“Remind them of these things, charging them before the Lord not to strive about words to no profit, to the ruin of the hearers” (II Timothy 2:14).

The desire to be clever has tainted many a good minister, sabotaged many an excellent sermon, and probably messed up a few marriages along the way.

On the way home from somewhere, I was listening to a radio preacher. He was local, sounded “live,” and was clearly a biblical conservative, meaning I liked most of what he had to say.  Then, he spoiled it all.

He mentioned a well-known Southern Baptist evangelist who once preached in his church. “I asked him, ‘Brother, how long does it take you Baptists to disciple a new believer?’”

“He answered, ‘I don’t know. We’ve never done it.’”

Then he, the radio preacher, said, “Shameful!”

From that launching pad, he proceeded to disparage churches for not discipling people while telling how it ought to be done.

I found myself wondering two things.

Why would the evangelist say such a patently dumb thing–that Baptists have never discipled anyone!–and then, why would the radio pastor repeat it?  Both are foolish statements, and reflect poorly on everyone involved–the speakers, the churches, and even the Lord Jesus Christ.

I suspect I know why the evangelist said it and the radio preacher quoted it.

The evangelist said it for shock value.  He got the reaction he wanted by making an absurd statement.

Had we said to him, “Do you mean to tell me no one in any Baptist church has ever become a disciple of Jesus Christ?” I’m confident he would have back-tracked and said that was not what he meant, then turned it into something other than the moronic statement it was.

The pastor repeated it because it fit his thesis, that no one but he and his little group are getting it right. And again, had we held him accountable–“Do you really believe that?”–I’m confident he would have backed up and taken a more reasonable position.

When you’re on the radio, no one answers you. No one raises his hand with a question. No one holds you accountable.

They just turn you off and walk away.

You have to wonder what goes through the mind of a preacher before he comes out with something this off-base, this Christian-bashing, Christ-dishonoring, and self-exalting.

I suspect that what rushes through his brain is a wave of self-love. He’s so proud of his insights, his grasp on truth, his willingness to publicly rebuke error, that he will now come out with a rash statement that will shock his audience and allow him to pontificate.

I understand the process. Any minister who has logged many decades knows how it feels to get carried away with one’s own words and come out with something that makes him wonder later, “What could I have been thinking?”

He wasn’t thinking.

Trying to be clever. To impress the audience with our unique grasp of the situation.

Lord, help us.

The church secretary once handed me a letter misaddressed to “Doctor Joe Clever.”  The staff never let me forget that.

Lord, help me.

One more story.

On Facebook, a pastor quoted Billy Graham as saying 80 percent of our church members are lost.

I replied to him.  “I’d love to know your source for that.”

The preacher replied that it was common knowledge and could be found in various Graham publications, but he couldn’t lay his hands on the exact piece at the moment.

So, a pastor friend decided to do the responsible thing.  Damon had been following our online conversation, so he contacted the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association in Charlotte.  They responded that, “We get asked that frequently. But we have found nowhere that Dr. Graham has given any statistics at all regarding how many in the church may be saved or unsaved.”

In short, Billy Graham didn’t say it.

So, why do preachers persist in saying that he did? I found where a Southern Baptist leader had quoted Mr. Graham saying half the members of our churches are lost.

Why do preachers do this?

The reasons are endless, I imagine.  Perhaps it’s–

–Laziness (We go through so much material, it takes effort to run down a specific statistic or quote).

–Sloppiness (No one will pay attention to this, no one will remember it, and if it’s wrong, no one will care).

–Presumption (Someone says, “Well, whether he said it or not, it’s true, and he should have said it!”).

–Weakness (To establish a weak point, it helps to cite some authority as having said it.).

—Sin (I don’t care whether he said it or not; it’s probably true anyway.)

You wonder why some preachers want that number to be so low, for the percentage of the redeemed in a congregation to be pitifully small.  Evidently they must, because we keep running into sermons in print and online which say the actual saved of modern church members is a tiny percentage. How do they know this?

I once pastored a young church where the members seemed to believe if you were saved, you would no longer struggle with sin, so if someone were in a struggle, clearly he/she had never been saved.

Their unfailing solution to this was to “get ’em saved, and that’ll solve their sin problem.”

That church had members who had been baptized a half-dozen times as a result of this flawed thinking.

I’m thinking of an evangelist who built a ministry around a sermon he preached on “the parable of the wheat and the tares” (from Matthew 13).  In preaching that message he unsettled a lot of church members about their salvation, and would invariably come away reporting that in his meetings so many deacons were saved and the preacher’s wife got saved and such.

Now, there is enough carnality in any church in the land to give underpinning to this kind of weak theology and support to that kind of faulty preaching. But if I read First Corinthians chapters one and two correctly, Christians come in two varieties, the carnal and the spiritual.  A believer who is carnal–the word means “fleshly” and would imply they still look and act unsaved–does not mean he has not believed on the Lord Jesus Christ and been saved, but that they need to grow into Christlikeness and maturity.

Whatever else that parable says, it establishes that the saved and the lost may look alike, that none of us is gifted with discernment for telling which is which, and that the Lord will separate them at judgment. (And yes, it is critical for each person to settle their salvation, to know without question they are redeemed by the blood of Jesus Christ. No one is questioning that.)

The last time someone asked me, “What percentage of church members are truly saved?” I tried to herd him away from such pointless guessing.

No one knows. Speculating is a waste of time.

After all, humility in areas outside our competence is always in order, fellow pastor.