Need for Counseling

 Bill Hull: We all share sin and the need for forgiveness, redemption, reconciliation, and for victory and celebration. We build these festivals into our calendars because they boost us and change us. But they only have their full effect when we combine the special with the ordinary. Conferences and special events can inject our spiritual blood stream with eagerness and desire, but we better get back to home base fast, connect into our community, and get real. Otherwise, we fall into the enemy’s trap. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, “Your sin wants to be alone with you.” If you can be isolated with your sin, believing that you and God can handle it alone, you will easy prey. Event spirituality and process spirituality are a partnership. We need jolts of joy to spur us on, that is the event. But daily process, reading, studying, praying, memorizing, a life submerged in obedience in the ordinary grind is where it manifests itself with such power that you feel God’s presence.

Counseling that attempts to logically teach new truth without concern for the emotional threat involved in changing one’s approach to meeting personal needs will plow headlong into resistance.

Larry Crabb, Effective Biblical Counseling

Few things are as rewarding as speaking words of life into hurting, confused, and mistreated people. Richard Blackaby

My thoughts on the Bible and counseling. 

Knowing the Bible is essential to a person’s redemption and restoration. Learning the Bible’s wisdom is the highest priority in helping a hurting person, and the top priority for growth as a Christ follower. But the assumption that we do not the help of family members, a pastor, a mentor, trained professional counselors, or a medical professional is wrong. The factors that have tangled a person’s story often need unraveled with the help of a caring community accompanied by medication, medical treatment, or long term therapy. Each resource is useful for a healthy diagnosis and treatment and the ultimate goal is full physical, emotional and spiritual health. Each sphere has an influence on the other. The goal of presenting information about counseling issues needs to be compassionate with the goal of pointing each person to Christ, empowering each to seek help from trusted family, church, medical, or community resources.  Teaching and mentoring each individual to guard their heart is a high priority, guarding against future sin, condemnation from past sin, and the abuse or manipulation of dysfunctional systems that surround us. Teaching individuals to seek help from Scripture and from others must be done in humility, as we are all are in need of His kingdom in our hearts, with resources helping us achieve that goal.  

 

That assumption is aweful, not because the Spirit never does what the assumption supposes, but because it excused pastors and leaders from the responsibility to tangle with people's lives. Many remain safely hidden behind pulpits, hopelessly out of touch with the struggles of their congregations, proclaiming the Scriptures with a pompous accuracy that touches no one. Pulpits should provide bridges, not barriers, to life-changing relationships.

Larry Crabb, Inside Out: Real Change Is Possible 

Diane Langberg - Self-deception works in concert with temptation so we can convince ourselves of the rightness or goodness of actions that are in fact wrong.  We use deception to say that external circumstances justify reactions. A classic example is domestic violence. I hit her because she ____.