GospelDrivenLife

Pastoral Weakness and Power

What do you admire in a leader?  What do you think makes a great leader? It is an age old question and one faced by the early Christians.  

 This last week, as I prepared to preach from 2 Corinthians, I asked those questions.  And I was a bit surprised by where I landed.

2 Corinthians may be the longest treatise in the Bible on leadership.  This is not Paul the Christian; this is Paul the apostle.  He argues against a secular view of leadership.

You see, Paul's critics in Corinth considered the apostle a less than adequate leader.  They believed leadership was a matter of charisma, powerful presence, strength and an air of triumphant confidence. They believed that real leaders were men on top of their game, especially leaders who preached the resurrection.  

Paul was weak. He changed his mind. He was not eloquent.  He suffered a great deal.  Surely, they concluded, this is not much of a leader. Paul argues quite a different perspective.  Gospel preaching leaders look like the Gospel.  Their lives and experience preach without words what they proclaim with words. This is where my world got rumbled.

You see, for Paul, and especially for Paul, a leaders’ life and experience and public persona are a constant display of their weakness and limitations and neediness, and a constant display of the power of Christ alone could accomplish much with such a person.

Christian leaders are not "wise men" with "brilliant and creative ideas."  They are certainly not celebrities.  They are the dregs of the earth, the humble caboose of the train.  They are the prisoners led behind the conquering general (2 Cor 2:14-17).

Paul discloses the pattern of ministry -- power in weakness,  sharing in the suffering of Christ, so that his comfort may be known as well.  

He defines what it means to enter into the suffering of Christ. 2 Cor 1:8-10 says it means being brought into circumstances so beyond us, so far above our powers, that we experience the sentence of death in ourselves.  This, Paul says, is so that we will not trust in ourselves but in God who raises the dead and thus experience his resurrecting power.

In other words, God designs the circumstances of leaders to reveal (to them and to others) their deficiencies, their emptiness, their neediness -- so that the work that is done is clearly a work of God.

Sometimes this means deliverance, sometimes not.  

In 2 Cor 12:7-10 Paul tells of the affliction God sent to him, a thorn in the flesh. I am not sure what the thorn is but I know it was some form of chronic pain.  It was a day in and day out reminder to Paul that he was mere dust, flesh and blood.  Migraines? Insomnia? Arthritis? Melancholy?  Those would be modern examples.

This thorn was designed by God, once again, to make clear to Paul and to others that God's grace is sufficient (therefore, Paul is not and we are not). This is to make clear that God's power is perfected in weakness, not in our strengths, or overcoming our own weakness.   Shockingly, power is most seen, not in healings, not in triumphant living, but in weakness and limitations and being in over our heads. 

The reason for this is simple: the treasure of the Gospel is located in earthen vessels (clay pots, brown paper bags) so it is clear to all that the pot is just a pot and the treasure is the treasure.  God designed leadership in the church to display his great power and glory. His ability to use such weak and broken vessels for his purposes of grace is remarkable. The skill of the workman is seen in what he can do with such limited tools.

And he designs the circumstances of leaders to remind them of their weakness again and again, and to display his sufficiency again and again.

The opponents of Paul looked on his suffering and weakness and said, "What kind of a leader is that? What is he hiding?  Surely the favor of God cannot rest on a man who suffers this much?"  

Paul says, "How can a man be a preacher of the Gospel and not experience such suffering and weakness? God displays the Gospel through words spoken and the life lived.  God alone saves in Christ.  So God makes that clear through the public display of the weaknesses and afflictions of leaders."

Leadership is a mix of God's glory and human frailty. As sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor yet making many rich; as having nothing and yet possessing all things. (2 Cor 6:8-10)

In other words, God reenacts the Gospel in the experience of leaders so that the Gospel preached is matched by the life lived. "Always being given over to death for Jesus sake, so that the life of Christ may be seen in us" (4:8-10).

My surprise was this: I was more sympathetic with the opponents of Paul than with Paul.  I want strong and gifted and charismatic leaders.  I want to be a gifted leader, whose weaknesses and flaws are less obvious.  I want to lead with strength, not with weakness.  I want to fix my weaknesses, eliminate mistakes, hide my sin, or at least grow to the point where I am sufficient.  

In other words, and I paraphrase a friend, I want to get to the point in my life and circumstances where I am mature enough and gifted enough and skilled enough to no longer be desperately dependent on God. HA!  I want to preach the Gospel but not live by the Gospel.

And, I find around me people who want the same.  I find leadership idolatry.  I find people with very high expectations of leaders and people who get quite upset when leaders make mistakes and even more so when they do not see their own sin.  I understand.  What they desire is what I want and that forms an unholy co-dependency (co-idolatry is better to describe this).

It will not be so.  God seems to go overboard to make us as unimpressed with the heroes of the Bible as we can be.  Abraham -- the man of faith -- lied to protect his own skin.  Jacob, whom God blessed, was a cheat.  Moses, impulsive and easily angered, led the nation.  I could go on.

We come to the New Testament and we find Jesus with the twelve.  Now that is quite a contrast.  Peter, of course, is front and center, foot in mouth.  He is proud, self-confident, a selfish coward who denies his Lord.  Then, 15 years later, he denies him again in Antioch.  Hmmm, would I want as a leader a man who denied his Lord both before the crucifixion and did so again, years later, under pressure from his peers in Antioch? Yet he is an apostle.

I am not justifying sin.  Elders meet certain qualifications.  But read them again, that list is quite un-extraordinary.  And, given the background just noted, certainly not to be seen as a list of perfections. These are graces, marks of the work of the Spirit in their lives.

I think Bruce Winter (9 Marks interview) is correct.  We need to minimize our use of the word "leader" in our churches.  It is a good word, but is carries with it so much baggage, so many notions of power and skill and ability, that it corrupts our thinking.  I support his notion that the proper notion is people responsible to serve the church, to care for and love the people of God and the local church unto Christ. It is slave work, menial labor for the King.

 

Genetic inbreeding

This weekend I listened to an excellent message by Mark Driscoll of Mars Hill Church in Seattle.  This is a movement of the Spirit of God that is seeing Gospel transformation and church planting in the avant garde culture. Mars Hill WEb where you can download.

Mark's title: Limited Unlimited Atonement.  In it he rings all the right bells on the singular authority of Scripture.  Deep into the message he points out that theology develops as the first generation studies the text and reaches certain conclusions -- but the second generation studies the first generation and adds to them -- and so on.  Scripture fades into the background and soon we are studying our conclusions and ultimately end up weird. It is the old problem of genetic inbreeding -- after a few generations the end product is "not right."  He then presents that the elders of his church believe that they must go with what Scripture says in their entirety and not try to fit their theology into a system.  Thus, he shows all the Scriptures on both sides of the issue and says they are all correct. This is so right!!

One of the helpful points Driscoll makes is that Calvin was not at all a later Calvinist -- if you read his commentaries on specific passages you would find conclusions that his later followers denied.

As I think about what should drive us in ministry, it is very simple -- the text of Scripture and nothing else.  Where Scripture speaks, we speak -- where Scripture is silent, we are silent -- what Scripture emphasizes, we emphasize.

As I observe my own thought or read others, I find that we quickly set aside the Word of God and start theologizing and moralizing.  Or we pick something in the passage we want to emphasize even if it is not what the author brings to a focus.  Recently I was preaching John 7 and so desperately wanted to end with the great promise of the Holy Spirit in 7:37-39 -- but I had a problem -- that is not where John ends the story!  Was I going to focus on what I thought best (we need to be reminded of the work of the Spirit) or was I going to submit to the inspired wisdom of God through John?  I must submit to God.  I will speak on the Holy Spirit in John 14-16!

Morally, there are too many examples to count -- we develop rules that cannot be found in any text -- about what we can eat or drink, what we can wear, what men/women can and cannot do in the home, what a spiritual gift looks like, what kind of music is good or bad, what proper courtship looks like, ad nauseum.  After we create these rules which may be our own outworking of the faith, we turn them into absolutes and measure everyone else by them.  We construct a house of conclusions out of one two-by-four of Scripture.  Exactly the opposite of what Paul says to do in Romans 14.

Theologically, there are also many examples.  Cessationism would be one such example -- there is no exegetical base for this conclusion.  There are many others -- among Reformed folks who love to force texts into their Reformed mold -- or among people who believe we can lose our regeneration and fit texts into that conclusion (Jesus says no one can pluck us out of his hand but that does not mean we cannot jump out!).

Jesus faced this.  It is of note that well meaning godly Jews developed a system of law-observance for the Jews in the centuries following the captivity.  They studied their conclusions and exegeted them.  The end result is Jesus noting that they developed traditions that actually contradicted Scripture and taught as their doctrine the traditions of men. (Matthew 15).  They were sincere; they were exegetically based at the start and they got way off base.

I am in danger of the same -- I can take the GospelDriven grid and find it everytwhere even if it is not in the text.  The text rules.

So shall we get rid of theology?  Certainly not -- it serves us as a guide but it is a servant to the text.  Beware preachers of reading a text and then speaking without ever referring to the text again.  Take people to the Word and show them its plain meaning -- then they can take it home with them.  Preach large enough sections that they can see the flow of thought. 

How effective is this way of doing things?  Let me answer with a story of a young Christian who was taught to read the Bible well.  They had a knock on their door one day and 2 men stood at the door with the Watchtower magazine in hand.  She invited them in and they began their schtick.  As they would make a point and quote a verse, she asked them to open their Bibles and read the entire paragraph around that verse.  Then she simply noted, "Hmmm, that is not what that verse says."  This she repeated many times until they arose and departed!

Scripture is clear -- it is not merely supreme -- it has no equals.  "It is written" is the last word.  "Take and read" is God's word to us about Scripture.

Our Only Protection

Lately I have been thinking on my own lack of attention to Scripture.  That may seem strange, given I preach the Bible and study it weekly.  But last week, as I was listening to some excellent messages at the Sovereign Grace Small Group Leaders Conference in Gilbert, AZ -- I noticed that a particular passage used in a message was one I had not read in about ten years.  That frightened me. It frightened me because the root of every distortion in the history of the church is a neglect of Scripture.  We begin with the text, reach some conclusions, and then we exegete our conclusions. Then we take our systematic theology and read it back into Scripture.  The classic example of this is the sermon on John 3:16 in which the Reformed preacher spends a great deal of time interpreting the word "world" to see in it the "elect" -- thus upholidng his doctrine of limited atonement.  This is sophistry in the extreme and would be condemned if we saw a Catholic doing it.

I find it very easy to theologize about Gospel centeredness.  Or conplementarianism.  Or the sovereign election of God.  Beginning with some clear texts I derive and build with principle upon principles.  But history tells me that theology can move from a position of submission to a position of control.  We cease to exegete the text and begin to read our own theology into it.  Theology must be submitted to the Word of God alone.  Scripture alone controls. 

It is clear from history that well-intentioned people may actually theologize themselves into positions that add to Scripture or even contradict Scripture.   See Matthew 15 for the NT example.  I have advocated a simple rule -- where Scripture speaks I will speak, what Scripture emphasizes I will emphasize, where Scripture is silent I may not speak!

In the years I have pastored I have found that my greatest challenges have involved undoing the extra-biblical commands that people live by.  Pastors and authors have fel compelled to speak where Scripture is silent or inconclusive.  People come with very strong convictions about certain ethical or theological matters and yet cannot cite one clear text in their own defense.  Rather, their convictions developed with a collection of principles plus considerable logic.  Thus, they become absolutely certain that men should not wear hats in church, that we must dress in nice clothes to serve communion, that women should not be ushers, that alcoholic beverages are evil, that women should never work outside the home, that we should not use birth control, that drums are evil in worship, etc.

One of the greatest gifts to me was a man named Earl Radmacher -- president of the seminary I attended.  Dr R , as we called him, insisted that Scripture alone must rule.  He actually preached a message in Chapel one day and then returned the next to correct his error of interpretation.  The seminary had a changeable doctrinal statement and the faculty were required to review it and restury the Scriptures regulalry to clarify and refine their convictions. 

I am concerned with those of us who love theology, that we have lengthy discussions untethered to Scripture -- that we hold the Magisterial Reformers as infallible interpreters of the text -- that we read our theology into the text and this twist its meaning -- and that we actually add to the Word of God.  I am concerned that we teach our theology and do not show people how to interpret Scripture. Soon, they prattle our theology and have no idea where it may be found in Scripture. Berean-like "testing all things by Scripture" must always be pursued among us.  Theology is excellent -- but the text rules and let our theology submit to the clarity of the text rather than visa verse.  Here alone is safe ground.