INTRODUCTION

So Jesus said to them, "Because of your unbelief; for assuredly, I say to you, if you have faith as a Mustard Seed, you will say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you."

Mathew 17:20

In February 2013, CCEF /USA (Christian Counseling Education Foundation) launched CCEF/UK by a conference entitled, "Changing Hearts, Applying the Bible to Everyday Life," at the Central Hall, Westminster in London. The two main speakers were Dr David Powlison and Time Lane, from CCEF /USA. At the end of the conference, they were asked if it would be appropriate to biblically counsel an unbeliever. There was a debate between the two. The end result was that they believed it would be possible with the hope that during the counseling sessions, the counselee would come to a decision and accept Jesus as the Savior, and thus he would have benefited from biblical counseling and they could have won a soul for the kingdom of God.

However, I have some reservations on this point. The Holy Spirit, the concern of this study, does not dwell in unbelievers, and by the time the counselee accepts Jesus as the Savior, he would not be spiritually mature enough to appreciate the crucial role of the Holy Spirit as God's empowering presence in the biblical counseling.

Jay Adams (1973) confirmed that biblical counseling should be for believers only. He says that, in truly biblical counseling, the counselor and the counselee meet in the name of Jesus Christ. They should expect the very presence of Christ as the Counselor-in-charge, according to the Scripture, when Jesus says, "For where two or three are gathered together in my name, I am in the midst of them."

Adams continues to explain that the Holy Spirit is the Principal Person. He points to what Jesus says before leaving His disciples, "And I will send another (allos) Helper (parakeltos), that may abide with you forever." The Greek word "allos" is translated literally as "another of the same kind." "Parakeltos" in Greek can also be translated to advocate, counselor, and intercessor. John MacArthur (2005),also highlights this issue.

Adams explains further by saying, when Jesus was on earth, He was God appearing in flesh, similar to us in everything except without sin. He was limited to time and place. So as He explained to His disciples later, that it was for their benefit that He had to depart as He said in John 16-7, "Nevertheless I tell you the truth, it is to your advantage that I go away; for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you; but if I depart, I will send Him to you."

Because the Holy Spirit, who has come, is not limited to time or place, He, for example, can be at the counseling sessions in China and in the USA at the same time. He is the Spirit of Truth and He is indeed the Spirit of holiness, and the source of holiness. The holiness of God's people results from their sanctification by the Holy Spirit. Sanctification is the ultimate goal of biblical counseling. To sum up, Christians cannot counsel or be counseled biblically without the Holy Spirit.

However, Adams disagrees with the other two scholars, Gordon Fee and Colin Dye, on two issues. First, he says that the Holy Spirit does not dwell in the believers. The Holy Spirit dwells in the Church as the body of Christ only. However, for the believers, the Spirit works through the Bible. We read and understand the Scripture effectively through the Holy Spirit, and then live in obedience to His truth. Second, all Christians benefit from His counsel, but the Holy Spirit counseled the apostles in a unique way, enabling them to remember the work of Jesus and the revelations written in the Bible. However, the supernatural charismatic gifts, described in 1 Corinthian 12-14, the apostles had, were ceased by the close of the New Testament canon.

Gordon Fee (1996) writes that we live in what he calls a "postmodern world," where the Church is regularly viewed as irrelevant at best and Neanderthal at worst. The Holy Spirit, despite our profession of faith in our creeds, hymns and lip service has largely been marginalized both in the halls of learning, and in the life of the Church. But there is reason for hope, as Fee explains. Our contemporary post-modernism era looks much like the culture of the Greco-Roman world into which the Gospel first appeared some two thousand years ago. The secret to the success of the early believers lay in two factors. First, upon the good news, this was centered on the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Jesus, Immanuel, had come, brought both revelation and the character of God to our fallen world. John 14:9, the Lord Jesus says, "Have you been with me for so long and don't know who I am? The one who has seen me has seen the Father." Jesus is our redeemer from our tragic fall, as written in Matth1:21, "You shall call his name Yeshua, for He will save his people from their sins." The second reason for their success laid in their experienced the Spirit who made the work of Christ an effective reality in their lives, thus giving them a radical alternative within their culture.

To explain Fee's second reason for the early believers' success in their Greco-Roman culture, I quote here what is written in Acts 1:3-8. The Apostle Luke records that the Lord Jesus was with his disciples, 40 days after His resurrection. The disciples had more than three years of intensive teaching from the Lord Himself. They saw with their own eyes, the Lord's resurrection from the dead and He was now with them talking. There was nothing preventing them from preaching the Gospel, the good news. However, Jesus instructed them, "not depart from Jerusalem, and you should wait for the promise of the Father, because you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come to you."

Although Fee does not examine biblical counseling in his books, the above same principles should be applied. We need, as counselors and counselees, to fully appreciate the power of the Holy Spirit to make our counseling sessions more effective in our postmodern world. We need to stop paying lip service to the Spirit and to recapture the Apostle Paul's perspective: the Holy Spirit is the experienced empowering return of God's own personal presence in and among us. The good news is that we do not have to wait. The Holy Spirit already dwells in us as believers.

Colin Dye has developed his model of biblical counseling influenced by Larry Crabb's model of integration of Christian faith with secular psychology. He planned to write three counseling manuals, each corresponding to the three counseling levels suggested by Crabb, to establish a counseling service in the church. However, he wrote and published only two of them. The third manual has never...