Soul Physician's Desk Reference Manual

How to Care Like Christ
Part III: The Soul Physician’s Desk Reference (SPDR) Manual

Blog Series Note: How to Care Like Christ seeks to equip lay people, pastors, and professional Christian counselors with the biblical knowledge and relational skills to change lives with Christ’s changeless truth.

Two books are standard in any physician’s office: The Physician’s Desk Reference (PDR) and The Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy (Merck). Both are considered “Bibles of medical knowledge and practice.”

With its 3,223 pages of prescription drugs, the annually updated PDR is the most comprehensive, widely used drug reference available. It details the usage, warnings, and precautions for more than 4,000 prescription drugs.

Merck is the most widely used medical text in the world. It provides the latest information on the vast expanse of human diseases, disorders, and injuries, as well as their symptoms and treatments. Intended for physicians, it is still useful for the layperson. As one sage has commented, “It is a must for everyone in a human body.”

If the PDR and Merck are the Old Testament and New Testament for physicians treating the body, then the Bible is God’s final, authoritative word for physicians treating the soul. It is the Soul Physician’s Desk Reference (SPDR) manual for dispensing grace. It’s “a must for anyone who is a soul.” God’s Word provides not only the latest, but also the eternal, enduring information on the soul’s design and disease, as well as its care and cure.

What do we discover as we read the pages of the Soul Physician’s Desk Reference (SPDR)? We learn what makes biblical counseling biblical. We learn our Great Physician’s authoritative truth about how to:

1. Nourish the Hunger of the Soul: Preventive Medicine—God’s Word
2. Know the Creator of the Soul: The Great Physician—The Trinity
3. Examine the Spiritual Anatomy of the Soul: People—Creation
4. Diagnose the Fallen Condition of the Soul: Problems—Fall
5. Prescribe God’s Cure for the Soul: Solutions—Redemption
6. Envision the Final Healing of the Soul: Home—Glorification
7. Dispense God’s Care for the Soul: Spiritual Friends—Sanctification

These seven biblical categories are essential for seeing the life of the soul through the lens of Scripture. We will examine them meticulously, as a med-school student examines the skeletal structure of the human body.

The Rest of the Story

*Return tomorrow when we explore how to nourish the spiritual hunger of the soul.

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