Ministers (and Old Testament Characters) Are People Too

I find it interesting that certain themes seem to impress themselves on me during a given week. Sometimes I think that maybe I'm starting to editorialize my life, organizing thoughts and concepts long after I've left the workplace, and that's a little scary. But the phenomenon has occurred yet again, and it's only Wednesday.

The theme for this week seems to be how great God is, how weak we are, and how He uses us in spite of ourselves. (I'm not claiming that the theme for the week is necessarily a new thought that has never occurred to anyone else, but usually I'm struck by the fact that even though I've heard these ideas tossed about many times, I'm suddenly aware of their profundity.)

The theme first emerged Sunday morning during the sermon, when my pastor was preaching from the Canons of Dort, Head 1, Articles 9-10 and 2 Timothy 1:1-12. The subject of these articles is unconditional election, in which we confess that there have been no conditions met by us in our salvation; our salvation is fully a result of God's activity, based on the work and merits of Christ, determined before the foundation of the world. God has purposed to display His grace and unconditional love to us in our salvation.

Our pastor made the point that all of us, regardless of what we may have done or who we are, stand equally in need of God's grace, and he pointed to the example of Paul and Timothy. Paul, of course, before becoming a Christian, had persecuted the church and purposed to destroy those who confessed the name of Christ. Not such a great past. Timothy had been raised in a Christian home by his mother and grandmother, had obviously confessed his faith as a young man, and was the kind of son we all would like to have. And yet Paul writes in 2 Timothy 1:9, "[God] saved us and called us to a holy calling, not because of our works but because of his own purpose and grace." Interestingly, despite the huge differences in their pasts, Paul places himself and Timothy in the same category, because even though Timothy had no real wretched life experiences worthy of a modern-day testimony (and Paul had), they were both sinners who, without God's saving grace, were without hope. I had never thought of the two of them that way, but it was an interesting way to understand them.

The theme recurred Monday morning during team devotions, where we are reading and discussing the book 12 Steps for the Recovering Pharisee (like me) by John Fischer. It has been an interesting read, and it has forced all of us to look at ourselves, recognize that we tend to be self-righteous and judgmental when we hold others up to an extrabiblical standard, and acknowledge that we must rest in God's love and grace rather than in our own hypocrisy. Monday we were discussing the eighth step: "We are looking closely at the lives of famous men and women of the Bible who turned out to be ordinary sinners like us."

Fischer's childhood church sounds much like mine. Sunday school training involved flannelgraphs and stories about the heroes of the Bible, which emphasized moral virtue and imitation. As Fischer became an adult, he began to realize that David was an adulterer, Jacob was a liar, and Samson was a womanizer. He felt that he had been taught half-truths as the reality of it all crushed the idealism of his youth. Our own discussion veered off course as the question was raised: Which of these flawed characters did we admire?

My response was that we were not to admire these people. Sinful people were what they were, and we couldn't expect any more from them than weakness. We were to be looking to and admiring the God who could use these weak, flawed people to accomplish His redemptive purposes. In spite of all of their failures, He used them to carry out His eternal purposes. We aren't to look at them and think about how great (or not) they were, but rather how great our God is. One person admitted that as the child of a pastor, he had sometimes almost envied those who had stories of being redeemed from a reckless past; he had no such tales of horror and redemption. And that's where I shared the example of Paul and Timothy that I had heard the day before (and at the same time put in a plug for catechetical preaching and confessions like the Canons), reminding us all that we are hopelessly lost without God's mercy and grace.

And so today I came to see a touch of pharisaism in myself during a lighthearted conversation with one of my favorite minister friends. We had been lightheartedly discussing the social habits and characteristics of young ministers, in particular, when he reminded me of an important truth. I know that ministers are sinful people, like me, and yet I'd like to think that when they get a paper cut, they don't say naughty words (like I do). I'd like to think that they don't struggle with vanity and competitiveness (like I do). And I'd really like to think that ministers don't get impatient and yell at their kids (like I do). And probably most of them have a better handle on these problems than I do. But I saw a kind of reverse pharisaism in myself, where I want to hold certain people in certain positions to higher standards than I hold myself, and this certainly is nothing new. People have been doing this to ministers, Christian school teachers, and leaders in the church as long as there has been church. And the obvious is that this is unfair, especially when we hold others to extrabiblical standards. But the most compelling truth of all that this friend shared with me is that (I'm paraphrasing here) ministers, like all of us, are simply weak vessels that God uses to declare His glorious truth.

So the theme of the week is how our almighty, powerful God can and does take the rawest of raw materials--people like us--to display His grace, mercy, and truth. And that, as my friend said, is truly amazing.