How to help people:

Basically if I am looking at a person in order to help them or disciple or guide them, I ask in prayer: where are they at in their spiritual growth Lord? What are you trying to give them now? How is the enemy trying to block it? And how are you working redemptively in their lives to bring wholeness? I ask this in prayer for people, cities and nations. It’s a simple method which has worked for me. It allows me to partner more with God is actually giving each person or place, and not just give them my own ideas.

Jesus discerned their true needs, their real questions, before He responded or taught them. “Perceiving their hearts, He turned and said…” That priestly seeking of God for others, comes first if we really want to be helpful. This is also how ministry can become part of your true spirituality or increasing union with Christ. We get in awe after we can see what He is really up to in this person or place’s life. It perforce, forces us to appreciate and love Him more, which is “the big law” Jesus taught.

  Christianity is a spirituality of increasing union with Jesus Christ and who He is, and therefore leads us into The Father and His Love for His Son. That’s its most basic spirituality—increasing union with Christ, so becoming more like Him in an embodied way, caught up in that space between Father and Son, in every area of who we are. We visit His cross, die to self, through confession and forgiveness, and move into His New Life in each area progressively as He leads us. So the ultimate goal is to be found “in Him”. That practice towards union is our daily practice.

We can read another person by where their spirit is with Christ’s. And start to see in prayer what they may need next in their journey with and into Him.

And He is always working to form more of Himself in each of us, so we can be found more in Him on that day. Our spirituality is a progressive series of deaths to self to enter more of Himself and therefore our true eternal selves. We lose ourselves to find ourselves in Him.

Each of us, is capable of being shown where we are spiritually, and what we need next to grow into our next season. The job of counselor is to help facilitate this process.