by Lucy | Mar 7, 2017 | biblical counseling, relationships
Adopted teens have unique struggles as well as the same heartaches nearly all teenagers face. How might the gospel apply to struggling adopted teens? Like guest writer Ellen Castillo, I too have adopted children (now adults) and so I found her article wonderfully instructive and encouraging. (It appeared first here on the Biblical Counseling Coalition website and is used with permission.) If you or someone who know is a family created through adoption, please share this post with them. –LAM
A Challenging Journey
“And whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me” (Matthew 18:5).
Twenty years ago, when my husband and I adopted three foster children, we were the only people in our small Christian community who were doing so. Our children were ages 5, 7, and 9 at the time of each of their adoptions. They all came from a background of abuse, neglect, and abandonment. We knew that this kind of background would mean that there would be challenges ahead, but we had no idea just how difficult those challenges would be.
When two of the children became teenagers, we were facing parental challenges that we were not prepared for, and our church was not equipped to help us. God was faithful to see us through those years.
One of the ways He has used those experiences in my life is that I became burdened to help other adoptive parents and their adopted teens through the ministry of biblical counseling. As I have counseled several adopted teens in the past few years, there are recurring issues that I have noted.
Common Struggles
“For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23).
Teenagers commonly struggle with their sense of identity. Teens who have been adopted have a unique form of this struggle as they have been removed from their birth family and placed into either foster or adoptive families. This can create a feeling of having nowhere to belong. This will often manifest as a lack of attachment to a new family.
The new family offers love, security, comfort and care. But at times the teen rejects all of their adopted parents’ sincere efforts, because of feeling displaced, confused, and disoriented. If they do not have the tools to communicate their feelings well, they may act out with poor behavior instead (lying, sneaking, anger, defiance, etc.)
If they do not know or remember their birth-family history, there will be identity struggles. Some will struggle with a sense of (false) guilt over the birth family not staying together. Others will struggle with worry and guilt about being disloyal to their family of origin if they love and attach to the new family. These are all complicated heart struggles that must be seen through a biblical lens rather than just assuming the teen is being rebellious.
Adopted Teens and Trust Issues
Understandably, adopted teens may have trust issues. If the people who were supposed to protect them abused, neglected or abandoned them, certainly they will wonder if others will do the same to them.
Adopted teens may struggle with unbelief that stems from having been betrayed. This often manifests as lying or sneaky behavior. They might think, “I can’t trust, so I really am all on my own. I must protect myself at any cost, even breaking the commandments such as ‘do not lie.’”
If adopted teens feel rejected, they often expect that they are going to be rejected again. Some will behave in such a way as to attempt to force the adoptive family to reject them because they believe it is inevitable, and they would rather have some control over the timing of it. Much energy is expended on acting out in order to force rejection. The outward behavior resembles normal teen rebellion, but the heart issues are actually rooted in significant fear.
Typical teen rebellion tends to have a malicious “I don’t care” nature to it. An adopted teen’s rebellion can be less malicious and more self-protective in nature. It is important to discern the difference as you seek to parent, mentor, or counsel the teen.
Applying the Gospel
“All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness” (2 Timothy 3:16).
Practical help needed for those who parent, counsel, and mentor struggling adopted teens is found in God’s Word. Determine to do your best to discern whether or not the gospel has been understood and received.
Once you believe that the teen is a believer, be sure that you teach him or her to view the past through scriptural teaching. Focus on all that the gospel has provided. Talk about sanctification as a process towards Christlikeness. Be sure that grace and mercy are understood.
Teach God’s view of family and the impact of sin on the family. Teach teens to apply the gospel to hurts, struggles, circumstances, and fears. Show them in Scripture that their identity is not in their birth or adoptive family; it is in Christ.
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Teach them that the fear of man is a snare and that people will disappoint them at times, but that they can fully trust in Christ. They must see that the gospel applies to their salvation and to their sanctification.
Call on a biblical counselor with experience in counseling troubled teens if you need assistance helping an adoptive family. Many adoptive parents endure the struggles alone, but God’s design is that the body of Christ would be a safe place for help and hope.
In the gospel struggling teens meet a very relatable Savior.
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He has endured betrayal and rejection, too. He modeled forgiveness, mercy, and grace. The entire narrative of the Bible is a story of redemption, and teens need to view their own history in light of that story. This is our hope–and the hope for the teens we are called to love.
Join the Conversation
Do you know an adoptive family that needs to know the hope of the gospel? How can you come alongside the parents and their teen?
Sharing Hope with Your Heart,
by Lucy | Oct 21, 2016 | biblical counseling, book reviews, identity in Christ |
Marie Notcheva highly recommends Because He Loves Me: How Christ Transforms Our Daily Life by Elyse Fitzpatrick. This gem articulates the gospel and encourages readers to live it every day. Marie is a featured Heart2Heart Counselor and writes a blog. Here article appeared first here on her website and is used with permission.
Elyse Fitzpatrick is who I want to be when I grow up.
Of course, I mean that completely in the Ephesians 4:15 sense of “grow up.” The ability to articulate the simple, profound truth of the Gospel and its implications for day-to-day life as beautifully as Elyse has in Because He Loves Me: How Christ Transforms Our Daily Life speaks of a real spiritual maturity. Her passion, from the first page of this encouraging book, is for her reader to have the same joyful, settled assurance of Christ’s love that she herself has found in the pages of Scripture.
Whose Responsible for Your Spiritual Growth?
Why is it that so many of us recognize our need for the Gospel – the Person and work of Jesus Christ – for salvation; then slowly move past the Good News in our daily strivings to “please God”?
We come to the Cross for justification, but practically live as if sanctification depended solely on us.
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Elyse spots this tendency – which often leads to a moralistic, defeated attitude – and reminds the reader of the only antidote: applying the finished work of Christ to our continually sinning hearts.
Weaving the entire thread of Scripture around a central point – that God FIRST loved us – Elyse shows how getting this knowlege of His deep, abiding, personal, and unfathomable love for us down into the very marrow of our bones completely changes everything. In fact, it transforms our whole identity – who we reckon ourselves to be.
If we see ourselves as “foster children,” who can be evicted or abandoned at any moment, we will live like it. Realizing we are a permanent, cherished part of the family – His adopted children – transforms our hearts and enables us to live for Christ in His strength.
As she writes, “Any obedience that isn’t motivated by His great love is nothing more than penance” (page 148). Well said.
The Impact of the Gospel on You
How does the Gospel message impact our walk, 10, 20, even 30 years after our conversion, when we can rattle off the Doctrines of Grace like the days of the week?
If we don’t consciously live in the light of His love, the gospel will be secondary, virtually meaningless, and Jesus Christ will fade into insignificance. Our faith will become all about us, our performance, and how we think we’re doing, and our transformation will be hindered.
This tendency to take our eyes off of Him and focus inwardly on our failure becomes a vicious cycle, especially when one is battling a life-dominating sin. Many of you bear witness to this fact. I once received the following e-mail from a reader:
…I have been REALLY struggling again lately. I have trouble turning to God, because I feel sometimes like I don’t deserve His forgiveness, or to ask Him for help.
Lately I have been obsessing about food and eating all day long, and binging and purging A LOT! I work as a nanny, so I am alone with kids and in a house full of junk food I wouldn’t buy, and have found myself unable to keep from destructive eating behaviors.
Please pray for me that I will go back to Christ for guidance, and be able to truly repent for my sin. Please also pray that I will stop worshiping false idols of food and thinness, and instead live to glorify Him… (emphasis mine).
This young lady sincerely loves God and wants to please Him, but her words reveal that she has fallen into the trap so common to all of us: living as if our position before God is based on our own merit.
When did any of us, in our “best” moments, EVER “deserve” His forgiveness? We didn’t. Christ secured it for us – while we were still His enemies. We forget this. When we succeed, we feel good and can worship. Failure brings shame and a fear of approaching God, which naturally leads to more failure and despair. We are, as Elyse points out in this book, essentially not trusting God that He is as good as He says He is.
This is unbelief, and it leads to idols. When we don’t feel fully secure in our position in Christ – solely based on His righteousness and grace – we seek the satisfaction that should be found in Him alone through counterfeits. Putting our trust in these “earthly treasures” leads to fear, worry, and anxiety – which leads us ever further away from the Cross.
Freedom from fear comes from contemplating and remembering the love of God, manifested in Christ. As I have written before (and Elyse so much more articulately), change in our behavior can only come from truly realizing and appreciating who God is and what He has done for us. Knowing that His kindness is what has led us to repentance (Romans 2:4) motivates us to love Him back, and approach Him with confidence. Our ‘identity in Christ’ (as Elyse refers to it; I might use ‘position’) is permanent and irrevocable. It is what frees us up to walk in love.
Remembering God’s Love for You
In the final section of Because He Loves Me, Elyse demonstrates how remembering and contemplating this unfathomable love God has for us is the true motivation for lasting change. She writes,
Our natural unbelief will always cast doubt on His love for us. It is the awareness of His love and only this that will equip us to wage war against sin. Until we really grasp how much He loves us, we’ll never be able to imitate Him.
We won’t come near to Him if we’re afraid of His judgment. We won’t repent and keep pursuing godliness if we don’t believe that our sin doesn’t faze His love for us one bit. We won’t want to be like Him if we believe that His love is small, stingy, censorious, severe. And we’ll never be filled with His fullness until we begin to grasp the extent of His love (Eph. 3:19).
As a member of His family, you’re the apple of His eye, the child He loves to bless.
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You’re His darling.
“Every failure in sanctification is a failure in worship.”
Far from minimizing the seriousness of sin, Elyse reminds the reader how costly it was to God – and invites her to rest in this reality. At the same time, we are thus enabled to “wage a vicious war against sin” – the imperative (command) that naturally follows the indicative (what God has already declared to be true). Every sin, from greed to sexual immorality, is a failure to love as we’ve been loved – at its root, unbelief.
The key to walking in freedom and joy, then, is remembering that we’re beloved children, redeemed by Jesus, set free from the power of sin. This settled confidence produces thanksgiving ane edifying speech, rather than complaining and bitterness. This is what applying the Gospel to every area of our lives looks like in practice.
I have been recommending Because He Loves Me to women who write me about their specific struggles, as well as counselors and anyone else who would benefit from the reminder of what Christ’s perfect life, love, cross, resurrection, and intercession really mean to us as we grow in Him.
In short, everyone reading this would likely benefit from the encouraging and joyful explanation Elyse presents on the synergy of God’s grace and our response. Like C.J. Mahaney’s The Cross Centered Life, Because He Loves Me trains the reader to reflect more deeply on the finished work of Christ on her behalf as a catalyst to worship, rather than presenting sanctification as a spiritual self-help plan.
See more about this wonderful book here.
Sharing Hope with Your Heart,
by Lucy | Sep 15, 2016 | biblical counseling, thoughts
Idolatry is making a god of something or someone who is NOT the God. All of us are tempted to cozy up to idols. Guest writer Ellen Castillo, one of the counselors in Heart2Heart Counselor Directory, reveals her go-to idol and how she–and you–can learn to say “no” and flee. Her article appeared first here on her website and is used with permission.
What do you run to? What should you run from?
Therefore, my beloved, flee from idolatry. 1 Corinthians 10:15
It’s humbling to admit this. For many years my go-to idol has been. . .food. Sin is always humbling, isn’t it? And it can be embarrassing and even humiliating, except that the Gospel takes care of that kind of self-focus and self-condemnation.
I’ll take the humbling, because that is what keeps me from turning back to idolatry. I’ll keep purposing to reject the embarrassment and humiliation, because I know that my sins are forgiven. To try to pretend that I am not the worst of sinners is just silly because it’s written all over me. And you.
Let’s remember this: we have a Savior.
Idolatry Everywhere!
Idolatry today comes wrapped in a lot of different packages. Food, alcohol, drugs, prescription meds, sex, materialism, shopping, anger, status, playing the victim, seeking aproval and attention, relationships, celebrities, pride of all kinds, and so many more.
There is no end, really, to what we allow to become idols in our hearts. Whatever we put before God, wherever our treasure is, whatever we worship, those are our idols.
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There is a reason these idols are called “false gods.” They are counterfeits. They ultimately fail us. We actually “become like them” and that is, to put it bluntly, disgusting.
Disgusting Idols
The psalmist wrote:
The idols of the nations are silver and gold, the work of human hands. They have mouths, but do not speak; they have eyes, but do not see; they have ears, but do not hear, nor is there any breath in their mouths. Those who make them become like them, so do all who trust in them! Psalm 135:15-18
This disgust gripped me a few months ago when I got a serious medical diagnosis that is worsened by my idolatry. I realized I had “eyes, but did not see, ears, but did not hear, and there was no breath in my mouth.”
I won’t say my idol is entirely gone now, but I am seeing consistent victories along the way. Praise God, it is His work in me, not my own. I am too weak apart from His strength. I have a long ways to go, but I am daily choosing to go toward Christ rather than my toward my false god.
Where are you going?
The Gospel Ensures Victory
One of the beautiful things about Jesus’s Gospel is that we do not need to strive for victory.
Yes, there is a part we must engage by obedience, but when (not if) we fail at times, we can praise God because He does not see what we see. Even if my hand gets caught in the cookie jar, I am forgiven.
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That does not excuse my behavior nor does it give me the green light to worship my idols. It does offer me grace to get back up again and press on in obedience because of the indwelling Spirit in me. I need to know that God’s love for me does not change (nor does my eternal security) when I fail at times, and I do fail. But by God’s grace you and I can experience more victories and fewer setbacks as long as we are not relying on our own strength.
How does God deal with our idolatry? How are we to be rid of it? We see in Scripture that His dealings with His people were consistent and blatant. We see the same kind of dealings with our current culture (just view the news or your Facebook feed and you will see it.)
The Word Reveals Our Need
The commands are clear: we are to have no other gods before Him. God is a jealous God.
You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments. Exodus 20:3-6
In our personal lives, if you have a personal relationship with Him through His Son, Jesus, God deals with us and our sin of idolatry very individually and specifically. For example, my conviction came as a result of that scary medical diagnosis that requires a change of habits if I want to be healthy and live to know my grandkids, Lord willing.
We fashion our idols and enjoy them for awhile, until God reveals to us the thoughts, beliefs, and desires that lie at the core of our hearts. Those are the things that mold and transform in to our idols.
Heart Matters
Out of that core of our hearts flow the things we worship, and we must remember that those things are not going to satisfy ultimately because:
The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it? Jeremiah 17:9
God’s Word is clear. When God reveals our idols to us, we are then responsible to flee them.
Ephesians 4 instructs us to put off the old man, and put on the new. Through the conviction, empowering, and enabling of the Holy Spirit, we can do this. We can say no.
Titus 2:12 reminds us that grace actually teaches us to say no.
Grace. The Gospel. Spirit indwelling. SAY NO. Flee!
Sharing Hope with Your Heart,
by Lucy | Jul 14, 2016 | biblical counseling, identity in Christ
“Getting Up After a Fall” appeared first here on Biblical Counsel Coalition, which promotes the biblical counseling movement and builds relationships.
Remember the outdoor water game Slip ‘n Slide? To slide as fast as possible, you could place the thin, yellow plastic slide on a gentle hill. Then you run, jump on the slide, pick up speed, reach the end, and tumble into muddy grass. Then you ran back and did it again—and again.
Sinful choices can become a slippery slope too.
One sinful choice may slide into another, reminiscent of Psalm 1:1. Then the Christian may face a problem she helped create: a marital separation, an addiction, a lost job, anxiety, depression, bitterness. Her problem might cause enough angst to bring her to your counseling office, looking for relief.
But relief isn’t the real answer is it? Relief is among the world’s counterfeits for mankind’s greatest and truest need—the gospel.
In this short article, you’ll learn how to. . .
- give hope after a fall
- give help to get up and walk again.
Your counselee’s sin problem is an opportunity for you to give guidance for her Christian walk (Eph. 4:1-2, ESV).
As a prisoner for the Lord, then, I urge you to live a life worthy of the calling you have received. Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love.
Everyone Falls
No one is immune to the self-deception of thinking he or she can sidestep the slippery slope of sin. James writes,
But each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death. Do not be deceived, my beloved brothers (1:14-16, ESV).
I’m reminded of a time many years ago when I caught my young son with holiday treats in his fists and smeared on his shirt.
“Did you have permission to eat candy?” I asked.
“I didn’t eat any chocolate,” he blurted.
“What’s that on your shirt and in your hand?”
His forehead wrinkled. “Well, I didn’t mean to eat them!”
Giving Hope after a Fall
Your counselees need not remain in a muddy puddle of poor choices. Knowing one’s identity in Christ is powerful and hopeful. By the power of the Holy Spirit, Christians can remember who they are in Christ, as described in Ephesians:
As you help your counselees remember who they are in Christ, you’ll give them hope to live out who they already are: God’s children. They also need the reminder that they are no longer identified by what they did and who they were–slaves to sin (Rom. 6:6-7).
In Christ they have been restored.
And that is what some of you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified, your where justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God (1 Cor. 6:11, NIV).
Remind your counselees of who they are in Christ and of what Christ did for them, and they will have hope after a fall.
Here is a suggested assignment to help counselees understand the blessings associated with being “in Christ”: Give your counselee the assignment of reading Ephesians 1 and listing, verse by verse, the words describing her new identity in Christ.
Giving Encouragement to Walk
To get up and walk in the ways of Christ, encourage your counselees with a masterful passage tucked in Titus:
For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age, waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ (Titus 2:11-13).
Paul wrote the epistle to Titus, encouraging him on several counts, including the truth that we are saved for good works (not by good works). Remind your counselees that they can get up and walk in God’s strength because the same gospel that saved them also sanctifies them. As Titus 2:12 underlines, grace trains them:
- To renounce ungodliness and worldly passions
- To live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives
Trained by grace, your counselees can say “No” to sin and live a godly life, for in his kindness and mercy, Jesus cleansed them by his blood and gave them new life so that they might display good works.
Consider these verses from Titus:
“Show yourself in all respects to be a model of good works” (2:7a).
“A people for his own possession who are zealous for good works” (2:14).
“Ready for every good work” (3:1).
“Careful to devote themselves to good works” (3:8).
Just as your counselees fall down the slippery slope of sin, they can make better choices by God’s grace. To do this, help them remember who they are in Christ and encourage them. . .
(1) to renounce ungodliness through confession and repentance;
(2) to live a godly life marked by good works.
They do not need to wonder if this is possible, because “Jesus Christ … gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works” (Titus 2:13-14).
Join the Conversation
How have you sought to teach counselees the critical doctrine of their identity in Christ?
Sharing Hope with Your Heart,
by Lucy | Apr 21, 2016 | biblical counseling, emotions, thoughts
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