BIBLICAL COUNSELING TRAINING CONFERENCE - opening night

It is a good thing I didn’t care to watch the super bowl this year; because I spent all afternoon traveling with my family (most of it) to a counseling conference in Indiana, only to sit through a couple hours of an opening session on Sunday night. But, God knows me and knows my heart, and knows exactly what I need. I guess there are over 1,500 people here and they are spread out over 6 tracks, beginning with new people on track 1. Several people from my church have taken some of these when they have gone “on the road” to Ohio. But, I enjoy being here, at the home church of the Biblical Counseling Training Conference: Faith Baptist Church in Lafayette.

The opening session for my track, track 2, was entitled: Counseling and the Attributes of God. It was fitting, given my out of control feeling I had entering the conference setting, that the first attribute of God discussed was His SOVEREIGNTY: God is in control of all the events of our lives. There were 9 attributes discussed, as it relates to the practice of counseling, but I will just mention this one here.

The speaker said: “This phrase could certainly be said this way: the fact that God is sovereign means that God is in absolute, total, control of all the events of our lives.” This attribute of God is tough for many of us to accept and impossible for any of us to fully understand. Our human finiteness and inability to control things (no matter how hard we try), together with the fact that only God has no beginning and ending and is perfect, makes it impossible for us to fully comprehend. But, it is still true, if we are willing, by faith, to believe in the infallible Word of God.

Here are the Scripture passages that the speaker listed, as it relates to God’s sovereignty. Any of these, all of these, would be beneficial to meditate on and learn from. Of course, before I think about how to use this in counseling someone, I need to apply it to my own life first. So, I read these with that primary intention in mind:

I Chronicles 29:11 – “Yours, O LORD, is the greatness and the power and the glory and the victory and the majesty, for all that is in the heavens and in the earth is yours. Yours is the kingdom, O LORD, and you are exalted as head above all.”

Job 42:2 – “I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted.”

Psalm 115:3 – “Our God is in the heavens; he does all that he pleases.”

Isaiah 45:9 – “Woe to him who strives with him who formed him, a pot among earthen pots! Does the clay say to him who forms it, What are you making? Or Your work has no handles?”

Daniel 4:35 – “All the inhabitants of the earth are accounted as nothing, and he does according to his will among the host of heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth; and none can stay his hand or say to him, What have you done?”

Ephesians 1:11 – “In him we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the purpose of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will.”

Romans 8:28,29 – “And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose. For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers.”

After reading through these passages, the speaker talked about how this attribute of God applies to certain counseling situations:
1) Temptation (sinful choices)
2) Worry (assuming responsibility God never intended me to have)
3) Trials/suffering (circumstances)

One thing I wrote down, that the speaker said, about this area of trials and suffering. When people are going through difficult times, they don’t want to “be there” and just want the difficulty to pass and “be better”. However, I like what the speaker said: “If you want to be like Christ, you are going to have to experience some of the things He did.” Think about that for a while.

God’s sovereignty: I believe in it, and although I don’t understand it fully, I trust in Him, to always do what is best – for my spiritual good. How does God’s sovereignty apply to your life today?