It never fails.

We’ll write something about pastors who are under pressure from wrong-headed church members and how they should stand tall and be strong, and someone will respond with a “Yes, but” scenario.

Their preacher is a terror, they’ll say. Or an embezzler or adulterer or a bully of the first rank.  Several have told me how their pastors have serious illnesses which have incapacitated them for ministry, but who insist on clinging to their pastoral jobs (along with the paycheck) to the detriment of the church. “People are leaving in droves,” they say.

What to do?

You get the impression that people think this is a new thing. Or that being as pro-pastor as I am (unabashedly!), I do not see that some preachers should be sent to pasture and immediately. (My cartooning mind wants to make a remark about sending a pastor to pasture, but I think I’ll pass.)

Nothing about any of this is new.

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On my birthday last week, granddaughter Darilyn sent a message from her home in North Carolina. “I have gotten my drivers license today.”  I said, “For my birthday you sent me another worry?”

What I found out later was that the same week, Darilyn’s cousin (and our second granddaughter) Jessica had gotten her drivers license. The next Monday, our youngest granddaughter JoAnne got hers.

Yikes.

Only 12-year-old Jack is still unable to drive. The rest of our eight grands–Leah, Jessica, Grant, Abby, Erin, Darilyn, and JoAnne–are all qualified (by the state at least!) to slip behind the wheel of an automobile and drive it anywhere.

Nothing moves one’s prayer life to warp speed like seeing his child or grandchild pull away in the family automobile.  The prayer is usually a constant repetition of the same panicky words: “Oh, Lord, protect her!!”

It’s time for Grandpa Joe to put in writing what he would like to say to each of the grands, if we could sit down for a session on the subject of “your new drivers license.”  Here goes….

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“Without faith, it is impossible to please Him” (Hebrews 11:6). And then there is this: “And those who are in the flesh cannot please God” (Romans 8:8).

Faith is not natural to earthlings.

We want to see, to know, to be certain. We shy away from struggling with nebulous concepts such as belief and doubts, convictions and educated guesses and worrying about whether we have enough faith.

Carl Sagan, the famous astronomer of a generation ago, whose television program “Cosmos” riveted the nation, was firm and outspoken in his atheism. However, his numerous Christian friends witnessed to him and tried to reason with him.  One asked his wife, “Doesn’t Carl want to believe?” She answered, “No! He wants to know!”

Reading that many years ago, I remember thinking, “Of course he does. We all do. But God has not set things up that conveniently for us.” Scripture says, “Without faith, it is impossible to please God” and “We walk by faith, not by sight” (Hebrews 11:6 and 2 Corinthians 5:7).

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“The (shepherd) calls his own sheep by name, and leads them out” (John 10:3).

The evangelist had held a revival in my church one year earlier, just before I arrived as the new pastor, and it had gone well. Since we had been seminary classmates and the congregation appreciated his ministry, I invited him to return a year later for a repeat engagement.

He walked in and began calling people by their first names.

I was floored.

I said, “James, how many meetings have you been in since you were here last year?”  The answer was something like 36, as I recall.

I said, “Then how in the world can you remember the names of our members?”

“I work at it,” was all he said.  (Looking back, I wish I had not let him off so easily but insisted on learning what he did.)

His words stuck with me.  A few months later, I preached a revival in Edison, Georgia, in a congregation that ran 130 in the morning service.  By the end of the week, I was calling all the people–every person in the building–by their first names.

Pastor Gene Brock said, “I wish I had your ability with names. How do you do this?”

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“And she gave birth to her first-born son, and….laid HIm in a manger because there was no room for them in the inn” (Luke 2:7).

One reason God’s people have made so much of this verse, even to the point of inventing harsh innkeepers who slam doors in the faces of the young couple from Nazareth until they find a friendly face who apologetically gives them room in his stable, is that it so perfectly summarizes what the world has done to Jesus ever since: shunted Him off to the side and tried to ignore Him.

Of course, Scripture mentions no innkeepers, harsh or otherwise, and doesn’t even reference a stable. Only a manger, a feed-trough.

I said to a church in rural Alabama this weekend, “Of course, those of us who grew up on the farm know that stables are where you find feed-troughs! There might be one manger outside in the ‘lot,’ what some would call a corral, but the little family will not be seeking shelter in an open cattle pen. So, our vision of Jesus as being born inside a stable is probably exactly right.”

Ever since that time, the world has tried to keep up that practice, crowding out the Lord Jesus and giving Him tiny places in our world and our hearts.

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