Biography
Dr. Lawrence J. Crabb, Jr. is a clinical psychologist and the director of the Biblical Counseling Department at Grace Theological Seminary, Winona Lake, Indiana. Larry has written many books, including two children's novels, and travels extensively in his speaking ministry dealing with counseling, marriage and parenting. [Biographical information is correct as of the broadcast date noted above.]

"Take An Inside Look" 
I've had an opportunity to speak to literally dozens — hundreds, I suppose — of people over the past twenty years, and I think I've come to one major conclusion about people's lives. That is that, way down deep, people are very different than what they appear to be on the outside. With some real conviction in my soul, I say that there is a quality of life that's available to me, a quality of life available to each of us, that most of us know very, very little about. It seems to me, if our Lord meant what He said when He talked about wanting to give us an abundant life, that we have some hard thinking to do. It seems to me that there are realities going on in people's lives and souls, way down deep where nobody else sees, that need to be looked at — and looked at very, very carefully.

I want to read one verse that our Lord spoke in the book of Matthew, Chapter 23. Our Lord was speaking to a group of people who specialized in looking good on the outside. If you had known these people you'd have said, "They're doing fine, they've got no problems, things are going well in their lives." They were religious, they were the kind of people who never missed church, perhaps, they were the kind of people who had no problems that anyone else could see. But our Lord looked at them and basically said, "You are like white-washed tombs. You look beautiful on the outside, but on the inside there are a lot of problems." His advice to the Pharisees, the group to whom He was speaking in Matthew 23:26, was this: "First, clean the inside of the cup and dish and the outside also will be clean." That's my topic — what does it mean to take an inside look? What does it mean to look deeply into your life to find out the kind of joy, the kind of reality that our Lord wants us to know in our lives?

I was talking with a 29 year old woman a year or so ago about how happy she was. She was sharing with me all the victories and all the good things. In the course of our conversation, over lunch, she was saying that she really was glad to be alive as a person.

Things were going her way for the first time in a long time, she was very happy in her circumstances, she was feeling pretty good. As I listened to her chat, it became clear that every time she referred to herself, she referred to herself as a person and never once referred to herself as a woman. After about 20 or 30 minutes of interaction, I said to her, "You have been talking about yourself in every case as a person. Tell me, why are you glad that you are alive as a woman?" When I asked that question, her eyes filled with tears. And I said, "Something is going on for you as I ask you about your joys in being alive as a woman." And that led to a long, tearful discussion of the fact that she had been sexually abused, the fact that as a woman she felt useless, as a woman she felt dirty, as a woman she had no joy whatsoever. On the outside, she was doing super, but on the inside she was dealing with problems that she had no idea what to do with. She was struggling with them, had no answers, and at the core of her being she was simply not the happy woman that she looked to be to other people. There were problems going on inside.

I suspect that most of us, when we have problems in our lives, know very little to do other than simply to try harder to do whatever we think we should do. Certainly it is true of me at times, and maybe of you as well. If we do what God says, if we live the way we should live, if we try harder to be the right kind of person, then enough moral effort to be the right kind of human being is going to result in that quality of life which our Lord promised. But I want to suggest that maybe there's more to putting our life together — to finding that kind of joy and aliveness and reality that God promised.

Maybe there's more to it than just trying harder. The Scripture passage that I read to you earlier suggests that our Lord's thoughts on the subject — and of course His thoughts are always authoritative — were that "I want you to look inside. There's something going on beneath the surface." If we're going to find out what it means to know the life of the Lord, we're going to have to look inside. That's going to be a painful proposition because when you and I do take a look on the inside of our lives, I would suggest that we're going to see two major categories of things that we're going to have to deal with. What I want to encourage me to do, encourage you to do, encourage anybody to do that wants to know real life, is to take a hard look at ourselves, to look in a real, sometimes painful, but honest way at the areas of life that are often not examined at all.

I want to suggest two things. When you look at the deepest part of you, you are going to see two major categories of problems. First, you're going to see hurt, you're going to see pain, you're going to see something down deep that is just not the way that it ought to be. When you look honestly at your relationships — with your spouse, with your friends, with your children, with your neighbors — would you agree that something's wrong with everything? That's kind of gloomy, not a real "up" sort of a sentence, but I think an honest look confirms that. There's something wrong with everything.

Sometimes what's wrong with our relationships is a very, very obvious thing. I was talking just a week ago with a 34 year old man. He told me he was born to a very wealthy, prominent couple who were active in their church. He was born with a severe, physical deformity. After medical doctors did their best and realized the deformity was not correctable, the parents decided they wanted no part of this youngster. They took that child and put him in an orphanage and left him there. He had no contact with his parents for well over 19 years. His older and younger brothers were told that he had died at birth. When I talked to this man he said to me, "If I were to face all the pain that I feel, thinking back over my life, it would destroy me. There's no way in the world that I could face all that pain, it's just too much." I would suggest that there are some people whose pain is very obvious. We know the pain and we stay away from it. We know the difficulties because they are just so awful, they're grotesque, they're bizarre, they're horrible. We'd all agree with that. We feel terrible for that young man.

But there are other situations more like mine. I don't have any big, horrible story like that to tell. I have loving parents. But each of us has a story to tell if we're willing to look at the subtle pain in our lives. Let me tell you why. I believe God designed us to want certain things and to want them legitimately. God designed us to enjoy certain things that in full measure are simply not available now. You see, I was built for what this world is simply never going to give me in full measure. I long for perfect relationship. I don't have one relationship that is perfect. I've got some real good relationships, some real strong relationships in which I feel joy and meaning and I'm real glad for them, but I don't have one relationship that provides me with every single thing my soul desires. I was built for more than what is now available. As a result of that, I hurt when I'm honest. Now most of us, myself included, work real hard to stay away from looking at that kind of pain. Most of us work real hard to stay away from admitting where we feel badly, so we keep busy, we try harder and we find ways to amuse ourselves. Some of us find the most reliable source of amusement available in America today — food — and, whenever we hurt, we eat. There's some way that we find to keep away from the deep pain that we really feel in the core of our being.

It may be obvious pain, like that man that was left by his parents for 19 long years, or it may be a much more subtle pain. I spoke to another man just recently. He was struggling in his job. He was in his late 40's, and he felt he had been dealt with very unfairly by his boss. He was angry about that and frustrated with life. He wanted to live properly and know about peace and joy, but had no idea how to get hold of it at all. In the course of our conversation, I said to him, "Tell me, when you look down deep inside, what kind of things bring you the greatest level of pain?"

He wasn't thrilled with the direction I was taking in the counselling session. His thought was rather, "Couldn't you tell me how to handle my boss? Tell me how to handle things differently so I can make life smoother again."

My reaction was, "My purpose as I chat with you is not to move directly into your life to help you make it smoother. Rather I want you to look deep inside and see if something might be wrong there that, when dealt with, can make your life not smoother, but more alive, more real, give you a sense of vitality and passion and joy that very few people have." So he went along with my question. I asked him about his parents and his background.

He had no big horrible story, but he did tell me a story about the time his grandmother came to live with them — a woman that, was apparently, rather mean to him. He refused, at about 10 years old, to continue calling her "Grandma." He began calling her "Mrs. ______." Now, suppose you were that young boy's dad and you heard him him talk to his grandmother in that way. Do you think maybe Dad might have noticed that? Do you think Dad might have picked up that there was something going on there? Maybe he'd observed some of the ways Grandma had been mean to his son. I said to this man, "Tell me how your dad dealt with that. Tell me what happened when your dad came to you and said, 'Why are you calling Grandma by her last name? Are you having some struggles with her? Is she reacting to you in ways that are making you upset? '"

This man said, "Oh, Dad never approached me like that. Dad never would, Dad was too busy. Dad was a good man, a wonderful man, but the kind that would never move into my life. He would never notice things that were happening inside of me." I said to him, "Did you want that?" His response was, "Look, Dad's a great guy. He provided well, we went to ballgames together. Now that I'm an adult and my dad's an older man, he has health problems and I look after him. I really care about him. We have a good relationship. Please don't mess that up!"

My reaction was, "I don't want to mess anything up. What I want to do is to encourage you to look honestly on the inside of your life, because when you do, the Lord seems to indicate that that can lead to joy." He began to acknowledge that he wanted to be pursued in a way that he had never been pursued in his life. Something's wrong with everything. He was built for what even the best parents, the best spouse, the best son or daughter, the best friend, the best pastor can never provide and therefore he hurt.

That really ought to be good news to us in a funny sort of way. All of us know, intuitively, somewhere down deep, that there really is pain. A lot of Christians feel very guilty because they have been living for the Lord, reading their Bibles, going to church, doing the right things, being good to their friends and neighbors and they assume that, after years, the hurt is supposed to go away. There is no longer supposed to be any pain left in our souls. The Bible teaches exactly the opposite: that way down in the core of my being, I'm to experience a level of hurt, "a level of groaning," the Bible calls it when Paul talks in Romans, a level of anticipation for getting someday what I do not have now and what I painfully feel the absence of now. It's okay to hurt and when you look down deep in your soul, what you find — what I find — is a lot of pain. "I just don't have what I want. I want more meaning than I have. I want more love than I have. I want people to notice when I'm tired more than they do. I want people to care about me more than they do. I hurt." And it's okay to hurt.

We live in a plastic society where we don't take honest looks — we stay too busy for that. But when we take an honest look — as I think every person needs to do — we're going to see not only a lot of hurt (my first point), but secondly, we're going to see something that is not going to elicit sympathy from others. We're going to see something that is not going to make others want to run to us, and hug us, and take care of us — as I presume you wanted to when I told the story of the man who was deserted by his parents for 19 years. You probably felt angry at the parents. I did. You wanted to take the young man, and hug him, and tell him things are okay. But there's something else that, when you look at it, you don't feel warmth, but a certain disdain. You feel a certain negative feeling that you wish you didn't have to feel when you see what else that inside look reveals. It reveals a stubborn, angry determination to hurt less.

Now let me explain this. You see, one thing the Bible makes very clear is that the real problem that I have, and the real problem that you have, and the problem that gets in the way of all of our happiness and our joy, that which gets in the way of the life which our Lord came to give us, really is self-centeredness. That self-centeredness is not the usual form of "looking after me and I'm going to grab the piece of pie before you get it." It might have involved that when we were little kids, but as adults, self-centeredness has a much more subtle form. It's using other people for the purpose of feeling better myself. I'm determined to find some way to avoid pain.

Some years ago, I was talking to a man who came in to see me for counselling. I'd never met him before, but he was on my list of people to counsel with. So after we'd introduced ourselves, I said my typical opening sentence when I counsel folks, "How can I help you?" You never know what's going to happen after you say those words. He looked at me with intensity, with real passion, and he said, "I'm here because I want to feel better quick."

My response was, "All right, your purpose is you want to feel better quick and you want me to provide you with some means so that you simply don't have to hurt anymore. I understand that you don't want to hurt, but your concern is not with your pain, rather you want me to respond to your demand that you want to feel better quick."

He said, "Well, yeah. I want to feel better quick. Tell me how. You're a psychologist, you're in the business of helping people feel better and I want to do it quick. I don't want to pay a lot of money. I want to feel better in one session. What can you recommend to me?"

Well, I had a thought. I said to him, "Sir, I think what I might advise you to do would be this: I would suggest that you get a case of your favorite alcoholic beverage, find some cooperative women, and go to the Bahamas for a month."

He looked at me and he said, "Are you a Christian?"

I responded by saying, "Why do you ask?"

His answer to me was, "That doesn't sound like good, Christian advice to me — to encourage me to get drunk and to be involved immorally and to spend money I haven't got on a vacation. Is that what you're really telling me to do?"

My response was this: "If your purpose is to feel better quick, right now, I'm really not sure that I recommend following Jesus. If what you really want is immediate relief, there's a better plan than Christianity. But that better plan is going to cost you dearly in the long run. There's pleasure in sin for a season, but the hooker there of course is 'for a season.'" Here was a man who was determined to feel better quick. What I want to suggest is that, maybe not quite as blatantly as that particular gentleman, I'm involved in the same enterprise. All of us really are. Way down deep we are determined to feel better quick. That's what I want. I want to find some way to relieve my pain.

Think about this for a few minutes. How are we going about that? If you look in your soul and you see that there's hurt — maybe a father that didn't pursue you like you wanted to be pursued, maybe sexual abuse in your background, maybe parents who didn't care in very grotesque and awful ways, maybe a lot of good things in your life, but just not everything you wanted and way down deep you're lonely and you hurt and you're unhappy. Beneath the surface of your busyness and your new clothes and the dinners out, there's something missing and you know it. What I want to ask is: How am I, and how are you, going about the business of finding ways to hurt less?

I had a very disturbing breakfast meeting about six months ago. Four of my very best friends asked me out for breakfast. When they asked me out, I presumed that they wanted me to have breakfast with them so that they could enjoy me, enjoy being with me, have a good time. They are good friends, they like me, I like them. So we went out for breakfast. I was being my enjoyable best, or so I thought. After a very few minutes, one of them said, "Larry, we are your friends. We were talking about you yesterday, I guess it was behind your back. We want to tell you directly today. First of all, we know you as a good friend, we love you and care about you and feel that you are a good person who is sincere and loves the Lord and you have been used in our lives. But there's one thing we want to say to you, there are times when we don't feel very cared about by you. There are times we feel that you are more loyal to your job than you are to your friends."

That led to a lot of self-examination, a lot of soul searching. I had to begin wondering if maybe, way down deep, I'm a wounded person. I've been let down in certain ways. I'm afraid. If I just give that wounded person to you, if I just approach you and give you who I am, what are you going to do with that? You might not respond to me the way I want you to when I just give you my affection, when I give you my tenderness. I'm a caring person, you're a caring person, but I'm sometimes scared to give that, because if I give you who I really am, I'm not sure what you might do. I've been trampled a time or two. I've given myself deeply and been let down. I wonder if what I'm doing now is giving that part of me which has worked the best over the years. If I'm good at something, as I am good at my job, does that become my preoccupation? Does the energy devoted to my job, as opposed to sitting down, relaxing with friends and learning to share my soul with them, reflect my commitment to self-protection? I wonder if that reflects my self-centeredness and I wonder if that's getting in the way of my experiencing the quality of life which our Lord died to provide for us.

There is something I want to say to you, and I want to say it to me, because we need to hear this very clearly in an ongoing way in our lives. We need to realize that when we're not experiencing the life of Christ, when we're not experiencing the joy that God has made available for us to experience, then ultimately it's our fault, ultimately it means that somewhere in the core levels of our being, we're committed to finding some way to preserve our lives on our own. We're committed to avoiding that awful pain. When we avoid that awful pain, then we define that as life.

Our Lord made it very clear that if we're going to experience the deep joy of living, the passion, the kind of life that's so few people experience, we're going to have to do two things. One, we're going to have to face our disappointments. The route to joy walks through a very deep valley sometimes. We're going to have to experience some very deep pain in our hearts as we experience that, and learn that no one can touch that button but Him. We learn dependence in a very meaningful sense of that word. Then as we give up our commitment to self-protection and move toward other people — not for the purpose of protecting ourselves, but of giving ourselves — the result of that kind of a life, over time, can be the quiet development of joy. Joy is available! There really is more to life than most of us know. I find those words encouraging to me, I sincerely hope they are encouraging to you.

I want to pray with you as we close. Father I thank you that you have come to make life available. You sent your Son, Jesus to make life available. Father, I'm glad for that and I want to know more of that life. I want to know more of what it means to know you with passion, with joy, in ways that I don't have to pretend about. Father, use these few remarks to encourage each of those who are listening to these words, to encourage my own heart, to pursue more of what it means to depend on you to face pain and to trust you enough to love somebody else. Teach me how to do that. Encourage us, we pray, in Jesus' Name. Amen. 

Interview with Lawrence Crabb
Interviewed by Gunther Knoedler

Gunther Knoedler: What are people really struggling with when they are by themselves?

Lawrence Crabb: "By themselves" is a tip-off, I suppose. There's a profound sense of loneliness in people's lives. There's a longing for a certain kind of human contact that we hardly ever get. When we are aware of ourselves deeply, I think all of us have to admit that there's a way we want to be touched that no one does a real good job of. I think there's a very, very painful sense of loneliness beneath our concerns for money and all that.

Knoedler: Just two days ago, I read an article in the paper which said this, "We have every sign we need that our culture is in grave danger and it's because we are not paying enough attention to strengthening our families." We're seeing families become two-career families — where the husband and wife are both working — and the children are put into daycare. We see government support for daycare. Tell me, how do you counsel a young couple in this regard?

Crabb: I think rather than making the decision as to whether two careers is right or wrong, I'd rather look beneath the surface, even, of that. I suppose there are some situations where two careers is not going to be a big problem, I suppose there are situations where the one career family is going to be no better off than the two career. I don't think the issue is that. I think the issue is what is the deep hidden agenda in each of these people's minds as they make those decisions? Whether it's for a single career or a dual career, I think the real issue is what they are deeply committed to. If the deep commitment of the person's heart is really to something other than the family, then no matter what they do — two career or one career — it is simply not going to work. All of us have a real, deep, hidden agenda. The Bible says, "The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked." We think we're going one way, but we're really going another way. The couple who has not really understood what it means to give from deep parts of themselves to their children and to each other, no matter what they do career-wise, will not have the kind of relationships that God designed.

Knoedler: Do you have a concern for the children in an issue of that kind?

Crabb: A deep concern, of course. Because children were designed to enjoy the genuine, rich involvement of Mom and Dad. Whatever interferes with that is going to damage that child in a way that is going to keep my practice going in the years to come — and that's not good.

Knoedler: What are some of the burning issues that keep you awake at night?

Crabb: I think, in a word, the thing that causes my mind to scatter — you know, when you want to go to sleep, but you can't find the switch to turn it off —the thing that makes it hardest to find the switch can be summarized in the word "confusion." I think I feel very deeply confused about certain things. The older I get, the more confused I am about more important things. There are certain things I'm not at all confused about — certain things about the ultimate meaning of life, Heaven/Hell, the Lord Jesus — but in deep parts, I'm very confused. What am I supposed to do with my son when something happens? What am I supposed to do with my wife when we're having a moment of tension? I can't find the right book to read to tell me the answer to that. I read my own books and I get more confused. There's no way to know the path to walk in every detailed situation. Trying to figure out how to respond to life's situations, to me, is the greatest challenge.

Knoedler: As a Christian Psychologist, do you ever find there is a conflict of interest? For example if a patient comes to you very angry at God, what do you say?

Crabb: You asked about a conflict of interest. No, I don't think there ever is a conflict of interest, if by that you mean as a Christian, am I ever moving in a direction that would be bad psychology. To be consistent with my Christianity, I'm always going to be speaking on behalf of the individual. In that sense, I don't see any possibility of conflict between psychology properly understood and Christianity. I don't see a clear distinction between secular psychological problems and Christian spiritual problems. I think they all come out of the same deep down mess in our souls. The guy who is mad at God is a fellow who has been dealt with in certain ways that are wrong. He's been let down by certain people, he's blaming God for that, perhaps, and he's handling his life in ways that reflect his own self-centeredness. Those are the central issues I'd deal with with him whether he'd made known his anger at God, or whether he was talking about depression or homosexuality or any of the other kinds of concerns that people come to me with.

Knoedler: What can a person really expect when he or she decides to become a Christian in a meaningful way?

Crabb: I think that's a very fair question. I fear that a lot of times, when a person decides "to become a Christian in a meaningful way," as you put it, that there are certain expectations that many times preachers imply, sometimes directly teach, that simply may not be accurate. The most common one, I suppose, is that when a person becomes a Christian, all their problems are somehow over, all the pain in their soul will be totally gone. If there's any pain left, it's evidence that they really haven't come to Christ, they really aren't Christians. I don't see that Christianity is an anesthesia to get rid of pain, I rather think it's a meaningful support to help us endure whatever difficulties life brings because of the passionate hope we have for the day when every tear is going to be wiped from our eye. That's Heaven obviously, and not now. So I think the major thing we can expect is, in some sense, an increased battle in our souls, an increased awareness that sometimes we really want to go in directions that go against the Lord, and then having to ask very deeply what direction we are going to go in. There's increased struggle, there's an increased awareness of pain, but there's a joy that comes over time — I wish it were by tomorrow morning — that makes the battle absolutely worth it.