I couldn’t believe how long she talked and how long my mentor sat listening to her. He seemed to have a bottomless supply of patience. It was my first time in a real-life counseling observation, and I quickly learned how vital patience is to being a good counselor. It...
Fear of being accused of legalism has, in some circles of Evangelicalism, led to decreasing calls for personal holiness. This is, I believe, particularly true among younger Christians. Many of them have grown up in a form of hyper-fundamentalism that was marked by all...
Matthew 5:21-26, "You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not murder; and whoever murders will be liable to judgment.’ 22 But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment; whoever insults his brother will be...
Biblical counseling has been going through something of an identity crisis as of late. What exactly is “Biblical counseling,” what is its relationship to extra-biblical content, how is it best practiced?: Answering these questions requires nuance, careful...
It is extremely easy to make the discipline of doing theology all about us. We can rob God of His glory in theological study by doing it in such a way that it ignores actual interaction with Him. Kelly Kapic reminds us that God is not merely an object of...
The Roman Catholic Church of Martin Luther’s day would have outright denied the concepts of Scripture alone and faith alone; it did not deny the concept that glory belonged to God alone. They certainly wouldn’t have suggested that God shared His glory, and yet the...
“Who do people say that the Son of Man is” (Mat. 16:13)? This question remains as pertinent a one today as it was when Jesus asked it of the disciples. Historically the Roman Catholic Church and the Reformers didn’t disagree with each other on the person of Christ....
It has been called the “main hinge upon which religion turns” (Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion. 3.11.1). The doctrine of justification by faith alone is easily the most significant issue arising from the period of the Reformation. Its significant lay in...
“The language of grace so permeates the Bible and all traditions of Christian theology, ” says Carl Trueman, “that to claim that salvation is by grace alone is, in itself, to claim very little at all” (Grace Alone, 17). Everybody loves grace. We name our churches,...
Everyone, it seems, is celebrating the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation. There’s good reason to celebrate it. The Reformation, after all, was a recovery of the gospel, which had been muddled by the traditions of men. That recovery was made possible by...
Doubt is not the same as unbelief, but if we don’t wrestle with our doubts wisely, they can lead to unbelief. John Stevens, National Director of the Fellowship of Independent Evangelical Churches in the UK, wants to help Christians wrestle well with their doubts. In...
There is no real disconnect between the theological and the practical. If we are sometimes convinced otherwise, and if we often live to the contrary, their compatibility remains. Don Whitney knows this, that’s why as he approaches the issue of assurance of salvation...
One in four women. Those are the startling national statics for cases of intimate partner violence. For many of us within the church, those numbers reveal just how desperately our world needs Jesus, but we fail to realize that domestic violence is a serious problem...
Biblical Counseling is all about sanctification. The goal of counseling is to help people, in the midst of their suffering and/or sin, to grow in their likeness to Jesus Christ. This means that the way we understand the process of sanctification, then, has a direct...
Trauma destroys. Diane Langberg knows something of the specifics of that kind of destruction, for she has been counseling those who suffer from trauma for more than forty years. In Suffering and the Heart of God, she uses her experience as a counselor and an...