Central to a biblical understanding of anthropology is that humans are made for worship. The understanding that there is something greater than we are has been hardwired into our hearts, and when we come to know the God of the Bible, our response above all else is worship. Continue Reading →
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If you’ve counseled for any length of time, you have likely found yourself in a spot where you have done everything you know to do, but the person you are counseling is no better. Maybe it’s a couple that you’ve been working with that’s highly conflicted, and they are just not responding to your counsel. Maybe it’s a woman struggling with anxiety who does all her homework yet shows no signs of improvement. We, counselors, are human and are likely to have intrusive thoughts suggesting we must not be very good at what we do. It’s even harder for us to take when our counselee says as much. Let’s face it—counseling people is hard work. While counseling at its best is a front-row seat to watch God work, it can be discouraging, frustrating, and at times humiliating when you can’t seem to figure out exactly what is wrong or what to suggest as a solution. Continue Reading →
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While recently reading Post-Christian: A Guide to Contemporary Thought and Culture by Gene Edward Veith Jr., my thoughts went on a tangential journey prompted by him talking about the Copernican revolution of the 16th Century. Up to that time, astronomers and scientists thought the Earth was the center of the universe, and that the Sun revolved around the Earth. This makes perfect sense to the observer. The Sun rises in the east, travels across the sky, and sets in the west faithfully each twenty-four-hour period. If the Earth was standing still and not rotating, logic would dictate that the Sun must be revolving around the Earth. Copernicus proposed that the Sun’s “rising” and “setting” was not because it revolved around the Earth every 24 hours. Instead, the Sun was the center of a planetary system, of which the Earth was a part, and the Earth was rotating on its axis every 24 hours while also revolving around the Sun, completing one revolution every year. What Copernicus proposed—which was eventually proven—was nothing short of a scientific revolution that changed human understanding forever. Continue Reading →
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This week’s mini-series on the Grace and Truth Blog addresses the topic of counseling individuals who are questioning God. In our first article, Gary Hallquist shares how to respond when our life experience seems to prove the opposite of the claims of Scripture. In other contributions to the series, Sue Nicewander Delaney considers the question of “Does God love me?” and Alexandre Sacha Mendes discusses when God’s wisdom does not make sense. Continue Reading →
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I love word pictures. As a counselor and teacher of future counselors, I am forever looking for ways to take spiritual truths and put them into images that are easy to grasp and hard to forget. When I ran across the picture of the bicycle in Rankin Wilbourne’s wonderful book, Union with Christ, I couldn’t help but write about it. Continue Reading →
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