Counselling & God’s Faithfulness – 1

What is our purpose in pastoral care? At what outcomes do we aim? As friends, as elders, as counselors, as pastors, we visit, listen, and offer counsel.

But we’re not moved merely by a desire to help with this personal struggle, or to resolve this relational trouble: we seek to lead those we counsel into a deeper and truer knowledge of the Lord God. Spiritual care leads an individual in heart and mind towards the Lord, to know and love him in his perfections, to “taste and see that the Lord is good” (Ps 34:8).

It’s this aim that moves caregivers to ask together with their people: “Who is our God?” To answer, we try to articulate something of God’s character. For instance, we might echo the first article of the Belgic Confession,

There is only one God, who is a simple and spiritual being; he is eternal, incomprehensible, invisible, immutable, infinite, almighty, perfectly wise, just, [and] good.

 For each of God’s attributes, we could explore its pastoral implications. The Lord’s perfections will always resonate with a person’s deepest needs. The victim of childhood sexual abuse, exposed to the utter wickedness of a fellow human, can gradually be reassured of God’s absolute and unfailing goodness—and his perfect justice. Or the person who has wrestled for years to break free from painkillers can be given precious hope by God’s almighty power, the One for whom all things are possible.

When the moment comes that our own resources fail—our resources as caregivers, and our resources as suffering sinners and saints—we are thrown upon the infinite resources of the Triune God, who is “perfectly wise, just, and good.”

God’s Faithfulness

I’d like to focus on the pastoral implications of God’s faithfulness. What difference does his faithfulness make in the counselling room, or in the home visit, or in the coffee shop conversation? We’ll see that the New Testament itself commends this as a pastoral strategy—that is, that we make appeal to the Lord’s great faithfulness in situations of temptation, persecution, loss of assurance, and overwhelming guilt.

Now, when we speak about the faithfulness of God, we mean his veracity, or his truth. “The LORD is the true God,” says Jeremiah 10:10, “the living God and everlasting king.” Scripture teaches us to know God as true in more than one sense. God is true in essence, as the only pure and unchanging being. He is also true in his knowledge, in that there is perfect correspondence between his thoughts and reality: God knows all things as they really are.

And God’s truth has an ethical dimension, in that his actions and words have an unfailing consistency; because of God’s moral integrity, ‘He cannot but be faithful.’ This was the song that Moses taught Israel to sing in Deuteronomy 32:4, “[He is] the Rock, his work is perfect, for all his ways are justice. A God of faithfulness and without iniquity, just and upright is he.”

For the Christian’s confidence, can there be any more sure footing than the faithfulness of God? He is the God who covenants with believers and their children, who gives promises and who keeps them.

We may count on him to remain loyal to his word, because God will be devoted at the depths of his very being. Even the false prophet Balaam had to speak these true words, “God is not 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? Or has he spoken, and will he not fulfill it?” (Num 23:19).

Jesus, who is the image of the invisible God (Col 1:15), projects a living picture of the LORD’s faithfulness. First of all, his time on earth—from conception to ascension—represented an endless litany of ancient prophecies fulfilled and old promises kept. “Not one word of all the good promises that the Lord had made to the house of Israel had failed; all came to pass” (Josh 21:45). And during his ministry, Jesus showed his own faithfulness by carrying out the Father’s will in all things. So it is that the book of Revelation calls Christ the “Amen, the faithful witness” (1:5; 3:14), and the Word who is “Faithful and True” (Rev 19:11).

Return for a moment, then, to that question we ask together during a tear-filled or despairing visit, “Who is our God?” What has the faithful God and the faithful Christ to do with your pain, your sin, grief or fear? And then the caregiver affirms with David, ‘There is none like the Lord:’ “Your steadfast love…extends to the heavens, your faithfulness to the clouds” (Ps 36:5). A.W. Pink reminds us that in the end, we know that it will be well, for “[God] never forgets, never fails, never falters, never forfeits his word.”

 Apostolic Counselling

This may already give you an impression of the pastoral potential that is inherent in God’s faithfulness. It is a potential shown already in the letters of the apostles. The New Testament letters can be characterized in many ways, of course; they are by turns doctrinal, or polemical, or ethical.

Whatever else they may be, the letters are also pastoral. Just as Jesus charged them to be in John 21, the apostles were shepherds. Peter and John and Paul gave spiritual care to the scattered believers through their own visits, through the visits of their co-workers, and through their letters. The pastoral method we see in the apostolic letters could be the subject of an intriguing study.

But one pastoral tactic in the letters is notable, an appeal to the faithfulness of God in response to the varying circumstances of the churches.  The apostles set before the believers 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.

We’ll turn to one example of this (and provide more examples next time), to see how this approach may equip spiritual caregivers today.

Counselling & Temptation

Few congregations needed pastoral care more than the Corinthians. One of several pressing issues was how they were sharing in cultic meals with their pagan friends. Paul highlights the danger of this idolatry: then, just as today, some sins are so incompatible with life in Christ that falling away from grace is the almost-inevitable result of persisting in them. By ‘eating at the table of the Lord and also at the table of demons,’ the Corinthians have put themselves into grave danger. Hard for us to imagine, but these cultic meals had an alluring appeal. Yet the enticement is not of such a nature that the Corinthians must succumb. There is hope for the one tempted and tried.

Listen to Paul’s counsel: “No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your ability, but with the temptation he will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it” (10:13). Paul has just warned the Corinthians against presuming on their own spiritual fortitude—‘take heed lest you fall’ (v. 12)—but now he assures them: God will not abandon his people in their most severe temptations. God can be counted on to provide an exit from the test that He has allowed. In our times of testing, God will surely apportion an ability to endure, an ability that is equal to the trial.

In the middle of these well-known words, see the three-word phrase, “God is faithful.” In Greek, it’s actually four words, with the little word “but” captured in many English translations: ‘Christian, temptations will overtake you, just as they do every person. But God is faithful.’

Faithful to do what? Paul tells us. 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.

Imagine a counselling conversation, and how this could fortify the Christian who is beset with temptation. When the magnetism of the pill bottle seems too much to resist. When I can hardly suppress this rage the moment that I come home from work. When escaping into a porn site again is a pleasure that I just cannot scroll away from. Our own resources against temptation are woefully finite, but God is faithful.

Because it is God’s will that we should be holy (1 Thess 4:3), by his Spirit He will also provide strength to refuse temptation. That’s his promise, and we may repeat it often (to ourselves and to others): God has said there’s a way out for those who seek it. Jesus taught us to pray, “Lead us not into temptation.”

Because in your hour of resisting the devil, God is with you. That’s his word, and He is faithful.