Good Friday morning! Last night after our life group lesson, we somehow got on the subject of pastors and priests and such. Growing up, some of us had made assumptions about pastors and priests. On the other hand, we were also encouraged to these assumptions by various teachers and organizations. By now you have probably come up hard against those assumptions in your life. Pastors and other clergy are not infallible; nor are they paragons of virtue, possessors of the unfailing dummies guide to perfect living, or holders of the lifetime manual of every answer. No matter how much we might want them to be those things.
In fact, just the night before the pastor had described the desire to sin so well that I thought someone must surely have taken him aside and instructed him. How else could a pastor know the feelings and desires leading up to sin? What I wanted him to say was something like: "At about the time I had been a Christian for this many years, I stopped having feelings of lust. I found that all I wanted was my wife and haven't looked at another woman with lust since that time. A few years later, I found that I was no longer tempted by money, and wouldn't you know it, it has been more than two years since I have fallen into any kind of sin!" Of course, he didn't say anything of the kind. His description of sin appeared to come right out of personal experience. From a pastor? Say it isn't so! Well, we must say that it is so. For him, for you, for me, and for everyone who has ever trusted in Jesus to save them from sin and unrighteousness.
We don't grow into a free pass on temptation. The Devil will never give up on trying to trip us up. The stronger a Christian becomes in the faith, the more forces of Hell and the world are joined in battle against him or her. And sadly, as we have seen in just our lifetime, the bigger they are, the harder they fall. We also ran into the assumption that all clergy are saved and firmly believe in Jesus Christ as the Way, the Truth, and the Life. Not so.
Pastors receive a lot of attention. On Sunday in many churches across the land the pastor will have an uninterrupted floor to speak his mind. While hecklers will heckle a stand up comic, and other politicians will try to shout over their rivals, the pastor has a time all to himself with an attentive (for the most part) audience eager to hear what he has to say. This attention can be like a drug and it draws those who have not given their lives to anything more than fame and fortune. Fortune? Oh yes, there are fortunes to be made by preaching the Word of God. While most pastors serve in a church with less than 200 members and are by no means wealthy, quite the opposite really, there are some who hit the big time, and that is what they got into the ministry for in the first place. Sure, we know this now and are watchful for it, but we all know that it was at one time much easier to fool us.
Christians need other Christians, but we need the Holy Spirit more. We need to look and listen, and see and hear, what our clergy is showing and saying. Some of that fruit is rotten, and much as we don't like it, the spoiled fruit must be cut off from the assembly of believers. Do I know of a specific example? No, and I am not going to start up a witch hunt, but we do know that some of what we have been led to assume is not the truth. By the way, that goes for devotional writers too! Go to your copy of the Word, check the fruit. I can tell you right up front that I'm not perfect, sinless, righteous through my own effort, and I don't have all the answers to the questions of life. I would very much like to get hold of that dummies guide to perfect living, but I can't seem to find it... oh wait, maybe that is just one of the working titles for the Bible that God discarded before it went to press.
Have a great weekend in Christ Jesus!
Bucky
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