Biblical counseling for lived Christian care.
Counsel The Word is a teaching-and-conversation show from the Center for Biblical Counseling and Discipleship. Keith Palmer and guests connect Scripture, pastoral care, church history, and everyday struggles without treating counseling as detached theory.
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Counsel The Word is a biblical counseling show built around careful, pastoral conversation. It comes from the Center for Biblical Counseling and Discipleship and is hosted by Keith Palmer in the sampled episodes. The episodes are plainspoken but theologically dense. They ask how Scripture speaks to the texture of real human struggle. Suffering is not handled as an abstraction. In the John Newton episode, pastoral care is framed through lived truth, humility, affliction, and the ability to enter another person's pain with care. The show also gives sustained attention to older Christian resources. Book Talk conversations with Stephen Yule bring Thomas Manton, Puritan meditation, devotional reading, publication work, and church history into practical view. The pace is unhurried. A topic can breathe long enough for definitions, cautions, and pastoral implications to surface. Contemporary issues are not avoided. Episodes on device addiction connect smartphone habits, reward, sensory stimulation, and addictive behavior with biblical categories for understanding people. Other conversations address marriage, grief, exhaustion, burnout, family life, and ministry strain. The guests often speak from counseling rooms, churches, classrooms, and personal experience. That gives the show a lived-in quality. It does not chase novelty. It returns to Scripture, theological anthropology, humility, providence, sin, Christ, and the ordinary work of care. The result is best suited to Christians who want counseling material that feels anchored rather than reactive. It also serves pastors, ministry leaders, and counselors looking for language that can move from doctrine to wise conversation. Counsel The Word is serious, warm, and resource-minded, with a recurring concern for how truth is known, practiced, and spoken to suffering people.
Made for: Counsel The Word is for Christians, pastors, church leaders, and biblical counselors who want Scripture-shaped help for suffering, habits, marriage, grief, and ministry fatigue. It especially suits listeners who appreciate pastoral conversation and Christian resources.
What sets it apart: The show joins practical counseling topics with church history, Puritan texts, and sustained theological reflection. Its strongest moments come when doctrinal categories are tested against ordinary pain, family pressure, technology habits, and pastoral care.
Conversations about biblical counseling from the Center for Biblical Counseling and Discipleship.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Biblical doctrine meets fear, grief, burnout and suffering through practical teaching, patient interviews and close attention to lived experience.
Counsel The Word begins with recognizable pressure points such as fear, grief, exhaustion and suffering, then asks what Christian belief changes about living through them.
Job's 42 questions meet your demand for neat answers, and neat answers lose.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
Keith Palmer and Terry Enns discuss how personal suffering can shape Christian pastoral care.
Keith Palmer and Terry Enns discuss John Newton's pastoral care through Palmer's book, asking what changes when a counselor has suffered personally. Knowing what Scripture says about affliction is one thing; holding to it while in pain is another.
Stephen Yule explains Thomas Manton's "lively truths" as subjects for holy meditation.
Keith Palmer talks with Stephen Yule about Thomas Manton's Holy Meditation, a volume in the Puritan Treasures for Today series. Yule takes up Manton's "lively truths," subjects meant to stir the heart as well as occupy the mind.
A counselor's account of slowing down brings family life into a discussion of burnout.
Keith Palmer and Jonathan Okunaga discuss burnout through the strain Okunaga's travel and speaking engagements put on family life. Okunaga recalls his wife asking him to slow down and telling him their son was asking where he was.
Keith Palmer and the Ellens discuss grief that looks different from person to person through a biblical counseling lens.
Keith Palmer talks with Nick and Vanessa Ellen about the idea that grief must follow a set of stages. They question that expectation and consider why one person's response may differ from another's.
A biblical counseling talk on worry, sinful fear, and the beliefs beneath anxiety.
The speaker starts with the familiar ways worry can take over: racing thoughts, lost sleep, strained relationships, and a sense of losing control. A series of slides gives those effects room before the talk turns to sinful fear in biblical terms.
A Christian counseling lecture on suffering, patience, and trusting God without knowing why.
Where is God when suffering has no clear explanation? A Christian counselor takes up that question through a father watching his daughter make destructive choices, a wife facing her husband's infidelity, and a husband sitting beside his dying wife.
Two Bible translators unpack Scripture's hardest passages, from Revelation's 666 to the Witch of Endor.
Scripture, surrender and faith put into practice.
Keith Palmer and Terry Enns discuss John Newton's theology of suffering and its application to pastoral care, focusing on a book based on a dissertation.
["Counsel the Word focuses on John Newton's theology of suffering and its application to pastoral care, with Keith Palmer and Terry Enns discussing Palmer's book, John Newton's Theology of Suffering and Its Application to Pastoral Care.", "Newton is presented as an 18th-century English former slave ship captain who became a Church of England pastor, wrote more than a thousand hymns and letters, and mentored William Wilberforce.", "Palmer argues that Newton treated suffering as the hub of theology, connecting God's sovereignty, Christ's sympathy in Hebrews 4, Romans 8:28, and the phrases \"love tokens\" and \"disguised mercies.\"", "The episode also traces Newton's care for his wife Polly and his friend William Cooper, showing how long-term affliction shaped his patience, correction, and pastoral method."]
Council of the Word's Keith Palmer and Dr.
This episode explores device addiction from a biblical perspective, focusing on spiritual dynamics and gospel-centered solutions.
Keith Palmer discusses device addiction from a biblical perspective, starting with the history of the cell phone.
Keith Palmer interviews Drs.
Keith Palmer interviews Dr.
Keith Palmer and Jonathan Okunaga frame "exhaustion and burnout" through John 15:4, Psalm 32, and 2 Corinthians 4:16 rather than only sleep or diet.
Counsel The Word episode 93 centers on finding grace in grief, with Keith Palmer interviewing Nick Ellen and Vanessa Ellen about biblical care after loss and Vanessa’s book, Grace in the Morning: A Faith-Filled Journey with Grief.
Counsel The Word's “Worry and Fear” distinguishes natural fear from sinful fear by examining bodily threat responses, anxiety, and idolatry.
Counsel The Word's "Trials and Suffering" opens with four concrete cases: an unconverted daughter, a wife's 14-year marriage ending in infidelity, a husband beside a dying wife's hospital bed, and a woman facing hostility for Christ's sake.
A religious lecture on how to deal with the past by focusing on present attitudes and desires, based on biblical principles.
A theology lecture explaining complementarian and egalitarian views on biblical manhood and womanhood, with a focus on complementarianism.
A sermon warning against mysticism and emphasizing the sufficiency of Christ's work, with book recommendations.