Welcome to Speak the Truth, a podcast devoted to giving biblical truth for educating, equipping, and encouraging the individual and local church and counseling and discipleship. Hello. Hello. Hello. I am so low today, but I do have a host with me today, except he's joining with us virtually.

And maybe the pronoun gave it away potentially of who I'm talking about. But I am joined with Jeremy. Lailik, Jeremy, brother. How are doing?

I'm doing good, brother. How are you?

Doing good, man. Doing good. I am glad to have you, and this is technically our first podcast of 2026 together, so I'm excited for that. And so today, you guys know that we've been releasing just the track leader podcast, and this one is gonna be no different, obviously. But what we are gonna be focusing on in this particular episode is we're gonna be talking with Jeremy about track A mental health, biblically unpacking diagnoses.

And so Jeremy, obviously having you on brother, I wanted to just walk through for our listeners as they are trying to figure out what track they wanna check out. They obviously are gonna be interested in this track, but so with that interest, we wanna give them a little further explanation and detail and excitement around this track. And could you just talk a little bit about just the objectives here and then as well as share a little bit about your track team?

Absolutely, man. I am very excited about this track. We did do the same track last year. However, we have switched up some of the topics for this year. And our heart is to be able to have people who are licensed or people that are simply in laity or pastors come up against these sometimes intimidating diagnoses that we hear in our culture and ask the question, does the scriptures speak into these diagnoses at all?

Does the scripture have anything to say about some of the things that we hear in our culture that are related to mental health diagnosis? And the exciting thing is that the scriptures absolutely do. And we live in a culture where people look at their mental health or their mental condition or emotional condition, especially if they're struggling. We are conditioned in our culture to look at those things through the lens of the medical model, which is driven by the psychiatric community. And so there's this huge book called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.

I think it's in its fifth version or maybe even sixth, 5R. It's constantly being revised. And people typically, they're thinking about how they're feeling on an emotional level, they're going to consider what they're experiencing through that lens. And so what we want to do is take some of those diagnoses, explain those from the psychiatric perspective, because there is something helpful about having categories. But the categories are simply descriptors, the categories in this diagnostic manual.

It doesn't really go into at all what to do about the diagnosis. If you have bipolar disorder, this manual will give you some criteria by which you judge whether or not that diagnosis is appropriate. But it doesn't tell us anything about what to do. How do we get out of that? So we want to bring Scripture to bear.

One of our objectives is to bring the Bible to these complicated, complex issues and ask the question, what does the Scripture have to say? So the issues that we're going to cover are post traumatic distress disorder, borderline personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, which is a huge issue in our culture struggle with anxiety. Obsessive compulsive disorder and scrupulosity is the idea so it's an OCD struggle where a person of faith is continually obsessing about committing the unpardonable sin or doing something that would cause God to stop loving them. And then finally, we're going to look at bipolar disorder. And so I have an amazing team that we've assembled who last year really just blew my mind how prepared everybody was and how well they explained the diagnoses, but then dug into the scriptural relevance in terms of people that are wrestling with these particular issues.

One of the participants on my team is a wonderful woman named Beth Clays. And Beth has a great story. She was once a psychologist and began to learn more and more about biblical counseling. And I can't remember where she was living at the time. I think it was somewhere on the East Coast.

Yeah, New York.

New York. Yeah. And she was a practicing psychologist, but then moved to Washington where she was introduced to biblical counseling through our Equipped to Counsel material. And reading that and ultimately teaching it and becoming a training center for us, she decided to drop her license and simply become a certified biblical counselor. And from what I understand, she stays very busy.

I know she also does a lot of teaching. She is in Vancouver, Washington, and she serves at New Heights Church and she's the director of their counseling ministry. What a blessing she was last year. She'll be covering the topics this year of borderline personality disorder as well as bipolar disorder. She gets into the details of the diagnoses, but also brings it to street level where we can understand just how powerful the Bible can be for those things.

One of our other participants is a great guy that I've gotten to know over the last year. His name is Doctor. Nate Brooks. And Nate is a professor at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, very intelligent individual. He just published a book called Disrupted Journey, and it deals with issues associated with chronic pain.

And what Nate is going to be talking about is post traumatic stress disorder. That's the disorder that's probably most prominent in the cultural milieu at the moment. A lot of conversation in the biblical counseling community about trauma. So he's just going to unpack the official diagnosis and give us an understanding on the scriptural relevance to that. He's also going to discuss, as he did last year, narcissistic personality disorder and did a great job last year on covering that.

And then another person that we're bringing in, and I think this is his fourth year, for sure his third year. His name is Doctor. Matthew LaPine, and he is the Director of Equipping at City Light Church in Omaha, Nebraska. I became a fan of Matthew several years ago when you gave me a book that he wrote. And the book is actually on his dissertation.

And it's called The Logic of the Body. And what he does is he does a beautiful job, a very sophisticated job of bringing the body into play as a part of the sanctification process. He does a great job of unpacking Romans six and brings together just the whole idea of the body being part of sanctification, but also the idea that how that impacts specifically in this particular book, the issue of anxiety. So that is a powerful team. He's going to introduce our talks with biblically navigating psychiatric diagnoses.

So he's just got a really good talk on how do we come as believers, as biblical counselors, how do we come to these diagnoses with Scripture in hand? And then he is also going to be the one who's covering generalized anxiety disorder. And that's a new we did not have that last year. So he'll be doing a new talk. And so that's our team.

And I'm extremely excited. Sometimes the church, if a person's not licensed, but even if you're licensed, some of these things can feel intimidating, some of these diagnoses. But a lot of times a pastor or a layperson if an individual brings up, oh, I'm diagnosed with XYZ. At times that's the automatic time to refer to the professional. And what we want to do is just help Christians understand that, hey, you have the Word of the living God with you.

And it's much more comprehensive about these particular diagnoses than people may realize. So we're hoping that folks that come and attend will leave feeling very equipped to step into these more challenging issues with the people that they're serving and loving.

Yeah. That's really good. And with this particular group, and for those of you who are listening, realize that a lot of these particular topics within the DSM, these descriptors and these disorders, a lot of these we've done on Speak the Truth. Matter of fact, I think we've hit all of these. Yeah.

I think we've hit all of these. But what's interesting to Jeremy's point is that you're gonna be getting a much more in-depth engagement with the topic. And then as Jeremy is talking about of navigating this and what does this look like for the local church? And Jeremy, you're right. When people in the church hear these diagnostic labels, they immediately feel like they are unqualified to anything, to say anything.

And that this is gonna make you an expert, but I do think to your point, this is an encouragement for the body to realize that the word of God actually does speak to these things at a heart level, not a fruit symptomatic level, but at a root level that allows us to to realize that the language, when you look at the descriptions of this, there are biblical terms that are associated with those descriptions. They're just different terms. And I think it'll help with that, as well as just realizing again, when you were mentioning Lapine's book there, just the reality of sanctification. So it's it's it's providing a theological lens to look at these psychological labels so that you can thoroughly unpack these theologically. Any thoughts on that Jeremy?

No, you're exactly right. And I think one thing that will stand out significantly is it always, when we're talking about emotional and mental issues, it always requires us to come back to anthropology. Who are we? And so our team will work really hard to bring a biblical anthropology to the forefront. When you look at it issued just through the medical model, the medical model is simply looking at the physiological.

It doesn't even acknowledge the reality of the spiritual. And so we'll bring that into play. We're not going to ignore the physiological. One of our objectives, as I've already mentioned, is to bring the scripture to bear here. But another one of our objectives is to concerningly and wisely consider the empirical information that's out there.

So we want to bring science. We don't want to ignore that. But we want to do both. We want to look at the spiritual, which is the deeper, biblically transforming realities that we want to bring into the counseling situation. But there are physiological aspects that empirical science has shown us.

And so we'll consider that as well. And then from a final objective, we want to make sure people are leaving with practical tools in their hands if someone comes to them with these particular diagnoses.

Yeah, that's really good. So who would you encourage Jeremy, just in closing, who would you encourage to come to this track besides everybody? Yeah.

Everybody go to the ABC, call the council conference, and click on my track.

Yeah.

Don't worry about don't worry about the others. No, I'm kidding. All the tracks, every single track is amazing. But if you're a licensed person, I know in my personal experience, and I went to Christian school all the way through PhD, I didn't really get much on how the Bible speaks into the world of psychiatry and psychology. I just didn't.

And I went to wonderful schools. Every school's wonderful. But the licensed person is probably at best going to be able to find a couple of verses here and there that talk about some of the issues or symptoms associated with these diagnoses, but probably haven't really gotten the training to go deep. So if you're licensed and you really want to go deep more than just say a couple of prayers and read a couple of verses and call us tomorrow, the real meat of what we're doing is in our psychology. Rather than that, we want the meat of what we're doing to be the Scriptures and to be theologically driven.

So that's for the licensed person. And then for the pastor or the person in lady or certified biblical counselor, obviously they may be coming more from a theological perspective, but may feel a little bit less educated on the psychiatric or the psychological empirical. So everybody does have something I think they would glean by coming and attending this particular track.

Jeremy, thank you for sharing that. And I unfortunately will be teaching in another track, I won't get to sit in on this. But thankfully, I get to check out the audio afterwards. But this is definitely gonna be a good track in to just basically mirror what Jeremy was saying a little bit is for those of you who are in the church who you seem like you hear a lot about these psychological labels, you're interested in hearing more, this is definitely a good track to gain a theological perspective on Jeremy said a biblical anthropology of how we should understand these diagnoses that our culture lives in and lives from and abides by. Right?

This is you have these labels, and it's it gives you a framework to how to deal with people, and that's just not how scripture calls us to. Anyway, it's it's gonna be exciting to do that. Thank you guys for listening. And remember, go to calltocounsel.com. You can click on this track.

You can register, and we hope to see you there.