mgpcpastor's blog

Here are three essays from last week that I found beneficial as a pastor and a person.

Let’s start with a post from Jon Acuff on the Stuff Christians Like site entitled “Pretending We Have Boxes”.
It’s part reflection on the Tiger Wood’s downfall and part personal application. Acuff remembers a time in his own life when his ‘public’ persona and personal actions and attitudes did not match up. We’ve all been there.
The notion that we can be one person in one place and another person in other situations will lead to downfall.
From the article:
“But what I do want to address is what my friends keep asking me about Tiger Woods:
“How could he have done that?”
“How could he have been so stupid to leave hundreds of text messages and voice mails?”
“Did he think he was going to be the first celebrity who didn’t get caught? Bill Clinton, David Letterman, Frank Gifford, Kobe Bryant, they all got caught. Was he expecting to break the mold and never get found out? What was he thinking?”
What kills me about those questions is the idea that in the middle of an affair you could make smart decisions. As if, in the middle of cheating on someone you would have the intelligence and rational to make wise decisions about how many text messages you should send. As if only part of you would be broken and wounded, but the rest of your life would continue moving along perfectly.
But sin doesn’t work that way.
There’s no such thing as a “smart affair.” Or a smart burglary or a smart lie. Every decision made in that moment is dumb on some level. I think it’s because sin is like a drop of poison in water. You wouldn’t put a little cyanide in a water bottle and then say, “Only the top is poisoned, I’ll drink from the bottom.” Not at all. You’d put the bottle down because the whole thing was poisoned.”

Tim Keller has a post on the Redeemer Church Planting Center blog that asks: “How Do You Respond To Criticism”.
As someone who receives a substantial amount of criticism, Keller writes that: “The biggest danger of receiving criticism is not to your reputation, but to your heart. You feel the injustice of it and feel sorry for yourself, and it tempts you to despise not only the critic, but the entire group of people from which they come. “Those people…” you mutter under your breath. All this can make you prouder over time.”
Keller provides some basic, simple questions that we need to ask ourselves when criticised in order to keep our hearts from pride, arrogance and hardness.

Finally Carl Truman writes “Fools Rush In Where Monkeys Fear To Tread” on the Reformation 21 site. This essay deals with the temptation to self-promotion and pride and the way that the internet and blog sites can feed these sins in the lives of Christians.
As usual, the essay is pointed and hits its target. Truman does not put himself above all this: “I am a man divided against myself; I want to be the centre of attention because I am a fallen human being; I want others to know that I am the special one; and as long as the new me and the old me are bound together in a single, somatic unity, I will forever be at war with myself. What I can do, however, is have the decency to be ashamed of my drive to self-promotion and my craving for attention and for flattery and not indulge it as if it were actually a virtue or a true guide to my real merit. I am not humble, so I should not pretend to be so but rather confess it in private, seeking forgiveness and sanctification.”
In pastoral life it is easy to put oneself at the center of every story and to be either the hero or the figure deserving sympathy in each one.

So, as a Christian and a pastor, there is no place for a life where public perception and private behaviour do not harmonise; there is no place for a life where we isolate ourselves from criticism or challenge by marginalising or ignoring those who call us to account; there is no place for a life that seeks to promote and enlarge its own reputation in the eyes of others.
But for every Christian there is a Saviour who died for our transgressions, a heavenly Father who will discipline our lives away from such sins and a Holy Spirit who enables us to turn away from such behaviour and become more like Jesus.
We don’t have to publish our tales or opinions on the internet to fall into this trap.