2. The Crisis in Counseling

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26. 1 John 4:1-3: Test The Spirits

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Okay, this is part two of a series we're doing on biblical counseling, and last week we just did an introduction and mostly we gave you what the course objectives were, why are we taking this course, why are we teaching it at this particular time.

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So this is part two, and I've titled this one, A Crisis in Counseling, and we're going to look at why are we so intent on doing biblical counseling and laying the foundation, what's the situation in the world today, and why is biblical counseling so important.

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So with that being said, we're looking at the world situation.

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Anybody realize it's not a perfect world? That news? I didn't think so, all right?

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Just look around the world, it's international unrest, families are falling apart at an epidemic rate, alcohol and drug addiction is going through the roof, blatant immorality, which often leads to unwanted children and abortion, and I put unwanted children, not necessarily just an unwanted pregnancy, but there are many children who are unwanted as well.

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And of course, leading to abortion. That's just a little snippet of what the world situation is today.

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Conclusion, man needs help. I think that goes almost without saying.

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And that's where counseling comes into it. Counseling is a very important part of using the word of God.

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And again, thinking about biblical counseling, why do we call it biblical counseling?

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Because we're using the Bible as our source of truth. We'll get into that a little bit later. I just wanted to start this, underlying truths, before you start any counseling, that all men need to know and understand.

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First is, of course, the sovereignty of God, which means, and I'm just going to give a little snippet,

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I'm not going to go into all the theology behind what that means. But he's omniscient, he's omnipotent, and he's omnipresent.

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He's absolutely autonomous, that means nobody tells him what to do. All power is under his control, doesn't mean that comes under his omnipotence.

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All power is under his control. That doesn't mean that he can do anything. That's something that you see in college classes, they'll ask, can

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God do anything? Can he create a rock bigger than he can lift? You know, that type of thing. So the definition of omnipotent is all power in this world is under his control.

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He answers to no one, and there is not one stray atom, not one stray molecule, anywhere in the universe that he is unaware of and has not designated its course.

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He plots the course of each electron around the nucleus and in every single situation.

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Second underlying truth that all men need is men are fallen creatures, all men are sinful,

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Romans 3 .23, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. So universal, inclusive, which means that sin is universal.

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Romans 5 .12 picks up on the same theme. Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world and death through sin, so death spread to all men because all sinned, okay?

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And again, we need to understand that, especially as Christians, if you're going to do any type of counseling, whether it's formal counseling or just casual counseling as you meet with people, you need to understand these.

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These are underlying truths that you have to understand. Now man's inability to resolve conflicts goes all the way back to the

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Garden of Eden, okay? What was Adam and Eve's response when they sinned?

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They tried to hide from God. You didn't know. Let me just ask you a quick question.

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Why do you think they tried to hide from God? Go ahead.

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They knew they were guilty. They knew they were guilty. They knew because of God's holiness, because of their sin.

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I think part of an answer too is they didn't really know who God was. God is also, he's not only wrath, he's merciful, he's gracious, and they misunderstood who

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God was. Then it continues, Cain kills

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Abel, all right? Ever read the

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Old Testament? Some of it you don't want to read just before you go to bed at night. It's a bloody book, and I don't mean that in a

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British sense. I mean literally it's bloody.

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Even the 12 tribes had conflicts with each other. They couldn't get along, and ultimately the kingdom was split.

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No one has been able to reconcile man to man, and along with that no one has been able to reconcile man to God until Jesus Christ.

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Here's the difference. John 3 .16,

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for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

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Armenians love to bring that verse up and try to use it as a hammer against Calvinism, which obviously it's right in line with Calvinism, but I use it frequently, probably more than I should, just to get under the skin of the

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Armenians. So anyway, I probably shouldn't have admitted that.

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Romans 5 .8, but God demonstrated his own love toward us, and that while we were yet sinners,

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Christ died for us. So if you're going to do any kind of counseling, there's some proactive steps that you need to take right from the beginning, right very first.

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First is to determine what the problem is, and that's very important.

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J .C. Ryle said very articulately, you know, the wrong diagnosis or the wrong diagnosis of the disease will often, will always lead to the wrong cure, and the same is true with counseling.

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When you have a problem, when a person is having problems, you have to determine what the problem is, and I'd like to use the example, especially in our society today, everybody gets a headache, what's the first thing you do?

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Take two aspirin, okay, and you don't stop and realize, you know, why do

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I have a headache? Very few people ask that question anymore. Headaches are so common, just pop a couple of aspirin.

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Your head hurts for a reason, and just because you can tell the pain with the aspirin might not be the best thing to do.

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You might have to take a look and see why does the head hurt in the first place. Second thing is to determine the spiritual condition of the person.

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That is so crucial, because depending upon where that person is and who they are, depends on how you're going to use the scripture to counsel them.

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For example, if you find out that the person is not a believer, Jesus Christ has never made a profession of faith, the very next thing you want to do is present the gospel, because there is more remedy available to the believer than there is to the non -Christian.

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Why is that? Why would I make that? And that's a blanket statement. Why is there more remedy available to the believer than to a non -believer?

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Go ahead. We have hope for the future. Yep, that's part of it. Let's see, because we're in unity with Christ.

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Yep, and that's getting really close. How is it that we have unity with Christ?

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Yes, because we have the Holy Spirit. You have the Holy Spirit as a believer dwelling in you, which gives you the power to do things and to make changes that a non -believer can't.

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So that's a crucial point. And this is getting back to what Abby said, the gospel gives hope.

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The gospel gives you hope, and that's why that's the first thing, if you're doing any type of biblical counseling, the very first thing you want to do is determine a spiritual condition, and if they're not a believer, give them the gospel, because that's the ultimate need.

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And I'm not saying that that's going to solve all the problems immediately, but it gives you a basis to build upon.

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Biblical approach to counseling. The counselor must show the person that he is personally accountable to God for his attributes, behavior, and sin, which have resulted in the problems he's facing.

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Doing this just as an introductory premises, we're going to look at these in depth later on in the study.

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So you have to show the person that they are, in fact, personally accountable.

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And I'm putting this at the very beginning because I'm going to go through what the secularist teaches a little bit later today.

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The counselor must show the person that the sovereignty of God is a cause for hope, joy, and peace in the midst of sorrow and pain, because God loves his children and will work all things together for good for them.

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Now you can see too why you must determine the spiritual condition of the person first, because you can't make that promise if they're not a believer.

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I've actually gone out when somebody comes in, especially in a marriage counseling situation, husband and wife, both believers,

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I look at them and say, you know what the percentage of the possibility of you being reconciled is?

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One hundred percent. The probability is up to you.

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But if you submit to the Holy Spirit and you both have the Holy Spirit, the possibility of success is one hundred percent.

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Therefore, life has meaning, life has purpose, there's a design for life,

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God intended for life to be abundant and fulfilling, and this can only be realized through Jesus Christ.

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Does that all make sense? Now we're going to get to the crux of what this session is all about.

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What is the crisis in counseling? We'll take this step by step. First, counseling has been hijacked by psychology and psychiatry.

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I'll expand upon that. No need to do it just yet. The Word of God has been replaced by many different schools of thought or philosophy.

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And you'll find that, I think I even told a story last week of a person who came to me for counseling from a

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Christian counseling center, and they had never prayed with them, they never opened the Word of God, but they were using a system, and that's been replaced, it's been hijacked.

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Many pastors have accepted these models for counseling. In other words, they've abandoned using the

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Scriptures as their sole authority, and they've used Freudian, Jungian, any of these other schools of psychology.

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Many pastors have abandoned counseling completely. There are pastors who will not counsel, and if somebody comes in with a problem, will refer them out to a psychologist.

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Many seminaries are telling pastors they are not competent to counsel. And I can attest to this firsthand.

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I was at a pastors' conference, 1 ,500 pastors sitting in an auditorium, and the speaker up front telling the pastors, you are pastors, you're

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Word specialists, you've got no business counseling, you have no business meddling in people's, you know, dirty lives, you just need to focus on the

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Word. And then we wonder why we have marriages falling apart within the church, and people suffering from all kinds of social and psychological problems.

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The result of this is that sinful behavior has been reclassified as an illness. You want to get under somebody's skin?

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Call somebody, oh, he's not an alcoholic, he's a drunk. Then duck.

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All right? Personal responsibility is taken away.

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If it's a disease, it's not my fault. I have this gene that causes me to drink too much.

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Psychoanalysis and medicine have replaced counseling to correct sinful behavior. Again, let me just throw in,

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I'm not saying that there's no such thing as mental, true, real, organic mental illness. We're not talking about that.

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And that's part of the initial interview when you're counseling somebody.

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Make sure that it's not a medical problem. There aren't, you know, like an overactive thyroid.

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You don't want to be, you know, accusing somebody of being lazy when they've got, you know, something physically wrong with them.

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But psychoanalysis and medicine has become the norm for everything that is classified as a mental illness.

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And contrary to the claims of the psychological profession, analysis and medicine do not help significantly.

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In fact, some seem to be worse than before. I can tell you how many times

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I've had somebody come in and say, I went to a psychologist and it only made things worse.

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Why would that be? Because they start dredging up a lot of the past, things that have been dealt with already, and they dredge them up and bring them to mind again.

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And plus some of the things that they have them do are contrary to what the

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Bible would say anyway. So that's just a brief description of the crisis in counseling.

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And I titled this slide, Challenging the Status Quo. Because what

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I've just described for you is pretty much the norm throughout the United States today and pretty much throughout most of the world.

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Two men in the mid -1900s, the last century, challenged the benefits of the system as it is today.

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Or actually as it was then, because they did influence enough to make some change. The first one was

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O. Hobart Maurer, all right. And the second one you should be familiar with is

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J. Adams. All right. Now Maurer was not a

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Christian. He was in fact a psychiatrist. He was working in a mental institution.

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And with his work in that mental institution, he began to challenge the existence of it.

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He said, we're not doing anything here. We're not helping these people. And the methodology that we use is not productive.

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So he started to challenge the system as it was. He said the emphasis on responsibility was central.

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He said a lot of these people can be helped if we hold them responsible for even their aberrant behavior.

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And so he urged people to confess their wrongs. Now here, because he's not a Christian, he said not to God, but he was confessing to one another.

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And to make restitution. Now notice, he's almost hit upon a biblical principle.

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Very close. All right. And he made some dramatic changes.

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If you notice that there used to be mental institutions, state institutions all over the place.

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We had three huge ones here on Long Island. One in Kings Park, one in Pilgrim State, and the other in Central Iceland.

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But they're virtually empty nowadays. And a lot of it has to do with the work of men like O.

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Hobart Mauer and J. Adams. Now J. Adams, who was a believer, had his degree, he's a

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PhD in psychology. His experience working with Mauer prompted him to ask another question.

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All right, and the question he began to ask, what does the scripture say? What does the scripture say about mental illness, about psychological issues and problems?

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And that would cause him to eventually write a book entitled Competent to Counsel. And if you want to follow through on any of the slides that we look at,

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I would suggest you pick up a copy of Competent to Counsel. This whole series is based upon that book, and also about an accompanying book called

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More Than Redemption, a theology of Christian counseling. And that was like a watershed event in the history of the church, the evangelical church.

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Adams came to the conclusion that a large majority of people in mental institutions were there because of their own failure to meet life's problems, and not because there was anything organically wrong with them.

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And he looked, because of unforgiven sin or unaltered sinful behavior. What Mauer and Adams both found was that people would actually start acting in a bizarre manner to avoid responsibility.

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And when they found out that they could avoid responsibility, it became habit with them to respond in a way that was not proper at all.

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Now, both Adams and Mauer rejected the medical model of mental illness.

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And we'll get into exactly what that means in a few minutes. The medical model equates personal problems to physical illness.

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And they say, for example, if somebody is going into depression, oh, it's got to be some sort of disease, some sort of an illness.

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So we can prescribe some medication to get you out of the depression.

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Maybe they were just reading the Puritans. Because if you can read the

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Puritans without being a little bit depressed, I don't know. The medical model takes away personal responsibility.

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It's not your fault that you robbed that bank. You were compelled to by the events of your past life.

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You're a slave to how you were raised. Psychotherapy is a search into the past to find someone to blame.

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And I'm talking mostly about Freudian psychology since that was the major breakthrough, if I can call it that.

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There are some 400 different schools of psychology and competing, and they don't agree with each other, which is interesting.

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That's why you have witnesses, psychology witnesses testifying in court. One will say, oh, no, he's absolutely sane.

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No, the other, no, he's absolutely insane. And that's frequent. That's not an aberration.

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That happens frequently. And now here's a chart comparing the two models.

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I just thought this might be helpful for you to see this. Okay, this is the medical model versus the moral.

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The nature of the problem. The medical model would say, it's a medical issue.

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There's something organically wrong. Even though there's no test.

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Well, for example, you've heard that people have chemical imbalance. Do you know that in 99 .9

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% there's no medical test to determine the chemical imbalance? It's determined by behavior, but they refer it as a medical problem.

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The moral model says, no, it's a moral issue. How about the nature of guilt?

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Well, the medical model says, well, it's the guilt feelings. That's the issue. And the moral model says, no, the problem is you're guilty.

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That's the crux of the whole thing. And you can see how this is even starting out here.

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Then you have, what is the basic irregularity? Well, the medical model says, well, it's emotions.

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It's an emotional thing. The moral model says, no, it's behavioral. It's what you do that is important.

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What about the relation to the conscience? The medical model says, you're a victim.

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You're a victim to alcoholism. You're a victim to this. You're a victim to that.

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The moral model says, no, you're a violator. You've violated God's law. Who's to blame?

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Anybody but me, is what the medical model says. The moral model says, no, you're to blame.

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And what are the solutions? The medical model says, you need to vent your feelings.

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And we'll get into that a little bit later. The moral model says, no, you need to confess your sin. You can see that it's almost 180 degrees diametrically opposed to one another.

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So the moral model asserts that the main problems people have is of their own making.

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Many mentally ill people, and that's in quotes, are people who can be helped by the ministry of the word.

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And the moral model must be in subjection to the standards of the Bible. You can't just come up with any, just your own set of moral values.

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The moral values that you use must be grounded in the word of God. Why is that?

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Because there's no standard apart from the Bible. Because all other standards are relativistic and subjective.

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So what we have also, another situation that is common in the church today, is pastors will become what they call eclectic.

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They went to school and they took psychology courses in whichever particular school of psychology.

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They start counseling that way. Then they're convicted that, oh, and I should be using the Bible. So they try to meld the

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Bible in with the psychology. That's eclecticism. You can't do that.

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You can see just from the chart, you've got just about 180 degrees opposed to one another.

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How can you meld things that don't agree with each other? And so it just doesn't work.

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So eclecticism is not biblical. Still in challenging the status quo, all non -Christian systems demand autonomy for man and seek to dethrone

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God. Man is the master of his own destiny.

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And we need to understand the Bible alone is inerrant and the sufficient standard for faith and practice.

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You see how this goes right to our theology, our bibliology.

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What is the Bible? The Bible alone is not only efficient, but sufficient for all of life and godliness.

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So if you're having problems, whether they're being emotional problems, spiritual problems, the answer is found in the

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Scripture, in the Scripture alone, because that's the only, it's the only supreme norm that is inerrant and infallible.

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Now here's one that'll rankle some people. Psychiatry is not scientific. It is steeped in humanistic philosophy and speculation.

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If you understand what science is, you can understand that psychiatry cannot possibly be scientific.

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It's not testable. You know, it's not repeatable.

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It's based upon the thoughts and systems that were created by godless men.

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And psychoanalysis has become a substitute religion for the middle class. And one of their own,

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Major, who was a 20th century psychologist, he likened analysis to religion.

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He says it has its ceremonies and it even has its articles of faith. So that's the challenge that we are faced with.

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I've called this next series Christianity and Psychiatry Today, just kind of telling it like it is.

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Remember, this is still somewhat introductory and looking at the crisis in counseling.

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Some people have come to the conclusion that their problems were induced by the treatment they received. And you see that more and more.

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That is, the treatment caused more problems than it solved. Psychotherapy has failed to make any significant advances in 225 years.

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Although a lot of psychiatrists now are rebuking

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Freud and his theories. Many analysts are also disillusioned with the

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Freudian methodology. The reality is people are just as likely to get well without psychotherapy as with it.

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And they have done tests on that, by the way. Freudianism has played a significant role in the collapse of responsibility in society.

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Freud has made significant contributions to the new morality. You know what the new morality is?

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It's the old immorality. Freud has popularized the medical model of human problems.

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That's the chart that we were just looking at before. The medical model has led people to believe that the root causes of the mental difficulties are sicknesses and disease.

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And again, these are things where there is no medical test to say, you know, there's no medical test to say that somebody's

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OCD. There's no medical test to say that somebody is bipolar. It's all diagnosed by behavior.

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If you exhibit certain characteristics. In fact, they had a Freudian that analyzed the

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Psalms, and they came across and said that David was a paranoid schizophrenic.

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Now, he's a man after God's own heart. So what does that tell you? Freudian thinking has society treating criminals as victims.

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In fact, a frequent phrase heard in the courtroom is, he couldn't help it.

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I can't tell you how frustrating that is. The medical model proponents tend to blame society for their problems instead of themselves.

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And you see this played out in the courtrooms all the time. The defense attorney would get up and plead for his client, say, you know, he had a bad childhood and all.

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That's why he became a mass murderer. So it's not his fault. Freudian psychoanalysis searches the past to find someone to blame.

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We've already looked at that. And human responsibility is undermined by Freudian thinking.

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If it's not your fault, then I'm not responsible. It's not my fault that I did that.

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And this has become a great defense in criminal trials now. It's not my client's fault.

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He's a victim of his circumstances. He's a victim of what his parents did. And that reminds me of the fellow who pleaded guilty to the murder of his mother and father and then pleaded for mercy because he was an orphan.

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That's a real one. And this has resulted in a breakdown of parental discipline.

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How so? Parents are told they can cause psychological problems if they discipline their children.

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And so don't give the little spanking. Spanking their bottoms is going to mess up their head.

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This is in direct contradiction to the Holy Scripture. And we should all know this, Proverbs 23, 13.

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Do not hold back discipline from the child. Although you strike him with the rod, he will not die.

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Hated it as a kid, loved it as a parent. Three natural results of the medical model, and this is the result in helplessness, hopelessness, and irresponsibility.

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They say if a person is sick, he's not in control and therefore not responsible for his actions.

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And again, this is very common that you see this in the courtrooms today. And so according to the medical model, there can be numerous reasons for a person's behavior except their own sin.

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They can come up with all kinds of reasons, but it's never their own sin. And I guess we'll stop it right here, especially because the slide came up that said questions.

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That was a good hint. I do have some more slides on the Freudian model, but I'm looking at the time, and I think we'll pick that up next week.