Our Core Values

 

 

These Core Values will help you understand our convictions and worldview orientation, and the practices that are an outgrowth of our beliefs. The first constellation of values has to do with our understanding of God and man’s relationship to Him; the second section is our application of these truths to the work of Biblical counseling.

 

• Core Values regarding: Statement of Faith
• Core Values regarding: Biblical Counseling

 

Our Statement of Faith

The following is a brief summary of the core doctrinal beliefs of Grace Harbor Counseling Ministries. This is not intended to be an exhaustive statement, but a framework to give you a point of reference regarding our beliefs and practices:

 

General & Special Revelation: God has revealed His existence and power in the created order, but the information from creation about God is only enough to inform mankind that there is a God. The creative power of God can be seen in nature, but nature is not God. The name for this limited information via the created order is General Revelation. To have a true relationship with his Creator, man needs more information than nature by itself can tell him. Mercifully, God has spoken in great detail about Himself in His Word. The name for this detailed information is Special Revelation. We believe in the verbal, plenary inspiration of the Bible (the 66 books of the Old and New Testament); that it is without error in the original writings; and that it is the final, authoritative standard by which our beliefs and conduct should be judged.

 

God: We believe that the One and only true God is triune; that He exists as three persons—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit; that all three are eternally equal in nature, attributes and perfection and as such are equally worthy of our worship, love and obedience.

--the Father is infinitely perfect both in His love and in His holiness. He is the Creator of all things, visible and invisible, and is therefore worthy to receive all glory and adoration. Immortal and eternal, He perfectly and exhaustively knows the end from the beginning, sustains and sovereignly rules over all things, and providentially brings about His eternal good purposes to redeem a people for Himself and restore His fallen creation, to the praise of His glorious grace.

 

Mankind and his Fall: We believe that God created human beings, male and female, in His own image. This image-bearing is what sets mankind apart from the rest of the created order and gives to all human beings an inherent dignity that other creatures do not possess. Men and women are equally made in the image of God and enjoy equal access to God by faith in Christ Jesus. Adam and Eve were made to complement each other in a one-flesh union that establishes the only normative pattern of sexual relations for men and women, such that marriage ultimately serves as a type of the union between Christ and His church. In God’s wise purposes, men and women are not simply interchangeable, but rather they complement each other in mutually enriching ways. God ordains that they assume distinctive roles which reflect the loving relationship between Christ and the church, the husband exercising headship in a way that displays the caring, sacrificial love of Christ, and the wife submitting to her husband in a way that models the love of the church for her Lord. By choosing to rebel against God, we believe that Adam, made in the image of God, distorted that image and forfeited his original blessedness—for himself and all his progeny—by falling into sin through Satan’s temptation. As a result, all human beings are alienated from God, corrupted in every aspect of their being (e.g., physically, mentally, volitionally, emotionally, spiritually) and condemned finally and irrevocably to death—apart from God’s own gracious intervention. The supreme need of all human beings is to be reconciled to the God under whose just and holy wrath we stand; the only hope of all human beings is the undeserved love of this same God, who alone can rescue us and restore us to Himself.

 

Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit:

-- Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God, was conceived sinlessly of the Holy Spirit by the virgin Mary, and received a human body and a sinless human nature. He was fully God and fully human being, one Person in two natures. We believe that Jesus Christ experienced all the normal temptations of human existence, yet was without sin. By His incarnation, life, death, resurrection and ascension, Jesus Christ acted as our representative and substitute. We believe that when Jesus Christ died on the cross, He provided the substitutionary, vicarious atonement for man’s sin. He did this so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God: on the cross he canceled sin, propitiated God, and, by bearing the full penalty of our sins, reconciled to God all those who believe. By his resurrection Christ Jesus was vindicated by his Father, broke the power of death and defeated Satan who once had power over it, and brought everlasting life to all His people; by His ascension He has been forever exalted as Lord and has prepared a place for us to be with Him. We believe that salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name given under heaven by which we must be saved. We believe that after being dead for three days, Jesus Christ arose physically and bodily from the grave. We believe in the visible and personal return of Jesus Christ.

--Holy Spirit: We believe that God is glorified in the salvation of sinners, and while this salvation is secured by Jesus Christ it is applied by the Holy Spirit. Sent by the Father and the Son, the Holy Spirit glorifies the Lord Jesus Christ, and as the Paraclete is present with and in believers. He convicts the world of sin, righteousness, and judgment, and by His powerful and mysterious work regenerates spiritually dead sinners, awakening them to repentance and faith, baptizing them into union with the Lord Jesus, such that they are justified before God by grace alone through faith alone in Jesus Christ alone. By the Spirit’s agency, believers are renewed, sanctified, and adopted into God’s family; they participate in the divine nature and receive His sovereignly distributed gifts. The Holy Spirit is Himself the down payment of the promised inheritance, and in this age indwells, guides, instructs, equips, revives, and empowers believers for Christ-like living and service.

 

The Plan of God in the Salvation of His People: We believe that from all eternity God determined in grace to save a great multitude of guilty sinners from every tribe and language and people and nation. We believe that God justifies and sanctifies those who by grace have faith in Jesus, and that He will one day glorify them. In love God commands and implores all people to repent and believe, having set His saving love on those He has chosen and having ordained Christ to be their Redeemer. We believe that the Gospel is the good news of Jesus Christ. Christ’s gospel is folly to the world, even though it is the power of God to those who are being saved. We believe that Christ, by His obedience and death, fully discharged the debt of all those who are justified. By His sacrifice, Christ bore in our stead the punishment due us for our sins, making a proper, real, and full satisfaction to God’s justice on our behalf. By His perfect obedience He satisfied the just demands of God on our behalf, since by faith alone that perfect obedience is credited to all who trust in Christ alone for their acceptance with God. Inasmuch as Christ was given by the Father for us, and His obedience and punishment were accepted in place of our own, freely and not for anything in us, this justification is solely of free grace, in order that both the exact justice and the rich grace of God might be glorified in the justification of sinners. We believe that a zeal for personal and public obedience flows from this free justification.

 

The Kingdom of God and the Local Church: We believe that those who have been saved by the grace of God through union with Christ by faith and through regeneration by the Holy Spirit enter the kingdom of God and delight in the blessings of the new covenant: the forgiveness of sins, the inward transformation that awakens a desire to glorify, trust, and obey God, and the prospect of the glory yet to be revealed. Recognizing whose created order this is, and because we are citizens of God’s kingdom, we are to love our neighbors as ourselves, doing good to all, especially to those who belong to the household of God. The kingdom of God, already present but not fully realized, is the exercise of God’s sovereignty in the world toward the eventual redemption of all creation. The kingdom of God is an invasive power that plunders Satan’s dark kingdom and regenerates and renovates through repentance and faith the lives of individuals rescued from that kingdom. It therefore inevitably establishes a new community of human life together under God. We believe that God’s new covenant people have already come to the heavenly Jerusalem; they are already seated with Christ in the heavenlies. This universal church is manifest in local churches of which Christ is the only Head; thus each local church is, in fact, the church, the household of God. The church is distinguished by her gospel message, her sacred ordinances, her discipline, her great mission, and, above all, by her love for God, and by her members’ love for one another and for the world. His purpose was to create in Himself one new humanity, thus making peace, and in one body to reconcile His chosen people to God through the cross, by which He put to death their hostility. The church serves as a sign of God’s future new world when its members live for the service of one another and their neighbors, rather than for self-focus. The church is the corporate dwelling place of God’s Spirit, and the continuing witness to God in the world. We believe that the local church is God’s primary instrument for His work today; that every believer should be an active member in a local assembly, supporting its worship, ministry, fellowship, discipleship, and evangelism with his time, talents and treasure.

 

About the Eternal State: We believe in the everlasting conscious blessedness of the saved and the everlasting conscious punishment of the lost.

 

 

Our Values in Biblical Counseling*:

 

I. True knowledge about people and counseling practice

 

We affirm that the Bible is God's self-revelation in relation to His creatures, and, as such, truly explains people and situations.

We deny that any other source of knowledge is authoritative for explaining people and situations.

We affirm that the Bible, as the revelation of Jesus Christ's redemptive activity, intends to specifically guide and inform counseling ministry.

We deny that any other source of knowledge is authoritative to equip us for the task of counseling people.

We affirm that wise counseling requires ongoing practical theological labor in order to understand Scripture, people, and situations. We must continually develop our personal character, case-wise understanding of persons, pastoral skills, and institutional structures.

We deny that the Bible intends to serve as an encyclopedia of proof texts containing all facts about people and the diversity of problems in living.

We affirm that the ideas, goals, and practices of counseling must cohere explicitly with the historic creeds, confessions, hymns, and other wise writings that express the faith and practice of the church of Jesus Christ.

We deny that the wisdom of the past sufficiently defines the issues of counseling ministry for today, as if the requisite wisdom were simply a matter of recovering past achievements.

We affirm that the Scripture defines and speaks to the gamut of problems in living for all people in all situations.

 

 

II. The givens of the human condition and the scope of biblical truth

 

We affirm that human beings are created fundamentally dependent on and responsible to God. People can only be understood when these realities control the counselor's gaze.

We deny that any form of autonomy severs people from dependency on God. We deny that any form of determinism neuters moral accountability to God.

We affirm that the ideal for human functioning is faith working through love. Such love for God and neighbor is the standard against which to specifically understand what is wrong with people. It is the goal to which counseling must specifically aspire.

We deny that any other standard or goal is true.

We affirm that evil, done by us and happening to us, is the fundamental and pervasive problem in living. Our own sin, in all its facets and dimensions, is primary and self-generating. The circumstances that happen to us provide both provocative context ("trials and temptations") and just consequences ("reap what you sow") for our moral response, but do not determine the quality of our moral response.

We deny that any other diagnostic system is valid, universal, or penetrating. We deny that nature and/or nurture determine the quality of our moral response.

We affirm that the Scripture defines and speaks to the gamut of problems in living for all people in all situations.

We deny that biblical truth is limited to a narrow sphere of "religious" or "spiritual" beliefs, activities, persons, emotions, and institutions, separated from the other spheres of daily life.

We deny that any particular realm of human life can be sectored off as the unique province of the theories, practices, and professions of the modern psychologies.

 

 

III. The solution to the sin and misery of the human condition

 

We affirm that the Bible teaches, invites, warns, commands, sings, and tells the solution for what troubles humankind. In the good news of Jesus Christ, God acts personally. In word and deed, He redeems us from sin and misery through the various operations of His past, present, and future grace. God uses many means of grace, including the face-to-face conversations of wise counseling.

We deny that any other solution or therapy actually cures souls, and can change us from unholy to holy, from sinners to righteous, from insanity to sanity, from blindness to sightedness, from self-absorption to faith-working-through-love.

We affirm that God's providential common grace brings many goods to people, both as individual kindnesses and as social blessings: e.g., medical treatment, economic help, political justice, protection for the weak, educational opportunity. Wise counseling will participate in and encourage mercy ministries as part of the call to love.

We deny that such goods can cure the soul's evils. When they claim to cure the human condition, they are false and misleading, competing with Christ.

We deny that Christless counseling—whether psychotherapeutic, philosophical, quasi-religious, or overtly religious—is either true or good. Their messages are essentially false and misleading, competing with Christ.

 

 

IV. The nature and means

 

We affirm that the growth process for which counseling must aim is conversion followed by lifelong progressive sanctification within every circumstance of life. Our motives, thought processes, actions, words, emotions, attitudes, values—heart, soul, mind, and might— increasingly resemble Jesus Christ in conscious and evident love for God and other people.

We deny that there is any method for instantaneous or complete perfection into the image of Jesus Christ. The change process continues until we see Him face-to-face.

We deny that the processes and goals labeled self-actualization, self-fulfillment, healing of memories, meeting of psychological needs, social adaptation, building self-esteem, recovery, individuation, etc., describe valid aims of counseling, though they may evidence analogies to elements of biblical wisdom.

We affirm that the Bible explicitly teaches the fundamentals of counseling method by precept and example. Through speaking the truth in love, we act as tangible instruments of God's grace in the lives of others.

We deny that the modem psychotherapies rightly understand or practice wise counseling methodology, though they may evidence analogies to elements of biblical wisdom.

 

 

V. The social context and scope of counseling ministry

 

We affirm that the Spirit and the Word create the church of Jesus Christ, and that the people of God should provide the personal, social, and institutional loci for speaking the truth in love.

We deny that the mental health professions and their institutions have the right to claim any sector of problems in living as their particular prerogative. Even those who suffer mentally disabling medical problems need godly counseling.

We affirm that the aims, content, and means of counseling ministry are of a piece with public ministry, the spiritual disciplines, and mercy ministry. These are different aspects of the one redemptive ministry of Christ.

We deny that the persons and problems addressed by the activity termed "psychotherapy" fall outside the intended scope of the ministry of Christ in word and deed.

We affirm that the primary and fullest expression of counseling ministry occurs in local church communities where pastors effectively shepherd souls while equipping and overseeing diverse forms of every-member ministry.

We deny that the institutional forms and professional roles of the mental health system provide a normative and desirable framework for counseling ministry.

We deny that current forms of church life and conceptions of the pastoral role are necessarily adequate and normative as vehicles to train, deliver, and oversee effective counseling ministry. The body of Christ needs institutional reformation, development, and innovation.

We deny that parachurch and other cooperative forms of counseling ministry in the body of Christ are inherently wrong.

 

 

VI. God's providence and the interplay between His common grace and the intellectual-practical effects of sin

 

We affirm that numerous disciplines and professions can contribute to an increase in our knowledge of people and how to help them. Scripture teaches a standpoint and gaze by which believers can learn many things from those who do not believe.

We deny that any of these disciplines and professions can align and constitute a system of faith and practice for wise counseling.

 

*Adapted from, "Affirmations and Denials: A Proposed Definition of Biblical Counseling" by David Powlison (Journal of Biblical Counseling, vol. 19, 2000, pp. 18-25).