Counselling & God’s Faithfulness – 2

A notable pastoral tactic in the New Testament letters is the appeal to the faithfulness of God in response to the believers’ circumstances.

The apostles often set before the churches a consideration of divine faithfulness, God’s truth and trustworthiness—and it becomes a catalyst of encouragement, an affirmation of grace, a push for perseverance.

In the last article we looked at one example, Paul’s encouragement to the Corinthians in the trial of temptation, “God is faithful” (1 Cor 10:13). God is faithful not to let us be tempted beyond divinely empowered ability, faithful to always provide us with a way of escape. God is faithful to help us be able to endure. We turn to a few more instances of this pastoral approach.

Counselling & Guilt

Every pastor has spent time counselling a person encumbered by guilt: ‘God cannot forgive me. I feel like He will not. What about my abortion? I killed someone that day. What about my lukewarmness, all those decades? So many years and opportunities wasted.’ Even when a Christian affirms as an article of faith “the forgiveness of sins,” mentally they also rehearse that long list of failings. There remains a sense of shame, stemming from the thought that God hasn’t forgiven us after all, that (deep down) the Father is still upset with us. In this way, shame strangles the joy of forgiveness.

What is a caregiver to say?

John wrote three letters to churches near Ephesus who were facing conflict because of false teachers. These teachers denied Jesus’s true humanity, at the same time as they championed the idea that a Christian can attain a rank of spiritual superiority, where sin no longer affects us. John counsels his churches by insisting that those in fellowship with God will no longer walk in the darkness—but neither will we deny that we still sin. And when we do sin, John reminds his flock, God has promised grace for the contrite heart.

If we humbly and sorrowfully confess, He will pardon.

Here is John’s counsel: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1:9). Once more, the starting point for this pastoral response is in God’s perfections, specifically his truth: “He is faithful and just.” We can appreciate just how closely linked are these two concepts in the Scriptures: ‘faithfulness and justice’ are practically synonymous for the Lord’s steadfast upholding of his Word. 

God is faithful (and just) to do what? Faithful to forgive our sins. Faithful to cleanse us from all unrighteousness through Jesus Christ the righteous One (2:1). We know this, because this remission is the very thing that God promised in his Word. Just two examples from a multitude will suffice:

Jeremiah 31:34, “For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.”

Isaiah 43:25, “I am he who blots out your transgressions for my own sake, and I will not remember your sins.”

This is his Word, and fundamentally, this is God’s character: He is faithful and just. To the person who feels she is being crushed by guilt for ‘sins of youth,’ to the man still hiding in his shame, the spiritual caregiver has an infallible message from God.

‘When you’ve made a confession of your sin, and you’re repenting from this, God is faithful to forgive you. It’s his promise, that God “according to [his] abundant mercy [will] blot out [your] transgressions” (Ps 51:1). You can be sure that God’s forgiveness is free and full, for it is founded on the one who is himself righteous, Jesus, the atoning sacrifice for sins.’

Counselling & Sanctification

If 1 John 1:9 affirms God’s steadfast purpose in our justification, 1 Thessalonians 5:24 asserts his resolve in our sanctification. Paul writes to his beloved congregation in Thessalonica, “He who calls you is faithful; he will surely do it.”

The Thessalonians were an unusual church—unusual in being so warmly appreciated by Paul for their flourishing love and their many good works. ‘You do love one another,’ he tells them in chapter 4, ‘and I am grateful.’

Yet Paul wants them to show love ‘more and more.’ Their pastor wants to see them keep advancing in Christian maturity. In fact, just in the verse prior to this one he prays, “Now may the God of peace himself sanctify you completely, and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ” (v. 23).

This is a penetrating and far-reaching prayer for the believers: total sanctification, even ‘spirit, soul, and body.’ 

This is a pastor’s prayer, and here is his undergirding confidence: “He who calls you is faithful; he will surely do it.” God can be counted on to finish our sanctification: those whom He has called He will also glorify.

In my own pastoral work, this was a theme to which I found myself returning often: God’s purpose to keep transforming believers—‘He’s not going to give up on you.’ When depression or anxiety wipes out a person’s joy in faith, when we never seem to get the upper hand against a besetting sin, when year-by-year a person yields a poor harvest in the fruit of the Spirit, we need the message of God’s faithfulness in our sanctification: “He who calls you is faithful; he will surely do it.”

I am sure that one of the texts that I quoted most frequently during my pastoral ministry was Philippians 1:6, “He who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.” It’s the same message as this passage. In your sanctification, God will not be inactive or ineffective, ‘nor will He abandon the work of his hands’ (Ps 138:8).

If you are in Christ, if you are joined to him by faith, even as you have to keep working out your salvation with fear and trembling, know that God is working in you, to will and work for his good pleasure’ (Phil 2:12-13).

Counselling & Persecution

From time to time, God gives us who live in the comfortable West a glimpse of what He means when He says, “All who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted” (2 Tim 3:2). As far as divine promises go, this is not one of our favourites!

And there are other promises. Paul in Second Thessalonians chapter 2 speaks of the coming man of lawlessness, and about his deception of those who are perishing because they refuse to love the truth. Just before this next text, the Holy Spirit speaks of wicked and evil men who will not have faith. How can the righteous possibly endure in a world where faith is out of fashion, where people do not believe the truth but take pleasure in wickedness? These are not theoretical questions.

Paul turns from the church’s impending persecutions towards the God on whom his people can depend. The decisive factor in this coming clash is the character of the Lord, not the might of the enemy. In spite of the opposition of satanic forces, the Lord’s purpose will ultimately triumph. Here is his pastoral counsel: “But the Lord is faithful. He will establish you and guard you against the evil one” (2 Thess 3:3).

By now the pattern is familiar. Paul roots his pastoral encouragement in the everlasting concern of the LORD, or what he calls a couple verses later, “the steadfastness of Christ” (3:5). We counsel those who are mocked in the workplace because of their faith, those who study on hostile campuses, who experience the pressure of rainbow conformity. When you are persecuted, when you meet an opposition that seems Satanic in its power and deception, God is faithful to do two things: to establish you, and to guard you.

Peter’s first letter is well-known as guidance for a harassed and suffering church. It’s little wonder that he too, urges the believers to place themselves in the care of the faithful God: “Let those who suffer according to God’s will entrust their souls to a faithful Creator while doing good” (1 Pet 4:19).

Counselling & Spiritual Weakness

In 2 Timothy 2:11-13, Paul shares a “trustworthy saying”—or, as in some translations, “a faithful saying.” In this case, Paul isn’t pastoring a congregation, but he is mentoring a sometimes-timid colleague. His encouragement is grounded in God’s saving purpose; for instance, verse 11: “If we have died with him, we will also live with him.” If you have shared in Christ’s saving death by faith in him, then you will never die.

Still, Paul’s words have an element of warning: “If we deny him, he will also deny us” (2:12). This is almost certainly a reference to apostasy, a final rejection of the faith. For the apprehensive Timothy, for the fearful Christian, it’s a frightening prospect. In the end, will the Lord Jesus deny that He knew me?

And from there, Paul’s “trustworthy saying” seems to be building towards a climactic threat—maybe like the “warning passages” in Hebrews (2:1-4; 3:7-4:13; 5:11-6:12; 10:19-39; 12:14-29). What do we say to the believers who are troubled by their failure to live up to their confession? What if we don’t always remain steadfast?

The trajectory of these verses leads us to expect the worst: “If we are faithless…” should God not cut us off? Don’t the righteous live by faith? So the faithless inherit nothing. But then comes an unexpectedly reassuring word in verse 13:

If we are faithless, he remains faithful.

In one sense, it’s a surprise that human faithlessness is met by God’s faithfulness. So we need the final phrase as explanation: “for he cannot deny himself.” When God chooses, when He promises, it is a question of his character. To break a promise would be to deny himself. And He will not: “He’s not a man, that he should lie, or a son of man, that he should change his mind. Has he said, and will he not do it?”

Timothy must know, as every believer must, that our weakness of faith does not invite God’s judgment. This is so reassuring for the sensitive believer—for the smouldering wick—because the Christian often plagued by fears their faith is lacking: ‘I don’t pray enough. I don’t read the Bible enough. I sit in church and listen, but it’s like I don’t really believe it. Instead of trusting in God, I am always worried, always anxious.’

But gospel-counsel to the struggling believer can be (and should be) profoundly theological. We are not saved on account of the worthiness of our faith, but only through the merits of Christ, saved only by the faithfulness of God: “If we are faithless, he remains faithful—for He cannot deny himself.”

Counselling & Final Perseverance

Back to the Corinthians, nobody’s idea of a model congregation. Yet in his first chapter of his first letter, Paul is remarkably positive about them: the Corinthians have been ‘enriched in all speech and knowledge,’ they’re not lacking in any gift, and they’re sure to endure until the end, “guiltless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ” (1:8).

How can the Corinthians, of all people, be sure that they’ll be found spotless on the day of Christ? How can we—or the people we counsel—be certain of our final perseverance, our rich welcome into God’s presence?

The answer is clear, isn’t it? The believer’s confidence of everlasting security is not founded on the strength of their resolutions or their ability to persevere, but it is founded on the veracity of him who cannot lie. That is Paul’s simple message in the next verse, “God is faithful, by whom you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord” (v. 9).

‘You are weak and weary. You are tired of doing good. You are conflicted, and thinking of turning back. You need not be: God will sustain you to the very end—and beyond—because He promised, and because He is faithful.’ This is the bolstering message that we need to speak—and need to hear—time and again.

In the words of another New Testament author, addressing believers who were faltering, “Let us hold fast the confession of  our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful” (Heb 10:23). You will persevere, through the grace of the Triune God!