Category Archives: Faithfulness

Pastor, those scars on your soul are blessed of God

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I bear in my body the brand-marks of Jesus.  Galatians 6:17.

We all do.

I suppose it’s a vocational hazard.

We preachers walk through the valley of the shadow with people in the church and out of it. We give them our best, weep with them, tell what we know, and offer all the encouragement we can. Then, we go on to the next thing. Someone else is needing us.

That family we ministered to, however, does not go on to anything. They are forever saddled with the loss of that child or parent. They still carry the hole in their heart and return to the empty house or sad playroom. However, there is one positive thing they will always carry with them.

They never forget how the pastor ministered to them.

He forgets.

Not because he meant to, but because after them, he was called to more hospital rooms, more funeral homes, and more counseling situations. He walked away from that family knowing he had a choice: he could leave a piece of himself with them–his heart, his soul, something–or he could close the door on that sad room in his inner sanctum in order to be able to give of himself to the next crisis.

If he leaves a piece of himself with every broken-hearted family he works with, pretty soon there’s nothing left.

So he turns it off when he walks away. He goes on to the next thing.

He hates doing that. But it’s a survival thing. It’s the only way to last in this kind of tear-your-heart-out-and-stomp-that-sucker ministry.

Case in point.

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Bludgeon thy neighbor. Oh really?

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Pastor John Hewett, a friend from some years back, once attended the Carolina Panthers-Minnesota Vikings football game in Charlotte. Just outside the gates, two stern-faced men stood holding up huge signs.

“JESUS CANNOT BE YOUR SAVIOR UNLESS HE IS YOUR LORD.”

Noticing the expression on John’s face, one of the men said, “Jesus can save you.”

John said, “He already has.”

The fellow said, “You sure don’t act like it.”

Fascinating the way some Christians find one single aspect of the Christian faith and turn it into the end-all of salvation and righteousness and go to seed on it.

Thereafter, it becomes the theme of their sermons and the thrust of their conversations. If they’re Facebook friends with you, that’s all you ever read from them.

For some, it’s the KJV Bible. If you’re using anything else, you are a compromised liberal and naive to boot. Either you have been taken in by the con men in the faith or you are a scam artist yourself.

For some it’s Calvinism. Unless you cross every ‘t’ and dot every ‘i’ as they do–or Brother John himself did–you’re shallow, don’t know your Bible, and a blind leader of the blind.

I once had a deacon who had come to Christ at the age of 43 after a life of ungodly living. His conversion was dramatic and total. He went from blind to perfect vision overnight and became a zealot for the Lord.

As a new believer, he looked around the church and saw complacent, dozing members and came to the conclusion they had probably never been saved. The aspect of salvation they had missed out on, he decided, was repentance. They had never truly repented of their sin, otherwise they would be changed, transformed, made new, and on fire for the Lord.

Thereafter, repentance became his theme.

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Pastors, be above reproach. Here’s what that means.

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It’s a hard lesson to learn in life, but fans of athletes and singers, actors and other television celebrities, would do well to adjust their expectations downward concerning the personal, private lives of those individuals.

The lives of very few superstars in any category will bear close inspection.

Life keeps trying to teach us this lesson, but so many in our society refuse to learn the lesson. So we are devastated when we learn the inner secrets and hidden activities of a Tiger Woods, a Michael Jackson, or an Edward Kennedy.

The reason we go on getting disappointed in such revelations is that we keep expecting other people to be better than they are.

And perhaps better than we are.

I was 18 years old when this lesson hit me up side the head. As a college freshman in Georgia and more than a little homesick, I was glad when I saw that a certain Southern gospel quartet was coming to nearby Rome for a concert. I had grown up singing their songs and had attended two or three of their programs, so this was like a little touch of home. I knew the personnel of the group and could sing most of their material along with them.

That’s why I decided to do what I did.

I left the campus early that Friday afternoon and took the bus into town.

I had decided I would hang out at the auditorium and help the quartet unload and setup. I would meet them personally, and wouldn’t that be special.

It was. In a way. The bus pulled up and my celebrities got out. They were glad to have an able-bodied youth to help carry boxes of records and set up tables. For a half-hour, I sweated alongside these singers who were the only stars in my small firmament.

And they were nice to me. No complaints there. They may have given me a record or two or maybe a free pass to the program, I don’t recall.

The one thing I do recall is the cursing.

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Good music that is hard to sing

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(First written and posted in the year 2010.) 

Someone has said that good music is music which is written better than it can be sung (or played).

I’m on a Turandot kick right now. I’ve loved this Puccini opera for two decades after discovering how different it is from all the others, but without knowing why. I’m not a musician or a singer to speak of. I just swoon at certain kinds of music, however, and this is one of them.

What was puzzling me for years was why Turandot was never as well known as Puccini’s other more popular operas (La Boheme, Tosca, and Madame Butterfly). Why fewer people had even heard of it. And today I found out why.

The liner notes on a CD of highlights from this opera explains that the soprano who sang the part of Princess Turandot was required to do things most singers cannot do. Here is critic Benjamin Folkman:

As late as the 1950s, facing two significant barriers, Turandot was a relative rarity in opera houses. First, it’s spicy harmonies was too modern for opera-devotees’ tastes. Second, the opera was (and is) too difficult to cast. Sopranos who would jump at the change to star in Puccini’s other operas all turned down the role of Princess Turandot. It requires a special type of voice. A Turandot must bring a supreme soprano’s tonal weight and thrust to a sort of unrelieved high-register writing normally comfortable only for piping soubrettes.

That’s what he said. I looked up “soubrettes.” It implies flightly, thin high-pitched voices.

What then made Turandot so popular today? After all, people today love it.

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I’m against boredom. Here’s why.

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All my life, I’ve had a low threshold for boredom. I don’t like being bored (which explains why I don’t do a lot of things) and I don’t like boring people–if I know it and can help it! And that explains a lot of my preaching, I suppose.

The Lord has wonderfully blessed my life with such variety that it prevents me from being stuck in a rut. My days are never the same and endlessly full of joy.

Take one particular week from my journal, for instance….

Sunday, I took a friend to church with me. He’s a new believer, even though he’s only a few years younger than me. I’m more or less introducing him to various churches. We talk about what to expect before we get there, I whisper to him a few times in the service (“That’s the visitor’s attendance slip; fill it out if you want to, but you don’t have to”), and I introduce him to people. When the pastor baptized last Sunday, I leaned over and remarked that “this is how we baptize, although every pastor does it pretty much his own way.”

We stood in the parking lot after church and talked about the sermon. The pastor had spoken on having a heart for God. My friend said it had really spoken to him. I said, “You know you can come back here any time you wish. You don’t need me with you.” He laughed. “Joe, going to church with you is like attending a baseball game with George Steinbrenner. You know everyone.”

I’ve smiled at that ever since.

Two days later, Steinbrenner made the front pages of the nation’s papers. A heart attack took him at the age of 80. People were falling all over themselves to praise him. Which is all right, of course. There’s little to be gained from saying that in addition to all those great things he did, Steinbrenner was brutal on those who worked for him.

One fellow said Steinbrenner fired him one night. “The secretary called me later and told me I was not fired, to come to work the next day. I came in at 9 o’clock instead of 8. George saw me and said, ‘This office starts work at 8 o’clock. Come in late again and you’re fired.’” Johnny One-note. It seems the only way he knew to motivate people was to threaten to terminate them. That’s sad, if you ask me.

That was Sunday. Then, on Monday….

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Your behavior matters. That’s I Peter 2:12 and it’s the truth.

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Keep your behavior excellent among the Gentiles, so that in the thing in which they slander you as evildoers, they may on account of your good deeds, as they observe them, glorify God in the day of visitation (I Peter 2:12).

Be a fly on the wall. Sit in on religious discussions and you will come away burdened by one huge conclusion: for a large number of people who call themselves followers of Jesus, doctrine counts far more than behavior.

They didn’t get it from Jesus, I’ll tell you that. And they sure didn’t get it from Scripture.

Start at page one of the New Testament. You’re not out of the opening chapter before you see that the sexual activities of the Lord’s people is a matter of major concern. It shows up in the genealogy of Jesus, with a number of people listed having been guilty or accused of inappropriate activities of a sexual nature. Still in that chapter, Joseph hears that his beloved Mary is with child and decides to call off the engagement. It took heavenly intervention for him to change his mind.

And that’s just in the first chapter of Matthew.

Skip over to chapters 5-7, what we call “The Sermon on the Mount.” There’s doctrine there–Scripture never slights the subject–but behavior before the Gentile world by God’s people is a major consideration. Oath-taking, brotherly treatment, sexual purity, relations with one’s enemies–and we’re still in chapter 5.

Sprinkled throughout that fifth chapter of Matthew are reminders that God’s people are to live by a higher standard than the Gentiles in order to bear a faithful witness to them.

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Anyone can love the lovely and well-behaved. But we have a bigger job than that.

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Fred Harvey was a name almost every American knew in the late 1800s and early 1900s. This son of Britain had come to America and made his mark in the food industry. Working with the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad, he built a chain of restaurants across the great Southwest which became legendary for their insistance on quality and their devotion to the customer.

In his book, Appetite for America: How Visionary Businessman Fred Harvey Built a Railroad Hospitality Empire That Civilized the Wild West, Stephen Fried says Harvey originated the first national chain of restaurants, of hotels, of newsstands, and of bookstores–“in fact, the first national chain of anything–in America.”

You may be familiar with the Judy Garland movie on the Harvey Girls, another innovation of Fred Harvey’s. He recruited single young women in the East, then sent them to work in his restaurants from Kansas City to California. In doing so, he inadvertently provided wives for countless westerners and helped to populate a great segment of the USA.

All of this is just so we can relate one story from the book.

Once, in the short period before women took over the serving duties for his restaurants, Harvey was fielding a complaint from one of his “eating house stewards” about a particularly demanding customer.

“There’s no pleasing that man,” said the steward. “He’s nothing but an out and out crank!”

Harvey responded, “Well, of course he’s a crank! It’s our business to please cranks. Anyone can please a gentleman.”

Pleasing cranks.

Anyone can please a gentleman.

It’s our business.

Why did that line sound familiar to me, I wondered as I read past that little story. I know. It sounds so much like the Lord Jesus.

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Sarcasm has no place in the life of a believer

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“Let your speech always be with grace, seasoned as it were, with salt, so that you may know how you should respond to each person” (Colossians 4:6). “Let no unwholesome word proceed from your mouth, but only such a word as is good for edification, according to the need of the moment, that it may give grace to those who hear” (Ephesians 4:29).

Mary Todd Lincoln was gifted in the dark art of sarcasm. Her sister Elizabeth said of her, “She was also impulsive and made no attempt to conceal her feelings;  indeed, it would have been an impossibility had she desired to do so, for her face was an index to  every passing emotion.  Without desiring to wound, she occasionally indulged in sarcastic, witty remarks, that cut like a Damascus blade, but there was no malice behind them.”  Lincoln’s biographer notes, “A young woman who could wound by words without intending to was presumably even more dangerous when angry or aroused.”  (Honor’s Voice: The Transformation of Abraham Lincoln by Douglas L. Wilson).

Woe to anyone bound in marriage to one gifted in sarcasm.  Lincoln bore many a scar from the blade his wife wielded.

Pity the church member who sits under the teachings of a sarcastic pastor week after week.  Such a pastor’s ministry will bear bitter fruit.

These days, Christian leaders are finding themselves apologizing for public pronouncements–in the media, on cyberspace, in print, on radio or TV–in which they were sarcastic toward someone who criticized them or opposed them or questioned them.

We even have websites given to satire and sarcasm. And some claim to be Christian.

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Those who would serve God should expect opposition.

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“A great and effective door has opened to me, and there are many adversaries” (I Corinthians 16:9). 

“Is this vile world a friend to grace to help me on to God?”   (Isaac Watts, “Am I A Soldier of the Cross?”)

This is a quiz.  Name the enemies George Washington faced in the Revolutionary War.

If you answered, “The British,” you’d be only partly right.

Washington did fight the British, as the thirteen colonies asserted their independence from the Mother Nation.  But Generals Howe, Cornwallis, and Clinton and their armies were only the most visible of the forces Washington had to contend with.

He had to fight the weather.  Think of Valley Forge and even without knowing the full story, your mind immediately conjures up images of a harsh winter with all the snow, ice, sleet, and freezing temperatures that includes.

Washington had to deal with starvation and deprivation.  No one knows how many thousands of his soldiers perished from the cold and starvation at Valley Forge and how many deserted in order to save their lives.  Many surrendered to the British at Philadelphia in the vain hope that the conquerors would feed and clothe them.

Washington had to deal with a Congress that was either ignorant, misinformed, or outright hostile to his situation. He wrote letter after letter detailing the misery of his army and pleading for help.  Finally, a delegation came from the national capital, temporarily at York, PA, to see for themselves, after which congress began to act.

Washington fought disorganization, a country that made impossible demands but gave minimal support, and criticism on every side.

Washington even had to fight certain members of his own staff, including several generals. Every schoolchild knows the name of Benedict Arnold, one of his generals who betrayed the cause.  There was also General Horatio Gates, forever undermining his own commanding officer in the forlorn hope that Congress would appoint him to Washington’s post.  Time and again, Gates was shown to be a coward who ran from battle, but blamed his failures on others.  There was General Charles Lee, another pretender to Washington’s position as commander in chief.  Lee, called “a carbuncle of a creature” by historians Drury and Clavin (book: Valley Forge), was known to run from a battle and then brag about how he had won it.  Some years after his death, a letter was found in Lee’s handwriting giving British General William Howe detailed plans for defeating Washington.  Drury and Clavin write, “That Charles Lee was a traitor surprised few.  That he had refrained from boasting about it shocked many.”

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This guy thinks he has found a contradiction in Scripture that disproves God

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“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds…” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

A friend wrote something  about the Bible’s authenticity on her Facebook page, causing someone else to leave a caustic reply..

After each statements the fellow left, all of them shallow and several insulting, my friend patiently responded with kindness and reason.

But nothing worked. Her “commenter” was determined to nail her to the wall.

He had found a contradiction in Scripture and knew this was the (ahem) unholy grail, the proof, the nail in the coffin of Jehovah God.

What was his “contradiction”?

“In one place the Bible says an eye for an eye and another place it says turn the other cheek.  What do you say about such a contradiction?”

I wondered if this guy was serious.  Any teenager in church could answer that.

Just so easily does this guy dismiss the living God, the Creator of the Universe.

Even if the Lord had such a fellow as that on His team, He wouldn’t have much.  HIs ignorance is shallow and doubtless his faith would be just as worthless.

Before commenting on the subject of contradictions in the Word, let me respond to that guy, just in case any reader needs to know how those two scriptures line up.

“An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” was given to Israel as a principle for assessing punishment for crimes (Leviticus 24:20). This formula was light-years more lenient and merciful than the standard used in pagan countries–and to this day, in some backward nations–that dictated a life for an eye; a limb for a tooth.

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