Do you take Christian service seriously? I don't mean cleaning and shoveling and cooking. Such service is crucial to the vitality of a church and we should always be thankful to God for those who serve with their hands. But the service I am talking about is the service of the head and heart. Are you serious about serving other Christians around you with thoughtful, Christ-honoring communication that turns the soul to God? Not just Bible-talk but a soulish care that listens carefully, a soulish care that probes gently, a soulish care that seeks connection where there is silence, a soulish care that is biblically ordered and thus reveals the presence and power of Christ because, after all, our Christian fellowship with one another exists only because we are each in fellowship with the ever-present Lord Jesus Christ (1 John 1:1-3).
Below you will find a second excerpt from Dr. David Powlison's book, Speaking Truth in Love. Where you see the word "counseling" feel free to insert the word "serving" as in "serving Christ's interests in another person's life." Thirty-one times in the New Testament alone we are commanded to serve "one another" in for Christ's sake.
Reminder: On Saturday, March 6, Dr. Powlison will be teaching day-conference in the Upper Valley for Christian called, "God's Heart for the Church." TBC is one of five churches sponsoring this event (see details and register at http://uvbc.wordpress.com).
The Facts of Life, Pt. 2
The War with Yourself
As you begin counseling any other person, you must be gripped by this vision. Without it, some species of self-deception will ultimately call the shots. Your finest insights and best intentions will short-circuit. None of us naturally approaches our troubles saying, “I must become different. I need help. Make me understand. Teach me simple trust, no matter what I face. Teach me to love other people. Teach me to respond well in every circumstance. Take away my grumbling, my anxiety, my pretense, my avoidance, my self-absorption. Forgive me. Change me by your mercy.”
The Christian life is a lifelong “race of repentance,” but we want to have arrived already. We don’t like having to become different, but repentance is the Bible’s word for “thorough, deep-seated, genuine change.” It means turning from old ways to new. You wake up to find yourself living in God’s universe, no longer sleepwalking through the universe of your desires and fears. A race of repentance calls for the ongoing reversal of our deepest instincts and opinions. You wake up again and again.
J.C. Ryle said that coming to vital Christian faith starts a lifelong quarrel inside a person: “You and sin must quarrel, if you and God are to be friends.” Imagine, I must quarrel with myself if I am to befriend God! To deal firmly with yourself is the hard way, the narrow way . . . and the only good way. Perhaps I should say it more strongly. To enter into yourself is the brutally wonderful, painstakingly delightful way. It sometimes feels like death, but always comes up life. The alternatives sometimes feel like life but always come up death.
Honest war with yourself comes paired with incomprehensible gifts. The peace of God passes all understanding, at the cost of all your fears! The love of God surpasses knowing, at the cost of every false love! Whatever you do, get this wisdom, this kingdom of God, this Christ! Nothing you could possibly desire compares. The cost is high: yourself. The reward is higher: no eye has seen, no ear has heard, no heart has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him.
Two Kinds of People
You counsel two kinds of people in principle. One kind will hear and embrace what Richard Sibbes stated so eloquently. Some hear immediately. Jesus can have his say and his way. Others hear more gradually. They may temporarily bristle at what is true, but sooner or later they listen. Even as they point a bitter finger at others or at God, or nurse narcotic self-pity, they listen to truth’s reproof. Hearts soften and they eventually prove teachable. Sooner or later, this first kind of person is willing to come under subjection to God. He begins changing in the directions Jesus intends. If you are this kind of person you may weave and stumble, but in roughly the right direction!
The other kind of person will not hear what Sibbes says. They are fundamentally closed to what the true God is all about. Perhaps they view God as “the errand boy to satisfy [their] wandering desires.” They might talk God-talk and be religiously active and have spiritual experiences . . . but they want something else out of it all. Or they might simply not care about God’s point of view. Most non-hearers crave thinking well of themselves. They get angry when God insists we glorify him instead of serving our lust for self-esteem. Such people don’t want to need Jesus. They want to be okay on their own. They want to be the hero of their own spiritual journey, not a small part in Jesus’ story. To them, Sibbes’s words are a depressing insult, not a doorway into unexpected joys.
Many cherished desires deafen people to the sanity of what Sibbes says – and so fulfill his prophecy. It’s not easy to face yourself, to think differently about what you hold dear. People crave love, success, money and good health, fame and power, marriage and children, comfort, excitement, food and pleasure, independence and being right – and more. Does it make you angry that Jesus intends to revise your personal goals in order to “break your schemes for earthly joy”? This second kind of person is fundamentally unteachable and will not make the daily U-turn and leads to life.
Probing the Soul’s Resistance
How does anyone muster up the courage to take any soul to task – including his or her own? How dare you assert to anyone that most of our lives are spent in fogs of self-deception? Interestingly, modern secular thought has spent a lot of time probing our resistance to knowing ourselves accurately. Tracing such “resistance” became a staple of serious thought about human nature in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Nietzsche, Marx, and the psychodynamic psychologists (Freud, Jung, Adler, existentialists) all agreed that people resist looking in the mirror. They wanted to make honest persons of us all, whatever the blows to our pride and self-satisfaction.
The “masters of suspicious” were brilliant at seeing that we delude ourselves. But they could never agree on what we were avoiding or what the alternative is. They could never answer the crucial questions, What exactly is that we’re all so unwilling to see?
Is it perverse sexual impulses? Murderous hostilities? A cosmic dark side in our souls? A craving for power and superiority? A fear of death? The self-serving rationalization and hypocrisy of “civilized” existence? The inequities of wealth, power, and status? Great but godless thinkers disputed each other’s theories; a Christian sees that each was partly right. All these things squirm within our souls. But all the theorists were ultimately wrong because an even darker cinder smolders inside us: “The hearts of the sons of men are full of evil, and insanity is in their hearts throughout their lives” (Eccl.9:3). What is that referring to? We human beings most fiercely resist seeing ourselves as God sees us, because we fiercely resist seeing God as he is. We don’t want someone else to get final say – and we don’t want to admit it. We don’t want to need someone else to rescue us from ourselves. Compulsive unbelief and self-sin (an against-God bias) are more ominous – and more interpersonal – than the psychological kinks of other theories. We compulsively rebel against the Person to whom we owe our lives. Our psychological kinks are wrongs done against the Person we are created to love. We are not first “psychologically” false. We are first interpersonally false, covenantally false, religiously false. We play false to ourselves because we play false to God and don’t want to face up to it.
In another word, we sin. We don’t want to know this. It’s easier to admit sexual perversity, a death wish, power drives, egotism, neediness, or class-consciousness than to admit sinfulness in the sight of God. Bad as they are, those other things are not the devastating blow that unglues us. This does.
You must approach counseling ministry with a keep awareness of this core choice in every human heart. The people who talk in any “counseling” conversation come with many different personal agendas. Few people begin with Sibbes’s observation in mind! So start with yourself. Take your soul to task. You will then be better abler to bring the hard and sweet words that others need, if they, too, are to let conscience have its full work.
No comments:
Post a Comment