Heath Lambert: Last week on the podcast, we spent some time answering your questions about counseling-related issues and we didn’t get to very many of them at all. This week on the podcast, I invited Sean Perron to come back. Sean is the Operations Director at ACBC. He makes the trains run on time here. Sean, we’re glad to have you back with us to pose more counseling questions from our listeners. So, what are we doing this week?
Sean Perron: Last week we talked about getting to heart issues towards the beginning of a case and we talked about ending a counseling case and what to do when a counselee is not doing their homework. You talk about giving hope as one of your sessions in the fundamentals track. Tell us, how can a counselor give hope? And should they give hope? Is it crucial to the counseling task?
Heath Lambert: Yes. We talk about hope in biblical counseling because it is crucial to give hope. By the time somebody comes for a counseling conversation, they need hope even if they don’t know they need hope because it is the nature of a counseling conversation to try to solve a problem. And it is the nature of problems in our life to drain hope out of our lives. It is a crucial task for a biblical counselor, whether that biblical counselor is a paid professional, whether they are doing ministry in the context of the local church, whether it is a friend talking with a heartbroken other friend across a living room table, it is crucial to give hope.
One of the things we want to say, though, if we’re going to give biblical hope is that the way we extend hope is as important as giving the hope itself. We would want to say as Christians that all hope is grounded in who Jesus Christ is and what He has done. Hope that is biblical hope is going to point people to the life and the death and the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and the good things that that purchases for you, and me, and our friends when we turn to Jesus in repentant faith. Without those things, without Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, and without our response of repentance and faith, there is no real hope.
Every other kind of hope we would give is false hope. Are we going to say, “Hey, you’re strong enough to overcome this yourself”? Well, actually, a lot of people aren’t. Are we going to give the hope that this is not that big of a problem? Well, we can’t give that hope because whether or not a problem is big is subjective and what might seem small to me is likely to seem very, very big to the counselee. Are we going to say this problem is just going to get better? Well, a lot of problems don’t get better. The only hope that matters is the hope that extends beyond the grave and the only person who can offer that is Jesus Christ.
Sean Perron: What are some key passages that you go to in order to communicate that hope to your counselees?
Heath Lambert: Okay, so that is a great question. It’s also a really, really long question and it’s a potentially infinite question because one of the things that is important for me to do is to listen well to a counselee and figure out what is driving their problem, what’s going on with their hopelessness, and then I would want to give very, very case-specific texts in order to give hope to them. There are texts that if you were just going through them in your read through the Bible in a year plan it might not seem very hopeful to you but if you’re talking to somebody who’s struggling with a problem related to that text it could be full of hope. So, there are a lot of texts. In fact, I would say potentially every text in the Bible is a candidate to give hope in some way, shape, or form but I would point to a couple of texts that I think they’re just sitting there and it’s low-hanging fruit that’s just ripe with hope.
2 Peter 1:3 is one of those verses. It says, “His divine power has granted to us everything pertaining to life and godliness, through the true knowledge of Him who called us by His own glory and excellence.” That is a text that I have often deployed in the conversation with a hopeless person and it’s full of hope because you’ve got somebody sitting there and they’re wondering, ‘Does God have an answer for this that I’m dealing with? Can God help me?’ And 2 Peter 1 is God’s promise that His power has given to you everything that you need for life and godliness through the knowledge of Him. As you come to know Jesus and grow up in Him, we can be confident that in the pages of His Word, He is going to reveal solutions and help for whatever you’re dealing with. So, that is very, very hopeful. It doesn’t address a specific issue, but it does promise that whatever the specific issue God is going to have something to say. And for somebody struggling with the confusion of a problem, that is really, really encouraging.
Another text that is very hopeful is Romans 8. And in fact, if Romans 8 were the only chapter in Scripture, we would say, “My goodness, we could do all counseling that requires hope out of Romans 8 and be doing really, really well. Certainly, better than what other approaches to counseling have.” One text that’s really, really helpful for folks who are maybe struggling with sin, not every counselee who comes for counseling struggles with sin, but for those that do, and there are many that do, a passage like Romans 8, starting in verse 9 says, “You are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you. But if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Him. If Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, yet the spirit is alive because of righteousness. But if the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies, through His Spirit who dwells in you.”
This is a text that gives hope that the same Spirit who brought physical life back to the body of Jesus is the same Spirit working in believers to give spiritual life to us. And the biblical truth is you are not alone in your struggle against sin, but you have the same life-giving force, the Spirit of God, that enlivened Jesus enliven your spirit and that means you can overcome sin. You can’t, of course, overcome it in your own strength and in your own resources, but you can overcome it in the strength and the resources that God gives you by His Spirit. That is very, very encouraging to people who are struggling in the aftermath of just repeated failure with regard to sin. And the Bible says, “Hey, you’re not alone, and you’re not stuck in failure, but God has given you a Spirit to overcome.”
Sean Perron: That’s helpful. We just had our winter online training. It started in January, ends this month, and we’ll be picking back up with our summer online training. Registration opens the end of March. In that training, you go over these key elements and you have in that one session giving hope and building involvement. I know you’ve wanted to expand upon those. Is there any relationship between building involvement and giving hope or are those two separate issues that counselors deal with and then what is building involvement and how should counselors do that with their counselees?
Heath Lambert: Yeah, so building involvement just means that one of the main things we want to do in counseling is we want to have a strong relationship with our counselees. We want our counselees to know that we love them. And that is important because the Bible says they actually know we’re Christians by our love. It is important for us to obey the second great commandment and love our neighbor our counselee, and not just to love them but have them know that we love them and have them receive our love and our care. This is so important for Christians to love one another and be seen to be doing that. So, that’s building involvement. And then there’s giving hope, which is what we’ve just been talking about. Those two things are distinct, and we treat them separately just as a matter of instruction and as a matter of biblical revelation. Having a relationship of love is one thing that’s addressed in the Bible and giving hope is another thing that is addressed in the Bible, but that doesn’t mean there’s not a relationship between the two.
So, I would describe the relationship between the two in a couple of ways. One is having a relationship of love with someone that you trust can be hope-giving. Just to know I’m not alone, to know there is somebody who’s walking me through this, there is somebody who knows more about the Bible on this situation than I do, there is somebody who’s experienced more of the grace of Christ in their life up to this point than I have. That can be very, very hope-giving. Another relationship between building involvement or loving the counselee and giving hope is seen in that it is an act of love to encourage someone with a kind of biblical hope that we were talking about. So, in those two ways at least, there’s more, but in those two ways at least, I think we could say we’re talking about distinct matters of biblical counseling methodology but they’re not unrelated and they can even depend on one another.
Sean Perron: When you’re building in involvement and you are met with resistance from a counselee, they’re not wanting to open up, they’re not wanting to tell you about their problems, what are the first couple of things you’ll do in order to try to break through that?
Heath Lambert: So, here’s the thing. It’s tempting in the counseling world with an organization that deals with certifying standards and counseling excellence like ACBC does, and I’m thankful for that, and it’s possible when we’ve got seminary instructions and we break up relationships into building involvement, giving hope, and getting information. It’s possible to clinicalize this in a way that forgets that when we’re doing counseling, we’re just having a relationship with somebody. It’s a relationship that maybe begins a little differently than, hey, we meet at the park, and we get to know one another. It begins perhaps with a formal meeting time and a formal place, but this is still just a relationship, and we ought to not let the formality of that distract us from the fact that when we’re doing counseling, we’re just doing what God has told us to do in loving other people. Loving other people well often means loving them wisely, and loving them slowly, and that means earning trust.
We can think in 21st century America that because of what we’ve seen in terms of how secular counseling works that the counseling relationship itself should just immediately create trust and you come in and I sit with you with my clipboard, and I stare at you over my spectacles, and I ask you questions, and you just start answering them. Well, that’s not the way it works all the time. We just have to remember I have just as much a demand to earn trust with you in our counseling relationship as I do to earn trust in my relationship with my assistant at work, and with my wife at home, and with my kids, and with the friends that I meet in the hallway. So, we need to be thinking about how we can earn trust.
If I’m asking you questions and trying to love you well and you respond to that slowly or reluctantly or with suspicion, then what that means is I got to figure out a way to get your trust and what that means is I’m going to have to make an investment in you. I’m going to have to love you by giving you something of me. And when I let you trust something of mine, then there is a growing chance that you’ll let me trust something of yours. I don’t mind with folks being very personal. I don’t mind telling them, “Let me tell you why what you came to talk to me about is so important to me.” and then it could be that I’ve had something similar happen to me or maybe not something similar, but something terrible, and they’ll realize that, ‘Hey, I know what you’re talking about.’ Or I’ll tell them something personal in the sense that, “Hey, I’ve struggled with this sin too or I’ve struggled with a sin like it.” I want to serve them by opening up my heart and showing them something of me and praying, hoping, trusting, and believing that when I do that to them, they’ll do it back and let me help.
