Counseling and the Goal of Sanctification
Scripture teaches that a major purpose in God’s redemptive plan is the restoration of His image in the believer (Ephesians 4:24, Colossians 3:10). According to II Corinthians 5:17, believers are made new. The newness is not instantaneously completed, but it is certainly genuine, and it is progressive. God pro-gressively restores His Image. The restoration is God’s work, but He gives human beings the responsibility of working with Him in the restoration process (Phil. 2: 12-13), thus allowing each person a measure of “ownership” of the sanctification process. In so doing, God honors the freedom and dignity inherent in the Image-bearing nature of the personhood of the believer.
Counseling deals with such aspects of healing as integrating the fragments of the person, promoting cohesive selfhood; strengthening the innermost sense of personhood; healing specific hurts; strengthening and binding up areas of vulnerability; validating the importance of the person’s God-created needs and helping the person find healthy ways to provide for the meeting of those needs; and helping people learn to relate interpersonally in effective ways. All of these areas are critical to deal with if the results of the Fall are going to be progressively reversed in the person’s life, therefore empowering the person to reflect God’s image more fully and more truly, which is the goal of sanctification. Therefore, as counseling progressively frees a believer from unhealthy effects of sin in the spiritual, mental, psychological, emotional, and inter-personal areas, counseling can be a tool the Lord uses to move sanctification forward, freeing the person to be more Christ-like in those realms.
For example, take the common problem of low self-esteem. The person with low self-esteem is out of sync with his or her true identity. Human beings are the pinnacle of creation, created by God in His Own image. It is clear in Scripture that God delighted in Adam and Eve—that He observed that His creation was very good immediately after their creation. Even after the Fall, God so valued human beings that He sent His Son to be a sacrifice for the sin of each human being so that believers in the Lord Jesus Christ could be progressively restored to an unmarred reflection of God’s glorious Person. The believer walking around with low self-esteem does not image a glorious God in the way he or she was created and redeemed to do.
Through counseling, this believer can learn experientially what it is like to feel accepted and valued. He or she can then take what has been learned in the counseling relationship and apply that to his or her sense of identity and relationship with the Lord and with other people. In particular, the person can begin to experience in a meaningful way the Lord’s acceptance and the tremendous value that the Lord places on him or her. As this begins to take root experientially, the believer’s perceptions begin to change. He or she can begin to see his or her true self—a growing Christlikeness—and in turn can now begin to think, feel, and act more like the invaluable God-imager that he or she was created and redeemed to be—and in fact is! In this manner, counseling can serve as a powerful tool for God to use in the sanctification process.
Jeanne L. Jensma, M.R.E., Ph.D., Director of Counseling
