Edward T. Welch

That was a ministry that was out of our church, um, and it became a independent, uh, ministry, uh, through Ken Sande and many people who attended my church.

And David, uh, as well as Paul Tripp and Ed Welch, uh, would sit on our board, would come.

So we had him in Billings back in, I think it was '94.

And, um, one of the things I loved is, uh, uh, I, I close my eyes and I can see a dot matrix, uh, image of three trees.

...

when it comes to, uh, who people are and what their problems really are.

And yet you have people like David Powlison, and if I can mention Ed Welch and, and Paul Tripp and John Bettler with CCF back then.

Back in the '90s, they were trying to address this.

As we come to think about this topic of caring one for the other, just a book that I think is helpful if you want to look at it at some stage.

It's Ed Welch's book, Caring for One Another.

And some of the stuff we'll look at will come from his book as we go through this together.

The goal tonight is really to get you thinking about how you can come alongside each other as you basically suffer together, struggle together, rejoice together, just as God would have us as part of the local church here in this community.

It's not just the pastor's job, not just the elder's job, not just the deacon's job to do this.

It's every single person's role within the church to care for those that they come in contact with.

And the phrase that Ed Welch uses in his book is this, that we need to move towards people, particularly those that are struggling.

We need to move towards people.

five minutes, get some prompts that you do some writing.

It's called the humility project for men by Ed Welch.

Okay.

Counselor.

exactly.

And so I think if we look at the categories there, idolatry and worship, Ed Welch has a great book, Addictions, A Banquet in the Grave.

And there's a couple of quotes that kind of will help us as we think through this.

And one of these, as it relates to idolatry, is anything we set our affections and indulge as an excessive and sinful attachment.

Yeah.

The other category is becoming enslaved to our idols.

Again, Ed Welch in his Addictions book says, we set our affections on ourselves and choose idols that will, we hope, satisfy us and we avoid the worship of the true God.

Yeah, that's when I heard that the first time, that understanding addiction as worship, it was like really impactful.

CCEF was led for a long time by David Powelson, probably the most prominent second-generation biblical counselor.

But then you have other people such as Ed Welch, Mike Emlett, and then Jonathan Holmes, who's now leading that organization.

Then there's another one.

There's the Biblical Counseling Coalition.

That's one that's impacting the Reformed world.

They're a little bit newer on the scene, and they arrived within the 2010s trying to bring unity to many movements and many institutions that were operating in isolation from one another.

And so if you look at your church library or the books that your church members are reading, if you've ever read a Paul Tripp book, an Ed Welch book, you're reading a biblical counseling book.

So biblical counseling as a movement has been resourcing churches, reformed churches, to in pastoral care and discipleship resources, applying Scripture to the problems that people face in life.

They don't know how to actually do this.

I'm thankful for all of Ed Welch's stuff.

I know he's really trying to, his books, Caring for One Another, Side by Side, all these things.

Here's how you prepare to talk about sin.

Another issue that's maybe a common one just in our hearts and lives is fearing people.

And so thinking through what does worship look like in that situation? A really great title of a book is, Ed Welch wrote the book a number of years ago, When People Are Big and God Is Small, and that's really what's happening worship-wise in the heart is When we fear man, this idea of fear in the scriptures, when we fear God, we care ultimately about what he thinks, because he's so great and awesome, we reverence him, we turn away from evil, that's what the fear of God accomplishes, and we turn towards him.

And the fear of man is consumed by, and again, there's various different forms of fear of man, but can be, at least in one sense, consumed by what people think.

And so that ends up driving our lives, what people think.

You're drawing near to him, and he loves to be your savior.

Ed Welch is a Christian counselor.

He says, he hears not because of us and the quality of our prayers.

He hears because he is the God who hears.

So absolutely, they begin to... to get to that point, and yet there's still this awful pull.

And Ed Welch, who is a biblical counselor who's thought a lot about addiction, has this interesting term.

He talks about voluntary slavery, where he's trying to capture what seem like two kind of contradictory ideas.

I want it, and yet it enslaves me.

Yeah, yeah, that's right, he said.

I said, it's kind of like a voluntary slavery, isn't it? He said, yes, that's exactly what it's like.

So I said, thank you, Ed Welch, for that.

And, of course, the team were sitting all around thinking, wow, that's right.

I think there's something about the firsthand account that is really valuable that you get that you don't get when someone's kind of writing about it, but from more of a detached perspective.

A book that from a biblical standpoint that's been helpful for me is Ed Welch's, I think it's called When the Darkness Will Not Lift.

And it gives a lot of imagery and I think helps, as Peter mentioned earlier, helps utilize scriptures in a way that kind of give voice to what we are feeling in the midst of those experiences.

So that's another one I would throw in there.