is thoroughly and abundantly scriptural. See that with, let the word of Christ dwell in you richly. Allow God's word to inhabit you, but not superficially. Richly. We want the word of God to abide in us. We want to abide in the word of God. Counseling requires wise teaching. Teaching people in all wisdom. There's no such thing as teaching less counseling. There's going to be some kind of teaching, some kind of doctrine, some lesson that the counselor is trying to give the counselee. Counseling attacks sin. This is one of those distinctions from biblical counseling and non-biblical counseling. we acknowledge that there is sin. That's a huge reason for a person's problems. Could be his own sin, could be the sin of others, could be living in a world that has been cursed from the fall. So there is sin, and because of that, there will often be admonishments. Counseling promotes singing. Talked about this in a few of our sessions. Singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs. There's something special that God has used singing in counseling. This is not necessarily that you would sing in the counseling room together, though you might. But remember, for you all, the context is most likely not, you know, these are air quotes for those listening, who will listen, professional counselor and counselee. You're going to be sitting in a coffee shop, you'll be at home, be in a room together, You can sing all you want together. It is a good thing to do. Counseling promotes thankfulness. In those verses, you see just twice that emphasis on thankfulness. There's that one sentence in verse 15, and be thankful. I guess there's more than one thanks there. And there's verse 16, with thankfulness in your hearts to God. Verse 17, giving thanks to God the Father through him. Thankfulness is very important aspect to highlight in counseling. Talked about how contentment conquers consciousness. That was one of the lessons. And you cannot be content without being thankful. And if you want to destroy idols, you must be thankful. Counseling is heart devotion, quorum Deo, before God. And your heart's to God. We are speaking about glorifying God. That's our major aim in all of life. Therefore, it's got to be a major aim in counseling. And the person has to recognize that he is living for God. Not just before his spouse or his co-worker, his boss, his children, whoever he's having these primary problems with. He is primarily relating to God. And the same goes for the counsellor. He is accountable to God. His counsel is being held accountable to God, the wise counsellor. What Bible counselors do in counseling? We counsel as one loved by God, set apart, and chosen. It's wonderful that you have that common ground with a counselee, assuming the person is a believer, usually. Usually believers alone go to believing counselors for counsel, not all the time, but you have that common ground. At least on the surface you might find out that the person really doesn't trust in Christ, and that's something that you would address in your interactions with that person. But we do have that common ground, thanks be to the Lord, that we have been loved by God. that he has set us apart from the world, he has chosen us in love, that we might be holy and blameless before him. We counsel with hearts full of compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. Counselors should not be approaching the counselee with this idea of, you know, I can't believe you did this, you are beyond any kind of redemption, shouldn't have the mindset that you're not going to help the person, otherwise why are you there? You have compassion, you see the sin, the ruinous effects that sin has on that person, whether the person is the offender or the offended. So you have compassion and you're humble because you know that you don't have the answers in yourself, but God does. And you do so with patience as well. You know that God is patient with you in your sins and you're not a perfect counselor. You're not a perfect human being. God is patient with you, so you are patient with the counselee. You don't just yell at them, stop it, I can't believe this is, How dare you come into this room sitting again the same way? No. We counsel by bearing with one another. We try to take the loads of another. See that in Galatians 5 and 6, what we can handle. We counsel by bringing real complaints against another while also promoting forgiveness. We don't deny when an offender has offended someone. And if we are dealing with the offender, we point them to reconciliation with the offended. We say, what you did was sin. You need to go over there and you need to apologize and you need to express your sorrow, ask for forgiveness, seek ways of reconciliation. We counsel with love and promoting love. We counsel loving the person. and encouraging that person to love as well. We counsel with Christ, our peace, ruling our hearts, and promoting peace. We counsel with thankfulness, and we counsel with God as our chief and at heart. So that's just a review of biblical counseling. I wanted to go through that pretty quickly because that isn't the actual focus of this, but that's a good way of concluding this course by reviewing some of the things with that text in mind. Yes, sir. and the counselor, what do you want to call it? Getting, I guess, frustrated. I guess the counselor has to remember that since they're saying that sanctification has to take place in order for the root of the issue to get done. And preacher can't sanctify that person. A counselor can't sanctify that person. Sanctification is the work of God. and just be more faithful to just do what you're doing. Like you said, have God as our chief in that heart. Yeah, and that's how we define success in counseling is the degree to which we are being faithful to what God's word calls us to do in action, in our behavior, and then in our actual counsel. We can encourage and we can admonish and impress and plead and all that, but the Lord has to do the work. This is not to say that we don't call the person to work out his salvation with fear and trembling, we do. Remember that God, who is sovereign over the sanctification of man, uses means and calls humans to be responsible for their living. But that's a great point, Omar, because you can get quickly frustrated when you say, well, I've checked all the boxes, I've done all these steps, why is this person not perfect? I'm leaning heavily for most of the rest of this document on a webinar from Randy Patton. famous, I guess you could say, biblical counselor, top dog in the counseling movement, older man who's seen a thing or two, and he did a webinar on homework. A lot of these notes are inspired by that. And he mentions that there are six elements of biblical counseling. There's data gathering, which by the way is continuous, but when you begin a case, when you begin talking to someone, you have to ask questions. You have to gather what's going on. And once you've gathered that data, those data rather, then you discern the problem. And yes, that means discerning the presenting problem. Why are they there? Surface level manifestation of the problem, but you don't stop there. We've talked about this. You try to look at the heart of the problem. You build involvement. What does that mean? You show that you are a human being who cares for the person and you maybe begin with some small talk. And you can involve yourself in the lives of your counselees to the degree that you can. And in your case, these are already people that you're involved with, right? It's not like somebody is a stranger and is coming to you for counsel. Usually this is your brothers and sisters that are in the other room or friends, family who are coming to you or that you come to for help. So you already have that involvement that's been organically built because of the relationship you've been building. But it's a little different if you're seeing somebody for the first time. they have to trust you, they have to know that you actually care and that you are knowledgeable and that you're committed, involved in their lives. A very important element of counseling is giving hope and hope ought to be given with each interaction and that hope is going to look different based on the case People are depressed, they're centered, but we always have hope to offer them. Hope in the midst of their trials, hope in the blessing of forgiveness of sins, hope in a future glory that awaits us. There's many things that we could point to to give the person hope. Also, an element of counseling is instruction. We need to instruct. the person's coming to us. And then homework, which is what we're going to look at today. I know when you hear the word homework, you see the word homework, you run away. What is this? This is awful. And this is not just me as a former teacher in the school system who loved giving homework, now trying to put it on all y'all, okay? No, this is a valuable, very important, it is a necessary element in one anothery, in counseling. Homework could be, I guess, loosely defined as assignments, activities, actions, projects, et cetera, that engage the counselee with his problem. They are doing something. They are working on something that relates them to the problem. They are engaging in some kind of activity. And the sky's the limit on this. There's so many different kinds of things. And you'll see it's all centered around Scripture. Otherwise it wouldn't be Biblical counseling. Homework is necessary regardless of the phase in the life of a counselee. Remember that fourfold process of change that we've talked about? Based on 2 Timothy 3. Just to show that you know the fourfold. In no particular order. What are they? All scripture is God-breathed. Prophet for? Corrections. I'm hearing it. Training in righteousness is the last one. It is. Teaching and punishing. Yeah. Teaching is rebuking. Corrections is training in righteousness. There's more than four, that's why. Yeah. I don't know which ones you're talking about. So there's going to be homework in each of those phases. If you need to teach somebody, because they're ignorant, and that's one of the categories of a counselee you'll see on the document. The person might just be ignorant of what the Bible teaches. So, it might be a new Christian. They might have made a profession of faith and have been a Christian for years, but they really don't let the word of Christ dwell richly in them. You just have to teach them. Counselees have problems from the very beginning of their Christian life to the very end. So you might catch one at the very beginning who just needs to be taught. But you might have a mature Christian who needs to be taught. I said I believe that. you know, gave you a statement of faith. Do you believe it or not? Say, yeah, sign up on that. Okay, but it seems like there's a disconnect between your life and this teaching. So let's revisit this teaching. So regardless of the phase, there is homework that needs to be done. And do note that you are likely dealing with many topics, especially as you keep gathering data. It would be wonderful if the person only had, say, an anger problem, and that's all you had to deal with. I came in here for anger, so handle my anger problem. Well, you're going to find out as you keep talking that there are other issues. There's fear. There's probably this pride. What's going on? You have to dig deep. As you continue to gather data, you're going to see You're going to be reminded of the complexity of the human being. And that a lot of these problems are connected. So you handle them. And this is why it's really important to address the heart. Because when you do address the heart of the problem, you usually kill many birds with one stone. So maybe somebody comes to you because that person has a drinking problem. That's the presenting problem versus an alcoholic. I think if you're a wise counselor, you don't go straight to the behavioral change and say, okay, I need you to get rid of all the alcohol from your home, which might be a piece of the puzzle. drinking right away, you might, and I would say, you would address the rationale behind the drinking, and get a history of the person's life, start talking to them about how they handle problems, how they solve problems, how they deal with grief, suffering, and relationships, and you'll find that if you address that, and they are being sanctified in that area, you'll realize that by the time you get to actually talking about the specific drinking, it might not be that big of a problem at that time. So, handling the heart of the problem is very important. Goal in mind, how do I want this counselee to be when he graduates counseling? So when you and the counselee stop having those intensive one-on-ones regularly, not saying you'll never interact with that person again, right, but you've come together for the purpose of addressing a particular problem or two, how do you know when that person's done? That's a question we'll look at in a little bit, but you won't know if they've reached that if you don't have a goal in the beginning. What would it look like for this person to be set free in this area? That's an important question you have to ask. Some characteristics of effective counseling. Effective homework, it actively uses the Bible. There is reading, there is memorizing scripture, meditating on scripture with writing things down, journaling, listing. There's researching, researching a particular topic. you would want to encourage the counselee to read his Bible. Ask the counselee how often he reads the Bible in a given week. I find that with many of the counselees that I have, their Bible reading is very poor. I read it maybe once a week. I don't have any particular intentionality. I just, if I have time, I read it. Well, that's gonna be a problem, isn't it? And there are those who say, oh, I read it every day. Okay. Well, how do you read it? That's another important question to ask. So walk me through a given Bible reading session. You have your Bible open. What makes, what, what, determines what book you read, and how much are you reading, and what are you doing. Are you coupling that reading with prayer? Are you making observations? Are you making any personification? What are you doing with the reading? That's going to tell you a lot about the person's commitment to allowing the word of Christ to dwell richly. You might ask the person to do some research. Sometimes it's good to get a whole Bible view of a given topic, maybe on money matters or on anger or fear. So you say, find 10 verses that address the issue of anger and summarize, and we'll come back together and we'll talk about those passages of scripture. Effective homework emphasizes biblical knowledge and understanding. has to be that biblical worldview through which the council sees all of life. We're constantly being bombarded with an anti-biblical worldview through all these media and we need to of our living and thinking. So, counseling and homework that is effective is going to have that whole biblical worldview perspective. It also pushes application of scripture to counseling's life situation. Obviously, this is not just a general application, it's person-specific. That's one of the benefits that counseling has over, say, the preached word. In preaching, you get these categories of people when you're seeking to apply the scripture. What about older, younger, or people who are struggling with this or with that? Well, you don't have to guess. When you have a counselee right there, you know the person's problems, so then effective homework addresses head-on that person's life situation. It is specific. People change in specifics, not generally. So if you're dealing with someone who has a bad relationship with his wife, you don't just say, It's true, he does need to love his wife. It's a command. Can you get any more specific than that? I do love my wife. I let her have a piece of this every night. I allow her to make me dinner. I give her the opportunity to submit. I love her. Okay, well what exactly can you do? How can you love her? And the Bible gives specifics as well, doesn't it? Yes, you see it in Ephesians 5, you see it in 1 Corinthians 13. Okay, love is patient. Okay, that still is general. You do want to command him, you need to be patient with your wife. Well how can you be patient? What if your wife has taken longer with making the food than you expect? How can you be patient? What can you do in that time to be patient? You can thank her for what she's doing. Yeah. You can assist. You can assist. So that could be an important problem. A person's got this problem. Man, I'm just really upset. My wife never puts food on the table at the proper time that I want. and you recognize that she's doing this, and that, and that, and that. And maybe you recognize that you have no reason to be impatient. And say a nice prayer of confession of sin. And aid your wife if she wants you in the kitchen. Effective homework is carefully reviewed and discussed in subsequent sessions. So the counselor is going to realize if this homework is important based on whether or not you actually talk about it. This does not mean that you have to go over everything that you assign, because sometimes it's these ongoing readings of scripture with some personal notes But asking the person about the homework and reviewing it, walking through it in the following session is effective. And one of the things that I tell my counselors is, and I don't say it like meanly, but don't come to me So I phrase it this way, if you need more time to get the homework done, then that's fine. I want to make the best use of our time together, and this homework is going to lead us to that. So if you need an extra week, that's fine. You're still working on it? OK. But in order to maximize our time together, I want you to do this. Effective homework encourages key spiritual disciplines And here are many of them. We've talked a little about them already. Systematic scripture reading. Patton says the goal that he has for his counselees is to have them reading the Bible five times a week. Ideally, seven times a week, right? Whenever I assign homework, I have that as my, I'm expecting that they are working on their homework five days out of the week. I give them a couple days of buffer, I guess. A Lord's Day would be a wonderful time to be focusing on the homework, but sometimes it's busy with other Lord's Day activities. So give them the goals five times a week. They might not be reading the Bible well five times a week. They might be doing it just once, so then incrementally encourage them to read it three times. And you see that they're doing that five times. Be specific about the what, when, and how often. I want you to read this passage and that passage. I want you to read it at this time. You tell me when is the best time for you to read scripture. You have to give it to them in that way often. Remember, people coming for counseling don't have it all together. Not that the counselor has it all together either, but the counselee is in a worse position. And that's in large part due to poor scripture reading and meditation on scripture and prayer. And just a secret of the trade here. He's left, but maybe you can get it on the audio. Counselors are not doing anything really, really special in one sense. It's not like we have all these tricks, all these aces up our sleeves. What we're doing is we're encouraging people to do the things that pastors encourage people to do day in and day out. Just read the Bible, pray, sing, take the Lord's Supper, contemplate baptism, be with one another, live as a church, and serve people. So you see these things right here and say, wait, hey, I hear that in these sermons. So Pastor Owen, You're right, it isn't. Yes sir? You know, I know you guys already read Colossians 3.16, and you would know 5.18 is a corollary to that. They correlate. But it's just, as you were just saying, having the Word of God dwelling in you, Richard, people and loving each other and singing to each other, all that kind of stuff. 518 describes that as being filled with spirit. So you ask about specifics, you know, someone will say, well, I just feel dry, I just don't feel like I work in my life. Well, you're going to come back to the same things. Have you been reading? You're actively trying to memorize scripture. You're trying to get the word of God dwelling in you richly at a fingertip and meditating on it. It may seem humdrum, ho-hum, whatever you want to call it, but that's the very way that God is working in your life. That's the very way the spirit goes through the work. And that's how you're filled with the spirit. It's not sitting in a corner, navel-gazing, emptying your mind or whatever. you know, these days it's filling your mind with the Word of God and that's how you're going to be filled with the Spirit. Absolutely. And people are going to... What verse were you referring to? Ephesians 5. I thought you said Colossians. There's a parallel in Ephesians 5. Colossians 3.16 and Ephesians 5.18. Well, do you have a TBI? If so, then maybe you do have a poor ability to memorize something. But if you don't have something like that, then God has gifted us with minds that do need to be massaged, used. exercise, and when they're not, you might think you don't have the ability, but you can if you work slowly at it. So if you do take, say, one verse, and you work on it for a few minutes every day, you can memorize that eventually. Some people, they can memorize it that day. And others, it takes a week or longer. And if it takes a week or longer, oh well, You've memorized it. You're putting God's Word in your mind that hopefully you can then reflect on and apply. So don't allow that kind of excuse. I don't have time to read the Bible. I don't have the ability to memorize scripture. Well, that's what God calls you to. Let's shave off some time. Let's look at your schedule. And one of the things that I've done with people is give them a time sheet and chart all the time that you spend on every day. This is what you do on Sunday. You sleep, and then you get ready, you eat breakfast. This is what you do on Monday or Tuesday. You go to work for these hours. You go to the gym. OK, so now what are you doing with this half hour? Even with that hour. And what you find normally is people are doing things that they don't have to do. Maybe they're on Netflix or they're just playing some games on their phone. Not bad things in themselves. I think there's a time for that stuff. Gotta watch The Mandalorian, right? Just finished the Sanctuary episode last night. So that's fine. But it's not fine if you're doing that instead of what God calls you to. God doesn't call you to watch The Mandalorian. It's as good of a show as it is. So I use resources that explain and apply scripture. All those booklets that I have in my office and I've mentioned in all these notes. Those are based on Bible passages and sometimes it's a systematic approach, sometimes it's just looking at one psalm or one given text like Matthew 18 and you have 30 or so pages of handling this topic to this text. Use those. Use those well. And homework is thoughtfully considered and tentatively prepared prior to counseling session. So you don't just come up, you don't just pull out of your hat whatever you think is a good idea. You need to give it time to devote what you think would be the best for this person for this week or for these two weeks, however long a gap is going to be between your next meeting. Whenever I conclude a session, for the next 30 minutes, I'm reviewing that session and considering what I'm going to have the person do for the next week or two. If it takes you a day or two to decide to guide the person that you're interacting with, that's fine. But it's tentatively prepared because sometimes when you talk with a person the next time, they say something that you didn't expect and you realize that's more urgent, let's talk about that instead. We'll get back to the other thing later. So you don't give them homework as soon as the session is done? You take time to digest it? If I am familiar with the case and the topic well enough, then I'll Say, okay, let's just, I'll get into homework, typically right then, but, and that's usually if we're going through a particular book of the Bible. You read James 3, and now we're gonna go to James 4, so read that five times in the next week. What was that? So, yeah, some counselors, Maybe most, actually. They have the homework already in mind for the next session that they just give to the person at the conclusion of the session. Unless something else pops up that they need to address. There are different categories of homework. There's homework that instills hope. You might have, again, a depressed individual who needs daily doses of the hope that she has in Christ. There are categories of homework related to just teaching, enlightening the mind, related to Christ, related to others. There's action-specific categories, things that they need to be doing. And that last one might cause some concern for some. I think sometimes we Protestants get too uneasy about things that relate to actions. I have to do something? You get to do something. The Bible does command you I can't just rest? Yeah, you can rest, but does that mean inactivity? Resting in Christ, is that inactivity? And there's a mindset. Somebody has said something like, the only thing that sanctification is, is remembering your justification. That was a big part of his council. But there was a movement, and I can't recall the name of that movement, but it was something like, something with gospel and new and reformation maybe, something like that. He knows. That was the emphasis. And you do see that sometimes in even some biblical accounts in literature. It's just focus on your being righteous before God on the merits of Christ. And we should focus on that. That's not the end. That's really the foundation that we are But again, there are many exhortations, there's commands, there's warnings, there's prohibitions in Scripture. There are threats in Scripture. And I'll be talking a little about that tonight in our sermon on examining ourselves. God uses us. I was just going to say in regards to reading a book, talking about the context of rest you see in scripture, especially with the ancient Near Eastern concept of it. We just think of it as being passive and relaxing. But especially, for example, you look at the curation story that God created the world and then rested. It doesn't mean passivity. It means the form and function has been completed. and now you can enjoy the work that happens within the form of function that has been brought up. Yeah. And Paul or Luke in Hebrews 4 11 says, let us therefore, let us therefore strive to enter that rest so that no one may fall by the same sort of disobedience. There's a striving Yeah, well I had to get that on the recording. Methods or tools. Look at the emphasis here. Scripture reading. Scripture saturated literature. So that's extra biblical writings like the booklets I referred to or good books on fear or anger or pride or lust of the heart. Don't be afraid to refer people to those kinds of books. Scripture memorization. Scripture guiding prayer. I think the best thing to do with that is you take a psalm and you use that as guidance. Guidance for your own prayer life. You personalize it. So a good counselor is going to know the kinds of psalms for a given situation and then, hey, why don't you read these four psalms this week and then use this psalm as a way to stir your own heart to pray. Oftentimes, we don't pray a lot because we don't, it's difficult to pray ex nihilo, right? Out of nothing. I don't pray for more than a couple of minutes because I don't know what to say. Well, you don't have a problem if you pray scripture. If you use scripture as a guide. And of course the Psalms are not the only place where you have prayers. Even Paul's prayers in his letters to the Ephesians that he prays that they would have wisdom. You see some of his prayers in Ephesians 3. Use that as a guide as well. Scripture guiding journaling or lists. So you are writing down Usually my counselees have a notebook that they are writing reflections from scripture in. They're saying, this is what the text says. It's really important. What is the Bible saying? What does it mean? Because you can't get the application if you don't start at the meaning of the text. Then, how does this particular text, this verse, apply to my life situation? Putting it on the castle league is a good way of them growing in the spiritual disciplines of scripture reading. So all we're doing is we're getting them back into the Bible and helping them to dive deeply into it and get out of the Bible the riches of the Word of God. Method also, scripture highlighting church. A church that is a church and that promotes the Bible. Different kinds of counselees. I'm going to run through this quickly. Some just require knowledge. Again, they might be just immature or ignorant. I don't mean that in a pejorative way. They just might not know. Counseling might have knowledge, but requires skill in applying the knowledge. In preaching, some might be under the impression that if I just explain the text, the listeners will know immediately how to apply it to their lives. Well, for some that's true, they do, they can get it and thanks be to God. Other times you have to show them exactly what that means for them. They might have the knowledge and skill but lack the will to use both or they might lack the knowledge and skill but are uninterested in gaining either. That's the saddest kind of counselee, right? I don't care. Spiritual apathy, hard-heartedness, that's It's not a good place for that person to be. And much prayer needs to be uttered on that person's behalf. And typically, interactions usually stop because they just don't want to do it. I'm fine the way I am. When has the counselee graduated? Goal is not perfection, obviously. The goal, as in leaving the counseling session, is not perfection, but yes, the goal in a person's life is to be spotless, that spotless bride, that work that Christ is doing. So, when has the counselor graduated? He understands his problem, or problems, from a biblical perspective. He calls sin, sin. He calls suffering, that he's going through evil but for his good. He understands the problem and he understands and regularly applies biblical solutions to his problem. So you're not graduating the person because the person no longer has any problems in his life. Sometimes there are problems that you can't correct. As in, that's just the way, maybe your wife has left you and you are counseling the person because his wife has left him and he wants his wife back. Well, you don't have any control over that. You can do your things as counselor. Is the person, however, responding better to his situation? Has he gone through, maybe if it was his own sin, has he gone through confession of sin? Has he sought ways to reconcile but can't do anything beyond that because it takes two? Okay. You have to obviously figure out the particulars of the situation, but the person knows the problem and knows what to do and is doing so regularly. And often times when a counselor graduates, and that's like a weekly or twice a month will be done and then I'll revisit in like a month, month and a half or two or you know, how are things, how are things going? Because this, we are trained in righteousness and these things take time, so they need to be revisited. It's easy for the counselee to do the homework every week if that person knows that he's coming to you the next week and you have that regular meeting. But if the problem has been solved, if the person understands his problem and is rigorously applying, well, he might be tempted to revert back to old ways or to neglect the spiritual disciplines that God used to put him in a good position. So you revisit with that person a couple months later and see how things have been going. What if the person fails to do the homework? Well, that might be your problem or his problem. Did you as a counselor give him enough time? Were your assignments realistic and manageable? It may not be realistic. You might say, I want you to read the whole testament in this next month. Tell me what it says. Nothing wrong with having big sections of scripture as assignments. but probably not realistic. Did you as a counsellor impress upon her the importance and necessity of homework? If not, made it into the homework, you're probably to blame. Did you or do you as a counsellor go through the homework with the counsellee? That's one way that you show its importance. Was there a legitimate reason for the failure to complete the work? Sometimes things come up. and people get sick. So if I have a counselee, I'll sometimes send a text or an email, are we still on for this time? Sorry, I can't because my kid got sick and I attended to them and haven't had time to do the homework. Okay, let's just meet the next week. No harm, no foul, right? Failure to do the homework may need to become the subject of counseling. They didn't have a legitimate reason for not completing the work. Well, then you got to focus on, why don't you want to do this? Are you committed to change? Are you committed to live your life before the face of God, God honoring ways? Do you realize that the scripture is the way to be changed? The spirit uses his word to change you? Do you care about that? Those questions are going to get to the person's heart and what he really believes about God's Word. So, these are a variety of activities, homework assignments that you can impress upon someone. Typically, I would say, what you're doing is you're praying for them. you're praying with them, you are looking at a passage of scripture that you know relates to that person's life, you read it, you meditate on it, you talk about it, you apply it, you have a plan for the next week, and then you ask about how the week went, and you go from there. And during the week, you might send some encouraging texts, emails, you might make a phone call, praying for you, And that's just one other ministry. So, yeah. I have to say, the second one, you said the importance, the counseling pressed upon the importance and necessity of homework. And just to basically restate what we already talked about, that we have to kind of say, look, truly love God, let's get you to a place where you can commune with Him more consistently. Absolutely. Yes, Molly. What do you do if the counseling all of a sudden has no interest in trying to get better or do better at all, and comes up with really lousy excuses for why? Well, you would consider those excuses and demonstrate their foolishness and you demonstrate that this is something God calls them to do everything to make it their aim to please the Lord in all things. as people who confess Christ. So you would remind them and impress upon them what God has already said and it's a good way of calling them on their confession in Christ. You say you're a believer. Believers are not content with their sin. Believers struggle against their sin and believers desire to be more like Christ. These things are ways that God uses to make you more like Christ. Do you want to be more like Christ? And what Christian is going to say, no I don't. But that's a brief answer to your question. Just really fast, I know we're almost done. I was just going to ask, I know, sorry, we're late. Really quick, especially not for you as like an actual counselor, but for like us, as like people say if we're just counseling a friend, if they are unmotivated to do the homework, would you say that it would be wise to offer to do something with them? Like, well, you know what, let's go through a book together. Let's read it together. Or would you think, like, no, they need to be doing this on their own? Oh, together. you read this book on anger together. And you're going to learn some things too. Oh, I've had this problem as well. Maybe it's not as highlighted as this person has it, but I see it in me as well. Let's pray. Our wonderful God, we thank you for these many weeks of looking at the topic of counseling, which or we know it's just really Christian living and trying to be more like Christ. That is our desire. Help us, Lord, to be more like Christ and to help others to be more like Christ. In Jesus' name we pray, amen.