Biblical counseling is difficult. If you’ve had any experience counseling others, you’ll know first-hand just how difficult it can be. We’re not the first generation of people who find biblical counseling or pastoral care difficult. Speaking of the difficulty of pastoral care, or of providing spiritual guidance, Gregory Nazianzen famously compared pastoral guidance to the practice of medicine. Nazianzen wrote: “the guiding of man, the most variable and manifold of creatures, seems to me in very deed to be the art of arts and science of sciences. Anyone may recognise this, by comparing the work of the physician of souls with the treatment of the body; and noticing that, laborious as the latter is, ours is more laborious, and of more consequence, from the nature of its subject matter, the power of its science, and the object of its exercise.”1
The Difficulty of Rejection
Because of this difficulty, wise biblical counselors realize that this ministry will be attended to with many hardships. One of those hardships is dealing with heartache when our counsel is rejected. Even when we counsel wisely, there is no guarantee that our counsel will be heeded. This is something we see happening within the pages of
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