Nothing is new. Your creative spark simply means that the people who provoked it have been assimilated into the way you think and live. “New” and “different” are forms of amnesia. The truly creative are merely dabbling with a puzzle, for which all the pieces are already on the table, and trying to find a piece that fits. We get excited that someone found a missing piece, but, in time, we will notice that the edges don’t match and somebody else will have to remove that piece for one that fits better.

I know some of the people who have put out the puzzle pieces I play with. An important person has been Jay Adams. I suspect a lot of what I do is just examine and rearrange what he has laid out, and, no doubt, someone will soon come along and correct some of my mistakes.

This blog post is a companion piece to this week's podcast on sexual misconduct with Aaron Sironi, Alasdair Groves and Tim Lane.

Biblical counseling has a history of being picky about words. Sometimes it sounded as if we had our own version of George Carlin’s dirty word list. For example, off limits were terms like: self-esteem, needs, psychological, or any psychiatric diagnosis unless you were going to critique it a bit first.