By Jeffery Bartz

I get the impression that many Christians see the Bible as a book about how to be saved and walk with Jesus, but don’t see it offering real insight into the most serious counseling topics.

Sufficient to save, but not to counsel. Sufficient to sanctify and disciple, but not to counsel.

A few proof texts are often used to confirm that Scripture is sufficient for counseling, like Psalm 19; 2 Timothy 3:10–17; and 2 Peter 1:3–4. While I believe those texts do teach the sufficiency of Scripture even for counseling, the Bible is so much more robust than that. As Dr. Heath Lambert notes in A Theology of Biblical Counseling, “We need not rely on only a handful of passages to prove the sufficiency of Scripture because we have an entire Bible that God has given us to change our lives and demonstrate the sufficiency of Scripture for counseling.”