Dale Johnson: This week on the podcast I have with me Jacob Elwart. He’s a pastor of Discipleship Ministries at Inter-City Baptist Church in Allen Park, Michigan. He also serves as Assistant Professor of Biblical Counseling at Detroit Baptist Theological Seminary. He’s a Fellow with ACBC and also a newly minted board member with ACBC. He and his wife Jennifer have three children and one grandchild. Jacob, welcome to the podcast, brother.
Jacob Elwart: Thank you. Thank you for having me.
Dale Johnson: And this is going to be fun talking about teaching counselees to apply truth. And it’s so important that we learn as a counselor the skilled responsibility that we have to apply appropriate truths in an appropriate way for the problem at hand. So I want you to talk about, before we get into the application piece, what is the goal of biblical counseling and how does assigning homework fit into that goal? Because honestly, some people would say, what? You guys use homework? That sounds elementary. But, describe the goal of biblical counseling and this whole concept of homework.
Jacob Elwart: Well, the work of counseling is really just discipleship. It’s intensive discipleship. So, what we’re trying to do here is we’re trying to get them to become more and more like Jesus Christ. It’s one aspect of the larger work that the church is doing to bring a person to full maturity. So, homework helps them put the truth of their learning into practice.
And the critical part, I think, for homework is that it cannot bypass the heart. You could have a counselee do all the assignments but never be changed. And so, what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to give them work on their own, apart from us, that would be helpful to take them to the next level of spiritual glory, as 2 Corinthians 3:18 talks about, as they gaze on the Scriptures. They get a sense more of who God is and who they are and are then changed by it.
Dale Johnson: Yeah, that’s exactly right. I mean, when I think about homework, it really is more of an emphasis on who the person is that’s responsible for helping that individual change. It’s less the counselor, although we have an important role, but it’s really the work of the Spirit. And so, the homework that we give allows the Spirit through the text of Scripture to continue that work with the individual in between sessions.
You know, one of the things that I see, Jacob, I teach at a seminary and just broadly in the church as I travel different places, and the secularization of our culture, one of the things that we see is the literacy of the Scripture going down. And often, even people in the church, maybe they don’t understand Scripture fully. And if they don’t understand Scripture fully, they certainly don’t know how to apply it well.
So how do you help people learn some of the basics of applying Scripture? Because that’s a really important task. They can’t be changed by Scripture if they don’t know it. And if they don’t know it, they can’t apply it. So we’ve got to start somewhere. How do we help people like that?
Jacob Elwart: I think it’s both taught and caught. I want to model it well in my counseling. So I want to be able to, whenever I take them to a passage, I want to be applying it well. So that requires me to first understand the passage, second, to be able to interpret it properly, and then to apply it. When I do, I’m modeling that for them.
And then for them to grow in that, what they need to do is practice. I mean, it comes down to that. It demands really the basic disciplines of the Christian life, and nothing can really replace practice. Hebrews 5:14 says, through practice, they have their senses trained to discern between good and evil. The challenge with application is most people just have one category for application. “I must do what the Bible says.” That’s their main principle, their guiding principle. So, when the Scriptures say, “love God,” they say, “I must love God.” Or when the Scriptures say, “love your neighbor,” “I must love my neighbor.”
But then they get the more difficult passages, and they might come to something like a food law, or a holy kiss, or something like that. And they say, “I must do what the Bible says, except for when it doesn’t apply.” So then they kind of change the principle. But the point is that it’s a difficult process. And really, even those passages about food laws do have application for us. We just have to be able to first understand them and interpret them. And we really can’t give a crash course, a full understanding kind of lesson to our counselees in the process. We’re actually trying to work towards a long-term. So short-term, I want to teach them some basics about it.
But if you think about it, if you had a brand-new believer, you wouldn’t give them the Bible and say, “apply everything in this.” They wouldn’t know how. They don’t have the categories to think about how to possibly understand, interpret, and apply them. So, what I’m actually trying to do is I’m getting them in connection to a good local church who can be teaching that, where their pastor’s modeling it on a week-by-week basis. And then also, hopefully there’s some classes on Bible study or whatever. I might encourage them to read a couple books on hermeneutics or Bible study, depending on their level of understanding or ability to comprehend those things.
But, it really does take time to build on these principles. And that’s really a long-term goal that I might not be able to do in counseling. So, I’m going to try to give them some of the basics. Part of that is just I’ll give them a text to look at and then I’ll tell them how they might apply that and maybe ask some questions when they meet back with me.
Dale Johnson: Yeah, that’s helpful. I learned in particular ways, I think it may be similar to others, but I need certain categories. So I think about sometimes in my mind, I feel like I need file folders. So give me somewhere to put the information. I feel like I can hold information better rather than just I get a blob of information. It really has nowhere to stick in my mind. And so, help counselors think through this process about, okay, you’re mentioning homework. I want to teach people to apply the Scriptures. Give us some categories, some file folders in our mind that we can start exploring, thinking about this is the type of homework that you can assign.
Jacob Elwart: When I first think about that, I start at the basic disciplines of the Christian life. So, those are like my fundamental things that I’m seeking to apply, help them to apply these truths that I’m teaching them in the counseling session. So Bible reading, Bible study, Bible memorization, prayer, write out a prayer, find a song that is a prayer to God that’s rich with theology. And then the third would be going to church, taking notes from the pastor’s sermon.
I might also add some other ones to that, like I’ll have them listen to a sermon. And when I started in counseling, I often would, I would usually have some that I recommend from John Piper or John MacArthur or somebody. But one of my desires recently is actually getting my counselees connected to their own local church. So, I’m actually sending them on a mission for themselves to find sermons about the particular topic from their own pastor, because I want them to hear his voice as the loudest voice in the room, because he is their shepherd.
And certainly, they can learn from these other guys, but sometimes what I don’t want to do is I don’t want to feed a mindset that it would be okay for someone to kind of have an independent “Lone Ranger” type of lifestyle and learn from a bunch of preachers, but never be able to submit to his own pastor. And so, I think listening to sermons is part of it. Journaling, Dr. Robert Jones says, doesn’t tend to be as helpful early in the counseling process because they may tend towards godless recycling of bad thinking.
But, over the long haul or later on in the counseling process, it can actually be a good way for them to apply or write down some of the things that they’ve understood from the Scriptures. Of course, that depends on how you assign it. But then the last category would be action steps. And in the short-term, this can be helpful, but long-term, you need to teach them how to apply the Scriptures. So those would be the basic categories that I’m thinking about.
Dale Johnson: Yeah, that’s, I think that’s helpful. And those are good categories to start building. Honestly, some really practical things that you’re suggesting.
Now, I want to turn our attention to something that we’ve all experienced if we’ve engaged at all in counseling and the counselee who’s not very motivated. They come back maybe after week one and they’ve not done their homework. They seem very unmotivated to complete some of the things that you’re asking them to do. And listen, counselees are that way, sometimes. It takes us a while to be motivated to do some of the right things, too. So I’m not just picking on them, but we’ve all experienced that. So, what do we do to try and motivate counselees who are slow to and unmotivated to do their assignments?
Jacob Elwart: The first thing I think I need to make clear is that it depends, because let’s say you have a mom who’s got a newborn baby and she’s struggling with postpartum depression or something, and you assign her this huge load of homework. That actually might be on me as a counselor to step it back. And maybe I actually might be burdening her even more.
But let’s just take a typical case where someone’s clearly not motivated. They’re not willing to do what you told them to do. The first time, I usually want to offer them grace and show patience. I assume that I did not communicate well. I didn’t make it clear that how important this is for their well-being. The second time I’m more stern, but still speaking gently as we’re told to. I can’t change you. Change cannot be happening only when we’re together. That change has to be happening. And the other time when we’re not together.
And then the third time, if it happens again, then I’m just going to say, you know, you just need to contact me when you’re done with your homework and then we’ll set up our next meeting. Some people I’ve found are just happy to meet with you as long as they don’t have to do work. And they like to pick their scabs in front of you if you’ll let them. And the most loving thing that you as a counselor can do is to warn them about not being a hearer only like James talks about.
And Jesus gives strong warnings to people who had ambition but never put it into practice. You have the wise man and the foolish man both heard the Word, one put it into practice, the other did not. You have the parable of the soils. All four of them heard the Word, but three of them did not put it into practice or they fell away. And the one did and bore fruit. And then you have the parable of the virgins, of course, where all ten of them wanted to trim their lamps, but only five did it in advance.
So, there’s lots of counselees who will come in with all this ambition. They want the change. They’re like, please change me. And you’re like, well, yeah, but it’s a cooperative work of you and the Holy Spirit. As John Murray says, the responsible participation with the Spirit, that’s what sanctification is. I can’t do that for you. That’s why I’m trying to help you. I’m giving you steps to be able to move closer to Christ. But if you don’t take them, there’s not going to be any change.
Dale Johnson: Yeah, well said. And in the same way that we think about homework being something that is, you know, immensely useful in between counseling sessions, probably the most important thing is local church involvement. And because we see the church as being not just, you know, a helpful addendum, we actually see it as a centerpiece of Christ’s care for His people.
And one of the things that I do is I try to help my students think through this. So, when they start engaging in counseling and I’m working with them in supervision and I’m getting them to evaluate how they did, how they understand, you know, the individual, how they think biblically about whatever the situation is, I always add on, I want you to think about how can the local church get involved. So, I think it’s important for us to think about that. So, describe how would some of your assignments that you give, how does that fit in with the local church?
Jacob Elwart: Yeah, so like I said, I think that’s one of the assignments. If I sense, and by sense, I have intake forms and I ask these questions, but if I sense that they’re not closely connected with a good Bible-believing church, then I’m going to make that part of their assignment. And then if they are, I’m going to continue to encourage that. But then also my end goal is to get them to a place where they’re closely connected to the local church and they’re detached from me.
So, I feel like people who are closely connected to a local church, actively involved in it, can grow much faster and seem to have better success over the long haul than those who are disconnected from a local church. And maybe that’s part of my assignment, but if they’re not, that’s actually what I’m working to do. I’m saying you need to find a good church. I’m going to try to help you find one. If it’s, if you don’t have one, you can come to ours, but if there’s one in your area, I’d love to point you to that one because change does not happen in a vacuum.
Ephesians 4 tells us that it happens as we speak the truth to one another in love. And they can’t just live their lives on an island and hope that change will happen. It happens as we are helping each other to grow up into all aspects into him who is the head, even Christ. And so we need each other. We need the body and the body needs us. That’s hard for someone who’s in a place where they’re struggling with some kind of sin, but that is the case. And so, I want to make sure that they have a high view of the church in terms of its benefit for them and how they can serve it.
Dale Johnson: I love it. And this has been immensely helpful. You’ve said a lot of things. I would summarize it maybe in three basic ways. And what you find are pitfalls, I think, and you’re helping people to overcome some of those stall points, if you will, within a counseling process.
First is encouraging counselors to actually give homework. One of the ways that it can stall is if we’re not engaging someone with work to be done in between sessions. The second is how do we motivate the individual if we’re giving homework, maybe we need to address the way that we’re giving homework, but helping to motivate them. And then that third piece, which I think is really critical, sometimes we have a tendency to forget. So, this is a good reminder. The church is really crucial. Helping a person get involved, assimilate them into the normal processes of body life for their ongoing care is going to be immensely helpful. And with any problem, it’s going to help to alleviate that more quickly than would just in a counseling situation.
So, Jacob, thanks for your time today helping us think through this and helping us learn how to apply the truth of Scripture to people’s lives appropriately.
Jacob Elwart: Thank you.