~ Adapted from email correspondence ~
There are three elements to recovery: doctrine, counsel, and power.
Doctrine is essential. A continuous review of the truths about God’s sovereignty, his unconditional selection and acceptance of his people, Christ’s work in redemption, his death by which he purchased deliverance from all sin, condemnation, and evil principalities, and so on, will all contribute to recovery, even if they are not studied to deliberately target your psychological problems. God’s word can comfort you, heal you, and set you free. Do not read the Puritans on psychological issues, on doubt, melancholy, and such things. Their works would probably increase your troubles because they could analyze even a lively soul to death with their tedious prose, speculative categories, and endless artificial divisions.
Counsel in the form of extended conversations on the basis of God’s word can help you specifically address your problems. However, all non-Christian counselors are harmful and dangerous, and most Christian counselors are also harmful and dangerous, if not more so. Do not trust most counselors. They do not know what they are doing or what they are talking about. They will more likely than not offer you false and anti-Christian advice. There is a biblical approach to counseling, but it is difficult to find one who uses this approach and who does it well. But God does not leave us at the mercy of men. If there is no man to help you, or even if there is, God himself can become your counselor by his Scripture and his Spirit.
Power is what will finally deliver you. No matter how much men insist that cessationism is not a denial of God’s power, the fact is that they reject God’s power as he teaches it in the Bible. They are selective about what they accept about it. The result is a chain and a curse. You will not find true deliverance and full recovery from most Reformed and Evangelical circles. You will not find it because they do not have it and they will not allow you to have it.
“Have faith in God” (Mark 11:22). Open up to the possibilities of God’s power at work in you. Think in terms of faith that moves mountains. Think in terms of power that can work miracles. Then persist in prayer. Ask God to deliver you and change you by his power. Renew your mind by knowing the Jesus of the Gospels and the Acts, and not the Jesus of unbelief and tradition. That Jesus, filtered by false doctrine, has ceased to exercise his power to help you like the Jesus in the Bible.
I offer you this advice even though it might invite criticism from those who have ceased believing in God’s power as he teaches it in the Bible, because I have compassion on you and desire to help you. There are “Christians” who would rather see you suffer than to accept that God’s power continues to be evident and his gifts continue to work through his people. They want God to cease and desist in anything that upsets their false theology and tradition.
Like the Pharisees, they are filled with a spirit of murder instead of a spirit of faith, love, and power. Jesus was angry with them because of the hardness of their hearts (Mark 3:5). Therefore, first be delivered from them! Why serve their unbelief, and why submit to their tradition, when you are the one who suffers? Instead, look to Jesus Christ, the Jesus of the Bible who is always compassionate, and always generous with his help and his power.