Saints, Sufferers, and Sinner

In this Scripture-saturated book, Michael Emlet uses real-life counseling interactions and insights gained from years of counseling and training counselors to demonstrate how we can love, listen to, grieve with, challenge, and accept the people around us in ways that befit the gospel of the grace of Jesus.

Dr. Michael Emlet has given us a treasure. He's primarily focused on how we relate to others through the triple lens of saint, sufferer, and sinner. He's particularly strong at blending those lenses together. The result? You can begin to look at and treat people as fully human. His experience as a counselor grounds his thoroughly biblical insights in real life. This immensely helpful book isn't just for counselors it's for all of Jesus's followers.

As Christians, we know we are called to love our neighbors as ourselves, but it can be hard to know what it means to offer love to our neighbors on the ground in concrete, daily ways. In this deep, rich, and practical book, Michael Emlet draws on Scripture and years of experience as a Christian husband, parent, church member, and counselor to help us more faithfully and fully love our neighbors, our spouses, our children, and all whom God brings into our lives. Through this exploration of what it means that we are all simultaneously saints, sufferers, and sinners, which is shaped by the wisdom of the Bible on every page, those who read this book will come away better equipped to fulfill the Great Commandment in the quotidian moments of everyday life and ministry.

This book will give you a fuller view of yourself and those you love. It is clear, helpful, gentle, and wise, which just happens to be the way I would describe Mike.

Every person who seeks counseling brings a unique blend of history, beliefs, behaviors, circumstances, and relationships, but there are fundamental truths that apply broadly to every person we minister to. Our identity before God as saints, sufferers, and sinners is perhaps the foundational truth upon which our counseling stands. Saints, Sufferers,and Sinners offers a deeply biblical and theological understanding of this reality and demonstrates how this broad principle fleshes out in the counseling experience with ground level practical application.

Two things I appreciate about Michael Emlet's new book: 1) Its clarity regarding the realities of believers being saints, sufferers, and sinners while we walk this earth, and 2) Its realistic application of our identity in Christ affecting each of these dimensions of our lives in the way that we live, love, counsel, encourage, correct, and repent for the sake of others.

Too often we speak only to parts of people because we only see part of them: they just need to get over their sin, just need compassion because life has been hard, just need faith because it's all that matters. Mike Emlet's Saints, Sufferers, and Sinners refuses to over-simplify. Instead, Emlet enables his readers in concrete, biblically rich ways to simultaneously take all three aspects of our Christian, human reality seriously. Full of winsome case studies, this book brims with wisdom in action about gently responding to sin, practical ways to encourage, and how to offer meaningful comfort to those who suffer. Saints, Sufferers, and Sinners is the product of a lifetime of godliness from a man whose compassion and humble grace come through on every page. This must become a foundational book for biblical counselors of every type for generations to come.

As a counselor, the value of seeing how the gospel speaks in unique ways to sin, suffering, and our identity as saints has been pivotal. As a pastor, these balanced truths are essential to being a good ambassador of the gospel. Michael Emlet's work in Saints, Sufferers, and Sinnersis a must read for anyone wanting to accurately apply the gospel to the full breadth of human experience.

Many of us err in tending to see 'the problem' in ourselves or in others as only one of sin or idolatry, or entirely one of suffering, and in focusing on either we can forget that all God's people are also saints in whom the Spirit is at work already. Saints, Sufferers, and Sinners helps us see people as they really are. Where others stop, this accessible yet profound book also equips us for talking to those not yet safe in Christ's kingdom. This book is everyday practical, richly biblical, and wonderfully re-balancing.

With the precision of a physician and the compassion of a counselor, Michael Emlet offers readers a template for engagement and relationship that will help you reimagine gospel-centered counseling. Saturated in Scripture and brimming with real-life case studies, one can quickly recognize this is the fruit of many years of study in Scripture and walking with our Savior. Michael is the exact type of counselor I would want walking alongside me in my journey of faith.