Psalm 32:1-5: “Blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. Blessed is the man against whom the Lord counts no iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no deceit. For when I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer. I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not cover my iniquity; I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the Lord,” and you forgave the iniquity of my sin.”
Why does repentance not occur for those like King David today? One reason is that a person who is “out of control” emotionally prefers to believe a psychological description and label of the outward symptoms of behavior rather than to deal with the real, sinful heart issues producing the emotions and subsequent behaviors.
In situations that I have dealt with in the past, often the family members, too, preferred to explain away the behavior as “mental illness” rather than believe the truth that the behaviors & emotions occurred due to sinful choices and thinking. In these cases, the family members did not want to believe that their loved one could be an unbeliever and would prefer to believe that they have a “mental disability.”
They mistakenly wanted a physiological reason to blame the outbursts of uncontrolled emotions. King David had physiological problems according to psalm 32 (his “bones wasted away”) yet the physiological problems were not the CAUSE but were the EFFECT of his sinful choices!
How often do secular counselors get the CAUSE and EFFECT backwards? Unfortunately, the answer is “a lot” I’m sad to say. Secular counselors often wrongly START with emotions rather than the sinful thinking/actions that produced those out of control emotions. Any good biblical counselor will start with thinking and actions when working with an emotionally “out of control” counselee to allow the Holy Spirit to work to bring conviction of sins and renewal of the mind!
-Mark (dealing with those having unbiblical thoughts that must be cast down and replaced with godly thoughts in accordance with the Scriptures)