The previous post in this series may be found here: https://memoirandremains.wordpress.com/2014/04/10/introduction-to-biblical-counseling-interpretation/

 

INSTRUCTION

As you gain and interpret information, you will need to instruct the counselee. In the end, counseling is the act of giving counsel.  Something has gone wrong in some manner. Counsel is given to help them change. Biblical Counseling seeks to bring someone to a change which conforms to Scripture:

What does this mean? Well, it means that at some point there is an understanding or acceptance of what God says in His Word that turns his [the counselee’s] wrong thinking and living to God’s right thinking and living. The breakthrough, then, is a breakthrough by the Spirit of God into the life of the counselee.[1]

I.          The Goal:  The Glory of God in Jesus Christ

The goal is to see and then reflect the glory of God in Jesus Christ.  First, the goal is to see this glory:

¹⁵ For this reason, because I have heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love toward all the saints, ¹⁶ I do not cease to give thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers, ¹⁷ that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him, ¹⁸ having the eyes of your hearts enlightened, that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, ¹⁹ and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe, according to the working of his great might ²⁰ that he worked in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, ²¹ far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the one to come. ²² And he put all things under his feet and gave him as head over all things to the church, ²³ which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all. Ephesians 1:15–23 (ESV)

¹⁷ Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. ¹⁸ And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.

4 Therefore, having this ministry by the mercy of God, we do not lose heart. ² But we have renounced disgraceful, underhanded ways. We refuse to practice cunning or to tamper with God’s word, but by the open statement of the truth we would commend ourselves to everyone’s conscience in the sight of God. ³ And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing. ⁴ In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. ⁵ For what we proclaim is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake. ⁶ For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. 2 Corinthians 3:17–4:6 (ESV)

The sight of this glory transforms the one who sees (2 Corinthians 3:18), which results in a light reflective of such glory:

⁹ And it is my prayer that your love may abound more and more, with knowledge and all discernment, ¹⁰ so that you may approve what is excellent, and so be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, ¹¹ filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God. Philippians 1:9–11 (ESV)

There is no circumstance in which seeing and reflecting the glory of God in Jesus Christ does not remedy the trouble. If one is sinning, the sin will stop. If one has been sinned against, the restoration will begin. If one is troubled, the heart will be at rest. If one abounds, there will be contentment without covetousness for more.

 

1. Scripture is the means of change: The Word of God is the primary means by which the Spirit transforms the life of human beings. The Word of God is the means by which God interacts with Creation.

 

1. God creates by means of the word: “By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible.”Hebrews 11:3 (ESV).

 

2. “He upholds the universe by the word of his power” (Hebrews 11:3).

 

3. The physical universe responds to God’s speech:

 

Psalm 147:15–18 (ESV)

15       He sends out his command to the earth;

his word runs swiftly.

16       He gives snow like wool;

he scatters frost like ashes.

17       He hurls down his crystals of ice like crumbs;

who can stand before his cold?

18       He sends out his word, and melts them;

he makes his wind blow and the waters flow.

 

 

 

4. The voice of God is powerful:

 

 

Psalm 29:3–4 (ESV)

3       The voice of the LORD is over the waters;

the God of glory thunders,

the LORD, over many waters.

4       The voice of the LORD is powerful;

the voice of the LORD is full of majesty.

 

5. God’s Word has the power of salvation: Acts 6:2, 7; 10:36, 11:1, 12:24, etc.

 

6. The Word of God will have an effect upon those who hear:

 

The power of the word brings wonderful blessings to those who hear it in faith with a disposition to obey. But it hardens those who hear it with indifference resistance, rebellion. In considering this biblical teaching, I often warn my seminary students to pay heed to what God is telling us here. For seminarians typically spend two or more years intensively studying Scripture. It is so important that they hear in faith, lest the Word actually harden their hearts and become a fire of judgment to them. God’s Word never leaves us the same. We hear it for better or worse. So we should never hear or read God’s Word merely as an academic exercise. We must ask God to open our heart, that the Word may be written on them as well as in our heads. (52).^[2]

 

7. God’s Word creates obligations:

 

1. John Frame explains that God’s Word “creates obligations in the hearer. God’s language is authoritative not only in telling us what to believe and do, but in directing our emotions, our preoccupations, our priorities, our joys and sorrows. That is to say, God’s words are authoritative in all the ways that language can be authoritative and their authority is ultimate. (Doctrine of the Word of God, 54).

 

1. Frame makes the further observation that since the entire universe exists in the context of God’s Word (both creating and upholding), “the world as a whole is meaningful, its meaning determined by God’s plan” (56). Therefore, “Everything that human beings do or say is a response to God’s Word or a consequence of their response” (56).

 

8. God’s Word is destabilizing: “Of course the Word of God not only stands against false teachers and their false teachings, it stands over against disobedience, faithlessness, pride, underdevelopment, legalism, selfishness, xenophobia, lethargy and other sins of the church and its members. Appropriately the Bible is “our adversary”; it always confronts with existential demands for reformation. As John Webster notes “Scripture is as much a de-stabilizing feature of the church as it is a factor in its cohesion and continuity. Gathered as the community of the Word, the Church draws life and sustenance from Scripture in its midst but it also receives conviction and rebuke from Scripture as it journeys on a pilgrim path that needs constant redirecting in order for the church to reach its ultimate destination.” ^[3]

 

9. Biblical counseling operates from and relies upon the authority of God in the Scripture, and upon that authority, alone:

 

The authority inherent in the New Testament prefacing phrase, “it is written,” should be apparent to every serious Bible student. This is the very note that is needed in counseling.¹

 

No other system of counseling has authority (even though Ellis and Skinner, et al. pretend to it) because no other system has an authoritative base. I cannot help but agree with most criticisms of the use of authority in counseling since they grow out of a recognition of the utter arrogance of any fallible man who attempts to speak authoritatively.

 

No counselee should entrust his life to the hands of another unaided fallible sinner. Unless the counselor has been converted, and is able to demonstrate that there is biblical authority for the directions he gives, a counselee ought to back off.

 

The Christian’s authority for biblical counseling comes not from himself; therefore, he has no necessary problem with arrogance (I say necessary, because there are plenty of ways for believers also to become arrogant). The fundamental criticism mentioned above simply does not apply. The authority by which he counsels is divine. The argument from arrogance, when applied to other counseling systems, however, is compelling; but it makes no impact at all on genuine Christian counseling. So, why should those who alone have good reason to counsel with authority hesitate to do so?^[4]

 

1. It is the Word of God which brings true change:

 

Psalm 119:9–11 (ESV)

9       How can a young man keep his way pure?

By guarding it according to your word.

10       With my whole heart I seek you;

let me not wander from your commandments!

11       I have stored up your word in my heart,

that I might not sin against you.

 

1. It is the Word of God which is our weapon:

 

2 Corinthians 10:3–6 (ESV)

3 For though we walk in the flesh, we are not waging war according to the flesh. 4 For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds. 5 We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ, 6 being ready to punish every disobedience, when your obedience is complete.

 

1. The Breakthrough. In the counseling we are looking for the point during the counseling where the counselee responds to the Word of God with fundamental change.

 

[I]t does mean that at this point in his life he has taken a step forward in such a way that he will now be able to overcome and replace some of those old ways with new ones….Of course he may have understood and may even have lived according to the new thoughts and ways in the past, but then he did revert. In that case, the counsel that he receives must focus not so much on new ways of thinking and new living but on those biblical truths that will enable him to repent of disobedience and become instead “rooted and grounded” in those truths (Ephesians 3:17).  This rooting and grounding takes place when the Holy Spirit “strengthens” him “with power in the inner person” (Ephesians 3:16) so that Christ dwells in his heart by faith (v. 17). In the parallel passage in Colossians, this dwelling is expressed as Christ’s Word dwelling in him richly as teaching and counseling takes place among believers (Colossians 3:16). Christ works within, through the Holy Spirit, Who strengthens him by the Word in those aspects of his life that previously were weak and had not been firmly rooted and grounded.[5]

 

 

1.        The Means: Application of the Scripture

Dr. Street explains that biblical counseling is expository counseling: It begins with a text of Scripture and unfolds that Scripture, making application to a particular situation. Thus, counseling and preaching/teaching are in some ways the same event but just directed to different groups. The best preaching will not merely unfold the text, but unfold it in such a way that opens the human heart and creates change – this is precisely what counseling must do. In this section, I will reference some texts on preaching because the goal is the same.

1. The counsel must be bound by the text. As Broadus (A Treatise on the Preparation and Delivery of  Sermons) notes, a sermon must be bound by the text:

 

“To interpret and apply his text in accordance with its real meaning, is one of the preacher’s most sacred duties. He stands before the people for the very purpose of teaching and exhorting them out of the Word of God. He announces a particular passage of God’s Word as his text with the distinctly implied understanding that from this, his sermon will be drawn—if not always its various thoughts, yet certainly its general subject. … But using a text, and undertaking to develop and apply its teachings, he is solemnly bound to represent the text as meaning precisely what it does mean. This would seem to be a truism. But it is often and grievously violated.” TPDS, 32

It seems strange that a preacher would not consider himself bound by the text, and yet as Broadus notes, “it is often and grievously violated.”

Now, his diversion may not be from malicious motives (it often is not). However, by substituting his own “good” idea for the text, the preacher places himself above the text and thus above God’s wisdom. He seeks to “improve” God’s exhortations. By so doing, the preacher lays a burden upon the congregation which God did not lay; or he exhorts the congregation to an appropriate goal by an inappropriate means (and thus calls them to work with providing God’s help).

“That is a distorted ministry which deals in any large proportion with subjects which are not logically presented in the Scriptures. It is not a biblical ministry” (TPDS, 34; quoting Phelps).

 

1. The counsel must unfold the meaning of the Scripture. William Shedd in his book Homiletics and Pastoral Theology explains that the one expositing the Scripture must draw out the meaning of the text: “it must breathe in, and breathe out from every pore and particle, the living afflatus of inspiration. By this breath of life it must live. If the utterances of the pulpit are to be fresh, spiritual, and commanding, the sacred orator must be an exegete. Every discourse must be but the elongation of a text.”

 

1. The power of the counsel resides in the text. Therefore, when giving instruction, the exposition of the text exists for the purpose of making the meaning of the text plain. This does not necessarily mean “simple”, because Scripture often contains some steps in thought. Scripture is not a children’s song. By “plain” we mean that your instruction should be so apparent, so clear and direct, that the point of the text cannot be avoided:

 

There is no characteristic more important to the preacher than this, and none which ought to be more earnestly coveted by him. Sermons should be plain. The thoughts which the religious teacher presents to the common mind should go straight to the understanding. Everything that covers up and envelopes the truth should be stripped off from it, so that the bare reality may be seen. There is prodigious power in this plainness of presentation. It is the power of actual contact. A plain writer, or speaker, makes the truth and the mind impinge upon each other. When the style is plain, the mind of the hearer experiences the sensation of being touched; and this sensation is always impressive, for a man starts when he is touched (William Greenough Thayer Shedd. “Homiletics and Pastoral Theology”).

 

1. Your counsel must have force. By this Shedd means that there is a power in the Scripture which the preacher (or the counselor) must proclaim in giving instruction. Here is the important part: For such force to be present, the Scripture must first affect the person who proclaims it.  The Scripture must go into your mind and heart and have its affect upon you. You then communicate that affect to others:

 

The preacher is a herald, and his function is proclamation. In this way, the ideas which he presents to his fellow-men augment, instead of diminishing his strength. He gives no faster than he receives. He simply suffers divine truth, which is never feeble and never fails to pass through his mind, as a medium of communication, to the minds of his fellow-men.

 

Second, all the power comes from the text. He begins this argument with a proposition concerning the functioning of the human mind: ““It was made to receive truth into itself, and not to originate it out of itself. The human mind is recipient in its nature, and not creative; it beholds truth, but it does not make it.”

 

Therefore, “The mind cannot think successfully, without an object of thought, and the heart cannot feel strongly and truly, without an object of feeling. There can be no manifestation of power therefore, and no force in the finite mind, except as it has been nourished, stimulated and strengthened by an object other than itself.”

 

When it comes to preaching, the objective truth which stands before the mind as truth is the Word of God, “We shall be able to answer this question, by considering the fact that the written revelation stands in the same relation to the sacred orator, that the world of nature does to the philosopher. The Bible is something objective to the human mind, and not a mass of subjective thinking which human reason has originated.”

 

And, “Human reason, therefore, is the subject, or the knowing agent, and the Scriptures are the object, or the thing to be known. All true power, consequently, in the sacred orator, springs from this body of objective verity”.

 

Third, to convey the objective reality of the Scripture, the preacher must be “mighty in the Scriptures”: This is far more than knowing everything about the Scripture. Rather, he must know the Scripture. He must be taken by the reality of the Scripture:

“Scripture should not lie in the preacher’s mind in the form of congregated atoms, but of living, salient energies. True Biblical knowledge is dynamic, and not atomic. There is no better word to denote its nature, than the word imbue. The mind, by long-continued contemplation of revelation, is steeped in Divine wisdom, and saturated with it.”

 

This should greatly encourage you. The act of counseling is first an act which transforms you as you wrestle with the Scripture. Then, you bring the Scripture to someone else who themselves is changed.

 

1. “Some practitioners of ‘biblical’ counseling wrongly attempt to expunge the human ingredient, as if ‘you’ interfered with the purity of the Word that needs to be presented to people. They try to reduce biblical counseling to Bible verses and formulas. How different from the Bible and all lively ministry! The attempts to expunge sinful human ingredient – messianic expectations, superiority, fear of man, sheer force of personality, manipulation, morbid curiosity, self-indulgent sharing and the like is admirable. But if you expunge the human ingredient itself you actually interfere with how the Living Word uses both his Word and his servants. Faith, hope, and love are contagious, just like grumbling, anxiety, and contempt are contagious. Biblical counseling is not formulaic. Paul begins Ephesians with joy in the Lord and fiercely intelligent concern for his hearers.

You, like him, enter into personal worlds where the weather report is often ‘storms of sleet and high seas.’ How will you not become discouraged, anxious, blasé, or self-confident? You must bring your own gladness and fierce love to the situation, confident in your Lord.”[6]

 

[1]Jay Edward Adams, Critical Stages of Biblical Counseling (Stanley, NC: Timeless Texts, 2004), 88.

[2] John Frame, The Doctrine of the Word of God, 52.

[3]Allison, Strangers and Pilgrims, 115.

^[4] Jay Edward Adams, A Theology of Christian Counseling: More Than Redemption (Grand Rapids, MI: Ministry Resource Library, 1986), 20.

[5]Adams, Critical Stages of Biblical Counseling, 89.

[6]David Powlison, Seeing with New Eyes: Counseling and the Human Condition through the Lens of Scripture (Phillipsburg, NJ: P & R Publishing, 2003), 39-40.