Quotes from Jay E. Adams

When Christ said, "take up your cross daily and follow me" (Luke 9:23), He put an end to all such thinking. He represented the Christian life as a daily struggle to change. The counselee can change if the Spirit of God dwells within him. Of course, if He does not, there is no such hope.

Corresponding to the two basic philosophies of life, then, hedonism and biblical theism, are two views of love. Everyone, of course, is for love. The hippies are for love, the situation ethicists are for love, the followers of Hari Krishna are for love, Christians are for love. But it is true of love, as it is of heaven, that "everybody talks about it ain't got it.

True love is always under control. It is commanded. Christ commands, "Love your enemies." You can't sit around whomping up a good feeling for your enemies. It doesn't come that way. But if you give an enemy something to eat or give him something to drink, soon something begins to happen to your feelings. When you invest yourself in another, you begin to feel differently toward him. Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

Love, therefore, may be commanded (Luke 6:27 ff.; Ephesians 5:25) and taught (Titus 2:3-4). Love does not come naturally, it must be learned.21 But since it is the fruit of the Spirit, Christians may be sure that it will take the work of God's Spirit in their lives to learn to love. The Spirit works through prayerful obedience to the Scriptures.

Every change that God promises is possible. Every quality that God requires in His redeemed children can be attained. Every resource that is needed God has supplied.

With a taproot sunk deeply in the unchangeable Christ, one can learn to live a relatively rootless life here with joy. Change is what the Christian ought to expect, ought to demand of himself, and ought to learn to live with. He knows that there is "no continuing city"26 here; his "citizenship is in heaven."27 Counselors with this hope can undertake the task of counseling with joy and expectation. By the grace of God, there is every hope of change!

Hope in the Scriptures always is a confident expectation; the word hope never carries even the connotation of uncertainty that adheres to our English term (as when we say cautiously, "I hope so"). There is no "hope so" about the biblical concept.

The biblical picture of intimacy and love between the shepherd and the sheep is foreign to us. The oriental shepherd lived with his sheep. He slept with them out on the hillsides at night, as David must have done. He went out seeking the hundredth sheep, not satisfied with only ninety-nine in the fold.

God's Word changes people, changes their thinking, changes their decisions, and changes their behavior. Change is an important matter to nouthetic counselors. The Scriptures everywhere anticipate change. The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of change. His activity is everywhere represented as the dynamic and power behind the personality changes in God's people.

Nowhere does the Bible say that one must wait for change. Jesus did not ask people to wait. He expected and effected change right away. Not everything, of course, but something can be changed as the result of every session, including the first. There is a solution to every unsolved problem; this is the Christian conviction that emerges from I Corinthians 10:13 and II Timothy 3:16, 17.

Cf. pp. 448 ff. In an interesting article, "Make Your Marriage a Love Affair," Joyce Brothers makes the following correct observation: "…most people have no idea of the far-reaching consequences of a single change in behavior," Reader's Digest, March, 1973, p. 81.