Spir Dynamics 588-9 3/5/95; Jam 30-31 2/7/90

DOCTRINE OF COUNSELING

A. Introduction.

1. The believer cannot think, apply Bible doctrine, or solve problems through the mind of another person.

a. God has provided for each one of us in eternity past our very own portfolio of invisible assets. All of these assets are designed for us to learn doctrine and have it circulating in our stream of consciousness. You were designed to counsel yourself and to give yourself far greater counsel than any expert who ever came along and called himself a counselor. God designed you to always be your own counselor.

b. No counselor is designed to have all the facts. There is no way he can have all of the facts, nor any way that he should have all the facts. The function of the ministry is not counseling. There is only one person who has all of the facts, when you have a problem—you. No one ever gets right information from a counselor unless the counselor has all the facts. Yet no counselor ever has all the facts.

c. In the Church Age, God gave all of us a priesthood. The pastor’s responsibility is to give you facts from the word of God, not to counsel you. In eternity past, God provided for each one of us ten problem solving devices to be deployed on the FLOT line of the soul through two power options—the filling of the Holy Spirit and the word of God circulating in your very own stream of consciousness through the filling of the Holy Spirit.

d. There has never been a thought, a problem, a pressure, or a disaster in your life that the word of God has not covered and given you answers. When it comes to testing, no testing has ever come your way apart from the will of God, and He never gives us more testing than we able to bear, and He always provides a way out—the use of a problem solving device to resolve the problem. God’s problem solving devices are infinitely greater than any counseling you will ever get from a psychiatrist or psychotherapist. The exception are truly mentally ill people who can be treated with medications and be able to function.

2. All problems you will ever face are resolved by four spiritual mechanics of the protocol plan of God for the Church Age only.

a. The four spiritual mechanics are:

(1) The two power options—the filling of the Holy Spirit and metabolized doctrine circulating in the stream of consciousness.

(2) The three spiritual skills—the filling of the Holy Spirit, metabolized doctrine in the stream of consciousness, and the deployment of the ten problem solving devices on the FLOT line of the soul.

(3) The function of the ten problem solving devices.

(4) The execution of the three stages of the adult spiritual life—spiritual self-esteem, spiritual autonomy, and spiritual maturity.

b. Your whole modus operandi and modus vivendi in the spiritual life are dependent upon the transference of doctrine from the page of the Bible to your soul.

c. The four spiritual mechanics demand that the believer solve all problems of life through deployment of the problem solving devices on the FLOT line of his own soul. When you do this, you have something far greater than any kind of counseling from another person.

d. The privacy of the priesthood demands that the believer of the Church Age use his own soul as a base of operation for his spiritual life. There is no problem in life greater than the ten problem solving devices. The primary purpose of assembling for worship is to provide the privacy of the priesthood. Only the accurate communication of Bible doctrine to an assembled group of believers fulfills the principle of the privacy of the priesthood for the accumulation of wisdom—metabolized doctrine circulating in the stream of consciousness—the inventory in your soul for self- counseling.

e. To the extent you are leaning on anyone else, you are not growing up. You cannot depend upon others. You have the most fantastic counseling system in your own soul. You counsel yourself in every problem.

3. In the Church Age, every believer is a priest, 1 Pet 2:5, 9; Rev 1:6, 5:10. The consistent use of the four spiritual mechanics results in an inventory of Bible doctrine, called by the Bible wisdom. No one is wiser than you are when you are counseling yourself. From this inventory of wisdom you are manumitted from the slavery to counselors. Instead you are dependent upon the Parclete ministry of God the Holy Spirit as the problem solver for the believer. God the Holy Spirit is your counselor, because He teaches you doctrine which you use to solve your problems.

4. Three things are involved in self-counseling.

a. Learning—Bible doctrine has to be transferred from the page of the word of God to your soul.

b. Thinking—you become your own counselor and apply Bible doctrine in your soul to your own experience.

c. Application—your very own doctrine in your stream of consciousness becomes the basis for the deployment of the ten problem solving devices on the FLOT line of your soul.

5. The principles of application of doctrine to experience.

a. Application without truth is false. Counseling that most believers are getting today is not pertinent to their situation and all they do is develop the arrogance skills, especially self-absorption.

b. Application without fact is fiction. The counsel faces the problem of getting a lot of fiction from the person who comes to him for counseling. Most people deny they have done anything wrong and blame the problem on someone else. You cannot solve problems until you take the responsibility for the fact you made a bad decision.

c. Application from emotion is both arrogance and irrationality. Any solution you have to a problem from emotion is both arrogance and irrationality.

d. Application without doctrinal principles is life without direction.

e. Application without accumulated wisdom from Bible doctrine is both distraction and distortion of your spiritual life. This means that application apart from the learning and use of the ten problem solving devices results in human solutions. The elative conclusion of 2 Cor 12:10 teaches than divine solutions are the only solutions and human solutions are no solutions.

f. Application of doctrine without rebound (that is, application without the two power options) means the believer will always make wrong decisions and will even deny the truth in his own soul about his own failures. Therefore, he will live a lie, 1 Jn 1:8, 10.

g. As goes your spiritual life, so goes your marriage. As a believer, your spiritual life is the key to your marriage. A person is no better in marriage than he is as a person. If you are a failure in your spiritual life, you are a failure in marriage.

h. Failure in your marriage is also failure to deploy the tandem problem solving devices—personal love for God the Father and impersonal love for all mankind. Failure in personal love always occurs outside of the integrity envelope of the tandem problem solving devices.

i. Regarding past failure, you can do nothing about it, but because of rebound you can do something about the future. As long as you are alive you can recover and even become a great believer.

j. Application to marital problems outside of the integrity envelope (personal love for God the Father and impersonal love for all mankind) is the malfunction of your spiritual life and tantamount to failure in marriage. To the extent that you go somewhere for counseling, to that extent you are in trouble, because you have been given your very own portfolio of invisible assets to solve your own problems. Application without virtue in the integrity envelope is pseudo love, and pseudo love is not strong enough to hold any marriage together.

k. God has provided mechanics of application. All correct and accurate application of doctrine to postsalvation experience must originate from the four spiritual mechanics. Everything you do correctly in the spiritual life is the power of the Holy Spirit.

6. Counseling is defined in this study as advise, opinion or instruction given in directing the judgment or the conduct of another person. It is not defined as the interchange of opinions as to the future procedure or modus operandi of any organization, nor does it apply to recommendation of a plan or policy within the framework of a local church or Christian service organization.

7. The Principle of Self-determination.

a. If you do not make your own decisions, you cannot take the responsibility for them.

b. Counseling should never deprive a believer of self- determination or making his or her own decisions.

c. Therefore, one of the many dangers of counseling is that you end up running someone else’s life.

d. You cannot make decisions for another person’s life. They become dependent upon you rather than Bible doctrine.

e. The exception is parents, who have a right to counsel their children without someone else contradicting that counsel or interposing their own counseling.

f. There is an invisible line between helping people which is a good deed, and running their lives which is dead works.

8. The Arrogance Factor.

a. Very few believers are qualified to counsel because of the arrogance factor.

b. Counseling becomes very stimulating and leads to blind arrogance, like the frog in a pot of cold water. The frog likes it in the pot of cold water, but does not realize that the water is gradually being heated. By the time he realizes the water is getting warmer, he is boiled. The heat is approbation lust, power lust, arrogance. The frog in cold water is a believer who counsels others. The counseling becomes dead works.

c. When the counselor imposes his or her own solutions on another believer rather than divine solutions from Bible doctrine, that counselor is producing dead works.

d. When a counselor imposes his or her own solutions on another believer, he or she often contradicts Bible doctrine being taught from the pulpit of the local church, and thereby undermines the authority of the pastor.

e. Even if the counselor does not contradict the doctrine coming from the pulpit, those who are being counseled begin to use the counselor for a crutch. This also undermines the authority and ministry of the pastor-teacher.

f. When a person begins to counsel the young people of a church and imposes their own solutions on those young people, they have undermined two categories of authority: the authority of the parents and the authority of the pastor.

(1) Young people are very impressionable, and they gravitate to role-models who have been created in two ways.

(a) A role-model created by the counselor from his or her own approbation lust.

(b) A role-model created by the young person who is being counseled.

(2) The very fact that you are counselling someone else’s children with or without their consent is an attack on the divine institution of the family and the Christian institution of the local church.

9. Conclusion.

a. Counseling is dangerous because it results in controlling others.

b. Counseling young people is dangerous because it interdicts the authority of the parents who have a right to counsel their children.

c. Counseling adults in the local church is dangerous because it interdicts the authority of the pastor.

d. The problem is that believers who are negative to doctrine solicit advise and counseling from those who are least qualified to provide it.

e. Counseling undermines the authority of the Word of God, the authority of the pastor-teacher, the authority of parents, and often the authority of government. In the past, Christian’s have counseled other Christians to avoid the draft into military service, or to not pay one’s income taxes. This undermines the authority of government.

f. When counseling destroys authority, the good which might have occurred is parlayed into evil. When counseling contradicts Bible doctrine, good is parlayed into evil. When counseling destroys the freedom and self- determination of the believer to make his own decisions, good is parlayed into evil. When counseling results in the believer walking on crutches rather than making his own application of doctrine, good is parlayed into evil. When good is parlayed into evil through counseling, the counselor is producing dead works.

g. Counseling can sometimes destroy the structural organization and the authority of both the family and the local church. In such a case counseling is functioning beyond one’s spiritual capacity.

h. Most counseling is functioning beyond one’s spiritual capacity. In the case of Christian counseling, the capacity has to be based on metabolized doctrine or wisdom.

(1) Wisdom includes both perception and metabolization of doctrine. It also includes knowing what spiritual self-esteem is and attaining it, and then spiritual autonomy, and then spiritual maturity.

(2) Wisdom is the application of metabolized doctrine to the experience of life.

(3) The first point of wisdom in counseling is to recognize that fine, invisible line between helping people (which is legitimate under the spiritual gift of gifts) and running their lives (which is not legitimate). Helping people can be construed as a good deed. Running their lives can be construed as anything from dead works to evil.

j. Christian counseling most avoid imposing one’s own solution to problems on another rather than the divine solution from doctrine. Sometimes even when the counselor gives the divine solution, the person being counseled, who is often negative to doctrine, associates doctrine with the counselor rather than the pastor’s teaching.

k. Doctrinal encouragement can be a good deed, while running someone else’s life through counselling is dead works and possibly evil.

l. When a Christian counselor crosses that invisible line, he or she replaces Bible doctrine solutions with human viewpoint.

10. The Dependency Problem.

a. The person who solicits counseling from another is like a drug addict; he or she goes back for more and more and more, so that the counselor has become their injection. The injection often contains false doctrine and human viewpoint.

b. So there is a problem of dependency and a pattern of dependency.

(1) The counselor begins to control the life of the dependent, so that the believer walks on crutches spiritually.

(2) The counselor replaces Bible doctrine which is tantamount to dead works, evil, and even blasphemy.

(3) The counselor establishes a dependency that destroys legitimate authority.

c. Counseling was never designed to control the volition of another, but to provide information on which other persons can make decisions which are compatible with Bible doctrine and the will of God.

d. When counseling substitutes the volition of the counselor for the volition for the dependent victim, the result is dead works, evil, and blasphemy.

e. One of the most difficult problems parents have with their children is withdrawal pains from counseling.

(1) The counselor who establishes the dependency is a role model and often worshipped by the impressionable and misguided child. The role model must be Bible doctrine, not the pastor, not the parents, and not the counselor.

(2) 1 Cor 2:16 tells us we only have one role model in Christianity—the Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is the only legitimate counselor. “Who has know the thinking of the Lord that he should counsel Him? We have the thinking of Christ.” The thinking of Christ is in the Word of God.

(3) When you get counsel from Bible doctrine, your role model is Jesus Christ. No counselor has the right to supercede our Lord as the role model for anyone in a congregation.

f. When a believer sets himself up as a role model through counseling, he or she has brashly added arrogance and blasphemy to good, and parlayed it into evil. This blasphemy refocuses the attention of the victim away from Bible doctrine to at best good advise and at worst human viewpoint.

g. Counseling, where the counselor crosses the line, is dead works and substituting the counselors volition for the victim’s.

h. Eph 6:1-3, “Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is righteous. Honor your father and your mother, which is the first commandment with promise, that you may become prosperous, and that you may have long life on the earth.” A counselor who comes between the child and the parent is putting that child’s life on the line.

B. Counseling belongs to Jesus Christ.

1. Isa 9:6, “For a child [humanity] will be born to us, and a son [deity] will be given to us. The government will rest on his shoulders, and His name will be called Wonderful Counselor, the Powerful God, the Eternal Father [of Israel], the Prince of Peace.” Jesus Christ is the “Wonderful Counselor.” It is blasphemy to take the place of Jesus Christ as the Wonderful Counselor.

2. Rom 11:34, “For who has known the thinking of the Lord, or who has become His counselor.” If you are going to be counseled by the Lord, you have to know what is in His mind. When you try to supercede the Lord in counseling, you are saying in effect that you have become His counselor.

3. 1 Cor 2:16, “Who has known the thinking of the Lord that he should counsel Him. We have the thinking of Christ [Bible doctrine].” Jesus Christ counsels through His own thinking that is recorded in the Bible. What is recorded in the Bible is all the counseling we will ever need.

4. Ps 16:7, “I will bless the Lord who counsels me; for doctrine in my inner person counsels me in the night.” You are counseled by doctrine transferred from the page of Scripture into your soul. You get your counseling from the teaching of the pastor-teacher.

5. Eph 1:11, “In whom also we have received an inheritance, having been predestined with reference to a predetermined plan from Him who works energizes all things on the basis of the counsel of His will.”

a. We need to know Bible doctrine when we have problems. The counseling of Jesus Christ is compatible with the will of God.

b. Our Lord counsels us from His own thinking, which is Bible doctrine. This makes the Bible our counselor. Only the spiritual gift of pastor-teacher communicates the Bible.

c. Counseling superimposes human volition on God’s will. None of us can improve on the counseling of the Word of God. We must avoid controlling others by counseling.

d. When people are negative to doctrine, they run to others for counseling.

6. Ps 1:1, “How blessed is the person who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked, nor stand in the path of sinners, nor sit in the seat of negative volition.”

7. Bible doctrine is the counselor the believer has all the way until his death. Ps 73:24, “With Your counsel You will guide me, and afterward receive me with honor.”

8. Negative volition to doctrine rejects the counseling of the Word of God.

a. Ps 106:13, 43, “They quickly forgot His works; they did not wait for His counsel. Many times He would have delivered them; They, however, were rebellious in their counsel, and so sank down into their iniquity.”

b. Ps 107:11, “Because they have rebelled against the doctrines of God, and spurned the counsel of the Most High.” If you have rejected God’s counsel, no counselor is going to put your life back together for you.

c. Is 41:28-29, “But when I look for help, there is no one; and there is no counselor among them who, if I ask, can give me an answer. Behold, all of them [the counselors] are nothing; their works are worthless.”

9. Prov 8:12-14, “I, wisdom, dwell with right application; and I discover knowledge of the evil thoughts of men. Respect for the Lord is to hate evil. Pride and arrogance and the evil modus operandi and the deceitful mouth I hate. Counsel belongs to Me and sound wisdom; I [doctrine] am understanding, power is mine.”

a. You are counseled by the doctrine you have in your own soul.

b. As your counselor the Lord teaches you when you are evil, when you are parlaying good into evil.

c. Counsel belongs to God, not to anyone else. When you run to others for counsel, you are saying in effect that they are smarter than God.

d. No counseling will ever give you power or strength available to you from the Word of God.

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