A Biblical Guide to Counseling the Sexual Addict is an excellent read for pastors, counselors and those who love God and love people. Pornography is destroying America because it treats women as objects, because it hinders intimacy in marriage, because it makes men passive cats and because it takes away God’s role of men in the world – to mirror who He is. Gallagher also authored the excellent book “At the Altar of Sexual Idolatry.”

Steve Gallagher is very open regarding his life.  After failure in several areas of sexual sins, God performed a miracle in his life and he has continued to step up to the next spiritual level by drawing men to face the reality of their perversion and waste of life through sexual addiction (Addiction is used in the sense of a life-dominating sin). Steve has written many other books related to the subject and “Biblical Guide to Counseling the Sexual Addict” is an excellent aid for the leader. But let’s wake up. Every man needs to recognize his privilege and responsibility to help other brothers pull their head out of the darkness and allow God’s Spirit to expose their perversion by means of God’s Word.  Steve does a great job of humbly exposing his own failure, so that any man can identify and see that there is hope for him also.

Steve divides his book into three parts. First, he examines the fundamentals of biblical counseling.  I’m glad that Steve avoids psychobabble and trusts in the power of God’s Word.  He is content with trusting in God’s Word that is living and powerful as his foundation.  The crux of counsel is to understand the scope of worship, true repentance and the place of devotions.  The method of counsel is understanding addiction, getting to the heart of the problem and God’s method of dealing with sin. The tool of counsel is God’s Word as it teaches, reproves, corrects and instructs in righteousness to equip men to be pure again.  The goal of biblical counsel is to help a person become conformed to the image of Jesus.

The second part examines counseling specifics.  Gallagher deals with counseling for everyone from the young person, to the hurting wife, the homosexual and the pastor who has fallen. He also covers five additional excellent moral questions.  These are good biblical-sense thoughts that every counselor needs to consider as he helps those that are involved in sexual sins and those offended by the sexual addict.

The third part identifies group dynamics. There must be transparency, but also respect and confidentiality within the group.  Birthing a group or ministry must be under the spiritual care of the leadership, that is, it must come under spiritual authority, which will ensure the conduct and progress remains biblically oriented.