is around 170 pages and while it's distilled, I'm going to try to make it through all those pages in three sessions. Does that work? I'm just joking. So thank you guys for inviting me to come and spend the morning with you and thank you for giving up your Saturday. I know that that's a sacrifice for a lot of you and so I want to be a good steward of your time and I pray that that our time together is going to be profitable for you. I pray that you'll see fruit just in your local body here. And what I want to do is over the next three sessions together, I want to begin to have sort of a dialogue. Some of this will be a lecture format, but some of this I kind of want to hear from you as well. And the more that I can hear from you, the more profitable our time will be together. For those of you who don't know me, my name is Joey and I serve on staff as a pastor and a counselor at another local church in this area. And over the years as we've grown in our local church, the Lord has has burdened my heart for shepherding ministry and what it looks like to shepherd people well, to care for people well. And I'm in process, will always be in process of what that looks like day in and day out. But day by day, God's growing me, and I pray that some of what I say this morning will encourage you to grow as well. And so with that, I know that we just prayed. I want to pray just over the stuff that I'm going to communicate to you, and then we'll jump in. Lord, thank you for this church body, God. Lord, I thank you for the elders of this church, God. I thank you for the quality of care that they provide for this local body. I thank you for the members here, God. I thank you for their passion for your Word. And God, I pray that as we work through what the Scripture has to say about caring for one another, God, that we would really put feet to our doctrine and God, we need to be doers of the Word, not just hearers of the Word. That's my heart this morning. And so, God, I pray that if we leave with nothing else, God, we would leave with a passion to be doers of the Word for your glory. And I pray all this in Jesus' name, amen. So I want to let you in on a question that myself and the other elders at our local church, we've been wrestling with, we've been asking over and over. And the question is this. It's how can we create a culture of member care within our own local body? How can we create a culture of member care within our own local body? And as we wrestled with that question, we knew that this was going to be a long-term equipping task. There's no shortcut to it. And one of the things that we decided that we need to introduce and emphasize in order to establish this culture of care was this theological care ministry through the means of a ministry called biblical counseling, which I'll spend some more time in just a moment teasing out. And what I'm gonna give you is is just this conversation starter. It's kind of the 30,000 foot view. It's beginning to build this foundation, if you will. And so there's going to be a lot of particulars that just our short time together, we can't tease out all the particulars that I would like to tease out. I will certainly point you toward more resources of study of how some of the things that I'm going to mention can, like I said earlier, animate your local body here. But it doesn't matter how large or how small your local church is. You can't hire enough vocational elders. You can't establish enough lay elders. to really have the culture of care that I believe the New Testament expects of the local church. And the reason why is because God doesn't intend elders to be the only means of care for your local body. Paul says to the church in Rome in Romans chapter 15 verses 14, and I'm going to kind of move around to a lot of passages, and so you just may want to just jot down the references and begin to look them up later. If I need you to actually look at the text, I'll ask you to turn there, but Romans 15, 14. The Apostle Paul, he commends this to the Roman church. He says, I myself am satisfied about you, my brothers, and if we were reading the NIV, we would know sisters is implicit here, my brothers and sisters, that you yourselves are full of goodness, filled with all knowledge and able to instruct one another. The King James Version says, able to admonish one another. And I think that admonish is a slightly better translation of the Greek here. The Greek word that's being emphasized here is nuthateo. Nuthateo. Nuthateo, it means to admonish. It means to encourage, warn, exhort, or counsel. And so in this verse, Paul, he's telling the Roman church, as he's winding his letter down to them, that they're competent to admonish, they're competent to encourage, to warn, exhort, and counsel one another. And this isn't directed solely toward the elders of this local church body. Paul, he's vetted, he's spent time with this church, he knows this local assembly, and he knows, and even assumes here, that they're competent to care for one another. They have that capacity. Now, for clarity's sake, I want to give you just, I want to spend some time giving you some other occurrences of this Greek word, this New Thetaia, in the New Testament. We see in Acts 20, verses 28 to 31, Paul says to the elders at Ephesus, he says, pay careful attention to yourselves and to all the flock in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers to care for the church of God, which he obtained with his own blood. I know that after my departure, fierce wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock, and from among your own selves, will arise men speaking twisted things to draw away the disciples after them. Therefore, be alert, remembering that for three years," and get this part, "'I did not cease night or day to admonish, to neutheteo everyone with tears.'" So Paul in this passage, in Acts here, has modeled care ministry for the elders at Ephesus so that they could model ministry for their local church body in his absence. So we have the Roman Church and we have the church at Ephesus both being charged with with this care ministry. And then 1st Corinthians chapter 4 verse 14 we see the Apostle Paul again He writes to this rebellious Corinthian congregation. You guys just spent a lot of time waiting through the book of 1 Corinthians on Sunday morning, so you know well the spiritual condition of that local church at the time the Apostle Paul wrote this letter. But he says in verse 14, he says, I do not write these things to make you ashamed, but to admonish, to neutheteo you as my beloved children. Colossians 1 28 Paul speaking to the church of Colossi says him speaking of Jesus we proclaim warning or admonishing Everyone in teaching everyone with all wisdom that we may present everyone mature in Christ In Colossians chapter 3 verse 16 Paul instructs the church, he says, let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs with thankfulness in your hearts to God. Speaking of those in authority first Thessalonians chapter 4 verse 12 We ask you brothers to respect those who labor among you and are over you and the Lord and new fatale you and admonish you Second Thessalonians 3 14 through 15 Paul exhorts the church as for you brothers. Do not grow weary in doing good and anyone does not obey what we say in this letter take note of that person and have nothing to do with him that he may be ashamed do not regard him as an enemy but warn or admonish there's that word again him as a brother so these passages they should make it obvious to us that God expects his church to be equipped for this one another work That's an expectation. It was expected in the Roman Church, it was expected at the Church of Ephesus, the Church of Colossae, the Church of Thessalonica. There was this care ministry that was in God's church. And the type of care ministry that the Apostle Paul is speaking of in these passages, it admonishes, which is to advise or to urge someone earnestly, in this very earnest manner. This type of ministry, it warns. It's clear that it's a warning ministry. It exhorts. It strongly encourages toward a particular action. And then it counsels. And again, we'll spend some time on that in just a moment. And in these passages alone, and we could spend even more time just exhausting some of what the New Testament says about this type of ministry, but in this passage alone, We see this type of ministry take shape and animate the local church in teaching and instructing. So we see what I'm going to talk about in a minute. There's this private ministry of the word. If we talk about public ministry of the word is what's going to happen tomorrow morning when Pastor Ron gets up and he opens the word and he proclaims it. That's the public ministry of the word, but we see a lot of what's going on with New Thetaeo as this private ministry of the word, this private type of instruction. It happens through the watchfulness of gentle discerners of truth. So there's this guarding against fierce wolves, there's warning of false teachers, there's warning of false teaching that leads to wrong beliefs, that leads to wrong behavior. It comes through the careful ministry of writing to our brothers and sisters at times, actually. You see, that's how the Apostle Paul exhorts and rebukes the Corinthian church, right? Through a ministry of writing. It comes through and really is discipleship. The purpose is to present others as fully mature in Christ Jesus. It's the result of someone whose entire being is saturated with God's Word. It comes through, thankfully, singing Psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, right? We're admonishing one another. That is, even one another, we're singing to the Lord, but there's this admonishing, this reminding one another of the glories of the Gospel, which is why it's very important to be lyrically careful when we're singing songs. It comes from God-fearing shepherds, as we as a local body submit to the Word that's rightfully divided, that's carefully divided. It comes through commending submission regarding the preached Word on the Lord's day. And it also happens through biblical accountability, warning, admonishing a professing believer who's deceived by sin's deceitfulness. And in this type of care ministry, it creates a culture in the local church that allows the church to remember their union with Christ. It allows the church to keep each other away from sin's deceitfulness, right? We see the author of Hebrews warn the Hebraic church to not be deceived by sin's deceitfulness, and the remedy being to remind one another every day, as long as it's called today. It encourages perseverance in the faith. guards against wolves and sheep's clothing and false doctrine, presents believers as mature in Christ, encourages discouraged downtrodden believers, and fosters a high view of the Lord's Day, singing, preaching, prayer, sacrament. Now if you have your Bible, I would encourage you to turn to a very familiar passage of Scripture, 2 Timothy chapter 3. We're going to look at verses 16 through 17, because I think that this passage of Scripture is a good foundational text for this type of care ministry. And again, most of you probably know this passage well. In the Apostle Paul, he's encouraging Timothy, he says, it's profitable for teaching, reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work." Now I want to camp out here for a moment because Paul's giving this charge, like I said, to Timothy, who's the pastor of Ephesus and he expects this type of ministry to permeate throughout the church at Ephesus as he commended back in the book of Acts, the passage that I just read you a moment ago. By the time that 2nd Timothy is written, the Apostle Paul, he's in prison in Rome and he knows that his fate is probably death So Paul's, he's writing on matters that he talked about in First Timothy, but he's writing about these matters in a more urgent way because of his imprisonment and because of his potential execution, all right? And so these are like, Paul's saying, listen, I'm about to die. These are my last words. These are some things I really want you to pay close attention to because I'm not gonna be here to remind you any more of these things. so this is a letter about the church and for the church. So what we should do is seek to apply the things that the Apostle Paul is commending to Timothy inside the local church context. Does that make sense? Alright, so Paul's concern for Timothy to faithfully minister to the church in Ephesus, and Paul expects that this ministry is going to remedy some of the disunity that's going on. So there's this subscription to false teaching, and this subscription to false teaching, it influenced the thinking and the moral behavior of those at the Church of Ephesus. Wrong beliefs lead to wrong behavior, right? Wrong beliefs lead to wrong behavior and much of Paul's ministry it's being sabotaged by these false teachers and he's writing Timothy to encourage him to persevere in this God-centered care ministry amidst all these shepherding challenges that he's facing at Ephesus and Paul's remedy is for combating false thinking and false doctrine and immorality is for Timothy to utilize the word. He's expected to utilize the Word. And what's interesting to me in this passage is that Paul's not teaching young Timothy that the Scripture is breathed out by God. We know Timothy's testimony. He had a faithful mother and grandmother. He'd been instructed and taught the Scriptures from a very young age. He's not trying to convince Timothy that the Bible is God's Word. You in this room, I'm probably not gonna have to convince you this morning that the scripture has God as its ultimate author. You're probably already convinced of that. Otherwise, you wouldn't be here. But what Paul seems to be pressing into Timothy that I think we just kind of gloss over oftentimes is that he needs to apply this belief of the doctrine and authority of Scripture in the context of the local church. So Paul's saying, because Scripture is breathed out by God, it's sufficient and it's profitable, therefore use it. That's what Paul's saying. Apply your belief. Apply your belief. And according to this passage, much like the passages that we've kind of glossed over already, We can apply the scriptures through teaching, we can apply the scriptures through reproof or rebuking, through correction, and through training in righteousness, so that the woman or the man of God may be equipped for every good work. Here's my fear about most local churches. My fear about most local churches is disconnection. It's disconnection. It's a disconnection between the public ministry of the Word, what's being exhorted here on the Lord's Day, week in and week out. It's a disconnection between that and the private ministry of the Word, what you're commending to one another. That's a big problem. most local churches, and I think that James had this same concern. In James chapter 1, he says this, starting with verse 21, he says, therefore lay aside all filthiness, an overflow of wickedness, and receive with meekness the implanted word which is able to save your souls. And then he goes on, he says, but be doers of the word and not hearers only deceiving yourselves. For if anyone's a hearer of the word and not a doer, he's like a man observing his natural face in a mirror. For he observes himself, he goes away, and immediately forgets what kind of man he was. But he who looks into the perfect law of liberty and continues in it and is not a forgetful hearer but a doer of the word, this one, will be blessed in what he does. And then later, if you're already in James, in chapter 2, start with verse 14. What does it profit, my brethren, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can faith save him? If a brother or sister is naked and destitute of daily food and one of you says to them, depart in peace, be warm and filled, but you do not give them the things which are needed for the body, what does it profit? Thus also, faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead." It's dead. But someone will say, you have faith and I have works. Show me your faith without your works and I will show you my faith by my works. You believe there's one God, you do well, even the demons believe and tremble. But do you want to know, foolish man, that faith without works is dead? Your local church, Grace Baptist Chapel here, believes that all scripture is breathed out by God. Your confession, the 1689 London Baptist Confession of Faith, has the scripture as its foundation. The contents of the confession that we believe are either explicit in the scripture, or they're arrived at by good and necessary consequence. And this is good, and I praise God for that. But none of that matters if your faith doesn't lead you past all scripture is breathed out by God. It's gotta go beyond that. Your faith must move to and is profitable. That's where we gotta get as a local body. And the disconnect I see in many local churches is that, like I said, of solid preaching and teaching on the Lord's Day and a very weak care ministry. what happens, often unintentionally, is that what goes on during corporate worship in the Lord's Day, it grows to be in conflict actually with what goes on in the body outside of the Lord's Day corporate worship. For us to be serious about one another ministry, we have to put legs on to what Paul's saying about God's Word being breathed out, right? Because the Scripture is God-breathed, it's profitable, it's sufficient, and it's sufficient to produce a fully equipped believer. It is. So we have to be in the business of building one another up in Christ Jesus. Now, I propose that a local church care ministry can happen best through a ministry called Biblical Counseling. We actually use the language Biblical Counseling in my own local church. You don't have to use that language. I'm not jealous over the language. You can call it one another care ministry if you like. But as we move forward, I'm gonna use the word counseling. I'm gonna use the word counsel, and that may be a stumbling block to some of you. You may say, man, I'm not, that's not me. I'm not passionate about that. That kind of raises anxiety to even think about me doing that type of ministry. And the reason I think that is because we often have some We already have some preconceived ideas about what counseling is and what counseling isn't. And this is where I'm going to need you to kind of speak to me a little bit. Give me, when you hear the word counselor or counseling, what are some of the images that come to your mind? Who dares speak first? Yeah, one-on-one? What else? Yes, sir. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Forgive any grammar mistakes, I'm from Georgia, so. Yep, absolutely. What else? Yeah. Yep. Give me a couple more. What images do you think of? Yes, ma'am. Knowledge. Yeah. Yeah Absolutely And I've had people before tell me, I think of the guy laying on the couch while the other person's kind of sitting. What's that? Problem driven. So Joey, you called the three words I was thinking of couch, chair, closed door. Yes. Absolutely, and it in it in it for me it screams cold clinical right And even there could be a level of shame that comes along with it as well And I think some of these capture what counseling should be some of these count I think capture why it is that when we hear counseling or counselor, we're really intimidated. And so there's kind of a hybrid of what's coming to your mind that's up here on the screen, or up here on the whiteboard here. And I want to give maybe just a less intimidating definition of counseling, okay? And it's this. And hopefully it'll alleviate a little bit of apprehension to approaching counseling. is a conversation where one party with questions, problems, and trouble seeks assistance from someone they believe has answers, solutions, and help. Counseling is a conversation where one party with questions, problems, and trouble seeks assistance from someone they believe has answers, solutions, and help. So according to that proposed definition, who in here has counseled someone? Every single person in this room at some point has done some sort of counseling. Now I want to give you a definition of biblical counseling because while all of us have probably done some sort of counseling work, if we're defining counseling in this way, that doesn't mean that we're good counselors, right? We may have given some really bad advice, right? But we've done the work before. And so let me give us some definition, and again, you can shorthand this. I can email you any notes that you want, so don't stress about having to write everything down. But if we have counseling as a conversation where one party with questions, problems, and trouble seeks assistance from someone they believe has answers, solutions, and help, what is biblical counseling? So I'm going to give you four definitions and then I'm going to give you a quote from a guy named David Powelson, but here are four different ways that we can define biblical counseling to give us a clearer picture of what it should be. If preaching is the public ministry of the Word, which I've mentioned already, biblical counseling is the private ministry of the Word. Okay, biblical counseling is the private ministry of the Word. It is, as I've already asserted, a one another care ministry. It's a one another care ministry. It is a theological discipline. It's a theological discipline. That's to say that it is a theologically informed counseling or a theologically informed care ministry. Biblical counseling is a local church ministry of soul care. It's a local church ministry of soul care. David Powlison, he's the executive director of CCEF, which is the Christian Counseling Education Foundation. He says that proponents of biblical counseling see the Bible as authoritative, relevant, and comprehensively sufficient for counseling. God has spoken truly to every basic issue of human nature and to the problems in living. His Word establishes the goal of counseling, how people can change, the role of the counselor, counseling methods, and so forth. Christians have the only authoritative source for counseling wisdom, which is the Holy Spirit speaking through the Word of God. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and wisdom is the only worthy goal of counseling. So if we now kind of have a definition of biblical counseling, what should it tell us about the ministry of biblical counseling? We've established A less formal, if you will, definition of counseling. We have four different ways to look at biblical counseling. What should that tell us about the ministry of biblical counseling? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. Yep. The Scripture is the authority. It's good. What else? Yes, absolutely. That's good. Think through setting because Ron was mentioning the you know, closed doors, couch, chair, what setting can biblical counseling happen in? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Are we actually doing it with the authority of Scripture versus our own experience? Absolutely. Anything else here? You said that the Bible speaks to every basic issue. that doesn't require, you know, a doctor or whatever. You can reference the Bible as the authority for the basic issue, whatever it may be. So, Joey, don't let me take you down a path That's all right. Yeah. So I was in a large church that we, in fact, transitioned to a level of care ministry. And one of the things we took were biblical counseling. So every problem is ultimately spiritually based. with a verse that can take care of depression, despair, anxiety, all those things. And so it would be helpful if you could describe, is biblical counseling in the sense of care, Bible-based on it, and at what point in time in biblical counseling you become broader in terms of there may be another cause associated with this so that the scripture is informing and giving hope, but isn't necessarily the sole solution. Will you be covering that? Yeah, well, so not to the extent that I would love to, but I'm glad that you brought it up. I mean, so the Bible promotes what's called dichotomy, right? We should be dichotomy, we're made of both body and soul, right? And which is where you're getting at and there's been the abuses even in the biblical counseling movement of take two verses and call me in the morning, right? You're wrestling with depression, just read these verses over and over again and you should be cured by the next day and if you're not, there's something deficient in your spirituality. And that is, a gross misapplication of the Word, right? And by no means is capturing the authorial intent behind the passages that are being given, right? And so we're made up of body and soul and the Lord has graced us with skilled physicians and with modern medicine. and we should have healthy relationships with medical professionals so that we have places to refer people to because for most of us we're not medical professionals and so we shouldn't even begin to venture into the world of saying stop taking this or start taking this. We should refer out and I'll spend a little bit of time on it in the next session but while we can trace every issue ultimately to Adam's sin, right? A result of Adam's sin is our biology is broken, right? And so we do have depressions that aren't caused by personal sin, but depressions that are caused from the sheer fact that our bodies are breaking down. And by God's grace, There's some medications that are out there that can help people think clearly and alleviate some of those symptoms. And so I would say all people need biblical counseling and some people also need medication on top of that. And those two things to go hand-in-hand. Does that make sense? And so, yeah, absolutely. No, thank you for the question. So yes, the Lord's given us his sufficient word, he's given us medical doctors and other believers, and we want to make sure that people are getting holistic care, and that certainly means that caring for people is a team effort. It's a group effort a lot of times, which is why I think care ministry happens best in the context of the local church. If it's happening in the context of even a secular counselor, they're just seeing the physical, they're not seeing the spiritual. If it happens solely in the context of the local church, and the local church is saying, it's all just going back to the word, we're shunning medical professionals, then we're just seeing one part of the way God made them, which is their soul, and we're not doing anything to alleviate body problems, physical issues. And so we need to come together on that particular issue. And so this is a, it's a, We have to effort to be equipped as counselors, and we have the Holy Spirit, we have the complete revelation of Scripture, God's not speaking anymore, He spoke, it's been documented, we have it, and it's Genesis to Revelation, and He's provided us what we need to labor in care ministry. The issue is we need to labor. We need to see that God expects it, and we need to do our due diligence, we need to effort, we need to work hard so that we can be competent to counsel as the Roman Church was when the Apostle Paul told them that they were. And as I said earlier, this is a long-term equipping process, and this is just an initial conversation today, and I'm sure Ryan and I can even get together on maybe what future seminars could look like for us together. But primarily, you need to work with your elders, with Chad, with Ron, with Ryan, on what I'm proposing, what it can look like, how it can animate your your local body and I can certainly speak with you on how it's animating our local church. And so we kind of have, we have it happening on different levels. What I want to do We've been going some about in about 10 minutes early. Is that right? So my next two sessions are going to be a little bit longer than this session. And so I'm going to try to borrow time from this session and reallocate it for later sessions. So why don't we take a 10 minute, 15 minute break. There's some snacks and coffee, all that stuff. And then we'll meet back in here in 10 or 15 minutes. Thank you guys.