IBCD Summer Institute: Plenary Session 3 “Christ: Don’t start your family without Him”

In the third plenary session George Scipione (founder of IBCD) unpacked for us why we need Christ to be the center of our family. In this session, Christ: Don’t start your family without him, Scipione pointed us to the person and work of Christ to encourage us to walk in accordance with His commands.

Scipione encouraged us in two ways:

• You need Christ as your mediator

If we do not point our counselee’s to Christ as our mediator, our counseling will devolve into nothing more than moralism. Scipione rightly pointed out that “Apart from the power of God (through Christ) we will get no where. Without humility we will be trying in a fleshly way to convince your flesh to do spiritual things.”

Our job as counselors and as Christians is to ‘introduce people to the person Jesus Christ and then get out of the way. The truth of the gospel is personnel, “I am the way the truth and the life”’

• You need Christ as your model

Scipione said, “If you appreciate Jesus you should want to be like him”. He pointed to Hebrews 12:1–6 where as he stated it “Looking to Jesus” is the lynchpin to this text. As we “have one eye on the problem” we must keep “one eye on Jesus” our example, and “the Holy Spirit will give you the wisdom to apply it.”

So how does this apply to our family life? We must introduce our families to Christ the person who took on flesh, obeyed, died, and was raised again to intercede for us both as our mediator and as our model.