Is this for me? Is it for you?

the making of good counsel

Have you ever wondered why that advice from an online influencer is sometimes helpful and other times disastrous? Do you find that sermons sometimes leave you torn between two opposing ideas? Has a successful person shared what guides their life yet none of those things seem to work for you?¹ All of that has happened to me and, for a long time, I thought I was the problem. But that’s a feature, not a bug.

The spectrum of personality

For most characteristics—how loving we are, how generous we are—we operate on a spectrum. Karen Swallow Prior taught me that every virtue is between two vices.² We can err on either side, isn’t that helpful? Some of us are so “loving” that we have no sense. We enable poor behavior, are guilted into decisions, and cannot say “no” and, for some variety of reasons, we call it love. On the other hand, some of us don’t love at all, and we call it truth. Some of us give away all of our money and can’t pay our mortgage, and some of us would not give a penny away if it didn’t benefit us somehow. When you are talking to a large group, without offering a ton of caveats, you can’t talk to everyone. If you preach generosity to a room full of people who already struggle to manage their money (because they give too much of it away, not because they overspend), you don’t help them. You need to teach them discipline or stewardship or how to say “no” or how to know what is theirs to do. You also can’t teach the same sermon on money management to people who live below the poverty line. If you give tips online about not being a doormat to an audience of people who rarely think about anyone but themselves, you’ve probably helped solidify them in sinful patterns.

Hopefully this post will help us deal with this phenomenon whether we are giving the advice or receiving it.³

I personally think this is why so much popular marriage advice tends to be bad. We have stereotyped men and women, given advice that meets cultural standards, and paid no attention to the personal dynamics of relationships.⁴ It sells books and conferences, sure, but there’s nothing like someone who loves you pulling you aside and saying, “Have you considered that you’re being a jerk here?”⁵ My guess is that the bones of that advice worked for someone.⁶ But to imagine that it works for everyone is to ignore the beautiful diversity that exists in humanity. God’s calling for believers is universal. We are all called to be like Jesus, to love others, to serve the world with our gifts. But it is also specific. The way each of us will do those universal callings is very different. God honors the uniqueness that He placed in each of us and we should too.⁷

I’m sure you’ve observed it. Justin and I talked about it again this past week but, this time, he asked how a person walks that line as a pastor. I thought it was a great question. Pastoral counseling or close mentoring should be personal. You can learn a lot from an internet teacher or a podcast and you should. That’s good. But when you are asking specifics about your life and how you follow Jesus in that, you need someone who knows you. And if you are giving counsel, this advice has to come from proximity, context, and the leading of the Spirit.⁸

Proximity

If we are going to give counsel, we need proximity to people.⁹ We need to know their lives and their tendencies, their losses and their longings. They need to know that we care so that they can care to listen to us. If we have proximity, we have a fuller picture of their lives and it helps prevent us from making caricatures or reducing them to stereotypes. But proximity is hard because we can only have proximity to so many people. Proximity limits us. It also helps our words take on the most power.

Context

We need the context of Scripture but also the context of their lives, and our own lives. Hopefully, the proximity we have gives us context. Do we know that they tend to legalism? We can gently guide them away from that. Do we know that they tend toward communal justice but believe they can do whatever they want because it doesn’t hurt anyone? We can speak to the transformation that the Spirit offers and how our behavior is supposed to reflect God’s character.

The leading of the Spirit

We also need the leading of the Spirit. We have to trust that the Spirit is interacting and directing the other person as well. Perhaps it’s actually time to say nothing. Perhaps God is working on something else in their life and they don’t need to be weighed down by another topic. God is so kind to not overwhelm us with everything we have going on. He will tell us to shut up about certain things and also give us the freedom to speak about others.

The counsel that we give someone in private might not be great internet content because it’s specific to their life and no one else has that life. We will be a lot more uncomfortable than just writing or reading an instagram post. It takes a lot more time and thought both to give and receive advice than what we would like.

What does this mean for speakers/preachers/teachers?

• Know who you are talking to and be clear about it

• Include a few caveats to address people who do not fit that mold

• Resist the urge to stereotype everyone in a certain group into the same mold

• Remember that the Spirit is alive and active in the lives of your listeners; not all of the work is yours

• Give people starting points and questions

• Highlight the lives of other people and how following Jesus can look different

What does this mean for listeners?

• Ask a lot of questions: Do you align with the person they have written this message for?¹⁰ How does this advice or instruction fit into what you know God has given you to do? How does this instruction fit into who you are as a person?¹¹

• View the work as ideas to get you started: look for how that principle can be lived out in your life

• Submit to the Spirit: Yes, if someone is telling you a plain Biblical principle, pay attention. But how that is worked out in your life needs the leading of the Spirit. Trust God at work in your life.

I’d love to hear where you have observed this and how you adapt advice and counsel from a larger platform for yourself!

1. Cue our large stacks of self-help books.

2. This is from her book On Reading Well.

3. Advice, preaching, counsel, teaching. It applies to all of them.

4. Is someone a jerk? Is someone manipulative? Does one person have no idea who they are as a person? Is one person neurodivergent? Is someone in a career path bounded by strict educational/training plans? Do they have a tiny baby? All of that matters.

5. Or “You need to hold a boundary.” Or “Maybe you should go to counseling.” Or “Perhaps you should let the other person decide because this matters more to them.”

6. Whether it led to flourishing for both people is another question.

7. And marriages also have this beautiful uniqueness. It is much easier to teach some Biblical principles of marriages than to walk a large group of people through how to have a flourishing marriage. They have to do a lot of work with each other and the Spirit to do that well.

8. I will offer advice. But I do way more asking questions and then offering questions for consideration.

9. Flip it for receiving. We need counsel from people who have proximity to our lives. Etc.

10. Sometimes sermons will directly state that they are talking about people who have grown up in fundamentalism. It’s possible that if you did not, you might not need to apply this instruction. (You might need something that is almost the opposite).

11. If the speaker/Internet personality tells you that they wake up at 5am to spend time in the Bible and you get off work at midnight, that’s not for you. If they host people in their home every other day and you are deeply introverted, that’s not for you.