Timeless Truth for Our Changing Times
You’re reading Part 5 in an ongoing RPM Ministries blog mini-series on Timeless Truth for Our Changing Times: The Ancient Paths of Soul Care. In this series:
- We’re examining ancient, historical Christian soul care to see what our 50-year-young modern nouthetic biblical counseling movement can learn from the ancient paths of 2,000 years of church history.
Here’s information on and links to our previous posts in this blog mini-series:
- In Part 1, I tell the story of my history with church history. I also introduce you to my writings on the history of soul care. You can read that post here: 3 Books on Biblical Counseling in Church History: A Treasure Hunt.
- In Part 2, I introduce you to “the democracy of the dead”—to past voices speaking to us today. You can read that post here: 17 Resources on the History of Pastoral Counseling, Soul Care, and Biblical Counseling.
- In Part 3, I ask and answer a series of questions. How do we date the beginning of “biblical counseling”? When did “biblical counseling” begin? What’s the birthdate of “biblical counseling”? What is “historic,” “classic” biblical counseling? You can read that post here: What Is “Historic,” “Classic” Biblical Counseling?
- In Part 4, we learned how the wisdom from the ancient paths (Jeremiah 6:16) of historical Christian pastoral care offers us a template for compassionate, comprehensive care and counseling. You can read this post here: What Can Modern Biblical Counselors Learn from Historical Soul Care?
A Review
In What Can Modern Biblical Counselors Learn from Historical Soul Care?, we focused on a four-dimensional model of historic pastoral care: sustaining, healing, reconciling, and guiding.
- Sustaining: “It’s normal to hurt.” “Life is bad.” The earthly story. Lament. Empathy.
- Healing: “It’s possible to hope.” “God is good.” The heavenly story. Hope. Encouragement.
- Reconciling: “It’s horrible to sin, but wonderful to be forgiven.” “Where sin abounds, grace superabounds.” “Exposing sin and dispensing grace.” Enlightening.
- Guiding: “It’s supernatural to mature.” “Fan into flame the gift of God.” Equipping.
We learned that:
- Wisdom from the ancient paths (Jeremiah 6:16) of historical Christian pastoral care offers us a template for compassionate, comprehensive care and counseling.
- Historical pastoral care provides a four-dimensional model of comprehensive, compassionate care. Understanding the history of pastoral care helps us avoid a one-dimensional mindset that mistakenly acts as if pastoral counseling is primarily about confronting sin.
- Historical pastoral care models how to provide shepherding care for saints on their sanctification journey who suffer in our sinful world and who struggle against sin journey.
Today, we want to see how modern biblical counselors can apply historical pastoral soul care.
Lingering in Lament: Comfortable with Comforting
In our previous post, we learned that throughout church history, pastoral care givers and one-another ministers were comfortable with comforting. They did not see their self-identity primarily as talkers who confront others. They saw their identity as companions on a journey who came alongside (parakaleo) others with empathy and encouragement.
What might this look like for us as biblical counselors to linger in lament and to be comfortable with comforting? When I train counselors in lab small group settings, we’ll read Psalm 13, Psalm 88, and 2 Corinthians 1, and then we’ll discuss together:
- “Could you be patient enough to allow a psalmist to linger in their lament?”
- “Imagine that you were counseling David in Psalm 13, and he said, ‘How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?’ Would you be comfortable patiently listening to David’s lament and compassionately entering David’s soul? Or, would you fear that David was in danger of saying something that he would later have to repent of. Would you feel the need to race from listening to truth telling?”
- Imagine that you were counseling Heman in Psalm 88 and he ended with these words, ‘You have taken from me friend and neighbor—darkness is my closest friend.’ Would you be uncomfortable with Heman ending his psalm with ‘darkness is my closest friend’? Or, could you have multiple sessions where you listened to and engaged with Heman in his confusion and lament?”
- “Imagine that you were counseling the apostle Paul in 2 Corinthians 1, and you just heard him share these words, ‘I do not want you to be ignorant about the troubles I experienced. I was under great pressure, far beyond my ability to endure, so that I despaired of life itself. Indeed, I felt like I had received the sentence of death.’ Could you linger there with Paul? Could you draw out Paul’s pain? Could you enter Paul’s emotions? Could you express empathy for Paul? Or, would you feel the need to correct Paul’s ‘feeling-based living’? Would you feel the need to confront Paul by quoting Paul back to Paul? ‘No temptation has overtaken you but such as is common to man, but God is faithful and will not allow you to suffer beyond what you are able to endure.’”
If we are church history-informed, as we learned in our previous post(s), then our repertoire expands beyond nouthetic confrontation. If we practice historical pastoral care, then we can be comfortable with the patient, pain-staking, relational, emotional connection involved in parakaletic compassionate care for suffering.
If we are church history-informed, then our repertoire expands beyond truth-telling (healing) to truth-listening (sustaining). If we are not church history-informed, then we might practice a one-dimensional model that teaches, “Don’t spend a lot of time in sustaining. Don’t linger with the person exploring and entering their fallen world and their hurting soul. Instead, move rather quickly to gospel hope (healing) and telling them truth about God.” If we practice historical pastoral care, then we could linger in both realities—the truth about their suffering soul (sustaining) and the truth about their suffering Savior (healing).
God’s Healing for Life’s Losses
In my grief booklet, God’s Healing for Life’s Losses, I apply this biblical/historical model of pastoral care to grief and loss using sustaining and healing.
Sustaining and Grief
- Candor: Being honest with ourselves about the pain of our fallen world.
- Complaint/Lament: Being honest with God about the pain of our fallen world.
- Cry: Crying out to God in utter dependence and longing—crying out for help; desperate for God.
- Comfort: Receiving God’s presence—the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort.
Healing and Grief
- Waiting: Waiting on God, longing for God. Enduring the chronic pain of chronic suffering.
- Wailing: Groaning with hope. Not denying our pain, suffering, feelings, emotions, trauma, experiences, or situation, but groaning to God while clinging to future hope.
- Weaving: Perceiving God’s goodness in the midst of life’s badness. Believing that though men meant this for evil, God will weave it together for good.
- Worshipping: Finding God even when we don’t find relief. Trusting God and serving others—in the midst of our own pain.
Care and counseling are not linear. Instead, we move back and forth between candor, complain, crying out, comfort, waiting, wailing, weaving, and worshipping.
- We are worshipping God when we candidly lament.
- We are worshipping God when we wail out with Romans 8-like groaning.
- We are weaving in biblical truth when we candidly lament how painful the evils of this fallen world are.
If we are not careful, if we are not church history-informed, then some of us might end up racing past candor, complaint/lament, crying out, comfort, waiting, and wailing. Historic pastoral care patiently journeys with the suffering person.
Perhaps we could summarize it like this:
- It is theological, biblical, and historical to patiently, relationally engage counselees in their earthly laments and to empathetically enter their painful emotions. This is psalm-like biblical counseling.
“Listening with Two Ears”: Lingering Listening
I teach counselors-in-training that we “listen with two ears.” With one ear we are listening to the person’s earthy story of suffering and pain. With the other ear we are listening together to God’s eternal story of compassion, comfort, care, and hope.”
Here’s my fear. If we force in eternal truth before people are even facing their own earthly reality, then people are not actually applying God’s story to their story or to their soul. Instead, they are generically applying God’s story before they are even clear on their own soul and situation.
“Facing Our Suffering Face-to-Face with Christ”
I also teach that we need to “face our suffering face-to-face with Christ.” But note what that requires: that we face our suffering. We don’t race from our sufferings. We face our suffering. And only then can we truly face our suffering face-to-face with Christ.
I provide pro bono counseling and soul care for pastors. In their pain, I seek to help them to face their suffering and to explore their pain, hurts, and disappointments. Not infrequently, instead of experiencing their pain, they quickly race themselves to inviting God into generic disappointment.
“Well. Yes. This hurts. But God is so good. I don’t want to complain or focus on the pain.”
When pastors don’t want to face their disappointments, pain, sorrow, suffering, and trauma, I seek to slow them down. I start by listening to them as they refuse to listen to their own suffering. Then, at some point I might share something like this…
“Yes. God is good. And in His goodness He invites us to lament….”
I give them biblical permission to grieve. My offer to “climb in the casket with them” often begins the process of their candidly facing their emotions, their pain, their sorrows. After several weeks of this sort of “lament work” with one pastor, he shared with me (and has given me permission to share this):
“I’ve been so brainwashed into thinking that it is weak to feel. For the first time, perhaps ever, I feel a freedom to feel and to invite God into my feelings, instead of stuffing my feelings. I feel the freedom to be honest with you and honest with God and honest with myself. I feel the freedom to feel weak. And for the first time, I am truly sensing God’s compassion for me.”
Here’s another summary—based upon the Bible and church history:
We don’t want us to force-feed God-talk into people before they actually have done real-life-talk.
How can we invite God into our feelings if we are terrified of our feelings? How can we invite God into our suffering if we are not truthfully facing our situation and our soul?
Care and Counsel Like Paul
In 1 Thessalonians 2:7-8, Paul tells the Christians at Thessalonica:
“We loved you so much that we were delighted to give you not only the gospel, but our own souls, because you are dear to us.”
Paul’s pastoral care and counseling embraced truth and love. It embraced Scripture and soul. It embraced relationship and the gospel. It was never either/or. It was always both/and.
Biblical counseling that commits to patient, in-depth relational/emotional engagement is not less theological than directive counseling that races people to answers. Theological counseling follows a biblical theological anthropology that sees us as physical, emotional, volitional, rational, relational, social, self-aware, spiritual beings.
We comprehensively, compassionately engage the whole person. We don’t’ just seek to pry open the cranium and do a content dump. We don’t just seek to confront them into volitional compliance with external standards of behavioral response to the trauma of living in a fallen world. We patiently, compassionately offer them our very own souls because they are dear to us.
Care Like Historical Pastoral Care Givers
We counsel like that great cloud of historical biblical pastoral care givers when:
- We invite people to lament like the psalmists, to groan like Romans 8, and to acknowledge despair like the apostle Paul.
- We journey patiently with people as they candidly face fallen life with integrity.
- We linger and listen compassionately to their suffering and enter empathetically into their pain.
- We listen long to their story of suffering and hurt, and we invite them to listen longingly to their suffering Savior’s story of comfort and hope.
- We move wisely at their pace as together we invite their Suffering Savior into their suffering soul.
- We journey together with them exploring how God’s eternal story of hope impacts their earthly story of suffering.
The Rest of the Story
Here’s your invitation to Part 6, where we’ll compare and contrast the expansive ministry of historical pastoral care with the more limited/focused nature of modern biblical counseling.
