Do You Need Godly Counsel?

Proverbs 15:22 (KJV) Without counsel, purposes are disappointed, but in the multitude of counselors, they are established.

I asked myself what I thought the word “counsel” meant in this verse. I supposed that it meant something along the lines of “good advice from the godly.” When I studied the word, I found that the definition was altogether different. Here it is:

• counsel (Strong’s H5475)-a session, i.e. company of persons (in close deliberation); by implication, intimacy, consultation, a secret; (BDB)-counsel taken by those in familiar conversation; (Gesenius)-deliberation. [from H3245-“to sit down together, i.e. settle, consult.”]1

So we see that this sort of counsel is not gained by making a thirty-minute appointment with a megachurch leader so that he or she can share scriptural principles about our situation. Nor is it a meeting with any leader of a church or other ministry with which we are only distantly connected. This is much more. It is counsel birthed out of ongoing relationships in the Body of Christ. In this context, the Lord settles matters and gives direction as those who are in close relationship deliberate together. This is priceless.

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1 James Strong, Strong’s Expanded Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2009), "counsel" (H5475); Francis Brown, S. R. Driver, and Charles A. Briggs, The Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon(Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2008); Wilhelm Gesenius, Gesenius' Hebrew Grammar, ed. Emil Kautzsch, trans. Arthur E. Cowley, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1910)