MarsCast

What if the way you were taught to forgive undermines the way you’re told to trust God? Many of us grew up hearing that God forgives only those who repent, so we should forgive that way too. It sounds biblical enough. But what happens to our assurance when we sin in ways we never notice? In Part 1 of a three-part series, Dr. J. Mark Beach joins Jared to challenge the “transactional” view of forgiveness, unpack what the biblical words for repentance mean, and ask whether repentance is the price of grace or its fruit.

Don’t think that you need to take the first pastoral call that comes along. Don’t wait for a perfect one, either. Somewhere between paralysis and presumption is a faithful way to decide, and most men facing a call have no map for finding it. In part two of our series on the pastoral call, Dr. Paul Ipema explains how an internal desire and an external open door work together, why an inquiry deserves more than a polite “no,” whether a pastor should stay three years, five, or twenty-five, and when it’s fair to weigh money or family. He also shows how prayer can expose whether fear or ambition is steering the decision. Seminarians, pastors, and search committees will all find something here.

Reformed churches are facing more pastoral vacancies than at any point in Dr. Paul Ipema’s lifetime, and the elders left to fill them are rarely trained for the work. Send a letter of inquiry today, and perhaps one pastor in ten will even consider a call. So how does a search committee avoid both the three-year drift and the six-month mismatch? In part one of this two-part series, Dr. Ipema, who directs MARS’ Ministerial Apprenticeship Program and is the Associate Professor of Ministerial Studies, explains why calling a pastor is nothing like filling a job, which three priorities Scripture sets, who to ask about a candidate before the interview, and the answer he treats as a red flag. If you’re on a search committee, press play, then send this to the rest of your committee.

Why would the apostle who calls marriage a living picture of Christ and the church also tell some people not to marry? In the final episode of our Christ and culture series, Dr. Marcus Mininger takes up 1 Corinthians 7 and a claim that rarely makes it into church life: good things can still be the wrong things to build your life around. He moves from Paul’s logic to the questions it raises about discretionary income, a nicer car, a political donation, a well-drilling project, and the careers we steer our children toward. He also tells why he turned away from Special Forces, politics, and graduate philosophy to study what lasts the longest. Cultural life matters, but how much of your life should it get? Listen, then pass it to the pastor, elder, or friend who is wrestling with that question.Read Dr. Mininger's Journal article on Christ and culture here.

In part two of this series on Christ and culture, Dr. Marcus Mininger dives into Paul's stunning move in Ephesians 5 — quoting Genesis 2's account of marriage, then declaring, "I am speaking of Christ and the church." Mininger unpacks what it means for marriage to be Christocentric by design, not just illustrated by Christ but built from the ground up to point toward him, and why that means believers and unbelievers can never fully participate in it on equal footing. Then the conversation widens: if marriage points to Christ, what about bread, banquets, homes, and cities? Could the way you bake, decorate, or build actually preach a sermon?

Can your job as a plumber, your Monday to Friday at the office, or your Saturday grocery run be an act of worship, or is "Christian living" really just a Sunday thing? In this opening episode of a three-part series, Dr. Marcus Mininger unpacks two impulses every believer feels but rarely reconciles: the belief that Christ changes everything, and the assurance that even if we lose everything, his victory stands unshaken. Drawing on Colossians and a lifetime of watching Reformed Christians debate culture (from social gospel enthusiasm to monastic withdrawal to today's two-kingdoms debates), Mininger makes the case that both impulses are biblical, and that getting the balance wrong has real consequences for how we live.

Two of biblical counseling's most influential leaders died within a year of each other (Adams and Powlison), and the movement has been fracturing ever since. In this series finale, Dr. Jared Poulton joins Jared and Dr. Alan Strange to bring the story into the present: the growing rift between "clinically informed" and "historic" biblical counseling, the theological debates over common grace and secular psychology no reformed denomination has ever weighed in on, and why so many Reformed Christians have kept biblical counseling at arm's length despite wanting exactly what it offers. Dr. Poulton makes the case for where the movement goes from here, and issues a direct challenge to pastors and elders who've sat this conversation out. Whether you've followed all four episodes or you're just catching up, this closing conversation will change how you think about the counsel happening in your own church.

Every biblical counselor assumes their approach comes straight from Scripture alone, but what if the underlying architecture came from an apologist rather than a counselor? In this third episode of our MarsCast series on biblical counseling, Dr. Jared Poulton joins Jared and Dr. Alan Strange to reveal the hidden intellectual DNA of the biblical counseling movement: how Cornelius Van Til's presuppositional apologetics (covenantal knowledge, the antithesis, the rejection of "brute facts") became the theological scaffolding Jay Adams built his entire system on.But it's not a simple story of inheritance. Dr. Strange raises a pointed challenge about what gets lost when the antithesis is applied to counseling without its necessary counterweight, common grace, right down to what that means for how Christians assess the insights of secular psychology. If you've ever wondered why biblical counselors are so skeptical of Freud, CBT, or trauma therapy, this episode traces that instinct straight back to its source. Find Dr. Poulton's book here.

He was a pastor with a PhD in speech, no formal training in counseling, and a class he never wanted to teach, so how did Jay Adams end up rewriting the rules for how the church cares for hurting people? In this second episode, Dr. Jared Poulton returns with Jared Luttjeboer and Dr. Alan Strange to tell the origin story behind the man behind biblical counseling: a reluctant professor at Westminster Theological Seminary, an emotional pastoral encounter he never forgot, and the unlikely chain of events that turned a scrapped lecture into a movement. Dr. Poulton also unpacks the three surprising influences that shaped his thinking, and why, even decades later, biblical counselors are still wrestling with what he got right and where he needs correcting.

What happens when the church stops trusting herself to help her own people—and hands the job to the therapist's couch instead? In the 1970s, one pastor's book sold a quarter of a million copies by daring to say pastors and elders were still competent to counsel their flocks from Scripture alone. In this first episode of a four-part series, Dr. Jared Poulton joins Jared Luttjeboer and Dr. Alan Strange to trace how the biblical counseling movement was born out of a head-on collision between the rise of secular psychology and the church's calling to shepherd souls—and why the "alphabet soup" of counseling organizations it spawned still shapes what pastors, elders, and even your church library look like today. Whether you've never heard the term "nouthetic counseling" or you've read every Paul Tripp book on the shelf, this episode will change how you see the counsel happening in your own congregation. Next episode: the man behind it all.Learn more about the Institute of Reformed Biblical Counseling. Find Dr. Poulton's new book here.