(Please note: the most recent conference for CCEF [Christian Counseling and Education Foundation] was on the related theme of fear, worry, and the rest of God. MP3s will be available soon at the CCEF website.)
by David Powlison
Newhart’s wit also creates a perfect foil for understanding the contrast between what our world offers and the riches of biblical counseling. Here are a half dozen contrasts:
1. The Bible gives a vision for lifelong transformation and mutual aid – as well as for the 5-minute moment of insight, or the 5-week and 5-month seasons of change, or the 5-year unfolding movement of progressive transformation and deepening. “Encourage one another daily, as long as it is called ‘Today,’ that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.” The encouragements of the gospel of grace meet us again and again. They are always new-to-you in some way. Yet they always embrace the Christ who is the same yesterday, today, and forever.
2. Our Father never simply says “Stop it!” to the Katherine Bigmans or anyone else. He knows we can’t change on our own. We have a living Savior, who died to give us mercy and lives to give us grace in times of need. The Word willingly became flesh and dwelt among us. We simply are not able to “Just say No.” If we happen to say No to one self-destructive behavior, our self-absorption will merely express itself in another, perhaps less obvious, form of self-destruction. Jesus sympathizes with our weaknesses. He was tempted in all ways as we are, yet without sin. We need help from outside ourselves – and he helps. On our own, sins and miseries are fundamentally inescapable. The fear of being buried alive, the compulsion to self-induced vomiting, and the instinct to pursue destructive relationships are certainly first-order human miseries, confusions, and sins. Our Father’s “Stop” always comes with lots of ways, reasons, and help to “Go.”
4. Human responsibility is never by oneself and to oneself. It is always relational. For example, like all therapists, Dr. Phil meets with men and women whose lives are tragically wrong-headed and tragically alone. He, like Bob Newhart, sees the wrong-headedness. It’s easy to see that something’s wrong. But he doesn’t see – can’t see – that the person inhabits the barren-universe-of-self. The real world overflows with God and with opportunities to love others. But when you watch Dr. Phil counsel or when you meet with strugglers, that essential, desperate aloneness will break your heart. God awakens us first to see that we are not alone, drifting across an uncharted sea. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,” now and always.
5. To bluntly confront such a frightened struggler violates the ABCs of biblical wisdom: “comfort the faint-hearted, hold on to the weak, be patient with them all.”If Katherine Bigman were a conscienceless serial adulterer, filled with self-righteous bitterness, and aggressively blameshifing others for all her problems… then she’d be a candidate for “admonish the unruly.” But she presents herself as confused and needy. You’ll respond appropriately. Of course, warning and moral exhortation are facets of comprehensive wisdom. But biblical admonishment is premised on entirely different assumptions than the accusatory severities of a Dr. Phil. You hold out an entirely different hope for change. You are never hectoring. You never deliver personal threats. You never cast a person back on his or her own resources, as if flesh might tame unruly flesh. And you always hold out offers of mercy and hope to those who begin to take seriously what they look like to God. You always invite another person out of a life of futility and into a life positively worth living.
And so forth. Don’t ever think that biblical counseling is just CBT dolled up with some Bible verses. And “Stop it!” if you ever treat people that way! Wisdom is a wonderfully different creature. When our Father stops us from doing something wrong, he always starts us walking along a delightfully different path.