When enough is enough: The pastor throws down the gauntlet.

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“Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.”  –a line from “Me and Bobby McGee,” an iconic song of the 1960s written by Kris Kristofferson and Fred Foster

There comes a time in a pastor’s ministry….

The Lord’s servant has taken all he’s going to take.  He has reached the point where getting fired from this church would be a relief.  And yet, he knows the Lord who called him into the ministry assigned him to this particular congregation, and he has no intention of walking away.  However, the time has come to speak out and tell God’s people what is going on.

A small but determined group of members is waging warfare against the preacher. They want him subservient to them, they want him different from who he is, they want him “out.” Snipers work in the darkness to undercut him.  A little group conspires to oust him.  Others simply detest him and are constantly voicing their displeasure with him.

Their work is crippling the ministry of the church and destroying the effectiveness of this minister.

And these are all leaders.

The trusting congregation loves the pastor and believes all is well.  They don’t have a clue.

God help your church!

(NOTE:  Whenever I post an article on the mistreatment of God’s servant, invariably someone will message me about some hot-shot preacher who mistreated a church, stole its money, and ran off with a deacon’s wife.  Please spare us.  We are well aware there are hypocrites in the pulpit as everywhere else in life.  But no one has a license to dishonor God by shaming the ministers He sends to lead His church.)

“The Holy Spirit makes the pastors the overseers of the church.”  That’s in Acts 20:28.  So, let’s establish this up front.

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The pastor’s wife’s greatest ministry

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“Let the wife see that she reverence her husband” (Ephesians 5:33).

(Disclaimer: I write as a Southern Baptist, where all our preaching pastors are male. While I know a few women pastors, they’re in other denominations and I know zilch about what goes on in their households and how they relate to the husbands. I respect them highly but for me to write about what they need would be presumptuous.)

A pastor’s wife’s greatest ministry is to her husband first, and her children second.

We were two weeks away from beginning a new pastorate.  A couple of days earlier, we had been informed that the church had voted 85% to invite me to become their new pastor.  After praying long and hard about such a less-than-unanimous call, we felt it was the Lord’s will that we accept.

It was a difficult time in our lives.  I had just come through the most difficult three years of ministry in my life, and the church to which we would be going was still reeling from a massive split just 18 months earlier. It was not going to get any easier.

Nothing about this was fun. We knew going in that we were bruised and that the people we would be shepherding were hurting.

My journal for Monday, September 3, 1990:

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Pastors never know who’s in the audience

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When a pastor stands to preach, he never knows who is listening to him. And if his sermon is recorded or broadcast, he has no clue who will be hearing his words. He will do well to make sure he knows what he’s talking about.

Case in point.

Last Sunday evening, I spent three hours with the deacons of a church near here.  At the conclusion of the two teaching sessions, I shared a favorite story.

Ted Traylor, pastor of Pensacola’s Olive Baptist Church, told this story to Leadership Journal back in 2001. For over a year, the pastor had tried to get a veteran staff member to make some needed changes in his ministry. But he refused all offers of help and all attempts to supervise him.  The staffer owned this particular phase of the church and no one was going to tell him what to do. So, finally and reluctantly, Pastor Ted terminated him.

The day he fired that staff member, the church held its regular business meeting that night.  A lot of people on that fellow’s team were incensed. “How dare the pastor do such a cruel thing!”  The anger was palpable.  The pastor’s name was mud. For weeks afterward, the bad spirit persisted. People would call the pastor’s home in the middle of the night, then hang up the phone.  Women said harsh things to his wife in the store.  Pastor Ted says, “Had a search committee from Toadsuck, Arkansas come, I would have gone with them.”

One night, as the pastor and his son were returning home, three men from the church were standing at the edge of the yard, waiting to talk.  Traylor sent his son into the house and walked back to where they were standing.

Even though these were among his greatest supporters in the church, Pastor Traylor figured they had come to ask him to leave.

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The scriptures I often pray

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In no particular order, here are several prayers that I find myself offering to the Father repeatedly….

I pray for my mouth: I have a tendency to say the wrong things.

My mouth has gotten me in trouble for my entire life.  It has been known to write checks I could not cash, to blurt out exactly what I was thinking but should not have been, and to cut people down just to get a laugh from the spectators.  God has let me learn the hard way to discipline my tongue.  So, over the years, I have often found myself praying Psalm 141:3 alongside Psalm 19:14.

“Set a guard upon my mouth, O Lord.  Keep watch over the door of my lips.”

“Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in Thy sight, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer.”

(Someone reading this wondered how the Lord let me learn to discipline my tongue.  The best thing to happen is that when I was young in the ministry, more than once a church member called me on the carpet for the cruel thing I’d said just for laughs.  When I apologized profusely–and on one occasion, even apologized before the entire church–it left a lasting impression.  I didn’t ever want to do that again!)

I pray for forgiveness:  I am so often negligent, disobedient, and rebellious.

Who among us does not feel the need for forgiveness every day of our lives? (The single exception might be my wife.  Last night as we chatted with a couple who stopped by to visit, Bertha mentioned something about confessing her sins each day.  Everything inside me wanted to shout, “What sins?  You are about as sinless as anyone I’ve ever known.”  I didn’t say it, of course, but I thought it.)

However, my wonderful wife is married to an accomplished sinner.  So very often, I find myself praying these words of Psalm 51, followed by the confession of the publican in Luke 18:13….

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Why the Lord is so rough with some of His best people

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“O you of little faith!  Why did you doubt?” (Matthew 14:31).

The teacher is hardest on the best pupils.

The Master Teacher is hardest on the Star Pupil.

The coach is in the face of the player with the greatest potential, on his back, never letting up.

Check out these words from the Lord Jesus.  “Get behind me, Satan.  You are a stumbling block to me;  for you are not setting your mind on God’s interests, but man’s” (Matthew 16:23).

He said those harsh, cutting words, not to the Pharisees, but to Simon Peter, His “star apostle.”

Simon Peter–the disciple with the most potential, the one Jesus renamed as “Rock.”  He called Peter a “satan” (adversary) soon after commending him for his confession that “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Matthew 16:16).  When Peter said that, the Lord said, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for flesh and blood did not reveal this to you, but my Father who is in heaven.”

Called him blessed one moment and turns right around and calls him a devil.

What’s going on here?

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Your great preaching is not going to build your church!

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This is the burden of my heart.

Get out of the office, pastor, and knock on some doors.  Later, you can get your people to doing it.  But first, you do it.

Do it by yourself, if you must.  Or take someone with you.  Do it by appointment or cold-turkey.  But do it.

That is as profound a way as I know to build a great church.

Visit your church members, visit your leaders, visit them in their places of business.  Visit your neighbors, the homes around your church.  Visit people who visit your church.

Write letters to them.  The personal kind.  Handwritten, maybe two sentences.  Just to say you’re thinking about them, praying for them, thankful for them.

Get out of the office and get with the people.

Pastor Bobby Welch, longtime shepherd of the great First Baptist Church of Daytona Beach, Florida, was teaching a soulwinning program to several hundred in the chapel at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary.

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Stepping out of the boat: Something Simon Peter did a hundred times

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Sometimes it’s scary obeying Jesus.

The incident recorded in Matthew 14–in the darkest part of the night,  the Lord came walking across the wind-tossed sea to the disciples and Peter is allowed, nay encouraged, to leave the boat and walk to Him, managing to take a few tentative steps over the sea before his fears got the best of him–turns out to have been the story of the rest of Peter’s life.

In a manner of speaking.

Leaving his comfort zone to come to Jesus, stepping out of the metaphorical boat and onto the watery surface where no visible means of support presented themselves, thus risking everything, is what Peter did–or was called on to do–again and again for the rest of his life.

One.  Peter, will you confess Jesus?  “Well, normally I would–but today it’s scary!”

He was warming himself at the fire in the courtyard while, not far away, the Lord was on trial. Three times Peter has the opportunity to confess Jesus.  The problem is that was a most scary thing to do.  He would have been hanging himself out there for all to see, he would have made a target of himself, and it would have been uncomfortable.  Luke tells us what happened at the end….

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I’m so glad Peter didn’t walk on water for a half hour. Here’s why.

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“But seeing the wind, Peter became afraid and beginning to sink, he cried out, ‘Save me, Lord!’ And immediately Jesus stretched out His hand and took hold of him….” (Matthew 14:30-31).

It’s like a video of the Boston Red Sox guy letting that World Series game-winning single run through his legs.  Had he caught it and stepped on first base, the game would have ended and the Red Sox would have ended that so-called curse a full fifteen or twenty years earlier than they did.  Ask that player and his family.  It has run a zillion times on youtube and in the minds of the fans.  They have enshrined his failure.  They think of him and they forget all the thousands of put-outs he made at first base, the hits he got, the runs he produced.  That is how Peter must feel.

Think of Simon Peter walking on the water to Jesus that night when the winds howled and the sea raged and far from being impressed–as one would think we should be!–we see only that “he took his eyes off Jesus and put them on the wave,” and began to sink.  As though we would not have!

I’m so glad Peter did that.  Yes, I’m happy he walked those few steps on the Galilee, of course, and really really impressed.  But everything inside me gives thanks that he then had a problem with what he was doing and messed it up.

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Deciding what kind of man you want to become

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Every male coming into the world will become a man, if he lasts long enough.  But sometime along the way he should stop and ask, “What kind of man do I want to become?”

“Quit you like men” is how the old version of I Corinthians 16:13 reads.  Modern translations has it saying: “Be on the alert, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong….”

Be a real man.

Be a man like Jesus.

He went up to the mountain by Himself to pray; and when it was evening, He was there alone (Matthew 14:23). 

Our text is the 14th chapter of Matthew’s Gospel.  In this passage, we have several stark contrasts in manhood.  We have King Herod Agrippa, we have the Lord Jesus Christ, and we have a disciple named Simon Peter.

Take a look at them…

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What the pastor prays for himself

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“Pray for me–that utterance may be given to me in the opening of my mouth….” (Ephesians 6:19). (Also Colossians 4:3 and I Thessalonians 5:25)

Everyone prays, we’re told.  And, doubtless, every follower of Jesus Christ prays for other people.  But we must be faithful in praying for ourselves.

Here are three prayers of mine from key times in my life…

The first:  I prayed for balance in my ministry and personal life.

This prayer is from an old journal of mine.  It’s undated, so I have no idea what was going on, what prompted it, and when it occurred.  It seems timeless, and knowing my own heart, this has been something I have longed for since the beginning…

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