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

I’m Special?

I contributed this week’s ‘Connecting with Culture’, a weekly email service provided by the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity.

The takeaway pizza box won’t fit in the fridge.

Too many presents. Had to walk twice to my room carrying stuff.

I can’t get the high def working on one of the flatscreen TVs in my yacht.

You might recognise these as examples of the First World Problems meme. Writing in The Independent this week, John Walsh takes it to task for telling people that their problems ‘count for nothing in the hierarchy of what’s serious’. Indeed, some first world problems are far from minor; nor do we have a monopoly on the need to negotiate everyday trivialities. Even so, #firstworldproblems at its best is a valid reminder that the ‘challenges’ we face are often small compared with many others around the globe.

More seriously, perhaps, the meme has become so commonplace that it’s in danger of lacking any serious empathy for global issues. It draws attention to our narcissism in a knowing, ironic way, which allows us to show how self-aware and ‘switched on’ we are, though without doing anything about it.

And if research is to be believed, narcissism is on the rise. A recent, widely-reported New York Times piece profiled Jean M. Twenge, Professor of Psychology at San Diego State University, whose close study of narcissism has led her to give the designation ‘Generation Me’ to young adults in the west. To be fair, not all accept her findings, with the alleged generational differences being particularly contentious. Still, as one commentator notes, ‘even if we’re not more narcissistic now than we’ve been in the past, I’m willing to entertain the notion that our popular culture is more narcissist-friendly’.

In The Big Ego Trip (IVP), writing from a Christian perspective, Glynn Harrison shows how the promotion of self-worth – ‘boosterism’ as he calls it – has gained widespread acceptance in different parts of culture, including the church, and explores whether there’s ‘a biblical and more psychologically secure approach to the big questions of significance and worth’. He makes it clear he is not arguing against the need for an ‘accurate self-concept’, but calling instead for a ‘radical self-compassion’, where questions of self-worth are ‘sorted out in the context of a larger “story” about our identity and purpose’. We’re special because we’re called to be part of something special, with an identity grounded in the grace and forgiveness of God.

Art Lindsley on Five Ways Pastors Can Affirm Faith, Calling, and Vocation

There’s a nice, short piece on the Gospel Coalition blog by Art Lindsley on ‘5 Ways Pastors Can Affirm Faith, Calling, and Vocation’:

1. Watch your language

2. Pray for people in professions

3. Interview workers

4. Commission people for ministry in their work

5. Stress that you can have a ministry at work

Ecclesia Reformanda

Over at Biblical Studies.org.uk, the wonderful Rob Bradshaw has seen to it that all three volumes of Ecclesia Reformanda are available online. It’s worth taking a look at what’s there.

Credo Magazine 3, 3 (July 2013)

The current issue of Credo is now out, this one devoted to ‘Born Again: God’s Sovereign Grace in the Miracle of Regeneration’.

According to the editorial blurb:

‘While doctrines such as election, justification, and sanctification typically receive all of the attention in theological conversations, the doctrine of regeneration is often forgotten. Yet, it is this doctrine that undergirds the entire order of salvation. It is the initiatory change in regeneration that results in everything else, from faith and repentance to justification, sanctification, and perseverance. All of these other doctrines owe their existence to that first moment when God breaths [sic] new spiritual life into the sinner’s dead corpse.’

The magazine is available to read here, from where also a 41.7 MB pdf of the whole issue can be downloaded.

Themelios 38, 2 (August 2013)

The latest Themelios is online here (and available here as a single pdf), containing the following articles:

Editorial

D.A. Carson

Kingdom, Ethics, and Individual Salvation

In recent years a number of stances have arisen that have set themselves over against traditional evangelicalism and traditional Reformed thought, not a few of them arguing, in part, on the basis of a particular understanding of the kingdom. These stances claim to be more biblical and thus more faithful than traditional stances. To some extent they overlap; to some extent each is identifiably different from the others...

Off the Record

Michael J. Ovey

From Moral Majority to Evil Disbelievers: Coming Clean about Christian Atheism

People rightly note the way Christians in English-speaking Western culture have moved in a generation from being ‘moral majority’ to ‘immoral minority’. But I wonder whether that really catches the intensity of the dislike and disdain that I see in the two Western societies with which I am most familiar, the UK and Australia. You see, when I read the Sydney Morning Herald or the UK’s Guardian, what I perceive goes beyond a simple charge of immorality...

Peter Orr

Abounding in the Work of the Lord (1 Cor 15:58): Everything we Do as Christians or Specific Gospel Work?

One of the deepest impacts of the Reformation on Western Culture arose from the robust rearticulation of the biblical doctrines of creation and vocation. Luther may have captured the combined impact of these neglected doctrines most strongly by rejecting the enshrined sacred-secular divide that was so prevalent in medieval thought. Luther emphasised the ordinary activities of daily life ‘as examples of a Christian’s return to creation and embrace of vocation’...

Owen Strachan

Carl F.H. Henry’s Doctrine of the Atonement: A Synthesis and Brief Analysis

Carl Ferdinand Howard Henry (1913–2003) was an American theologian in the conservative evangelical tradition. Born on Long Island and trained as a journalist, Henry served as the first editor of Christianity Today from 1956 to 1968. Henry earned two doctorates, including a PhD in theology from Boston University. The capstone work of his career was the six-volume series God, Revelation, and Authority, published in stages from 1976 to 1983...

Gerald R. McDermott

Will All Be Saved?

Will everyone one day be saved? Is hell only temporary, if it exists at all? If the answer is yes to either of these questions, the historic Christian commitment to the conversion of the world to Christ would appear to be somewhat silly. Why go to such effort and expense trying to persuade people that Jesus is the only way if they all will see that eventually anyway? Why risk offending people – especially those who follow other religious traditions...

Book Reviews

Powerful Deliverance

I contributed last week’s ‘Word for the Week’, a weekly email service provided by the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity.

LORD, how many are my foes!

How many rise up against me!

Many are saying of me,

“God will not deliver him.”

But you, LORD, are a shield around me,

my glory, the one who lifts my head high.

I call out to the LORD,

and he answers me from his holy mountain.

Psalm 3:1-4

Psalms 1 and 2 are clear and confident: the righteous prosper and the wicked are blown away like chaff; God is in charge of the world, and the nations will serve him and his Messiah. Except it doesn’t always feel that way, does it?

The need for the assurance of Psalms 1 and 2 becomes clear with the first lines of Psalm 3. But that Psalm 3 comes so early in the Psalter seems appropriate, given how many of the psalms arise out of the experience of being attacked, of feeling ashamed, isolated and abandoned, of wondering why the ungodly prosper when those who serve God suffer. That bundle of emotions and more was likely true of David who, according to this Psalm’s title, wrote it when he fled from his son Absalom, a story told in 2 Samuel 15-18.

Interestingly, David’s foes were not saying that God does not act; they were saying that God does not act for David – ‘God will not deliver him’. They consider David to be cast aside by God, a failure, defeated. Of course, we don’t always need the ‘help’ of others to think that way about ourselves.

But as the Psalm progresses, David’s prayer becomes less a statement about his enemies, himself, or even his trust, but a declaration about the Lord: ‘But you, LORD, are a shield around me.’ Shields are normally held in front of a person, but this shield encompasses him. In the place of prayer, where we see things we might not otherwise see, David confesses that God will protect him from attack, whatever direction it comes. It is the Lord who will lift his head high, removing his shame and restoring his dignity.

The final note of the Psalm is one of deliverance – ‘from the LORD comes deliverance’ (3:8) – even though it’s not clear that David’s situation has altered. For us too, the ‘problem’ itself might not immediately change – that illness we’re facing, or situation we find ourselves in, or task we have to do. What changes is our sense of dependence on God. Peace comes not primarily because we’re clever enough to work things out, but because of his power and promises of protection. Through prayer he moves us from fear to faith, from peril to peace, from a place of saying, ‘How many!’ to a place of confessing, ‘But you, LORD’.