Dale Johnson: This week, as I promised from last week, Dr. Greg Gifford is going to join us again. He’s Assistant Professor of Biblical Counseling at the Masters University. He earned a Ph.D. in Biblical Counseling from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He holds a Master of Arts in Biblical Counseling from the Masters University, and he has a B.A. in Pastoral Ministry from the Baptist Bible College. He’s certified with us at ACBC. Greg, I’m really excited about this book that you’ve written, Lies My Therapist Told Me. As we talked about last week, this book is coming out on May the 27th. So this week, and I’m looking forward to its release!
I had a chance to review it before, and I’m just really excited about the concepts that you’re trying to talk about on two different levels. Let me just say very clearly, two different levels I think would be helpful. First of all, I think you’re helping people to understand why it is that the secular approach to mental health has been so convincing. Because we’ve misunderstood, in many ways, from a secular perspective, a biblical distinction between mind and brain. I think you’re helping people to understand and distinguish and create that discernment from the Scriptures.
Again, the second thing is you’re not just being critical. You’re helping to see why this is such an important issue to deal with, why it is that so many have been deceived and moving in this direction. You’re helping us to see biblically how we can recapture this concept of mind and brain and distinguish the way the Bible does about the ways in which we’re affected by the curse of sin and the fall of mankind and the way that sin impacts us both in body and in soul and material and immaterial.
We want to pick up that conversation, if we can, and talk a little bit about the mind itself and distinctions when we talk about salvation itself. So many people want to say, “Well, the Bible is so helpful for things like salvation. So yeah, naturally, he would talk about salvation being a part of the mind, but that seems to eliminate lots of other issues that are going on.”
Help us to understand clearly about salvation itself and how salvation impacts the mind. And this is where so many mental health professionals disregard this concept. Even integrationists disregard this concept in their definitions of mental health in relation to the mind. So, salvation in relation to the mind, helps us understand that a little bit better.
Greg Gifford: I originally wrote the book and didn’t have a chapter on it. And after we were in the editorial process, my editor, James Neidhart, who is just very discerning, said, “Greg, you didn’t really address the role of salvation in the mind.” And he’s not—this isn’t even a biblical counseling book per se. We’re not arguing for a methodology. We’re really arguing for biblical anthropology as it pertains to mental illness.
So, the mind, when you begin to research it, it’s immaterial. Romans 12:2, You know this from Awana days. It’s immaterial. You’re transformed by the renewing of your noos (Mind in greek). It’s like an attitude or a disposition. It’s best as like the seat of your cognition or the faculty of thought. And oftentimes, most biblical counselors, though not all, most are going to be in a dichotomous camp. Where the immaterial mind and the immaterial heart are different aspects of your inner person, but they’re all inner person, nevertheless.
So, your mind is not material. It’s not your brain. The Scripture does talk about Jesus opening the minds of the disciples in Luke 24. Or in 1 Corinthians 2:16: the believer has the mind of Christ. You don’t have Jesus’s brain, just to be clear. There’s one brain for Jesus and he has it. He’s completely man. So, you’re not wanting to make that weird, but you do have His way of thinking. So, Philippians 2:5: have this way of thinking, which is yours in Christ Jesus—that you have this mindset. We underestimate the power of the mind and the power of a sinful mind.
But biblically, the mind is going to be depraved, Romans 1:28: God handed them over to a depraved mind. The mind is going to be corrupt, Titus 1:15: Not like pretty cool and mostly there, but corrupt. Ephesians 4:17-24, we love verse 22- 24, but verse 17-20: the mind is hardened, darkened in understanding before Christ. You just keep going on and on. I think you can even use the Jeremiah 17:9 passage, which uses heart. Heart and mind are used interchangeably in the Old Testament. Either leb, so the leb is the heart or the mind, depending on your context.
It’s sick. Your mind is sick. Apart from regeneration, your mind is sick. And that’s the most medicalized expression of the mind, but it’s about sin. And sin is what makes your mind sick. It’s not an illness. The solution isn’t treatment and medicine. The solution is salvation. And fundamentally, when you understand the mind biblically before Christ, you set the stage and you say, “I don’t need health. I need transformation. I need renewal.”
Like a pill and yoga and cucumber water, I joke about those as means of being self-care, but just Google what is self-care or mental health self-care, and you’re going to see that it’s just very symptomatic. It’s to sleep more, eat better, and exercise. That’s the health, the self-care for the mental health aspect. You don’t need that stuff. What you need is a mind transformation. Nothing is going to change your mind apart from the work of the Holy Spirit. And that is what happens at the moment of salvation. He is the one that makes you alive, John 3:3. You have to be born again. That which is born of the Spirit is spirit, that which is born of the flesh is flesh. You have to be born of the Spirit. What does that mean? He made you alive. He regenerated, made your mind alive. When did that happen? At the moment of salvation.
Dale Johnson: Greg, when you talk about this, one thing I want people to understand very clearly is many, particularly integrationists or even others within the biblical counseling movement, will want to make some sort of distinction. They may say, “Yes, the Bible is sufficient for everything that’s spiritual and certainly salvation is that way.” But I don’t want people to miss what you’re describing. What you’re describing is that the method that God is giving when He describes salvation is the rescue of the mind.
And so the domain that He’s speaking over has to do with all spiritual issues that we wrestle with in the mind. And I think sometimes we dismiss this concept, as if salvation should be reduced in explanation of the types of problems that man has. And so, we say, “yes, the Bible is sufficient, but as we explain the problems of man, this concept of the spiritual gets reduced further and further and further. And so, the Bible is less authoritative over less parts of man.
What you’re doing, however, is you’re helping to flip that narrative to say, “No, no. We shouldn’t diminish at all what we see of the problems of the mind in man, because that’s actually the domain that God is speaking about in the Bible.” And this transforms everything in how we think in our mind and how we address the issues that we face in a given day. The things that are opposed to us, the ways that we’ve been sinned against, the experiences that we have and so on and so forth—that we are still moral agents to respond appropriately.
And part of that is not just salvation proper, but as we get into sanctification. Biblical counseling has always said that the aim of our counseling is sanctification. And this is what makes it so significant. You shouldn’t hear that as a reduction of things we can work with. This should be an expanse upon your mind to see the domain of the mind as comprehensive in how we deal with all kinds of issues that people face. So, talk a little bit about how sanctification and the mind interact Scripturally.
Greg Gifford: Yeah, it’s really unfortunate for us. The last episode we did together, I said, “Hey, we really want to be discerning and somewhat skeptical.” And that really comes to a flashpoint when you’re sitting in front of an unsaved psychiatrist. Seriously, this is like boots on the ground.
Can you imagine as a Christian sitting in front of an unsaved psychiatrist and they’re now telling you what’s going to help your mind? You don’t know your Bible well enough if you’re sitting there saying, “Please help me with my mind,” When the unsaved psychiatrist has the most “unhealthy mind.” They are the one in need of regeneration.
Just think about how we’ve like relegated the Bible to like this cute Sunday school flannel graph. It’s like memorizing a verse and praying about it. Oh, that’s cute, but let’s go to the professionals and get help with our minds. Imagine this from an eternal perspective. It’s like, we’re going to the professional psychiatrist who has a hard and dark and unregenerate, sick mind. And as a believer, I’m saying, “Please help me with my mind.” Biblically, the term is whack. I don’t know how you spell that. I think there’s an H in there, but that’s just whack.
We are saying, No, you need regeneration and at the moment of regeneration, the Holy Spirit doesn’t just leave you there. He doesn’t just capacitate you—He indwells you. 1 Corinthians 6:19, you’re a temple. He empowers you for sanctification. So, you’re dependent on Him too. Philippians 2:12-13: You obey. As you obey, God actually changes what you want. So, He gives you the ability to obey, but also changes your desires.
God the Spirit doesn’t abandon you there, but through progressive sanctification He conforms your mind to be more and more like Christ’s mind. The incarnation is one of the best examples of putting on this mindset. The term mind isn’t actually used. It’s a way of thinking. You’re thinking like Jesus thinks. And the more you think like Jesus thinks, the more sanctified your mind is. So, at the moment of salvation, you have regeneration, which gives you the capacity. Progressive sanctification says we’re more and more and more like Jesus in our minds. That’s the role of sanctification in the mind.
Dale Johnson: Now you’ve put together the concept of salvation in the mind and sanctification as it’s practically working out continually in the mind—renewing the mind constantly to have the mind of Christ. But now, help people to understand how these concepts affect our understanding of mental health issues. Because I think people would still say, “Greg, man, we love what you’re saying, but what about this mental health stuff?” Right?
Help our listeners, Greg, to make sure that they’re not going to syncretize these concepts and say, “Yes, we love the things you’re talking about with the mind and we’re going to renew our minds with sanctification. But we still want to have these explanations of mental health.” How did the concepts that you’re describing affect our understanding of mental health remedies?
Greg Gifford: Let me just be very straightforward. And I would welcome fact checking and I welcome, you know, blogs written against this concept. Like please chew on it as the listener. And I know there are those that are not sympathetic to biblical counseling, listening to Truth and Love. So please, the short answer is that you can’t have an illness of the mind. If you’re using the term in its biblical way, you do not have a medical issue of your mind. You can struggle with anxiety and it is not a mental illness. And you can struggle with depression and it not be a mental illness. And you can struggle with ADHD and it not be a mental illness.
There’s this emotional, sometimes a response of like, “How dare you use simpleton. You’re rejecting science and saying there’s no such thing as mental illnesses.” It’s like, “No, I didn’t say that.” I didn’t say that—read my book. I said that it’s not a mental illness. You can struggle with anxiety and it not be an illness of your mind because you can’t have a pathological illness of something that’s immaterial. You can’t have—just like you don’t have a mind bruise and you don’t have a mind abrasion—You don’t have a mind illness either. I mean, just break down what we’re getting at.
So, what is going on then? Well, to reconstruct what’s being called mental illnesses, you have to do some heavy lifting. You honestly do. Like, it’s almost easier to be like, “No, that’s dumb. I’m out of here… going to live in my cave.” That’s not what we’re trying to do as Christians and just reject everything, call it worldly and have no alternative. You have to do the heavy lifting of saying, “and what the world is calling this, the Bible would call this.” Where you have to do the heavy lifting of exegesis, knowing your Bible, practicing proper hermeneutics, and then reconstructing a theology of that thing.
So, if the Bible calls it anxiety and it’s being used in its biblical form, then I want to know what the Bible says about anxiety and it’s not an illness of my mind. It can exist. And now I’m going to reconstruct what the Bible would say on that, or I’m going to take what the world calls ADHD, and I’m going to interpret that through the lens of Scripture and say, “This is what the Bible would call ADHD.”
And you’re of course doing heavy lifting, some of which requires you to say, “Hey, maybe you should go to a medical doctor. Maybe there is a medical cause. We’re not sure. There’s no diagnosis, but maybe there is.” Of course, that’s the heavy lifting. So, the work that is ahead of us as people who are committed to the sufficiency of Scripture. And some of us are biblical counselors, we’re not just rejecting mental illness labels, we’re reinterpreting them through the lens of Scripture. That is the work. And that’s the hard work that’s ahead of us.
And there will be another diagnosis tomorrow that pops up and there will be four more that are dropped off. They’re non-verifiable illnesses anyway, so they’re always going to change based on the culture. So, what you and I have to do is be thoughtful and engaging with the Scripture.
If you’re syncretistic, you don’t know your Bible in all fairness. If you’re like, “Oh, that’s great. Let me add that one over here. Where’s Carl Rogers again? Let me grab his stuff.” If you’re syncretistic, you just don’t know your Bible and you don’t know the difference of the mind and the brain. You haven’t thought carefully about it. And I don’t say that to shame you, I just say, hey, look, the Bible has better answers, and you need to engage them a little bit more carefully. Because mental illness, if you’re using that term mental illness, it’s a misnomer and it just shows us that you don’t really understand the mind and the brain distinctions there.
So, I would say a syncretist needs to dig a little bit deeper. You probably grabbed the book a little too quickly and incorporated it a little too quickly, instead of sitting down and really thinking deeply about the nature of the mind, what the Bible says about it. Syncretism, which leads to eclecticism. That’s not biblical counseling. Number one, it never has been. I don’t think it ever will be genuine sufficiency of Scripture, biblical counseling.
That’s pragmatism. And often it’s just trying to alleviate symptoms. It’s like, well, that helped. So let me use that. It’s like, well, yes, Tylenol can help with a dental infection, but it’s not really treating the root of the cause. It’s treating the symptoms. So, you’re not a syncretist, not just because you’re concerned about titles, but because it’s not permissible. The Bible doesn’t allow you to be such.
Dale Johnson: Greg, what you’ve done in the last couple of weeks, I think has been very helpful to us. And I want to make a final appeal to people who would read your book. I want to encourage them to pick this book up and read it. Now, a lot of times we pick up a book and we read it based on, well, is Greg saying something that I agree with or is he not? And so, I’m going to critique him because maybe he doesn’t agree with where I am.
I want people to read the book in this particular way. I want them to say, “Is what Greg saying representative of what the Bible is actually saying?” Because that’s what matters. And if you want to critique the things that Greg has said, then by all means, do it. Greg’s not perfect. Anything I write, I’m not perfect, right? But the way in which that correction should happen is to know that the Bible expresses ideas in a different way, and that’s a helpful critique. That’s how we grow in this whole process.
If you’re just saying, “Well, no. I just disagree with Greg.” I mean, sometimes that’s not helpful, right? So, when you read the book, just continue to ask the question, is what he’s presenting, is it something that is biblically defensible? And I think this is our pattern forward, right? It is thinking about these topics, which are hard topics, difficult topics, topics that have been confused over quite a long period of time—how do we allow the Bible to speak into these areas? It is still a domain of the soul, and how do we understand it and understand it well?
Greg, I think you’ve helped us take a huge stride forward. Thank you. With this book, I’m looking forward to it. And thanks for spending time with us here on the last couple of weeks to help us understand the book, what it’s about. And I encourage you all to go pick it up, Lies My Therapist Told Me, out May 27th.
Greg Gifford: Thank you.
Helpful Resources:
Listen to Part 1: Truth in Love 517—Lies My Therapist Told Me
Explore our past Mental Health podcasts and additional resources on our website.
