Challies thoughts on another's counseling thoughts

Like Challies, i found this perspective on counseling helpful. If your history can explain anything then it explains nothing. Our history can provide context for our sin but not excuses...

One aspect of David Powlison's ministry that has often challenged me is that he gives no quarter to sin. He never allows sin to be shown to be anything other than what it is: an offense to God that arises from a person's sinful nature. For instance, when speaking of the counselor's method of helping Amelia understand the source of her sin, he writes, "Knowledge of a person's history may be important for many reasons: compassion on sufferers, sympathetic understanding, locating the present within an unfolding story, knowledge of characteristic temptations, and so forth. But it never determines the heart's proclivities and inclinations." We know this because many people experience similar events in their histories and react differently. One woman may indulge in lesbian fantasies, another may drift from man to man, and another may seem to go through life unscathed....

Did you catch that? "Sin is its own final reason." We can only do so much to explain sin, for ultimately, there is a mystery to sin that we just cannot understand. We can attempt to find reasons for our sin, or look into the past to find its source, but in the end, sin is the deepest explanation and the final reason.

But this is not the purpose of Powlison's article. The article shows something that has been discussed a fair bit in the Christian blogosphere: so often truth and folly are bound up together. "Things would be nice and tidy if you could always keep the good guys straight from the bad guys. But often it's not possible. The same person who is a primary means of grace to another may also be a secondary means of confusion--or a primary means of confusion and a secondary means of grace. We consciously aim to disciple others in the truths we know and seek to live - but others easily catch our errors, blind spots, and failings in the bargain!" Where there is sin, and sin exists in all of us, there will be confusion. Where there is truth there is so often error. This ambiguity is constant. There are not always good guys and bad guys. Rather, often the good guys are the bad guys.