Quotes of Note: What Makes Biblical Counseling Biblical? Part 1
The following “Quotes of Note” are from Chapter Eight of Equipping Counselors for Your Church. This chapter focuses on what makes biblical counseling truly biblical. For quotes from Chapter One, read God’s Grand Vision for His Church. For quotes from Chapter Two, read Knowing and Loving Those We Serve and Equip. For quotes from Chapters Three and Four read Christ’s Compelling Calling. For quotes from Chapter Five read My First Priority in Ministry. For quotes from Chapter Six read Mobilizing Ministers. For quotes from Chapter Seven read The Résumé of the Biblical Counselor.
• The Bible is the Soul Physician’s Desk Reference (SPDR) manual for dispensing grace.
• God’s Word provides not only the latest, but the eternal, enduring information on the soul’s design and disease, as well as its care and cure.
• For equipping in biblical counseling, the Bible not only guides the curriculum, it is our curriculum.
• Ask, “To speak the truth in love, what do biblical counselors need to know, do, and be in the context of community (love)?”
• Three biblical categories form the core of biblical counseling: people, problems, and solutions.
• If your trainees are to understand people created in God’s image, they first must understand the One in whose image people are created.
• As you develop your biblical counseling curriculum and content related to the Bible, ask, “How do my trainees need to view and use God’s Word in order to speak the truth in love?”
• We must communicate to our trainees by how we live and by how we counsel that God’s Word is absolutely necessary and totally sufficient (2 Timothy 3:16-17) for addressing all matters of the soul.
• Our trainees need to feast on God’s Word. They need to develop the conviction that the deepest questions in the human soul are God-questions, and that we find our deepest answers in God’s Word.
• Our equipping should help our trainees to share Paul’s certainty that in Christ are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge (Colossians 2:3-10).
• If our trainees are to use the Bible to nourish hungry souls, they must hear the Bible’s story the way God tells it. And God tells it in story form, as a narrative of relationship.
• Our trainees need to understand that their biblical counseling will be sterile and dead if they see the Bible as a textbook. But if they read and use the Bible as the story of the battle to win our hearts, then their biblical counseling will come alive.
• We want to communicate that the Word of God is profound—it deeply addresses the real life issues of real people in a really messy world.
• Create in your trainees the longing to share Christ’s changeless truth to change people’s lives.
• We need to train biblical counselors to use the Bible in relationally relevant ways.
• The Bible is our relational manual written by the most relational Being in the Universe.
• Through exploring the eternal community within the Trinity, our trainees begin to see that they must relate soul-to-soul because God is Trinitarian (John 1; John 17).
• A person’s image of God is central to their growth in grace.
• The goal of biblical counseling is our inner life increasingly reflecting the inner life of Christ.
• Our goal is not simply symptom relief, but Christlikeness.
• Equip your trainees to be soul-u-tion-focused, not solution-focused.
• As you develop your curriculum and content in this area, ask, “How do my trainees need to view suffering and sin in order to counsel people with compassion and discernment?”
• Ask, “What comprehensive understanding of salvation do my trainees need to grasp in order to counsel people toward progressive sanctification?”
• Our trainees need to understand that biblical counseling applies our salvation, comprehensively understood, to our progressive sanctification.
• How do people change? By applying justification, reconciliation, regeneration, and redemption to their daily lives.
• Our trainees need to think biblically about progressive sanctification.
• Trainees need to understand the process of growth of grace, including issues such as mind renewal, putting on/putting off, and the spiritual disciplines.
• Trainees need to know that sanctification is neither a self-improvement project or an individual process. We grow in community. Our trainees need the big picture of the relationship of biblical counseling to the rest of the life of the church.
• Heaven is not only the end of suffering and sinning. Heaven is the motivation for endurance of suffering today and for fighting against sin today.
• The comprehensive biblical insights of the soul physician must morph together with the compassionate, competent Christian engagement of the spiritual friend.
• Biblical counseling is not either/or: either a brilliant but uncaring soul physician, or a loving but unwise spiritual friend. God calls our trainees to be wise and loving soul physicians and spiritual friends.
• Pastoral care is defective unless it can deal thoroughly both with the evils we have suffered and with the sins we have committed.
• Historically, biblical counseling has always dealt with both suffering and sin.
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What makes biblical counseling truly biblical?
