ACBC Theology Exam 5 - Common Grace
00:00:00.000 | meeting of intermediate biblical counseling. It's a great joy to be
00:00:06.240 | able to gather tonight and to be able to continue our study of God's Word. I trust
00:00:13.060 | that the Lord has been blessing you and blessing your studies and just look
00:00:17.740 | forward to a wonderful time tonight looking at a very important topic on
00:00:21.780 | common grace. And so I do want to wish you all a very happy Father's Day and
00:00:28.620 | trust that the Lord is blessing you as you appreciate our earthly fathers, but
00:00:36.380 | even more importantly, it's a day to celebrate our relationship with our
00:00:40.380 | gracious Heavenly Father who has sent His Son to die for our sins and to
00:00:46.780 | reconcile us to Himself. And so we do rejoice in our relationship with our
00:00:52.860 | Heavenly Father whom we can draw near to and the scripture says that we are
00:00:57.540 | indeed sons of God in Christ and that is a great joy to be able to celebrate that
00:01:02.060 | today. Well tonight, before I pray, I want to open our time with a devotion from
00:01:10.980 | Matthew chapter 5 verses 43 to 48 and if you have your Bibles you can go ahead
00:01:18.300 | and turn there. This is gonna be a key passage that we'll look at tonight as it
00:01:22.540 | relates to theology exam number 5 on common grace and I think it's also a
00:01:28.460 | good passage to encourage us in our walks with Christ and also has some
00:01:33.940 | implications for counseling ministry. So let me go ahead and read Matthew 5
00:01:38.940 | verses 43 to 48 for us and we'll use this as a time to prepare our hearts to
00:01:46.140 | our study tonight. Jesus said this, "You have heard that it was said you shall
00:01:51.860 | love your neighbor and hate your enemy but I say to you love your enemies and
00:01:57.300 | pray for those who persecute you so that you may be sons of your Father who is in
00:02:03.320 | heaven for he makes his son rise on the evil and on the good and sends rain on
00:02:09.140 | the just and on the unjust for if you love those who love you what reward do
00:02:14.560 | you have do not even the tax collectors do the same and if you greet only your
00:02:19.740 | brothers what more are you doing than others do not even the Gentiles do the
00:02:24.660 | same you therefore must be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect." I was
00:02:32.900 | teaching on the Sermon on the Mount this past Wednesday and reflecting on the
00:02:38.020 | Beatitudes which open the Sermon on the Mount, "Blessed are the poor in spirit for
00:02:41.780 | theirs is the kingdom of heaven," and just reflecting on this whole idea that the
00:02:47.420 | principles of Christ's kingdom are so radically different from the kingdom of
00:02:51.940 | man or the kingdom of this world. In the kingdom of man you have pride and
00:02:59.340 | self-sufficiency, you have personal retaliation, you have an eye for an eye,
00:03:06.300 | tooth for tooth, you have this unrelenting desire to be right and never
00:03:13.460 | to be wronged, and if you look at the principles of Christ's kingdom in
00:03:17.980 | Matthew 5, the values are so very different, they're the very opposite.
00:03:22.100 | "Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven, blessed
00:03:27.320 | are the humble, blessed are the gentle, the meek, those who have power under
00:03:32.140 | control, blessed are those who mourn over sin and a desire to be right with God," and
00:03:40.780 | you just see how the principles of Christ's kingdom are so radically
00:03:44.820 | different from the kingdoms of this world, and that makes sense because Jesus
00:03:52.180 | said in John 18 verse 36 that my kingdom is not of this world. So Jesus continues
00:04:02.620 | this theme of how his kingdom is so different from the kingdom of this world
00:04:07.060 | in verse 43, and basically what he says in this passage is that the subjects of
00:04:14.540 | his kingdom are characterized by grace in their relationships with others. They
00:04:21.820 | don't treat others the way that others deserve to be treated, they treat others
00:04:28.740 | according to the principle of grace, they give unmerited favor to others. Subjects
00:04:34.700 | of Christ's kingdom don't only love their friends, they love their enemies,
00:04:40.940 | they don't only love those who love them, subjects of Christ's kingdom love
00:04:46.140 | those who persecute them and who are their enemies, and Jesus says in
00:04:54.260 | Matthew 5 verse 43, "You have heard that it was said you shall love your neighbor
00:04:58.940 | and hate your enemy," and by the way, that's not what the Word of God said.
00:05:04.500 | Leviticus 19 verse 18 says, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself," but then
00:05:10.380 | Jewish tradition added that statement, "You shall hate your enemy," and we can
00:05:17.580 | understand why a man would turn that into a standard like that because that's
00:05:24.900 | basically the natural operation of the human heart is to love your friends and
00:05:29.700 | hate your enemies, and Jesus is drawing a contrast between the principles of man's
00:05:35.660 | kingdom with the principles of his kingdom. He says, "You have heard that it
00:05:40.380 | was said you can hate your enemy," but verse 44, "I say to you love your enemies
00:05:46.620 | and pray for those who persecute you." So I just want to, this passage is going to
00:05:54.020 | be key to our essay tonight, but I also just want to make some practical
00:05:58.460 | applications and draw out some counseling implications for this passage.
00:06:04.940 | What we face in counseling often is helping people to reconcile. I mean, that
00:06:11.340 | would be a lot of marriage counseling, which is probably about 50% of or more
00:06:18.340 | of counseling is marriage counseling, just helping husband and wife to
00:06:22.100 | reconcile, to forgive, to love one another. There's also reconciliation
00:06:27.220 | between fathers and sons and daughters and neighbors and even reconciliation
00:06:33.380 | between church members, and that's a lot of what we do in counseling is helping
00:06:39.380 | people to make peace, and I think the fundamental truth that we're trying to
00:06:45.220 | communicate in our counseling ministry is that if you're a follower of Christ,
00:06:49.380 | you don't just love your friends, you love your enemies, you don't just love
00:06:54.580 | people who love you back, but you love people who don't love you back, and when
00:07:03.180 | you begin to adopt that kingdom mentality of grace in your relationships,
00:07:08.420 | of showing favor to those who don't return anything in response, then you are
00:07:14.740 | living out the principles of Christ's kingdom. In marriage counseling, oftentimes
00:07:22.260 | husband and wife come in, and the husband does an incredible job of confessing the
00:07:27.540 | wife's sin, and he confesses the wife's sin with clarity, with accuracy, with
00:07:34.820 | perfect memory, with records, dates and times, and specific examples and
00:07:42.460 | illustrations, and then the wife confesses the husband's sin and does the
00:07:48.020 | very same thing, and we work with people in teaching them from the Bible that you
00:07:57.500 | are called not only to love your spouse if your spouse loves you
00:08:03.100 | back, but even if your spouse does not love you back, to be a subject of Christ's
00:08:08.500 | kingdom is to love, is to pray for those who bless you, is to not revile those who
00:08:16.540 | revile you. If a husband's saying my wife is disrespectful, she's unsubmissive, she's
00:08:24.060 | selfish, she undermines me, it's helping that person love with the love of Christ.
00:08:32.540 | Verse 45, Jesus says, gives us the reason why we are to love in this way. He says,
00:08:41.060 | "So that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven, for he makes his Son
00:08:46.980 | rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust."
00:08:53.460 | This is the perfect verse for Father's Day. It's a great word that we are sons
00:08:59.740 | of the Father who is in heaven, and essentially, Jesus says here that
00:09:05.340 | subjects of his kingdom are characterized by grace in their
00:09:09.660 | relationships because they are children of a Heavenly Father who shows grace to
00:09:16.180 | the just and to the unjust. This is just something that I pray we will celebrate
00:09:25.940 | about our Heavenly Father. If you stop to think about it, that our Heavenly Father
00:09:31.320 | is filled with grace toward his enemies. He shows goodness and kindness not just
00:09:38.060 | to people who love him, but he shows his goodness and kindness to people who hate
00:09:43.980 | him, and our Heavenly Father is gracious toward his enemies, and that's gonna set
00:09:53.500 | the table for our discussion tonight on common grace. What common grace is, is
00:10:00.020 | God's unmerited favor toward both believers and unbelievers, and you
00:10:08.740 | realize this every day that unbelievers wake up every morning, they hate God, they
00:10:14.460 | blaspheme God, they want nothing to do with Christ, they don't worship the true
00:10:20.900 | and the living God, they despise his word, they despise his law, and yet for even
00:10:28.940 | the unbeliever, God causes the sun to rise in the morning, God feeds them with
00:10:34.500 | food, God shelters them with a roof over their heads. For many unbelievers, God
00:10:41.420 | even gives them a good job that they can go and make money and prosper. God
00:10:47.900 | continues to show kindness and goodness not just to believers in this world, but
00:10:52.740 | he shows kindness to unbelievers, and that's the theological category of common
00:10:59.620 | grace. It's God's unmerited favor toward believers and unbelievers. God is
00:11:08.340 | gracious toward believers in that he gives them saving grace, and he gives
00:11:13.860 | them forgiveness of sins and eternity in heaven, status as being an adopted child
00:11:19.220 | of God, and all of that he gives to believers. But even to the unbeliever
00:11:26.140 | whom God has not saved, at least up to this point, even to the unbeliever living
00:11:32.500 | in darkness, God feeds that person, God shelters that person, God withholds his
00:11:39.780 | judgment, and he shows kindness. And that's what theologians call "common
00:11:45.460 | grace." And what Jesus is saying in Matthew chapter 5 is that when you see
00:11:53.060 | God being gracious to people who hate him, to his enemies, when you see the sun
00:12:00.140 | rising every morning on unbelievers who hate the Lord, and God continuing to
00:12:06.260 | preserve their life and give them health and give them even enjoyable things to
00:12:11.780 | do in this world, that ought to drive you to reflect the same image, to reflect the
00:12:19.340 | same likeness, to be sons of the Father who is in heaven. And you ought to see
00:12:25.860 | how gracious God is toward people who hate him, and that ought to cause you to
00:12:31.420 | love your enemies. Now, I share this devotion tonight, and the great thing and
00:12:39.820 | the hard thing about any devotion on personal relationships is it requires
00:12:44.980 | immediate application. All of us are gonna have the opportunity this week, and
00:12:50.380 | some of us are gonna have the opportunity tonight to put this into
00:12:55.780 | practice, and to come across a person who is unkind, who is disrespectful, who is
00:13:04.500 | hurtful, who maybe doesn't like you, who gets in your way, who maybe even insults
00:13:13.860 | you, and you and I are gonna have a choice at that point whether to live
00:13:20.220 | according to the principles of man's kingdom and retaliate, or to live
00:13:29.660 | according to the principles of Christ's kingdom and to love our enemies and to
00:13:33.180 | do good to those who who do not do good to us. And that's gonna set the table for
00:13:41.300 | our essay, but also for our own personal application. We can't help counselees to
00:13:47.140 | live in this way if we're not living this way ourselves, and so let me just
00:13:52.280 | challenge all of us and to encourage us to love our enemies, to do good to those
00:13:58.900 | who do not do good to us, and so reflect the character of our gracious Heavenly
00:14:05.820 | Father who shows his kindness to both believers and unbelievers. So let me pray
00:14:12.900 | for us, and we'll go over our essay topic tonight. Father, thank you so much for
00:14:17.300 | your amazing grace. We tend to celebrate most often your saving grace, and
00:14:24.580 | rightly so, for you are a saving God who has delivered us from the domain of
00:14:31.100 | darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of your beloved Son. But Father,
00:14:36.180 | help us tonight to understand your common grace, to understand the
00:14:42.220 | astounding truth that you show your kindness even to the unbeliever, even to
00:14:49.620 | the person who hates you. You treat them not according to what they deserve, but
00:14:57.820 | you withhold your judgment. You give time and space to repent. You give food and
00:15:04.780 | shelter. You give enjoyable pursuits in life, and you just show kindness, Lord, to
00:15:13.620 | the unbeliever. We just pray that we might understand your character and that
00:15:21.540 | we ourselves might reflect that in our own dealings with others, that we would
00:15:26.860 | be gracious and kind and merciful, that we would love our enemies, pray for those
00:15:32.260 | who persecute us, and bless those who revile us, and so be sons of our Father
00:15:41.180 | who is in heaven. This Father's Day, we thank you for our earthly fathers, but
00:15:47.140 | Father, we thank you most of all that you are our Heavenly Father, and you are
00:15:52.580 | gracious to us as your children. So bless us tonight as we look at your word, and
00:15:55.980 | we pray all this in Christ's name, amen.
00:16:00.620 | Okay, well, we are looking at tonight the subject of common grace. I hope you all
00:16:08.060 | can see the slides, and I've got this Zoom thing working okay. So, common grace.
00:16:17.580 | This is the subject of tonight's topic, and the question on theology exam number
00:16:27.040 | five is to explain the doctrine of common grace relating the doctrine to
00:16:34.020 | the ability of secular psychologists to understand true information about the
00:16:38.140 | human condition. So that's page one on your handout. We have the doctrine of
00:16:45.740 | common grace. There's two parts to this question. The first is to explain common
00:16:51.140 | grace, what is common grace, and what are the passages of scripture that speak to
00:16:56.060 | common grace, and then you have a second part of the question to relate that
00:17:02.100 | doctrine to the ability of secular psychologists to understand the human
00:17:08.060 | condition. So basically, ACBC wants you to interact with the integrationist
00:17:17.340 | perspective that a secular psychologist under common grace can understand who
00:17:25.360 | man is and help man with his problems. So let me give you a slide here that I
00:17:30.180 | think will explain what we're looking at here. That's a little bit later on, but
00:17:39.220 | here we go with the grace of God. What we're looking at here under the broader
00:17:46.340 | category of God's grace. God's grace can be defined as his unmerited favor, and
00:17:52.780 | there are two categories of God's grace. There's common grace, which is God's
00:17:58.340 | unmerited favor extended to all men, and that's believers and unbelievers, and
00:18:03.900 | then there is saving grace, which is God's unmerited favor extended to
00:18:08.660 | believers only. As I prayed, we tend to focus in on saving grace, and a lot of
00:18:16.640 | our songs and hymns and messages, sermons, celebrate the saving grace of God and
00:18:23.340 | Jesus Christ, celebrate our forgiveness of sins, our standing in his unmerited
00:18:30.280 | favor, our peace with God, our reconciliation to God, all of that
00:18:33.940 | focuses in on saving grace, but I would ask you this question. When is the last
00:18:40.780 | time you've heard a sermon or a message on common grace? It's kind of an area of
00:18:50.340 | theology that we don't often focus on, and yet I think if we understand God's
00:18:56.280 | common grace, we'll be equipped to love the Lord and to celebrate an essential
00:19:02.060 | aspect of his character. Common grace is God's grace given to all men, believers,
00:19:10.500 | and unbelievers, so the truth is that you and I ought to wake up every morning and
00:19:20.700 | be amazed by God's common grace. We ought to be amazed by his grace to believers
00:19:29.820 | and unbelievers. We ought to be astounded by the fact that so many people in this
00:19:38.100 | world hate the Lord and trample upon his word, and yet God continues to show
00:19:47.420 | kindness to them. It really ought to be a truth that amazes us, that every day man
00:19:55.660 | does things that would invite the judgment and the wrath of God. Every day
00:20:02.140 | man disobeys God's Word, and yet God continues to show his kindness to them.
00:20:12.580 | The average unbeliever in America wakes up every morning, the sun is shining,
00:20:18.900 | there's food to eat, gets in a car, drives to work, enjoys productive labor, comes
00:20:25.700 | home to a family, has shelter, a roof over his head, and then on the weekends goes
00:20:34.300 | hiking or goes to the ocean or goes to the beach and enjoys some recreation. You
00:20:41.540 | and I ought to look at that and say, "Amazing grace, that is amazing grace, that
00:20:47.260 | an unbeliever who hates God is shown such kindness." I became a believer
00:20:54.900 | in February of 1992, so don't do the math here, but that means for 20 years I was
00:21:04.780 | a recipient of common grace. I lived as an unbeliever, I hated the Lord, I
00:21:12.740 | blasphemed his name, I made fun of Christians, and for 20 years God kept my
00:21:20.980 | heart beating, God kept me alive, God put me in a nice family, God gave me
00:21:29.060 | educational opportunities. The fact that the first time I blasphemed the Lord
00:21:36.740 | Jesus Christ, God didn't strike me down and allow his fiery wrath to consume me.
00:21:45.900 | The fact that my my lungs kept breathing and my heart kept beating is evidence of
00:21:51.740 | God's common grace. Just the fact that he endured with my sins so long and gave me
00:21:57.580 | time and space to repent is an expression of his common grace. And then
00:22:07.780 | in February 1992, I trusted in the gospel, gave my life to Christ, and at that point
00:22:14.420 | I received saving grace. And so I have received both common grace and saving
00:22:21.660 | grace in my life, and that astounds me. I mean, the grace of God ought to astound us.
00:22:30.380 | We ought to be astounded by common grace, and as I rehearse my testimony, I'm
00:22:35.980 | celebrating common grace. I would not have had the opportunity to repent and
00:22:41.740 | believe in Christ if God had struck me dead when I first blasphemed his name.
00:22:48.380 | But God has shown me his common grace in giving me time and space to repent. I'm
00:22:59.580 | gonna make an application to food at this point because I am Korean and we
00:23:05.660 | have some pretty good food. Oh, that's an understatement. We have really good food.
00:23:10.500 | Korean barbecue is, I think, one of the marvelous expressions of common grace in
00:23:17.140 | this world. And I took my wife out for her birthday back when the restaurants
00:23:25.100 | were all open, and we went to this amazing Korean barbecue restaurant. The
00:23:32.220 | restaurant was filled with smoke and just slabs of meat being barbecued, and
00:23:38.940 | everyone in that restaurant looked happy. They looked like they were enjoying
00:23:43.220 | themselves, and I remember saying to my wife that night on her birthday that
00:23:50.180 | there is an amazing concentration of common grace in this room tonight
00:23:55.620 | because I don't think all of these people are believers. In fact, I would
00:24:00.340 | guess that many of them are unbelievers, and yet the fact that God is feeding
00:24:05.260 | them with such amazing food is an expression of his common grace. He's not
00:24:11.980 | treating them according to what they deserve because what they deserve is the
00:24:16.480 | wrath of God because of their sins. So all that to say, you and I ought to be
00:24:22.660 | amazed by common grace. This is from Donald Gray Barnhouse. He writes, "You are
00:24:32.140 | not a believer in Christ, and yet you are still out of hell. That is the grace of
00:24:37.440 | God. You are not in hell, but you are on earth in good health and prosperity. That
00:24:42.380 | is the common grace of God. The vast majority of those who read these words
00:24:47.340 | are living in comfortable homes or apartments. That is common grace. You are
00:24:52.140 | not fleeing as refugees along the highways of a country desolated by war.
00:24:56.620 | That is common grace. You come home from your job and your child runs to meet you
00:25:02.420 | in good health and spirits. That is common grace. You're able to put your
00:25:07.840 | hand in your pocket and give the child a quarter or a half dollar for an
00:25:11.000 | allowance. It is common grace that you have such abundance. You go into your
00:25:14.820 | house and sit down to a good meal. That is common grace. On the day that you read
00:25:20.780 | these words, there are more than a billion and a half members of the human
00:25:23.500 | race who will go to sleep without enough to satisfy their hunger. The fact that
00:25:28.040 | you have enough is common grace. You do not deserve it, and if you think that you
00:25:32.380 | do deserve anything at all from God beyond the wrath which you have so
00:25:35.940 | richly earned, you merely show your ignorance of spiritual principles." And
00:25:42.740 | then this quote from Chuck Swindoll and Roy Zuck. They write, "Every human has been
00:25:49.340 | graced by God with the sense of sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste. Even though
00:25:56.460 | the world is under the curse of sin, it is replete with opportunities to enjoy
00:26:01.340 | viewing the power of Niagara Falls, the massive depth and colors of the Grand
00:26:05.540 | Canyon, or the quiet fragile beauty of the Olympic National Rainforest. How
00:26:12.020 | pleasant it is to enjoy the soft touch of a baby's hand, and who does not enjoy
00:26:16.760 | the aroma and taste of culinary delights." So moving to page two of your handout, we
00:26:26.700 | want to ask the question, "What is common grace? What is common grace?" And you have
00:26:33.260 | there on your handout a number of definitions by theologians. Wynne
00:26:38.180 | Grudem writes that, "Common grace is the grace of God by which he gives people
00:26:43.100 | innumerable blessings that are not part of salvation." So you notice here that this
00:26:50.580 | is non-saving grace. Common grace does not make a person a Christian. This is
00:26:57.860 | the grace of God that gives many blessings, but not salvation. It does
00:27:05.580 | not bring anyone into Christ's kingdom. It does not reconcile an unbeliever to a
00:27:13.020 | holy God, but there are many blessings that are not part of his salvation.
00:27:18.900 | Charles Robby writes, "The common grace may be defined as the unmerited favor of
00:27:24.220 | God toward all men displayed in his general care for them." And then Heath
00:27:29.620 | Lambert has an entire chapter, I believe it's chapter three, of "A Theology of
00:27:35.620 | Biblical Counseling," and you will want to read that entire chapter for this
00:27:39.220 | essay because he does go into some great depth of what is common grace and how
00:27:45.740 | does it relate to the ministry of biblical counseling. It says, "Common grace
00:27:51.740 | is the good kindness of God that he shows to all people regardless of
00:27:55.620 | whether they have experienced the salvation that comes through Jesus
00:27:58.560 | Christ. It is called common because it comes to all people, believers and
00:28:03.580 | unbelievers alike. It is referred to as grace because this kindness of God is
00:28:08.740 | undeserved." So we mentioned Matthew 5 verse 44 to 45, "The father who is in
00:28:15.740 | heaven makes his son rise on the evil and the good and sends rain on the just
00:28:21.940 | and the unjust." Luke 6 verse 35, "But love your enemies and do good and lend,
00:28:28.500 | expecting nothing in return and your reward will be great for you will be
00:28:32.340 | sons of the Most High, for he is kind," note there, "he is kind to the ungrateful
00:28:40.620 | and the evil." I don't know how many people went out of that Korean barbecue
00:28:46.900 | restaurant thanking and praising God for his kindness in Jesus Christ, but they
00:28:56.280 | all ate the same food. And so even to the ungrateful, God shows his his kindness
00:29:03.900 | and his goodness. Acts 14 verse 16 says, "In past generations he allowed all the
00:29:10.300 | nations to walk in their own ways, yet he did not leave himself without witness,
00:29:14.620 | for he did good by giving you rains from heaven and fruitful seasons, satisfying
00:29:20.940 | your hearts with food and gladness." Psalm 145 verse 9, "The Lord is good to all and
00:29:30.620 | his mercy is over all that he has made." Verse 15, "The eyes of all look to you and
00:29:36.580 | you give them their food in due season. You open your hand, you satisfy the
00:29:43.260 | desire of every living thing." Wayne Grudem writes that, "Unbelievers continue
00:29:51.860 | to live in this world solely because of God's common grace. Every breath that
00:29:56.620 | people take is of grace, for the wages of sin is death, not life. The beauty of
00:30:01.700 | multicolored flowers, of grass and woodlands, of rivers and lakes and
00:30:05.460 | mountains and ocean shore still remains as a daily testimony to the continuing
00:30:09.900 | common grace of God. Unbelievers deserve to enjoy none of this beauty, but by God's
00:30:14.420 | grace they can enjoy much of it for their whole lives." So just a note here
00:30:23.740 | that unbelievers show their lack of gratitude for common grace and the fact
00:30:30.420 | that when common grace is withheld, they howl injustice. They say God is unjust if
00:30:41.860 | common grace is withheld, when the reality is that God treats them not
00:30:52.260 | according to their sins, and it is his right to withhold grace. He is not unjust.
00:31:02.180 | He does not need to show grace. He's under no obligation to treat people
00:31:08.620 | with undeserved favor, and I think that's true of all of us that at times when God
00:31:18.500 | withholds his grace, we can indict God's character in saying he's not fair, when
00:31:26.020 | in reality if he gave us what was fair, then all of us would be in hell for our
00:31:32.180 | sins, and he has been very gracious to us. So I just encourage you to take this
00:31:39.220 | opportunity as you study this essay to once again be amazed by God's grace. Now
00:31:44.540 | let's move to some elements of common grace. You have here physical blessings.
00:31:51.540 | These are, as Paul ends, writes, "Those general blessings such as rain and
00:31:57.460 | sunshine, food and drink, clothing and shelter, which God imparts to all men
00:32:01.260 | indiscriminately, where and in what measure it seems good to him. God gives
00:32:07.020 | sunshine and rainfall to the atheistic farmer that enables him to harvest his
00:32:11.140 | crop just as he provides for the Christian farmer." So my wife and I went
00:32:18.860 | to Target because we live the high life in our household, and this was I
00:32:27.620 | think a date night that we went to Target, and we were in search of chocolate,
00:32:33.140 | and whenever we go to Target to search for chocolate, my wife always texts our
00:32:40.580 | kids and says, "What kind of chocolate do you want?" and they all text us, you know,
00:32:45.660 | they want dark chocolate, they want milk chocolate, they want chocolate with
00:32:48.620 | peanuts, chocolate with almonds, chocolate in bunny-shaped sizes, big chocolate,
00:32:55.460 | small chocolate, I mean there's all sorts of chocolates that they want, and we were
00:33:01.980 | in Target and we could find every variation, almost every variation of
00:33:06.220 | chocolate was there in the aisle, just this abundance of chocolate. I mean take
00:33:12.060 | your pick of dozens of types of chocolates that are available not at a
00:33:17.220 | chocolate store, but at just a regular Target. You don't have to be a
00:33:24.300 | believer to go into Target and enjoy that incredible bounty of blessing of
00:33:33.980 | all these abundant blessings in Target. You can be an unbeliever and you can
00:33:40.420 | walk in there and that is an expression of God's common grace that you can have
00:33:46.300 | every type of dessert and every type of chocolate that is available in America.
00:33:54.580 | If you and I can walk into a Ralph's or pavilions or a Costco or 7-eleven and
00:34:02.460 | not be amazed by common grace, then we need to do some some theology. We need to
00:34:10.780 | be amazed once again at the fact that unbelievers are given so many physical
00:34:17.140 | blessings. Let me move to a second element which is the withholding of judgment, the
00:34:24.300 | withholding of judgment. This is Genesis 6 verse 11. God judged the world through
00:34:31.180 | the universal flood in the days of Noah and destroyed the life of
00:34:39.860 | man and living creatures. Genesis 19 verse 24, the Lord rained on Sodom and
00:34:45.220 | Gomorrah sulfur and fire from the Lord out of heaven and he overthrew those
00:34:48.220 | cities and all the valley and all the inhabitants of the cities and what grew
00:34:51.620 | on the ground. But Lot's wife behind him looked back and she became a pillar of
00:34:54.900 | salt. As Billy Graham has famously said, if God doesn't judge America, then he's
00:35:05.060 | going to have to apologize to Sodom and Gomorrah. We are a sinful nation. Romans
00:35:15.260 | 1 verse 29 says they were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil,
00:35:19.340 | covetousness, malice. They're full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness.
00:35:23.820 | They're gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of
00:35:28.780 | evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, and ruthless. And
00:35:33.620 | yet God has shown his common grace to America. I love my country and I plead
00:35:45.460 | for God's grace upon this country and God has been gracious to America and yet
00:35:54.460 | I understand that this is according to his grace. It's not because of our moral
00:35:59.220 | superiority. It is just the fact that he has shown common grace to us as a
00:36:04.900 | country even though we have mostly unbelievers in our country. So this is a
00:36:13.580 | little bit like if you have a teenager who lives in your house and you love
00:36:20.220 | that teenager, you feed him, you care for him, and every day that teenager wakes up
00:36:26.040 | and says, "I hate you, mom and dad," and you continue to feed and to care for
00:36:32.820 | that teenager and every day he wakes up and says, "I hate you even more. I despise
00:36:38.620 | you. I hate you," and you continue for years to love and to care for that
00:36:46.100 | teenager and your love for that teenager does not make the hatred go away. In fact,
00:36:55.060 | it just increases that teen's hostility. What kind of patience would it take for
00:37:03.260 | you as a parent to wake up the next day and to continue to love that child?
00:37:09.260 | That's an illustration of what unbelievers do to God every day. They
00:37:16.460 | say, "I hate you," and yet God every day continues to show his kindness and his
00:37:21.260 | goodness. That's the withholding of judgment and 2 Peter 3 says he
00:37:25.820 | does this because he wants to give men space to repent. And then you have a
00:37:32.780 | letter C, the restraining of sin. All hearts are evil, but not all hearts
00:37:38.100 | express the full extent of their depravity. God puts a limit on the
00:37:43.380 | expression of men's sin, sometimes through laws and government, sometimes by
00:37:47.540 | limiting the opportunities to sin. God protected Cain, though Cain was a
00:37:53.220 | murderer. God limited Satan's activity in Job's life. 2 Thessalonians 2 verse 7
00:38:00.860 | says, "The mystery of lawlessness is at work. Only he who now restrains it will
00:38:05.180 | do so until he is out of the way." So the Holy Spirit restrains the full
00:38:09.740 | expression of man's sin, but in the seven-year tribulation that is to come,
00:38:14.260 | that restraint will be removed and you'll see man give full expression to
00:38:20.860 | the depravity that is in his heart. The fact that our planet in this nuclear age
00:38:30.180 | has not been consumed with nuclear war is an expression of common grace, that
00:38:37.220 | God has withheld the full expression of man's sinfulness. And so there is a
00:38:43.180 | restraining of sin that is an element of God's common grace. And then letter D is
00:38:49.940 | really to our point in why we're writing this essay. There are intellectual
00:38:55.780 | blessings with common grace. So let me just say on one hand at this point that
00:39:05.220 | from one perspective, unbelievers are really smart. I mean, we just have to
00:39:14.860 | affirm that, that from an intellectual perspective, unbelievers do some amazing
00:39:21.180 | things with their minds. They build bridges, they design smartphones, they
00:39:27.060 | build cars, they design spaceships that go to the moon and back, they solve
00:39:34.100 | calculus problems, they design pharmaceuticals, and they build
00:39:41.420 | skyscrapers, they write literature, they write music that is
00:39:48.340 | beautiful and amazing. So from an intellectual perspective, man does do,
00:39:55.340 | even without the Holy Spirit, just on a purely intellectual level, there are
00:40:01.660 | some really smart unbelievers in this world that, you know, I have to concede
00:40:07.580 | that there are many, many unbelievers who are just much smarter than I am in terms
00:40:13.340 | of their intellectual capacity and their intellectual ability. No one in the
00:40:21.100 | biblical counseling movement is saying that unbelievers lack intelligence.
00:40:26.540 | That would not be a true statement. Unbelievers have intelligence because
00:40:31.300 | they're made in the image of God. What we are saying is that the unbelieving mind
00:40:38.580 | is so affected by sin that the unbeliever will use that intelligence to
00:40:47.420 | argue against the true and the living God. The unbeliever will take all of the
00:40:54.620 | intellectual capacity that has been given to him by God and then use that
00:40:59.420 | capacity to argue against God and to attack God. And so unbelievers are
00:41:08.060 | intelligent but they are not neutral. The unbeliever is hostile in mind toward
00:41:15.260 | God. But the point of this letter D is to say that unbelievers do have intellectual
00:41:21.500 | blessings. I mean, unbelievers will, every time you turn on the radio and listen to
00:41:27.380 | a nice piece of music written by an unbeliever and enjoy that piece of music,
00:41:32.020 | you are witnessing to the common grace of God. So Wayne Grudem talks
00:41:40.420 | about this, the intellectual blessings. This is under letter D. All science and
00:41:44.980 | technology carried out by non-Christians is a result of common grace, allowing
00:41:49.260 | them to make incredible discoveries and inventions, to develop the earth's
00:41:52.460 | resources into many material goods, to produce and distribute those resources,
00:41:56.300 | and to have skill in their productive work. In a practical sense, this means
00:42:00.220 | that every time we walk into a grocery store, or ride in an automobile, or enter
00:42:04.580 | a house, we should remember that we are experiencing the results of the abundant
00:42:08.620 | common grace of God poured out so richly on all mankind. And as Heath Lambert
00:42:15.760 | writes in chapter 3 of Theology of Biblical Counseling, saved and unsaved
00:42:20.820 | people are able to know correct information. So this is, in an algebra
00:42:30.860 | class, you can have a, or any math class, you can have an unbeliever who says 2
00:42:37.540 | plus 2 equals 4, and that unbeliever would know correct information. And then
00:42:46.220 | you have a believer who's filled with the Holy Spirit, and that believer might
00:42:49.140 | say, you know, to the glory of God and for the glory of Christ, 2 plus 2 equals 4.
00:42:55.380 | But the answer would be the same. Both saved and unsaved people are able to
00:42:59.780 | know correct information. And so under common grace there are intellectual
00:43:07.460 | blessings. I'm thankful for that. I'm thankful every time I drive on the
00:43:13.180 | freeway, or get in a car that was made by an unbeliever, I'm thankful for common
00:43:18.300 | grace that this car, probably designed by an unbeliever, is able to drive on a
00:43:23.420 | freeway and be safe. So why is ACBC asking you to write this essay? Let me
00:43:36.180 | back up and look at last week's essay. Last week we saw that ACBC wanted you to
00:43:48.140 | write an essay on general revelation and special revelation, because they wanted
00:43:53.780 | you to respond to the integrationist argument. The integrationist argument is
00:43:57.940 | basically that God has given us general revelation in creation, and special
00:44:02.580 | revelation in scripture, and that we should use both to help people change.
00:44:08.380 | And so they would classify secular psychology under general revelation,
00:44:13.220 | scripture under special revelation, and make the argument that we have to use
00:44:18.120 | both general and special revelation to help people change, and so we should
00:44:23.380 | integrate secular psychology and scripture. And last week ACBC wanted you
00:44:28.980 | to respond to that idea, and the basic response is that no unbeliever accepts
00:44:36.540 | general revelation. No unbeliever, from a secular perspective, looks at general
00:44:45.540 | revelation and comes to accurate conclusions. So under the left-hand
00:44:50.100 | column, if you're looking at secular psychology, you're gonna have a very
00:44:54.780 | distorted understanding of general revelation, if you are looking at
00:45:00.380 | revelation from a purely secular view. And if you try to combine that with
00:45:04.340 | scripture, you're gonna come up with a hybrid that is flawed and faulty. But
00:45:09.800 | that was the general integrationist argument that ACBC wanted
00:45:13.500 | you to respond to, that our focus is on special revelation, scripture, because
00:45:19.540 | only scripture has the power to convert the soul. So with that in mind, today's
00:45:27.220 | topic is similar. The integrationist argument is basically that we should use
00:45:33.220 | both common grace and saving grace to help people change, and they would
00:45:40.100 | classify secular psychology under common grace, scripture under saving grace, and
00:45:45.700 | make an argument for integration saying that we should use both. We should use
00:45:52.260 | the intellectual discoveries of unbelievers in psychology, and we should
00:45:57.420 | use scripture and bring them into a type of hybrid. Now you would look at that, and
00:46:04.900 | I guess from a conceptual standpoint, you might look at that and say, "Well, that
00:46:07.860 | makes sense. You should use both. You want all of the grace of God, right? And so
00:46:11.420 | maybe we should integrate secular psychology and scripture." But what's
00:46:16.220 | wrong with that argument? So very, very quickly, what this argument does not, what
00:46:25.180 | this doesn't capture is the fact that common grace has limitations. Common
00:46:31.800 | grace, as wonderful as it is, has limitations. And if you don't understand
00:46:39.100 | those limitations, you're gonna come up with a flawed understanding of an
00:46:44.740 | approach to counseling. So what are the limitations to common grace? The first
00:46:51.820 | limitation under letter A is that common grace does not save. Common grace does
00:46:57.660 | not save. Common grace does not lead anyone to the saving knowledge of Jesus
00:47:01.260 | Christ. You need saving grace to become a Christian. So common grace does not save
00:47:07.580 | anyone. Common grace is for unbelievers and unbelievers. Saving grace is for
00:47:12.540 | believers only. Common grace delays judgment for time. Saving grace satisfies
00:47:19.300 | judgment in Christ. It doesn't just delay it. It satisfies God's judgment in Christ
00:47:25.980 | so that we no longer bear the judgment of God. Common grace gives physical
00:47:31.240 | blessings, but only saving grace gives spiritual blessing, and not just some
00:47:36.060 | spiritual blessings, but every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in
00:47:40.980 | Christ. So saving grace is what caused you to be born again and what causes
00:47:47.340 | your heart to become alive to the knowledge of Christ. Common grace, as
00:47:52.780 | wonderful as it is, does none of that. Does not bring forgiveness of sins, does
00:47:58.240 | not bring the knowledge of Christ, does not bring understanding of God's Word. So
00:48:05.700 | there are limitations here. I have some language on your handout on, if you read
00:48:13.600 | Paul Enns, his Moody Handbook of Theology, you'll find that he interchanges, he uses
00:48:20.060 | the term efficacious grace to describe saving grace, and don't get lost there.
00:48:27.180 | He's referring to the same concept, but using the term efficacious grace, he's
00:48:31.860 | really highlighting the idea that anyone who receives saving grace does not fail
00:48:39.700 | to come out of darkness into light. No one receives saving grace and then
00:48:44.140 | stays an unbeliever. Saving grace is Jesus saying to Lazarus, it's like that
00:48:53.660 | scene where Jesus said to Lazarus, "Lazarus come forth," and Lazarus came
00:48:58.460 | alive. So that's what he's doing when he uses the term efficacious grace, but he's
00:49:04.740 | referring to the same category of saving grace. So the first limitation of common
00:49:10.280 | grace is common grace does not save. What's a second limitation of common
00:49:13.860 | grace? And I think this is really important here, letter B. Common grace
00:49:19.180 | does not overcome sin's effects on the mind. Common grace does not overcome sin's
00:49:26.500 | effects on the mind. So I'm going to introduce this phrase here, and then
00:49:31.820 | we'll do some more work on this next Sunday, but the phrase is the noetic
00:49:37.860 | effects of sin. You'll have, if you read chapter 3 of Heath Lambert's Theology of
00:49:44.260 | Biblical Counseling, you'll find he talks a lot about the noetic effects of sin.
00:49:48.660 | What does he mean by that? The term noose comes from the word mind, and so when
00:49:53.620 | we're talking about the noetic effects of sin, we're simply talking about sin's
00:49:58.220 | effects on the mind. Sin has effects on the intellect of the unbeliever. It doesn't
00:50:07.500 | remove their intelligence, but what it does is it biases the unbeliever's
00:50:12.820 | intelligence so that the unbeliever will always argue against God and use his
00:50:18.340 | intelligence against God. So unbelievers are intelligent, but they're not
00:50:22.900 | objective. They're biased against God. The unbeliever is not neutral. You can't just
00:50:31.020 | hand an unbeliever a list of evidence of why God exists. The unbeliever will look
00:50:36.060 | at this created universe and the galaxies and the stars and all that God
00:50:40.380 | has created and conclude that it all came out of a Big Bang and nothing
00:50:46.060 | created something and order came out of chaos. That's not objective reasoning. It
00:50:54.420 | may be intelligent reasoning, but it's not objective reasoning. It's very biased,
00:50:59.780 | and this is what the unbeliever does with his intelligence is he uses it to
00:51:07.500 | argue against God. Ephesians 4 over 17 is a key passage talking about the noetic
00:51:14.260 | effects of sin. Paul says, "Now this I say in testifying the Lord that you must no
00:51:20.300 | longer walk as the Gentiles do in the futility of their minds." Once again, the
00:51:26.620 | intellectual capacity of an unbeliever does not produce any spiritual fruit.
00:51:32.580 | There is a futility in their thinking. Paul says they are darkened in their
00:51:37.460 | understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in
00:51:41.920 | them due to the hardness of heart. Colossians 1 verse 21, "And you who once
00:51:45.420 | were alienated, hostile in mind." That phrase ascribes me when I was an
00:51:49.700 | unbeliever. When I first came to church in college, I was hostile in mind. I
00:51:56.340 | listened to the pastor sermons and I wrote down copious notes of all the
00:52:00.500 | reasons why he was wrong and the Bible was wrong, but because I was a college
00:52:05.740 | educated person, my notes had good punctuation, good grammar that had
00:52:13.860 | orderly logical flow to it, but all of that intellectual ability was being used
00:52:21.220 | to argue against the Bible and to argue against the truth. I was hostile in mind
00:52:27.180 | and the grace of God was evident in my life and that God saved me and turned
00:52:33.580 | that hostility into a love for scripture. But common grace cannot overcome the
00:52:40.420 | noetic effects of sin. So the ACBC Standards of Doctrine, this essay is
00:52:47.540 | so important. They have an entire section there. I would encourage you to look that
00:52:52.100 | up at the ACBC website and they have an entire section on common grace. They
00:52:59.460 | write, "The chief manifestation of God's grace is the salvation of sinners by the
00:53:03.340 | blood of Jesus Christ. To all who believe, common grace cannot overcome the
00:53:07.500 | corrosive effects of sin upon human thinking without the special saving
00:53:11.060 | grace of Jesus." Continues, "This reality guarantees that though unbelievers can
00:53:17.780 | know many facts, they will misunderstand information that is most central to
00:53:21.180 | human life, which includes information about God, the human problem, and a
00:53:25.420 | solution in Christ. Because the central elements of counseling include God, the
00:53:30.480 | nature of the human problem, and God's solution in Christ, the counseling
00:53:33.340 | methods of secular people are ultimately at odds with a uniquely biblical
00:53:37.660 | approach to counseling." And so Lambert writes in Theology of Biblical Counseling,
00:53:45.420 | "Common grace makes it possible for unbelievers to know facts, but the
00:53:48.460 | noetic effects of sin make it impossible for them to embrace the most important
00:53:53.620 | facts." So let me show you how this works out in a counseling method. Lambert
00:54:01.680 | writes, "The closer unbelievers get in counseling to issues having to do with
00:54:05.320 | God," so note that really carefully, "The closer unbelievers get in counseling to
00:54:11.840 | issues having to do with God, the ultimate meaning of life and the
00:54:14.560 | problems that plague humanity, the greater will be the impact of the noetic
00:54:20.200 | effects of sin on their thinking, and the more cautious Christians must be in
00:54:25.000 | accepting the information they produce. The closer you get to the real ultimate
00:54:30.520 | issues of life, the more the noetic effects of sin are seen. The unbeliever
00:54:36.440 | gets more hostile toward any discipline that is close to the discipline of
00:54:44.040 | theology because the unbeliever is hostile in mind." And so let me give you a
00:54:52.400 | third limitation here. "Common grace does not enable unbelievers to understand the
00:54:56.360 | root of human behavior," which we covered in year one. The root of human behavior
00:55:01.400 | is what is going on in the heart. It is out of the heart, the flow of the issues
00:55:06.080 | of life. The heart is always relating to God in a worshiping relationship, whether
00:55:11.400 | that is a disordered worship relationship or whether that is a true
00:55:17.200 | worship relationship. The heart is always worshiping something, and that is the
00:55:21.280 | root of human behavior. So as Lambert writes, and this should be reviewed from
00:55:27.680 | year one, there are three levels of psychology. There is observation of
00:55:32.560 | seeing how men are behaving, what are the words, the actions, the emotions that are
00:55:39.840 | observable from an external perspective. There is interpretation, which is the
00:55:46.320 | question, why does man behave in this way? What is the root issue that is giving
00:55:52.540 | rise to man's behavior? And then once you have interpretation, you have
00:55:58.640 | intervention, which seeks to address the issue that is at the root of the problem.
00:56:03.680 | And Lambert talks about in chapter 3 of Theology of Biblical Counseling that
00:56:08.360 | when it comes to observation, a secular psychologist and a biblical counselor
00:56:12.640 | will pretty much come up with the same observations. If a person has an anger
00:56:17.960 | problem, both a biblical counselor and a secular psychologist will observe that
00:56:22.920 | his heart rate goes up, his face turns red, he raises his voice, he says certain
00:56:29.480 | words, and they will pretty much agree under common grace they can make the
00:56:35.560 | same observations, whether you're an unbeliever or a believer. I've often said
00:56:40.480 | that, you know, if someone's designed an experiment of how many people get angry
00:56:45.920 | when they're on the freeway and there's traffic on the freeway, a secular
00:56:52.440 | psychologist and a biblical counselor would pretty much make the same
00:56:55.480 | observations, that 90% of people who are on a traffic-clogged freeway tend to get
00:57:06.120 | angry when a temperature reaches a certain number of degrees. Under
00:57:12.160 | observation, under common grace, secular psychologists tend to make pretty
00:57:17.600 | accurate observations. It's really in the issue of interpretation that the road
00:57:22.680 | diverges. A secular psychologist cannot make a correct interpretation of that
00:57:28.640 | external data because they cannot understand who man is, that it is out of
00:57:36.040 | the heart that flow the issues of life. The reason why a person is getting
00:57:40.680 | angry is because he is relating wrongly to the true and the living God, and it is
00:57:47.920 | that interpretation that is inevitably flawed under the study of secular
00:57:54.200 | psychology, and if, as Lambert writes, if your interpretation is flawed, your
00:57:58.160 | intervention will be flawed as well. So here's how we would draw this out as an
00:58:07.440 | illustration. Here's a person who's behaving a certain way. Let's say the
00:58:10.680 | issue is anger. Under observation, the question would be how is this person
00:58:16.820 | behaving? What are the actions and words that are coming out of this person's
00:58:21.240 | mouth? So I think a secular psychologist and a biblical counselor would make the
00:58:26.840 | same observations at this point. They would say that this man is saying a lot
00:58:31.400 | of bad words, he's saying them very loud, he's agitated in his emotions, he's
00:58:42.520 | getting sweaty and his face is turning red. Those are some external observations
00:58:49.040 | that would probably be the same under a biblical counseling system and also a
00:58:54.240 | secular psychology system. It's at the level of interpretation that the road
00:59:01.920 | diverges. Interpretation asks the question why is this person behaving in
00:59:07.120 | this way? Why is he angry? Why is this husband, let's say for example, why is
00:59:13.600 | this husband being angry with his wife? And secular psychologists cannot answer
00:59:20.360 | that question because a secular psychologist cannot understand the heart
00:59:26.600 | of man, which is spoken of in Scripture. The thoughts, desires, and motivations of
00:59:31.720 | a man's heart are always relating to God and it is the overflow of that
00:59:37.480 | relationship to God that expresses itself in observable actions. So it's
00:59:44.340 | really under interpretation that a biblical counselor and a secular
00:59:48.760 | psychologist will have a widely divergent interpretation and that's
00:59:54.120 | where the issue needs to be dealt with. Under common grace, we would say that a
01:00:01.800 | secular psychologist can make a correct observation under common grace. They can
01:00:06.360 | observe behavior, but where common grace is limited is that a secular psychologist
01:00:12.880 | cannot make a correct interpretation because they don't include the knowledge
01:00:18.600 | of God in their system of thought. I hope that makes sense to you. So under
01:00:25.200 | secular psychologists, the intervention will be out in the realm of actions and
01:00:31.120 | words, a lot of behavior modification. The secular psychologist will go to the
01:00:35.800 | angry person and say here's some tips and techniques to manage your anger, you
01:00:40.320 | know, here's a ball to squeeze if you get upset, here's, you know,
01:00:44.520 | learn to count to ten or, you know, things that give that modified behavior but
01:00:49.680 | don't deal with the heart issue. The biblical counseling model intervention
01:00:56.240 | is in the heart. Hebrews 4 verse 12. We're after the thoughts and the intentions of
01:01:02.040 | the heart and we have only one tool to get there and that is the Word of God
01:01:06.880 | because only the Word of God can discern the thoughts and intentions of the heart.
01:01:12.080 | So I hope that that makes sense to you of where the differences are. Okay,
01:01:20.920 | let me let me end with this and I'm gonna run a little bit over time here,
01:01:26.560 | but I think this will be helpful and set us up for next week. So I put in your
01:01:32.360 | Dropbox folder George Sipioni's articles called Eeny, Meeny, Miny, Moe and it's an
01:01:40.760 | excellent article. I encourage you to read it all, but if you don't read all of
01:01:44.200 | it, the gold is really in footnote 24 and so search through the entire essay and
01:01:52.520 | get down to footnote 24 and he gives probably the best illustration I've come
01:01:57.640 | across as to how the noetic effects of sin increase the closer you get to the
01:02:05.720 | knowledge of God. And he has this diagram. You have these disciplines of
01:02:11.480 | knowledge. You have math, physics, chemistry, biology, anthropology,
01:02:15.000 | sociology, psychology, and theology. And basically his point in footnote 24 is to
01:02:21.800 | say that if you are left on this diagram, you have a lesser amount of the noetic
01:02:31.120 | effects of sin because the discipline is not as close to the study of God as some
01:02:36.960 | other disciplines. The more right you go on the diagram, the more you will see the
01:02:43.660 | noetic effects of sin on the unbelievers mind because you are getting closer to
01:02:50.560 | the study of the knowledge of God. So the more right you go, the more you see the
01:02:56.680 | hostility of the unbelievers mind manifesting itself in that realm of
01:03:02.200 | study. So I'll quote Scipione here. He says, "As we go from left to right, we move
01:03:09.440 | from the abstract non-personal to the concrete personal aspects of the
01:03:14.200 | universe. As we move to the right, the noetic effects of sin is multiplied at
01:03:19.520 | an escalating pace, distorting the observation of data and the conclusions
01:03:24.320 | drawn from that data. The distortion grows as we move right until we find
01:03:29.440 | clearly rival theologies that openly, self-consciously reject the true and the
01:03:35.880 | living God." And so here is the issue as it relates to the counseling discussion.
01:03:45.400 | You will find the most distortion of the noetic effects of sin in the study
01:03:53.120 | of psychology, the study of man. Why is that? Because Genesis 1 verse 27 says
01:03:59.600 | that man is made in the image of God. The more right you go, the closer you are
01:04:05.720 | getting to the study of God. And when you get to the study of man, you are as close
01:04:11.120 | to the study of God as you can be because man is made to reflect God's
01:04:17.920 | likeness and he's made to live in relationship with God. So you are gonna
01:04:22.520 | see the most distortion, the greatest effect of sin's effects upon the mind in
01:04:30.960 | the study of psychology because you are as close as you can get to the study of
01:04:36.320 | theology. So back to the question. With all that said, how do you write this
01:04:45.960 | essay? Explain the doctrine of common grace relating the doctrine to the
01:04:49.480 | ability of psycho-psychologists to understand true information about the
01:04:52.640 | human condition. Well, first you need to explain common grace. Just start off with
01:05:01.680 | what is grace and then give the categories of common grace versus saving
01:05:06.960 | grace. Draw the distinctions between common grace and saving grace and just
01:05:13.200 | give verses and good quotes from established theologians that explain the
01:05:19.480 | doctrine of common grace. The second part of the essay is you need to explain how
01:05:25.680 | does this relate to the ability of secular psychologists to understand true
01:05:28.800 | information about the human condition. Under that basic framework of Lambert
01:05:35.320 | gives you under observation, interpretation, and intervention. We
01:05:42.480 | would expect the secular psychologists to be able to make some true observations
01:05:49.040 | about human behavior under common grace because the psychologist, the
01:05:55.360 | psycho-psychologist has intellectual ability. We would not discount the fact
01:05:59.960 | that those observations may be accurate. The issue comes, as I mentioned, under
01:06:09.000 | interpretation. A secular psychologist is not able to accurately interpret that
01:06:14.440 | data and understand the true condition of man. A secular psychologist can't
01:06:20.440 | understand the root of the issue, which is the heart. A secular psychologist
01:06:24.680 | can't relate to that data of observable information to how a person is relating
01:06:30.920 | to the true and the living God. Therefore, a secular psychologist cannot
01:06:36.880 | give the proper intervention to deal with the heart issues because he does
01:06:44.000 | not understand the interpretation of the data. Under the second part of this
01:06:50.760 | essay, you want to work through Lambert's categories of observation,
01:06:55.840 | interpretation, and intervention. I think the basic framework is that common
01:07:02.360 | grace allows a secular psychologist to make accurate observations, but the
01:07:06.800 | limitations of common grace keep the secular psychologist from making
01:07:11.320 | accurate interpretations. Therefore, the interventions are flawed. That
01:07:18.440 | leads us to just embrace the fact that as biblical counselors, we minister under
01:07:24.280 | saving grace. We minister saving grace. We want our
01:07:29.240 | counselees to be saved, first of all. We don't want to just modify their behavior.
01:07:33.920 | We want them to come to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ, and then we
01:07:37.840 | want our counselees to experience that grace of God, which conforms them into
01:07:42.760 | the likeness of Christ and makes them more and more holy. So a lot there, but I
01:07:51.080 | hope that's helpful, and this is a real crucial issue as it relates to your
01:07:55.640 | essays and to biblical counseling. Okay, what I'm gonna do, I've gone over time, so
01:08:01.960 | I'm gonna pray for us, and you can be dismissed and enjoy a nice Father's Day.
01:08:06.160 | I'll hang on for five or ten minutes if any of you have questions on the
01:08:09.420 | material or in any of the essays, but you're free to go if that's
01:08:14.280 | sufficient, and let me pray for us and close our time. Father, thank you for
01:08:19.760 | your amazing grace, both common grace and saving grace, all of the expressions of
01:08:25.840 | your grace. We just praise you and thank you that you are a gracious Heavenly
01:08:31.240 | Father. Thank you that under saving grace, we have the ability not only to observe
01:08:37.640 | how people behave, but we can diagnose the true condition of the heart through
01:08:42.160 | your word, and so we pray that you would help us and make us into effective
01:08:47.240 | biblical counselors who minister to the thoughts and intentions of the heart
01:08:51.280 | using your word, and we trust in the sufficiency of your word for life
01:08:55.360 | change. Thank you for each student here. Thank you for their dedication to this
01:09:00.000 | training. May you bless it. May you give it much fruit. May this be a clarifying
01:09:05.560 | process for each one, and help us to dig deep into your word that we may be
01:09:12.360 | useful to you and be able to minister your word to others, and we just thank
01:09:16.000 | you and praise you in Jesus' name, amen. Okay, amen. You are dismissed, but I'll
01:09:22.200 | hang on for five, ten minutes. If any of you have any questions, I'll be happy to
01:09:25.400 | answer them, or we can also be free to go. Okay, Lord bless you.
01:09:31.720 | [silence]
01:09:33.720 | [silence]
01:09:35.720 | [silence]
01:10:03.720 | Okay, question is, do we need to retype the questions at the beginning of each
01:10:08.760 | essay? Essays are kind of long, and this would help me save space. So, a great
01:10:15.540 | question. We would want you to use the template at biblicalcounseling.com,
01:10:21.840 | and I believe the template has all of the questions listed at the top, so yes,
01:10:30.240 | the questions should be at the top of each essay if you follow the template. I
01:10:35.480 | don't know if ACBC is going to be super strict on that, but that is kind of the
01:10:40.160 | template that they've given us, is to put each question at the top. So, it's a good
01:10:46.160 | question. I'm encouraged to hear that you have more material that you need to cut
01:10:50.400 | down rather than less material, but that's good news. So, editing is always,
01:10:55.800 | it's always a difficult thing. So, may God bless you as you seek to edit
01:11:03.880 | your essays down to a page and a half.
01:11:07.880 | Question is, do you ever go through common grace and saving grace to lead to
01:11:13.120 | sharing the gospel to a counselee you think is unsaved? That's a great
01:11:20.080 | question. I think common grace is, it's very fair to go to explain common grace
01:11:26.080 | to a counselee because it's part of the inspired Word of God, and I think it
01:11:33.680 | illustrates God's holiness, His justice, His wrath, all of those concepts are
01:11:41.000 | directly relevant to the unbeliever. As always, you would want to move from
01:11:47.880 | common grace to saving grace to the person and work of Jesus Christ, and make
01:11:53.880 | sure that is the focus of sharing the gospel, but absolutely, you can use common
01:11:59.600 | grace to minister to a counselee because it's part of God's truth, but always
01:12:06.600 | keeping in mind that a person is saved when they come to place their trust
01:12:10.920 | in the person and work of Jesus Christ and His full atonement on the cross for
01:12:16.120 | their sins, so make sure you get from common grace to saving grace in your
01:12:21.080 | presentation of the gospel, but great question.
01:12:25.360 | All right, wonderful. Okay, well, Lord bless you all. If there's not any more
01:12:37.160 | questions, I'm gonna sign off, and I think I'm gonna go to Father's Day, some kind
01:12:42.000 | of Father's Day celebration. We'll see what my kids want to do.
01:12:48.400 | One more question is, "Can you expand on your counseling example you gave at the
01:12:53.520 | beginning about reconciling between spouses and parent, kids, and church
01:12:57.200 | members?" Yeah, I just think the goal--great question, Steve--and I just think the goal
01:13:06.680 | of counseling, when you're doing a marriage issue, for example, is you want
01:13:14.000 | to help the person to become more like Christ, and becoming more like Christ
01:13:19.080 | means not loving your wife when she is respectful to you, but loving your wife
01:13:26.120 | when she is disrespectful to you, or, you know, vice versa. For the wife, it's
01:13:32.120 | loving your husband when he leads you well and loves you well, or loving him
01:13:37.440 | when he's selfish and aloof and doesn't seem to care. Becoming like Christ is
01:13:44.400 | learning to love your enemies. That's how Christ loved us. Christ loved us when we
01:13:48.640 | were his enemies. He died for us, and I just think that that's the powerful
01:13:54.000 | truth that biblical counseling offers that no other counseling system can
01:13:57.440 | ever offer. No other counseling system can offer a
01:14:02.320 | counselee the hope of becoming more like Christ. I mean, you can do behavior
01:14:06.360 | modification, you can do some tips and techniques to put a band-aid on the
01:14:10.280 | marriage, but you can't offer the hope of becoming more like Christ, and that's
01:14:15.880 | where our counseling method differs from the secular method, because a
01:14:20.640 | biblical counselor will tell the husband that your wife does not need to change
01:14:27.320 | for you to become more like Christ. You can become more like Christ today,
01:14:33.000 | regardless of how your wife behaves or doesn't behave toward you, because being
01:14:40.320 | like Christ is loving those who are disrespectful and those who don't love
01:14:45.720 | you in response. So that's my criticism of Gary Chapman's "Five Love Languages." My
01:14:50.600 | critique of that, I did that in year one, is that book is basically holding out a
01:14:55.040 | model of love others so that they will love you. Learn your spouse's love
01:15:01.200 | language so that your spouse will learn your love language, and a biblical
01:15:05.000 | counseling approach is much deeper than that. You need to love your spouse,
01:15:10.320 | and you do so for the glory of Christ, and because it makes you more like
01:15:15.240 | Christ, not so that you will expect something in return, and that's just a
01:15:21.920 | whole different issue. When a husband gets a hold of the idea
01:15:26.880 | that he is to be like Christ regardless of how his wife behaves toward him,
01:15:31.840 | that's a powerful life-changing element that brings hope and help into the