“If I want to help people without wanting to help them find the God who made them, that is not how God defines help.”
How has our culture been influenced by psychology? How has that affected the church? You cannot go very many places in our world and not encounter the definitions and categories that have been handed to us by the psychology establishment. Many Christians- including ourselves as pastors and church leaders- have allowed our anthropology and epistemology to be informed by a broader unbelieving culture: one that has a rival explanation for truth, man, sin, our problems, and the solution. This has had subtle to striking ramifications in how Christians conduct both their formal practice and informal daily discipleship of those around them.
William (Bill) Smith joins Kari Gross to discuss how psychology has infiltrated the way Christian people think about themselves and their problems. Bill has pastored several churches, been a faculty member of the Christian Counseling and Educational Foundation, and taught practical theology at Westminster Theological Seminary. He is the author of Parenting with Words of Grace, along with numerous other books and booklets. He and his wife, Sally, have three adult children who are married.
In this episode, Bill warns about how science, psychology, and culture have impacted the church and offers gospel hope for living in a sinful world with broken bodies, minds, and relationships.
Listen in!
RESOURCES:
- Follow William on his Facebook or check out his numerous books on Amazon
- Learn more about our 5-Project Biblical Counseling Blueprint Model™
- Explore the rest of our website – bcmnational.org
- Read our Articles
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- Donate to support BCM
- Previous episode with Bill: Episode 40: Guiding the Culture of Your Church (with William Smith)
KEY TAKEAWAYS:
- Recognize that you and your flock are being discipled and influenced by the language and beliefs of the culture whether that is subtle or overt. We can only understand God’s word and His world if He corrects what is broken in our minds, if He resets the darkness in our understanding and allows us to see what He sees. We need to be renewed daily by the Word.
- Do not be intimidated by people who argue the helpfulness of psychology with appeals to science. Any kind of science that ignores the fact that every particle in this universe was created by God to declare the glory of God ultimately cannot fully appreciate, understand, or explain the world we live in.
- We need to be reminded of the gospel daily. We need to read the Bible not to learn something new but to be convicted of our sin to greater depths, shown the magnitude of the riches of Christ’s grace, and called to something greater. We don’t need something new. We need to be made new by the gospel that is unstained by evil and unimpaired by time.
Whenever you engage culture, you will either reinterpret culture through the lens of scripture, or you will reinterpret scripture through the lens of the culture.
Meet William (Bill)
William Smith is a pastor, author, and speaker. Bill has an MDiv and PhD and was a faculty member and counselor at the Christian Counseling and Education Foundation (CCEF), He has authored several books including Loving Well (Even When You Haven’t Been) and Caught Off Guard: Encounters with the Unexpected God. Bill and his wife, Sally, have been married for over 30 years and are the parents of three adult children. He enjoys being with his family, rehabbing his home, gardening, cooking, and reading.
A note to the listener:
Bill made a comment at the end of the episode and we recognize it may have confused some listeners. We want to clarify what Bill intended to communicate. He said “Kari, you and I are looking at 70 billion years of life, we have hardly begun to explore who we are and what all God has envisioned for us.” Bill meant this in a future tense as a way of saying, “We are looking at eternal life.” A concrete number often helps people grasp and also be appropriately struck with bewilderment at what eternity means. There is joy we eagerly anticipate in that reality for those in Christ: we are going to have so much time to keep learning and developing and exploring all that God has made, including what He has built into each of us.
