“Our pastor is not a good fit for our church.”

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The committee could not find any specific reasons they wanted the pastor to leave.  Church attendance was healthy, the congregation was responding well to the minister’s leadership, and finances were in line with expectations.  But there was an undercurrent of dissatisfaction with the preacher, and had been since day one.

“You’re just not a good fit for our church” was all the committee could come up with.

They wanted him out. If he refused to go peacefully, a movement would be started to oust him forcibly.

If this sounds unlikely to readers, let me assure you it happens quite often.

The wife of a youth minister texted me recently with a similar story about her husband.  The administrator and personnel chair had visited him that evening to cut him loose upon just this basis–“you’re not a good fit for our church.”  They informed him the pastor would meet with him the next morning to discuss details of his severance.

Just so easily are leaders willing to toy with the lives and ministries of God-called servants as well as with the health, unity, and reputation of His churches.

In many cases, what “you’re not a good fit” means is that certain members simply dislike the minister.  And since they do not like him, clearly, the solution is for him to go back where he came from.

The presumption of some people is truly amazing.

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Truth has this interesting quirk: Only those willing to adapt to it get it.

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“If any man is willing to do His will, he shall know of the teaching, whether it is of God or whether I speak from myself” (John 7:17).

Truth is a funny thing: If you want it, you tend to find it.  If you don’t believe it exists, you never come across it.

A generation ago, Professor Allan Bloom wrote a bestseller called “The Closing of the American Mind” in which he said a growing percentage of young Americans considers the mark of the modern man to be an open mind.

By “open mind” they mean an intellect that tolerates everything and considers truth to be relative, that takes no hard and fast positions, and gives  all positions equal footing. To them, a “closed mind” ranks as the epitome of ignorance and backwardness.

Students enter the university, said Dr. Bloom, “just knowing” that maturity requires that they jettison all those “prejudices” and outdated restrictions from their parents’ repressed generation.  Those wishing to take a strong stand for (insert your favorite value here) patriotism, Americanism, the Bible, the Ten Commandments, or the church are old-fashioned and still bound in chains of ignorance.

In the years since Professor Bloom’s book topped the bestsellers’ lists, nothing has happened to change this sad state. To far too many young Americans, to be educated and sophisticated is to reject hard and fast notions of truth and to welcome relativity in every discipline.

Such is the philosophy of a large section of the up-and-coming generations.

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Sorry. I do not feel your pain.

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President Bill Clinton popularized the line: “I feel your pain.”  He could say it with such pathos in his voice, you felt–at first, anyway–that he just might do that.

“I feel your pain.”  I suspect that is said too easily much of the time. And I can almost guarantee that hearing the words does not give comfort to the one hurting.

For the last forty years of his life, my coal-miner dad had silicosis, “black lung” it’s called, the result of breathing coal dust for decades in the depths of the pits.  He started working inside the mines when he was 14–that would be 1926–when child-labor laws were in their infancy and safety for the workers was an afterthought.  As a result, he often had trouble breathing.

There were times when he would look at me with pained eyes and say, “I can’t get my breath. You have no idea how it hurts.”

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Paying your vows, watching your words, and being responsible.

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“What shall I render to the Lord for all HIs benefits toward me?…. I shall pay my vows to the Lord…in the presence of all His people” (Psalm 116:12-18)

Scripture says it’s better not to vow anything to the Lord than to make a vow and not keep it (see Deuteronomy 23:21 and Ecclesiastes 5:4).

This happened some 25 years ago….

My wife and I were captivated by the words in Psalm 66 which described the awful time we were enduring in the church where the Lord had sent us to pastor only a couple of years earlier. “You brought us into the net; You laid an oppressive burden upon us. You let men ride over our heads; we went through fire and through water.” And then, we spotted the promise and began claiming it. “Yet You did bring us out into a place of abundance.” (Psalm 66:10-12)

All of that quickly proved to be dead on. We have written on these pages how our reassignment to serve in New Orleans drove us to ask, “Is this the place of abundance?”  It seemed anything but. Then we found Romans 5:20, “Where sin abounded, grace did much more abound.”  We had our answer: abundant sin and abundant grace.

From time to time over the next year or so, I would return to Psalm 66 to be refreshed on its contents, to consider the larger context, and to ask whether I had missed anything.

Then one day I noticed something.

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The best time I ever had in the ministry

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The only reason that plane ride in the T-38 was so much fun is that I survived it, then looked back and remembered it with pleasure. Columbus AFB Wing Commander Chet Griffin arranged it. He said, “You’ve been ministering to these student pilots all these years; you ought to learn something of what they go through.”  As I say, it was great fun–in retrospect. (smiley-face goes here)

The 1977 trip to Singapore (via Chicago, Anchorage, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Bangkok, and finally my destination) and back was part of a long, long process of drawing an evangelistic comic book for the missionaries there, then coloring each of the many pages (with acrylic and tiny brushes!), and printing up 10,000 copies for their use. It was a job! And fun mainly in retrospect because we did it, it was most unusual, we would never be doing anything like that again, and we survived it.

That deacons meeting that went on for four hours with me as its subject (“to fire or not to fire, that is the question”) was exhilarating only in looking back after we saw how God used it and what He did with it. At the time, no fun.

In fact, I have an admission to make.

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Asleep in Jesus later; Awake and alert in Him right now!

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“When I awake, I am still with Thee” (Psalm 139:18).

There is a time for sleeping in Christ, which is one way Scripture describes the death of the Lord’s children.

I love Psalm 17:15, and find myself tying it closely with the verse above, Psalm 139:18.  So it all reads:

“As for me, I shall behold Thy face in righteousness; I will be satisfied with Thy likeness when I awake.” 

And then, “When I awake, I am still with Thee.”

One day, at a time set by the Lord Himself, I will go to sleep here and awaken on the other side. When that happens, I will be “still with Thee” and will “behold (His) face in righteousness.”

Whatever that is like, “I will be satisfied.”

Whatever that is like, I will be more awake there than I’ve ever been here.

Whatever that is like, I shall “know even as also I am known” (I Corinthians 13:12).

Whatever that is like, we know that while “it does not (yet) appear what we shall be….we shall be like Jesus, for we shall see Him as He is” (I John 3:3).

Scripture calls it sleep, I think, for two reasons: 1) That’s how it appears to us, and 2) it’s possible that some time transpires between our “going to sleep” here and “awakening” over there.  God knows, He’s in charge, and whatever He does is fine.

Why do we fear death?  I think it’s the unknown part. We shrink from things we know little about.

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Getting tough at the funeral

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“And we urge you, brethren, admonish the unruly, encourage the fainthearted, help the weak, be patient with all men” (I Thessalonians 5:14).

At the funeral, as at every other place where you rise to serve the Lord, preacher, tell the truth.

The gospel truth.

You have an obligation to comfort the bereaved, true. But you have an even greater duty to obey your Lord by declaring the whole counsel of God.

The Holy Spirit can guide you on how to do both; the flesh doesn’t have a clue and will lean to one extreme or the other.

My pastor friend R. J. did something rather bold the other day.

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Slow Down Your Sermon: What the preacher can learn from a motorcycle

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I’m on the interstate, solidly in the middle of the pack of motorists, holding my own at a comfortable 65 or 70 or even slightly more. Suddenly, from out of nowhere–maybe he dropped down out of the sky!–a motorcycle is all over me, appearing suddenly on my back bumper or just to my left elbow, then swerving around. The noise is horrendous and completely unexpected. He zooms past like he was jet-propelled and disappears into the distance.

I am unnerved.

Honestly, I feel like taking the next exit and finding a rest area where I can pause and get hold of myself, breathe deeply, and regain my composure.

That was frightening.

The cyclist has no idea what he did. Or maybe he did.

Common sense says the fellow under that helmet drives a car from time to time and surely has had the experience of having a daredevil on a Harley materialize out of nowhere and scare the blazes out of him.  Or maybe not.

If he had, he’d never do that to anyone else.

At this point I have a private conversation with the unknown cyclist. No, I do not curse him (really).  In fact, I’m far more likely to send up a prayer that the Lord will “protect that fool and protect everyone he comes into contact with; he’s an accident looking to happen.”

Then, I wish I could tell him one huge thing….

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The mess we make because we like our doctrine soft and easy

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“This is a hard saying. Who can hear it?” (John 6:60)

A fellow arguing for a cult religion scoffed at my statement that some doctrines are difficult and sincere Christian people differ on their interpretation.

“If it’s difficult,” he said, almost yelling with delight, “it’s because you are getting it wrong!”

I knew enough about his religion to be wary of anything he said.  The leaders of that religion grew tired of having to explain away the obvious teachings of Scripture and so they came out with their own translation.  Bible scholars scoff at what they did and Greek/Hebrew linguists assure us that no one involved in that translation–if we want to call it that–was trained and capable of such a mammoth task.

What these people did with Scripture in order to get it simple and make it say what they wanted was akin to a fellow trying to close an overstuffed suitcase by taking the scissors to anything that didn’t fit and snipping it off.  At the end, it closed easily. The only problem is that everything inside was injured.

Beware of anyone telling you there is nothing in the Bible difficult to understand.  (In the same way you want to be wary of those who say nothing in it is understandable. Both are erroneous.)

Something inside us wants doctrines to be simple.

Those people will reject doctrines that are difficult to get their minds around.

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The abundant part of the “abundant life.” Not what we expected.

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In 1989, when Margaret and I were dealing with a church situation where the Lord had sent us three years earlier, we found comfort in the 66th Psalm.  Specifically a few verses in the center jumped out at us as we read it on our back porch one evening….

“For you, O God, tested us; You refined us like silver; You brought us into prison and laid burdens on our backs. You let men ride over our heads; We went through fire and water, but you brought us to a place of abundance” (Ps. 66:10-12).

As we were praying a few minutes later, Margaret surprised me with these words: “And Lord, in that scripture you said you were bringing us to a place of abundance.  So, we’re going to claim that right now. Whatever it is and wherever it is. Whether it’s here in this church or somewhere else, we believe you are going to lead us to a place of abundance.”

I had not seen that as a promise. But once my spiritually-sensitive bride spotted it, it made a world of sense.

Thereafter, when we prayed, we frequently thanked the Lord for HIs promise to lead us to a place of abundance.

Not long after, things went south.

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