It’s Supernatural to Mature

Note: This is the seventh and final post in a blog mini-series asking the simple question: Is there a biblical model for spiritual friendship, one-another ministry, biblical counseling, and pastoral counseling?

Read Part 1: Spiritual Map Quest, Part 2: God’s Treasure Map, Part 3: Biblical Soul Care for Suffering, Part 4: Climbing in the Casket, Part 5: Celebrating the Empty Tomb, and Part 6: Dispensers of Grace.

I’m summarizing these posts from Spiritual Friends.

God’s Biblical Counseling GPS # 4: Guiding—”It’s Supernatural to Mature”

Biblical counselors have the privilege of guiding believers to realize that it’s supernatural to mature. Our task is to guide faith by strengthening our spiritual friends to understand, depend upon, and apply Christ’s resurrection power.

We start the process by understanding new life in Christ—our new nature (regeneration) and our new nurture (reconciliation). We look inside our struggling spiritual friends and see the power of sainthood—a new creation in Christ, and the presence of sonship—a new relationship to God.

Growth in Grace: Stir Up the Gift of God

We enlighten our spiritual friends to the truth that God’s grace not only saved them for all eternity, but also changed them for life now. In Christ, they have everything necessary to live a godly life (2 Peter 1:3). Thus it is neither impossible to mature, nor is it natural to mature. Maturity is the supernatural work of God implanted in us at salvation and growing daily in sanctification (2 Corinthians 3:18; 2 Peter 1:3-11; 3:18). We grow in grace by grace because God is gracious.

We continue the guiding process by envisioning the work of God within our spiritual friends (2 Timothy 1:5-7; Hebrews 10:24-25). Paul realizes that he does not need to create spiritual power, love, and wisdom within his disciples. All he has to do is stir it up. Provoke it. Fan it into flame.

“For this reason I remind you to fan into flame the gift of God, which is in you through the laying on of my hands. For God did not give us a spirit of timidity, but a spirit of power, of love and of self-discipline” (a sound mind, wisdom) (2 Timothy 1:6-7, emphasis and parenthesis added).

In fact, according to the author of Hebrews, one of the prime directives for Church life is mutual provocation.

“And let us consider how we may spur (provoke) one another on toward love and good deeds. Let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching” (Hebrews 10:24-25, emphasis and parenthesis added).

We draw out what God has already placed within.

The Goal of Guiding

Notice what we draw out—love. The goal of guiding is not to make life easier. The purpose of biblical spiritual direction is not to change circumstances. The focus is to equip and empower our spiritual friends to love—holy living through Christ-like loving.

Created for Paradise, our friends find themselves in a desert of suffering. Tempted to dig broken cisterns (self-sufficient idols of the heart and false lovers of the soul), they repent and receive Christ’s grace. Turning to God, they drink from the Spring of Living Water. Streams of living water overflow into the lives of others (John 7:37-39). Empowered by the Holy Spirit, our spiritual friends become shepherds in a jungle. In the jungle of fallen life in a fallen world, they exalt God by loving him and loving others.

God’s Roadmap; Our Treasure Map

God really has left us His roadmap, our treasure map. Discovering it, we uncover His plan for offering biblical soul care and spiritual direction through sustaining, healing, reconciling, and guiding.

How to, of course, does not imply easy to. It does not suggest a one-size-fits-all, mechanical, soulless process.

Consider sustaining, healing, reconciling, and guiding like the four points on a compass. They inform you what direction you are heading and what direction to head. However, there’s still the journey. The dance. The art of biblical soul care and spiritual direction (1 Thessalonians 2:8).

The Rest of the Story: Be Equipped with 22 Biblical Counseling Skills

To learn twenty-two biblical counseling skills of sustaining, healing, reconciling, and guiding, visit RPM Ministries’ Spiritual Friends Page.

Join the Conversation

Who has stirred up the gift of God in you? Who has fanned into flame spiritual growth in your life?

What is your biblical model for spiritual friendship, one-another ministry, biblical counseling, and pastoral counseling?

RPM Ministries: Equipping You to Change Lives with Christ’s Changeless Truth

Tags: Biblical Counseling, Guiding, Spiritual Direction, Spiritual Friends

Dispensers of Grace

Note: This is the sixth in a blog mini-series asking the simple question: Is there a biblical model for spiritual friendship, one-another ministry, biblical counseling, and pastoral counseling?

Read Part 1: Spiritual Map Quest, Part 2: God’s Treasure Map, Part 3: Biblical Soul Care for Suffering, Part 4: Climbing in the Casket, and Part 5: Celebrating the Empty Tomb.

I’m summarizing these posts from Spiritual Friends. 

God’s Roadmap Marker Number Two: Biblical Spiritual Direction (Noutheteo)

Recall that God’s roadmap, our treasure map, provides two directional markers: biblical soul care (parakleo) and biblical spiritual direction (noutheteo). The absence of either lens leaves our biblical counseling out of focus, distorted.

Some counselors focus only on the evils we have suffered: the damage done to us. They tend to ignore or minimize the sins we have committed: the damage we have done. Comprehensive biblical counselors, on the other hand, also focus on the truth that “God is gracious even when I am sinful.” They are disciplers who practice the ancient art of fraternal correction—concerned confrontation and challenge encouraging core heart change.

Biblical counselors understand spiritual dynamics and discern root causes of spiritual conflicts.

• They understand anthropology—God’s original design for the soul.

• They grasp sufferology—the effect of being sinned against in a fallen, hurtful world.

• They comprehend hamartiology—sin, our fallen nature, and the horrors of personal sin against God and others.

• They apprehend soteriology—salvation, sanctification, and the process of growth in grace.

Biblical counselors use their discernment to provide loving wisdom that reconciles and guides people. Their reconciliation and guiding emphasizes the same ultimate purpose of sustaining and healing—communion with Christ and conformity to Christ. They want to empower and equip people to fulfill the great commandment of loving God and loving others.

God’s Biblical Counseling GPS # 3: Reconciling—“It’s Horrible to Sin, but Wonderful to Be Forgiven”

Some counselors who focus on sin fail to focus on grace. They are quick to quip, “It’s horrible to sin.” But slow to grasp, “It’s wonderful to be forgiven.” We must focus on both.

Satan loves to foul and fool us. Even as regenerate believers with a new heart, Satan dupes us into believing that we are his slaves. He tempts us to curse God, condemn others, and experience contempt for ourselves. It requires tremendous biblical wisdom and personal discernment to sort through his pack of lies and cling to God’s Word of truth.

The truth is, it is horrible to sin. Sin alienates us from God, separates us from each other, and dis-integrates us from our own selves (Romans 1:18-32; Ephesians 2:1-3; 2:11-19; 4:17-32). Due to sin’s deceitfulness (Romans 7:11; 2 Corinthians 4:4; Ephesians 4:17-20; Hebrews 3:13) we need spiritual friends. We need biblical counselors who can ask and answer the question raised in James 4:1. “What causes fights and quarrels among you?” Only biblical counselors like these can fulfill the ministry description provided in Hebrews 3:12-13.

“See to it, brothers, that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God. But encourage one another daily, as long as it is called Today, so that none of you may be hardened by sin’s deceitfulness.”

We also need biblical counselors who can use the living Word of God to expose the thoughts and attitudes of the heart (Hebrews 4:12-13), and to teach, rebuke, correct, and train in righteousness so that God’s people are equipped for every good work (2 Timothy 3:16-17).

As biblical counselors, we are like the Puritans who practiced the art of loading the conscience with guilt. Like them, we know that to break the habitual web of sin’s deceit, people need to experience the horrors of their sin against God and others.

We also need to be like the Puritan soul physicians in practicing the art of lightening the conscience with grace. How sad that many counselors de-emphasize grace. It is wonderful to be forgiven. Forgiveness by grace is the dynamic God uses not only to cleanse our lives, but also to change our love. Christ woos us back to God by grace (Romans 2:4; 3:1-5:21; 1 John 4:7-20).

Dispensers of Grace

Christ calls biblical counselors to be dispensers of grace meeting human guilt with God’s grace and forgiveness. Grace is God’s medicine of choice for suffering and sin. Grace is God’s prescription for our disgrace.

Notice how the author of Hebrews exposes grace in the context of exposing sin. After exposing sin in Hebrews 3:12-13, he shifts to grace in 3:14. “We have come to share in Christ if we hold firmly till the end the confidence we had at first.” We detect the same pattern in Hebrews 4:12-16. After discussing the power of the Word to expose evil in 4:12-13, he immediately focuses on grace in 4:14-16.

“Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has gone through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold firmly to the faith we profess. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet was without sin. Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need” (emphasis added).

We expose our spiritual friends’ sins and Christ’s grace. We speak the truth in love to them, softening their hardened hearts. We invite them to drink from Jesus their Spring of Living Water who is the Friend of sinners—even of sinners who dig broken cisterns that can hold no water.

The Rest of the Story

I invite you to return for Part 7 where we learn about Biblical Counseling through Guiding: “It’s Supernatural to Mature.”

Join the Conversation

Who has been a dispenser of grace in your life?

RPM Ministries: Equipping You to Change Lives with Christ’s Changeless Truth

Tags: Biblical Counseling, Nouthetic, Reconciling, Spiritual Direction, Spiritual Friends

Climbing in the Casket

Note: This is the fourth in a blog mini-series asking the simple question: Is there a biblical model for spiritual friendship, one-another ministry, biblical counseling, and pastoral counseling?

Read Part 1: Spiritual Map Quest, Part 2: God’s Treasure Map, and Part 3: Biblical Soul Care for Suffering.

I’m summarizing these posts from Spiritual Friends.

God’s Biblical Counseling GPS # 1: Sustaining—“It’s Normal to Hurt”

Knowing that life lived in a fallen world can be raw, we communicate to one another, “It’s normal to hurt.” We weep with those who weep, refusing to blame people for hurting or shame them for feeling pain. We join them in the fellowship of their suffering.

Created for Paradise, our hurting spiritual friends now live in a desolate desert. Our first calling is to sense their earthly story of suffering. We empathize with their agony, engaging them in their despair.

How? We offer compassionate commiseration, a term flowing through the pages of Church history. Co-passion feels another’s passion, shares a friend’s suffering. Co-misery becomes a partner in our spiritual friend’s misery and woe. Such empathy is not simply understanding with someone’s pain, but sharing in and experiencing his or her pain.

Shared Sorrow

Shared sorrow is endurable sorrow. As Jonathan with David, the binding of our hearts together exponentially and miraculously enables us to endure what otherwise would overwhelm. Ponder Paul’s words.

“Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God. For just as the sufferings of Christ flow over into our lives, so also through Christ our comfort overflows. If we are distressed, it is for your comfort and salvation; if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which produces in you patient endurance of the same suffering we suffer. And our hope for you is firm, because we know that just as you share in our sufferings, so also you share in our comfort” (2 Corinthians 1:3-7).

In order to provide compassionate commiseration, we need to practice dual listening: listening to our friend’s earthly story while listening to God’s eternal story. Spiritual friends tune into their friend’s smaller story that communicates “Life is bad” (sustaining). Spiritual friends also tune into God’s larger story that communicates “God is good” (healing).

In sustaining, our empathy promotes our spiritual friend’s grieving. Paul commands us to grieve within the context of hope (1 Thessalonians 4:13). Without hope, grieving terrifies. Faced with what appears to be nothing but a black hole of unending pain, we back away. We deaden ourselves; deny. We refuse to grieve and groan. Often to start the “chain of grieving” we must grieve for our spiritual friends before they can grieve for themselves. Our weeping allows them to weep. Grieving is the bridge toward healing. When we grieve and groan we admit that we are not God, that we cannot control life, and that we need God (Romans 8:18-27).

Climbing in the Casket

Spiritual friends understand the essential principle for sustaining faith in the goodness of God: we have to climb in the casket with our spiritual friends. Life is a series of multiple deaths, daily crucifixions. We need the courageous compassion to climb in the casket with our friends in the throes of death, in the valley of the shadow of death. When they sense us there with them, when they see our courageous hope, then they’re encouraged to face death so that they can face life again. As Paul wrote to his friends in Corinth:

“We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about the hardships we suffered in the province of Asia. We were under great pressure, far beyond our ability to endure, so that we despaired even of life. Indeed, in our hearts we felt the sentence of death” (2 Corinthians 1:8-9a).

Sometimes it appears that our “default” response is to “spot sin.” Instead, let’s be biblical counselors who understand suffering. Let’s not be ignorant of our friends’ earthly stories of suffering. Let’s not miss their hearts. When we do, we tend to cram God in. Instead, we want to encourage them to invite God into the casket with them.

The Rest of the Story

I invite you to return for Part 4 where we learn about Biblical Counseling through Healing: Celebrating the Empty Tomb.

Join the Conversation

Who has climbed in the casket with you in your suffering?

RPM Ministries: Equipping You to Change Lives with Christ’s Changeless Truth

Tags: Biblical Counseling, Grieving, Soul Care, Spiritual Friends, Suffering, Sustaining

Biblical Soul Care for Suffering

Note: This is the third in a blog mini-series asking the simple question: Is there a biblical model for spiritual friendship, one-another ministry, biblical counseling, and pastoral counseling?

Read Part 1: Spiritual Map Quest and Part 2: God’s Treasure Map.

I’m summarizing these posts from Spiritual Friends.

Biblical Counseling for Suffering: Parakaleo—“The Evils We Have Suffered”

Biblical counseling recognizes that not all suffering is due to personal sin (Job 1-2 and John 9). Therefore, not all counseling focuses upon confrontation of the sins we have committed. Biblical soul care faces the evils we have suffered by living face-to-face with Christ.

Parakaletic (John 14; 2 Corinthians 1) spiritual friends assume the role of encouragers coming alongside to help their friends because we believe the world is fallen and it often fall on us. As the Good Samaritan crossed over to the other side and bloodied himself to care for a stranger’s suffering body, so biblical counselors move near to enter the mess and muck of a friend’s suffering soul.

Biblical Soul Care

Biblical counselors compassionately identify with people in pain. We reject the shallow pretense that denies suffering. Like Jeremiah, we lament. Like Paul, we groan for home. We’re out of the nest. East of Eden. We’re not home yet. We join our hurting spiritual friend in admitting that life is bad.

We also insist that God is good. Therefore, we don’t direct people to us. Instead, we redirect people to Christ and the Body of Christ. We point our suffering friends to their suffering Savior. We remind them what a Friend they have in Jesus. We also equip them to avail themselves of all the resources of the Body of Christ through discipleship, worship, fellowship, stewardship, and ambassadorship.

Loving God and Others

Biblical counselors have God’s greater purposes in mind: experiencing communion with Christ and conformity to Christ as people love God (exalt God by enjoying and entrusting him) and love others. Symptom relief is not our primal goal. Whether our spiritual friends find a “cure” or not, whether their symptoms are alleviated or not, we want to help them to find God (communion) in the midst of their suffering.

Biblical counselors long for people to love Christ and love like Christ. We want them to see that God is good even when life is bad. We want to empower people so that they:

• Exalt God: Worship, glorify, praise, and honor Him

• By Enjoying God: Seeking, desiring, thirsting for, and drawing near to Him

• And by Entrusting Themselves to Christ: Clinging to, living for, obeying, serving, and surrendering to Him).

Empowered by their deepened connection to Christ, they love others more deeply.

Satan wants suffering to crush us. God uses suffering to soften us. Satan wants suffering to defeat us. God uses suffering to defeat Satan by transforming us into better lovers. Becoming a better lover—that’s the goal of biblical counseling for suffering.

The Rest of the Story

I invite you to return for Part 4 where we learn about Biblical Counseling through Sustaining: Climbing in the Casket.

Join the Conversation

How well are you equipped to help people to face their suffering face-to-face with Christ?

Who has been a biblical soul care-giver for you in your suffering?

RPM Ministries: Equipping You to Change Lives with Christ’s Changeless Truth

Tags: Biblical Counseling, Parakaletic, Soul Care, Spiritual Friends, Suffering

Spiritual Map Quest

Note: This is the first in a blog mini-series asking the simple question: Is there a biblical model for spiritual friendship, one-another ministry, biblical counseling, and pastoral counseling? I’m summarizing these posts from Spiritual Friends.  

Comprehensive, Compassionate, Christ-like Care

Two recent interviews with prospective faculty members reminded me of Frank Lake’s insight. “The maladies of the human spirit in its deprivation and its depravity are matters of common pastoral concern” (Lake, Clinical Theology, p. 37, emphasis added).

The first interviewee saw deprivation or suffering as the core issue addressed in Christian counseling. “We have to focus on healing the hurts in human hearts,” he contended.

The second interviewee perceived depravity or sin to be the core issue that biblical counselors must face. “God calls us to expend our energy on confronting hard hearts,” he insisted.

Which is it?

• Do we follow the counseling roadmap marked deprivation, suffering, hurts, healing/comforting, and parakaleo?

• Or, do we travel the route marked depravity, sinning, hardness, confronting, and noutheteo?

• Or, like Frank Lake, do we see deprivation and depravity as matters of common spiritual friendship, pastoral care, and one-another concern?

In this blog mini-series, I propose that a biblical and church history model includes sustaining and healing for the evils we have suffered (parakaletic counseling/comforting) and reconciling and guiding for the sins we have committed (nouthetic counseling/care-fronting). Clebsch and Jaekle, along with Lake, say it well.

“The ministry of the cure of souls, or pastoral care, consists of helping acts, done by representative Christian persons, directed toward the healing, sustaining, guiding, and reconciling of troubled persons whose troubles arise in the context of ultimate meaning and concern” (Clebsch and Jaekle, Pastoral Care in Historical Perspective, p. 4).

“Pastoral care is defective unless it can deal thoroughly both with these evils we have suffered as well as with the sins we have committed” (Lake, Clinical Theology, p. 21).

Do We Even Need a Roadmap?

Of course, there’s a more fundamental issue. “Do we even need a roadmap?” Some say, “I don’t have a counseling model. I just do what comes naturally.” Still others claim, “I don’t follow a model of counseling. I simply use the Bible.”

Realize it or not, we all have some counseling “model.” We all approach personal ministry from some perspective and practice our approach according to some pattern.

Every person approaches spirituality and spiritual care out of some particular framework. The value of a model is that it makes explicit the already implicit framework.

Further, it’s evident that we either develop a biblical approach to counseling or we borrow a secular model of counseling. Speaking about what happens when we lack a well thought-out Christian model of care, Clebsch and Jaekle explain:

The unfortunate result of this circumstance is that the pastoral profession sorely lacks any up-to-date vocabulary of spiritual debilities and strengths that takes seriously man’s intense personal and social aspirations and anguishes. Faced with an urgency for some system by which to conceptualize the human condition and to deal with the modern grandeurs and terrors of the human spirit, theoreticians of the cure of souls have too readily adopted the leading academic psychologies. Having no pastoral theology to inform our psychology or even to identify the cure of souls as a mode of human helping, we have allowed psychoanalytic thought, for example, to dominate the vocabulary of the spirit. (Clebsch and Jaekle, Pastoral Care in Historical Perspective, p. xii).

Urgent concerns plus no Christian model equals acceptance of secular psychology as the only hope.

Someone enters your office saying, “My daughter has been diagnosed with an eating disorder . You have to help us. Please meet with him tomorrow.”

What do you do? Does your Bible concordance have a notation for “eating disorder”? Since it doesn’t, you and I are tempted to rush to the self-help shelf of the local bookstore. When faced with the complexity of the human soul, we turn to secular models if we have no thought-out Christian model.

Edwards sounds a dire warning concerning what is happening in post-modern Christianity due to our lack of a time-tested, traditional, Christian model of care.

But if there is no deep awareness of the experiential, developmental anthropology of the tradition, then there is no real mutation, just a whole-hog graft. If the graft takes, it tends to take over. Sooner or later then the Church loses its unique experiential wisdom for society; it finds itself more and more absorbed as an expedient base for someone else’s “revelation,” unqualified by its own (Edwards, Spiritual Friend, pp. 32-33).

Without a theological foundation and a historical Christian model, we reject biblical revelation in favor of human reasoning.

Wayne Oates joins his voice to the chorus of concern. Speaking specifically of Protestants, he notes:

Protestants tend to start over from scratch every three or four generations. We do not adequately consolidate the communal wisdom of the centuries because of our antipathy for tradition. Therefore, we have accrued less capital in the form of proverbs, manuals of church discipline, etc. We have been, furthermore, in closer contact with the distinctly empirical dimensions of pastoral counseling by reason of our greater dependence upon secular forms of education. At the same time, as Protestants we have tended to draw our theoretical presuppositions for pastoral counseling from the scientific sources that are extrinsic to the theology of the church (Oates, Protestant Pastoral Care, p. 11).

We all follow some model in our people helping, and our approach is either Christian or non-Christian. We surrender our approach to the prevailing secular theories unless we follow some roadmap, some model of Christian care based upon biblical theology and Church history.

The Rest of the Story

I invite you to return for Part 2 where we introduce God’s Treasure Map for one-another care.

Join the Conversation 

How have you developed your biblical model for spiritual friendship, one-another ministry, biblical counseling, and pastoral counseling?

RPM Ministries: Equipping You to Change Lives with Christ’s Changeless Truth 

Tags: Biblical Counseling, One Another Ministry, Pastoral Counseling, Soul Care, Spiritual Friends

How I Write Versus How I Live

I’ve been thinking lately how difficult it is to live what I write. In my books like Soul Physicians and Spiritual Friends, I write about living the Christian life and being a Christian friend.

Frequently I fail at both.

While pondering my dilemma, I stumbled upon a quote from Samuel Johnson’s The Rambler (1750, Essay 14). (See Sympathy for Hypocrites by John Zahl at his blog Mockingbird.)

“It is not difficult to conceive that for many reasons a man writes much better than he lives. For, without entering into refined speculations, it may be shown much easier to design than to perform. A man proposes his schemes of life in a state of abstraction and disengagement, exempt from the enticements of hope, the solicitations of affection, the importunities of appetite, or the depressions of fear, and is in the same state with him that teaches upon land the art of navigation, to whom the sea is always smooth, and the wind always prosperous…

We are, therefore, not to wonder that most fail, amidst tumult and snares and danger, in the observance of those precepts, which they laid down in solitude, safety, and tranquility, with a mind unbiased, and with liberty unobstructed… Nothing is more unjust, however common, than to charge with hypocrisy him that expresses zeal for those virtues which he neglects to practice; since he may be sincerely convinced of the advantages of conquering his passions, without having yet obtained the victory.”

Well put. Two lines summarize it best for me.

“It is not difficult to conceive that for many reasons a man writes much better than he lives.”

“Nothing is more unjust, however common, than to charge with hypocrisy him that expresses zeal for those virtues which he neglects to practice; since he may be sincerely convinced of the advantages of conquering his passions, without having yet obtained the victory.”

I want to live well what I write. However, I’m not there yet.

More importantly, I want to live well what is written in God’s Word. I’m certainly not there.

I’m thankful for the grace of God in Christ.

Join the Conversation

How do you deal with living imperfectly your own teaching, writing, or counseling?

Tags: Hypocrisy, John Zahl, Samuel Johnson, Soul Physicians, Spiritual Friends