|
A Letter to All Students
of This Course
Dear Friends,
Greetings to you as you commence this useful Course.
It seems appropriate to give you a special welcome, and to encourage
you to persist in what is quite a long Course. We believe it is
worth persisting, and gathering to yourself those elements of wisdom
by which firstly you yourself can be helped and by which you can
lead others to be enriched.
The 'Self-Questionnaire' enclosed
with our First Lesson may seem a little drastic in the questions
it asks us honestly to face, but we believe it can be quite helpful.
The prophet Jeremiah said that the heart of man is deceitful above
all things and desperately corrupt. He asked, 'Who can know it?',
and his answer was, in effect, 'God alone'. This means, of course,
that we need a lot of humility in approaching what is really the
whole of man, namely his, or her heart. The Israelites understood
the heart to be what we today would call the intellect, the will
and the emotions-cognition, volition and the affections.
The value of a course on Biblical Counselling is
that it draws its information regarding God, Man and Creation from
the Scriptures, and we assume that what we are taught there is
authentic. Left to ourselves our thinking would be vastly different.
The wisdom contained in the Scriptures has been gathered together
over a long period of time and has also stood the test of time.
Christians who feel called upon to counsel others not only have
a treasure-house of profound truth and wisdom, but they can be
confident they are not putting forward novel ideas of their own.
We want to wish you every blessing as you begin
the Course. It will surely lead you out to issues beyond, even,
those it seeks to teach. Do persist, then, in covering all its
materials and we are sure you will be greatly rewarded.
Yours sincerely,  Geoffrey
Bingham
|
