For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder, and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Isaiah 9:6
I spend most days meeting with people discussing their problems in a counseling environment. If you had told me when I became a pastor that this is how I would be spending a majority of my time, I would have thought you were mad. Pastors study and preach. They don’t counsel. They leave that to the professionals.
I read books like the Reformed Pastor by Baxter in school that encouraged pastors to meet with people in the congregation for what he called private instruction of the Word. Baxter even went so far as to say that he would see more progress in his people’s walk with God through these private sessions than in a year’s worth of sermons. It was easy, however, to write off his ideas as being part of a time when people were not as busy. In Baxter’s time life moved slower, I thought. Nowadays preaching the gospel every Sunday was a much better use of my time. The trouble was people needed more. They required the gospel applied explicitly to their lives not just generally on Sunday morning.
So, I began to meet with people in my office to help them apply the gospel to their lives. Despite my hesitancy at first, I found I began to enjoy these times. Unlike Sunday, I would often have a front row seat to see a person changed by the gospel. I started to see people change that had sat in services for years relatively unchanged. People in the church began to talk and encourage others needing help to come for counseling. This was an exciting time in my ministry of the gospel. The problem is no one had ever warned me of the danger of becoming a good counselor.
I woke up one day and realized I had a problem when I looked at my schedule for the week. I had five days of seeing four to five people a day for counseling. In addition to this, we had a waiting list of people wanting to schedule a time. The danger of being a good counselor is that you can unintentionally take the place of the Wonderful Counselor. People will rely on you to help them apply the gospel in their lives. The same danger exists in the pulpit when the people rely solely on the pastor to be the one to interpret and explain the Bible for them. In both cases, you create dependent Christians. The sad truth is that this dependence is on you and not their Savior.
I will be the first to admit that this dependence can be intoxicating and addictive. Who in ministry does not want to hear repeatedly how helpful they have been in applying the gospel? Who in ministry doesn’t want to know that their labors are not in vain? Many pastors spend years of struggling in ministry wondering if anyone is learning, much less applying, what you are teaching from the Bible. It is no wonder that so many pastors become discouraged easily. Then suddenly you start to see peoples lives change. They begin to apply the truth you have been preaching for years and find victory over their sin. It is exciting to see! What could possibly be wrong with this new private ministry of the word?
The truth is we are just one person. We only have a certain number of hours in a day, unlike the Wonderful Counselor. What was missing in my counseling was creating a dependence on the Wonderful Counselor rather than on the good counselor. While people might find victory over a particular sin after a counseling session, they would struggle with identifying the next sin and need to come back for more counseling. The problem wasn’t that I wasn’t using the Bible in counseling sessions, without it change is not possible. The problem was I was not helping the counselees learn how to rely on the Wonderful Counselor. I was not teaching them how to discover biblical truths on their own. It was much easier and more efficient if I just explained the biblical truth to them. Dr. Stuart Scott refers to this as seeing the counselor as a wise sage that has all the answers. This created a system where people looked to me for answers rather than looking to God’s word for answers. Every biblical counselor should be on guard against the danger of creating dependence on anyone other than the Wonderful Counselor.
Are you pointing your counselees to the Wonderful Counselor?
Do you see people growing in their dependence on your counsel or His counsel?