A wish to be happy, and a different aim

Counseling, a Korean essay on Larry Crabb begins, takes its direction from the counselor’s theology, from the relationship with the person who has come, and from much else besides. Many who come want, in the end, to be happy. Wanting that is not a fault; a strong hunger for one’s own happiness can, Crabb argues, still get in the way of a biblical path.

If happiness is truly wanted, the essay follows him, the desire should be to live like Jesus, in obedience to God’s will. The center of a Christian life, and of Christian counseling, is not private well-being. It is to please God. The counselor’s work is to help a person toward that. In one word, the goal is maturity.

Immediate obedience, character, a shift of goal

Maturity, in this book, has two sides: obedience in the present case, and a deeper obedience of character. A Christian grows more like Christ by learning, gradually, to obey the Father. Biblical counseling, as Crabb frames it, is concerned with whether a person answers a hard setting with a willing obedience or not. The counselor’s task is to help that person onto that path.

The essay calls this a transfer or rise of the goal — the student text says “Overgoal,” a slip for that shift. The point is not only to ease a symptom, but to move a person toward a biblical response and a change of conduct. That move, the same account says, is a necessary condition of the maturity the book is after, and it differs in kind from the goals ordinary counseling often sets.

Needs, motive, structure, and a disputed middle

The theory, as the essay outlines it, works with three ideas. What a person needs for an effective life; why a person acts; and the structure of personality. Basic needs are significance and security. Motive is explained with Paul’s trouble in Romans 7; change, Crabb says, has to aim at wrong thinking and wrong motive, because most people act from a deficient motive.

The essay also sketches stages of the work — a first movement of compassion and meaningful talk, then counsel by exhortation, then edification — and the counselor as an instrument of the Spirit. Crabb is read as taking secular psychology in under biblical authority, and as standing between a closed Christian practice and a psychology that would lead. He is credited with widening the work, and criticized for a mixed approach that seems to some to put psychology first. This is a reading of a book, not a manual for practice. The same Korean essay, at its full length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. A student reading of Lawrence Crabb’s Effective Biblical Counseling, following the aim of maturity and the three ideas of needs, motive, and personality structure.

Last updated 15 November 2026