Tag: nouthetic counseling

Counseling on Mission

Posted on April 7, 2009

As a church planters we often reach unreached, unbelieving, and very broken people. As a result, pastoral wisdom and gospel-centered counseling quickly become an important skills. After all, the biblical office we hold is not church planter but elder-pastor. How are you cultivating pastoral wisdom? How are you growing in your capacity to shepherd your flock with wisdom, truth, and love? Are you spending time with “slow” or “challenging” people each week? Or do you gravitate to “teachable” people, neglecting the weak and hurting sheep?

Why Counsel?

Why should we spend time counseling when we could be evangelizing or preaching? Because in order to plant healthy missional churches, we must grow in gospel depth and breadth. In order to guard and guide our people well, it is imperative that church planters have a regular intake of wisdom (applied theology) from which we can counsel, disciple, train, and lead. As we mature, our sermons should deepen with pastoral application that grows from spending time with struggling sheep. The best application is mined, not from homiletical brainstorming, but from pastoral counseling. Why counsel? Counseling the church is: 1) part of our calling/office 2) critical to healthy community and mission 3) essential for insightful application 4) part of being a church that speaks the truth in love.

Growing in Pastoral Wisdom

Nothing like regular time with unchurched, newly believing, broken people will alert you to the need for gospel-centered counseling. For years I’ve been reading the materials put out by Christian Counseling Education Foundation. I’ll never forget the first time I heard David Powlison speak with such measured wisdom at the Desiring God Conference in 1999. Since then, I have read The Journal of Biblical Counseling, followed nouthetic literature, and started a certificate program in biblical counseling with CCEF. CCEF offers tremendous insight into human motivation and how the gospel applies to everything from addiction to garden variety idolatry. I highly recommend the Journal, their books, and distance education.

Westminster Bookstore carries all CCEF materials at heavy discounts and highlights Best Sellers of the Month. CCEF offers a host of articles on a whole range of counseling issues for free on their topical resource page. In addition, you can buy a CD ROM of all the JBC articles from 1977-2005. Add to these resources, the fine work of Tim Chester. See especially You Can Change, The Busy Christian’s Guide to Busyness. Tim and Steve Timmis are currently working on a Gospel-centered Life Series that will be a tremendous help to equipping us to counsel on mission. And very soon, I will be releasing a short book called Fight Club: Gospel-centered Discipleship.

Counsel on Mission

Counseling on mission is critical. If we do not counsel while we are on mission, we will fail in planting missional churches. Gospel-centered counseling is the overflow of gospel-centered church planting. If our churches aren’t founded and shephered in the gospel, then church planting will devolve into service planting or crusade speaking. Mission must be accompanied by counseling. Without counseling, churchplanting devolves into mission minus discipleship, which hardly mission at all.

Superficial Prayers?: Praying Beyond Sickness

Posted on May 12, 2008

So often our prayers and prayer requests remain generic and superficial: God help so and so, bless this, heal that, and so on. Generic, superficial prayers are heard by God, but we have to wonder if we are really “praying in the Spirit” when we maintain a generic, superficial course in prayer. He’s not a healing or blessing genie. God is set on changing us, making us into his likeness, confronting our sin, renewing our souls, strengthening our faith, deepening our joy. The Spirit specializes in “deep interior” prayers, guiding, shaping, convicting, renewing, leading to repentance and faith. In Speaking the Truth in Love, David Powlison comments our superficial prayer in sickness:

Too often pastoral prayers, prayer meetings, and prayer lists disheartened and distract the faith of God’s people. Prayer become either a dreary litany of familiar words, or a magical superstition. It either dulls our expectations of God, or hypes up fantasy hopes. Prayers for the sick can even become a breeding ground for cynicism: wouldn’t these people have gotten better anyway as nature took its course or medicine succeeded? Prayer can also become a breeding ground for bizarre obsession with health and medicine,; naming and claiming your healing…Sickness, like any other trouble, can force us to stop and face ourselves and find our Lord. I may find sins I’ve been too busy to notice: irritability, indifference, self-indulgence…Is God interested in healing any particular illness? Sometimes. Is he always interested in making us wise, holy, trusting, and living, even amid our pain, disability, and dying? Yes and amen. People learn to pray beyond the sick list when they realize what God is really all about.

Fighting Sexual Sin

Posted on March 13, 2008

In an article entitled “When the Problem is Sexual Sin,” John F. Bettler breaks down the problem of sexual sin into three areas: 1) Objects of lust 2) Relationship Lusts and 3) Life-meaning Lusts. Arranging these sins into a pyramid (Lust Objects at the top and Life-meaning lusts at the bottom), Bettler makes the point that removing the lust object only deals with the tip of the triangle. Of course, the tip needs to be dealt with, temptations should be removed, software installed on the computer, codes on the T.V. and so on; however, this is simply remedial, not redemptive.

In order to move beyond accountability and into grace-based victory over sexual sin, our heart issues must be exposed, our relationship lusts revealed. Sexual sin is frequently the result of unmet or over-met relationship desires. Thus, we must ask ourselves, “What is it that we are looking for in our relationships?” Do we want intimacy or safety, affirmation or space? Honest answers in this area will reveal how lust functions as a misdirected relational desire. It will help us understand some of the deeper issues and deviant beliefs that guide us into sexual sin. Once we honestly answer these questions, we can turn to asking the life-meaning lusts questions. Bettler defines life-meaning questions as: “What do we believe we must have in order for life to work, to be successful? This will bring our idolatrous desires out into the light. It will show us the false promises we are believing…like “God owes me a spouse” or “I don’t need anybody.”

After answering these questions honestly, we can move into accountability, assess our relationships, and take action in cultivating proper belief and delight in God’s true and faithful promises in order to redirect our desires for safety, spouse, and intimacy into God himself. This will require repentance and big gospel, a message of hope and the person of Christ, who dies our death and lives our life offering us true acceptance and joy. Here is an outline to summarize Bettler’s advice:

  1. What are the objects of lust?
    1. Question: Where, when, how are the patterns of temptation?
    2. Action: Accountability is needed for this level. (1 Tim 2:22)
  2. What are your relationship desires? Close, distant, safe, risky, affirmation, space?
    1. Question: What do you desire most from your spouse, parent, and friend?
    2. Action: Assess relationships—excess or deficiency?
  3. What are your life and heart desires?
    1. Question: What do you really want/desire out of life or from God?
    2. Action: Act to take redirect ungodly desires in order to cultivate trust, hope, faith in God. (1 Tim 4:7) Discover how God in Christ rebukes misplaced desires and satisfies our true longings, demonstrating his infinite worth.

How to Suffer (and to Preach Suffering)

Posted on February 26, 2008

If you have suffered or struggle to minister, counsel, or preach on suffering, Instruments in the Redeemer’s Hands by Paul Tripp has a chapter you should read. Mind you, Tripp is not dealing with the philosophical problem of evil; he is addressing the practical issues of suffering. The chapter entitled “Building Relationships By Identifying with Suffering” holds out a deeply communal, redemptive vision of suffering. Accordingly, he frames his chapter with this insight:

You are a sufferer who has been called by God to minister to others in pain. Suffering is not only the common ground of human relationships, but one of God’s most useful workrooms. (145)

Tripp goes on to develop “the humble character of personal ministry” in suffering, noting that God sends suffering people into our lives, not only so that they will change, but so that we will change too. (146) He pushes back against the spiritual professional approach of many pastors, who are inclined to dole out advice and counsel in suffering without identifying with others in suffering. I was convicted of this tendency to identify with sufferers “from above,” not from their level. When recounting stories of suffering and how God sustained me through them, I have typically pointed to God’s sufficiency and the triumph of his grace, but without confessing my struggles towards embracing that sufficiency and victory.

As a result, on Saturday night I changed the way I told/shared/preached the story of losing my best friend to suicide. I did my best to follow Tripp’s advice: “Tell your story in a way that breaks down the misconception that you are essentially different form the person you are helping” (155). And I incorporated these elements: 1) the difficult situation 2) your struggle in the midst of it, and 3) how God helped you. Some of us need to do more of 1, just telling the stories. Others need more 2, to be more honest about our struggles in suffering. And others need more 3, to look beyond the pain to embrace and tell of God’s all-sufficient grace in suffering.

This chapter helped me immensely. I hope that this post helps you.