meeting of intermediate biblical counseling. It's a great joy to be able to gather tonight and to be able to continue our study of God's Word. I trust that the Lord has been blessing you and blessing your studies and just look forward to a wonderful time tonight looking at a very important topic on common grace.

And so I do want to wish you all a very happy Father's Day and trust that the Lord is blessing you as you appreciate our earthly fathers, but even more importantly, it's a day to celebrate our relationship with our gracious Heavenly Father who has sent His Son to die for our sins and to reconcile us to Himself.

And so we do rejoice in our relationship with our Heavenly Father whom we can draw near to and the scripture says that we are indeed sons of God in Christ and that is a great joy to be able to celebrate that today. Well tonight, before I pray, I want to open our time with a devotion from Matthew chapter 5 verses 43 to 48 and if you have your Bibles you can go ahead and turn there.

This is gonna be a key passage that we'll look at tonight as it relates to theology exam number 5 on common grace and I think it's also a good passage to encourage us in our walks with Christ and also has some implications for counseling ministry. So let me go ahead and read Matthew 5 verses 43 to 48 for us and we'll use this as a time to prepare our hearts to our study tonight.

Jesus said this, "You have heard that it was said you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy but I say to you love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven for he makes his son rise on the evil and on the good and sends rain on the just and on the unjust for if you love those who love you what reward do you have do not even the tax collectors do the same and if you greet only your brothers what more are you doing than others do not even the Gentiles do the same you therefore must be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect." I was teaching on the Sermon on the Mount this past Wednesday and reflecting on the Beatitudes which open the Sermon on the Mount, "Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven," and just reflecting on this whole idea that the principles of Christ's kingdom are so radically different from the kingdom of man or the kingdom of this world.

In the kingdom of man you have pride and self-sufficiency, you have personal retaliation, you have an eye for an eye, tooth for tooth, you have this unrelenting desire to be right and never to be wronged, and if you look at the principles of Christ's kingdom in Matthew 5, the values are so very different, they're the very opposite.

"Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven, blessed are the humble, blessed are the gentle, the meek, those who have power under control, blessed are those who mourn over sin and a desire to be right with God," and you just see how the principles of Christ's kingdom are so radically different from the kingdoms of this world, and that makes sense because Jesus said in John 18 verse 36 that my kingdom is not of this world.

So Jesus continues this theme of how his kingdom is so different from the kingdom of this world in verse 43, and basically what he says in this passage is that the subjects of his kingdom are characterized by grace in their relationships with others. They don't treat others the way that others deserve to be treated, they treat others according to the principle of grace, they give unmerited favor to others.

Subjects of Christ's kingdom don't only love their friends, they love their enemies, they don't only love those who love them, subjects of Christ's kingdom love those who persecute them and who are their enemies, and Jesus says in Matthew 5 verse 43, "You have heard that it was said you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy," and by the way, that's not what the Word of God said.

Leviticus 19 verse 18 says, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself," but then Jewish tradition added that statement, "You shall hate your enemy," and we can understand why a man would turn that into a standard like that because that's basically the natural operation of the human heart is to love your friends and hate your enemies, and Jesus is drawing a contrast between the principles of man's kingdom with the principles of his kingdom.

He says, "You have heard that it was said you can hate your enemy," but verse 44, "I say to you love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you." So I just want to, this passage is going to be key to our essay tonight, but I also just want to make some practical applications and draw out some counseling implications for this passage.

What we face in counseling often is helping people to reconcile. I mean, that would be a lot of marriage counseling, which is probably about 50% of or more of counseling is marriage counseling, just helping husband and wife to reconcile, to forgive, to love one another. There's also reconciliation between fathers and sons and daughters and neighbors and even reconciliation between church members, and that's a lot of what we do in counseling is helping people to make peace, and I think the fundamental truth that we're trying to communicate in our counseling ministry is that if you're a follower of Christ, you don't just love your friends, you love your enemies, you don't just love people who love you back, but you love people who don't love you back, and when you begin to adopt that kingdom mentality of grace in your relationships, of showing favor to those who don't return anything in response, then you are living out the principles of Christ's kingdom.

In marriage counseling, oftentimes husband and wife come in, and the husband does an incredible job of confessing the wife's sin, and he confesses the wife's sin with clarity, with accuracy, with perfect memory, with records, dates and times, and specific examples and illustrations, and then the wife confesses the husband's sin and does the very same thing, and we work with people in teaching them from the Bible that you are called not only to love your spouse if your spouse loves you back, but even if your spouse does not love you back, to be a subject of Christ's kingdom is to love, is to pray for those who bless you, is to not revile those who revile you.

If a husband's saying my wife is disrespectful, she's unsubmissive, she's selfish, she undermines me, it's helping that person love with the love of Christ. Verse 45, Jesus says, gives us the reason why we are to love in this way. He says, "So that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven, for he makes his Son rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust." This is the perfect verse for Father's Day.

It's a great word that we are sons of the Father who is in heaven, and essentially, Jesus says here that subjects of his kingdom are characterized by grace in their relationships because they are children of a Heavenly Father who shows grace to the just and to the unjust. This is just something that I pray we will celebrate about our Heavenly Father.

If you stop to think about it, that our Heavenly Father is filled with grace toward his enemies. He shows goodness and kindness not just to people who love him, but he shows his goodness and kindness to people who hate him, and our Heavenly Father is gracious toward his enemies, and that's gonna set the table for our discussion tonight on common grace.

What common grace is, is God's unmerited favor toward both believers and unbelievers, and you realize this every day that unbelievers wake up every morning, they hate God, they blaspheme God, they want nothing to do with Christ, they don't worship the true and the living God, they despise his word, they despise his law, and yet for even the unbeliever, God causes the sun to rise in the morning, God feeds them with food, God shelters them with a roof over their heads.

For many unbelievers, God even gives them a good job that they can go and make money and prosper. God continues to show kindness and goodness not just to believers in this world, but he shows kindness to unbelievers, and that's the theological category of common grace. It's God's unmerited favor toward believers and unbelievers.

God is gracious toward believers in that he gives them saving grace, and he gives them forgiveness of sins and eternity in heaven, status as being an adopted child of God, and all of that he gives to believers. But even to the unbeliever whom God has not saved, at least up to this point, even to the unbeliever living in darkness, God feeds that person, God shelters that person, God withholds his judgment, and he shows kindness.

And that's what theologians call "common grace." And what Jesus is saying in Matthew chapter 5 is that when you see God being gracious to people who hate him, to his enemies, when you see the sun rising every morning on unbelievers who hate the Lord, and God continuing to preserve their life and give them health and give them even enjoyable things to do in this world, that ought to drive you to reflect the same image, to reflect the same likeness, to be sons of the Father who is in heaven.

And you ought to see how gracious God is toward people who hate him, and that ought to cause you to love your enemies. Now, I share this devotion tonight, and the great thing and the hard thing about any devotion on personal relationships is it requires immediate application. All of us are gonna have the opportunity this week, and some of us are gonna have the opportunity tonight to put this into practice, and to come across a person who is unkind, who is disrespectful, who is hurtful, who maybe doesn't like you, who gets in your way, who maybe even insults you, and you and I are gonna have a choice at that point whether to live according to the principles of man's kingdom and retaliate, or to live according to the principles of Christ's kingdom and to love our enemies and to do good to those who who do not do good to us.

And that's gonna set the table for our essay, but also for our own personal application. We can't help counselees to live in this way if we're not living this way ourselves, and so let me just challenge all of us and to encourage us to love our enemies, to do good to those who do not do good to us, and so reflect the character of our gracious Heavenly Father who shows his kindness to both believers and unbelievers.

So let me pray for us, and we'll go over our essay topic tonight. Father, thank you so much for your amazing grace. We tend to celebrate most often your saving grace, and rightly so, for you are a saving God who has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of your beloved Son.

But Father, help us tonight to understand your common grace, to understand the astounding truth that you show your kindness even to the unbeliever, even to the person who hates you. You treat them not according to what they deserve, but you withhold your judgment. You give time and space to repent.

You give food and shelter. You give enjoyable pursuits in life, and you just show kindness, Lord, to the unbeliever. We just pray that we might understand your character and that we ourselves might reflect that in our own dealings with others, that we would be gracious and kind and merciful, that we would love our enemies, pray for those who persecute us, and bless those who revile us, and so be sons of our Father who is in heaven.

This Father's Day, we thank you for our earthly fathers, but Father, we thank you most of all that you are our Heavenly Father, and you are gracious to us as your children. So bless us tonight as we look at your word, and we pray all this in Christ's name, amen.

Okay, well, we are looking at tonight the subject of common grace. I hope you all can see the slides, and I've got this Zoom thing working okay. So, common grace. This is the subject of tonight's topic, and the question on theology exam number five is to explain the doctrine of common grace relating the doctrine to the ability of secular psychologists to understand true information about the human condition.

So that's page one on your handout. We have the doctrine of common grace. There's two parts to this question. The first is to explain common grace, what is common grace, and what are the passages of scripture that speak to common grace, and then you have a second part of the question to relate that doctrine to the ability of secular psychologists to understand the human condition.

So basically, ACBC wants you to interact with the integrationist perspective that a secular psychologist under common grace can understand who man is and help man with his problems. So let me give you a slide here that I think will explain what we're looking at here. That's a little bit later on, but here we go with the grace of God.

What we're looking at here under the broader category of God's grace. God's grace can be defined as his unmerited favor, and there are two categories of God's grace. There's common grace, which is God's unmerited favor extended to all men, and that's believers and unbelievers, and then there is saving grace, which is God's unmerited favor extended to believers only.

As I prayed, we tend to focus in on saving grace, and a lot of our songs and hymns and messages, sermons, celebrate the saving grace of God and Jesus Christ, celebrate our forgiveness of sins, our standing in his unmerited favor, our peace with God, our reconciliation to God, all of that focuses in on saving grace, but I would ask you this question.

When is the last time you've heard a sermon or a message on common grace? It's kind of an area of theology that we don't often focus on, and yet I think if we understand God's common grace, we'll be equipped to love the Lord and to celebrate an essential aspect of his character.

Common grace is God's grace given to all men, believers, and unbelievers, so the truth is that you and I ought to wake up every morning and be amazed by God's common grace. We ought to be amazed by his grace to believers and unbelievers. We ought to be astounded by the fact that so many people in this world hate the Lord and trample upon his word, and yet God continues to show kindness to them.

It really ought to be a truth that amazes us, that every day man does things that would invite the judgment and the wrath of God. Every day man disobeys God's Word, and yet God continues to show his kindness to them. The average unbeliever in America wakes up every morning, the sun is shining, there's food to eat, gets in a car, drives to work, enjoys productive labor, comes home to a family, has shelter, a roof over his head, and then on the weekends goes hiking or goes to the ocean or goes to the beach and enjoys some recreation.

You and I ought to look at that and say, "Amazing grace, that is amazing grace, that an unbeliever who hates God is shown such kindness." I became a believer in February of 1992, so don't do the math here, but that means for 20 years I was a recipient of common grace.

I lived as an unbeliever, I hated the Lord, I blasphemed his name, I made fun of Christians, and for 20 years God kept my heart beating, God kept me alive, God put me in a nice family, God gave me educational opportunities. The fact that the first time I blasphemed the Lord Jesus Christ, God didn't strike me down and allow his fiery wrath to consume me.

The fact that my my lungs kept breathing and my heart kept beating is evidence of God's common grace. Just the fact that he endured with my sins so long and gave me time and space to repent is an expression of his common grace. And then in February 1992, I trusted in the gospel, gave my life to Christ, and at that point I received saving grace.

And so I have received both common grace and saving grace in my life, and that astounds me. I mean, the grace of God ought to astound us. We ought to be astounded by common grace, and as I rehearse my testimony, I'm celebrating common grace. I would not have had the opportunity to repent and believe in Christ if God had struck me dead when I first blasphemed his name.

But God has shown me his common grace in giving me time and space to repent. I'm gonna make an application to food at this point because I am Korean and we have some pretty good food. Oh, that's an understatement. We have really good food. Korean barbecue is, I think, one of the marvelous expressions of common grace in this world.

And I took my wife out for her birthday back when the restaurants were all open, and we went to this amazing Korean barbecue restaurant. The restaurant was filled with smoke and just slabs of meat being barbecued, and everyone in that restaurant looked happy. They looked like they were enjoying themselves, and I remember saying to my wife that night on her birthday that there is an amazing concentration of common grace in this room tonight because I don't think all of these people are believers.

In fact, I would guess that many of them are unbelievers, and yet the fact that God is feeding them with such amazing food is an expression of his common grace. He's not treating them according to what they deserve because what they deserve is the wrath of God because of their sins.

So all that to say, you and I ought to be amazed by common grace. This is from Donald Gray Barnhouse. He writes, "You are not a believer in Christ, and yet you are still out of hell. That is the grace of God. You are not in hell, but you are on earth in good health and prosperity.

That is the common grace of God. The vast majority of those who read these words are living in comfortable homes or apartments. That is common grace. You are not fleeing as refugees along the highways of a country desolated by war. That is common grace. You come home from your job and your child runs to meet you in good health and spirits.

That is common grace. You're able to put your hand in your pocket and give the child a quarter or a half dollar for an allowance. It is common grace that you have such abundance. You go into your house and sit down to a good meal. That is common grace.

On the day that you read these words, there are more than a billion and a half members of the human race who will go to sleep without enough to satisfy their hunger. The fact that you have enough is common grace. You do not deserve it, and if you think that you do deserve anything at all from God beyond the wrath which you have so richly earned, you merely show your ignorance of spiritual principles." And then this quote from Chuck Swindoll and Roy Zuck.

They write, "Every human has been graced by God with the sense of sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste. Even though the world is under the curse of sin, it is replete with opportunities to enjoy viewing the power of Niagara Falls, the massive depth and colors of the Grand Canyon, or the quiet fragile beauty of the Olympic National Rainforest.

How pleasant it is to enjoy the soft touch of a baby's hand, and who does not enjoy the aroma and taste of culinary delights." So moving to page two of your handout, we want to ask the question, "What is common grace? What is common grace?" And you have there on your handout a number of definitions by theologians.

Wynne Grudem writes that, "Common grace is the grace of God by which he gives people innumerable blessings that are not part of salvation." So you notice here that this is non-saving grace. Common grace does not make a person a Christian. This is the grace of God that gives many blessings, but not salvation.

It does not bring anyone into Christ's kingdom. It does not reconcile an unbeliever to a holy God, but there are many blessings that are not part of his salvation. Charles Robby writes, "The common grace may be defined as the unmerited favor of God toward all men displayed in his general care for them." And then Heath Lambert has an entire chapter, I believe it's chapter three, of "A Theology of Biblical Counseling," and you will want to read that entire chapter for this essay because he does go into some great depth of what is common grace and how does it relate to the ministry of biblical counseling.

It says, "Common grace is the good kindness of God that he shows to all people regardless of whether they have experienced the salvation that comes through Jesus Christ. It is called common because it comes to all people, believers and unbelievers alike. It is referred to as grace because this kindness of God is undeserved." So we mentioned Matthew 5 verse 44 to 45, "The father who is in heaven makes his son rise on the evil and the good and sends rain on the just and the unjust." Luke 6 verse 35, "But love your enemies and do good and lend, expecting nothing in return and your reward will be great for you will be sons of the Most High, for he is kind," note there, "he is kind to the ungrateful and the evil." I don't know how many people went out of that Korean barbecue restaurant thanking and praising God for his kindness in Jesus Christ, but they all ate the same food.

And so even to the ungrateful, God shows his his kindness and his goodness. Acts 14 verse 16 says, "In past generations he allowed all the nations to walk in their own ways, yet he did not leave himself without witness, for he did good by giving you rains from heaven and fruitful seasons, satisfying your hearts with food and gladness." Psalm 145 verse 9, "The Lord is good to all and his mercy is over all that he has made." Verse 15, "The eyes of all look to you and you give them their food in due season.

You open your hand, you satisfy the desire of every living thing." Wayne Grudem writes that, "Unbelievers continue to live in this world solely because of God's common grace. Every breath that people take is of grace, for the wages of sin is death, not life. The beauty of multicolored flowers, of grass and woodlands, of rivers and lakes and mountains and ocean shore still remains as a daily testimony to the continuing common grace of God.

Unbelievers deserve to enjoy none of this beauty, but by God's grace they can enjoy much of it for their whole lives." So just a note here that unbelievers show their lack of gratitude for common grace and the fact that when common grace is withheld, they howl injustice. They say God is unjust if common grace is withheld, when the reality is that God treats them not according to their sins, and it is his right to withhold grace.

He is not unjust. He does not need to show grace. He's under no obligation to treat people with undeserved favor, and I think that's true of all of us that at times when God withholds his grace, we can indict God's character in saying he's not fair, when in reality if he gave us what was fair, then all of us would be in hell for our sins, and he has been very gracious to us.

So I just encourage you to take this opportunity as you study this essay to once again be amazed by God's grace. Now let's move to some elements of common grace. You have here physical blessings. These are, as Paul ends, writes, "Those general blessings such as rain and sunshine, food and drink, clothing and shelter, which God imparts to all men indiscriminately, where and in what measure it seems good to him.

God gives sunshine and rainfall to the atheistic farmer that enables him to harvest his crop just as he provides for the Christian farmer." So my wife and I went to Target because we live the high life in our household, and this was I think a date night that we went to Target, and we were in search of chocolate, and whenever we go to Target to search for chocolate, my wife always texts our kids and says, "What kind of chocolate do you want?" and they all text us, you know, they want dark chocolate, they want milk chocolate, they want chocolate with peanuts, chocolate with almonds, chocolate in bunny-shaped sizes, big chocolate, small chocolate, I mean there's all sorts of chocolates that they want, and we were in Target and we could find every variation, almost every variation of chocolate was there in the aisle, just this abundance of chocolate.

I mean take your pick of dozens of types of chocolates that are available not at a chocolate store, but at just a regular Target. You don't have to be a believer to go into Target and enjoy that incredible bounty of blessing of all these abundant blessings in Target. You can be an unbeliever and you can walk in there and that is an expression of God's common grace that you can have every type of dessert and every type of chocolate that is available in America.

If you and I can walk into a Ralph's or pavilions or a Costco or 7-eleven and not be amazed by common grace, then we need to do some some theology. We need to be amazed once again at the fact that unbelievers are given so many physical blessings. Let me move to a second element which is the withholding of judgment, the withholding of judgment.

This is Genesis 6 verse 11. God judged the world through the universal flood in the days of Noah and destroyed the life of man and living creatures. Genesis 19 verse 24, the Lord rained on Sodom and Gomorrah sulfur and fire from the Lord out of heaven and he overthrew those cities and all the valley and all the inhabitants of the cities and what grew on the ground.

But Lot's wife behind him looked back and she became a pillar of salt. As Billy Graham has famously said, if God doesn't judge America, then he's going to have to apologize to Sodom and Gomorrah. We are a sinful nation. Romans 1 verse 29 says they were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice.

They're full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They're gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, and ruthless. And yet God has shown his common grace to America. I love my country and I plead for God's grace upon this country and God has been gracious to America and yet I understand that this is according to his grace.

It's not because of our moral superiority. It is just the fact that he has shown common grace to us as a country even though we have mostly unbelievers in our country. So this is a little bit like if you have a teenager who lives in your house and you love that teenager, you feed him, you care for him, and every day that teenager wakes up and says, "I hate you, mom and dad," and you continue to feed and to care for that teenager and every day he wakes up and says, "I hate you even more.

I despise you. I hate you," and you continue for years to love and to care for that teenager and your love for that teenager does not make the hatred go away. In fact, it just increases that teen's hostility. What kind of patience would it take for you as a parent to wake up the next day and to continue to love that child?

That's an illustration of what unbelievers do to God every day. They say, "I hate you," and yet God every day continues to show his kindness and his goodness. That's the withholding of judgment and 2 Peter 3 says he does this because he wants to give men space to repent.

And then you have a letter C, the restraining of sin. All hearts are evil, but not all hearts express the full extent of their depravity. God puts a limit on the expression of men's sin, sometimes through laws and government, sometimes by limiting the opportunities to sin. God protected Cain, though Cain was a murderer.

God limited Satan's activity in Job's life. 2 Thessalonians 2 verse 7 says, "The mystery of lawlessness is at work. Only he who now restrains it will do so until he is out of the way." So the Holy Spirit restrains the full expression of man's sin, but in the seven-year tribulation that is to come, that restraint will be removed and you'll see man give full expression to the depravity that is in his heart.

The fact that our planet in this nuclear age has not been consumed with nuclear war is an expression of common grace, that God has withheld the full expression of man's sinfulness. And so there is a restraining of sin that is an element of God's common grace. And then letter D is really to our point in why we're writing this essay.

There are intellectual blessings with common grace. So let me just say on one hand at this point that from one perspective, unbelievers are really smart. I mean, we just have to affirm that, that from an intellectual perspective, unbelievers do some amazing things with their minds. They build bridges, they design smartphones, they build cars, they design spaceships that go to the moon and back, they solve calculus problems, they design pharmaceuticals, and they build skyscrapers, they write literature, they write music that is beautiful and amazing.

So from an intellectual perspective, man does do, even without the Holy Spirit, just on a purely intellectual level, there are some really smart unbelievers in this world that, you know, I have to concede that there are many, many unbelievers who are just much smarter than I am in terms of their intellectual capacity and their intellectual ability.

No one in the biblical counseling movement is saying that unbelievers lack intelligence. That would not be a true statement. Unbelievers have intelligence because they're made in the image of God. What we are saying is that the unbelieving mind is so affected by sin that the unbeliever will use that intelligence to argue against the true and the living God.

The unbeliever will take all of the intellectual capacity that has been given to him by God and then use that capacity to argue against God and to attack God. And so unbelievers are intelligent but they are not neutral. The unbeliever is hostile in mind toward God. But the point of this letter D is to say that unbelievers do have intellectual blessings.

I mean, unbelievers will, every time you turn on the radio and listen to a nice piece of music written by an unbeliever and enjoy that piece of music, you are witnessing to the common grace of God. So Wayne Grudem talks about this, the intellectual blessings. This is under letter D.

All science and technology carried out by non-Christians is a result of common grace, allowing them to make incredible discoveries and inventions, to develop the earth's resources into many material goods, to produce and distribute those resources, and to have skill in their productive work. In a practical sense, this means that every time we walk into a grocery store, or ride in an automobile, or enter a house, we should remember that we are experiencing the results of the abundant common grace of God poured out so richly on all mankind.

And as Heath Lambert writes in chapter 3 of Theology of Biblical Counseling, saved and unsaved people are able to know correct information. So this is, in an algebra class, you can have a, or any math class, you can have an unbeliever who says 2 plus 2 equals 4, and that unbeliever would know correct information.

And then you have a believer who's filled with the Holy Spirit, and that believer might say, you know, to the glory of God and for the glory of Christ, 2 plus 2 equals 4. But the answer would be the same. Both saved and unsaved people are able to know correct information.

And so under common grace there are intellectual blessings. I'm thankful for that. I'm thankful every time I drive on the freeway, or get in a car that was made by an unbeliever, I'm thankful for common grace that this car, probably designed by an unbeliever, is able to drive on a freeway and be safe.

So why is ACBC asking you to write this essay? Let me back up and look at last week's essay. Last week we saw that ACBC wanted you to write an essay on general revelation and special revelation, because they wanted you to respond to the integrationist argument. The integrationist argument is basically that God has given us general revelation in creation, and special revelation in scripture, and that we should use both to help people change.

And so they would classify secular psychology under general revelation, scripture under special revelation, and make the argument that we have to use both general and special revelation to help people change, and so we should integrate secular psychology and scripture. And last week ACBC wanted you to respond to that idea, and the basic response is that no unbeliever accepts general revelation.

No unbeliever, from a secular perspective, looks at general revelation and comes to accurate conclusions. So under the left-hand column, if you're looking at secular psychology, you're gonna have a very distorted understanding of general revelation, if you are looking at revelation from a purely secular view. And if you try to combine that with scripture, you're gonna come up with a hybrid that is flawed and faulty.

But that was the general integrationist argument that ACBC wanted you to respond to, that our focus is on special revelation, scripture, because only scripture has the power to convert the soul. So with that in mind, today's topic is similar. The integrationist argument is basically that we should use both common grace and saving grace to help people change, and they would classify secular psychology under common grace, scripture under saving grace, and make an argument for integration saying that we should use both.

We should use the intellectual discoveries of unbelievers in psychology, and we should use scripture and bring them into a type of hybrid. Now you would look at that, and I guess from a conceptual standpoint, you might look at that and say, "Well, that makes sense. You should use both.

You want all of the grace of God, right? And so maybe we should integrate secular psychology and scripture." But what's wrong with that argument? So very, very quickly, what this argument does not, what this doesn't capture is the fact that common grace has limitations. Common grace, as wonderful as it is, has limitations.

And if you don't understand those limitations, you're gonna come up with a flawed understanding of an approach to counseling. So what are the limitations to common grace? The first limitation under letter A is that common grace does not save. Common grace does not save. Common grace does not lead anyone to the saving knowledge of Jesus Christ.

You need saving grace to become a Christian. So common grace does not save anyone. Common grace is for unbelievers and unbelievers. Saving grace is for believers only. Common grace delays judgment for time. Saving grace satisfies judgment in Christ. It doesn't just delay it. It satisfies God's judgment in Christ so that we no longer bear the judgment of God.

Common grace gives physical blessings, but only saving grace gives spiritual blessing, and not just some spiritual blessings, but every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ. So saving grace is what caused you to be born again and what causes your heart to become alive to the knowledge of Christ.

Common grace, as wonderful as it is, does none of that. Does not bring forgiveness of sins, does not bring the knowledge of Christ, does not bring understanding of God's Word. So there are limitations here. I have some language on your handout on, if you read Paul Enns, his Moody Handbook of Theology, you'll find that he interchanges, he uses the term efficacious grace to describe saving grace, and don't get lost there.

He's referring to the same concept, but using the term efficacious grace, he's really highlighting the idea that anyone who receives saving grace does not fail to come out of darkness into light. No one receives saving grace and then stays an unbeliever. Saving grace is Jesus saying to Lazarus, it's like that scene where Jesus said to Lazarus, "Lazarus come forth," and Lazarus came alive.

So that's what he's doing when he uses the term efficacious grace, but he's referring to the same category of saving grace. So the first limitation of common grace is common grace does not save. What's a second limitation of common grace? And I think this is really important here, letter B.

Common grace does not overcome sin's effects on the mind. Common grace does not overcome sin's effects on the mind. So I'm going to introduce this phrase here, and then we'll do some more work on this next Sunday, but the phrase is the noetic effects of sin. You'll have, if you read chapter 3 of Heath Lambert's Theology of Biblical Counseling, you'll find he talks a lot about the noetic effects of sin.

What does he mean by that? The term noose comes from the word mind, and so when we're talking about the noetic effects of sin, we're simply talking about sin's effects on the mind. Sin has effects on the intellect of the unbeliever. It doesn't remove their intelligence, but what it does is it biases the unbeliever's intelligence so that the unbeliever will always argue against God and use his intelligence against God.

So unbelievers are intelligent, but they're not objective. They're biased against God. The unbeliever is not neutral. You can't just hand an unbeliever a list of evidence of why God exists. The unbeliever will look at this created universe and the galaxies and the stars and all that God has created and conclude that it all came out of a Big Bang and nothing created something and order came out of chaos.

That's not objective reasoning. It may be intelligent reasoning, but it's not objective reasoning. It's very biased, and this is what the unbeliever does with his intelligence is he uses it to argue against God. Ephesians 4 over 17 is a key passage talking about the noetic effects of sin. Paul says, "Now this I say in testifying the Lord that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do in the futility of their minds." Once again, the intellectual capacity of an unbeliever does not produce any spiritual fruit.

There is a futility in their thinking. Paul says they are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardness of heart. Colossians 1 verse 21, "And you who once were alienated, hostile in mind." That phrase ascribes me when I was an unbeliever.

When I first came to church in college, I was hostile in mind. I listened to the pastor sermons and I wrote down copious notes of all the reasons why he was wrong and the Bible was wrong, but because I was a college educated person, my notes had good punctuation, good grammar that had orderly logical flow to it, but all of that intellectual ability was being used to argue against the Bible and to argue against the truth.

I was hostile in mind and the grace of God was evident in my life and that God saved me and turned that hostility into a love for scripture. But common grace cannot overcome the noetic effects of sin. So the ACBC Standards of Doctrine, this essay is so important. They have an entire section there.

I would encourage you to look that up at the ACBC website and they have an entire section on common grace. They write, "The chief manifestation of God's grace is the salvation of sinners by the blood of Jesus Christ. To all who believe, common grace cannot overcome the corrosive effects of sin upon human thinking without the special saving grace of Jesus." Continues, "This reality guarantees that though unbelievers can know many facts, they will misunderstand information that is most central to human life, which includes information about God, the human problem, and a solution in Christ.

Because the central elements of counseling include God, the nature of the human problem, and God's solution in Christ, the counseling methods of secular people are ultimately at odds with a uniquely biblical approach to counseling." And so Lambert writes in Theology of Biblical Counseling, "Common grace makes it possible for unbelievers to know facts, but the noetic effects of sin make it impossible for them to embrace the most important facts." So let me show you how this works out in a counseling method.

Lambert writes, "The closer unbelievers get in counseling to issues having to do with God," so note that really carefully, "The closer unbelievers get in counseling to issues having to do with God, the ultimate meaning of life and the problems that plague humanity, the greater will be the impact of the noetic effects of sin on their thinking, and the more cautious Christians must be in accepting the information they produce.

The closer you get to the real ultimate issues of life, the more the noetic effects of sin are seen. The unbeliever gets more hostile toward any discipline that is close to the discipline of theology because the unbeliever is hostile in mind." And so let me give you a third limitation here.

"Common grace does not enable unbelievers to understand the root of human behavior," which we covered in year one. The root of human behavior is what is going on in the heart. It is out of the heart, the flow of the issues of life. The heart is always relating to God in a worshiping relationship, whether that is a disordered worship relationship or whether that is a true worship relationship.

The heart is always worshiping something, and that is the root of human behavior. So as Lambert writes, and this should be reviewed from year one, there are three levels of psychology. There is observation of seeing how men are behaving, what are the words, the actions, the emotions that are observable from an external perspective.

There is interpretation, which is the question, why does man behave in this way? What is the root issue that is giving rise to man's behavior? And then once you have interpretation, you have intervention, which seeks to address the issue that is at the root of the problem. And Lambert talks about in chapter 3 of Theology of Biblical Counseling that when it comes to observation, a secular psychologist and a biblical counselor will pretty much come up with the same observations.

If a person has an anger problem, both a biblical counselor and a secular psychologist will observe that his heart rate goes up, his face turns red, he raises his voice, he says certain words, and they will pretty much agree under common grace they can make the same observations, whether you're an unbeliever or a believer.

I've often said that, you know, if someone's designed an experiment of how many people get angry when they're on the freeway and there's traffic on the freeway, a secular psychologist and a biblical counselor would pretty much make the same observations, that 90% of people who are on a traffic-clogged freeway tend to get angry when a temperature reaches a certain number of degrees.

Under observation, under common grace, secular psychologists tend to make pretty accurate observations. It's really in the issue of interpretation that the road diverges. A secular psychologist cannot make a correct interpretation of that external data because they cannot understand who man is, that it is out of the heart that flow the issues of life.

The reason why a person is getting angry is because he is relating wrongly to the true and the living God, and it is that interpretation that is inevitably flawed under the study of secular psychology, and if, as Lambert writes, if your interpretation is flawed, your intervention will be flawed as well.

So here's how we would draw this out as an illustration. Here's a person who's behaving a certain way. Let's say the issue is anger. Under observation, the question would be how is this person behaving? What are the actions and words that are coming out of this person's mouth? So I think a secular psychologist and a biblical counselor would make the same observations at this point.

They would say that this man is saying a lot of bad words, he's saying them very loud, he's agitated in his emotions, he's getting sweaty and his face is turning red. Those are some external observations that would probably be the same under a biblical counseling system and also a secular psychology system.

It's at the level of interpretation that the road diverges. Interpretation asks the question why is this person behaving in this way? Why is he angry? Why is this husband, let's say for example, why is this husband being angry with his wife? And secular psychologists cannot answer that question because a secular psychologist cannot understand the heart of man, which is spoken of in Scripture.

The thoughts, desires, and motivations of a man's heart are always relating to God and it is the overflow of that relationship to God that expresses itself in observable actions. So it's really under interpretation that a biblical counselor and a secular psychologist will have a widely divergent interpretation and that's where the issue needs to be dealt with.

Under common grace, we would say that a secular psychologist can make a correct observation under common grace. They can observe behavior, but where common grace is limited is that a secular psychologist cannot make a correct interpretation because they don't include the knowledge of God in their system of thought.

I hope that makes sense to you. So under secular psychologists, the intervention will be out in the realm of actions and words, a lot of behavior modification. The secular psychologist will go to the angry person and say here's some tips and techniques to manage your anger, you know, here's a ball to squeeze if you get upset, here's, you know, learn to count to ten or, you know, things that give that modified behavior but don't deal with the heart issue.

The biblical counseling model intervention is in the heart. Hebrews 4 verse 12. We're after the thoughts and the intentions of the heart and we have only one tool to get there and that is the Word of God because only the Word of God can discern the thoughts and intentions of the heart.

So I hope that that makes sense to you of where the differences are. Okay, let me let me end with this and I'm gonna run a little bit over time here, but I think this will be helpful and set us up for next week. So I put in your Dropbox folder George Sipioni's articles called Eeny, Meeny, Miny, Moe and it's an excellent article.

I encourage you to read it all, but if you don't read all of it, the gold is really in footnote 24 and so search through the entire essay and get down to footnote 24 and he gives probably the best illustration I've come across as to how the noetic effects of sin increase the closer you get to the knowledge of God.

And he has this diagram. You have these disciplines of knowledge. You have math, physics, chemistry, biology, anthropology, sociology, psychology, and theology. And basically his point in footnote 24 is to say that if you are left on this diagram, you have a lesser amount of the noetic effects of sin because the discipline is not as close to the study of God as some other disciplines.

The more right you go on the diagram, the more you will see the noetic effects of sin on the unbelievers mind because you are getting closer to the study of the knowledge of God. So the more right you go, the more you see the hostility of the unbelievers mind manifesting itself in that realm of study.

So I'll quote Scipione here. He says, "As we go from left to right, we move from the abstract non-personal to the concrete personal aspects of the universe. As we move to the right, the noetic effects of sin is multiplied at an escalating pace, distorting the observation of data and the conclusions drawn from that data.

The distortion grows as we move right until we find clearly rival theologies that openly, self-consciously reject the true and the living God." And so here is the issue as it relates to the counseling discussion. You will find the most distortion of the noetic effects of sin in the study of psychology, the study of man.

Why is that? Because Genesis 1 verse 27 says that man is made in the image of God. The more right you go, the closer you are getting to the study of God. And when you get to the study of man, you are as close to the study of God as you can be because man is made to reflect God's likeness and he's made to live in relationship with God.

So you are gonna see the most distortion, the greatest effect of sin's effects upon the mind in the study of psychology because you are as close as you can get to the study of theology. So back to the question. With all that said, how do you write this essay?

Explain the doctrine of common grace relating the doctrine to the ability of psycho-psychologists to understand true information about the human condition. Well, first you need to explain common grace. Just start off with what is grace and then give the categories of common grace versus saving grace. Draw the distinctions between common grace and saving grace and just give verses and good quotes from established theologians that explain the doctrine of common grace.

The second part of the essay is you need to explain how does this relate to the ability of secular psychologists to understand true information about the human condition. Under that basic framework of Lambert gives you under observation, interpretation, and intervention. We would expect the secular psychologists to be able to make some true observations about human behavior under common grace because the psychologist, the psycho-psychologist has intellectual ability.

We would not discount the fact that those observations may be accurate. The issue comes, as I mentioned, under interpretation. A secular psychologist is not able to accurately interpret that data and understand the true condition of man. A secular psychologist can't understand the root of the issue, which is the heart.

A secular psychologist can't relate to that data of observable information to how a person is relating to the true and the living God. Therefore, a secular psychologist cannot give the proper intervention to deal with the heart issues because he does not understand the interpretation of the data. Under the second part of this essay, you want to work through Lambert's categories of observation, interpretation, and intervention.

I think the basic framework is that common grace allows a secular psychologist to make accurate observations, but the limitations of common grace keep the secular psychologist from making accurate interpretations. Therefore, the interventions are flawed. That leads us to just embrace the fact that as biblical counselors, we minister under saving grace.

We minister saving grace. We want our counselees to be saved, first of all. We don't want to just modify their behavior. We want them to come to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ, and then we want our counselees to experience that grace of God, which conforms them into the likeness of Christ and makes them more and more holy.

So a lot there, but I hope that's helpful, and this is a real crucial issue as it relates to your essays and to biblical counseling. Okay, what I'm gonna do, I've gone over time, so I'm gonna pray for us, and you can be dismissed and enjoy a nice Father's Day.

I'll hang on for five or ten minutes if any of you have questions on the material or in any of the essays, but you're free to go if that's sufficient, and let me pray for us and close our time. Father, thank you for your amazing grace, both common grace and saving grace, all of the expressions of your grace.

We just praise you and thank you that you are a gracious Heavenly Father. Thank you that under saving grace, we have the ability not only to observe how people behave, but we can diagnose the true condition of the heart through your word, and so we pray that you would help us and make us into effective biblical counselors who minister to the thoughts and intentions of the heart using your word, and we trust in the sufficiency of your word for life change.

Thank you for each student here. Thank you for their dedication to this training. May you bless it. May you give it much fruit. May this be a clarifying process for each one, and help us to dig deep into your word that we may be useful to you and be able to minister your word to others, and we just thank you and praise you in Jesus' name, amen.

Okay, amen. You are dismissed, but I'll hang on for five, ten minutes. If any of you have any questions, I'll be happy to answer them, or we can also be free to go. Okay, Lord bless you. Okay, question is, do we need to retype the questions at the beginning of each essay?

Essays are kind of long, and this would help me save space. So, a great question. We would want you to use the template at biblicalcounseling.com, and I believe the template has all of the questions listed at the top, so yes, the questions should be at the top of each essay if you follow the template.

I don't know if ACBC is going to be super strict on that, but that is kind of the template that they've given us, is to put each question at the top. So, it's a good question. I'm encouraged to hear that you have more material that you need to cut down rather than less material, but that's good news.

So, editing is always, it's always a difficult thing. So, may God bless you as you seek to edit your essays down to a page and a half. Question is, do you ever go through common grace and saving grace to lead to sharing the gospel to a counselee you think is unsaved?

That's a great question. I think common grace is, it's very fair to go to explain common grace to a counselee because it's part of the inspired Word of God, and I think it illustrates God's holiness, His justice, His wrath, all of those concepts are directly relevant to the unbeliever.

As always, you would want to move from common grace to saving grace to the person and work of Jesus Christ, and make sure that is the focus of sharing the gospel, but absolutely, you can use common grace to minister to a counselee because it's part of God's truth, but always keeping in mind that a person is saved when they come to place their trust in the person and work of Jesus Christ and His full atonement on the cross for their sins, so make sure you get from common grace to saving grace in your presentation of the gospel, but great question.

All right, wonderful. Okay, well, Lord bless you all. If there's not any more questions, I'm gonna sign off, and I think I'm gonna go to Father's Day, some kind of Father's Day celebration. We'll see what my kids want to do. One more question is, "Can you expand on your counseling example you gave at the beginning about reconciling between spouses and parent, kids, and church members?" Yeah, I just think the goal--great question, Steve--and I just think the goal of counseling, when you're doing a marriage issue, for example, is you want to help the person to become more like Christ, and becoming more like Christ means not loving your wife when she is respectful to you, but loving your wife when she is disrespectful to you, or, you know, vice versa.

For the wife, it's loving your husband when he leads you well and loves you well, or loving him when he's selfish and aloof and doesn't seem to care. Becoming like Christ is learning to love your enemies. That's how Christ loved us. Christ loved us when we were his enemies.

He died for us, and I just think that that's the powerful truth that biblical counseling offers that no other counseling system can ever offer. No other counseling system can offer a counselee the hope of becoming more like Christ. I mean, you can do behavior modification, you can do some tips and techniques to put a band-aid on the marriage, but you can't offer the hope of becoming more like Christ, and that's where our counseling method differs from the secular method, because a biblical counselor will tell the husband that your wife does not need to change for you to become more like Christ.

You can become more like Christ today, regardless of how your wife behaves or doesn't behave toward you, because being like Christ is loving those who are disrespectful and those who don't love you in response. So that's my criticism of Gary Chapman's "Five Love Languages." My critique of that, I did that in year one, is that book is basically holding out a model of love others so that they will love you.

Learn your spouse's love language so that your spouse will learn your love language, and a biblical counseling approach is much deeper than that. You need to love your spouse, and you do so for the glory of Christ, and because it makes you more like Christ, not so that you will expect something in return, and that's just a whole different issue.

When a husband gets a hold of the idea that he is to be like Christ regardless of how his wife behaves toward him, that's a powerful life-changing element that brings hope and help into the