Well, good morning to you. I also would like us to pray and seek God before we join our hearts and minds in thinking through the issues at hand.

Counseling the Word and Counseling Christ

The title that I’ve given to our talk this morning, “Counsel the word, Counsel Christ” is intended in some ways to sound a little bit odd, but it shouldn’t sound odd, right? The things that sound familiar to us are, “Preach the word,” “Preach Christ,” and, “Preach grace.” And we would be ashamed if we did anything but that, wouldn’t we?

And yet it is interesting how odd it sounds to us to just simply change the, you might call it the setting in which words get expressed. So if you switch it from a public setting into a conversational setting, it sounds odd to say, “Counsel the word.” What does that mean? Do you just sit down with somebody and preach a sermon to them? It’s fine to say, “Preach Christ,” and, “Preach Christ crucified,” but what would it mean to converse Christ crucified? Does that mean that every third word out of your mouth is Jesus, when you talk with someone? Or it’s fine to preach grace, what would it mean to counsel grace? To actually take the grace of this Christ that this word reveals and work it and knead it and press it and make it sing and dance and live and talk and renew the lives of an individual that we talk to?

I don’t want these words to sound odd to us at the end of our days together here. I want us to be just as natural as breathing, as natural as we’d say, “I would never do anything but preach Christ or preach the word. I would never do anything but converse the word, counsel the word, counsel Christ. Of course this is what I do.”

Strange Responses to Counseling the Word

You’re going to find though that people respond to the notion in some very odd ways. I flagged four here. Some people, when you say something like, “Counsel the word,” or, “Counsel Christ,” they respond with perplexity. They’re quizzical. It’s like it doesn’t make sense, that’s not what the church does because the church doesn’t do real counseling beyond, “I’m praying for you and I care and here’s a verse that might help you and encourage you tomorrow.”

Anything more than asking a few more questions and hanging together a few more times and really meeting and caring and probing and figuring out what’s going on in this person’s life as though anything beyond that is not really what we do. To aim deeper, wider, broader, and more persistently going for the details perhaps of what you’re going through or how you organize your reality. It’s not really church business, it’s the mysterious province of some state license profession but not you.

Or a second kind of response, a little more intense than being quizzical is suspicion. It’s as though counseling the word or counseling Christ would mean that you would be insensitive, even censorious to troubled people. Someone might think, “What do you mean you? Do you just preach to struggling people? Do you beat them over the head with Bible verses? Do you exhort them to change? Is that all you do?” It’s interesting because when John Piper preached here on Sunday morning, no one would say that he preached at us and beat us over the head with Bible verses. Somehow preaching when it’s in this setting can be full of life. It feeds our joy, it nourishes our life. It makes sense of the world, it gives us hope, and it encourages us.

Somehow the same word applied to counseling elicits the response, “What do you do? Just preach at people? Do you just shove the Bible down their throats?” In the context of a counseling, a conversational setting, it takes all these negative moralistic kinds of connotations.

A third kind of reaction is that the word is fine for relatively normal people. You could counsel the word and counsel Christ for relatively normal people who can have a quiet time, who can follow a passage, who can memorize something, who can read, who can get out of bed in the morning, go to church, and hold a job. But highly troubled people or highly troublesome people or people who can’t read or people whose minds kind of fly all over the place somehow you couldn’t really help them with God’s truth. Big sufferers and big sinners need something different, something better, something deeper and wider. And again, it’s an odd kind of reaction.

The fourth group actually gets outright offended at the notion that you would counsel Christ, you would unashamedly, boldly and persistently and wisely and in a life-changing manner, you administer words of life to individuals. They get offended at that as though somehow it’s like a housewife or a pastor saying he would offer to do open heart surgery, to put it kind of close to home. It’s inappropriate that we would do this. There are funny sorts of reactions and I don’t want them to seem funny. I want them to seem as the most normal thing in the world that in this area of care of the soul and cure of the soul we would see our calling to do that aspect of ministry with as much fervor and intelligence and hard work and care and theological development and practical skill as any other aspect of ministry that we would engage in.

Speak Much About Apostolic Truth

Now I’d like us to jump in this morning and get off and rolling by thinking about a particular passage from the end of Titus 2. Titus is a letter written to a man involved in ministry. Paul’s writing Titus. So that’s naturally of great implication and application for others down the centuries who are involved in ministry of different sorts, particularly ministries that bear the authority of Christ in his church. And I’d like us to start by camping out for a minute on Titus 2:15, where Paul says:

Declare these things; exhort and rebuke with all authority. Let no one disregard you.

Before we get to other things, I want you to look at the way that Paul piles up words there. These things, speak, talk about, discuss. It’s any verbal behavior. This is what’s on your mind and what comes out of your mouth. These things talk about in the foyer, these things you have a conversation about, these things discuss, these things teach to people. You preach sometimes and it’s more formal. Teach, preach, converse, speak about these things. So he gives you the general word. Then he moves to a word that’s a little bit more positively valenced. These things exhort or encourage. Console people and sustain people with these things. Comfort people with these things. Remind them and urge them and help them to understand. Nourish people with these things that we’ll be looking at in a minute.

So talk about it and nourish people with it and are proved with these things. Also, reprove with these things. Admonish and challenge. When you’ve got to confront, when you’ve got to show something is wrong here and needs fixing, use these things. Warn and reprove with all authority. Don’t let anyone slip away from it and dodge and miss these things. There’s not too many more ways he can say it, can he brothers? These things that are actually put as the focus of the entire range of verbal behavior and ministry has a lot of verbal behavior in it. A lot of conversation takes place, a lot of interaction, and a lot of teaching and such, these things.

Now what are these things? We could pick up at any point from through the entire letter. It is obviously going to be right from Titus 1:1. It’s Paul’s understanding of his own message. He’s a speaker too, he’s in the talking business and his talking is for the faith of God’s chosen people and the knowledge of the truth that is in accord with godliness. In other words, right from the get-go, there’s these things that have something to do with getting people to live in a world that has God at its center, that has the renewal and sparkle of their faith at its center, the knowledge that is according to godliness.

I don’t think by godliness here he means the way we sometimes think of that as just simply sort of an abstract moral uprightness. We kind of tend to take godliness and simply look at the horizontal components. It’s not less than that, but I’d submit that godliness fundamentally is God-liness. It’s fundamentally the vertical dimension. It’s about worship, it’s about what you believe, and it’s about who you love. It’s about what fills your mind. It’s about what controls your gaze. And there is a truth that accords with being awake to a God-centered universe that we would see people and what we would see are creatures of this God. We would see subjects of this king. We would see men and women and children accountable to this judge. We would see the sheep of this Savior and we would see a snowstorm or an ice storm or a sunset or a tree and we would see a creation, wouldn’t we? It’s something made by the maker of heaven and earth who is also our help.

The maker of heaven earth that helps these people who are in front of us, who are creatures and redeemed sons, daughters of this most high. We would treat people in accord with how we see them, with who they are made to be. And so that any particular thing I look at, whether it is a dollar bill or a TV show or a person or a sunset, I actually see that thing in relation to the one who made it, sustained it, judges it, and saves it. That’s godliness. And there is a teaching and there’s a truth that accords with that. Paul is pretty concerned that that be the centerpiece of our speech, isn’t it? Our speech in whatever setting it comes out.

Why Grace?

Then pick it up just a little bit closer to home. Titus 1:1 certainly sets the trajectory of the entire letter. But pick it up just from Titus 2:11–14:

For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age, waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works.

Let me just have us ponder a couple of questions here. Why grace? Why did the grace of God come? What’s it about? There’s obviously many answers to that. It’s a multifaceted answer, but here he picks out one thing: why grace? What we could say is that grace came with a change agenda. That’s part of why I focused here on this passage because preaching is a change agenda and counseling is a change agenda.

In fact every conversation we have, according to Titus 2:15, has this change agenda. Why grace? Grace has a change agenda. What is it about that it’s changed? Well this grace has come, the grace of God has appeared bringing salvation to all men. Just a sidebar here. This is not universalism spoken here. As you look through the passage, he’s talking about both Gentiles and Jews, right? This is Crete, it’s a gentile territory. It’s the nations, the people that didn’t used to be part of salvation. And he’s been speaking to older men and young and younger men and to older women and younger women and to slaves. And if there had been any saved masters in Crete, they would’ve gotten addressed too. It’s interesting the way Scripture just leaves that out. There were no saved masters. He didn’t talk about it here, but every kind of person there is this salvation that has come.

The Grace That Teaches

Grace has come to do this, but this grace that saves us from death and sin comes with a teaching agenda and that’s what Titus 2:12 goes on to say. Grace came instructing, teaching, discipling, and nurturing us in a certain direction to say no to ungodliness and worldly desires. So to say no to one thing and to say yes to something else; that we might live with a wise mind, that we might live righteously, that we might live godly. And I would submit to you that the fundamental focus of Titus 2:12 is change at the level of what we might call the heart. It’s change fundamentally in regard to the vertical dimension of our lives. The contrast that is drawn here is from two motivational terms — ungodliness and worldly passions of this present age. Those are both fundamentally motivational concepts.

They have to do with vertical dimension. It’s what rules you. And that godlessness, that ungodliness, is that fundamental outlet that would look at a person and not see image of God, sustained creature, one who will be judged, but would instead see something like someone to use or someone to take sexual advantage of or someone to get money from or someone to impress or someone to be afraid of. It’s your gaze that controls the whole way you look at the world, and we’re taught to say no to that. It’s a renewal of mind. It’s a renewal of the fundamental interior, vertical dimension of human life. And it’s to say no to worldly desires, to those lusts of the flesh, to the things that hijack the plane of the human heart because the human heart is meant to be attuned to the desires of the Holy Spirit, to the desires for the glory of God, to desires that love and redemptive truth would triumph and yet just look around.

It’s not hard to see what we live for, what we tend to live for is all that other stuff I mentioned: “Will you like me? Can I control you? I want to feel good. I want Nikes. Give me more money.” It’s those things that just everybody everywhere, that’s just what people want. In fact, it’s related to the wonderful question that came at the end of our time last night. The things that typically get called “needs” in our culture are, you’re usually on pretty good ground if we retranslate them as “desires” and if they’re getting someone in trouble as “lust.” They’re typically the things that people lust for. They’re the worldly desires: “I want you to love me, fill my love cup. I want to be significant. I want to be a success. I want to accomplish something. I want to think well of myself. I want better health. I want more money. I want a safe neighborhood. I want life to be easy and comfortable.”

Needs or Lusts?

One of the interesting things about the way those need theologies tend to work is that they’re only plausible with a certain slice of humanity that is wired to that particular need, that particular lust. It’s one of the things that has always struck me as I’ve read Meier and Crabb and so forth. They camp out as though the core of the human heart is the desire to be loved. It’s this need for love. I can admit those books have never rung my bell, because my core lusts aren’t in that area. My core lusts are in the area of wanting an easy life. I don’t care so much about whether you love me, just don’t hassle me. So I don’t walk around with this love cup saying, “Love me, love me, love me.” It’s more like, “Just don’t bother me. I want peace and quiet.”

Now does that mean that I’ve got a peace and quiet cup that’s empty and I need to look to God to fill my peace and quiet cup, and you realize no, that’s not so. It’s why the American pop psychologies, Christianized or not, are so implausible in other cultural contexts. Saddam Hussein does not have an empty love cup does he? He has an empty power cup. He wants power. That’s another very typical human desire. That’s a worldly desire. Some people want power, some people want love, and some people want to accomplish something. I never wanted to accomplish anything. I’m a child of the sixties. I was a hippie. I got burned out on achievement by 1969 and I wasn’t standing in line when God handed out the ambition genes, but I was standing in line for the other side of the hippie life, which is, “Let me just get high feel good” and all that kind of stuff. It’s the worldly desires that the human heart is tempted to misread as masters and needs and drives and instincts and longings and things that cannot be changed.

They’re hardwired into our system. In fact, every one of the major psychologies — whether it’s humanistic psychology, whether it’s hierarchy of needs, whether it’s behavioral psychology, whether it’s primary and secondary drives, whether it’s psychodynamic psychology, whether it’s conflicting instincts — all view the fundamental desire structure of the human heart as a hardwired given and that all subsequent counseling and interpretation change is a matter of working with the givens trying to either meet the need or bring insight into the instincts or re-pattern the drives. And what this says in Titus, from the mind of God, the redeemer, is that in fact the Holy Spirit intends to rewire what we want, which is wonderful stuff.

Is it true that the desires of the human heart cannot be changed? That is false. In fact, at the very center of our message is that it is the desires of the human heart that can be changed. So you look at a passage like 1 Kings 3, where Solomon is asked what he wants from God. First Kings 3 is about the closest the Bible comes to genie in a genie lamp kind of thing. God comes to Solomon and says, “What do you want?” Carte blanche.

It’s like a 30 minute shopping spree at Walmart or something. You can get whatever you want from me. Solomon says, “I want wisdom.” And God says, “Isn’t this remarkable? This man wants wisdom. He doesn’t want death to his enemies and riches and a long life, which is what kings want. His desires have been changed. The typical desire pattern or mosaic of a ruler is not operating in Solomon’s life. So I’m going to give him wisdom, and I’ll give him these other blessings on the side.” Isn’t that always true that our idolatries, our “felt needs,” are typically blessings of God that we exalt. It’s like the old saying: We exalt the gift over the giver. It’s not as though it’s bad to be loved by someone, right? It’s not bad to have good health, it’s not bad to have a pile of money. It’s not bad to have power or education or lots of things, but it is really bad to have it on the top of the heap.

If you love the gift and not the giver, you’re an idolator. And if you love the giver, then you receive the gift with gratitude. And if you don’t receive the gift, life can be hard, but heaven will receive not only the giver, but all the gifts and the streets are paved with gold. We’ll all be rich and we’ll have resurrection bodies so we’ll all have good health and everybody that hates us will be destroyed, so everyone will love you. And you will sit on thrones so you’ll have power over the universe and you’ll get all the gifts on the last day, but til the last day it’s, maybe, maybe not. There is this huge battle for the human heart of this change agenda of the Holy Spirit. Will you learn to say no to the worldly desires that exalt the gifts, worshiping and serving the created thing and the blessings of the giver and the creator rather than the creator.

Saying Yes to Righteousness

That’s this change agenda. There’s on the one side, change is a “from this and to that” process. Biblical change, at every point, is from something and to something. And when you look at the renewal of the heart, the renewal of the vertical dimension relationship, it is a renewal fundamentally of the things that had been mentioned way back in the op Paul’s opening shot. He is a servant for the faith of God’s chosen people. It’s so that what would rule our hearts is God and none of the idols that we tend to erect to change agenda. So it’s saying no to ungodliness and worldly desires and it’s saying yes to a wise-minded life, a righteous life, and a godly life in the present age. It is a life that is God-centered in every respect in the present age and then you get this thrust to the future. This is just a crucial part of biblical counseling that no other counseling model can touch because no other counseling model can have any possible gaze to the future.

That’s why typically all they do is look to the past, only they even look to the past in a much too shallow way. They only look to your personal past. They don’t look through your personal past to the past that includes the life, death, and resurrection of Christ — the real past that is meant to then write and overwrite and reedit the script of your past. But we not only talk about the past, we have a future and there’s this hope of happiness, this joyous hope of the return of this Christ — the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Christ Jesus. So the Christian life, as you think about counseling, as you think about what it is that gives us an absolutely unique thing to offer to people in suffering, it’s that we have a future hope. We are the only people on the planet that can work with people in profound suffering and give them a future hope.

Looking to a Future Hope

I remember one time I met with someone. It was one of those times in ministry where I thought, “Who’s counseling who?” There was a lady who was a young widow, her husband had been killed in a car accident. She was late twenties, left with three young kids and then she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, one of the worst. This was back 15 years ago when the thing had a 90 percent death rate or something like that. She was a 28 year-old woman, her husband was killed in the last two years, she had three children under six, and she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. She’s naturally in a great deal of distress. She needs pastoral care and attention and counsel and encouragement and she needs these things that we would speak and encourage and at times even be admonished.

But it was one of those situations where again, as I said, “Who’s counseling who?” Because this woman, as much as she had her heartaches and things, had something that I had never witnessed with such clarity before in any person’s life. She had a future hope and that future hope let her do things that seem almost incomprehensible. They were exactly the right thing to do. From the get-go she was very open with her children in a non-alarmist way, but she was very candid in a way appropriate to them being three, five, and six. She said, “Mommy is facing this and it’s very hard and it’s very dangerous and hazardous and mommy might die.” She was open to her kids. Why could she be open when most people would tend to shuffle their feet, or hide it, or be in despair? It’s because she had a future hope.

She was looking to something ahead of her that put in perspective, present tense suffering. There were times I would break into tears just hearing her talk about it. From the get-go, she started to think, who will take care of my children? It’s the right thing to do, isn’t it? She might die and her children need care. She was able to start to bring a young couple and just weave them into her family’s life over the months that followed. It was a remarkable picture of a person living in the light of the blessed hope of the return of a Savior. This is a lady living as seeing not just death and the void, but seeing through it to Christ himself and having life and then being able to do these very appropriate things.

I remember the metaphor last night, the huge hurricane and the very small eye of the hurricane. These are not things that solve the problem are they? To talk honestly with your kids and to get another couple involved in your life, but they are exactly the right thing to do out of love for her kids that grows out of a faith in this Christ. And she did it. She was one of these “from–to” people. She was one of these people who had been taken from ungodliness and worldly desires and to a living faith in this Christ that has a present dimension, but it looks forward to something that is essential.

To Redeem a People

Then it goes on to this Savior Jesus Christ. And we asked the question a few minutes ago: why grace? Grace has a change agenda primarily focused on the vertical dimension. And then we ask the question, why did Christ give himself? Why did Jesus Christ die? Why the cross? Why the incarnation? And again, it’s one of those things that has many answers.

It has a hundred answers, depending how you come at it, but Paul is focusing on one particular aspect of it as he’s riveting our ministry towards those things that most matter.

[He] gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works.

It’s that same answer, isn’t it? Grace has a change agenda. Why did Christ give himself? It’s a change agenda. It is the change agenda of a progressive sanctification. In this case (Titus 2:14), he is not speaking of the vertical dimension, but the horizontal fundamentally to redeem us from lawless deeds, from all the crud of how we act when we are ruled by ungodliness and worldly desires and to create a people of his own possession who are zealous for good deeds.

This is one of these places where in unpacking with people, I always make sure people understand this. The phrase “good deeds” are some of those words that have the juice sucked out of them. It’s like the quotation that Dave read. I think when people hear the word good deeds, they usually think of some religious realm, some sort of combination of Mother Teresa and a boy scout that helps little old ladies across the street and is really sacrificial and prays a lot. I would suggest that you might almost paraphrase that word, that phrase good deeds this way: a beautiful life. It is a life worth living. This woman that I mentioned who talked candidly with her kids, who involved and folded another young couple into their family in the context of a grave threat against her very life, she was living a beautiful life.

She was zealous for good deeds and I think sometimes that phrase “good deeds” gets a kind of moralistic coloration to it and we fail to see that what God actually has in mind is a life that is nothing less than beautiful. It is what life is meant to be. It is the tongue that just drips wisdom. It is a tongue of jewels. It is a life whose behavior is lovely. It’s worth emulating. You want to be like that. Getting to know that lady, I can remember times thinking, “This lady is about the closest thing I’ve seen in flesh and blood to ‘for the joy set before him, he endured the cross despising its shame and is seated at the right hand of God.’” There were times I felt in a way I was witnessing a mini Christ, on a much smaller scale and with all the sin and struggle and heartache that went along with it in an incomplete life, but a significant strand. For the joy set before her she was enduring her sufferings at that particular point. She was bearing the fruit of a beautiful life that grows from it.

Why did Christ give himself? He gave himself to change us, right? It’s the change agenda that God has. And it is these things, it is this change agenda of the living God himself, of Jesus Christ, of the Father of the Holy Spirit of the word of God, that is the very center of all ministry.

Revived in Worship

Now why am I starting here? I’m starting here for this reason. Before we get to the question that gets called counseling — or preaching, teaching, discipleship, friendship, one-anothering, small group life, child-rearing, modeling, worship — we want to know, what is the purpose? Because the purpose of all of those is the same. It is this change agenda of grace. It is this change agenda of the Holy Spirit. In fact, we could even say corporate worship has the exact same agenda, doesn’t it? We have all experienced this. The people in your church hopefully have experienced it too. You walk into church and you are dead as a doornail spiritually. You are thinking about the argument with your wife, or you’re thinking about the fact that you’re sleepy, or you’re thinking about the fact that, “Oh no, I wore a green sock and a blue sock.” Or you’re thinking about the fact that you ate three eggs and it’s sort of out of your diet and you feel sort of guilty and greasy. Or you’re thinking about the fact that the Vikings are playing the Giants this afternoon and they’re probably going to win.

There’s all kinds of things on your mind and you come into worship and a good worship leader knows that he’s standing in front of a congregation of sleepy idolaters who need to be awakened, who need to be caught from a functional atheism and a functional living for worldly desires. There are a whole bunch of teenage girls out there who are wondering if the guys like them and they’re worried about what their clothes are, and there’s a whole bunch of men out there that are disgruntled with their wife and so forth. A good worship leader knows that and he takes people. He’s speaking, exhorting, reproving, and drawing people. By the time you get to Amazing Grace, your heart warms up a little bit and you forget the Vikings and you realize, “Well, even if the Giants win, life’s going to go on.” There’s the change agenda and that’s primary.

Then out of that we can start to think through the various tasks of pastoral theology, of practical theology. How do we lead worship in such a way that it enhances that agenda of grace, that agenda that Jesus gave himself for. And we can start to think through our practical theology of preaching and how will our preaching actually further those purposes. So these people that we are ministering to are different or we are at least doing everything within our power and persuasion and utter reliance on the Holy Spirit who alone changes people, the grace of God, that alone can get in there and renew hearts, but we’re doing everything in our power to preach and pray and work and worship towards that end. We are also able to think through our practical theology of counseling, of personal ministry, of face-to-face conversation and think through how this will be aligned with the change agenda of Jesus Christ that has in mind this vertical renovation and this horizontal renovation and that those are always in view.

There’s a vertical renovation and there’s a horizontal renovation. There’s a from–to about what you functionally worship and there’s a from–to about whether your life is beautiful or sordid. And that issue is absolutely critical to then starting to be able to think clearly about the nature of ministry and what we’re about as we get going. In particular, I’m focusing here on this question that we’re calling counseling.

The Goal Is Change

Now, the goal is change and one of the things that then faces each of us is that there is a lot of hard work between saying what we’ve just said and actually being able to do it, isn’t there? All I’ve done is set a vision and it’s a vision that sets you in a direction, but that direction is a direction of what we could call “practical theological labor.” Because one of the things in which the church is most harmed, our ministries are the most weakened, and we’re the least effectual is that we tend to understand and use these wonderful truths in ways that don’t carry the freight.

We know them, but they don’t carry the freight. There’s a quotation from a man named Addison Leitch used to teach at Gordon-Conwell Seminary. These are very wise words from a wise, seasoned man of God. He said this:

On the near side of complexity is simplistic, on the far side of complexity is simple.

Those are very wise words. I was talking about those lifeboats, “Get your doctrinal ducks straight, be a good boy or girl, get busy in Christian service, give it to Jesus, cast out the demon, and get involved in corporate church activities.” What makes those lifeboats not essential to the ocean liner or the human condition is that they have become simplistic forms, they are pat answers. They have not wrestled with the complexities, they have not worked through the complexities of the human condition to actually then touch base with real people.

Pat Answers and Quick Fixes

So the product of the ministry, the product of the doctrine, the product of the worship, the product of the faith, the prayer, the good morals and so forth, is an actual changed life. We’ve all done this. We’re throwing stones at ourselves here. Biblical truth gets understood and used simplistically, doesn’t it? So in the context of people’s serious life problems, we throw a verse and a prayer at a problem for example, don’t we? Now the verse and the prayer may be the truth. In fact, it may be the same truth, that used simplistically, just rattles around and is ineffectual, but if that same truth has been worked through the complexity of this person’s condition, it would’ve been simple and would’ve set their life aflame. But it misfired because it was misused. It didn’t come with a comprehension of the complexity which that truth is meant to address.

So we throw at people pat answers and quick fixes, which is our reputation. I would assume that our reputation as Christians, as the church, is in some way earned. It is no accident that the ones who are sophisticated in thinking about counseling ministry aren’t us. We are known for pat answers and quick fixes. Now maybe it’s false, and I hope it’s more and more false as our lives individually and corporately go forward. But the shoe fits at times. We can get caught up in slogans and catchphrases, a little formulaic thing that says, “Rehearse your identity in Christ,” or, “Remember justification,” or, “Remind yourself that you’re a child,” or you take something like Proverbs 3:5–6:

Trust in the Lord with all your heart,
     and do not lean on your own understanding.
In all your ways acknowledge him,
     and he will make straight your paths.

Sometimes you’ll hear it in people’s language, even the way the word just is used: “Just trust the Lord.” But trust the Lord is not just is it? If it’s “just trust the Lord,” it’s simplistic, it’s pat, it’s formulaic. Because “trust the Lord,” when you actually look at the complexity of a person’s life, is not simplistic. Let’s remember where we just came from in Titus 2. It is “trust the Lord” instead of trusting this host of other things that we tend to trust. We talked about Sarah last night and Sarah did have to trust the Lord. That was the simple answer, but it was a trust in God as opposed to trusting in her ability to know what really happened, as opposed to trusting in her wanting her two friends to like me, as opposed to trusting in wanting peace and quiet and everybody to get along, as opposed to trusting in lots of things.

That renewalm that from-to process, had to engage the complexities of her life, both of what was going on in your heart, the intricacies and hardships and perplexities and difficulties and pain of her world, the way she tended to put her world together in her own thinking and believing. In that, “trust the Lord” becomes the simple answer because it’s been set up rightly. It hasn’t been used as a pat answer in quick fix. When biblical truth is understood and used simplistically, it seems to stumble before the intricacies of people’s lives, before the repeated problems, before the slavery that people are in.

Profound Truth Worked Into Deep Suffering

I think for example, of the many people I have known — because I get them in pastoral ministry — come to me gun shy about, for example, Romans 8:28. It has become a curse to them. God works all things for the good of those who love them.

They think, “What do you mean this is good? My husband walked out on me, ran off with the secretary, and left me his trash. He’s got a bunch of money, I have to struggle. He spoils the kids on the weekends. I have to pick up the pieces. He never disciplines them. I’ve got to deal with the fact that they’re selfish brats. How can you say to me Romans 8:28? Just read Romans 8:28. It says, ‘God works all things for good.’ You call this good?” See, for that person, Romans 8:28 has seemed to stumble at the feet of the perplexity of her life situation. But the fact is that Romans 8:28 is exactly what she needs. It is the simple truth that will set her free, but some of that simple truth has got to be kneaded through, threaded through, and worked through. How does she see God?

What is she facing? Does she know you’re a sympathetic ear? Does she have a sense of the patience of God? Romans 8:28 is followed by Romans 8:29 and going on, which is the sanctifying and glorifying agenda of Christ. Does she have a sense of how God works for good and what good is working? There may be a hundred pieces that she either doesn’t know or has twisted or she’s confused about. She’s looking at the wrong Christ. That same truth worked through, understood, and applied through the complexities is simple. It is true that God works all things for the good of those who love him. He does so Christ might be the firstborn in many brethren, that they might be conformed to his image, who learn obedience through what they suffer, who actually become glorified through a process of affliction. We would never say to her it’s a good thing what your husband did, and she would never say that.

What you will find is that people who actually work those biblical truths through the complexities, they end up saying things like this: “I would’ve never chosen that to happen to me, and I would never wish to go through it again. But it was through that season that I learned to put my hope in God. I learned to know Christ through what happened in that.” I mean I could say the same thing in a very immediate sense with the heart surgery I came out of. I would never want to go through that again. I can remember waking up out of the anesthesia and being an absolute abyss of pain and weakness and vulnerability and hazard. And yet, particularly those two weeks right after it happened, I have probably never had a time in my life where my faith was more simple.

God is a very present help in trouble. I thought, “Lord, this is trouble, help.” And he helps. I mean this is not Bavinck and Berkouwer and Charles Hodge. This is not complex theology. It is a raw need pointed to a very loving savior through the complexity of being in life-threatening hazard. And he is there and he’s with us and he helps us and he meets us and he aids us. It’s the same truth workded through the complexities.

The Biblical Model of Change

The biblical model of change is actually exceedingly simple. It’s not any number of ways you could break it down. I’ll break it down into four fundamental things that are always true. People are always located in a situation, a real world. It’s a real world that happens to exist within the sovereignty of God. It exists within his design. We are the only people who say that every theory of counseling says something about the world we live in. We alone say that the real world we live in is significant and it exists within a context of sovereign purposes.

We also say that the situation is not determinative of your response. That’s another way we tend to differ from most of the counseling alternatives in the world around us, except for say, moralistic psychotherapy like Dr. Laura, or existential psychotherapies and that kind of thing. Just about all the rest put some kind of causal weight on the situation. The situation makes you the way you are and we as Christians say, “No, the situation is highly significant. I cannot understand a person without understanding their world.” You might find this very edifying at some point. Look at how much attention is paid to the circumstances that people face in the Bible. Consider the Psalms, the letters of Paul, and the life of Jesus. The circumstances are described because it is in those circumstances that the battle for your heart gets revealed. The circumstances are significant. But then the situation is never determinative.

To pick the simplest example of all, there were three men tortured to death on three crosses. They had the exact same experience of pain and you had three different responses. One of the men in undergoing that torture was full of hate and blasphemy and accusation and bitterness and self-righteousness and hostility. And one of the men in that situation started out that way and then changed and repented and is in paradise. The third man was always holy and persevered in affliction, per Psalm 31 and Psalm 22 and a hundred other Psalms of affliction and refuge. You had three types of responses in the same situation. We would never dare say the situation was irrelevant. Jesus Christ learned obedience through what he suffered. When he is at a feast, he’s not weeping and sweating so violently that his sweat is like drops of blood because his situation is part of what he’s facing.

But in that situation he’s saying, “Father, not my will, but thine be done.” He’s fighting the battle for the heart at that point: “Who will rule me? Everything in me does not want to face torture and rejection and humiliation, but my Father does and I will go through it.” He submits the desire for blessings to the will of his Father for the joy set before him. Those are part of the biblical thing, the biblical worldview. It’s working through the complexities to bring about an application.

How to Fuse Truth Into Suffering

I don’t mean to be simplistic by this, there are a hundred different highly nuanced things that we could say about how one works it through. How do you take the same truth and forge it through the complexity to come out with the simplicity? There’s a hundred things we could say. I’m just going to say two.

One of them is this. It seems to me that an honesty about your own experience, you yourself walking through this change agenda of Christ, is the sine qua non of wisdom for counsel and ministry. You have to know it firsthand and if you yourself understand the battle with ungodliness and worldly desires and the power of grace of God to bring about godliness, if you yourself have some experiential, existential, practical knowledge of it, then you can help others. I used to have a temper and I am still tempted to let that word fly, but I have learned by the power of God to put aside lawless deeds and to start to aim for a beautiful life and to start to clarify what I mean and watch my tone of voice and listen to people. Thank you Lord. Hammering through that in the furnace of your own soul will make you patient and bold with others.

The net result of doing it in your own life is that you will not be simplistic. You will not ever say, “Just trust the Lord,” or, “Just read this Bible verse.” You’ll never say that because you will know that change is much harder won. You’ll have sympathy with people and you will also have something I alluded to a minute ago. There’s something about the end result, the beautiful life that godliness produces that is inexplicable. How do you put together an utter patience and tenderness that never loses hope, that is always gentle with people, that deals kindly with the ignorant and the wayward. In other words, it’s patient with the people that don’t get it and are doing the wrong thing. It deals gently at the same time with a boldness, even a fierceness and a directness that is like a bulldog hanging onto what is true and right and good and clear about what is wrong and evil and ugly in people’s lives.

How do you put those two together? By the natural way that our personalities run, some of us see problems that we’re harsh and critical and want to fix it. And some of us are nice and soft and accepting and it’s humanly impossible to put the two together. But you walk out this change agenda in your life and you will put together that combination of fierceness and gentleness that is the aroma of Christ. That’s one comment.

Save the Truth for the Right Moment

The second comment is this. Again, I don’t mean this to be in any way simplistic or some kind of gimmick. I think there are many times where when we’re in a ministry conversation, if we had in our mind the thought, “I think that verse applies here, that truth,” and if we saved it five minutes, we would often have a much more effective ministry. I’m not meaning that as some sort of trick, but in those five minutes what you’re doing is a number of things.

Some of it is just the willingness to wrestle in your own heart. We pray, “Lord, do I understand this person rightly? Is this the truth that this person needs? What would speak to this person? What does apply, Lord? What would you say? Lord, I don’t know what to do, help me and give me wisdom.” It’s a little bit of a cutting down of our almighty opinion of our own fix-it and such. It’s some of that sense of the abandonment and need of any true ministry where you realize, “I don’t know what’s going on in this person’s heart. I cannot throw the switches that change them. Lord, help me.” Or it could be, “Lord, I know that people tend to hear biblical truth and they go, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah.’ How can I say it so that they will hear? How can I say it so that they will hear?”

That may mean lots of different things, the wisdom God would give you from out of that prayer. It may just mean that there’s a pause in there. It may mean that there’s counseling with tears. There’s a tale with tears in Acts 20. It may be that there’s a story you would tell. It may be that you set it up by saying, “I understand what you are facing and it is hard and I’ve been there and here’s what I think.” Maybe you realize I need to open this with a question. It could be lots of things.

Asking Good Questions

Sometimes it may be in those five minutes you ask more questions. Like in preaching, I come to this morning and I figure out what I’m going to say. Hopefully by the grace of God and the prayers of the saints and the work of the Holy Spirit, I say something half useful. But in conversation, you have this huge advantage in that you can ask a person things like, “What do you think would solve this?” You can save yourself a lot of headaches. Maybe the person is right and you save yourself some wasted breath and you let them say it, and then you say, “I think you’re right. It’s hard to do that, isn’t it? How can we help you?” See, that’s a conversation very different from dispensing the Bible verse. They already knew the Bible verse. They already knew the truth.

Ask a question like that, “What do you think would solve it?” Sometimes they give you the right answer and sometimes they give you the wrong answer, and their wrong answer is extremely illuminating. Because you find out by their wrong answer, what is the functional savior in their reality? That is hugely useful, because the real Savior is in a warfare with that functional savior and by simply asking a person the question, “What do you think would solve it?” you’ve actually brought on the table the enemy of Christ in that person’s soul that will now have a huge impact on your warfare because the complexity of this person coming to faith in the real Christ is that Christ must destroy the hold of the false saviors and the false hopes that this person looks to.

Or maybe it’s a question like this: “Is there more going on?” I have often found talking with somebody that they lay out a story and rhere’s things on their mind. I’ve got ideas about what they’ve said. I’ve got ideas on marital communication or this or that. But a lot of times people are testing you. They don’t give you the whole story right up front. I’ve often found I need to ask, “Is there anything more going on?”

They say, “Well, I’m seeing prostitutes.” You say, “Oh, is that so? Well, I had my little sermonette on marital communication, but there’s something else going on here, isn’t there?” Or maybe they say, “I sometimes wonder if God could really love me because I had an abortion when I was in college. I’ve just labored for 25 years and tried to get rid of these feelings.” This lady might be the lady who’s the star of your prayer group and the star of your deaconesses, and she’s full of a lack of understanding that God loves her. Just ask, “Anything more going on?” It just slows you down and gets into the details, which is what pastoral counseling thrives on because pastoral counseling needs precision. I mean it’s the old shotgun and rifle metaphor, isn’t it? Here I talk to people I don’t know and I would be in sin if I did know something and then said, “By the way, brother Joe over there, he’s got a real problem with such and such.” That would be wrong.

So you aim wide, but you have the privilege in conversation to aim very narrow because you want to know, who is this person? It’s wonderful. Or you can ask, “what burdens are you bearing?” This one I’ve often found to be just a tremendous assist for ministry: “Have you seen any encouraging things?” People come in and they’re usually whining and complaining and bitter and angry and hostile and frustrated and depressed, and they say, “God’s not there and nobody loves me and my life’s a wreck.” A lot of times God has already been doing some pretty neat things in their life. A question like that can bring it out: “Have you seen any encouraging things?” They might say, “Well, last night I felt like biting my husband’s head off and I didn’t, and I tend to think of him as such a jerk, but he actually offered and said, ‘We ought to go out because we haven’t been spending enough time together lately.’” Oh, that’s encouraging.

Instruments in the Savior’s Hands

So here, ministry is one of those delights of doing ministry, again, we as Christians alone have this. We are ministering in the context of somebody else who’s at work. I mean, just think about that. You are not the change agent. You are not the person who has to make it all come together. You are only an instrument in somebody else’s plan and that somebody else has gotten there before you. If you can find out some of the ways that somebody else was there before you and bring blessing into a person’s life, it’s terrific.

I’ll give another example here. I’m counseling a man coming out of homosexuality and he is very discouraged. He is falling back into fantasy life and masturbation and such and he feels guilty. And he thinks, “God couldn’t love me,” and he is depressed and he asks, “Am I even a Christian?” I said, “Well, can we step back a bit? Where did you come from up to where you are now?” He said, “Well, I used to be in a kind of fast-lane, bathhouse, homosexual lifestyle, and that was five years ago. And that dropped off.” Then he used to buy pornography and that’s not there. What actually turns out is that this was a sporadic pattern of masturbation before falling asleep. And there were some dreams he had that were immoral and he felt foul because of them.

It’s one of those wonderful points in ministry where you’re able to counsel with two hands. On the one hand, this is a serious sin. On the other hand, praise be to God. Look how far you have come. Look how good the grace of God has been in your life. That God who brought you from renting out square bathhouses in Philadelphia to where you are now is surely going to take you the next step.

I remember the outcome of that particular conversation with that gentleman. The next time we got together, a couple weeks later he said, “I had something happen that had never happened before. The evil thoughts were stealing in and I was about to fall asleep and I remembered something that God said.” Now, I was really curious because I had given him an open-ended assignment. I said, “You pick a Bible passage, you pick some truth to meditate on.” And what he picked was the 10th commandment, “Don’t covet.” That’s a really interesting passage in this context because he said, “As the evil thought stole him, it’s like a voice in my head said, ‘Don’t covet, this does not belong to you, you belong to me.’” He said it was like Viet Cong sappers coming under the wire and they went away and the thoughts came back, “Don’t covet.”

The thoughts went away. And the thoughts came back a third time, and he thought, “Don’t covet.” And he fell asleep. He said, “It was the first time I’ve ever been at that point and didn’t fall back into fantasy.” It was a wonderful victory. Your counseling is interested in what the Lord is already doing there. He’s working in people.

Questions and Answers

The near side of complexity is simplistic, the far side of complexity is simple. It’s the exact same truth. It just sings and dances in the midst of all the intricacies of what a person is facing. We’ve got some time for some interaction. I know there’s lots of things that we’ve been talking about, a zillion possible questions. Take it away.

You’ve mentioned Larry Crabb a couple of times in your talks. I’m not sure if you’re referencing some of his earlier works, but he seems, in the past few years, to really echoed this idea that soul care really is the domain of pastors and the church and the church body specifically. I didn’t know if you were familiar with some of his newer works and if you were able to comment on it.

Larry Crabb is a very interesting figure within the wider Christian counseling world. He is the psychologist who has always been most committed to biblical authority. He’s been the one who’s been most willing to talk about sin and most willing to talk about Christ, and I think has also had a great sensitivity to some of the weaknesses of Jay Adams. I see Crabb and Adams kind of standing against each other, each very attuned to the other’s weaknesses and each having strengths that are sort of complimentary, you might say. But Crabb is also a moving target. It’s hard to interact with him in some ways, because basically, I would say there have been three distinctive eras in Larry Crabb’s thinking. The early Crabb, from about 1975 to 1982, was a straight out Abraham Maslow need theory. He quotes Maslow, it’s just lifted straight out of the pages. It’s the two middle sectors of the hierarchy of needs.

The middle Crabb, of Inside Out and Understanding People is more subtle. There’s a shift in his thinking. It’s not so much a need, like an empty cup inside, but he talks more about longings. It’s more about what you’re reaching for. Still, I think the man-centeredness is still there though. The later Crabb, from about 1992 on, has a sin model that seems increasingly to be dominating. There are still things that trouble me in what Crabb does, but I would echo what you’ve said. There have been a number of things I think that are very healthy movements. His thinking is moving more towards a sin model since 1992 and he has more concern for the church since 1992, and he has more concern for Christ and the gospel since 1992. It’s one of these things that’s hard to get your hands on because I think Crabb is an American. By that I mean Crabb is wired to the intimacy idols, the love idols, and whereas in the seventies it was a need for love and a need for security, in the late eighties, it was a longing for relationship.

I think in his model, the thing he does with intimacy still does not come up to what biblical love really is. Think about this. For example, he’s got such an emphasis on that intimacy is the core of love. I would want to say, “Well, I don’t see that in the Bible. In fact, the most dramatic expression of love in the Bible has no intimacy in it.” It produces intimacy down the road, but the cross is not an expression of intimacy; it’s an expression of desolation. So I still think there’s something missing. You could almost call it the deep structure of Larry Crabb’s thought, that he just cannot quite see through the intimacy idols that are so plausible within our particular culture. It tends to just put a sour note, kind of like middle C is a little bit flat on the piano that just keeps jarring you. It makes his system, I think, just not fully trustworthy, though there are many positive directions.

In the course of my own growth in thinking about trying to help people, the issue that continually comes up as I’m dealing with people is the whole issue of anger. As I’m dealing with angry people and I’m sending them off to a Christian counseling center to get anger management and then they’re coming back saying, “My anger isn’t the problem, it’s how I’m dealing with my anger.” I feel like they’re not really dealing with the issue. There’s a short circuit here and my job is harder trying to get them to face the reality of their sin and why they’re mad and all that kind of stuff. How do I deal with Ephesians 4:26–27? What I’m thinking right now is if you’re angry because somebody offended you — I think there is anger like Jesus had — is that always wrong? Is that evidence of sin?

All these questions are million-dollar questions and 25 cent spaces for answers, so I apologize for the brevity. I think the instinct of where you’re going, I would heartily concur with it. That sentiment, that anger per se is not sin, is something to correct. People will go further than that and say it’s neither good nor bad, it just is. I would say that is a flat lie. That’s just not true. Anger is either good or bad. Joy is either good or bad. You could be joyful because you just managed to score on your secretary and nobody found out about it. Or you could be joyful because you love Jesus Christ. Joy is either good or bad. Anger is either good or bad. Fear is either good or bad. Every emotion is either good or bad because all of life is either good or bad. When God looks at life, that’s how it splits open — good or bad. Your senses are trained to discern good and evil. And so that’s a very unhelpful presupposition to say it’s neutral.

Here’s my second comment. This is where you see the colossal shallowness of approaches like simple anger management. They may have a couple of good tips here and there. You can say, “Count to 10 and take a walk around the block and take credit for your own stuff and watch your body language.” Those are all fine and dandy, but they are shallow compared to the problem. Because as you look at the way the Scripture takes apart the problem of anger, it is one of those sins that is archetypal. Remember our vertical-horizontal. Anger is coming out horizontal, but it is revelatory of what rules me vertically. It is a wonderful opportunity not just to get a grip so that you’re less of an angry person horizontally, but to ask yourself, “Okay, my buttons got pushed. What are those buttons? What rules me?”

It’s a swinging door open into the human heart for questions like those that James 4 poses. What do you want that you live for? What do you expect that you’ve got to have? What are your felt needs that when you don’t get them, you hit the ceiling. You will find that the mosaic of a person’s idolatry will come right on the table, which then leads to a solution to anger like James 3–4 does. James 3–4 is so interesting because, although there are many sorts of practical tips that you could apply out of that, the heart of it is what goes on in chapter four. It is a radically vertical solution to the problem of anger because the problem of anger horizontally is an expression of a radically vertical problem, and that you will not find in any book in Barnes and Noble. None of them. It’s not only the self-help books, which are just going to tend to be horizontal anger management stuff. But it’s all the psych books too. They will not identify the way in which the sins of anger express the sins of pride and lust and unreasonable expectations and so forth.

I’ll stop there. That’s 25 cents. I actually wrote three articles on this topic in “The Journal of Biblical Counseling.” There’s another couple of wonderful articles that a man named Robert Jones wrote on anger at yourself. It’s called, “I Just Can’t Forgive Myself.” And he wrote another one on anger at God. They are topics where the pop psychology mindset really comes out. They say, “You need to forgive yourself,” or, “You need to forgive God.” Both of those are completely false constructs or understandings of the phenomena of anger at yourself and anger at God. We’re not blowing away the phenomena. Lots of people are angry at God and lots of people are angry at themselves, but people fail to think hard and biblically about what’s going on and what it reveals about the human heart. And then we ask, how does the gospel impact it? Robert Jones has written a couple of things that are very helpful there.

I have an observation from what you said with regards to gifting. I was thinking about the hymn that AB Simpson wrote: “Once it was the Blessing, now it is the Lord. Once the gifts I wanted, now the giver only.” One of the dilemmas that we face today, especially with some of the influences that are coming out of Bromley and in England and the Toronto Airport Fellowship, is the tremendous pressure on experience-centered gifting and this whole concept. I was just wondering, how do we answer that emphasis on the gifts as opposed to the giver?

You’re asking, again, a huge question. This will be inadequate to give a small answer. I’ll just pick up one strand. I spent some time in 1979–1980 as a short term missionary in Uganda and Uganda had had, under the tyranny of Idi Amin, lots of people murdered. And in that context, a very wild, extremist version of Christianity had come in. It was sort of living off of dreams and that kind of stuff. I remember one of the pastors there, a man named Edward Kasaija, just tied it up in a knot. He said, “People want the power of Jesus and not the character of Jesus.” He just sort of tied it up. You look at the Bible and you look at a passage like Titus 2 that we looked at. It’s about power, but it is power unto character, isn’t it? Or pick another passage like 1 Timothy 1:5:

The aim of our charge is love that issues from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith.

Those are three different ways of talking about vertical transformation. The two great commandments are love God and love neighbor. So I think it’s one of those things where, again, you get the typical polarizing. In the backdrop, often of a kind of dull, boring, ritualistic Christianity, you tend to want something exciting. Martin Luther had a wonderful metaphor for that. He said, “The church is like a drunken German peasant trying to get on a donkey.” And he was a German, so he could tell German jokes. That drunken peasant throws himself on the donkey and rolls into the muck on one side and staggers up and throws himself on the donkey and rolls in the muck on the other side. It’s really hard to get the drunken German peasant to sit on the donkey and ride home. This is one of those issues. Is it going to be dull and boring and ritualistic, or is it going to be experience driven, or are we going to sit on the donkey and aim for the goal of our instruction.