Tag: counseling

Jettisoning Some and Embracing Others

“Keller asked the Oxford students to imagine an Anglo-Saxon warrior in Britain in AD 800. Inside he feels the impulse to destroy anyone who disrespects him. That’s the response his honor/shame culture demands, and so he does. But he also feels sexually attracted to men. His culture demands that he suppress those feelings, so he does not act on them. Now consider a man of the same age walking the streets of Manhattan in our day. He feels just like the Anglo-Saxon warrior. He wants to kill anyone who looks at him the wrong way. And he desires sexual relations with other men. Our culture sends him to therapy for anger management. He will identify publicly with his sexual orientation.

So what does this illustration teach us? Keller explains:

‘Primarily it reveals that we do not get our identity simply from within. Rather, we receive some interpretive moral grid, lay it down over our various feelings and impulses, and sift them through it. This grid helps us decide which feelings are “me” and should be expressed—and which are not and should not be. So this grid of interpretive beliefs-not an innate, unadulterated expression of our feelings—is what shapes our identity. Despite protests to the contrary, we instinctively know our inner depths are insufficient to guide us. We need some standard or rule from outside of us to help us sort out the warring impulses of our interior life.

‘And where do our Anglo-Saxon warrior and our modern Manhattan man get their grids? From their cultures, their communities, their heroic stories. They are actually not simply “choosing to be themselves”— they are filtering their feelings, jettisoning some and embracing others. They are choosing to be the selves their cultures tell them they may be. In the end, an identicy based independently on your own inner feelings is impossible.’”

—Timothy Keller, Preaching: Communicating Faith in an Age of Skepticism (New York: Viking, 2015), 135-136. Quoted in Collin Hansen, Timothy Keller: His Spiritual and Intellectual Formation (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2023), 241.

Desolate and Unpeopled Vacancy

“A man will no more consent to the misery of being without an object because that object is a trifle, or of being without a pursuit because that pursuit terminates in some frivolous or fugitive acquirement, than he will voluntarily submit himself to the torture because that torture is to be of short duration. If to be without desire and without exertion altogether is a state of violence and discomfort, then the present desire, with its correspondent train of exertion, is to not to be got rid of simply by destroying it. It must be by substituting another desire and another line or habit of exertion in its place—and the most effectual way of withdrawing the mind from one object is not by turning it away upon desolate and unpeopled vacancy, but by presenting to its regards another object still more alluring.”

—Thomas Chalmers, The Expulsive Power of a New Affection (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2020), 33-34. Chalmers said this while preaching on 1 John 2:15.

Your Gaze and Intentions

“Is it possible to alter the subtle tendencies that pattern how you look at people? Yes. The Holy Spirit is about this business. It takes a while: a lot of walking on the paths of light, a lot of needing God and loving God, a lot of receiving his mercies, a lot of learning to genuinely love people. But you can grow wiser even at this subtlest of levels. You can increasingly view each human being as a sister or brother, a mother or father, a daughter or son—as someone to care for, not a sexual object. Your gaze and intentions can become more and more about caring and protecting.”

—David Powlison, Making All Things New: Restoring Joy to the Sexually Broken (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2017), 100

Your Life Hangs Upon Sheer Mercy From God

“When you recognize sin’s subtlety, you realize how much your life hangs upon sheer mercy from God. He is utterly aware of thoughts and intentions of which we may be barely aware or wholly unaware. Mercy extends here, too.”

—David Powlison, Making All Things New: Restoring Joy to the Sexually Broken (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2017), 99

As a Nursing Mother Stammers

“For if our Lord spoke only of things that are obscure and beyond our reach, we might have cause to complain that we were wasting time on speculations which required much hard work, which in the end did us no good and left us no wiser than before. In that case it would be right for us to feel annoyed. When, however, our Lord condescends to our ignorance and teaches us in so intimate a way, as a father instructs his children or as a nursing mother stammers to her immature infant so that he will understand—when, I say, God treats us so graciously and makes sure that there is nothing superfluous in his word—nothing which does not yield good fruit for our salvation—when we see that, must we not be mad and naturally wilful if we fail to profit by it?”

—John Calvin, trans. Robert White, Sermons on Titus (Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth, 2015), 269-270. Calvin said this while preaching on Titus 3:8-15.

Everything Being Renewed Will Be Entirely New

“God works organically in our lives. Organic growth has integrity. God works step-by-step. He walks with you. He’s always interested in how you take your very next step. Walking through life with him feels right. You’re going somewhere. The day of “completion” will not arrive until the day when Jesus Christ arrives (Phil. 1:6). When we see him, then we will be like him (1 John 3:2). Only when God lives visibly in our midst will all tears be past (Rev. 21:3–4). Someday, not today, everything being renewed will be entirely new (Rev. 21:5). Much of the failure to fight well, befriend well, pastor well, and counsel well arises because we don’t really understand and work well with this long truth.”

—David Powlison, Making All Things New: Restoring Joy to the Sexually Broken (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2017), 59