But where my wife remains content with her husband, I see so many Christians who struggle to be content with their pastors. And why is this? Because all week long, these people are drinking from another cistern, to borrow a phrase from Proverbs (5:15). They are doing the equivalent of a wife who spends her week plastering her home with posters of movie stars and staring at them greedily. How can her husband hope to compete with those ridiculously good-looking guys? And many Christians today listen to their pastor on Sunday and then listen to fourteen sermons by fourteen pastors before the next Sunday comes around. And, more often than not, their own pastors' sermon pales in comparison. Little wonder that we see increased cases where small-time pastors find themselves simply copying the top dogs, plagiarizing the brilliance of other men. Haven't we almost driven them to this?
The fact is, God has put us in churches with less-than-perfect and often less-than-brilliant pastors. The fact that there are extraordinary preachers tells us that there must be vast numbers of perfectly ordinary pastors. This means that most of us have been blessed by God with a very ordinary kind of pastor, just as most of our wives have been blessed by very ordinary-looking husbands. These men, these ordinary pastors, are the ones to whom we owe our loyalty. They are the ones to whom Paul refers when he tells the church at Thessalonica "to respect those who labor among you and are over you in the Lord and admonish you, and to esteem them very highly in love because of their work." These are the men God has given to serve you and to labor as pastors before you. It is through these men that God means to specially bless you in that unique body called the local church.
Monday, September 14, 2009
Ordinary Pastors
Tim Challies:
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3 comments:
Great reminder Zach. Thanks.
I thank God for my pastor Bob Hapgood. Small town, small church and faithful man.
Dan Phillips made a similar point at Team Pyro about "paper pastors."
http://teampyro.blogspot.com/2009/04/porn-and-paper-pastors.html
Always a good thing to keep in mind, especially when there is so much good teaching available on line.
I also think it is a good idea to raise awareness about this, but I don't think we should throw the baby out with the bathwater. I mean, how far do we take this? Does it mean that I should not read books by Driscoll or Piper or Keller (or even Spurgeon or Edwards) because they are pastors?
I believe we can learn a lot from these men and I think we should seek to know the gospel as well as we can. Certainly a primary source of our teaching should come from our home preacher, but if I choose to spend my drive time listening to sermons rather than the Bob and Tom Show, I don't feel that is time wasted.
On a similar note, perhaps we should also stop listening to the likes of Bob Kauflin, Mutemath, or U2 because they are musically superior to what I hear in my church and I will somehow see my church's worship team as second rate?
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