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Consider Your Counsel by Bob Kelleman is one of the best biblical counseling books I’ve ever read. It is essentially a primer on how to disciple others. The book’s content is based on ten mistakes that Kelleman has witnessed counselors, including himself, make. Consider Your Counsel includes ten chapters based on the ten mistakes which are:
- We Elevate Data Collection above Soul Connection
- We Share God’s Eternal Story before Listening to People’s Earthly Story
- We Talk at Counselees Rather Than Exploring Scripture with Counselees
- We Target Sin but Diminish Suffering
- We Fail to Follow the Trinity’s Model of Comforting Care
- We View People One Dimensionally Instead of Comprehensively
- We Devalue Emotions Instead of Seeing Emotions as God’s Idea
- We Minimize the Complexity of the Body-Soul Interconnection
- We Maximize Sin While Minimizing Grace
- We Confuse the Sufficiency of Scripture with the Competency of the Counselor
Each chapter’s conclusion contains four questions for counselors to consider. I found the questions convicting and encouraging and believe they provide a good heart check to ensure that counsel comes from a place of humility and compassion. Consider Your Counsel begins with the author’s vital observation that, “We use a ‘concordance approach’ to Scripture that makes the Bible a shallow answer book rather than the redemptive gospel story it is,” (pg. 11). He then draws from Scripture to help readers understand how to rightly use Scripture in the care and counsel of others.
On page 14 he wrote, “Biblical counseling is the personal ministry of the Word where we explore together the specific biblical passages and scriptural principles that best relate to this particular person. Biblical counseling is God’s wisdom for life in a broken world—a fallen, messy world that requires depth of insight, not shallow platitudes.”
In many ways, Consider Your Counsel provided healing from some unhealthy spiritual situations I experienced in which God’s word was wielded like a weapon and rarely presented as a beautiful story of redemption. My heart was encouraged upon reading the author’s observation, ” . . . I continue to detect a pattern of viewing fellow Christians predominantly through the grid of depravity and thinking of counseling primarily as ‘spotting the idols of the heart’. This is one-dimensional and can cause great harm.”
I also deeply appreciated his thoughts in chapter 9 on making the mistake of maximizing sin while minimizing grace. He wrote, “If we maximize sin while minimizing grace, then we are actually joining Satan’s condemning scheme,” (pg. 72).
On the same page, he asked, “As biblical counselors, do we emphasize sin or grace? In our concern for confronting sin, do we sometimes inadvertently become sin-sniffers, idol-spotters, and sin-maximizers? Or as we confront sin, do we consciously communicate Christ’s superabounding, amazing, infinite grace?”
Consider Your Counsel was written to help biblical counselors but is a great manual for anyone serving in any ministry capacity. The book is only 87 pages long making it a very accessible read for individuals or groups.
Consider Your Counsel is one of my favorite Christian books. It is rich with biblical wisdom and I strongly believe it is a must read for all Christians.
