LIBERTY UNIVERSITY JOHN W. RAWLINGS SCHOOL OF DIVINITY
Lying Vanities in Christian Counseling
A Paper Submitted to
the Faculty of the School of Divinity
in Candidacy for the Degree of
Doctor of Education in Christian Leadership (Ed. D) Department of Christian Leadership
and Church Ministries
By
Mary Gracias
Lynchburg, Virginia
10/2022
Lying Vanities in Christian Counseling
The tragedy in the contemporary marketplace is that many models of Christian counseling
are based on theories more accurately subsumed under the error of Jonah 2:8 (“lying vanities”)
than under the truth of Jonah 2:9 (“Salvation is of the Lord!”). Wittingly or not, some counselors
have proven themselves to be blind leaders of the blind; they have acquiesced to ear-tickling
notions that are sub-biblical and God-dishonoring, notions that only make people more
comfortable in their wickedness.
It is distressing to contemplate the catalogue of “lying vanities” that have insinuated
themselves into sundry models of “Christian” counseling: models that legitimize a narcissistic
preoccupation with self; models that fabricate a dimension to the human psyche that cannot be
proven to exist, but the acknowledgment of which has the insidious practical effect of making
individuals the victims of forces for which they cannot be held accountable, and thus of denying
that people are morally responsible for the way they act, think, or feel; models that validate the
notion that finite creatures have a right to be angry with the infinite Judge of the universe (who
has, in fact, assured us that He will do right, Gen. 18:25), and that there can be spiritual and
therapeutic benefit to expressing such an attitude of rage against God; models that speak of
emotional healing and growth in relationships and in maturity while deliberately eschewing any
appeal to the Holy Spirit or to the standard graces vouchsafed us by God.
All of these are lies! They are not intellectually compelling to anyone operating within a
scriptural worldview, but because they make people comfortable in their sin they are extremely
seductive. Furthermore, because it is a fixed reality of the moral universe that all who observe
lying vanities will always forsake their own mercy, these lies are also destructive.
For both the counselor and the counselee, the means to counter these destructive lies is
to make a deliberate and practical commitment to focus on the glory of God. This was the
delivering discovery of the prophet Jonah. When he focused on his selfish desires he found
himself in a mess, but when he recognized the destructiveness of his selfish predisposition,
when he confessed the enslaving character of the lying vanities he had embraced, when he
acknowledged that in clinging to those vanities he had forsaken God’s goodness and brought
destruction upon himself, Jonah found release. Millions have followed his example, people who
would happily confess that all the glory and praise for the relief they found belongs to God
alone.
THE DYNAMICS OF JESUS’ SPIRITUAL PARADOX
Well into His eighteen-month ministry in Galilee, when opposition had increased
dramatically and it was apparent that time was short, Jesus called to Himself the twelve men He
had authorized as apostles. He empowered them to work miracles as proof of that
authorization and then dispatched them to “preach, saying, ‘The kingdom of heaven is at
hand!’ ” (Matt. 10:7). Anticipating the difficulties His apostles would encounter, however, the
Lord armed them with a promise as enigmatic as it was blessed. It was a paradoxical promise, at
once the most rudimentary governing principle of the moral universe as framed by God and the
greatest stumbling stone to mortals, who insist on defining that moral universe based on finite
perspectives and distorted human values. What was that paradoxical promise? “He who has
found his life shall lose it, and he who has lost his life for My sake shall find it” (Matt. 10:39).
On three other occasions recorded in the Gospels, Jesus proclaimed this principle. Some
weeks after the Lord had authorized the apostles, He traveled with them to a remote area
known as Caesarea-Philippi. There He told them for the first time that He would suffer many
things of the Jewish leaders and would die (16:21). The disciples were horrified. Then Jesus
followed this unhappy revelation with the warning that they, too, would have to be willing to
take up a cross, deny themselves, and follow Him (Matt. 16:24; Mark 8:34; Luke 9:23). As part
of that challenge, Jesus said,
For whoever wishes to save his life shall lose it;
and whoever loses his life for My sake and the gospel’s shall save it. (Mark 8:3)
And again, in the midst of His final trip to Jerusalem for the Passover feast, Jesus
confronted His antagonists, the Pharisees, with this cryptic warning:
Whoever seeks to keep his life shall lose it,
and whoever loses his life shall preserve it. (Luke 17:33)
Finally, during the final Passion Week, Jesus addressed “certain Greeks” who had sought
Him out. Contemplating His own impending death, Jesus said,
He who loves his life loses it;
and he who hates his life in this world shall keep it to life eternal. (John 12:25)
On at least four different occasions, while addressing three different audiences, our Lord
uttered this hard saying. To finite humans, these are difficult words: paradoxical at best,
nonsensical at worst. But they are, in fact, the words of the Savior Himself and they are words
that communicate a truth central to His teaching about living successfully.
Losing Life—Finding Life
To understand Christ’s promise we need to consider two nuances of the word life that are
at stake.
21 The warning is that whoever wishes to save his or her life (that is, temporal, material
life) will lose it (that is, eternal blessedness). The promise is that whoever is willing to lose life
(again, temporal matters) for the sake of the Savior will, in fact, find life (again, eternally
significant matters). Indeed, Hort insisted that “this ‘paradoxical’ saying gets its point from the
fact that men call by the name of ‘life’ that which is not truly life: ‘he that wishes to save his
‘life’ (i.e. life in the narrower sense) will lose his true ‘life’ (i.e. life in its highest sense).”
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Morison acknowledged this same distinction; he paraphrased the warning: “In grasping at the
shadow he shall infallibly lose the substance.”
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The statement is paradoxical, then, only because people do not comprehend what
constitutes real life. They are fully persuaded that life consists in the things that a person has;
Jesus said it does not (Luke 12:15). They live under the delusion that satisfaction lies in
accomplishing goals, establishing a reputation, exercising great power, and amassing much
wealth; Jesus stated simply that the person who learns to hunger and thirst after righteousness
is blessed, because that person will be filled (that is, satisfied, Matt. 5:6). The soulish
individuals, who have persuaded themselves that happiness and contentment are to be found
in the present world, are compelled by the force of their own abominable logic to set their eyes
on this world.
But the dynamic of Jesus’ spiritual paradox constrains us to focus on the glory of God
rather than upon the gratification of our own desires. The rationale for such a selfless ethic is as
uncomplicated to the eye of faith as it is inscrutable to the natural man; it is as compelling to
one impelled by the Spirit as it is repugnant to one controlled by the flesh. That rationale is
simply this: “Whoever loses his life for My sake and the gospel’s sake shall save it!” In other
words, the only way to find a fruitful and contented life is to give one’s self away to God (“My
sake”) and to others (“the gospel’s sake”).
It might be argued that there is egocentrism latent in this ethic, that giving one’s life away
with the motive of getting it back is only selfishness once removed. But this argument is based
on the mistaken notion that God is displeased if people are happy, that God wants them to be
miserable, and, thus, that it is morally inappropriate for anyone to long for or strive for
happiness. In fact, God is a good and loving God who yearns for His creatures to find the soul-
satisfaction He has provided for them. The univocal testimony of Scripture is that God’s heart
longs for each person to find contentment. Indeed, God so loved the world that He gave His
own Son in order to provide such soul-satisfying peace. Wickedness lies not in the desire to find
contentment of soul but in the determination to find it at the expense of God’s standards and
mandates. God takes immeasurable delight in those who determine to obey Him and by means
of that obedience to know the peace that transcends human comprehension.
Focusing on God
So we see again the necessity of a focus upon the glory of God in the ministry of
counseling. Tragedy will certainly befall people who live each day in an attempt to find
satisfaction, for in that very effort they will lose it! When these soul-sick individuals come to us
for counseling, we need to encourage them to honor the dynamic of Jesus’ spiritual paradox;
that is, to redirect their focus, to set their soul’s gaze first of all upon God and then upon those
about them, and then to order their lives in ways consistent with that focus. Lamentably, the
effect of much counseling today is to reinforce the counselee’s focus upon self. Exegetical and
theological acrobatics are attempted to justify this strategy, but such efforts notwithstanding,
this counsel is twice grievous: it is explicitly condemned by the Scriptures, and it is disastrous to
the counselee.
How much wiser and God-honoring it is to acknowledge the authority of Jesus’ person
and the truth of His words, and to prove the life-changing power of the spiritual paradox He
gave to us.
The way of self-crucifixion and sanctification may seem foolishness and waste to the
world, just as burying good seed-corn seems waste to the child and the fool. But there never
lived the man who did not find that, by sowing to the Spirit, he reaped life everlasting.
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In sum, the spirit of the biblical counselor must be like that expressed by the psalmist
David: “Be thou exalted, O God above the heavens; let thy glory be above all the earth” (Ps.
57:5, KJV). Indeed, the primary goal of counselor must be to see this same spirit functioning as
the controlling attitude in counselee’s lives. Only as a person’s heart becomes overwhelmed
with the desire articulated by the psalmist and is consumed with the prayer, “Be thou exalted,
O God,” is that person going to know the peace God longs to give to His children.
The realities of the moral universe demand that I live my life out in every way for His
honor rather than for my own; after all, God is God, and I am not! But the deepest need of my
soul also constrains me to honor God as God, to submit to His standards and cherish His
instruction; only as I thus hunger and thirst after righteousness will I be filled. Indeed, as Tozer
has reminded us:
There is a logic behind God’s claim to preeminence. That place is His by every right in
earth or heaven. While we take to ourselves the place that is His, the whole course of our lives
is out of joint. Nothing will or can restore order till our hearts make the great decision: God
shall be exalted above.
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