My friend Bob Kellemen has released a new book Gospel-Centered Counseling: How Christ Changes Lives and I thought my readers would benefit from the 20 twitter-sized summaries of the key points from his book.
- To view the Bible accurately and use the Bible competently we must understand the Bible’s story the way God tells it—as a gospel victory narrative.
- The supremacy of Christ’s gospel, the sufficiency of Christ’s wisdom, and the superiority of Christ’s Church provide the wisdom we need for counseling in a broken world.
- We discover wisdom for how to live life in a broken world from the wisest person who ever lived—Christ!
- We must know the Trinitarian Soul Physician personally to be a powerful soul physician.
- To know the God of peace and the peace of God we must know our Triune God in the fullness of His holy love demonstrated in the cross of Christ
- Because Satan attempts to plant seeds of doubt about God’s good heart, God calls us to crop the Christ of the cross back into the picture.
- The whole, healthy, holy person’s inner life increasingly reflects the inner life of Christ—relationally, rationally, volitionally, and emotionally.
- Biblical counselors pursue compassionate and wise counseling where our love abounds in depth of knowledge about the heart in the world
- The essence of sin is spiritual adultery—choosing to love anyone or anything more than God.
- Sin is not just a thief caught in a crime; sin is an adulterer caught in the act.
- Apart from Christ we’re condemned as adulterous spouses, dead in sin, separated from the life of God with depraved heart capacities enslaved to sin.
- Sin is what personal beings imagine, think, choose, do, and feel as they desire and love anything or anyone more than Christ.
- Fully biblical gospel-centered counseling deals thoroughly both with the sins we have committed and with the evils we have suffered.
- We must build our biblical counseling models of change on Christ’s gospel applied to Christians—justified, reconciled, regenerated, and redeemed people.
- Through regeneration our new heart has a new want to; through redemption our new heart has a new can do.
- Together with all the saints the church is the place to belong to Christ and the Body of Christ and to become like Christ.
- Sanctification is a community journey.
- As saints who struggle with suffering and sin, we must crop back into the picture our future purity (the wedding) and future victory (the final war).
- Sanctification is the art of applying our complete salvation by God’s grace, Spirit, Word, people, and future hope so we increasingly reflect Christ.
- Gospel-motivated and empowered heart change puts off and puts on affections, mindsets, purposes, and mood states so we increasingly reflect the heart of Christ.