What Do You Think?

Below you will find an excerpt from Dr. David Powlison's book, Speaking Truth in Love. On Saturday, March 6, Dr. Powlison will teach a conference in the Upper Valley for Christians called, "God's Heart for the Church." TBC is one of six churches sponsoring this event (see details and register at http://uvbc.wordpress.com ).

Some of you met David last summer, or the summer before, when he worshipped with us at TBC. David is a graduate of Harvard (A.B.), Westminster Theological Seminary (M.Div.), and the University of Pennsylvania (Ph.D.). Since 1977 he has served as a counselor and teacher at the Christian Counseling and Educational Foundation (CCEF). Since 1992, he has been the editor of the Journal of Biblical Counseling. He is also an adjunct lecturer at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. David has done much thinking, speaking and writing on topics like suffering, marital intimacy, death and dying, anger, sexual abuse, heart idolatries and emotional stress...all through the lens of Scripture. His two highly regarded books focus on how believers speak to one another and what they are speaking about: Speaking Truth in Love and Seeing With New Eyes.

To warm you up for the conference, I will give you brief excerpts of Powlison's writing over the next few weeks. In the section below, where you read the word "counseling" you might also read "being the church."

The Facts of Life (Part I)

It were an easy thing to be a Christian,
If religion stood only in a few outward works and duties,
But to take the soul to task,
and deal roundly with our own hearts,
and to let conscience have its full work,
and to bring the soul into spiritual subjection unto God,
This is not so easy a matter,
because the soul out of self-love is loath to enter into itself,
lest it should have other thoughts of itself than it would have.
- Richard Sibbes, Puritan Pastor (1577-1635)

Striking words, aren’t they? This statement—some 400 hundred years old—touches the deepest issues of counseling in any time and place. The soul of every human being is loath to enter into itself because of self-love. None of us wants to acknowledge things about ourselves that we would rather deny. We would really rather not know.

Do you ever talk with people about their problems or about your own? Sibbes’s words are a slipper that fits every foot. Perhaps your role is designated by some title that defines you as a counselor. Or you might be “just” a coworker, neighbor, friend, parent, spouse, sibling, child, or grandparent. How do you help a person you love to think straight, when he or she thinks crooked? How do you learn to see straight and think straight, when something inside you compulsively bends in the wrong direction?

You need a clear-eyed realism about the human tendency towards self-blinding. Only then will you bring a buoyant sense of the centrality of the grace of Jesus Christ in counseling ministry. And only then will you help people make the most essential change of all, learning to know God in real life. Those three issues—accurate honesty, living mercy, and daily intimacy—are the focus of the pages that follow.

Facing the Truth About Yourself
Sibbes gets first things first. Jesus’ almighty kindness comes to sinful people in order to recreate us as children of God’s glory. He remakes us poor in spirit, so we face our dire need for outside help. He remakes us boldly committed and grateful, knowing whom we have believed. He remakes us tender-hearted regarding the interests of others. As you become willing to “have other thoughts” of yourself than those that arise spontaneously, you initiate a torrent of other changes. The overthrow of your self-righteousness produces wonderfully different thoughts about Jesus Christ and other people.

But the soul’s blind self-love resists this sort of change. The one activity that creates the truly human life feels harmful to us instinctively. What keeps us from loving and needing God with all that we are? Something in us doesn’t want to face the Someone who insists on having the first and last say about our lives.

Naturally, that something in us does not want to be seen for what it is. It is allergic to the truth about ourselves because we have an allergic reaction to “spiritual submission to God.” We say No, No, No to life on God’s terms, and we forfeit self-knowledge in the bargain.

“Follow Me”
Yet the words of the personal Word and the power of the personal Spirit go patiently about the business of remaking us. God persistently teaches us to fear him, to trust him, to love him, and so, when we have ears to hear, we begin to serve him. To counsel others well, to seek wise counseling yourself, or to simply be a Christian (in the rich sense of Sibbes) all involves the same thing: a willingness to face up, to find mercy, and to change in this very particular way.

Only if you face up to your sin and your resistance to God can you see clearly and act gently, helping others to face up to themselves as well. The Bible calls this essential change dynamic by many names. Jesus says, “Become my disciple.” In other words, sign on for life learning. A learner is committed to becoming different. Do your opinions, feelings, choices, and habits currently have the status of divine right? Is how you are a given, something you insist on? As soon as I’m willing to say, “Not necessarily,” I step off the death spiral and onto the learning curve.

Jesus says, “Follow Me.” To follow somebody else runs completely opposite to the self-will that characterizes what I do instinctively. Listening to him runs directly opposite to the opinions I obsessively think. This change dynamic will make you radically counter-intuitive. To follow somebody else runs flat opposite to the entitled self-assertiveness that western culture reinforces in us every day. This change dynamic will make you radically counter-cultural, while every alternative to “Follow me” is just another way of going with the flow.

Jesus says, “First take the log out of your own eye.” Lightened of your sin’s blindness, you begin to see yourself and to cling to the mercies of God. You will treat other people’s failings more perceptively and gently. You will treat their troubles more generously. Every counseling model assumes some ideal of human functioning against which diagnoses are made and towards which the counseling process aims. But only one counseling model on Earth proposes this particular ideal: to see yourself the way Jesus sees you, and to know Christ as the person he knows himself to be. Only the Word made flesh sees into our evil this deeply. Only the Lord of life aims us in the direction of what human life is meant to be: honest love for God and neighbor. Do you genuinely love God? Do you heartily consider the interests of others? How can you move in that direction? Those are the final exam questions in the school of life. Counseling that neglects these questions neglects reality.