I’m Pondering… 

These are some initial ponderings—thinking out loud, if you will. Musing.

So…ponder with me…

You may recall David Powlison’s classic article from 1996, How Do You Help a “Psychologized Counselee”?  In his editorial, Powlison discussed biblical counseling with a counselee who views their problems through primarily psychological categories—a “psychologized” counselee.

I’ve been pondering a different, but perhaps related concept. I’m wondering about the issue of Counseling the “Biblicized” Counselee. By “biblicized, I mean:

The counselee who has mistaken ideas about what the Bible actually teaches about Christian living, Christlikeness, and the process of change. These mistaken beliefs are often influenced, sadly, by our modern Christian culture, and even by our secular world, more than by biblical truth.

Perhaps a Companion Book… 

I posted about this on my X (Twitter) account and on my Gospel-Centered Biblical Counseling Facebook group page. I had about ten times the responses I might normally receive. People were excited and positive about the need for help in counseling the biblicized counselee. Several people suggested I make it into a book.

So….

That got me thinking that perhaps this could be a companion book to my book Consider Your Counsel: Addressing Ten Mistakes in Our Biblical Counseling.

Perhaps it could be a somewhat similar title, such as:

Counseling the Biblicized Counselee: Addressing a Dozen Unbiblical Ideas Our Counselees Believe.

My Very Preliminary List of Unbiblical (Biblicized) Ideas 

If this were to become a book, I think I would start with some preliminary chapters on topics such as:

• What is a biblicized counselee?
• How does our current Christian culture, especially in the West, and including the modern biblical counseling movement, contribute to these unbiblical ideas about the Christian life?
• How might a counselor interact lovingly, patiently, wisely, and graciously with a biblicized counselee?

Then I would have several chapters (perhaps a dozen, but who knows) summarizing various biblicized ideas and discussing more specifically how to lovingly and wisely engage with biblicized counselees.

Some of my preliminary ideas about biblicized false beliefs include:

• Emotions are sinful (and empathy is sinful).
• Addressing the body in counseling is wrong (seeing us primarily as souls instead of embodied-souls).
• We should “suffer well” meaning that mature Christians should experience an absence of painful feelings and never lament.
• True biblical counseling focuses on sin, not suffering.
• The concept of “trauma” is purely a secular idea.
• Anxiety is always sin.
• Depression is always sin.
• Bodily interventions are secular and sinful.
• Wives should stay in an abusive home and submit to their husbands no matter what.
• Common grace descriptive research has no place in biblical counseling.
• Abuse victims should immediately forgive and reconcile with abusers.

These are all ideas that the biblicized counselee may assume are biblical, but they are not. 

Question for Discussion 

As I mentioned, I posted these preliminary ideas on X and Facebook. I then asked,

What “biblicized” false concepts do Christian counselees bring to you that you would add to this list?

I received so many helpful responses that I can’t even keep up with collating them. But here are the suggestions from other pastors, counselors, educators, and leaders that I’ve collated so far.

• Abuse victims should quickly think of ways they have contributed to the abuse.
• Marriage and/or parenting is your highest calling and the primary path toward your sanctification.
• Men want/need sex more than women.
• A wife must always meet her husband’s sexual needs.
• My story doesn’t really matter.
• Doubt always equals sinful unbelief.
• A godly home will automatically equal saved/godly children.
• Using psychotropic medication is always wrong.
• Biblical counseling will make all pain go away.
• Self-forgiveness.
• Setting boundaries is unloving.
• Forgive and forget.
• God will always give you good things and bless you if you obey Him. If anything bad happens to it is because you stepped outside of God given authority.
• Men should lead their families using the “power over” model.
• Women are “easily deceived” and cannot rightly interpret or understand the Bible.
• Suffering is always the result of sin.
• We always experience God’s presence the most/in the most powerful ways in times of suffering.
• Experiencing temptation is sin.

What Would You Add? 

What “biblicized” false concepts do Christian counselees bring to you that you would add to this list?

What are false ideas and concepts that the “biblicized” counselee assumes are biblical, but in reality they have more to do with the world’s foolishness than the Word’s wisdom?

Addendum: “Linguistic Irony” and the Prophetic Precedent for “Biblicized”

It is sad and tragic when any of us as Christians are duped by the Deceiver—Satan—into believing unhelpful, unhealthy, unholy ideas about what the Bible actually teaches. The term biblicized captures the tragedy of twisting biblical language or concepts into forms that distort rather than reveal the heart of God. Creating the term “biblicized” is a form of linguistic irony which stands in continuity with a long biblical tradition in which prophets, Jesus, and apostles deliberately inverted or redefined sacred vocabulary to expose spiritual corruption and misplaced confidence.

The prophets often turned covenantal titles into their own indictments: Hosea transformed Israel’s covenant names Ammi (“my people”) and Ruhamah (“loved”) into Lo-Ammi (“not my people”) and Lo-Ruhamah (“not loved”) to dramatize the nation’s betrayal of divine love (Hos. 1:6–9). Similarly, Isaiah lamented that “the faithful city has become a harlot” (Isa. 1:21), converting one of Scripture’s most exalted titles for Zion into a symbol of unfaithfulness. Amos reversed the people’s expectation of “the day of the LORD” as a time of deliverance, warning instead that it would be darkness and judgment (Amos 5:18–20). Ezekiel denounced Israel’s corrupt leaders as “shepherds” who fed themselves rather than their flock (Ezek. 34:2), and Jeremiah mocked the prophets who cried “Peace, peace” when there was no peace (Jer. 6:14). Even sacred metaphors of love and marriage were subverted in Hosea, where Israel’s “lovers” symbolized spiritual adultery. In these prophetic ironies, holy words are not rejected but turned back on their abusers.

Jesus likewise participated in this prophetic-linguistic tradition. He transformed the ordinary Greek term hypokritēs—originally meaning “actor” or “performer”—into a moral accusation against religious showmanship: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!” (Matt. 23). He took the noble identity of “sons of Abraham,” a cherished marker of covenant privilege, and redefined it ethically rather than genealogically: “If you were Abraham’s children, you would be doing the works Abraham did” (John 8:39). He used the term “righteous” ironically to describe those who thought themselves in no need of repentance (Luke 5:32), and His references to “teachers of the Law” and “experts in the Law” often dripped with holy sarcasm toward those who used Torah to exalt themselves (Luke 11:46–52). By His usage, once-honored religious terms became mirrors revealing spiritual blindness.

The apostles continued this pattern of sanctified wordplay and reversal. Paul famously mocked his rivals in Corinth by labeling them “super-apostles” (2 Cor. 11:5)—a title of self-promotion turned into a stinging caricature. Likewise, he transformed the revered covenant sign of peritomē (“circumcision”) into katatomē (“mutilation”) when that sacred practice was detached from grace and weaponized as legalism (Phil. 3:2).

In this biblical lineage, biblicized names a modern continuation of that prophetic irony. It describes the phenomenon in which the language of Scripture is invoked in ways that betray its intent—when biblical truth is flattened, hardened, or misused in unhelpful, unhealthy, and even unholy ways. To biblicize something, in this sense, is not to make it truly biblical but to baptize distortion in biblical vocabulary, producing an appearance of piety while severing it from grace and truth.