What broken people need …

It bothers me when preachers dabble in pop psychology or “preach” motivational seminars.

It bothers me as a fellow minister, knowing preachers should be preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ. And it bothers me as a clinical therapist, knowing that too often the attempt at pop psychology by a preacher can cause more harm than actually help someone.

Preachers should preach, therapists should counsel, and others should handle the motivational speaking circuit.

But there’s more to why straying into such territories for preaching bothers me. Here’s an important point: what broken people need is truth. They’ll never find hope, they’ll never find healing, they’ll never finally experience wholeness, without discovering truth.

What broken people need is truth!

Without truth, broken people — all of us! — lack a firm, lasting foundation upon which whole lives can be built and sustained. Everything else is shifting, changing, and ultimately unreliable. Journalist and self-proclaimed “psychology nerd,” David McRaney, highlights this point in a tidbit for boingboing.net …

In medical school, they tell you half of what you are about to learn won’t be true when you graduate — they just don’t know which half.

In every field of knowledge, half of what is true today will one day be updated with better information, and it turns out that we actually know when that day will come for many academic pursuits.

This is what author Sam Arbesman calls “the half-life of facts.” The premise is that for every domain, silo, discipline, and school of knowledge, the facts contained within are slowly being overturned, augmented, replaced, and refined — and in medicine, for example, the rate of that overturning is high enough that you never really complete your education. Medical school, in other words, never ends.

… For instance, in physics, about half of all research findings will be disconfirmed within 13 years. In psychology, it’s every seven. In other words, if you graduated with a degree in psychology seven years ago, half of the information in all your textbooks is now inaccurate.

The “half-life of facts” is the reason why, in many professions, continuing education is a requirement. And it’s because the facts dug out by human knowledge and understanding are so unreliable that broken people — all people — desperately need truth in order to have a firm foundation for living.

No one understood that better than Jesus, who straightforwardly pronounced that He, Himself, IS the truth we need!

“Jesus told him, ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me,” John 14:6.

Jesus even explained that He is that firm foundation for living that is essential for all of us …

“Anyone who listens to my teaching and follows it is wise, like a person who builds a house on solid rock. Though the rain comes in torrents and the floodwaters rise and the winds beat against that house, it won’t collapse because it is built on bedrock. But anyone who hears my teaching and doesn’t obey it is foolish, like a person who builds a house on sand. When the rains and floods come and the winds beat against that house, it will collapse with a mighty crash,” Matthew 7:24-27.

Unlike the constantly changing knowledge of man, Jesus is our perfectly consistent source of truth:

“Whatever is good and perfect is a gift coming down to us from God our Father, who created all the lights in the heavens. He never changes or casts a shifting shadow,” James 1:17.

“Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever,” Hebrews 13:8.

“The grass withers and the flowers fade, but the word of our God stands forever,” Isaiah 40:8.

If you want to serve and truly help broken people, then give them truth. Not pop psychology or a motivational seminar.

What have you built your own life on? What do you teach to the broken people in your life?

Scotty