Counsel for Couples

A Biblical and Practical Guide for Marriage Counseling

Jonathan D. Holmes

• Publisher: Zondervan
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780310577386
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Christlicher Dienst

Many pastors feel ill-equipped to handle the challenges that arise when a couple is going through marital difficulties.

If you are or have been in this situation before, this book shows church leaders how to counsel married couples from both a logical and biblical perspective.

Author and pastor Jonathan Holmes offers you a practical guide to get started with the first sessions and then offers specific guidance on nine of the most common topics that come up in marriage counseling.

In Counsel for Couples, Holmes provides you with:

• a biblical methodology that navigates you through the world of marriage counseling based on God's word
• a theological counseling approach addressing the deepest of marital issues
• advice from several respected voices in the biblical counseling community

In each chapter, you'll meet a new couple dealing with a different issue, much like the people in your church, office, and neighborhood.

Whether you're a novice or already knowledgeable, Counsel for Couples provides theologically sound and biblically practical tools to help you as you help couples in need.

PART 1

THE BASICS OF
COUNSELING
COUPLES

Chapter 1

GETTING THE LAY OF THE LAND

Be shepherds of God’s flock that is under your care, watching over them—not because you must, but because you are willing, as God wants you to be.

1 PETER 5:2

We keep bringing in mechanics when what we need are gardeners.

PETER SENGE

Jeff and Jennifer Jones have been married for twenty years. Currently, they’re preparing to send their first daughter, Riley, off to college and get their twin sons, Carson and Connor, adjusted to high school. Four years earlier, though, Jeff and Jen had just received the surprise of their life: they found out they were pregnant.

Since they had thought they would be empty nesters soon, Jeff and Jen felt torn between being excited to welcome little Chloe into the family and realizing their dreams of worldwide travel would need to be postponed for eighteen more years.

Jennifer admits she is not doing well. The past twenty years with Jeff have been fine, almost uneventful. Yet in many respects she wonders where those years have gone. Why haven’t she and Jeff grown and connected in deeper ways? The only connection they seem to have is communicating pick-up and drop-off times for the boys’ basketball practice and Chloe’s pick-up from preschool.

From the outside looking in, the Joneses look great. They’re happy, they’re together . . . but both Jennifer and Jeff instinctively know things aren’t right. After a particularly hectic day, Jennifer snaps at Jeff, which initiates a long, drawn-out fight. (The fights used to be more sporadic but have lately come with increasing frequency and heightened emotion.) Jeff tells Jennifer they need to talk to someone at church—and so they reach out to you.

Jeff and Jennifer come in and sit down. You’re nervous (but hope they don’t see it) and they’re nervous. In twenty years of marriage they’ve never needed “counseling.” After giving you some basic background of what brought them in, Jennifer says, “Things are just off. I don’t feel connected to Jeff anymore, and frankly, I’m worn out.”

So, what’s your next move? What do you do? What do you say? Closing in prayer and dismissing them isn’t an option at this point. There’s no time to excuse yourself for a few hours to go and do research and preparation. You don’t have a phone-a-friend. What’s your initial goal? How do you spend the next thirty to forty-five minutes?

These types of scenarios can be scary. Most churches cannot afford to have a staff counselor or resident therapist, much less a pastor of counseling. Most of the counseling is either referred out to a local Christian counseling center or is hopefully taken care of in a couple of meetings with the pastor. But Jeff and Jennifer obviously have some trust in you to address their issues. How do you move forward? Are you equipped to help them in these moments?

Doing marriage counseling can be a daunting task even for those who have years of experience and are licensed for such work. Well-known marriage therapists Drs. John and Julie Gottman describe the work as facing “two dragons trying to immolate each other. We . . . feel scared sometimes, and we’ve been doing this work for decades.”¹

Counselor and author Everett Worthington quips, “Most counselors dread dealing with troubled marriages even though troubled marriages often form the majority of their caseload.”² If this is how licensed professionals feel about marriage counseling, then what hope do people like you or I have when it comes to helping couples in crisis?

PASTOR, YOU ARE A COUNSELOR

I readily acknowledge that many of you are already laboring faithfully to help couples who are struggling and hurting. Many of you spend hours—many late in the evening—offering wise counsel to those in need. Sometimes you see repentance, growth, and change, and sometimes you don’t. Marriage counseling can be a long, arduous journey for both the counselor and the couple, and yet despite these obstacles, I’m convinced that pastors³ are well positioned to meet marriages in crisis with the hope of the gospel. Gregory the Great called pastoral care and counseling the “art of arts.”⁴ While some pastors may not view themselves as counselors, all pastors counsel. In fact, William Clebsch makes a point that many church attendees view their pastors as counselors: “Gauged both by consumer demand and by the clergyman’s self-evaluation, the chief business of religion in the United States is now—as it probably has long been—the cure of souls.”⁵

Author and counselor David Powlison states it bluntly: “Pastor, you are a counselor. Perhaps you don’t think of yourself that way. (And perhaps your people don’t think of you that way, either.) Perhaps you don’t want to be a counselor. But you are one.”⁶ This might surprise some of us. We attended seminary to preach, not counsel—right?

But why do we pastors separate preaching the Word from counseling the Word? Paul Tripp explains the similarity between the two pastoral duties: “From a biblical perspective, both public and personal ministries base their hope for change on the Word of God. They are simply different methods of bringing the Word to people in different contexts.”⁷ This is not to say pastors should seek to turn their Sunday morning sermons into group counseling sessions. E. Brooks Holifield notes the error in going toward that extreme: “Despite some excessive enthusiasm, Protestant clergy have profited vastly from the new sensitivity to pastoral counseling. The problem is that our era has evidenced a singular preoccupation with psychological modes of thinking—modes which have tended to refashion the entire religious life of Protestants in the image of the therapeutic. When Harry Emerson Fosdick referred to the sermon as counseling on a large scale, he forgot that Protestant sermons, at their best, have interpreted an ancient text that resists reduction to the psychological.”⁸

And what does the Bible say about the pastor’s role as a counselor? In his letter to the Ephesians, Paul recounts the glories of being in Christ; for three chapters, he layers truth upon truth about who we are in Christ and the resulting privileges of that relationship. In chapter four, however, Paul makes a transition, urging those in Christ to live a certain way: “I urge you to live a life worthy of the calling you have received. Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love. Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace” (Eph. 4:1–3).

Our union with Christ has direct pastoral and ethical implications on how we live and how we treat others. And Paul goes on in Ephesians four to describe the way God has equipped the church to help us deal with those implications. When Jesus ascended on high, he “gave gifts to his people” (4:8). These gifts include the ministries of apostles, prophets, evangelists, shepherds, and teachers. Paul tells us that the purpose of these gifts is to equip God’s people for works of service so that ultimately the entire body of Christ can be edified and built up.

We might be tempted to end our reading there. Some might read Ephesians 4:12 and say, “See! That’s it. I’m a pastor/teacher who preaches and builds up the body of Christ. There’s nothing in there about counseling people.” If we read further, though, we see Paul continuing his outworking of the believer’s calling by exhorting all the members of the body of Christ to be growing and maturing in their faith (Eph. 4:13). And he describes in detail how this will work out: “Speaking the truth in love, we will grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head, that is, Christ” (Eph. 4:15, emphasis mine).

There you have it. This is counseling in its simplest formulation: speaking truth in love. Paul tells us this is for every believer! Every pastor, every evangelist, every minister of mercy—all of us who are a part of the body of Christ—are called to speak the truth in love. This is at the very heart of what it means for every pastor to be counseling. Counseling is one of the many ways we can take the truths of God’s Word and speak them in love in the context of a personal relationship with the goal of growing in godliness.

This definition of counseling embraces constituent elements that naturally fall within the ministry of a pastor. Powlison writes, “Counseling is not essentially a technical enterprise calling for technical expertise. It is a relational and pastoral enterprise engaging in care and cure of the soul. Both psychotherapy and psychiatry attempt pastoral work, engaging in ‘care and cure of the soul’ as their etymologies accurately signify. Sigmund Freud rightly defined therapists as ‘secular pastoral workers.’ ”⁹

Pastor, you are called to publicly proclaim the truth of God’s Word in public, but you are also called to privately minister the truth of God’s Word interpersonally. Every pastor is a counselor. Paul is not alone in calling pastors to this task either. Peter reminds us to “Be shepherds of God’s flock that is under your care, watching over them—not because you must, but because you are willing, as God wants you to be; not pursuing dishonest gain, but eager to serve; not lording it over those entrusted to you, but being examples to the flock” (1 Pet. 5:2–3). Shepherds shepherd by being among their people, leading and guiding them—not by keeping them at arm’s length.

In one of the most intimate and moving letters to a church, Paul recounts with sincere fondness the time he spent among the people of Thessalonica: “Instead, we were like young children among you. Just as a nursing mother cares for her children, so we cared for you. Because we loved you so much, we were delighted to share with you not only the gospel of God but our lives as well. Surely you remember, brothers and sisters, our toil and hardship; we worked night and day in order not to be a burden to anyone while we preached the gospel of God to you” (1 Thess. 2:7–9).

This is not a letter from a detached pastor who has a “Sunday-only” mentality. No, Paul is a gentle, affectionate leader who embraces his calling as a pastor and shepherd. His proclamation of the gospel was not limited to pulpit ministry alone. Powlison notes that Paul’s relationship here with the Thessalonians is decidedly “emotionally involved.”¹⁰ He goes on to write, “If Jesus had entered into purely consultative, professional relati...