About Biblical Counselling

 Biblical Counselling in many ways is God’s living and active Word through His gospel applied to suffering, sinning and searching people. The following few paragraphs from the book The Pastor and Counseling is a good summary of Biblical Counselling:

If you have ever looked online or shopped for a counselor, you’ve noticed a dizzying array of counseling models available on today’s evangelical market—Emotion Focused Therapy (EFT), Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT), Dialectic Behavior Therapy (DBT), to name just a few. To date, there are dozens of models that Christians use to counsel. This section is intentionally brief.  We want to give a definition of counseling that may help you determine the direction you should take your church’s counseling ministry or perhaps discern the counseling philosophy of a local professional. In our view, counseling that is Christian, or biblical in its most basic form, is a ministry of the Word by which Christians help others understand how their hearts are actively responding to God amid their specific life circumstances, and how faith in Christ Jesus changes those responses.  To unpack this a bit, we could say that a Christian counselor addresses a person’s thoughts, beliefs, desires, feelings, decisions, and actions in light of God’s revealed will for how people ought to function. As people relate rightly to Christ through faith in his gospel, their hearts are progressively transformed to relate rightly to everything else—to others, to self, and to circumstances. Being right with God restores right relations to everything else.  Counseling requires skill and wisdom to parse out the complex issues in life. Yet Christian counseling is unapologetically guided by a biblical view of God and his intentions toward people. It unapologetically understands Christ as the means and goal of change. While acknowledging human trouble as complex in its dynamic expression, it unapologetically uses old biblical categories like pride, lust, anger, fear, hatred, revenge, foolishness, ignorance, confusion, and suffering. The contours of counseling follow the narrative contours of an ancient book of divine wisdom, a book that cannot be domesticated and is always relevant to the farthest depths of the human experience.  In short, Biblical Counselling digs deep into the human heart through the sufficient and authoritative Word of God bringing change, hope and a growing holiness in life and love to God and others.