Foreword

The people of God have a huge stake in the issues captured by our word counseling.

What problems impel or compel a person to seek counseling help? The answer is simple, though the problems are complex. Emotions play in darkly minor keys: anxious, embittered, guilty, despairing, ashamed. Actions run in self-destructive ruts of compulsion and addiction. Thoughts proliferate internal chaos, obsessing fruitlessly. Sufferings hammer a person down until the experience seems unspeakable.

But something important often goes unmentioned in mentioning the obvious. Such life-disabling problems are complex intensifications of the utterly ordinary. The human condition intrudes brokenness into everyone and everything. Things go askew inside all of us. We live for good gifts, not the good Giver. Our instincts run to self-serving, even with the best of conscious intentions. We invest life energies in vanities and reap confusion. We addict ourselves to follies and reap pain. Relationships disappoint, and fragment, and alienate, and isolate. Others hurt you—and you hurt them. We find ourselves without resources to face suffering and feel crushed and overwhelmed. Young or old, you suffer a cascade of losses, and then, one way or another, you die. We are more like each other than different, when you look below the obvious differences.

It is a wonder that more people aren’t in continuous emotional lockdown, in the fatal grip of panic, despair, and bitterness. The apparent stability of “ordinary life” bears an eloquent triple witness. God’s providential goodness shines in all that’s fair—Thank you for all the blessings of this life. Humankind is fascinated lifelong by schemes for earthly joy, sowing seeds of self-destruction—Have mercy on us, Father of mercies. What appears stable and ordinary is extraordinarily fragile—You alone are the way, the truth, and the life.

Failure and fragility, whether ordinary or intensified, can open a person to seek help or force a person to need help.

So why should the people of God care about these things that impel and compel people to seek counseling help? Because as ordinary people, these troubles and struggles are ours. And as God’s people, in particular, such waywardness and woe is exactly what our Bible is about. This is what Jesus comes to do something about. This is what church and ministry are intended to tackle.

Or is it? Are the Bible, Jesus, church, and ministry about counseling problems? Or is our faith preoccupied with a religiously toned set of beliefs, activities, places, and experiences? Do counseling problems belong mainly to secular mental-health professionals? Make no mistake: according to Scripture, Christian faith and life are occupied with all the gritty, grimy, sad, or slimy things that make for human misery. Jesus came to start making right all that has gone wrong. And we are his living body put to work here on earth to keep making right whatever is wrong. And never forget: we are part of what is wrong. One and all, we need the give-and-take of wise counsel: Hebrews 3:12–14; Ephesians 4:15, 29; 2 Corinthians 1:4. In fact, we need Genesis 1 through Revelation 22 and the well-honed practical wisdom of brothers and sisters, both past and present, who have taken this God to heart.

We ought to be good at counseling, the very best at both receiving and giving. No one else’s explanation of human misery goes as wide and long or as high and deep as the Christian explanation. No one else can account for the complexity of factors while keeping the actual person clearly in mind and heart. Think about this. Other counseling models never notice that actual persons are made and sustained by God and are accountable to God, searched out and weighed moment by moment. They never mention that actual persons are sinful by instinct and by choice; that we suffer within a context of meaningfulness; that Jesus Christ entered our plight; that we are redeemable and transformable by intimate mercy and power. Every other supposed explanation and answer looks shriveled when juxtaposed with the breadth, length, height, and depth of the love of Christ.

We should be very good at counseling. After all, Christian faith invented the hands-on care and cure of souls (the root meaning of psychotherapy). Intentional, life-transforming discipleship is a Christian distinctive. That’s not to deny that many other intentional discipleships have arisen in the last one hundred years. But given their intrinsic and relentless secularity, other proposed psychotherapies cannot avoid “heal[ing] the wound of my people lightly, saying, ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace” (Jer. 8:11). They offer Band-Aids and analgesics by essentially seeking ways to augment self-reliance. But we can heal deeply, forming essential reliance on the God of life. They hope to shape happier, more constructive human beings, a bit less self-destructive and others-destructive. But we aim for the faith that works out into self-giving love, that drinks from the springs of joy, that finds peace and knows how to make peace.

We should be good at counseling—caring, skillful, thoughtful. We should become the very best—careful, helpful, practical. But more often than not, we have been poor and foolish, rigid or inept. The pat answer, snap judgment, brisk manner, and quick fix are too often characteristic. Where is the patient kindness? Where is the probing concern and hard thought? Where is the luminous, pertinent truthfulness? Where is the flexibility of well-tailored wisdom? Where is the unfolding process? Where is the humanity of Jesus enfleshed in humane, humble, sensible people? Have mercy upon us, Father of mercies.

You are reading a book about the people of God attempting to become good at counseling. Notice four things about this book.

Notice the significance of the fact that Heath Lambert traces a story. A good story develops, unfolds, and goes places. It is like life itself, never static, frozen in one time, place, and person. This book traces a good story: we, God’s people, can cooperate, building together to become good at counseling. We are becoming better at counseling. We will get better by far. Jesus is the best and wisest counselor. It does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when we see him, we will be like him. Such a hope gives us reasons to set out in his direction. The vision of Ephesians 3:14–5:2 will be realized in times, places, and persons. Wiser counseling will be realized in your life, in our lives, in the real-time-and-place story of the church of Jesus.

Notice the significance of the fact that Heath Lambert is in this story. He does not stand outside, pretending to dispassionate objectivity. He cares about what happens. How will this story go? Where will we end up? This is his story—and yours. You and your church have a part to play in what happens next.

Notice the significance of the fact that Heath Lambert treats other people well. Yes, he’s candid about the shortcomings he perceives; he is willing to disagree. But he notices strengths, too, and he is constructive in his candor. He wants us to rightly understand the points of essential continuity so that we all appreciate the organic nature of godly wisdom. He also wants us to rightly understand the significant points of difference so that we all appreciate the organic nature of growing in godly wisdom.

Notice the significance of the fact that Heath Lambert proposes some desirable next steps in the unfolding of our corporate wisdom. There are more chapters to be written in this story. Where are we heading? How can we go forward in a good direction?

Our trajectory into the future is the most important part of all this. As I look over the landscape that this book describes, I see a progression of six stages in the development of our collective wisdom. This is the process any one of us goes through in awakening and maturing into the wise love of good counseling. These six stages also describe the process all of us will go through as we grow up together.

First Stage. We each need to hear—some of us for the first time—that the church has a unique and significant counseling calling. The Lord interprets personal struggles and situational troubles through a very different set of eyes from how other counseling models see things. He engages us with a very different set of intentions from how other counseling models proceed. We, as his children, are meant to counsel according to how he sees and proceeds. The fruition of that vision may seem far off. Your church currently may be doing a poor job of counseling, or counseling through deviant eyes, or abdicating the task entirely. But as you come to realize that the Wonderful Counselor intends to form his people into, well, into pretty good counselors—and getting better all the time—it makes you stop and think. Until we know that something might exist, we can’t envision participating. Participation becomes a possibility when something rises above the horizon. I hope that you hear the call.

Second Stage. We need to agree that the vision is a desirable one. Not only could the church become good in counseling, but we should become wise and fruitful in counseling ministries. Our God calls us to grow up in this area of ministry. You might want to read Ephesians 3:14–5:2 through the eyes of the question, “What does this imply about mutual counseling ministry?” Every sentence has implications. Hearing that it is possible to counsel in biblical wisdom—that God wills us to do so—leads...