Guidance

            God guides Christians through their knowledge and application of His Word which is contained in the Old and New Testaments.  NANC considers these sixty-six books to be the sufficient and sole source needed for counseling a believer concerning all matters pertaining to life and godliness. We wholeheartedly believe that God continues to work in the world today as He sovereignly chooses, ordering all events according to His own providence, but that His will prior to such working is known only as He has expressed it in the Scriptures.  We enthusiastically encourage persons who also affirm biblical sufficiency to apply for certification.

Pastoral Implications

            The claim to forms of revelation outside the completed canon of the Bible invites confusion. It breeds relative distrust in and neglect of the truth and sufficiency of God’s divinely-revealed written Word. The “fresh revelation” becomes the exciting and memorable thing. Particular individuals are viewed as authoritative receivers of God’s words. The dynamic of the Christian life is fundamentally misconstrued. In many different ways, a defective view of guidance causes counselees to misplace their faith.

There are a number of common variants on the idea that God immediately and authoritatively communicates His will by a fresh revelation. The most extreme error believes that Christians can (and even should) receive additional authoritative revelations from God, a personalized message given in order to elucidate, or in some cases even to transcend, the guidance that the Bible gives. For example, this view is central to “Theophostic Ministry,” and frequently arises in Pentecostal circles.

A second approach takes a step in the right direction by denying that the counselor (or counselee, or another party) receives additional revelation from God. But it suggests that believers can be assisted in understanding and applying the Bible to current life issues through authoritative prophetic utterances and impressions from the Lord. This view adds a biblical check on the content of any supposed revelation, but it still teaches that a direct pipeline to God’s voice can be expected in order for us to know His point of view and His will regarding our current situation and choices.

A third approach teaches that God’s direct personalized guidance may be obtained through hunches and inner impressions, by the presence or absence of “peace,” or by attempting to read messages from God in the configuration of circumstances. In this view, God’s ways of communicating His will aren’t precise and propositional. The freshly-revealed will of God is sensed inside each person. There’s more ambiguity, subjectivity, and uncertainty in comparison with “Thus saith the Lord” or “The Lord is saying to me ___” of the previous two views. This approach is very common all across the denominational spectrum.

The net effect of each of these is to distract counselor and counselee from the primacy, sufficiency, and relevance of Scripture to the issues that counseling addresses. What the Bible calls “wisdom” is the ability to identify the relevance of God’s person, promises and will in any current situation and current problem. But those who seek immediate, direct, extrabiblical, personal guidance are attempting to make God relevant to current events by a direct revelation, not by growth in wisdom. It’s a short-cut to relevance. It affects counselees in two profound ways. First, most obviously, a counselee is distracted from objective, biblical revelation, and is instead led into a morass of other possibly authoritative voices. But there’s a second, equally significant effect. Counselees are led away from a biblical understanding of the concrete details of their current problems, situations, and choices. Counseling leaps into the upper story. A superspiritual religiosity replaces the biblical wisdom that walks on the earth. Two elements combine to create relevant wisdom by the power of the Holy Spirit – Scripture illumining current human realities – and both are downplayed. Change occurs by spiritual magic, rather than by acquiring wisdom from God about how to live biblically and fruitfully in the midst of current realities.

            The cash value of this issue comes not only in the way it shapes the overall goals of counseling, by replacing wisdom with superspirituality. It also affects the details of counseling process in two crucial places. First, in seeking a “revelatory diagnosis,” a counselor bypasses normal channels of getting to know and love another person. Instead, an immediate word from God will identify the counselee’s problem. Revelatory diagnosis is a particular characteristic of Theophostic Ministry and of some in the John Wimber tradition. Second, in seeking to offer a “revelatory prescription,” a counselor bypasses normal channels of communicating God’s truth relevantly – e.g., Ephesians 4:15 and 4:29, 2 Timothy 2:15, Titus 2:15. He or she instead seeks to find an extrabiblical message from above so that a counselee can obtain a relevant promise to trust or command to obey.

            Many dangers and confusions arise for counselees discipled into this way of living the Christian life. It creates generalized instability; it dehumanizes the Christian life; it produces ongoing temptation to look in multiple directions in hopes of finding God’s will.

            Counselors who expect and utilize what they consider to be immediate authoritative revelations cannot be certified by NANC. But there are some teaching points that the grader or supervisor can be aware of in order to do further work with a candidate. It’s worth remembering that many errors are reactive. One bad teaching begets the opposite bad teaching; one misunderstanding begets the opposite misunderstanding.

On this issue, part of the appeal of revelatory guidance comes because a person thinks that the “sufficiency of Scripture” means that the Holy Spirit is not personally and pointedly involved in the counseling process. If dry, deistic rationalism is the meaning of “Bible-only,” then mystical fresh revelations come to seem like what it means to “listen also to the Spirit.” When people think that “biblical” means merely the human acquisition of Bible knowledge and the dispensing of proof texts, then they are tempted to set the Spirit somehow against the Bible as a wildcard factor. A misunderstanding of the Bible leads to a misunderstanding of how to bring the living God back into the picture. The Holy Spirit is treated as an additional (and superior!) factor to the Bible, perhaps even the freeing and creative alternative to something rather boringly predictable!

NANC’s view of Scripture’s sufficiency does not believe that the counselor’s own Bible knowledge, analytic abilities, and prescribing of Bible texts constitute the sum total of what he or she brings to the table. The Holy Spirit is on scene, the true Counselor, the giver of living wisdom to both counselor and counselee. A study of the first two chapters in The Christian Counselor’s Manual could prove very helpful to a candidate who will otherwise fail certification because of the allure of unbiblical views of the Spirit’s role. One can heartily believe in and rely on the immediate presence and power of the Spirit, without believing that He will spontaneously broadcast authoritative messages if only we become tuned in to His voice via mental impressions, feelings, and circumstances.

The Spirit’s presence enables us to minister the Word relevantly and wisely. True ministry is always a joint human and divine work, with the accent on God the Redeemer. To bring truth to bear relevantly on the ever-shifting details of human experience demands the Spirit’s illumination, power, and gifts of wisdom. So the Bible and the Spirit are not two different channels you might listen to, switching back and forth between channels. The Spirit authored the Word  and continues to enable both counselor and counselee to apply and live out that Word. For example, in Hebrews 10:16f, the Holy Spirit is acknowledged as the author behind Jeremiah’s original words c. 600 B.C.; the Spirit is now the author behind this new application being made c. 65 A.D by the author of Hebrews; and the Spirit will again be the author behind a counselor’s new application of that same message today. God himself writes His law on our hearts – as the text says. Text and Spirit are cooperative and complementary with each other, not alternative and supplemental to each other.

Proverbs 2:1-7 is a classic text. Wisdom comes from studying and taking to heart the revealed Word of God AND wisdom is the gift of God as He hears our cries for wisdom. There’s no disjunction, as if we rationalistically study and master the Bible, and meanwhile the Spirit works dynamically outside the Bible. Similarly, in Psalm 119 we read of the written Word in verse after verse, and we also say: “Teach me. Make me understand. Revive me.,” and the living God does just that. Augustine’s famous “Give what You command, O Lord, and command what You will” has been foundational to NANC from the start.