Saturday 17 August 2013

Journal of Biblical Counseling 27, 2 (2013)


The latest issue of the Journal of Biblical Counseling is now available ($10 for a year’s electronic subscription of three issues), this one containing the following pieces:

Featured Articles

Kevin DeYoung
Salvation Stories
Everyone lives according to a story. Everyone has some meta-narrative, some story that seeks to make sense of everything. You can’t avoid trying to explain how life works. You need a framework. You don’t directly experience reality. You constantly interpret it.

Julie Lowe with Lauren Whitman
Teach Your Children About Sex
Imagine this scene. You’re walking through the mall with your children, shopping for new shoes for the kids. You pass a store window with a huge advertisement for clothes. No surprise there, you’re in a mall. The only problem is that the model is barely wearing any clothes. In fact it looks like she is provocatively taking off the clothes she is wearing. As a parent, what do you do?

Timothy S. Lane and Edward T. Welch
The Unpardonable Sin: Two Pastoral Applications
When two articles on ‘the unpardonable sin’ came in to JBC, it presented us with an unusual opportunity. Tim Lane and Ed Welch both desire to comfort troubled souls who get hung up on Jesus’ words. Both authors carefully consider aspects of the context for Jesus’ unsettling words in Matthew 12:31–32. And both counselors point to the same merciful Savior and invite strugglers to interact with God in faith. So why are these articles so different?! Is one of them right and the other wrong? Is one approach better than the other? Or do they complement each other? And that poses a larger question. What do we learn from the similarities and from the differences about how to use Scripture in hands-on pastoral care?

David Powlison
How Does Sanctification Work? (Part 2)
Part 1 looked at how ministry connects various bite-sized truths to life-lived. It critiqued attempts to distill sanctification down to a single truth. Part 2 will do two things. First, I will be anecdotal and autobiographical, giving a sense for the variety of ways that God goes about the lifelong re-scripting of our lives. Second, I will give a simple model for staying oriented to the multiple factors at work.

Pierce Taylor Hibbs
Words of Counsel – Part 1: A Biblical-theological Foundation
As readers of Scripture, we are carried by God’s words. God meets us in the valley of our suffering, in the deathtrap of our sins, and speaks words that bear us up. His words minister to us in our weakness, and they bolster our hearts with their strength.

Counselor’s Toolbox

Paul David Tripp
The Power of Words
Our words help, teach, encourage, and comfort – or they divide, discourage, threaten, and destroy.

Paul David Tripp
How to Fight Right
You will never have a relationship with another person that is free of conflict. You will always find yourself in moments of disagreement, even in the best of relationships.

Lives in Process

Each of us is a work in progress. Biblical counseling exists because God uses people to help people, comforting the disturbed and disturbing the comfortable. Biblical counseling exists because none of us changes all at once, in the twinkling of an eye. When we see Jesus face to face, then we will be fully like him. Until that day, the story is not yet complete. Ths section of JBC seeks to capture snapshots of the struggles and the change process as it is happening. The stories are framed by and infused with biblical truth – not just the theory, but the rough and tumble, the fis and starts of an unfolding personal story.

Anonymous
Numbing My Emotions

Emmelyn Chong
Facing My Contempt

Book Reviews

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