Cross Talk: Where Life and Scripture Meet [Paperback]

Michael R. Emlet (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 10, 2009

Your friend just left his wife. You catch your child posting something inappropriate on the Internet. Someone in your small group is depressed. A relative was just diagnosed with an incurable disease. When those you know and love experience trouble, you don't want to hand out pat answers or religious platitudes. Instead, you want to offer real hope and help from God's Word. You know it s true, but how does an ancient book, written thousands of years ago, connect with our twenty-first century problems? In CrossTalk: Where Life and Scripture Meet, Michael R. Emlet gives you the tools to connect the Bible to your life and to the lives of your family, friends, neighbors, and coworkers. You will learn to understand people and God s Word in ways that promote gospel-centered, rich conversations that help you and those you know grow in love for God and others. This book will make the whole Bible come alive to you. Instead of platitudes, you can offer a cup of living water to those who are struggling in this broken world.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Michael Emlet has written a readable and insightful guide on how to move from the ancient text to our present situation. This book is especially important for counselors, pastors, and seminarians, but all thoughtful Christians will benefit from reading it. --Tremper Longman III, Ph.D., Robert H. Gundry Professor of Biblical Studies, Westmont College, author of Reading the Bible with Heart and Mind

Are you, like me, unsatisfied with your ability to link passages to problems or people? With poignant insights shaped by years of teaching and counseling, Mike Emlet helps us connect the dots between Scripture and permanent change. If you hunger to apply the Bible to life, or to help other people gain an appetite, then feast on this book! --Dave Harvey, D.Min., Sovereign Grace Ministries and author of When Sinners Say I Do

In CrossTalk, Mike Emlet is serious about applying all of Scripture to all of life. Mike teaches us how to weave together the story line of Scripture with our own stories. And Mike gets the story right. It is a gospel story. Mike's passion for the immediacy and centrality of the gospel story comes through on every page. --Paul Miller, Author of Love Walked Among Us and A Praying Life

About the Author

Michael R. Emlet, M.Div., M.D., practiced as a family physician for twelve years before becoming a counselor and faculty member at CCEF. He is the author of many counseling articles and the booklets, Asperger Syndrome, Angry Children: Understanding and Helping Your Child Regain Control, Help for the Caregiver: Facing the Challenges with Understanding and Strength, and OCD: Freedom for the Obsessive Compulsive.

Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: New Growth Press (November 10, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1935273124
• ISBN-13: 978-1935273127
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #31,068 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Michael R. Emlet, M.Div., M.D., practiced as a family physician for twelve years before becoming a counselor and faculty member at CCEF. He is the author of many counseling articles and the booklets, Asperger Syndrome, Angry Children: Understanding and Helping Your Child Regain Control, Help for the Caregiver: Facing the Challenges with Understanding and Strength, and OCD: Freedom for the Obsessive Compulsive.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Relating Truth to Life, January 12, 2010

By 

Robert W. Kellemen "Doc. K." (Crown Point, IN United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Cross Talk: Where Life and Scripture Meet (Paperback)

Recommended: Michael Emlet's CrossTalk offers one of the most robust approaches yet to the biblical counseling process of relating the scriptural narrative to a person's life story. Its Christ-centered, comprehensive, and compassionate approach powerfully and practically equips readers for the personal ministry of the Word.

The publishers aptly promote CrossTalk with the phrase, "An antidote to 'take two verses and call me in the morning.'" For far too long, some segments of current pastoral ministry and modern biblical counseling have practiced the idea that there is a simplistic one-verse, one-problem, one-solution method to every counseling and relationship issue.

Michael Emlet's training as a family physician and as a seminary professor seamlessly equips him to teach a much more robust approach to changing lives with Christ's changeless truth. In CrossTalk, he investigates the intersection of biblical truth and people's lives by exploring how we understand people biblically and how we use the Bible in biblical counseling.

Speaking the Truth in Love

We have many books about how to interpret the Bible, but few address the topic of how to relate truth to life--how to connect Scripture to struggles. Or, if they do, they focus on the pulpit ministry of the Word--preaching and teaching, and not on the personal ministry of the Word--biblical counseling, one another spiritual friendship, and personal spiritual direction.

Emlet teaches us how to look at life experiences through biblical lenses. His focus is on the person and the passage, on how to read the Bible and how to "read" people biblically. You might say that he understands that hybrid Christians run on truth and love. CrossTalk promotes a gospel-centered, personally relevant use of Scripture in personal ministry. "It describes a way to use the Scriptures to help people to grow to love God and others more fully in the midst of their complex daily lives" (p. 4).

The Story of Suffering and Sin

CrossTalk also counters another all-too-frequent error in modern biblical ministry--dealing with sin but minimizing issues of suffering caused by sin. Historically, the church has always helped hardened (sinning) and hurting (suffering) people. Soul care through sustaining and healing has always related God's hope to suffering people, while spiritual direction has always related Christ's grace to people's besetting sins. Emlet wisely continues this biblical, historical practice of Christ-centered, comprehensive, and compassionate biblical counseling.

Emlet connects the Bible to life--all of life in all its complexity. He does so by focusing on the "story"--the story of Scripture and the stories of people's lives. CrossTalk equips readers to make meaningful connections between the two.

Connecting the Bible to Life

While emphasizing the connection between truth and life, Emlet refuses to make the process simplistic. He begins by explaining the nature of the Bible--what it is not and what it is. He correctly summarizes the Bible as a CFR Narrative--the story of Creation, Fall, and Redemption with a Christ-centered focused of helping people to become Christlike.

With this foundational understanding in place, Emlet begins to establish implications for reading and using the Bible. Rather than imagining that personal ministry involves finding the right passage for the right problem for the right person, truly biblical ministry thinks theologically about relationality.

*Creation: Who are we? What makes us tick? (People)

*Fall: What went wrong? Why is the world such a mess? (Problems)

*Redemption: What's the remedy? How do people change? (Solutions)

Biblical counseling is more than looking for one verse for one problem. It is more than looking for theological categories to relate to life issues. It is exploring how a person's dominant story (approach to life) intersects with God's Christ-centered Creation, Fall, Redemption story so that people respond to suffering and sin in such a way that Christ is glorified as they become more Christlike.

Connecting the Stories

In simplistic biblical counseling, we connect the dots. We connect a problem to a passage or a principle.

In robust, rich, relational biblical counseling, we connect the stories. We connect a person and his/her dominant life story of suffering and sin to God's redemptive meta-story of grace.

Emlet first offers some general principles for applying his approach to personal ministry. These seem a tad brief while at the same time being a tad technical--not as full of "real and raw life" as the preceding buildup. However, Emlet subsequently takes an in-depth look at this model, thus breathing life into the skeletal outline. He offers insightful questions for saints, sufferers, sinners, and Scripture which serve as foundations for relating truth to life.

Even more helpfully, CrossTalk introduces Tom's story and Natalie's story. He teaches readers how to read the person, how to connect the person to the Old Testament narrative, and how to connect the person to the New Testament narrative.

We "read" a saint's story by looking for marks of grace. Where is the person living true to his identify as a child of God?

We read a sufferer's story by pondering what circumstances impact his or her struggles. Here Emlet looks predominantly at "level one suffering"--what is happening to the sufferer, and less at "level two suffering"--what is happening in the sufferer. An in-depth look at such internal suffering could have added more richness to this overall valuable approach.

We also read the story of sinning by probing what desires (relational), thoughts (rational), emotions (emotional), and actions (volitional) are out of line with kingdom values and therefore compete with the biblical story. Here Emlet models a thoroughly comprehensive approach to spiritual direction through reconciling and guiding.

Perhaps the most powerful and practical chapters are the two (chapters 9 and 10) in which Emlet demonstrates how to use an Old Testament and a New Testament passage with Tom and with Natalie. Talk about rich! The dialogues of applying scriptural narratives to life narratives are worth the proverbial price of the book. And, quite importantly, Emlet emphasizes that once we understand the grand biblical narrative and the person's dominant life narrative, there are a host of potentially applicable intersecting passages. He offers samplers to whet our appetite and to model what it looks like in "real life."

While the purpose of CrossTalk was not to focus on the relational element in biblical counseling (no one book can cover everything), Emlet's approach is clearly relational. He emphasizes that ongoing relationship is the context for personal ministry and that multiple conversations over time provide a natural framework to relate the biblical story to a person's dominant life story. Growth happens in community.

A Watershed Book

CrossTalk is one of those watershed books. It has the potential to help move the modern biblical counseling movement into the next generation. Its dynamic incorporation of truth and life in the context of scriptural and life narratives is a rare blend. Everyone interesting in understanding where life and Scripture meet should read and apply CrossTalk.

Reviewed By: Bob Kellemen, Ph.D., LCPC, Author of Soul Physicians, Spiritual Friends, Beyond the Suffering, Sacred Friendships, and God's Healing for Life's Losses.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Book About Connecting the Bible to Life, December 16, 2009

By 

Joel S. Frady (USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Cross Talk: Where Life and Scripture Meet (Paperback)

Many churches and Pastors in our day see the need for helping people with answers for their life's problems. Slogans like "Real Answers for Real Life" are common in many contemporary churches. Sadly, many times these real answers are not Scripturally-grounded or focused on Christ but are more like the answers one would receive at a self-help seminar or from a motivational speaker. Michael Emlet's book, Cross Talk, points to a better way for Pastors, counselors and other believers. Emlet is convinced that the Bible is inspired by God and therefore incredibly useful in the life of a believer. He is also convinced that Christians often misuse or underuse the Bible by just dealing with it at the soundbite, surface level. Emlet encourages us to go deeper, to let the Scriptures speak by understanding what they meant to their original audience and then transferring that understanding to our current situation. Emlet makes a point that passages connect to people on the level of saint, sufferer and sinner, but that not every passage applies on all three levels. The first half of the book is Emlet's attempt to build the case for reading the Bible in a holistic way. The second half of the book deals with the application of the principles of the first half to two case studies, Tom and Natalie. In each case, Emlet shows how an Old Testament passage and a New Testament passage can be used in counseling. There are samples of dialogue and a depiction of how this kind of biblically-based counseling works in practice.
I was most impressed by this book. Emlet has done an excellent job of connecting serious study of the Bible with diligent application of Scripture to daily life. I hope that many churches will move toward the approach of this book, by acknowledging the paradigm of saint, sufferer and sinner instead of providing simplistic answers to real life which are really not answers at all and which fail to address life as it really is, beautiful and broken, challenging but hopeful.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Extremely Helpful Book, February 9, 2010

By 

R. Hayton "Bob the book-nut" (St. Paul, MN USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Cross Talk: Where Life and Scripture Meet (Paperback)

In today's world, Biblical illiteracy is becoming widespread. Even in America, one will find people without any knowledge of even the most basic Bible stories. The evangelical church doesn't fare much better, unfortunately. While the average church-goer is familiar with Bible stories and even Bible trivia, they are often unable to connect the Bible's message to the real, every-day problems life throws their way. As a result, the Bible stays tucked away on a dusty shelf, while the latest self-help book lies half-read on the nightstand.

Michael Emlet addresses this problem head on in his new book, "CrossTalk: Where Life and Scripture Meet". The book explains how to understand and apply the Bible to the problems of life. Along the way it deals with questions of nature and interpretation: What is the Bible all about? How do we interpret the Bible? What are the real nature of life's many problems? How should we understand these real life situations?

The book opens by explaining the concept of ditches and canyons in relation to the Bible. Some passages have a relatively simple connection to our modern day life. The separation from the original world and context of the Bible to today is comparable to a shallow ditch. Other passages seem, in contrast, like canyons. It is hard to visualize any kind of contemporary application from the endless genealogies of 1 Chronicles or the bloody conquest of Canaan. Functionally, this leaves many Christians with an abridged Bible. Ditch passages resonate with us and: "In practical terms, we end up ministering with an embarrassingly thinner but supposedly more relevant Bible." (pg. 16) Of course, the Bible wasn't given to us in such an abridged manner. In fact, upon closer examination of several passages, Emlet shows how the ditches are actually wider than they seem, and canyons may not be quite so deep.

The next 2 chapters discuss what the Bible is and what it isn't. For me, this was the best part of the book. Emlet confronts several popular misconceptions of Scripture. The Bible is not primarily a book of Do's and Don'ts. It is not a book of timeless principles for the problems of life. The Bible is not primarily a casebook of characters to imitate or avoid. It is not primarily a system of doctrines. In all of this, Emlet emphasizes that for too many, the Bible has become Gospel-deficient! "You could talk about how to discipline your child..., draw encouragement from God's presence as you start a demanding new job..., emulate David's courage..., and discuss predestination..., without ever referring to the coming of the kingdom in Jesus Christ or encountering him yourself! Shouldn't the life, death and resurrection of Christ have some practical connection to disciplining children, God's presence, living with courage, and the doctrine of predestination?" (pg. 37-38) The Bible is a story - The Story. It's chapters include creation, fall, and redemption. It's main character is Jesus. It is all about Him!

Emlet draws important implications from this understanding of what the Bible is. We should read it back to front and front to back. Using a bigger Bible, results in a richer ministry. God's mission is central. Our lives should be lived bidirectionally. Interpretation and application should be a community (church) affair.

The next few chapters address the story aspect of life. The bits and pieces of life, which are so easy to diagnose and correct, actually have a "narrative skeleton" on which they hang. These pieces "add up to a cohesive whole". "Despite (their) diversity... certain patterns can be discerned. Life histories are going somewhere." (pg. 65-66) In light of the True Story, our lives are a combination of competing stories. Focusing too narrowly on individual aspects of one's life may ignore the larger picture of what God is doing, and where the real battle is.

We are fallen people. But created in God's image, and redeemed by Christ, we are simultaneously saints, sufferers and sinners. It is important to provide hope to those we minister to. "Ministry to others is much more than correction or reproof. It is also encouragement..., vision-casting, and hope-building." (pg. 95)

The final chapters of the book apply the approach to two case studies. "Tom" and "Natalie" present challenging life situations and varying degrees of understanding Scripture. Michael Emlet models how to apply Scripture carefully from a variety of texts (both ditches and canyons) to their life stories. This fleshes out the book's message and offers a practical explanation for how this perspective to the Bible and people works out. Emlet takes pains to emphasize that this isn't an exact science, nor is ministry only to be performed by people who have everything figured out. You will learn and grow, and the more you do, the better able you will be to connect the Bible to life, and the more impact you will have on people's lives.

The book covers a lot of ground as it seeks to explain how to approach Scripture and how to approach people. Both skills are needed. "In ministry we are reading two `texts' simultaneously, the story of Scripture and the story of the person we serve.... Reading the person without reading the Bible is a recipe for ministry lacking the life-changing power of the Spirit working through his Word." (pg. 90)

I appreciated the immense practical value of this book. I can't think of a more important topic for Christians to study. We need to minister to our own selves and speak the Word into the lives of those around us. Readers will find the book laid out in a helpful way, and very easy to read. Discussion questions after each chapter make the book ideal for group studies.

I can't recommend this book more highly. The "whole Bible", redemptive-historical approach to Scripture that is explained is life changing. The pattern for personal application of Scripture for use in ministry to others will multiply that change exponentially. You need to get this book!

Disclaimer: This book was provided by New Growth Press for review. I was under no obligation to offer a favorable review.