You could extrapolate the previous section to include more than just counselees in a biblical counseling context. The inherent liability in counseling can just as accurately be called the liability in any discipleship situation we enter into whether you are trying to disciple a friend, family member or counselee.

Here are a few questions that will get at what I am talking about:

• Have you ever tried to get your kid to change, repent, turn from bad behavior and only ended up frustrated because of his unwillingness?
• Have you found yourself at your wit’s end while trying to come alongside your spouse in hopes change would come?
• Have you had similar frustration with a friend that you have prayed for and pleaded with but yet change did not come?

In all discipleship situations it is absolutely essential the discipler’s theology informs the discipleship process or the discipler can be tempted to lose hope during the process. And an essential theological question to ask yourself as it applies to your theological understanding of discipleship is what is your view of the doctrine of repentance. More specifically do you believe that repentance is a gift from God?

If you do, great! So does God. Listen to Paul’s words in 2 Timothy 2:24-26:

And the Lord’s servant must not be quarrelsome but kind to everyone, able to teach, patiently enduring evil, correcting his opponents with gentleness. God may perhaps grant them repentance leading to a knowledge of the truth, and they may come to their senses and escape from the snare of the devil, after being captured by him to do his will.

Let me paraphrase

And the Lord’s counselor must not be quarrelsome but kind to all his counselees, able to counsel them, patiently enduring evil resistance and ingratitude, and when you do correct them you do this with gentleness. Who knows, God may perhaps grant them repentance leading to a knowledge of the truth, and they may come to their senses and escape from the snare of the devil, after being captured by him to do his will.

If you believe, with Paul, that repentance is a gift then you are very aware that repentance cannot be conjured, contrived or artificially applied to anyone at anytime. Repentance cannot be willed into the heart of an individual in a discipleship process or counseling session. Armed with this understanding that repentance is a gift and this gift comes from God then you know the implication is that God might not grant this gift during the counseling session or the counseling season that you are with the individual. And to be totally honest he might not grant it at all.

In counseling it becomes a timing thing: will God give the gift of repentance while you are counseling the counselee?

God granted me the gift of repentance in a salvific way as a 25-year old rebellious, young man. If you had tried, which some did for which I’m grateful, to counsel me as a 15-year old, rebellious kid who had just landed in jail you potentially could have been very frustrated by my rebellion, stubbornness and self-deceived thinking that I was okay.

However the good news is that the “watering and planting” in my soul would not have been wasted. (1 Cor. 3:6) But now that I can look back on how it all actually went down I can see that no effort no matter how caring or courageous was going to bring me to repentance. I repented 10 years later as a broken 25-year old young man. Hopefully, you would have persevered with me for those 10 years until God effectively brought change into my life by granting me the gift of repentance. At that moment I was radically saved.

And once repentance was given it has been much easier to disciple me, praise God.

• Inherent Liabilities in Biblical Counseling – Part One
• Inherent Liabilities in Biblical Counseling – Part Two
• Inherent Liabilities in Biblical Counseling – Part Three
• Inherent Liabilities in Biblical Counseling – Part Four
• Inherent Liabilities in Biblical Counseling – Part Five
• Inherent Liabilities in Biblical Counseling – Part Six
• Inherent Liabilities in Biblical Counseling – Part Seven

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