Monthly Archives: October 2023

The most important person in the church office

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The receptionist–the one who greets the public–is in many ways your most important staffer.

She is the first person most people see when they walk in, the voice they talk with on the phone, and the only one a lot of outsiders will deal with from your church.

Pastor, she can make you or break you.

She can be a light to someone coming in from the dark, lift the spirits of a visitor who ran out of hope miles up the road, defrost the spirit of Jack Frost himself, and protect the beleaguered pastor who desperately needs an hour of study time without interruptions.

She can do all these things and more. But she can also run people off faster than Sunday’s lousy sermon or Wednesday night’s cold ham and peas.

Where does one find a receptionist sent from Heaven?

Answer: Heaven.

Ask God. He knows them all, has full resumes on each person on the planet, and runs the best placement service ever. Pray.

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How Christians insult Jesus

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Sally had been a teenager in a church I once pastored, and her parents were dear friends. Her father, a former Marine, is in Heaven now, and her mother, then in the care of Hospice, was having a little trouble coming to terms with her own impending departure.

I sent the mom a note by Sally, suggesting that she read it to her.

The note to her mother and my Facebook note said: “If we could interview a baby in the mother’s womb about to be born, we might find that he/she is frightened by what lies ahead. It’s about to leave the only world it has known–warm, soft, safe–and emerge into a strange unfamiliar world with people it doesn’t know, who all speak an unintelligible language. To the baby, it would be death. But to everyone else, it’s a birth. When you get to Heaven, you will look back and say, ‘I was afraid of THAT?!’”

Had there been room on Facebook, I would have added something more. So, two hours later, we tacked on the following:

The Apostle Paul literally taunts death. ‘O death, where is your sting? O grave, where is your victory?’ (I Corinthians 15:55) In college football, he would be flagged for showboating. Followers of Jesus Christ, you are not allowed to fear death. To do so insults the One who went to the cross and experienced the grave for you. Laugh at death. Like a honeybee that has lost its stinger, death still flies around scaring people, but it can’t do you any permanent damage.

For a Christian to fear death is to insult the Lord Jesus Christ.

I suppose the biblical word for this would be “blasphemy.” But since that word is used almost exclusively in theological realms and associated with falling from grace and incurring God’s wrath, and not a term we use in our everyday life, I’d just as soon not conjure up images of the Inquisition.

We are not talking about apostasy here. Just poor discipleship.

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10 bad things that happen when pastors commit adultery and 2 good ones.

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A minister falls into adultery and it becomes public knowledge. This becomes a sad, sad day for everyone who knows him.

And yes, I am aware it takes two people to commit this sin.  However, this blog is directed toward pastors and other church leaders, so the minister is the focus of our comments here.

“I think we all should consider this a wakeup call,” said a colleague of a friend who had fallen into sin and lost his ministry.  The other ministers nodded in agreement.

It can happen to any of us. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Will anyone tell you “otherwise”? Oh yes.  He is called by various names such as Satan, the devil, Lucifer, that old serpent, and the slanderer.  Remember, friend–he’s not called the “accuser of the brethren” for nothing (Revelation 12:10).

Jesus called him a liar and the father of lies (John 8:44).

“Let him who thinks he stands take heed lest he fall” (I Corinthians 10:12).  Beware of feeling this sin or any other sin could not happen to you, friend.

“If Thou O Lord should mark iniquities, who would stand?” (Psalm 130:3)
You know that you are just as bad a sinner as the adulterer, don’t you?  If you do not, if you believe that your sins are of a nicer variety and deserve less severe treatment from God, you have more problems than we can deal with here.

If anyone should be above the law and able to come and go sexually as he pleases, it ought to be the king, right?

One king of Israel seems to have bought into that myth.

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When God calls you into His service, He wants you, not your imitation of someone else!

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Pastor, you have not been called by the Lord to be Abraham or Moses, David or Jeremiah. Not Joseph, Samuel, and not Elijah.

Nor did He call you to be David Jeremiah.

Not Charles Stanley, or Warren Wiersbe.  Not Mark Driscoll, Stephen Furtick, Andy Stanley, or Louie Giglio–and not their clone.

Speaking of Louie, he says, “You are not a reprint or a lithograph. You’re a one-of-a-kind, original creation of God.”

What a marvelous creative inventive (someone get Roget’s Thesaurus down and finish this list!) God we have.  Billions and billions of human beings, no two alike, each one an original! Each one known by Him, and each loved, with a unique place in His divine plan.

Mull on that a while.

God has called you to be you.

God has a place for you, a plan for you, and hope for you.  In order to fill that role and fulfil that purpose in the universe, you must be the “you” He created you to be.  And if you are not, something in the universe is never quite right.

Be yourself. That’s His plan.

It sounds so simple. But that, I submit, is what drives you to distraction.

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The streams which form my river of tears

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“Thou dost give them to drink of the river of Thy delights” (Psalm 36:8).

My friend told me she had read something I’d written and wept.  I asked what had prompted that. She replied, “It was just the Lord. They were good tears.”

That’s all she said.

I know the feeling.

Any tears I shed come in one of three situations.  I’m traveling down the highway talking to the Lord or going over a sermon and become so carried away with the joy of the Lord that the tears flow.

I’m on my knees with my face buried in a couch cushion, sometimes saying nothing, and I tear up.

Or, I’m at this laptop tapping out insights from God’s word and His promises and am overwhelmed by His goodness. (Such as at this moment.)

Men always want their wives to say why they’re crying. I quit that long ago when my wife Margaret had no answer. “I just am. I’m a woman and sometimes we cry.”  Basically, that was no answer, but it was all I was going to get.

Being a man, I want to know why I cry.

And I think I know.

My tears are made up of several components in the same way that the great Mississippi River which flows unendingly down that massive channel about 3 blocks below where I lived for 26 years is formed from various waters. The Father of All Rivers, aka the Big Muddy, receives input from the Allegheny and the Ohio, the Susquehanna and the Missouri, from streams and creeks and runoffs from fields far and near, an area stretching from western New York to eastern Montana. An incredible basin.

It’s not all just from one source.

Why are my tears flowing?  Well, they are….

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One thing we must never do in ministry

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A number of my friends are going to think this was written just for them.  They will be right.

They’ve just lost their ministry positions which had been their existence for the last year or many years.  They loved that church and delighted in serving Christ there.  And now, they’ve been cut loose and told their services are no longer needed. They are hurting as though a death had occurred.  They grieve, they fear for their future, and they deal with anger over how they were treated.

The termination of ministers is reaching the epidemic level.  And shows no signs of abating.

So, this is a word to ministry friends who have suddenly found themselves cut loose.  Flockless shepherds.  Ministers without portfolio.  Called by God, trained for the ministry, employed by a church, and then suddenly made redundant.  Pink-slipped.  Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

God bless you.  May He comfort you with His nearness. Hold your head up high.  No moping allowed (except in private, maybe on your back porch).

May He speak to you in your pain and minister to you through a few of His most faithful servants.  Those who have been there/done that will be of most comfort to you.

In one sense, this is a word to you five years ago.  Something we wish we could turn back the clock and say to you back then when things were going well.

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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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