The Need For Biblical Counseling
The Need for Biblical Counseling
Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”
-Matthew 11:28-30, ESV
When we think of counseling, we often envision laying on a couch and talking at length about our childhood to a professional who listens intently while taking notes before offering some tips to help address our problems. So when my previous church was emphasizing its biblical counseling ministry and encouraging people to take the biblical counseling course they offered, I agreed with the need for it but was not interested in it myself. Now, I am even more convinced of the need and feel called to help meet that need, having completed that course and subsequent exams so that I am now on the cusp of beginning to counsel. So why the shift?
What is Counseling?
This shift began with a shift in my understanding of what counseling actually is. While we often envision therapy conducted by professionals, counseling is not confined to this scenario. Heath Lambert provides a more general definition:
“Counseling is a conversation where one party with questions, problems, and trouble seeks assistance from someone they believe has answers, solutions, and help.”
– Heath Lambert, A Theology of Biblical Counseling, Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan: 2016, 13.
By that definition, we are all giving and receiving counsel all the time. When I advise a subordinate in how to handle a difficult work situation, I am counseling. When I worked with a junior airman who was struggling financially to develop a budget, I was counseling. When my former team lead reached out asking me to explain to his subordinates how I had run a program in order to help them better run their programs, I was counseling. All of these are examples of counseling in an informal sense, and none of them involve couches or professional therapists. These are just some of the enumerable circumstances where we get and give counsel all the time. So whether we admit it or not, we are frequently involved in counseling. This is especially true for Christianity, where this definition of counseling fits within the broader context of discipleship, being part of teaching people to observe everything that Christ commanded (Matthew 28:19-20). It is commanded elsewhere as well:
All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work….I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing and his kingdom: preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching.
-2 Timothy 3:16-17, 4:1-2, ESV
Brothers, if anyone is caught in any transgression, you who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness. Keep watch on yourself, lest you too be tempted. Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.
-Galatians 6:1-2, ESV
Clearly, counseling is necessary to life in general and the Christian life in particular, so we need to know how to counsel. For Christians, the supremacy and authority of Scripture mean that we need to learn how to counsel in a way that is biblical.
What Makes Counseling Biblical?
So what makes counseling biblical? In short, biblical counseling is when the Bible is the primary source used in counseling and the standard to which all secondary sources are subordinated. In biblical counseling, everything revolves around Scripture and the process of lasting change that God lays out in Scripture. Dr. T. Dale Johnson, Jr. and Samuel Stephens give a more detailed definition of biblical counseling:
“Biblical counseling is the personal discipleship ministry of God’s people to others under the oversight of God’s church, dependent upon the authority and sufficiency of God’s Word through the work of the Holy Spirit. Biblical counseling seeks to reorient disordered desires, affections, thoughts, behaviors, and worship toward a God-designed anthropology in an effort to restore people to a right fellowship with God and others. This is accomplished by speaking the truth in love and applying Scripture to the need of the moment by comforting the suffering and calling sinners to repentance, thus working to make them mature as they abide in Jesus Christ.”
-Samuel Stephens, A Call to Counsel and Care: The Distinguishing Qualities of Biblical Counseling, booklet by the Association of Certified Biblical Counselors, 2021, 14-15.none
This definition lays out the distinctives of biblical counseling:
Biblical counseling is a discipleship ministry. It is the private ministry of the Word just as preaching is the public ministry of the Word. This involves understanding the situation biblically and applying Scripture to the situation.
Biblical counseling is done by Christians for Christians under the authority of the local church. Since it requires submission to Scripture, it must be conducted by Christian counselors to Christian counselee in order to be effective. As with all discipleship, biblical counseling must be done under the authority of the elders of the local church. A biblical counselor operates under the authority of the elders of a local church for all formal counseling, and the counselee should be under the authority of the elders of a local church as well.
Biblical counseling depends on the authority and sufficiency of Scripture. I dealt with this in my post on American theological illiteracy regarding Scripture, so I will only summarize here. God’s Word has ultimate authority over every aspect of our lives, including every situation that any counselee will ever face. God’s Word is also sufficient to equip every Christian for every good work, including handling every situation a Christian counselee can encounter (2 Timothy 3:16-17, 2 Peter 1:3). This is one of the major distinctives of biblical counseling, since it means that biblical counselors see the teachings of psychology and psychiatry as unnecessary and in many cases unhelpful (or even harmful). Based on a secular humanist worldview devoid of God, psychology and psychiatry overemphasize self, underemphasize (or even deny) sin, deny the spiritual side of soul issues, and rely on human remedies from a human understanding that is severely tainted by sin. Instead, biblical counseling relies on Scripture as the only completely reliable source of information about the soul. God, who created the soul and is the only one who truly understands it (Jeremiah 17:9-10), so Scripture is the only definitive work on the subject.
Biblical counseling relies on the power of the Holy Spirit to transform the lives of counselees. Scripture teaches that the issues we face are a result of sin: our sin, the sins of others, and the world corrupted because of sin. The only way to bring true and lasting change is for the Holy Spirit to transform our sinful hearts. Anything short of this results in only short-term and superficial change. This means that the Gospel is the first priority of biblical counseling. If the counselee does not understand or believe the Gospel, that must be addressed before any of the issues the counselee is facing can be approached biblically.
Biblical counseling focuses on the desires and motives that undergird our words and actions rather than the words and actions themselves (Matthew 15:10-20, Mark 7:14-23, James 4:1-3). Words and actions are the fruit of desires and motives, so true change comes from the inside, with transformed motives and desires producing transformed words and actions.
Biblical counseling seeks to understand and address the counselee’s situation using biblical rather than psychological terminology. This means helping counselees understand who God is, who they are, and where their situations originate as the Bible teaches using biblical language instead of the psychological language. Whether counselees are familiar with the Diagnostic and Statistics Manual of Mental Disorders or not, they often use psychological terminology because it is so pervasive in our vernacular. It also carries certain baggage, particularly in rooting counselees’ identity in psychological conditions rather than in an identity shaped by Scripture. Instead, biblical counseling describes the counselee’s situation in biblical terms. This means lovingly calling out sins, exhorting counselees to repent of their sins when appropriate. It also means helping them respond biblically to situations in which they are sinned against, including forgiving those who sinned against them as God has forgiven them
The ultimate goal of biblical counseling is sanctification in which the counselee becomes more like Christ, not necessarily the removal or resolution of the situation the counselee is facing (Romans 8:28-30, 1 Thessalonians 4:3). Since God never promises to remove our troubles but does promise to help us in them, we cannot promise counselees that which God does not promise (1 Corinthians 10:13). This means biblical counselors help counselees to understand and trust in the sovereignty and goodness of God in their situations so that they place their hope in God, resting in and striving for God’s present work of sanctification and future work of glorification rather than short-term remedies to their present problems.
Biblical Counseling vs. Christian Counseling
These distinctives differentiate biblical counseling from both psychology and the methods of Christian counseling that are often used in churches and parachurch organizations. Christian counseling seeks to integrate Scripture with psychology under the argument that psychology results from God’s common grace. God has graciously given people the ability to discover truth by observing the world around them. Part of this is the systematic and rigorous observations that result from psychological and psychiatric study. Thus, it would be foolish to completely ignore this wealth of information that God has graciously provided, so Christian counseling seeks to integrate psychology with Scripture in order to bring the full toolbox that God has provided to bear on a counselee’s problems.
Biblical counselors would agree that we should not completely ignore the observations of psychology and psychiatry. With the sheer volume of psychological observations over the years, there is certainly some useful information to be gleaned. However, like all observations resulting from common grace, these are tainted by the noetic effect of sin, which describes how sin distorts everyone’s ability to think and reason properly. Tarnished by the Fall, our minds suppress the truth that exalts God and abases self, which Satan then uses to further blind us from the truth (Jeremiah 17:9-10, Romans 1:18-32). Since the worldview that produced psychology and psychiatry is rooted in atheism, these disciplines ignore the inherently spiritual nature of soul care, over-value self, misinterpret sin as sickness, and lack any satisfying answer for suffering. In contrast, Scripture gives us a God-centric view of the world, which describes our hopeless condition in sin using no uncertain terms. And in both its description of the sovereignty of God and the effects of the Fall, Scripture gives us a truly satisfying answer for the origin, purpose, and remedy of suffering (Romans 5:3-5, Hebrews 12). Scripture and psychology/psychiatry therefore contradict one another and thus cannot be effectively integrated, so attempts to integrate them must favor one to the detriment of the other. The integration in Christian counseling often favors psychology to the detriment of Scripture, while biblical counselors are committed to Scripture to the detriment of psychology. This means that in biblical counseling, the observations of psychology can only be used when viewed through the lens of Scripture and having successfully passed through the filter of Scripture to be proven true by Scripture as the ultimate standard of truth.
This is not to meant as a slight to the many dedicated Christian counselors who are legitimately trying to help people to the best of their ability and training using the tools and expertise they have. I merely say this to point out the distinction between Christian counseling and biblical counseling. I also acknowledge that there is a spectrum in Christian counseling as to how much Scripture vs. psychology individual counselors use. This means that while there may be Christian counselors who use Scripture almost exclusively (just as biblical counselors do), many lean much more heavily on psychology. This creates a broad spectrum within Christian counseling between almost exclusive use of Scripture and almost exclusive use of psychology such that a Scriptural foundation cannot be consistently expected from Christian counseling. This does not mean that those seeking counsel should avoid Christian counselors entirely, but that they should use careful discretion to ensure that the specific Christian counselor in question uses a Scriptural rather than psychological foundation before beginning counseling.
I am also not claiming that psychology can never be effective, as it has been proven to bring about change in people’s lives. However, psychology is attempting to address the soul, which is inherently spiritual (and therefore outside of the realm of observational science) and can thus only be understood through Scripture. This means that the methods of psychology can only result from what can be observed, limiting their ability to be consistently effective. This is not to say that biblical counseling can always effective, as its dependence on the work of the Holy Spirit gives us no guarantees that our objectives will be met. He decides whether He will bring about the desired change and the manner and timeline with which He will act. Still, biblical counseling does take the spiritual aspects of counselees’ problems into consideration in ways that psychology and psychiatry cannot.
Finally, it is important to note that while biblical counseling emphasizes the spiritual aspects of the counselee’s situation, that does not require a complete neglect of the physical. There can be physical aspects to counseling problems (and biblical counselors encourage the involvement of medical professionals in addressing the physical aspects of these problems), but we cannot ignore the spiritual aspect of counseling issues and expect to consistently produce deep and lasting change.
Who Should Counsel?
Since counseling is a part of discipleship and all Christians are commanded to make disciples, all Christians are involved in biblical counseling in an informal sense whenever they use the bible to help people face various situations. Thus, we are counseling people biblically when we use the Scriptures to help someone understand their situation and what God says about it in order to help them obey what God says about their situation. In a formal sense, biblical counselors need to be people who are well versed in the Bible, who can listen empathetically to the struggles of others, and who can gently guide people to a biblical understanding of their situation and obedience to God in addressing it. These must be mature believers who hold themselves to a high standard of biblical conduct. Because counselees will be sharing things that are very personal and sensitive, counselors need to be very trustworthy. All of this fits the description of a deacon in 1 Timothy 3:8-13, so while biblical counselors do not need to be deacons, a biblical counselor should have the character traits of a deacon. One of these traits is that they “hold the mysteries of the faith with a clear conscience”, meaning they need to understand Scripture and theology well enough to explain them clearly and help people to apply them.
This means that even formal counseling is not merely the realm of professionals who are licensed or certified, though certifications for biblical counseling do exist (I am working toward one now). This means that regardless of your training, if these traits describe you, or if you desire for this to describe you, I would encourage you to consider becoming a biblical counselor. The Association of Certified Biblical Counselors and similar organizations offer training in the fundamentals of biblical counseling that I think would be of value to any believer. If you are interested in receiving counsel from such people, you can use the “find a counselor” tool on that site or visit my own biblical counseling page.
All in all, the church in general and the American church in particular needs biblical counseling. It is my desire and prayer that each local church (or potentially group of local churches) would have a cadre of men and women trained in biblical counseling and called by God to care for the saints through this private ministry of the Word to which all manner of people in the church can turn for biblically-based help with any issue they may face. We also need counselors and counselees to be committed to the supremacy and sufficiency of Scripture in understanding the human condition in general and how that impacts every counseling issue and equally committed to the biblical process of change that is rooted in Scripture and empowered by the Holy Spirit. We trust that while we may plant or water, God provides the growth.
And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose. For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. And those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified.
-Romans 8:28-30, ESV
Now may the God of peace himself sanctify you completely, and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. He who calls you is faithful; he will surely do it.
-1 Thessalonians 5:23-24, ESV
Resources for Biblical Counseling in general:
The Bible itself, especially Ephesians
Jay E. Adams, The Christian Counselor’s Manual: The Practice of Nouthetic Counseling, Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan: 1973.
Heath Lambert, A Theology of Biblical Counseling, Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan: 2016.
Timothy Lane and Paul Tripp, How People Change, Winston-Salem, NC: Punch Press: 2006.
John MacArthur and Wayne Mack (ed.), Counseling: How to Counsel Biblically, Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson: 2005.
David Powlison, How Does Sanctification Work?, Wheaton, IL: Crossway: 2017.
David Powlison, Seeing With New Eyes, Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing: 2003.
Paul David Tripp, Instruments in the Redeemer’s Hands: People in Need of Change Helping People in Need of Change, Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing: 2002.
Check out my theology page for more resources on Scripture and theology in general
Resources for a few specific issues:
Thomas Brooks, Precious Remedies Against Satan’s Devices, Edinburgh, UK: Banner of Truth Trust: 2021 (orig. 1652).
John Flavel, Facing Grief: Counsel for Mourners, Edinburgh, UK: Banner of Truth Trust: 2022 (orig. 1674).
John Flavel, The Mystery of Providence, Edinburgh, UK: Banner of Truth Trust: 2021 (orig. 1678).
Robert Jones, Uprooting Anger: Biblical Help for a Common Problem, Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing: 2005.
Heath Lambert, Finally Free: Fighting for Purity with the Power of Grace, Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan: 2013.
Ken Sande, The Peacemaker: A Biblical Guide to Resolving Personal Conflict, Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books: 2004.
Edward T. Welch, Depression: Looking Up from the Stubborn Darkness, Greensboro, NC: New Growth Press: 2011.
Edward T. Welch, Running Scared: Fear, Worry, and the God of Rest, Greensboro, NC: New Growth Press: 2007.
Edward T. Welch, When People are Big and God is Small: Overcoming Peer Pressure, Codependency, and the Fear of Man, Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing: 1997.
Anything on the ACBC Required Reading List and Continuing Education Reading List.