The Spirit in Counseling [Excerpts]
Many Christian counselors are guilty of ignoring the divine Counselor. It’s time to rediscover His role.
I think it’s no exaggeration to say that the Christian counseling scene today is in total shambles. I’m not talking about true Christian counseling -- that which trusts the Bible and the power of the Holy Spirit to conform a person to Christ -- that kind of counseling has been successfully changing sinners since the apostolic age. I’m talking about pseudo-counseling -- the attempt to fix people with a blend of secular psychological theory and the Bible.
But have integrationist counselors affected any real change among evangelical Christians?
Are people really fixed?
It has been sad to see so many Christians seek counsel from Christian psychotherapists who fumble around with theories developed by Sigmund Freud, Carl Rogers and B. F. Skinner. Psychology and talk therapy are so bankrupt that many are abandoning them to embrace biological psychiatry. Psychotropic medicine is the new savior. Problems that were once blamed on dysfunctional families and Id/Superego conflict are now charged to chemical imbalances and disorders.
Yesterday’s psychology and today’s psychiatry share the same fatal errors -- they reject the total depravity of man due to sin; they treat the symptoms instead of the heart; and they aim for change that is not true sanctification.
In spite of obvious failure, the notion prevails within the church that psychotherapy and psychiatry are more effective agents of change -- particularly in dealing with the most difficult cases -- than the Holy Spirit who sanctifies. But can psychotherapy or psychiatry possibly accomplish something the Holy Spirit cannot? Can an earthly therapist achieve more than a heavenly Comforter? Is behavior modification more helpful than sanctification? Of course not.
(Excerpted from "The Work of the Spirit and Biblical Counseling" in Introduction to Biblical Counseling, John MacArthur and Wayne Mack, editors).
