I believe that the church needs most right now for pastors to address specific sins in the congregation through their preaching.
Here's what I've noticed: we love to talk about sins like homosexuality and abortion because there is likely no one in our churches that really deals with either of those things. So we can rant and rave all day long about the evils of these specific sins because no one goes home afterward and starts to put together a clandestine group to get the pastor fired.
We can also talk very high and mightily about 'sin' in general. We can discuss holy living as an amorphous entity. We can talk about the need of the church to get involved in missions and evangelism (a favorite soapbox of mine), but all the while, what people really need is to come face to face with that ugly sin that they hide and walk away humbled and repentant.
Who does this today? Now I can point to a whole bunch of prophets and apostles who did this very thing, but that's not what I see in church pulpits today. On the contrary:
All the flabby moral platitudes that roll off the tongues of hired servants in the pulpits — those vague calls to godliness devoid of concrete guidelines of daily behavior - receive the automatic “amens” from the congregations that do the hiring. Let the preaching become specific, and “the preacher is meddling in areas that he knows nothing about.” What the congregations pay for is a weekly affirmation of their status quo. Of course, their status quo may be somebody else’s revolution, so they may regard themselves as being very, very daring, very hip, very chic, the vanguard of change; always, however, their status quo is left undisturbed. That is what they pay for, just as the people of Israel paid for it in the eighth century, B.C. ( Ezek. 14). The result for the people of Israel was captivity. (Gary North, Introduction to Christian Economics, pg. 3)I think there are two main reasons why preachers don't touch this with a 10-foot pole: 1) when you tell someone that they are sinning heinously against God where they thought they were not, you make them very angry - angry enough to want you gone, and 2) when you start confronting someone else's specific sins, you have to publicly admit to your own or else you become a hypocrite, with 'woes' pronounced against you (Matthew 23:4, 25-28).
What is needed to get us back on track? Right up front we are going to have to realize that we are all sinners, and we all sin in different ways. What would you rather do, go on sinning placing yourself in danger of God's wrath, or get it out in the open and start to be delivered from it? What would you rather your pastor do, participate in some secret sin that you know nothing about, or humbly confess his sins in public as well and start to be delivered from it? There is no victory in darkness when it comes to sin. Light is needed to bring freedom from the darkness.
These thoughts are terrifying and hopeful. I would love to be transparent about my own sinfulness. I know that I need to preach honestly about sin in our congregation. I know the good - the revival even - that would accompany such actions. But I also know that things will get really ugly. The blood-chilling challenge to pastors is whether or not they will put it all on the line to do the right thing. I'll say this, though: I'm not starting this week...
1 comments:
I wish pastors would be so bold as to lovingly and biblically rebuke sins that hit home in their own congregation. But it's not just up to the pastor; it has to start with each believer holding their fellow church members accountable. I can honestly say that I've never had someone confront my own sin in an effort to lead me to repentance and sanctification. Even though it would be hard to hear and even harder not to let my pride justify my sin, I long for someone to love me enough to care that much about my soul. In the meantime, I'm working on being that kind of a Christian friend to others.
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