Your Emotional Relationship: Jesus as Counselor

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n today’s emphasis on good health, mental and emotional issues have moved into priority status.  For many years, society simply wrote people off as weak when they could not cope with the challenges of life.  They were shamed, told to get a stronger constitution, or shouted at to “man up!” These responses grew out of a gross lack of understanding about emotional health.  We now know that stress, anxiety, depression, fear and other factors affect a number of conditions: individual happiness, physical health, the quality of other relationships, and life in general. A negative mindset permeates every facet of a person’s life.  Aside from salvation, your emotional relationship with Jesus Christ may mean more to you than anything else.

Our awareness of emotional problems, however, has led to attempts at medical rather than spiritual remedies.  Modern society has been called the “Prozac Nation,” the “Medication Generation,” or declared guilty of “cosmetic psychopharmacology.” Dr. George Malkmus in his book “Why Christians Get Sick,” contends that Christians have fallen into the same pill-popping routines as our secular brothers and sisters.  If this is true, it is only symptomatic of a massive relationship failure.  An anemic relationship with Jesus makes believers vulnerable to all the emotional sicknesses that afflict the general population.  On the other hand, a strong relationship with Jesus produces a tranquility that drugs seek to emulate.  While this is not an invective against psychiatry and psychology, it is a reminder to every believer that your premise for emotional health and your first appeal for emotional help is your Wonderful Counselor, Jesus Christ. (Isaiah 9:6).

Jesus is deeply interested in your emotional welfare, whether it is a broken heart, sorrow or heaviness of spirit.  The prophetic passage in Isaiah that ministers to ravaged emotions is the same one quoted by Jesus as He began his ministry in Luke chapter four.  “The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon Me, Because the LORD has anointed Me to preach good tidings to the poor; He has sent Me to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound;  to proclaim the acceptable year of the LORD, and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all who mourn,  to console those who mourn in Zion, to give them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness; that they may be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the LORD, that He may be glorified.” Isaiah 61:1-3. 

The closer your relationship is with Jesus, the stronger you will be inwardly.  Certainly, the Apostle Paul emphasized this outcome in his epistle to the Ephesians.  For this reason I bow my knees to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, from whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named, that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with might through His Spirit in the inner man, that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love,  may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height—to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. Ephesians 3:14-19.

This inner man, this soul, this psyche—your conscious being—comprises the real you.  It is not your intellect, your social status, your physical stature or your financial worth that stands naked before God.  (Job 1:21). It is your inner man that has always been the focus of God’s interest.  Behold, You desire truth in the inward parts, and in the hidden part You will make me to know wisdom. Psalm 51:6. In the following posts, we will look at some principles that form the strength of your emotional health.