Heath Lambert: We get questions in to Truth in Love all the time and this week I’m glad to be joined on the podcast with the operations director of ACBC, Sean Perron. Sean, we are glad you’re here to throw some counseling questions at us and see if we can help those who are raising them.
Sean Perron: So, we are getting ready to start our spring CDT’s, which are our counseling and discipleship training events, and we’ll be in Sioux Falls, Houston, and Huntsville. You have spoken at all kinds of counseling training all across the country and these questions are related specifically to our fundamentals track.
Heath Lambert: Okay.
Sean Perron: So, we have a session in there called Getting at Heart Issues. Where does someone start when they have a counselee come to them and they need to identify what’s going on at their heart, how can a counselor do that biblically?
Heath Lambert: So, in Proverbs 20:5 it says, “A plan in the heart of a man is like deep water, but a man of understanding draws it out.” And so, this is talking about how the heart and what the heart thinks and plans is a deep water, and a man of understanding draws it out. So, if we want to be counselors of understanding, counselors who are wise, we want to draw out what is in the hearts of people. There are a lot of ways to get at this. Let me focus on one text and one way here in this conversation. In James 4:1-2 it says, “What is the source of quarrels and conflicts among you? Is not the source your pleasures that wage war in your members? You lust and do not have; so you commit murder. You are envious and cannot obtain; so you fight and quarrel…” And so, this is a text specifically about fighting and anger, but when it gets at the root of quarrels and fighting’s, it asks you to consider what your pleasures are or what your motives are, what your desires are. And so, one of the best, most concrete ways to get at what is going on in the heart of someone is to ask them why they were doing what they were doing. Why are you thinking what you’re thinking? Even a little more concrete than that question of why which can be a little nebulous for some folks is to say, “What were you wanting? What were you pursuing? What are you after? There’s something you want, what is it that you want, this word that you said, this thing that you did, this thing that you thought was in an effort to get something, and what is that?” And when a person explains to you what they’re wanting, they’re going to be explaining to you what they’re cherishing in their heart and what’s driving their thinking and their words and their actions.
Sean Perron: Okay, so a lot of people talk about the idols of the heart. In your book After Adams, you mention pride as a root for sin. In Finally Free, you talk about how thanksgiving is a clear issue, a theme that you can trace back to, when people are sinning, they’re not being thankful. Is there a core issue that every counselor should try to identify or is it a smattering of issues that they should be looking at when they’re looking for, okay, what’s the sin behind the sin?
Heath Lambert: Yeah, so the root sin is always pride. In fact, if you go up just a few verses from what I just read a moment or two ago in James 4, James 3:14 says, “If you have bitter jealousy and selfish ambition in your heart, do not be arrogant and so lie against the truth. This wisdom is not that which comes down from above, but is earthly, unspiritual, demonic,” verse 16, “for where jealousy and selfish ambition exist, there is disorder and every evil thing.” So, the apostle James looks at every disorder and every vile thing, and he backs it up into the common problem of jealousy and selfish ambition. Different language for pride, different language for arrogance. And so, the human heart, what it means to be sinful, is to want what you want and not what God wants and not what neighbor wants. That’s what it means to be sinful. That’s what it means as a Christian to have indwelling sin that we are yet trying to put off our self-centered lusts that drive us to act. And so, whether you use the language of idols, or whether you use the term that’s a little more friendly in the New Testament of lusts, your sinful, self-exalting heart attaches onto idols or attaches onto lusts and it uses those to try to get the sinful, self-exalting heart what it wants. Of course, they fail and that’s where you get into consequences for sin, but the root sin is always going to be my sinful, self-exalting heart that is trying to get whatever I want at the expense of God and everybody else.
Sean Perron: That’s helpful. When we talk about root issues and identifying the sin behind the sin, so to speak, what would you say to a person who says, “Okay, I think unbelief is the source of all sin, not pride.” Is there any merit to that? What would you say about that?
Heath Lambert: There is a diversity of speech in how the Bible talks about these kinds of things. What I’m doing is kind of systematizing when I say, “Hey, the root issue is pride or the sinful, self-exalting heart.” I’m trying to systematize a lot of texts. I would actually want to make the argument that when I say pride is at the root of, you know, kind of the sin behind the sin, I can make an argument that saying unbelief is the root sin is saying the same thing as pride is the root sin, because “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’…” (Psalm 14:1a). And so, the pride leads to unbelief, unbelief leads to pride. You know, if you think about Adam and Eve in the garden, they did not believe God’s instruction to them. They believed the satanic instruction to them. That’s pride and unbelief mingled right in there together. I don’t believe God I’ll do what I want. Pride and unbelief really depend on one another.
Sean Perron: That’s helpful. This topic is getting at the beginning of a counseling case, so to speak, or throughout a counseling case, if we talk about ending a counseling case, one question is what are reasons to end a counseling case? And then follow-up, when should we know that it’s time for the counseling case to end?
Heath Lambert: Yeah, so it is crucial to know how to end a counseling case, because for the most part, this isn’t always the case, but most counseling cases do need to end. Sometimes they go on and on and they morph into a different kind of relationship, and you couldn’t discern, “Hey, when did we stop meeting formally and start just hanging out as friends?”, but for the most part counseling cases end and the question is to know how to do that. I don’t think the answers about how to end and how to know when it’s time to end a counseling case are as nice and neat and tidy as some of my friends in the biblical counseling movement seem to think. So, let me just give a few thoughts. You can know that it’s time to end a counseling case when this person is growing and changing on their own and you’ve dealt with all of the issues and realities that came to be what we sometimes call “on the counseling agenda”. These are issues that got listed on the agenda of things we need to talk about in this person’s life and once you’ve dealt with those and once this person is growing and changing on their own that’s a good time to end. We love it when that happens. There also is often a time to end a counseling case when the counselee is not growing and changing, but that’s where things get a little tricky. So, let me tell you just a general scenario when I’ve ended counseling when things are not going well and when I’ve actually continued counseling when things are not going well. So, situations where somebody comes in and they’re not doing the work in between sessions, where you call it “homework”, or “sanctification projects”, or “personal improvement projects”, or “counseling application”—
Sean Perron: — “growth assignments”.
Hearth Lambert: — “growth assignments”, whatever people want to call it. We’re having people do things during the week in between sessions, in between the times that we meet, because that’s where the change is happening, that’s where life is lived. If somebody is coming back and regularly not doing the work, there have been numerous times when I’ve said, “Hey, the reason that work was important for you to do is because it’s setting us up for things that we’re going to talk about in our time together and things that you need to do after this in order to take the next step towards change, and if you’re not going to do that, then we really don’t have anything to talk about, we really can’t move forward in any way.” and so I give—hey, look, life’s busy, things come up. I often give people two or three or even four misses, but after we’ve established a pattern and even if there’s not a pattern, but “Hey, look, what we were going to talk about this time together was dependent on you finishing the work.” I will say something like, “Hey, we can’t meet until you’ve got that done. So, you get it done and then you call me, and we’ll get back together.” So, that’s kind of a soft ending. I actually have never told a counselee that I won’t meet with them again. I just don’t do that. My general rule of thumb is if you want to talk about Jesus and the Bible, I’ll talk with you. And then after that, it’s just constrained by practical realities of, you know, are you doing the work, can we continue this conversation?
There have been times when I have allowed counseling to continue even when somebody is blowing it, and that has been in a handful of situations where the stakes were very, very high. There was one situation where I was a court-ordered counselor for a young woman who was destroying her life and I knew that if I said, “I’m not meeting with you anymore.”, she was going to be tossed back out on the street out of this facility that she was living in and the consequences of that for her life in terms of being broke, prostitution, drug use, it was just simply a consequence I was not willing to accept, and so, I kept meeting with this person that I knew it was not being effective, it was not working, the meetings were going nowhere, but if I said, “I won’t do it.”, it was going to have such drastic consequences in her life that I just couldn’t live with it. And so, I continued for a very long time past any kind of effectiveness in order to keep a consequence from coming into her life that would have just been life-ending. So, I want to say there is a time and a place that you would say, “Hey, this doesn’t need to keep going, but in a spirit of Christian grace and charity, we’re going to keep it going anyway and trust that maybe this drop of truth this week, this kernel of grace this week, is going to be something that’s going to make the difference in this person’s life.”
