I freely confess to you my brother that it is with some fear and trembling that I come. I was so deeply honored at being invited and so deeply moved by the significance of the things that we’re going to be considering that I wanted to do it. At the same time, I don’t know if those of you who’ve had major health problems or known others where even one small thing tends to run the well dry very quickly. I very much desire your intercessions for me with the Father of power, the God who works in weakness, the one who is with us and for us.

The Gospel for Individual Use

I am delighted to be here, brothers, as hard as it is in the physical sense. The things that we’re going to be speaking about are extremely important. We are talking about issues that have to do with the very wellbeing of the church. One of the things that has struck me is that if the gospel of Jesus Christ, if the truth of the one eternal Word of God, is only good enough for public ministry, to get crowds into heaven, but it is not good enough to change and convert and sustain and renew the souls of individual people, brothers, we skate on thin ice. Ministry then verges into irrelevance. It verges into being something that is simply a public show, a public demonstration of religiosity. But meanwhile, the very things about where people are actually living, breathing, thinking, feeling, relating, suffering, struggling — if we cannot touch people at that place, we do not touch them. We play a game.

Now, that’s part one. We also live in a culture that offers very persuasive, very well organized, very well thought through, very well institutionalized, very mature and sophisticated alternatives. There are alternative visions, a different truth, a different word on the soul of man, a different word on the meaning of suffering, a different word on the nature of what it is that human life is, a different perspective on who it is that can most offer help, and a different profession, you might say. It’s a different church, a different institution.

We live in a world, as I mentioned in my prayer, that God in his sovereign, providential care of his people is allowed to rise up. But we should not be fools and dupes. But we should grow up ourselves and understand, as God always uses persuasive competitors, that with the church, the people of the Lord would grow up into the fullness of Christ and we would become what we are meant to be to his glory.

A Disconnect in Our Worship

I want you to think with me for a minute. What did we do over the last half hour, besides introductions and a little off and running here? We worshiped, didn’t we? We blessed our Lord and Father to put it in the language that James 3 puts it. We blessed our Lord and Father.

But that act of public worship, of giving voice, of looking at words in front of us and singing together, is loaded, isn’t it? It’s not unambiguous. There are many potential deviances that can inhabit public worship. Think of that very passage I just mentioned in James 3:9. It warns of the fact that we can be people who worship in words, and then there’s this disconnect and our hearts are in a very different place. It’s as though we worship and those words and just fly away. It’s just a light balloon and it’s gone.

And meanwhile, we’re standing here on the ground and we are angry and bitter and full of wrath and disappointment and defensive and argumentative with perhaps our wife or our children, or the elders or someone who lives next door, or our parents. It is possible to live with a disjunction between the public ministry, and in that case where it is that we are actually standing. The rivet pulls loose, you might say, between the truth we profess and the way that we actually function and live.

And there’s other sorts of disconnects that happen as well. Perhaps the most vivid is when Jesus talks in Matthew 15:8–9, quoting Isaiah and he says:

This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.

That’s something you see in counseling too. You see in the context of the church where you get, again, you get a disconnect where there are things that happen in worship, things that get said. There are things that happen from the pulpit that are preached and proclaimed, things that are taught in Sunday school, things that are prayed in the closet. And then what transpires in the conversations in the foyer between brother and sister, sister and sister, brother and brother, what transpires in the offices in which counsel occurs and conversation that takes lives apart has a contradiction. There’s a different teaching. There’s not a match in the worldview of what is preached and worshiped and what is conversed, you might say. That’s a problem. You have a disconnect, don’t you?

Other Disconnects

There are other disconnects as well. There’s the one that any one of us can identify with where we have just simply done like what we’ve sung here: “How oft in grief hath he not brought you relief, spreading his wings to shade you. He has decked you with health, with a loving hand. He has guided and stayed thee.” And we sing that and then we wake up in the morning and we’re anxious, juggling plates, right? There are 10 things on our mind, and they aren’t how he has brought thee relief, how he has gently sustained you and sheltered you, that your desires have been met and what he ordained. There’s that disconnect too. Those are personal disconnects. I call them moral disconnects, ways that the rivet pulls free.

But there are also more formal kinds of disconnections, more systematic sorts of disconnections, what you could call intellectual deviance, institutional deviance, or practical defection from the truth. And it’s in that area of the counseling world, this thing our culture calls counseling on our title, the Christian care of the Soul, it’s in that area that there’s often a huge disconnect. We think of worship and worship is about God and worship is to God and it is from God in Christ. And we think of preaching and preaching as from and about God in Christ and it dare not be different. And we think about prayer. We go to our closet and it is an answer and a response to God in Christ. It is before God in Christ. It needs God in Christ. It calls on God in Christ. It is in God in Christ and it is to God in Christ.

And then it’s funny because those would be the natural definitions that would spring to mind as we think about both public ministry and the closet. But then when we think about the word “counseling,” maybe we do a little better than the run of Christian humanity, certainly than the culture. But I tell you, the culture and the people that sit in your pews, and probably many of us when we think about the word “counseling,” do not tend to think that it’s about God in Christ, that our conversations would inhabit the same world as our preaching.

That doesn’t mean at all that our conversations turn into a preaching occasion. There are many differences in style and technique. If you videotape it, it looks a whole lot different. But the worldview should be the same, shouldn’t it? Otherwise, you get this funny disjunction. When we’re in crowds like this, when there’s lots of us, when it’s public religious events or when we’re in our closet, having private religious practices and activities, we talk about God. But in a curious way that when we have a conversation that’s intentional, that pursues really knowing somebody, rolls up at sleeves and asks, “Who are you? What are you really thinking? What happened to you? What is happening to you? What are you facing? How can I help you?” — so often those kinds of conversations, they don’t talk about God, they talk about me. It’s where they end.

We always talk about me and preaching the worship, and there’s lots of me, I, and us in these hymns we sing. But they talk about me in the final sense. It becomes about simply the person and their experience devoid of God.

Living in the Real World

Typically, counseling, two or three people getting together to actually talk face-to-face, honest, inhabits a different world. And it’s no surprise because education runs in that direction. The culture runs in that direction. There are many books out there. Run into Barnes and Noble or Borders, there are hundreds of books about human nature, not just the self-help and psychology books, but the sociology books and the history books and you know what? Those books are almost without exception, neutered of the God of the Bible. They are.

And yet they are presented as this is the way to understand people and the meaning of suffering and how you interpret your experience and how you change and how you can help yourself and become different. You think about the educational programs to train counselors. Counselors are not trained to say what we sang there in the second verse of “Praise the Lord, the Almighty,” that there is a God who wondrously reigns. And he will shelter you under his wings and gently sustain you. Have you not seen how your desires have ever been met in the things that he ordains?” The counselors aren’t taught to ask those questions or say those things. They’re another world. They’re a “religious world.” They may be personally gratifying and personally stimulating if you happen to be so minded as a Christian person, but counseling can proceed without those things. And that cannot be, can it?

I see there’s a few women in here too. There are a few roses amid the thorn bush. We as men and women are called to honor a Christ where this is what reality is about. This is what our desires are about. This is what motivation is about. This is what suffering is about. It lives in this world, not that other world.

Counselors don’t tend to explore how it exactly is that sin is your deepest problem. It’s like the little case study that John read in the beginning, a man who is full of anxiety, kind of a walking nervous breakdown. His actual problem, his deepest problem is sin. Not just in general or theory sort of way back there with Adam, and not just as a matter of his conscious willed acts and bad behaviors, but as a matter of who he is, a fundamental perversion of his essential nature that takes very specific forms that an honest, probing, careful conversation can bring out onto the table.

Therapists don’t say that that’s something that’s wrong with you and has only one hope. They don’t say that it is so wrong that there’s only one way to get better. And it’s not count to 10. It’s not improve your self-talk. It’s not trying to find ways to improve how you think about yourself. It’s not a trick for self-confidence. It’s not changing your friends, so you get more affirming friends. What is wrong with you is so wrong that it takes the one good man who ever lived to die for you and to completely master you and to change you around utterly to reverse your direction, to change who you are.

Blessed Are the Bankrupt

Therapists aren’t taught to talk about that. They aren’t taught to say something like this to someone, “Do you want to be truly happy? I mean truly happy? Do you want to find a maturity that is what being a human being is all about? Do you want to become a sane man or woman? Truly sane, not fundamentally insane.” Well, you’d think that people seeking counseling would say, “I’d like to be sane. I’d like to be mature and I’d like to be happy.” But they aren’t taught to say, “Well, here’s where it begins. The poor in spirit are blessed because they have the kingdom of heaven. It is they who are blessed.”

And what are the poor in spirit? It is a sense of your utter need in the fundamental sense of who you are. You are a beggar in who you truly are. We might put it this way, that in your fundamental sense of who you are as a person, that you live hand to mouth on the generosity of another. That you don’t have a place to lay your head. You live day to day on the protection and provision of another. You need a sheltered living situation and you need someone to give you a handout because you do not have marketable skills. You’re a beggar. You do not have a marketable degree. You don’t have an IRA. You don’t have a big bank account. You don’t have the friends in high places. Being poor in spirit is a fundamental sense of need for another, the Lord of heaven, the only God and Father, the only Savior.

That is the doorway to all sanity. The only alternative fundamentally is the way that Ecclesiastes 9 puts it: “There’s an evil in all that is under the sun. The hearts of the sons of men are full of evil. And there is madness in their hearts while they live and then they die.” And see, that madness is not just simply in those that get locked up, is it? Is a madness that lives life as though there were no king of heaven, as though there were no one upon whom you could depend, as though there were no Jesus Christ who gave his life to save people like you and like me.

That’s what we sing about, isn’t it? That’s what we preach about. And of course, of course, of course, when we start to have a conversation, isn’t that world still true? Isn’t that still the one way to sanity, maturity, happiness, holiness, and the rest? There is a reason for the title that was chosen for this conference: God, Psychology, and the Christian Care of the Soul. It didn’t say, “God, Psychology, and Prayer,” or, “God, Psychology, and Preaching,” or, “God, Psychology, and Worship.” That’s not to say that there aren’t some inroads of the therapeutic into preaching and into prayer and so forth. But it is in the area of personal conversation — caring, intentional, roll up your sleeves, get-to-know-you, love you, let’s find out who we are, what’s cooking in life, and how we’re going to help and bring about change — that there are some huge battles, brothers and sisters.

The Plethora of Personality Theories

There are many personality theories around. Many views of what makes people tick. The cornerstone of a personality theory is a theory of motivation: Why do you do what you do? That is the question. It’s like you get that question down, the cornerstone is laid, and the whole theory tumbles out from there.

Why do you do what you do? Do you have biologically rooted instincts in conflict with socially conditioned instincts, is that why? Are you on a hierarchy of need? Do unmet vacuums and voids inside you that have to be filled? Are you a construct of certain drives and those drives get conditioned various ways by the world in which you live? What is the weight of suffering and situational variables? Because see, what’s going on in your motivational pattern, however you determine the motivational structure, gets key to what’s out there in your world.

So if it’s a matter of the conditioning of your drives, then it’s the conditioning forces, the contingencies of reinforcement in your world that determine why you do what you do. And if you want to break a bad habit, then at the end of a week give yourself a milkshake and change your world and stop your smoking — those sorts of things. And if it’s that your needs have not been met, then you need someone to fill the empty space, to meet your love need, to meet your esteem need, to meet your significance need. You need something to fill the emptiness inside you. And if it’s your instincts that are conflicted, you need insight into those instincts and it’s the traumas that you experience in life.

But then you think about that. Why is it there’s none of those personality theories as they talk about what’s obvious to anyone, that there is motivation on the inside that has something to do with our desires and what we want and what we believe and what we fear, and it has something to do with what’s on the outside, with what comes at us, with what we experience, why aren’t there personality theories that say this?

These inward trials I employ, From self, and pride, to set thee free; And break thy schemes of earthly joy, That thou may’st find thy all in me.

Now see, there is a personality theory in that. There is a view of the meaning of the world. There’s a view of the nature of your motivations. There is an agenda. It’s a personal universe. And the counseling models that our culture teaches and follows, they are neutered of personality, aren’t they? There’s no personal universe. It’s a different system.

To Reattach the Rivet

We want to reattach the rivet. We’ll try to do that in a number of different ways, but I’d like to start by jumping straight into a brief case study because after all we’re talking about people, we’re talking about ministry, we’re talking about details. And by the way, it is that part that I see as one of the supreme privileges and reasons why as a pastor you must talk to your people. You must counsel your people. It’s the details.

People live their lives in the specifics. And it is spectacular to not just talk at the level of generalities and theories — suffering, sin, righteousness, love, and Jesus — but to get into the specifics. What’s suffering? And what’s sin? How does sin think about this person? And now how does Jesus meet this person? What will love look like in this person?

A Case Study

Now, a woman, a dear old friend of Nan’s and mine — let’s call her Sarah — we had a number of long conversations this fall. She was going through a very hard time. It was like she was caught in the jaws of a vise. It was like crossfire between drug gangs. Her world was falling apart. The two most important people in her world had had a falling out and started to hate each other. And it was just sending avalanche effects in all kinds of directions. And they were sniping at each other and she was the monkey in the middle. And she was torn apart.

Her world was falling down around her ears, buffeted by the mutual jealousies, the hostilities, the accusations. Both people had a totally different story of what happened. So here’s Sarah and she talks to person A and person B and it’s like, “What universe am I in?” She’s just spinning, trying to even figure out why they hated each other. She couldn’t make sense of it. It didn’t make sense. And each of them started to lobby and create factions among Sarah’s wider social network. And pretty soon she was caught and there’s all kinds of people. Pretty much everybody she knows is arguing one side or the other in this battle. It was hell for her. She was being manipulated. She was being gossiped about. She was being accused. Each of the people says to her, “You don’t believe me? I say this is how it happened and that person is an idiot.”

But then she would hear the other person. Here’s what she said: “It is tearing me apart. I don’t know who to believe. These are the two people I’ve trusted and they are at each other’s throats and me in the middle, and every one of my friends is taking sides. I’m not eating. I’m not sleeping well. I wake up in the morning. I wake up at night. I’m fretful. It’s always on my mind. I turn it over and over and over and over and over and over. I’m restless. I feel like killing myself. I can’t face it. I don’t know what to do. My life is disintegrating. I wish I wasn’t alive to this. I feel like my life is falling apart. I’m angry at times. I hate what they’re doing. I just want to run away from it.”

A Pastor’s Responsibility?

Now, that’s the short version. There’s a thousand other details. But let me just ask a series of questions that have to do with whether we as servants of Christ can help Sarah. The first question is probably the biggest one of all that in terms of getting you off and running. Is Sarah even your responsibility? There are those in our culture who would say that you as a pastor are monkeying in business you shouldn’t be in. It would be like you trying to do brain surgery. You are impertinent even to try to tackle someone. I meant after all, this is a lady on the verge of a nervous breakdown. There’s clinical diagnoses we can put on her. This might be a suicide. She needs drugs. You can’t help her. There are those who would say, “Look, this is about interpersonal conflict,” and the implication being there’s other experts when it comes to interpersonal conflict. That’s not your turf.

Is it even your turf? Is it even your responsibility? Is it your calling? There’s all these dysphoric emotions — anger, guilt, jealousy, depression, and anxiety. She doesn’t feel good. And some of those not feeling goods are at such an extreme that some people would put the adjective “clinical” on them. She’s got suicidal fantasies. She’s on the verge of a breakdown. Is she your turf? She is experiencing a shattering life experience here. Her world is falling apart. Is that your turf? Are you really in the business of dealing with people who are facing shattering life-experience trauma? This is in post-traumatic stress syndrome. This is mid-traumatic stress syndrome. She is in the soup now. Is that your area?

There are issues in Sarah’s life that have to do with the deepest operative beliefs, fears, desires with how she organizes her world, her psychodynamics, her deepest parents and motivation. Is that your province? Is that what pastors are about? Aren’t you about religion? There’s a lady having a breakdown here in front of us. How will she change? For her to change, this is going to take time, likely. This is like a jackhammer to the old foundations and complete rehabilitation and complete renewal of the way this lady processes life. It’s going to take time and patient rebuilding. And do you have the time, the expertise, the patience, and the kindness? Are there other people who would do a better job than you? Other people who would be more loving perhaps? Other people who would be kinder?

Is there some other counselor who could go deeper than you? Is there someone who would be able to explain what makes her tick more profoundly than you can? Is there someone who can make her sufferings better, understand them more helpfully? Is there someone who would be more compassionate and accepting than you? Is there someone who would give better advice? That’s the first question.

The culture we live in would put many diagnoses that would attach right to Sarah — all sorts of things about situational stresses and syndromes that way, and all sorts of things about borderline tendencies and puts a more pop psychology codependency in various narcissistic personality disorders and all sorts of things that might run her way and might say that what she needs is, because she’s so distraught, calming medication and she needs a professional.

But I would say that Sarah’s pretty run-of-the-mill in terms of pastoral ministry. Of course you can deal with her, or you ought to. I mean, this is just life 101, right? Bad stuff happens and you’re full of distress and in that distress is sinful. The refiner’s fire goes under the life and the crud and junk and scum comes to the surface. That’s pretty normal human life. In fact, she’s not all that different from you or me. I’m not going to throw anything at you. I can identify with Sarah. I’ve never done or thought some of the things about where she’s at, but it’s a difference of degree, not kind. It’s a quantitative difference. It’s not qualitative. Yeah, she jacks it up to a higher decibel level. But humanity 101 is pretty much coming out there. Of course you can help.

The Common Ground of Our Humanity

And there’s some really basic things that come out there. First of all, have you yourself walked in the kind of shoes along the path she’s walking? Probably. I hope you have. You will someday because everybody does. That’s the nature of life in a fallen world. Have you walked this way? It’s one of those funny things where I just had heart surgery. It’s very fresh. My doctor never had heart surgery, and he’s given me medicine he never took. He’s doing procedures he never had happen to him. And he’s doing things that cause experiences that he’s never had. That’s okay. And he was good.

But it’s not like that in ministry. It’s not like that in the care of souls. There’s something in the heart of Care of Souls that you’ve had this disease, you’ve walked this path, and you’ve been here. In fact, not only you’ve been here, but Jesus himself has been here. He’s walked this path. This is very common ground.

Many different places we could look. We’ll camp out for a few minutes in Psalm 31. This is just what human life is about, isn’t it? I won’t read the whole thing, but I’m going to hit a couple highlights here:

In you, O lord, do I take refuge;
     let me never be put to shame . . . (Psalm 31:1).

There’s a plea. And there’s confidence in that plea too. It starts out on a note of, “It’s you Lord, you’re my stronghold.” And then it starts to get more worried. It starts to kind of crank up a bit:

Incline your ear to me;
     rescue me speedily!
Be a rock of refuge for me,
     a strong fortress to save me! (Psalm 31:2).

And he says:

Into your hands I commit my spirit . . . (Psalm 31:5).

That’s a quote, isn’t it? Jesus lifted that phrase straight out. Psalm 31 was the heartbeat of his own experience. He went through this exactly. This is a glimpse into his mentality. We’re seeing his inner life here:

I hate those who pay regard to worthless idols,
     but I trust in the Lord.
I will rejoice and be glad . . . (Psalm 31:6–7).

There’s even joy because you have seen my affliction.

When the Lights Come On

This was one of those wonderful moments with Sarah. One day it was particularly bleak. I mean, she felt like she was walking through inky blackness. There was absolutely no light at all in her world. And we had one of those funny little conversations two people have. We got talking about how the house can be absolutely pitch black and you put on a little two watt nightlight and all of a sudden everything has changed. And we got talking about the fact that just really simple things like this can change it. “You have seen my affliction,” or Psalm 23:4 says, “The Lord is with me as I walk to the valley of the shadow of death. You’ve not given me over into the hand of the enemy.”

And then it goes on. It gets very passionate, very raw you might say:

Be gracious to me, O Lord, for I am in distress;
     my eye is wasted from grief;
     my soul and my body also.
For my life is spent with sorrow,
     and my years with sighing;
my strength fails because of my iniquity,
     and my bones waste away (Psalm 31:9–10).

Interesting there, isn’t it? Again, the Scripture always does this. It’s mostly about suffering, and Sarah’s life has got a ton of suffering in it. I mean, there’s objective things around her that are collapsing and people biting and devouring her from both sides and factions and all this. But isn’t it interesting that her sins are also there? God always stuff he’s working on in his redemptive sanctifying agenda. And David was well aware of that. Not only is it his suffering and what’s done to him, but his iniquities. He says:

     Those who see me in the street flee from me.
I have been forgotten like one who is dead;
     I have become like a broken vessel.
For I hear the whispering of many —
     terror on every side! —
as they scheme together against me,
     as they plot to take my life (Psalm 31:11–13).

Inspired Pathways for Emotional Distress

And then it goes on and it ends with a wonderful hope:

Oh, how abundant is your goodness,
     which you have stored up for those who fear you
and worked for those who take refuge in you,
     in the sight of the children of mankind!
In the cover of your presence you hide them
     from the plots of men;
you store them in your shelter
     from the strife of tongues (Psalm 31:19–20).

We looked at this and Sarah couldn’t believe it. She said, “This is in the Bible? This is my life. This is me. This is Jesus? Can he understand this too?” Yes, and there’s a last little note of alarm:

I had said in my alarm,
     “I am cut off from your sight.”
But you heard the voice of my pleas for mercy
     when I cried to you for help.
Love the Lord, all you his saints!
     The Lord preserves the faithful
     but abundantly repays the one who acts in pride (Psalm 31:22–23).

You might say that most of the Psalm is caught up in that immediacy of experience of my world and my God. But there is a wonderful jet start at the very end. He launches you back into the world, whether it’s Jesus, whether it’s you, whether it’s Sarah. He says:

Be strong and let your heart take courage,
     all you who hope in the Lord (Psalm 31:24).

It sends you out and kicks you out back into life. Have you ever walked out? Yeah, you should have. It’s that kind of walk that makes us the way the priest is described in Hebrews 5:1–3 — “able to deal gently with the ignorant and wayward since he himself is beset with many weaknesses.” Because of that he may sacrifice first for himself and then for the people.

Owning the Reality of Sin and Acting in Compassion

It is so odd in our culture that people like you and I who believe that man’s deepest problem is sin are thought to be moralistic, punitive, unsympathetic, impatient, and ungracious. And the only way to actually be gracious and tender and patient and long-suffering and hang in there with people is if you believe that their problem is something else besides sin — bad conditioning or trauma. It is crazy, isn’t it?

We know it’s crazy. That’s not to say there haven’t been people who have been moralistic and punitive. But at the center of the biblical message, it is actually to sinners that grace comes and it’s to sinners that there is patience and that you deal patiently and gently with the Sarahs. Sarah has had problems for a long time. I’ve known her for 15 years. She’s a slow mover. She’s a slow mover and she went through a real crisis this last fall.

But she knows I love her and she knows that I will hang in there with her, and one of us is going to beat the other to glory. She will be in glory. She’s one of Christ’s precious saints. The very fact that I understand her sins and her sufferings is a comfort. It’s the way the Heidelberg catechism puts it, what lets you live and die and enjoy this comfort, it’s we know how great our sin and misery are. And then the wonder of the provision that has been made. How God has come to us in Christ?

Agents of Christ’s Ministry

Then what do you do with someone like her? What is this? What is counseling? What is this conversation? Well, pretty basic stuff. You have to have walked through it. You have to know that you have a responsibility towards Sarah, and that Christ will equip you to deal with it. Then you have to walk in that. So there’s integrity and humility and gentleness. And you need to love her, right? Love her.

Love is patient. Love is kind. I think you could tie both those words together, that you’re in it for good. Love is patient. You’re in it for good. You’re in it for the long haul. Love is kind. You’re in it for good. You’re going to do her good. You’re going to help her. You’re going to be with her through the hard time. You care for her. And in a funny way, one of the privileges that Jesus Christ gives each of us is that though we are not the refuge, we’re part of the refuge and part of the safety. She’s in a world where everybody else in her world is like a dog eating her. You’re not doing that. You’re safe. You’re for her. Other people are trying to get her to play one faction or the other. You just want to hear how she’s doing and want to love her and help her grow and see what God’s agenda is for her joy.

You’re not the one who will hear her cry, like Psalm 31. But then in another sense you do. You hear her cry. You listen to her. You take her seriously. You’re an ear. You’re an agent, an instrument of Jesus in her life.

Then you speak to her, right? So you take up the call and you walk with integrity and you love her and you get to know her. That’s a given. I mean, we obviously got to know her. We heard all these facts. And you ask questions, you observe, you listen, you’re all ears, you probe, you dig around a little bit. You ask a follow-up, you get some specifics, and you speak into her life many different kinds of things. You use some Scripture, some personal story and testimony, some metaphors about night lights and dark houses at Psalm 31.

One of the things that just really blew the doors down for Sarah out of Psalm 31 was that Jesus was in it. That when it says doctrinally in Hebrews 4 that he sympathizes with our weaknesses, it gives that experientially in Psalm 31. He knows her path and he is with her and he is for her. That meant a tremendous amount to her. Why would it mean much to her? Because she’s a Christian. She knows the Lord. And she was lost and confused and baffled as her world was crumbling.

And then there’s many other things about this. Part of it is that understanding that God is in her circumstances, that they aren’t random, that God in fact has even designed her world for her good. It doesn’t feel good, but it’s for her good. Those purposes aren’t just total mystery. There’s very specific purposes in 2 Corinthians 1, 1 Peter 1, the Book of Job, 100 Psalms, Romans 5, Romans 8, and the Book of Revelation. The Bible is full of telling us the kinds of good that God does because he is for her, right? Nothing can separate her from her love. And he is with her a very present help in trouble. And he will be with her. There is a future grace to that that she looks to, that is sure, and certain.

What Rules the Heart

There’s other things. One of the most significant things that there was in the hope and the whole retooling of her world and seeing things differently. But God was dealing with her sins too. And not just the behavioral sins. If she had acted out suicidally or boiled over with rage and hostility, those would be behavioral sins towards people and horizontally you might say. But God is doing things about what rules her heart. What are ways where we’re supposed to hate those who regard vain idols, but trust the Lord. So why isn’t she trusting the Lord? What is she trusting instead?

Now it’s very interesting as we talked about the pattern of her desires, what was it she wanted that was grabbing hold of her life and prompting despair, rage, self-pain and so forth? And there were a number of things. We came up with four really crucial things. One was, “I want to be able to trust people. These are my friends.” Like a lot of Christians, like a lot of people to whom we minister, to quote John Calvin here: “The evil in our desires is often not what we want (natural affections), but that we want it too much.” It rules our lives. It seizes the throne. It becomes idolatrous. In the old language of the old theologians, natural affections become inordinate lust.

So it’s fine to want to be able to trust your friends, but it can’t rule your life because your friends aren’t friends anymore. If it rules your life, you’ll kill yourself or be full of rage. It becomes idolatrous if it rules your life.

A second one was this: “I want peace between people.” Yeah, that’s a natural affection. But if it rules your life, these people aren’t at peace. They don’t want to be at peace. They hate each other. They’re building factions. We’re in the works of the flesh territory here. You can’t live for peace. You have to live for something else. Something else has got to rule your life. Someone else has got to be your refuge. She said, “I want both of them to be my friends.” Great. So do I. That can’t rule you. One or both of them may end up hating you. Is your life over? Will it rule you or not?

Then one of the ones that really plagued her was, “I just want to know the truth. What really happened?” It would be great to know the truth. I’d like to know the truth too. But nobody has a videotape of what happened, and we may never know the truth. You can’t live for that either. But there is one you can live for. You can live for this Lord that Psalm 31 so wonderfully, powerfully, sweetly lays out.

In the Eye of the Hurricane

Then out of that comes all the practical stuff. There’s all kinds of things that Sarah can do in her life. We talked in detail on the basis of a renovation of who she worships and loves. There’s a renovation of a life. Faith has an action plan. Faith works through love. And love gets specific. There were all kinds of things about what it was that she could say to people, how she could approach the people in her life, and who needed to be confronted about what that would be like. We even got as specific as things like you could say to them, when you are being manipulated: “I know you want me to believe you and take your side, but I am not going to take sides. I can’t take sides because I love you and I love Susie too much. Whether or not I take sides, I still care for you.”

Now see, a comment like that is not going to solve the problem, is it? A metaphor I find very helpful is that the problem is often like a satellite picture of a hurricane. It covers hundreds of square miles and is a gigantic swirling cloud. And then there’s the eye and it’s very tiny, and the eye is the obedience we’re called to it. It’s a very small obedience. It’s never big enough to actually fix the problem. All our obedience is that way. That’s radical. We never control the world. Our ability and our call to obey is never as much as what’s wrong or what we’re concerned about.

Even the things where we feel like we have the most control, like our children when they’re newborn, we actually never control the two most important things, whether they will live and whether their hearts will be right with God. With kids, you have maximal control. The hurricane is smaller but the eye is about 80 miles across. But you never control the big things. And as the kids grow, the eye gets smaller and smaller. There’s much of life like in Sarah’s situation where she’s called to a few small things of peacemaking and wisdom. And the Lord who is her refuge will renovate her heart and teach her and empower her to do that thing. She’s never called to fix the situation. She can’t. And yeah, we work through what God’s call was in her life.

Responding to the Distressed and Afflicted

How did the church, how did we as the people of God lose the Sarahs? How did the world become the way it is? I’m going to paint with giant strokes here in these last few minutes tonight and give historical generalities. So it’s a paintbrush. It’s a roller about 40 feet wide, but excuse me for that. But I think the things I’ll say are fair enough, even in very broad strokes.

How did we get to the place whereas the people of God, by and large, the Sarahs are seen as somebody else’s business, not ours? We are in some ways relegated to religious activities, either private or public, but that significant conversation is somebody else’s duty and somebody has got the skill. I want to just lay out a couple of points here first.

A Self-Conscious Competitor

Right on the surface of it, in the 20th century, Christianity has a self-conscious competitor. There is a conflict between the Christian faith and the modern psychotherapies. This is not a product of fundamentalist paranoia. The fight really comes from the other side. I’ll give you a couple of quotations. Who said this?

The words a “secular pastoral worker” might well serve as a general formula for describing the function which the analyst, whether doctor or medical layman, has to perform in relation to the public. I look forward to the day when there will be a salvation army of mental health personnel in every town, village, and neighborhood.

That’s Sigmund Freud. Now see, he knows what he is doing, doesn’t he? He is very self-conscious. This is a post-Christian age. Christianity is an illusion, but the human condition is that people are brutalized and suffering and confused and lost, and they still need help. But since Christianity’s dead, a secular pastoral worker will fill the goods.

Or listen to this one. Who said this?

Patients force the psychotherapist into the role of a priest and expect and demand of him that he shall free them from their distress. That is why we who are psychotherapists must occupy ourselves with problems which strictly speaking belong to the theologian.

That’s Carl Young, Freud’s first disciple and first apostate and rebel. Or how about this one?

Human nature seems not to be either intrinsically evil, or primarily evil, or necessarily evil.

That’s by a man who also in the same book said, “That I am going to get my model not by looking in a fat black book, but by neutral empiricism.” It’s Abraham Maslow, one of the founders of humanistic psychology. Or maybe he should have looked in a blue and yellow book perhaps. It might have given him a different spin on the nature of the human heart.

Whose Responsibility?

These are the stated intentions. These are not dumb people. And it’s one of the things that’s very important as we interact with the secular cultural leaders. They aren’t stupid, are they? They aren’t unobservant. There’s a big difference between saying someone is wrong and saying someone is stupid. These men are not stupid and they know exactly what they’re doing. And they were very self-conscious non-Christians. And they were in their own way very caring people. They saw someone suffering. They wanted to help. It’s one of God’s common graces. Common grace always borrows stuff that’s good from God and then sin twists it and they use it against God. But they knew what they were doing.

You would expect that there would be a conflict between these stated intentions and the psychological models that went with them and the faith. It’s a threefold conflict. The first aspect of the conflict is, who’s right? Because we have different views of the nature of man, different views of what motivates people, different views of what’s wrong, different views of what’s right, a different ideal against what you make your diagnosis of what’s wrong, a different goal for counseling, a different meaning for history, and a different interpretation of the influence of situation who’s right. You expect a battle over that. It’s the issue of truth, isn’t it?

You expect a battle over the issue of love. Who has the right to help people? Whose call is it to help those in need? Is it the church’s call? The Church may be doing a lousy job of it, bumbling and so forth and half-baked. But is it still our call to help the Sarah’s — Christian, non-Christian, or whoever they are? Or is it somebody else has the right, somebody else has the call to love, to help people with their problems?

And a third question is of power. Who can make it right? Who can make it right? Who can actually fix what’s wrong? And one would think that the church would stand up, and truth, love, power. These things aren’t just intellectual, theoretical. I myself did not come to Christ till I was 25. I was raised in a liberal church. By the time I was 15, I thought Christianity was a bunch of hokum, a bunch of candy coating for nice people and so unreal. And the secular psychologists became my masters and they were the source of truth and of love and of power. And that’s where I was going. And by the grace of God, I became a Christian.

I became a Christian, and in this evangelical faith I see all these brothers and sisters fleeing back to what I just left because there was nothing there. You would expect that we would realize that Christianity is a theology, but it’s also a psychology. It’s a view of man. In fact, Christianity is the final psychology. It’s the true psychology, because Christianity is the revelation of the gaze of God who is the searcher of hearts, who will evaluate people for what they are. He takes apart what people are. So his view is what’s true. It’s the final, ultimate psychology. It’s what’s playing on the universe. And so why don’t we have our own? Why don’t we have our own understanding, our own truth, our own love, our own power? Why is it so weak in the body of Christ?

A Borrower of Intellectual Disciplines

The church typically, and again I’m drawing with real broad strokes here, has typically been intellectually weak and derivative, typically the borrower. You’ll often find even in what otherwise are very well-meaning Christian people that as though the leading issue is what can we learn from the world. Now, we’ll get a little bit of this later in the week, but there are obviously some things we can learn from anybody on the planet — Muslim, maniac, Nazi, or Sigmund Freud. There are things you can learn from anyone.

But that is not the leading question. The leading question is how do you understand your own gaze? What’s your own model? What’s your own worldview? And that we receive by revelation, the gaze of God, God’s point of view, the searcher of hearts, the one sovereign over circumstances. But the church has tended to be intellectually derivative. And in fact, in the area of care of souls and cure of souls — care being what we do to help another and cure being the progressive sanctification and transformation from the inside — there was no serious work from a Bible believing perspective from before the Civil War for over a hundred years. It is really only a creature of the last third of the 20th century that the church has even awakened that there could be such a thing as a distinctively Christian approach to the cure of souls.

Once you put it that way, once you realize that such a thing ought to exist, it’s patently obvious. Well, of course. The very things that go on in public like ministry, preaching, teaching, worship, sacraments, evangelism, and church planting should have the same worldview and its rich application into conversation, into friendship, into loving people, into counseling people, into helping people, sustaining sufferers and transforming sinners. Of course.

But where you don’t get serious work, other people do the work. The 25 cent theory of heresy is that heresy is the unpaid debts of the church. If you don’t do work in a certain area, someone is very willing to do the work for you. Liberals and non-Christians are very willing to do the work. Churches tend to be structurally subordinate rather than establishing the institutional structures for training and regulating and delivering the care for people to be a kind of gopher in the system. So pastors are allowed to be nice guys. You’re allowed to be hand holders. You’re not allowed to do the real work.

Getting into the Work

I worked for four years in the psychiatric hospital where I was converted, and the most pitiful person in the entire hospital was the chaplain. He was a complete loser. I mean, the guy was emasculated. There was absolutely nothing he could do except be a religious functionary, but he was not allowed to engage people about their lives. He was structurally subordinate.

The church has also been practically weak. Maybe I could create a metaphor here for you. Imagine this mighty ocean liner of the human condition, okay? What is it that ministry is tackling as Jesus Christ invades the world, becomes a man, and makes the world new, this ocean line of the human condition? Then you get these little lifeboats out to the side. What I would submit to you is that often what has happened is that we, as the Church of Christ, have been pushed out to the lifeboats rather than inhabiting the ocean liner. What do I mean by this?

What’s on the ocean liner? For instance, who are the experts on human self-deception? It would be Freud, Nietzsche, and Marx. They are the masters of suspicion because they tear apart “the idolatrous lies of people.” They do their de-mythologizing of the lies people serve in favor of a truth that our suspicion shows as just another lie, right? We have a deeper suspicion and the true suspicion to the degree that we reflect and understand the gaze of God who searches hearts and tears down all the lies and tears down the idols.

Who are the experts in human self-deception? Who are the experts in situational influences like traumatic circumstances being sinned against? What about social shaping, sociocultural factors? Well, the Bible is about that and not being conformed to this world and don’t do what the Canaanites are doing. Those things are presented often in story form, not in a formal theory of sociocultural effects. But situational influences, whether it’s being sinned against or influence of other people on us, that’s ocean liner stuff. But the church has not been seen to be the knowledgeable folks to go to on that stuff.

Or how about understanding motives? What about intrapsychic conflict between motives? People are torn up between two competing motives. What about interpersonal conflict, peacemaking, child-rearing advice, compulsive and addictive behavior, and dysphoric emotions, the things that feel bad? Who are the experts on these things? What about grief and the grieving process? That was one that actually stayed in the church, one of the longest. It wasn’t really till maybe the 1960s that secular grief and dying started to become secularized.

Who deals with guilt, anxiety, depression, fear, aging, and death? Who really knows what’s wrong with people? Who really gets their hands dirty to change people? Those are ocean liner things. We get squeezed off to the lifeboats. I might describe six lifeboats on the left side here. These are the ways in which the faith becomes, you might call, too externalistic, too simple, too shallow.

Lifeboats on the Fringes

First, there is doctrinalism. People have a problem so study the catechism. Just get your doctrinal ducks lined up. Now see, I’m not in any way arguing against doctrine. True effective doctrine is on the ocean liner. It’s just teaching about what’s true from the mind of God. But doctrinalism substitutes our system and the sort of religious knowledge becomes where the church goes.

Another lifeboat on this side is moralism. Be good boys and girls. Just say no. Here’s the right and here’s wrong. And the church is the place where good people go. And yes, sin could describe when your deacon who ought to know better gets drunk and sleeps with the secretary, but for someone who is a sex addict and an alcoholic, you can’t use sin. It’s this really funny worldview where sin covers nice people who should know better, but people that are really stuck are something else. And it’s moralism, right?

Another lifeboat is activism. Just do what you’re supposed to do. Get involved in ministry and be a missionary in China and have your quiet time and religious actions. I’m not against doctrine and I’m not against morals or against action, but morals, action, and doctrine are meant to live in the same boat where self-deception, perverse motivation, patient hands-on change, dysphoric emotion, and suffering exists.

And on the other side, you might say that the faith is not only too shallow over here, but the faith is kind of mystically deep and otherworldly over here. So on the one hand, you get over here pietism, that Christianity is about mystical experience. “Let go and let God. Have a mountaintop experience. Give your problems to Jesus.” There’s no problem with giving your problems to Jesus, right? That’s Psalm 31, true piety. But pietism shuts off the brain, doesn’t it? It fails to think and bring that Jesus tailor made to that person.

The next lifeboat is spiritism. What the church offers is to cast out the demon of cigarettes, or to cast out the demon of pride. It’s as though we can’t really probe the way the Bible probes pride, fear of man, “addictions”, drunkenness, drug addiction, pornography. Somehow all we can offer is something weird, something really more spiritistic than biblical — cast out the demon. Or consider the third one on this side, sacramentalism. It’s a kind of ecclesiasticism where we live in this churchly world and sacraments and what the pastor does. And it’s kind of a sacerdotal religious ritual, mystical stuff. And meanwhile, the ocean liner is abandoned.

We want to say the Bible is about the ocean liner, isn’t it? It’s about doctrine. It’s about morals. It’s about action. It’s about piety. It’s about true spiritual warfare. It’s about true life and what a church ought to be under good authority. It’s about all those things. But it’s not in the lifeboats. Those things connect to all that other stuff that the Bible is also about. The Bible’s about that ocean liner and what have us, you might say, reinvade there.

Fresh Opportunities

Finally, I’ll close with this. Our present moment has fresh opportunities. There are opportunities in our day, and this is no surprise, given the workings of a sovereign Christ who loves his people and who is redeeming the world. I’ll look at the opportunities both negatively and positively.

First, negatively, modern psychologies are in a period of what I would say are probably fatal epistemological doubts. There is no one who believes that there is a true psychology. They don’t. In fact, the closest thing to a grand unified theory of human nature, the only candidate that has any punch that could possibly sweep the field is not even a psychology at all. It’s biopsychiatry. It’s just reducing everything to biology. And that’s obviously the hot candidate. It’s on “Time Magazine” five times a year, that kind of thing.

But biopsychiatry is death to psychology because it’s not even a system of understanding the mind. We’re all just reduced to bodies. And biopsychiatry is so implausible in the long run because people know it’s not true. They are not just their genes. They’re all kinds of other stuff. In the psychologies themselves, everything epistemologically is chaotic. It’s all skepticism. Everything is multi-theory and a little bit of this, a little bit of that. There are micro-theories and nobody has the big picture. There’s a lot of skepticism.

There are eclectic theories where you mix and match. It used to be a bad word until the 1970s. And now eclecticism is a good word because it’s the only option. It’s the only intellectually honest thing. Eclecticism may work for a short while, but eclecticism is a death sentence in the long run, right? It has no substance. I think that one of the things that gives us as Christians, the potential for a remarkable invasion back into the culture, even an evangelistic invasion, is that we have a grand unified theory that, if we’re able to articulate it well, sweeps back in and says, “No, this is what people are.” And it explains all people, not just a little bit of this and a little bit of that.

In the history of science, the philosophy of science, and history of medicine there are people like Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn. Psychology is not science in their view. It’s religion. It’s myth. It’s art. It’s poetry. And those epistemologies, those philosophies of science have really gained a lot of currency. So there’s a lot of chaos. There’s a lot of fragmentation and a fundamental epistemological despair and skepticism that creates opportunity for us.

The other side is that we have a model. It’s rough, it’s crude, it’s new, and it’s still being developed. But I think we have the potential in our day and age to develop a lively, distinctive model of pastoral care and of the cure of souls, and not to just be the borrowers but to actually be the initiators. And in that, it’s not only for the edification of our own people in doing effective pastoral counseling, but ultimately it is an evangelistic and apologetic reach into the culture at the very place where they have put their eggs in the basket of truth about people and the meaning of life. It’s going to come out of a certain quarter and that that quarter has got feet of clay. We have the opportunity for some effective ministry.

Questions and Answers

You said in the last a hundred years, there hadn’t been anything written in the cure of souls from the church. Was that different prior to the Civil War? Was there more written?

Sure. Yeah.

Are there things that you would recommend that we read from then?

Historically, there were no secular theories of cure of souls until the late 1800s. And the first reel off and running one was Sigmund Freud who came to the States in 1909. That was the first psychotherapy. Before that, a psychiatrist was just an administrator and gave drugs. A social worker was a charity worker. A psychologist was a scientist. And it’s really subsequent to around World War I that you start to get the mental health professions.

Before that, the church was where counseling happened. Psychology was a purely good word up until the 20th century from our point of view, because it was the church’s province. So you look at real high points in the church’s psychology. In the Bible, you have the Psalms and Paul for starters. But then you have Augustine. Augustine’s Confessions is just a masterful analysis of the distortions in what we love, in our passions, in what we live for. And Augustine nailed it. He knew the human heart and there’s some things he can be improved on, but there’s an awful lot where the first word was one of the best words that has ever been spoken.

There have been profound analyses by other church fathers like Gregory the Great and so forth, though he was more of a collator. There was a lot of effective thinking by the Puritans. Jonathan Edwards’s treatise on Religious Affections is really a psychology. In fact, it’s so much of a psychology that was the inspiration for William James, who is the founder of American Secular Psychology. He stripped God out, but adopted Edwards’s empirical method of really looking at people and studying to try to figure out what’s cooking. So I would say if you want some starting places historically, I would go to Augustine, Edwards, and some of the Puritans. Those would be good places to go.

I’m trying to understand the relationship between needs and sin as it pertains to the biggest problem that a person has. In other words, it sounds great, and I so much want to embrace that our biggest problem is sin. On the other hand, for example, in Genesis 2:18, before sin has entered the world, it says that it is not good, God said it’s not good for a man to be alone, and therefore he creates a companion for him. So my question is, is it sin that gives rise to desires that are fundamentally wrong, or is sin rather that we are trying to meet legitimate God-given needs in inappropriate ways? Because as I’ve read through the Christian counseling that seems to be a fundamental difference between your perspective and others.

That is an excellent question. What I’m going to say is much too brief in terms of what the question is worth. The word “need” is a perfectly fine word. It’s not good for a man to be alone. Your Father knows what you need. You need food, don’t you? We all need sleep. It’s good to have a wife. You can say perfectly well, “Gosh, I really need a vacation,” or, “I need someone to hold me accountable.” Those are all perfectly, I would call them non-technical uses of the word need, need with a lower case.

But the thing that, the place where it gets a lot more ominous is that under the influence of humanistic psychology, the word “need” is a technical capital letters thing. You have this need for love. To put it in Minirth Meier New Life Clinic terms, “you have an empty love tank.” Your love need was not met. And you’re going around scrambling on all sorts of second shells and bad ways to try and meet the need. You have to meet the need in a legitimate way. If it’s a Christian that says it like Minirth Meier or Larry Crabb, you look to Christ to meet the need. It sounds so close to being true, but there’s a fundamental flaw in it, in that it has elevated “need” in a particular definition of the word. It’s this kind of empty self-notion that you are this vacuum and the reason for your problems is that your needs have not been met and your sin is only the wrong way of meeting needs.

What I would say is that construction creates a fundamentally man-centered gospel. Jesus is about me. It is me-centered and need-centered. And in fact, here’s an analogy for you. I think most of us in this room would probably be sympathetic that the health and wealth gospel is bogus. Why? Because the health and wealth gospel has the exact same structure as what I just said. It assumes that you have this need for health and this need for wealth. Your sin problem is a secondary development. You look for wealth in the wrong places. You play the lottery, you rip people off as a salesman, and you look for health in the wrong places. You look to the medical profession and you look to quacks and so forth.

But you should look to God to meet your need. Look to God, trust him. He’ll make you healthy. Look to God, he’ll make you wealthy. That’s the structure of it. So what I would call the lust for health and wealth is never challenged, and thus people create a fundamentally self-centered gospel. Jesus serves their craving for health and for wealth. Well, what goes on with the “needs” for love, significance, and self-esteem is the same kind of thing. The passion that people have to be loved and there is a feeling of emptiness when you’re not loved. Sarah was a classic. Sarah would tend to just eat up that “need theology.” She’s a love junkie. She’s a people pleaser. She’s a man-fearer. She’s a “love me, love me, love me” kind of person.

But what has set Sarah free is that she has seen that not as a need that now Jesus is going to meet, but she has seen it as a lust that she is freed from to serve Jesus as a byproduct. Of course, she feels loved. You deal with the problem of sin, you feel loved to bits. It’s one of those funny ironies, and I bet you’ve seen people in your ministries like this. The people who try to get Jesus to meet their love need, they never feel like he loves them. But the people that know they are sinners know they are loved. It’s because it’s the wrong foundation put in there. The right answer in the wrong foundation, you might say, creates a false answer.