daily java

Daily Java:

“The words of a priest’s lips should preserve knowledge of God, and people should go to him for instruction, for the priest is the messenger of the Lord of Heaven’s Armies. But you priests have left God’s paths. Your instructions have caused many to stumble into sin.  (Malachi 2:7-8)

Being a pastor is one of the hardest jobs you can imagine. With most jobs, you deal with the subject matter and maybe interacting with people, doing things that may be important on one level.

But as a pastor, you deal with people on a different level. You deal with the hearts and minds and souls of people. You help them to determine their ultimate destination. You teach and you guide and much of what you do and how you act will result in their either accepting the gospel message of Jesus or rejecting it, of accepting God or rejecting him.

The old joke of a pastor only working one day a week really kind of grates on most pastors. A pastor, a teacher, dos things no one ever knows. And one thing for sure, if he does not study and prepare for his “one day a week,” it will show.

Preserving knowledge and transmitting that knowledge to others is one of the biggest jobs a pastor has. He has to be one that his people know will tell them what they need to hear. And they will know that if he does not know, he will tell them that too. There are some things you cannot know, and he will not pretend to knowledge he does not have or cannot get.

He will keep the paths to God open in his own life so he can share those paths with others. That is not to say he will be perfect, because no one is. But he has to do his best to be godly and above board in all he does.

The writer James said: Dear brothers and sisters, not many of you should become teachers in the church, for we who teach will be judged more strictly (3:1). I will admit that I enjoy the teaching, the preaching parts that come from being a pastor. And it is that which attracts so many young men. But James said remember the responsibility that comes with it. God is going to look at his pastors differently than he does those they guide.

In 1 Timothy 1:7, the apostle Paul wrote: They want to be known as teachers of the law of Moses, but they don’t know what they are talking about, even though they speak so confidently.

There is nothing worse than a pastor or teacher who only does what he does out of greed, either for attention or for profit.

Hard stuff for a pastor to read.

daily java

Daily Java:

And in the church God has appointed first of all apostles, second prophets, third teachers, then workers of miracles, also those having gifts of healing, those able to help others, those with gifts of administration, and those speaking in different kinds of tongues. (1 Corinthians 12:28)

Christian colleges and the like are responsible for my education. I appreciate them. I guess the only problem is that they were all from a radically different denominational group that the one in which I am today. The perspectives of my education and the place where I am with God today are poles apart.

It is an odd thing overcoming your educational bias. You are taught one thing by godly men and then you learn something better. But the men who taught you are still godly men, just with a different perspective. It does not make them better or worse than you, just different.

That is the beauty of the Christian faith. We can be different. That group was aggressively anti-Pentecostal. That was due somewhat to ignorance, as the Lord had not baptized them in his Spirit.

But I know for a fact that those men had the Spirit of God in them, even though they would have felt me to be a heretic today. And the sad thing is, they would have and many do.

Their teaching, however, set me on a course in life as a lover of knowledge. I love to learn things and I think I have a good grounding of the word of God, both linguistic and philosophical. If there is anything the teaching of a legalistic institution can give you, it is a definitive knowledge of the word of God.

I find as I get older, the knowledge I received from that schooling has been better, sheer knowledge wise, than any other I have seen from almost any other denomination. It was word heavy, memorization heavy, very comprehensive.

When we graduated from that time of study, we knew our Bible, we could quote it backwards and forwards. We were walking, talking, living preacher machines. We didn’t know social graces or pastoral ability, or anything else. But by the Lord above, we could preach and we knew what we were saying, at least in the context of that denomination.

We could debate and argue and 90% of the time could talk anybody, no matter their denomination or belief into a corner. Our sheer knowledge was amazing. Perspective was lacking, but a lot of that was that we were young.

In the ensuing years, I have had the chance to put it all in perspective, which is really what education is for. It is designed to give you raw materials from which you make your life philosophy. And the raw materials they gave were great amounts of raw, intensive Bible study.

Yes, it was slanted. All study is slanted because people teach it. You cannot help teaching your ideas and opinions. You are human. But other people can take your ideas and opinions and from their own maturity distill the truth.

I thank God for my teachers and my education.