People in Need of ChangeHelping People in Need of Change

Orange Park Bible Church

Love-Know-Speak-DoModel of Ministry

• LOVE – Getting to know people - God's purpose is that these relationships would be workrooms in which his work of change can thrive.

• KNOW – Discovering where change is needed - Knowing a person means knowing the heart. Friendship is the connection of hearts. The goal is to get below the surface.

• SPEAK – Speaking the truth in love - This involves bringing God's truth to bear on this person in this situation. It means helping your friend to see his/her life clearly. Getting them to the mirror of God’s Word.

• DO – Applying change to Everyday life - Do something with what she/he learns-to apply the insights God has given to him/her daily life and relationships. God calls your friend not just to be a hearer of his Word, but to be an active doer of it as well.

1. Enter the persons world.2. Incarnate the love of Christ.3. Identifywith suffering.4. Accept with agenda.

LOVE

Counseling for Everyday LifeKnow

KNOW – Getting to know the person and discovering where change is needed.Note: it is not the reverse (speaking to change first)

The goal of the KNOW functionIs to get to:• Understand the person – Proverbs 20:5

• To help the person understand themselves as God sees him.

• Not simply to uncover the problem or expose sin.

Terminally Causal RelationshipsDo you have any?

Many of us live in interwoven networks of terminally casual relationships. The sense we actually know one another is a delusion.

Paul Tripp – Broken Down House

2-Main Points• Ask Good Questions• Organize Data Biblically

Ask Good QuestionsInsightful people are not the people with the right answers, but those who ask the right questions, because you cannot get to the right answers unless you ask the right questions.

If we want to fulfill God’s call upon our lives to be instruments of change it is important that we develop habits in asking good questions. Good questions are vital to helping people face the reality of who they are and what they are doing.

The tendency of most people is to rewrite their history in self-serving ways. We look for explanations for our behavior that are outside of us. We blame shift. We tend to be more impressed with our own righteousness than God is.

Because of this we need others who are wise and patient enough to ask good questions, listen, and after listening ask again instead of judging quickly.

How do you learn to ask good questions? Through repeated practice.

To make sure that our conclusions are valid, there are three things we must

regularly do:• Ask people to define their terms. Human language is

messy. We all define even familiar words in very different ways.

• Ask people to clarify what they mean with concrete, real-life examples of the terms they have used.

• Ask people to explain why they responded the way they did in the examples they have given you.

Principle #1Ask open ended questions

A closed question is a question which expects a yes or no answer. Because of this, it requires almost no disclosure of personal information and therefore has limited usefulness in counseling.Example: if you ask a couple “How is your communication?” and they answer fine, you have not learned much. For starters, you haven’t defined what you mean by communication. They could be thinking, “All we ever do is argue and we haven’t this past week so I guess we are doing great.”

An open question is a question that cannot be answered without the counselee disclosing things about self and the situation.On the other hand, an open ended question cannot be answered without revealing what the person is thinking. For example, “How would you characterize your communication as a couple?” In Contrast to “How is your communication?”

Opened Ended Question

“How would you characterize your communication as a couple?”

That question forces the person to examine his or herself and to answer in a self disclosing manner.

Principle #2Ask a combination of survey questions and focused

questions.

We do not want to assume that a problem in one area of a person’s life only exists in that area so we ask survey questions…..

Survey Questions ask a little about a lot. They are profitable for uncovering themes and patterns.

Example: Using Survey Questions

If a friend comes to you with the presenting problem of anger in the workplace that has resulted in the loss of his/her job you would want to ask a series of questions about other relationships.(at home, with friends, with relatives)

You are looking for evidence of this kind of bad fruit in other areas of his life.

When we want to trace problems to their roots in the heart, we ask focused

questions…

Focused Questions ask a lot about a very little. They are profitable for uncovering roots and causes.Survey Questions ask a little about a lot. They are profitable for uncovering themes and patterns.

Principle #3 Ask a progressive line of questions

(1) Each question is based on information obtained from a previous question.

(2) There is a logical flow to your questions.(3) The goal should be to fill in the gaps in your

understanding of the persons situation.(4) The question to ask is “What do I not know

about what I have just heard?”

RememberCertain questions uncover Certain information.

• What? – questions are the most basic, uncovering general information. (“What did you do on your date night last month?” “Had a conflict”)

• How? Questions reveal the way something was done. (“Describe your tone of voice during the conflict.” “Defensive.”)

• Why? Questions uncover a person’s purposes, desires, goals and motivation. (”Why were you so defensive?” “I wanted her to know that she was exaggerating the facts.”

• How often? And Where? Questions reveal themes and patterns in a person’s life. (“How often do you have conflicts on date night?” “Every time he fails to plan our date night ahead of time?”)

• When? questions uncover the order of events. (“Describe for me exactly when the conflict broke out.” “We got in the car and I innocently said, ‘So, what do you want to do tonight?’ At that point she got real quiet and I knew we had a problem.”)

Mistakes to avoid• Being carried along by your own curiosity.• Either/or questions which tend to lock the person

into your list of choices.• Using questions to cross-examine, interrogate,

corner, or entrap the person you are counseling.• Asking a barrage of questions at once.• Using questions as a way of camouflaging your

agenda.• Settling for non-specific/generic information.

Other ways to gather information.

• Careful observation of real time data. (clothing, gestures, posture, eyes, facial expression, tone of voice, behavior during the session.)

• Homework (lists, evaluations, journals, studies, etc.)

• Interviewing other people. (with permission)• Careful note-taking and review.

Asking Good Questions• CRITICAL - if we want to be used by the Lord as instruments of

change in someone’s life. • As sinners all of us know what it is like to rewrite our history, hide

behind the pressures of life, blame shift and look outside of ourselves for the problem.

• Because of this we all need people who will love us enough to patiently ask questions in an effort to help us see what God sees.

• In the hands of God’s Spirit (Colossians 3:12-17) questions can become keys that unlock the chains that bind peoples’ lives so that they are able to trust Jesus in ways they never had before.

THE BIG QUESTIONAs you minister to others, do you ask good, biblical questions or is your ministry weakened by assumptions?

DISCUSSION?People in Need of Change

Helping People in Need of Change

Orange Park Bible Church