Am I influencing you for good or ill?

Some of you may be familiar with the curriculum called Changing Hearts Changing Lives, put out by the Christian Counseling and Education Foundation, and taught by David Powlison and Paul David Tripp. It's a DVD of thirteen 30-minutes sessions, and Kristen and I have just started working through it together. I've watched most of the sessions previously, and I highly recommend it (and I look forward to watching and discussing the rest of them with Kristen).

It is basically about biblical counseling and the role that each of us play in helping one another along in our growth in Christ. Here are the 2 foundational assumptions that were communicated in the first session, about our lives as believers:

1. All of us are people in need of change.
2. God has called all of us to be instruments of change in his redemptive hands.

One big takeaway for me was the biblical truth that, in one sense, all of life is counseling. We are constantly giving and receiving counsel, either knowingly and directly or unknowingly and indirectly. We are all influencing each other to one degree or another, so an important question to ask is, Am I influencing you for good or ill? Am I pointing you to Christ as your source of hope and joy, or to something else? As Tripp put it, "You are influencing people every day. The question is: Is that influence Biblical?"