Thoughts on counseling

I am currently completing a master's degree in biblical counseling, as most of my friends and family know. What many of you may not know is what that specifically means. While I will not try and explain it all in one post, let me give you a few brief thoughts to consider about the way that each of gives and receives counsel. Because let's face it, we are all counselors in some fashion or another. Understanding true biblical counsel means understanding the depravity of man, which most of us don't. Even those of us who have been well-taught in a solid doctrinal church, who claim that we understand it, really don't when we step back and examine our typical responses to the sin that we see in our own lives. We are eager to excuse it, to blame it on something or someone else, as if it is out of our control somehow. We are bad people struggling to do good, not the other way around! One of my pastors recently told me that his most basic definition of depravity is that it is "refusing to accept the goodness of God". This floored me with its simplicity, yet obvious truth when I consider it experientially. God's goodness is found in His Law, which He was kind enough to reveal in His Word, so that we have the instructions for righteousness, yet we continue to choose our sin over Him every day. We must embrace wholeheartedly what the Bible says about our hearts, our wicked imaginations and our deceitful thoughts. Consider what God's Word says in Hebrews 4:

11Let us therefore strive to enter that rest, so that no one may fall by the same sort of disobedience. 12For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart. 13And no creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account.

This is where biblical counseling finds it foundation, by using Scripture ALONE through the power of the Holy Spirit, to lay open the heart of man, exposing his evil ways and then supplying the healing and hope-filled balm of the Word.