Lord, deliver us from helpful, meddlesome friends!

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My journal tells of a revival in our church in 1992.  After the final service, my wife and I took the guest evangelist and singer to lunch.  And there they proceeded to unload.

My journal…

At lunch for one solid hour, they filled me with their suggestions for improving our work here.  Finally Margaret intervened and said, “You guys are overdoing it.” I was about to overdose on their helpfulness!

I don’t recall asking for their input.  And to be sure, they presumed upon the relationship.  I’m confident they felt they were serving the Lord well by suggesting ways we could get this big church off the ground and into the air.  And because they have been in full-time itinerant ministry for decades and have seen it all, they have definite opinions and convictions on what works and what doesn’t.  And they are friends, although not with a lengthy history. Anyway…

My well-meaning friends had no clue the forces I was contending with inside the membership of the church.  But, they wanted to help me, so I listened.  And praise the Lord for a good wife.  She spoke up and told them that was enough already. Smiley-face goes here.

She was right.  There is such a thing as overdoing a good thing.

These days, in retirement, I’m in a different church almost every Sunday.  I preach in big ones and little ones, taking them as the invitations arrive.  And frequently after ministering in a church, I do have thoughts on what the pastor can do to serve the Lord better there.

But unless I’m asked, I keep it to myself.

These days–

Perhaps one time out of ten, the host pastor will say to me toward the end of our meeting, “So, Brother Joe, I’d welcome any suggestions you have on what I should be doing.”  And this is the honest truth, the pastor who says that almost never needs anything from me.  The very fact that he is looking for ways to do a better job speaks volumes about that pastor and his leadership.

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What wears pastors down, ages them prematurely, and uses them up too quickly

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Betrayals.  Disappointments.  Constant conflict.  Second-guessing everything you say.  Griping.

This week a pastor texted to say while he was out of town the deacons met to revise the bylaws and make the preacher answerable to them.  They conspired not to tell the pastor about this until he returned home. But someone thought he ought to know, called him, and now it’s all hit the fan.  The chairman of deacons is saying if the pastor pushes his opposition to this it will split the church and will be his fault.

You feel like banging your head against the wall. How crazy is this!

It wears preachers down.

Most church members have no clue that the constant murmuring (the KJV’s favorite word for it) among the flock is offensive to the Heavenly Father, upsetting to the good people in the congregation, and burdensome to the minister.

Moses is a great case study for us.  For forty years–think of it!–he gave faithful leadership to the people of God who, far from appreciating him, were relentless in their eroding, grinding, burdening undermining, questioning, and outright opposition.  Scripture gives a reason for this:  Throughout the flock was a group of strangers, aliens to the faith.

These people were the root of the problem.

Scripture says when they left Egypt’s slavery, a mixed multitude went up with them (Exodus 12:38).  Some translations call them “rabble.” Since the Hebrews were not the only slaves of Pharaoh, when God threw off the shackles it must have been like a massive jailbreak.  All who wanted to leave Egypt joined the Exodus.  And since this Moses fellow seemed to have a glorious destination in mind, with no other place to go, the “mixed multitude” decided to accompany the Hebrews.

This bunch became the source of a thousand headaches for Moses.

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Wasting time in church

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“When you come to appear before Me, who requires of you this trampling of My courts? Bring your worthless offerings no longer, incense is an abomination to Me…. I cannot endure iniquity and the solemn assembly.  I hate your….appointed feasts; they have become a burden to me….  Even when you multiply prayers, I will not listen.”  (Isaiah 1)

Often I pray at the beginning of a sermon, “Lord, help me not to squander Thy blessing, waste their time, or miss my opportunity!”

Let’s talk about the second of these: Wasting time.

We do a lot of that in church, I suspect.

We waste time in church every time we find ourselves:

–praising the God whose word you are flouting, pretending to adore the God whose will is the last thing you want.

–voicing hymns which express truths you do not believe and adoration you do not share.

–bringing pitiful offerings in place of something meaningful.  Or even worse, bringing an offering while griping about pastors preaching on money.

–saying prayers by rote when your mind is a thousand miles away.

Our Lord said, “This people honors me with their mouths, but their hearts are far from me” (Matthew 15:8).

Such worshipers are wasting their time.

If we’re not going to do what God tells us, then a worship service in which we say all the right things and act like we believe Him and believe in Him, is an exercise in folly.  Jesus asked such time-wasters, “Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord’ and do not do the things I tell you?” (Luke 6:46).  Why indeed?

“Wash yourselves,” says the Lord in the Isaiah chapter 1 passage.  “Make yourselves clean.  Remove the evil of your deeds from My sight.  Cease to do evil.  Learn to do good. Seek justice.  Reprove the ruthless.  Defend the orphan. Plead for the widow.”  Only then would their worship be genuine.

So many ways to waste time in church

When I asked some friends what they perceive as the biggest time-wasters in church, the consensus was that making announcements already printed in the bulletin ranks at the top of the list.

I’m not sure I agree.

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This fellow found a contradiction in Scripture and thinks he can now disprove God

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

I was reading comments on a friend’s Facebook page below something she had written about the Bible’s authenticity.

I suppose her critic was a friend, because after each of his statements, each one shallow and several insulting, she patiently responded with kindness and reason.

But nothing worked.

When one is determined not to believe, no amount of truth or reason or logic can penetrate the protective armor of alibis, arguments, excuses, and slander in which he clothes himself.

What was his “contradiction”?

He said, “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 found myself wondering if this guy was serious.  Any 10-year-old 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 on His team, He wouldn’t have much.  HIs ignorance is shallow and whatever faith he could muster would be 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 a hundred times more compassionate than the standard used in pagan countries–and to this day, in some backward nations–that went like this: a life for an eye; a limb for a tooth.

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What causes God to laugh

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“But Thou, O Lord, dost laugh at them; Thou dost scoff at all the nations” (Psalm 59:8).

Was it Erma Bombeck who once said, “Know how to make God laugh? Tell Him your plans.”

Or was that Joan Rivers?

Anyway.  It’s right on the mark.

The writer for Our Daily Bread tells this:  I was washing my car one evening as the sun was preparing to kiss the earth goodnight.  Glancing up, I impulsively pointed the hose at it as if to extinguish its flames.  The absurdity of my action hit me, and I laughed.

I get a kick out of seeing how prophecy experts bend over backward trying to locate the United States–as well as whatever country happens to be giving us headaches at the moment–in Scripture.  As though our moment in history is so huge and our place in God’s plan so essential, how dare anyone suggest He could have planned the grand sweep of history without our being given a starring role.

As if.

Isaiah 40 has a good word on this.

Behold, the nations are like a drop from a bucket, and are regarded as a speck of dust on the scales;  Behold, He lifts up the islands like fine dust.  Even Lebanon is not enough to burn, nor its beasts enough for a burnt offering.  All the nations are as nothing before Him; they are regarded by Him as less than nothing and meaningless. (40:15-17).

How clear is that?

Once while prayer-walking the United Nations in New York City, I was struck by two tidal waves rushing by in opposite directions. On the one hand, a common citizen like myself stands in awe of that magnificent place.  Leaders from all across the world come there, I think to myself, and they hammer out the huge problems of this day.  Surely, if we would pray for peace, we must intercede for all who work in this place.

And on the other hand…

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How to grow a small church

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“It doesn’t matter to the Lord whether He saves by the few or by the many” (I Samuel 14:6).

Depending on a number of factors, growing a small church is one of the more do-able things pastors can achieve.

Those variable factors include…

–the health of the church.  Now, you don’t want a sick church to grow; you want it to get well first. In an early pastorate, I told the congregation, “There’s a good reason no one is joining this church.  I wouldn’t join it either!” Believe it or not, those words were inspired and they received them well, and repented. (I explained that there was a bad spirit in the membership, people were engaging in idle gossip, and the love of God was missing.  When we extended the invitation, the altar was filled with God’s people praying. We began to have a genuine revival that day.)

–the attitude of the congregation. If the people are satisfied with the status quo, they would not welcome newcomers.  I’ve known a few Sunday School classes composed of long-time best friends who felt imposed on by visitors and offended by new members.  No one wants to go where they’re not wanted.

–the location of the church campus.  A church situated five miles down an isolated road, at the end of the dead end trail–I’m thinking of one in particular!–can almost certainly forget about growing.

The great thing about pastoring a healthy, small church is you can make a big difference in a hurry.

My seminary pastorate had run 40 in attendance for many years. The day the little congregation voted to call me as pastor, I overheard a man saying to another, “This little church is doing all it’s ever going to do.”  I was determined to prove him wrong.

Within one month, we hit 65 in attendance.

What had happened is this…

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The best thing you’ll ever do for yourself

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I’m remembering the time I bumped into Jeff Ingram in the hotel breakfast area. The previous evening, I had spoken at a local church while Jeff had led a conference for Sunday School directors in a neighboring community.

Jeff said, “I had 14 directors in my conference. It was great.”

I have never worked for Jeff’s employer–the Louisiana Baptist Convention with headquarters in Alexandria, Louisiana–but I knew what he is experiencing.

Without asking him, I can tell you the high point of his day.

Jeff is sitting in his office and the phone rings. A pastor or church staffer or lay leader from somewhere across this state is on the line.

“I need help,” he says. Jeff’s heart races. “Great,” he thinks to himself. “Someone needs me.”

What he says is, “Well, I’ll be happy to do anything I can for you.”

If the caller has a problem of untrained leaders or an anemic organization that needs a shot in the arm or his Sunday School is in disarray and he is desperate for assistance, all the juices start flowing in Jeff Ingram’s veins.

This is great.

This is what a denominational worker lives for. (He may even quote the Esther verse to himself : “I’ve come to the kingdom for such a time as this.”)

This is why he’s there.

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Pastor, what makes your sermon Christian?

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“Then Philip went down to the city of Samaria and preached Christ to them…. Then Philip opened his mouth, and beginning at this Scripture, preached Jesus to him…” (Acts 8:5,35).

Two sermons stand out in my mind as possibly the worst I have ever heard.

(And to those who ask about the worst sermons I personally have ever preached, there have been so many, it’s hard to choose!)

One sermon was interesting and easy to follow.  The other was a self-centered rant I found completely offensive.

The first was delivered by an interim pastor, a professor at the local Christian college. The subject was friendship.

The second was delivered by a young celebrity-type pastor who started that church eight years previously and it now ran in the thousands.  We were at one of their multiple locations watching him on a large screen. His subject? I’ve long forgotten.

Both sermons were helpful in some ways. Neither was biblical.  Both were delivered by gifted communicators; neither mentioned Jesus.  Neither message had even a passing acquaintance with the gospel.

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There are reasons not to believe. And some are pretty good.

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“Now, faith is the substance of things hoped for; the evidence of things not seen…. By faith we understand….” (Hebrews 11:1ff)

There are good reasons not to believe in God, not to believe in Jesus, and not to believe in Holy Scripture.

A wise servant of the Lord will want to learn what they are and why people hold on to them. In doing so, he will better understand his own belief and will be able to respond to the questions/attacks of unbelievers.

This is far more important than the typical Christian realizes.

We cannot effectively counter the resistance of the unbeliever–whether he/she is a seeker, an agnostic, skeptic, atheist, or full bore antagonist–until we learn why they reject the heart of the message of the Christian faith.

Faith.  It starts with this and perhaps ends there also.

The very nature of faith means while there are good reasons to believe, there are also reasons not to believe.

The theist–one who believes in God–decides the reasons “for” God  are greater than those against Him.  The atheist–one who does not believe in God–attaches greater weight to the reasons on the negative side of the balance sheet.

To the Christian who says there are no reasons for not believing in God, that only a fool would say otherwise, I suggest you may want to become re-acquainted with the concept of faith.  Faith demands that some questions remain open and some evidence is missing.  It’s like “hope” in Romans 8:24. “Hope that is seen is not hope. For why does one still hope for what he sees?”

Question: But doesn’t the Bible say “the fool has said in his heart there is no God”? Yes, in Psalm 14:1.  But it does not say that everyone saying that is a fool. Those are two separate things altogether. A fool may eat chocolate cake, but everyone eating chocolate cake is not a fool.

Okay now…

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The abrasive Christian

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“The Lord’s bond-servant must not be quarrelsome, but be kind to all, able to teach, patient when wronged, with gentleness correcting those who are in opposition, if perhaps God may grant them repentance, leading to the knowledge of the truth…” (Second Timothy 2:24-25)

In Lynne Olson’s book Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America’s Fight Over World War II, 1939-1941, she has this interesting depiction of Harold Ickes, a member of FDR’s cabinet during the Second World War:

“According to T. H. Watkins, Ickes’ biographer, ‘a world without something in it to make him angry would have been incomprehensible to him.’ A disgrunted Republican senator who had been the target of one of Ickes’ verbal assaults called him ‘a common scold puffed up by high office.’ To one cabinet colleague, Ickes was ‘Washington’s tough guy.’ To another, he was the ‘president’s attack dog.’”

Olsen tells how an assistant secretary of state once refused to shake hands with Mr. Ickes and described him in his diary as “fundamentally, a louse.”

Having such an irritating person in high government office is one thing; having them in church leadership is quite another.

I’m remembering a woman had a reputation for being a strong witness for the Lord, even to the point of teaching classes on faith-sharing.

One day I called her office following up on something her boss had told me.

I was amazed by her reaction.

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