Saints, Sufferers, and Sinners: Loving Others As God Loves Us by Dr. Mike Emlet (New Growth Press, January 2021) is one of the most important and helpful counseling books since the launch of the biblical counseling movement half-a-century ago. As a writer-practitioner, it’s sometimes difficult to be “comprehensively compassionate.” You want to say everything, yet you want to balance depth with practicality. Mike Emlet eminently succeeds in being “biblical-practical” in Saints, Sufferers, and Sinners. If you want comprehensive and compassionate equipping in one-another care, then this is the book for you.
A Three-Fold Trellis
Writing in the 1960s, British Christian psychiatrist Frank Lake noted that, “Pastoral care is defective unless it can deal thoroughly both with the evils we have suffered as well as with the sins we have committed” (Clinical Theology, p. 25). Lake’s model is a predecessor to the common designation in modern biblical counseling of Christians as saints who face suffering and fight against sin.
Emlet takes these three concepts (saints, sufferers, sinners) and develops them as three foundational and biblical ways of understanding and ministering to friends, family members, and counselees. As Emlet describes it, “Scripture gives us a kind of trellis—a basic structure—on which love
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