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.

*For the full story, feel free to visit: http://bit.ly/7vaE

The Tale of Two Counselors

How to Care Like Christ
Part II: The Tale of Two Counselors

Several years ago, “Tim” (not his real name) shared his story with me. His uncle had repeatedly sexually abused him while he was in elementary school. Tim never told anyone about the damage in his soul until he finally found the courage to tell a pastoral counselor. Hear Jim’s words.

“Bob, it was incredibly hard. I felt so ashamed, but I got the words out—sobbing as I shared. The second I finished, my counselor whipped out his Bible, turned to Genesis 3, and preached a thirty-minute message on sin. Bob, it wasn’t even a good sermon! But worse than that, I knew that I was a sinner. I’m clueless as to how my pastoral counselor intended to relate that passage to my situation. At that second, did I need a sermon on my personal sin?”

Tim did not return for his second session with his pastoral counselor. Instead, he arranged an appointment with a professional Christian counselor. Here is Tim’s rendition of his second counseling experience.

“Bob, at first things went well. My counselor seemed to be able to relate to me, seemed to have compassion for what I went through. But after two months of counseling I was ready to have him help me move beyond sympathy and empathy. I knew that I wasn’t loving my wife and kids like Christ wanted me to. But my counselor kept telling me that I was too hard on myself and that I was too damaged to love the way I wanted to love.”

The tale of two counselors. One hears a sordid story of sexual abuse and immediately responds to his sobbing counselee with a sermon on sin. The second hears his counselee’s longing to move beyond damage to dignity, from victim to victory, and informs him that he’s too disabled to function fully. These two diverse approaches illustrate the ongoing divide concerning what makes biblical counseling biblical. Just what is biblical one another ministry?

Tim’s story forces us to ask ourselves some hard questions. Practical questions such as:

*In your own life, do you tend to be more on the “truth/Scripture side” or more on the “love/soul side”? Why?

*Has anyone ever interacted with you like either of Tim’s counselors? What did it feel like? What were the results?

*What view of the Bible and of “people helping” might have motivated Tim’s counselors?

*What content does a person need to know to be a biblical counselor, pastoral counselor, lay counselor, spiritual friend, soul physician, mentor, discipler, or people helper?

The Rest of the Story

Return tomorrow when we explore how to make one another ministry truly biblical.