This article is written by Dale Johnson and is sponsored by The Association of Certified Biblical Counselors (ACBC). Dale is the author of The Church as a Culture of Care  and Executive Director of ACBC. ACBC is hosting their Annual Conference O Church Arise: Reclaiming a Culture of Care this October in Charlotte, NC. (See below for a coupon code!)

Your church is God’s ordained center for care.
The post-fall world is filled with desperate and broken people, the very people God intends to care for through His church.
We see this pattern clearly in the early church. Sinners are confronted; sufferers are consoled. The power and presence of the Holy Spirit comforts and corrects God’s people. Believers are consistently reminded of the benefits of God’s Word and the fellowship of the saints to care for the weary, wounded, or wayward soul (2 Corinthians 1:3-7; 1 Thessalonians 4:18).
Within the fellowship of the church, ongoing discipleship draws men and women to walk more closely with Christ, and sacrificial kindness and grace can restore the suffering. The church is best positioned and equipped to bear the burden of soul care (Galatians 6:1-2).
Your church may not yet thrive in soul care, but all churches are called to be a culture of care.
I realize that churches are full of sinners, who can and do sin against each other. Far too many churches have a culture that has harbored or hidden the carnage of sin, instead of being a haven of restoration from sin’s destruction, failing to live out the charge of John 13:34-35.
But that doesn’t mean we should dismiss the necessity of the church. Instead, we need to repent and return to the purposes and design God established in order to see true restoration.
We need to hear the call of Christ to restore the brokenhearted back to the fullness of life abundant in Christ, who restores the soul (Ephesians 4:11-16, 2 Corinthians 5:18-20).
Your church offers the only true answer for the care of souls.
God has not given any other institution the responsibility to minister to the problems of life (Hebrews 13:17, Colossians 1:28). The Bible presents a comprehensive approach to soul care where Jesus is at the center of restoration (2 Timothy 4:1-5, James 5:13-16).
So many of the troubles we face in life are vexations of the soul as we wrestle with the realities of our own mortality, purpose, meaning, and value. God has given his church the responsibility to steward souls by providing context for our human experiences and hope for true restoration in Christ. The Bible explains our human experiences better than any human wisdom.
May we be found faithful to love as Christ, shepherd as Christ, care as Christ, and mend the brokenhearted as Christ, to the praise of his glory.
Your church can grow together in the pursuit of care.
ACBC is committed to calling and equipping the church to grow as a culture of care.
One way we do that is through our Annual Conference. There’s still time to get signed up for this year’s conference in person or online. Use code CHALLIES to save 10%.
We’re also offering a deeply discounted group rate and additional resources for churches with a group of 10 or more who will watch the conference together. Check out the Group Watch option.

Before I set fingers to keyboard, I asked my wife if I should write this article—one requested by Ligonier’s Tabletalk magazine. Before I so much as typed a single word, I asked her if I was at all qualified. She pondered this for a few moments and said, “Yes, I think you are.” I was grateful for her affirmation, yet we both had to acknowledge that many parts of the Christian life are easier to say than to do, easier to describe than to live out. And this one is no exception. It’s easy enough to plan and pledge and pray to live selflessly, but it’s difficult to actually do it moment by moment and day by day. That’s true even of living selflessly with the person in this world I love the most.

I have often pondered one of the strange paradoxes of the married life—that the person I love the most is the person I will sin against the most. Because of our proximity, because of our intimacy, because we have pledged to live our lives together “till death do us part,” I will have a lifetime of opportunities to love my wife but also to hurt her, to bless my wife but also to sin against her. Every day I will have the opportunity to live with her selflessly but also to battle the temptation to live with her selfishly.
God’s Word makes it clear that it is the responsibility of every husband to live with his wife in an understanding way—a way that shows her special honor (1 Peter 3:7). God makes it clear that while a husband is called to lead his wife, he is to lead in a way that is marked by love, not control, and that is shown in sacrifice, not dominance (Eph. 5:25–31). If a wife’s calling is to submit to her husband’s leadership and to show him honor, the husband’s calling is to lead in a way that makes it easy for her to follow and to love in a way that makes him worthy of her honor. It is to think more of her than of himself, to consider her good ahead of his own, to love her even at his own expense. It is, in short, to live selflessly.
To live selflessly is to live with an awareness of complementarity, to understand and embrace the differences between men and women. There is something deep within every man that tacitly believes that marriage would be easier and his union stronger if his wife were only more like him—if she thought like a man and reasoned like a man and felt the desires of a man. Yet God has chosen to display His glory in two genders that are wonderfully different and wondrously complementary. A husband who truly loves his wife is a husband who embraces the differences rather than battling them, who sees them as a feature of God’s design rather than a mistake. He listens to his wife attentively; he comforts her lovingly; he provides for her willingly. He understands and accepts that she is fearfully and wonderfully made in God’s image every bit as much as he is, both in her similarities and in her differences.
To live selflessly, then, is to live compassionately. When writing to the Colossians, Paul says, “Husbands, love your wives, and do not be harsh with them” (Col. 3:19). Surely he would not have included that particular exhortation if it did not reflect a common temptation. And every husband must admit that he can so easily stoop to harshness, to treat his wife brusquely, sharply, or unseriously. Yet the husband who means to honor his wife will treat her with kindness and dignity, with care and compassion. He will be sobered that God has provided him with a wife at all, be honored that God has entrusted this particular wife to him, and be eager to extend to her all the love and affection that God has extended to him. He will be gentle and forbearing and will always be quick to repent, quick to seek forgiveness and to restore the relationship when he has sinned against her.
To live selflessly is also to live as a companion. It is to “enjoy life with the wife whom you love, all the days of your vain life that he has given you under the sun” (Eccl. 9:9). A godly husband enjoys the freedom and intimacy of the marriage relationship and relishes his wife as his dearest companion and closest friend. Though any marriage is at times difficult and though any relationship will at times demand effort and require work, he is committed to enjoying his wife and delighting in the unique joys and wonders of the marriage relationship. He embraces the unique strengths that come with his wife’s femininity, appreciates the unique insights she brings, and learns to enjoy what she finds pleasurable. As he sets aside his natural selfishness, he awakes to the wonders of the closest and dearest kind of human companionship.
Any good man would be willing to die for his wife—to take the bullet that would have struck her, to welcome the pain that would have afflicted her. But it is the rare man who is willing to live for his wife—to set aside the selfishness that is always so close at hand and to instead live for her good and her joy. But then no husband is behaving in a more Christlike manner than the one who considers his wife’s good ahead of his own, who puts to death his natural self-importance so that he can live truly selflessly with the wife whom God has given him.

I am new to the writings of George Herbert Morrison, but was quickly taken with this quote about the Bible—about the way it meets our needs and the way it satisfies our spiritual hunger. I hope you’ll enjoy it too!

Whenever the Almighty satisfies his creatures, he gives them drink as abundant as the seas. Think of the Bible—an ancient book and yet intensely modern and practical. Think of the ages that have gone since it was written; think of the life we [now] live and of the stress and strain unknown in the quiet East; to me it is wonderful that the Bible should be of any use at all now and not have moved into the quiet of libraries to be the joy of the unworldly scholar.
But one thing is certain—the Bible meets the need of modern life. As a practical guide there is no book to touch it. There is not a problem you are called to face and not a duty you are called to do, there is not a cross you are compelled to carry and not a burden you are forced to bear but your strength for it all will be as the strength of ten—if you make a daily companion of your Bible.
The Bible never offers a drink from shallow waters. There, you do not find a set of petty maxims, but the everlasting love of God; you do not find any shallow views of sin, but a Lamb slain from the foundation of the world. And that is the secret of the Bible’s permanence—when our little systems have ceased to be, for sin and sorrow and life and death and duty, it gives us drink “as abundant as the seas.”
Think of Jesus in relation to his words. If ever words were as water to a thirsty world, surely it was the words that Jesus spoke. How simple they were and yet how deep! How tender and full of love and yet how searching! There are those whose lives so contradict their words that when you know the people you cannot listen to them. And there are those who are so much less than their own words that when you come to know them you are disappointed. But what people felt about Jesus Christ was this, that when all was uttered, the half was never told, for at the back of all his words there was himself, deeper unfathomably than his deepest speech. That is why the words of Christ will live even when heaven and earth have passed away. You can exhaust the cup or drain the goblet, but you cannot exhaust the spring fed from the deeps. And just because the words of Jesus Christ spring from the depths of that divine humanity, they will save and strengthen the obedient heart to the last recorded syllable of time.