Dale Johnson: I’m so delighted to have with me this week one of my good friends, Omri Miles. I’m so grateful for this brother. He serves as the lead pastor of Grace Bible Church in New Orleans, Louisiana. He holds a Master of Divinity degree from the Expositors Seminary and a Master of Arts in Biblical Counseling from the Masters University. He’s been certified with ACBC since 2018 and he spent more than 15 years in Tempe, Arizona, training for ministry until he was sent to plant this church in New Orleans East, where he now lives with his wife, Emily, and their five children.
Brother, welcome to the podcast. Looking forward to this topic today.
Omri Miles: Thank you, man. It’s good to be back.
Dale Johnson: And we’re talking about gospel-centered counseling. And we think about that, obviously, in positive terms. And there are all kinds of reasons to think that this is the way we should be counseling, right? But we always have to pay attention to what are our strengths and what potentially could be our weaknesses? So, I want you to talk about all this discussion relative to the gospel and how that’s a healthy thing. But there are some pitfalls. So, why should biblical counselors be cautious with something as good as the gospel is to us as Christians?
Omri Miles: Well, first of all, the gospel is the very best news that exists. And I think in this discussion about things to be warned of, it’s important to just start off, just thinking about that the gospel is God’s hope for mankind. It’s the only hope for mankind, that He himself has graciously provided an innocent substitute in His son, Jesus Christ, who absorbed his wrath and rose again, and now receives all who come to him in humble faith.
In that message, everybody who believes, knows (Romans 11:6) by experience, that we are unashamed of that message, because by it, the righteousness of God is revealed when He saves those who believe. Jews first, and then Greeks also. This is the hope for believers. And that message not only offers salvation, but has temporal implications for us as well. And I appreciate on that note what Milton Vincent says in The Gospel Primer. He says, “the gospel is not just one piece of good news that fits into my life somewhere among all the bad. The gospel makes genuinely good news out of every other aspect of my life, including my severest trials. The good news about my trials is that God is forcing them to bow to His gospel purposes and to do good unto me by improving my character and making me more conformed to the image of Christ.”
And so with that in view, just the goodness of the gospel, because we’re sinful, we need to just accept and be ready to guard against this precious treasure that we have being corrupted by anything we bring to the table. And Paul was aware of this in 1 Corinthians 1:17. This is why he went to Corinth. He chose not to preach the gospel with manmade eloquent words, or else he says, the cross would be emptied of its power. And so in these pitfalls, really what I’m aiming at is that we would guard the gospel and in all of our gospel centeredness to not fall into, what I think, are some common errors.
If you read gospel centered literature of our day, especially, then I’ll just name these five pitfalls. And more than likely, in my experience, you will see the writers kind of move in and out of these pitfalls. So, just these five things we need to be aware of. For starters, misunderstanding God’s chief end in the gospel. What I mean by that is God is aiming at God’s glory in the gospel. That’s primarily what God’s after. Although the gospel is useful in a temporal sense to bring about change, sanctification, restoration of relationships, etc., those things have a greater end. They are not ends in and of themselves.
And so, we need to embrace that God’s chief end in the gospel is His own glory. And as we seek to help people who are sinning, who are suffering, we should be aiming at the glory of God. That’s the first thing. If we miss this point, then nothing else matters. We’re preaching essentially a different gospel than Jesus and God himself have delivered to us by not making God’s own glory the chief end. And all of the help we bring to people, as we bring the gospel to bear on their problems, it must be transforming them into worshipers, so that at the end of the day, God is exalted. He’s honored. That’s the first pitfall.
The second is assuming that the gospel is all that’s needed in counseling. People, I think, with good intentions can describe the gospel as sufficient for counseling. And what I mean by that is in the sense that a man is justified by faith alone, by the grace of God alone, in Christ alone, Christ crucified and resurrected. That message in a nutshell, if that’s all you know and you don’t have any other knowledge of God’s word, we’re actually missing out on a significant portion of God’s word that doesn’t describe those particular details in that way. And another way to think about this is that our “gospel centeredness” needs to be as broad as the 66 books of Scripture.
So, not just our own particular articulation of the good news, but everything that God has to say in the Scriptures from Genesis to Revelation. Which is obviously what Jesus is intending when He says, “that man doesn’t live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.” We need to have all of Scripture in our tool belt, if you will, so that we can counsel people effectively.
Just one example in my own experience, there was a really tricky situation that another pastor and I were trying to navigate. It was interesting, as we thought through this issue together, what was really instructive for us was the end of 2 Samuel, when David is given an option for how he was going to take his punishment. You know, that message, not disconnected totally from the gospel, but when God presents three options for David to choose from and he chooses the lesser of the punishments, he’s actually casting himself on the mercy of God and choosing to be at God’s mercy instead of the wicked whose mercies are cruel.
And so, in this particular situation, just thinking of that principle and following in David’s example actually gave some encouragement, hope, and liberated this sheep who was trying to navigate a really tricky situation. So, in that sense, the narrative portions of Scripture, the law, all of it is good for teaching, reproof, correction, training, and righteousness.
Another thing, thirdly, rushing too quickly to the gospel for comfort. This one is perhaps one of the more tricky pitfalls because the gospel is so comforting. It’s natural and right and good to rush to the gospel for comfort. But really taking all wisdom, which is how Paul proclaimed Christ—with all wisdom as he was admonishing and teaching all men. It just takes the wisdom of God to discern in a moment, what does this person need? Do they need comfort or do they need something else? And Paul had those categories thinking of 1 Thessalonians 5.14.
You admonish the unruly, you encourage the fainthearted, and you help the weak. You have three different groups of people in the church with three different needs, and everybody didn’t need to be admonished. Everybody didn’t need to be exhorted. Please don’t admonish the fainthearted. You need to encourage them. And the weak need help, but everybody needs patience. So, we just have to discern, does this person need the comfort that the gospel brings? Or do they actually need the chastisement and guilt and reproof that the gospel might bring?
Dale Johnson: I’m going to add another there, Omri, that I think is really important, and I teach my students this, and I’ve seen this in the counseling room. Is this an issue where we’re talking about justification or sanctification in a person?
First of all, do they really know the Lord? So if I move in with gospel comforts, but this person is constantly unrepentant, moving in a direction away from the things of God, and 1 John, as a classification on their own life, is demonstrating, maybe they don’t believe.
Their life demonstrates something otherwise. The church should get involved in this person’s life. We can use the gospel as if it’s intended to be a comfort when it’s actually condemning to them, because maybe they don’t know the Lord, and we have to be discerning. I think that’s another application of your warning here. I rudely interrupted, so I want you to keep moving.
Omri Miles: Excellent feedback. Thomas Watson in The Godly Man’s Picture had just a sentence where he describes how thinking about the love of God produces something other than comfort. He said, “when I believe God’s love to me, this makes me weep that I should sin against so good a God.”
So you see, the gospel, even to the one to whom it eventually does always bring comfort; The gospel always brings comfort. And the path to the most robust gospel comfort is through gospel conviction. And so that’s what Watson is describing. I would commend to listeners chapter 11, in Mortification of Sin by John Owen, where he, apparently, has a group of people on his mind who should not go to the gospel for comfort, because they’re not mortifying their sin. And so he gives great counsel. I’ll leave that to our listeners to look into on their own.
And then just two more pitfalls to be aware of. Number four, drawing unbiblical implications from the gospel. This is a really bad practice in our day to look at a text, and with all of the good, healthy gospel doctrine that just leaps off the pages of Scripture—doctrines like justification, adoption, redemption, union with Christ. It’s actually not up to us to decide what those things mean. God decides what those things mean. And oftentimes in the very context where those doctrines make themselves known, the author is describing those doctrines because of the implications he’s already drawing on.
One example of this is in 1 Thessalonians 4, where in verses 7-8, he mentions God’s calling in salvation, and then the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Those are two gospel doctrines, they have to do with salvation. This is what God does independent of the believer’s effort, calls the Holy Spirit to dwell in us, calls us. And this occurs in a context, and the reason that he’s bringing up those doctrines is because he wants to, according to the previous verses, (1 Thessalonians 4:1-6) make a request, exhort them, command them, and even according to verse 6, warn them to flee sexual immorality.
So, these gospel doctrines, what they’re doing is they are placing commands and requirements. If God has done this in the gospel for you, you must go live this way. And so, the implications there would lead us away from just dreaming up on our own because we have something in our mind when it comes to this doctrine, then importing our own understanding onto the text of what people should do with those doctrines. And the safest way to do that is just to let the implications arise first and foremost from the text, and then anything that may not be in that passage, per se, has to still line up, can’t contradict or go against anything else that the Scriptures say.
So, things like be patient with yourself is not a valid implication based on biblical doctrine. Love yourself, forgive yourself. God forgives you, therefore you must forgive yourself. Oh man, that could sound so gospel-centered, but it actually contradicts other teachings of Scripture. And so that’s something we should be guarded from.
And then finally, fifthly, teaching the indicatives of the gospel to the neglect of its imperatives. So teaching the indicatives: what God does for us in the gospel in an imbalanced way or to the neglect of teaching what the gospel requires. And the way I like to think about this is that everything God has done for us in Christ makes some kind of command, obligates us to God in some way.
If God has adopted you, then according to Ephesians 5:1, you have to imitate God like children imitate fathers. God the Father has adopted you. According to Hebrews 12, you have to endure discipline like all legitimate sons. And so, we would be wise in our counsel to bring to bear on people’s lives, both of those sides of the gospel message.
This is what the gospel is. This is what it says. This is what God has accomplished. And then the therefore, to not leave out the therefore, this is what it demands of our lives.
Dale Johnson: Yeah. What you’re calling us to is an appropriate application of the gospel. And that takes discernment because even when we see the New Testament writers specifically applying the gospel in very particular ways, again, for the need of the moment, whatever that may be—whether it be comfort, exhortation, granting of mercy, or admonition—whatever the need is, that’s where the gospel is applied. But it has to be applied appropriate to the need. Talk a little bit about how these errors can actually work out to be harmful to people.
And listen, Omri, that sounds weird, right? So we’re thinking, how is the gospel harmful for people? But there’s a reality at which we can say, a misapplication of the gospel in an inappropriate moment can lead to errors where, on the other side, it has an unintended consequence toward the counselee that’s not something that’s helpful, it’s actually harmful. Sort of unpack that a few.
Omri Miles: Yeah. And a good way to think about this is that the gospel has never done any harm, only our handling of the gospel. So, one way I think about this is in 1 Thessalonians 4. This is a passage that I’ve gone to in my own counsel for those struggling with sexual immorality or not striving for sexual purity. God, in 1 Thessalonians 4—if you were to go to 1 Thessalonians 4 and pick out the gospel truths of the first eight verses, and if all you used those truths to do was to bring encouragement, comfort, and only remember what God has done merely—then what you would actually be doing is counseling with the gospel. With Paul’s words, with God’s words through Paul, in a way that God and Paul don’t counsel the Thessalonians.
So, here he actually says, and he brings out this in verse six, where he reminds them to let no man transgress and defraud his brother in the matter, because the Lord is the avenger in all these things, just as we also told you before and solemnly warned you. The way that he wants them to think about God, the same God, the same Lord Jesus who accomplished the gospel and who is coming again.
He’s been saying throughout the book, He’s coming to avenge Himself on wrongdoers. The God of the gospel is coming to avenge himself on wrongdoers. Think about that before you commit sexual immorality. If you practice sexual immorality, you should not assume you’re safe. And this is supposed to produce a fear of God in them that compels them to run far away from sexual immorality.
If we just went to this passage to say be encouraged. God gave his Holy Spirit to you, be encouraged, God called you not to impurity, but sanctification, and didn’t issue any kind of warning, we would actually be helping to numb that person’s conscience from the very words that God intends to heighten their sense of danger and fear of sin.
Dale Johnson: That’s right. Yeah, it veils. I love the way you said that. I describe it as it veils the conscience. It makes them not tender toward the thing of God, the things of God, or the calls of obedience that God describes. And you’re right. That fruit that’s coming out of a person’s life is demonstrating that something is not right. So, for us to use the gospel in a way as if it’s satisfying the soul is to veil them against their sin, and where we should be raising the commandments of God in such a way that their conscience now aligns with what the Word of God says, and it should be pricked in moments just like that.
So, talk about ways this can happen with counselors. And if we’re talking about quality control with our counselors—how we do better with the text, handling of the text of Scripture, and engaging in real counseling issues, where we see beautiful, real, healthy applications—talk about how counselors can avoid falling into these errors.
And listen, I’m going to preface this with just, you know how this is in raising children. Our kids will do something, and I’ll get on to them for doing that certain thing. “But dad, I didn’t intend to.” “Well, son, it didn’t matter. That’s what you did.”
Omri Miles: That’s right.
Dale Johnson: And so, whether you intended to or not, we need to learn what it is that put you in a situation that that was the outcome. That’s right. So, let’s take intention away. Motivation is important, okay? However, sometimes we make decisions, or we do things in the counseling room that have unintended consequences. Talk about how we can avoid falling into these errors in the counseling room.
Omri Miles: Yeah, that’s an excellent question. What comes to mind most is really this basic principle, not to oversimplify things. But your safest bet to not fall into these pitfalls is to be a continual student of the Scriptures. You have to be a student of the Scriptures. You cannot rely on your phase one training to carry you through. “And now I’m sufficiently equipped for counseling.” I mean, a thousand pages isn’t a small number. But really, I mean, if you’ve done any degree of counseling, then you know, I need to be reading way more than that as I step into people’s lives.
And this is what God intends in bringing people into our lives that need help. We exist as much to help them as they exist to sharpen us. And so, when that problem comes along in that person, that you need more Bible knowledge, you need more passages under your belt, go get it.
And what that really does for us, it doesn’t let us get comfortable, get lax in our handling of the Scriptures. No, we have to actually stay tethered to the text and look at those same passages that we’ve understood, to beg God for insight, to illuminate our understanding, and to really, again, let the implications that we counsel with from the gospel arise from the text itself.
That’s our safety. The text is our safeguard, not a confession, not a creed, not our doctrine, but where we are always safe is when we’re paying close attention to the details and just letting those fine tune our articulation of truth.
Dale Johnson: Omri, that’s really helpful into thinking more specifically, strategically and being careful with how we use the text and how we think about the lives of people.
To me, what you’re accentuating is really important. Counseling with the wisdom of God is not a one-size-fits-all scenario. That’s what our flesh wants. That’s why we beg for, give me some psychological modality that can help me in this situation.
What you’re describing is that the Bible is so dynamic, we have to be very cautious about how we use it because the Bible is to be applied, and the hope that God has given us in his promises are to be applied in a specific way, the specific situations that a person finds himself in, and so to be wise in how we do that. As you think about these things specifically, obviously you’ve been refined in your own counseling experience, your reading of the text, and maybe there have been other people who have helped you to think through this. What are other resources that have been helpful to you?
Omri Miles: So, the main resource that I would commend to our readers on this particular issue is Free to Be Holy by Jerry Wragg and Paul Shirley.
They have their finger on the issues that we’re seeing in, what they end up calling, gospel off-centeredness. It’s a book on sanctification, Free to Be Holy, and it actually addresses some of the major errors in the gospel-centered movement as it builds for the reader a healthy way to think about the doctrine of sanctification. So, I would commend that to all our readers.
Dale Johnson: Very helpful. What we’ll do is we’ll put that in the show notes. Omri, this has been a great discussion. Thanks for giving us some warning. Always good for us to grow in our precision in how we think about the Scripture text and then how we move toward an application that’s appropriate for the need of the moment in the life of the individual. So brother, thank you for challenging us in this way.
Omri Miles: Thanks for having me.
