Spiritual resources for counseling, though not automatically effective, are, when used with wisdom, supernaturally effective.
—Gary Gulbranson

For over a year I counseled a woman whose problems stemmed primarily from abuse. Throughout her life she had been physically and emotionally mistreated by various men, including her husband. In order to find personal healing and wholeness in her marriage, she desperately needed the spiritual resource of biblical truth.

In our early sessions, however, I knew I couldn't simply read the blueprint for wedded peace in Ephesians 5, not because I doubted the validity of that passage in her difficult situation but because she would not understand those verses as God intends. For her the term submit had been perverted into be abused.

Still, I had to offer her spiritual resources. The question was how.

Like a surgeon at a state-of-the-art hospital who employs the best technology can offer, a Christian counselor has powerful resources—spiritual resources—to draw ...