The Sufficiency of Scripture For Counseling

This book is a collection of true accounts about real people. The men and women featured here received hope, peace, joy, and dramatic change in their lives from Jesus Christ as they met with him in the pages of his Word, the Bible. These stories recount the details of how these people came to seek biblical counseling for problems they were experiencing in their lives, how caring Christians assisted them and oriented them toward Jesus, and how they encountered the rich and transforming presence of Christ through his Word in the community of the church.

The problems recounted in these stories are not trivial. The people in the following pages struggled with some of the most difficult and complex problems that any human can encounter in this life. They struggled with pain and difficulty for weeks, months, and even years, seeking help from many sources. Our contributors engaged them in relationship, walked with them through difficulty, and watched as Jesus used the ministry of counseling to bring life, comfort, and transformation….

Is Scripture sufficient to inform all the possible counseling situations m this fallen world? The Implications of such a question are massive. If Scripture is an over flowing source of wisdom for all counseling, then the pressing task for Christians is to be busy mining the text of Scripture for an understanding of the manifold problems people experience and for the wisdom to help them. If Scripture, though valuable and useful, is ultimately inadequate as a source of wisdom for all counseling, then the urgent work is to look to the corpus of secular psychology for those truths that supply the Bible’s lack….

(Stuart Scott and Heath Lambert Ed., Counseling the Hard Cases, p. 1-2