Lecture

Well, there is one thing that is obvious. There is something going on beneath the surface of my life, and beneath the surface of your life, that is causing trouble. What may not be quite so obvious is that there is something even deeper in my life, and in yours, if we are followers of Jesus that can cause progress to take place. If we are going to enter the mystery of someone’s soul, if we are going to do battle for people’s souls, and get involved meaningfully in conversation, and get into the tough areas, the confusing areas, then it seems to me that we are going to need to have a roadmap. We are going to need to have some kind of a guide that will help us to discover what is bad inside, what is bad that needs to be seen and then abandoned, and maybe a roadmap, even more importantly, to see what is good in the center of the being of every follower of Christ.

It seems to me that it is easy to make the mistake of not entering deeply enough into the human soul to fight the battles that are there. It is terribly easy to make the mistake of moralism, to fall into the error of a moralistic culture, which says to somebody when they have a problem, “get over it.” “Here is the biblical principle … look, you are not loving your wife as you should. Haven’t you read Ephesians 5? And if you will read that, you need to do what is right, and I am going to hold you accountable.” How many times have people tried to change solely on the basis of mutual accountability? How many times have you been in a small group, where the whole dynamic of how you are going to grow spiritually is accountability. “Here is the principle, I promise that I will do it, and next week, you will check up on me.” Moralism—do it right! That is a mistake that we need to avoid by being able to go deeply into somebody’s soul.

The second mistake that I think it is very easy to make in our culture is to become therapeutic in our thinking. Now let me use that word in kind of a negative way. It can have a good meaning, but let me use it in a negative way. It is very easy to become therapeutic and to assume that we are going to be able to plumb to the depths of people’s unconscious, to get into that which is hidden, and to somehow do a repair job, to fix what is wrong. Two ways of thinking about change: do what is right (moralism); and fix what is wrong (therapy).

There is a third way, a way that I think is pivotal, foundational, to all of my thinking about SoulCare, and the third way can be summarized with the idea of “release what is good.” Has the Spirit of Christ, at conversion, really put something inside of my heart that when you see me acting obnoxiously and arrogantly and neurotically and crazily, you are able to assume that there is something beneath all of the junk? There is something that is wonderful beneath all of the junk, that if you knew how to enter my soul, if you knew what to look for, if you knew how to sift through all of the junk and all of the bad and to get down to what is core within me, maybe there is a possibility of releasing something that is good. SoulCare gets involved with someone’s life—I hope that is a big sentence for you now—SoulCare gets into the reality of somebody’s life. It enters with a curiosity that really wants to know, a curiosity that is intrigued: “I wonder what is going on? I don’t know.” It is not a judgmental spirit of, “Something’s wrong, and I want to straighten it out.” But, “I am just so curious about how you are thinking, about why you reacted that way. Why did you get so paranoid about that? I am not judging you—I am just dying to know. I would love to explore and to understand, with curiosity, what is going on.”

And secondly, SoulCare enters the battle for somebody’s soul with a vision. We talked about that last time—with a vision that no matter what you find, you know the power of God is sufficient to move a person from where they are to a vision of what they could be. SoulCare enters the soul with curiosity, and with vision, and engages the battle that, in fact, is raging in the deepest part of our soul.

Now, if you are prepared to do that, if something in you is feeling stirred by this, if you are saying, “You know, I would like to get involved with people at this level. I am not sure how to do it. (I hope that you are going to get around to telling me someday.) I really want to know what it means to get into a conversation that could be called SoulCare.” Let me warn you that when you get into people’s lives deeply, it really can be confusing. I cannot tell you the number of times, in my more than thirty years now as a psychologist—having talked to hundreds, thousands of people, I am sure—I cannot tell you the number of times that I have gotten into people’s lives, and I have gotten so confused by what I have heard that I have said to myself (I had the wisdom to not say it out loud), “This person needs professional help.” Then I had to realize, “Wait a minute, I am the professional; I am supposed to understand all of this stuff.” There is a mystery that no amount of training will reduce. There is a bottom-line mystery about the human soul that you must be prepared to get involved with, and to be threatened by a little bit, until you realize your absolute dependence on the Spirit of God to make anything valuable happen, whatsoever.

I remember a man some years ago came to see me in my professional capacity. I was in private practice, and he came to see me, and he told me the following story—and this is very close to exactly what happened a number of years ago—and he said, “Dr. Crabb, I have been married now for about twenty-some years, and I just lost all sexual interest in my wife. I feel a revulsion to any kind of physical contact. Our marriage is doing fine, but I don’t know what it is, but there is just something about the idea of even holding my wife’s hand, let alone kissing her, let alone going into physical relations, that I just almost feel a physical nausea. I know it is hard on her, but it is hard on me. I don’t know what to do. I went to my pastor, and when I shared this dilemma with my pastor . . .” (Now let me insert an editorial comment: the pastor did not enter the man’s soul.) What the pastor said to the man was, “You know, in 1 Corinthians, Paul makes it clear that our body belongs to our spouse. He makes it clear that we are not to withhold sexual relations from our mate except by mutual agreement for spiritual purposes. And I presume that if God is telling you to be involved with your mate at a physical, sexual level that He will give the power to make that happen. So here is my recommendation to you (pastor to parishioner): I want you to take that passage of Paul in 1 Corinthians, and I want you to memorize it, and I want you to spend all week pondering, and reflecting on it, and praying about it. And then I want you to trust God for the power to carry out His commandments, because God never requires what He does not empower us to do.” The pastor went through all his clichés that were true but sound so pat. Then he told the guy to “trust God, and move toward your wife.”

Well, the fellow did his best. He did it for a couple of weeks. The pastor asked, “How’d it go?” And his response was, “I experienced no change whatsoever. I don’t know what to do.” And the pastor finally, after several weeks of exasperation, realizing that his moral model was not working, the accountability model of instruction was not making the change that he was hoping would be seen in this particular guy’s life, he called me up (I know the pastor, he is a friend of mine) and he said, “can I refer so-and-so to you,” and these were his words, “I think he has a psychological problem. I have tried the biblical approach, and I think that he needs psychotherapeutic attention.” Can you hear the two models, the moral model, the moralistic model, which says here is what you ought to do and in the power of God, go do it? And if that [model] does not work, then I guess that there is something inside of you that only a psychologist could understand and deal with; so go for therapy, and maybe he can fix what is wrong, so you will be able to obey God.

I am suggesting a very different way of thinking about this situation, a way of thinking that perhaps came home to me with what happened with that gentleman. At our first session—he did come to see me—in our very first session, he told me the story, and I let him know, of course, that the pastor had called me and let me know some of what was going on. And toward the middle of our first session, when he was sharing with me that he felt like there was a force within him—that’s how he put it— “there is a dark force within me that seems when I want to move toward my wife, pushes me away. And I need to tell you, Dr. Crabb, if you tell me to just go do it because it is the right thing to do—I know that I should love my wife in a different way. I know I should move toward her. But I can’t—and if you tell me just to go do it, I’m going to give up on being helped by you, and I’ll just walk out. Forgive me, but that’s how I feel.”

I remember sitting there looking at him. I was a young psychologist; I was not sure what I was doing—I am not sure if I do now sometimes—and I remember looking at him kind of thoughtfully, and trying to stroke my chin and pretend that I am thinking deep thoughts, and understanding all of this, and in the middle of all of that, he said to me, “Now stand up.” I remember being a little nonplussed that my client was telling me in my office to stand up. I remember thinking that I had not had a course in graduate school on how to deal with it when a client tells you to stand up. It also occurred to me that I had not had a course in graduate school for most of the things that I faced in my counseling office. So, not knowing what to do, I decided to cooperate, and so I stood up right in front of my chair. And as I stood up, this man got out of his chair, and he walked slowly over toward me—I was not quite sure what was about to come—and then suddenly, without warning, he took his hand, and put it on my chest and pushed me hard, so I fell back in the chair. And then he looked down at me, and I am wondering what is going on here, and he said, “Why did you sit down?” And I looked up, and I said, “Because you pushed me.” And he said, “Did you have a choice?” And I said, “Well, no. The power of your hand against my body required me to sit. I did not have the power to stand against the force that came against me.” And his sentence was, “That’s how I feel. When I begin moving toward my wife in a physical way, I feel something inside of me pushing me away, and it is stronger than I can handle.”

What on earth does SoulCare do with that? How do you deal with that? How do you think about that? Do you just exhort him more strongly, and hold him more accountable, and get him to read more Bible verses? Do you say that there is some sort of a deep, dark, unconscious secret perhaps— maybe he was sexually abused; maybe his mother was involved with him in terrible ways . . . and maybe memories of that revulsion are coming back—that could be. Is that what you deal with? How do you deal with these kinds of things? These are the questions that I want us to think about. When you and I get involved in the battle for somebody’s soul, we are going to get confused. And I am wanting us to start thinking about a roadmap for moving into the reality of how people experience life, of how people experience forces moving them away from godly living, of how people feel very little impetus toward godly living except pressure from the saints.

What does it mean to involve yourself in SoulCare? Maybe if this man were your friend, and shared all of that with you that I just made known was his problem, is it possible that you could envision yourself moving into his life with spiritual power? Is it possible that you could actually talk with this man as your friend and have power in his life? What would that mean? What would that look like? Maybe what this man needs is SoulCare that you can provide. SoulCare that I can provide—not as a professional psychologist, but SoulCare that I can provide as a Christian in whom the Spirit of Christ dwells; therefore, SoulCare that you can provide, whether you are an engineer or a plumber, you finished third grade, or have a Ph.D. in nuclear physics—SoulCare that you can provide because the Spirit of Christ is within you.

Now let us review a little bit. If we are going to move into people’s lives, we are going to accept a few things perhaps about SoulCare. 1) We are going to agree that SoulCare you want to provide for this gentleman involves offering him not your expertise, but a certain kind of relationship, a certain kind of relationship where he feels good about the idea of you knowing him—not just his sexual problems with his wife, but a lot of other stuff as well—exploring him, getting into the depths of his soul, discovering what is in him that is ugly, profoundly ugly, far uglier than staying away from his wife sexually, but also discovering what is in him that is profoundly beautiful, that is wonderful, that is good, and being able to touch him with your life in a way that releases that which is good. That is the beginnings of understanding SoulCare, to think in those categories. You want to see his appetite for God stirred to the point where he wants God more than he wants to avoid his wife; and where the strong appetite for glorifying God and honoring Him fills him in such a way that there is actually a power within him that is released through the operation of his will, but a power, that enables him to move toward his wife through the force that is opposing him. What does it mean to stir an appetite for God that can have those kind of practical effects?

Now, another point we have made, in terms of our review, is that you feel as I do—you feel inadequate for the job. But maybe we can view inadequacy not as something to be overcome with good training, but maybe we can view inadequacy as an opportunity, an opportunity to learn humility, that if anything eternally good happens in somebody’s life, God gets the glory and not me. I did not make it happen. And dependence—I have got to listen to the Spirit. SoulCare is not a technique that I am going to train you in, and you are going to go out and practice and do it right—I do not do it right; you do not do it right. SoulCare is rather, when it comes down to the bottom line, is a matter of listening to the Spirit, of having a way of thinking about things (certainly), but moving into people’s lives according to the movement of God’s Spirit, discerning what the Spirit is doing within them and kind of tagging along, following behind the Spirit as He does His mysterious works. SoulCare is something for which inadequacy is a prime prerequisite. Because if you recognize your inadequacy, then maybe you can begin to listen, as I want to be able to begin to listen more and more to the Spirit within me. You also know, as you involve yourself in the possibility of SoulCare, you also know that there are a bunch of troublesome motives inside of you.

As you talk to this gentleman with his difficulties, and you want to offer a certain kind of relationship, to know, explore, discover, and touch, and you recognize that your goal, your basic vision for this gentleman is to have an appetite for God that is stronger than all other appetites. And you know you are inadequate for the job, and then you go on to realize, “You know, even as I am talking to him, I know that beneath the surface of my life, there is a mess. I am feeling threatened by this guy. Maybe I have similar sexual problems or problems that are different from his, but in the same broad category; and I have found no power to overcome them; and I am aware of the fact that I am just looking to move into this guy’s life without much hope at all, and hoping to find some way to help this guy so that I can get my belief in Christianity validated; and there is a lot more going on inside of me than just a real burden to see the Christ formed in the deepest parts of the soul.” You have a lot of junk happening inside of you, as I have a lot of junk happening inside of me.

Now, do understand this: that junk is not going to go away. For the rest of your life, for the rest of my life, when I sit down to chat with a friend—whether as a professional therapist or a buddy or a husband to my wife or a parent to my children—I am going to have junk inside of me. Do not get discouraged by that. Rather, be defeated by that. Do not be discouraged by that with the idea that maybe, “I can overcome all of that. Let’s see, how can I do that?” Be defeated by it in a way of recognizing “that’s always going to be with me.” If God is not moving in deeper ways through me, I am licked. I am totally defeated. But praise God! He is working in deeper ways through me. There is something in me that is far better than all of the junk, and when I face the junk, and become broken over the fact that I am so full of messy motives, then that brokenness allows the perfume of the fragrance of Christ’s life with His Spirit to begin coming out of me.

You begin to realize that the passions within you are very self-centered. But as you feel more and more brokenness over those passions because you have faced them, then some of the passions of other-centeredness begin to bubble up out of you. And with all of that happening, you begin to feel curious. You begin to ask yourself, “What is really going on? What is the battle in this man’s soul?” Can you envision the effect on some other person if you were sitting with them and being profoundly curious about wanting to know, what is the battle going on in their soul?

It was a few years ago when my wife and I were in a downtown hotel preparing for a conference I was about to give the next morning, and at about 4:00 in the morning, I woke up from pain in my side. And when I am in pain, I think that others should be aware of that fact. So I made known that I was in pain by making noises appropriate to the occasion that were designed both to express my pain and to wake up my wife. She woke up—she had very little choice in the matter—and she immediately discerned something was wrong because I was rolling on the floor of the hotel room and telling her that I was in profound pain that I had never known before. She called the ambulance, and they came—and I had my first ambulance ride that morning, at about 4:30. It turned out to be a kidney stone, by the way. And I had never had one before, and hope I never have one again. But as I rode to the hospital in the ambulance, my wife was in the front seat, and the attendant was in the back seat with me. I was lying on the gurney. He was taking my blood pressure, and asking me questions, and talking to the doctor, and saying “white Caucasian male about 62”—and I said, “wait a minute, I am 55”—and he was asking me all of these questions, and at one point, when the pain subsided a little bit, I said to him, “You are making a lot of fuss over me. You’re asking me a thousand questions. Why all the fuss?” I will never forget his words. “We have to know what battle we are fighting.”

A thought occurred to me. Who has made a fuss over me spiritually? Who has said, “Larry, I would like to get to know you. Can I ask you a thousand questions? Can I talk to some other people that are pretty wise too? I would love to know the battle you are fighting. It would mean the world to me to be able to join you in fighting that battle. I want to enter the battle for your soul.” Curiosity: entering the battle for somebody else’s soul. I am reviewing all that we have talked about already in the class.

So now basically we have a picture that we can draw a little more completely. We can take the familiar icebergs, and we can say here you are—here is the person who is offering SoulCare and you want to enter the other person’s soul. You want to go beneath the surface of this person’s life, and you want to get involved in that person’s life, and you begin by understanding that what you have to offer is a relationship—a certain kind of relationship where you come to know the man, the woman, to explore, to discover, and to touch, in a deep soul-to-soul way—that is your attitude as you move into SoulCare. You begin to realize that you have a deep longing within your soul, and the longing is to see Christ formed in this person’s life. And by the way, just a second diversion, you can have that same attitude with an unbeliever. Now the unbeliever does not have the power of Christ within him, but he has a God-shaped vacuum and he bears the image of God. As you are talking to your unbelieving friend, rather than beating him in the head with the Gospel, begin with an understanding of how much you long for the fullness of Jesus to invade his life. There’s a longing for that inside of you toward your fellow believers, toward the unbelieving community—that longing is there. That motivates you. That begins to get you going in a certain way. But then you realize that there is a profound felt inadequacy. You are just not sure how to go about this. You know that what you really want to see happen, you cannot make happen. You cannot solve the problem, so you do not even try. You embrace your inadequacy as an opportunity to create a space to listen to the Spirit.

You begin to realize that your inadequacy is more profound than you thought, because there are all sorts of self-centered motivations going on inside of you. There are all sorts of ways in which, as you are talking to this individual, you are preoccupied with yourself—you are trying to look good, trying to impress, trying to make a point, trying to prove some point, you are working very hard—but it is really more about you than about God, and about them. And you begin to realize that, and you are broken by it. And you realize, “Oh, what a mess I am.” And then out of that brokenness, something begins to bubble up within you, something of the energy of Christ, and you begin to feel a profound curiosity about this person; and a vision begins to develop in your mind of what could happen. With all that going on, with all of that being your internal reality, you want to enter this individual’s life. So what do you say?

Well, I want to give you a basic strategy that I call a roadmap, a wisdom roadmap, to understand what you are looking for and what to think about and how to move into a person’s life. But before I give you that basic strategy, before I outline that for you, let me just give you a couple of preliminaries that I think you might find helpful as you actually engage in talking with people. I want to give you a couple of dos and don’ts. I want to give you a couple of basic dos and don’ts as you move into people’s lives; with all of these realities going on, there are a couple of things that I think are very important “not” to do, and a couple of things that are very important “to” do. And with those in our mind, we will be ready to look at the actual strategy.

Let me give you three basic “don’ts.” The first “don’t”: Don’t back away no matter what you hear. When the person shares with you stuff that is uglier than you ever dreamed, don’t back away with a mood of, “I’m not going to handle that. That’s too much for me.” Stay involved. Don’t back away. When you do back away the person who you are wanting to provide SoulCare for begins to feel dangerous, begins to feel like there is something inside of him or her that nobody can handle, and the walls get thicker, the walls go up. And the person retreats more and more. Don’t back away.

The second “don’t”: Don’t advise. Don’t start your SoulCare enterprise by giving advice. Your counselee, the person with whom you are providing SoulCare, is going to feel pressured, is going to feel judged. If, early in the game, you begin giving advice, and saying, “You know, here’s what I think you ought to do.” If you start with that, the person internally is going to recoil, and say, “You really cannot handle me where I am. I feel pressured and judged to be different. I really am going to tune you out.” Premature advice to the person for whom you are providing SoulCare is going to put up a wall between you and him or her. The second “don’t” therefore is don’t give advice early on. There is a place for advice, but not early on.

The third “don’t” (and this will sound strange): Don’t offer support. Don’t merely offer the support of saying, “May I pray with you?” Don’t, early on, merely offer the support of saying, “I want to affirm you. I think you are a great guy. You don’t like yourself, but I like you a bunch. I don’t quite get what your problem is.” Don’t offer the kind of support that more often than not has the effect of making the other person feel trivialized. If you give an aspirin for a person who has got a migraine headache, the person with the headache is going to say, “You don’t understand. My headache is far worse than what a single aspirin can handle. Don’t do that to me. Don’t give me the simple answers, the simple prayer, the simple affirmations. It really is not going to help me at all.”

Let me give you a couple of basic “dos” as you begin this incredibly important work of SoulCare. The first “do”: Do listen closely and expectantly. Listen hard, expecting to hear very important things. Your friend will feel valued. Secondly: Do ask questions. In the next lesson, we will talk about what questions to ask, but do ask questions, not with a naked light bulb over their head and a thousand interrogational questions—that is not the point—but questions that say, “I just would love to know. I am going somewhere. I am wanting to see God work in your life, and I have a lot of questions that I am just dying to ask you.” The person that you are chatting with will feel validated that there is something there worth knowing—“I do exist.” It is amazing the number of people who have no sense of their own existence. Asking questions can validate a person’s existence. The third “do”: Reflectively think. As the person shares, and you have asked a question, do not feel like you have to fill every moment with verbiage, with words. Allow yourself to sit back, and sure, go ahead and stroke your chin, and sit back, and maybe even say, “I just want to pray about this for a minute. I am in the middle of thought, and I want to ponder a few things.” The person will feel joined, connected, that you are taking them very seriously and that you are thinking about their journey. Three “don’ts” and three “dos”—in preparation for developing a roadmap for entering their soul. The actual roadmap, we will sketch at the outset of the next lesson.