Saturday, May 2, 2009

The Master's Plan for Spiritual Leaders

The following is a passage from "The Master's Plan for the Church" by John MacArthur. This has been an incredibly challenging and convicting book.

I believe the Devil attacks spiritual leaders with more severe temptations than most Christians will ever experience. It makes sense that those who lead the forces of truth and light against the kingdom of darkness will experience the strongest opposition from the Enemy.

An unholy pastor is like a stained glass window: a religious symbol that filters out the true light. That's why "above reproach" is the initial qualification for spiritual leadership. The seventeenth-century Puritan Richard Baxter wrote,

"Take heed to yourselves, lest you live in those sins which you preach against in others, and lest you be guilty of that which daily you condemn. Will you make it your work to magnify God, and, when you have done, dishonor him as much as others? Will you proclaim Christ's governing power, and yet condemn it, and rebel yourselves? Will you preach his laws, and willfully break them?

If sin be evil, why do you live in it? If it be not, why do you dissuade men from it? If it be dangerous, how dare you venture on it? If it be not, why do you tell men so? If God's threatenings be true, why do you not fear them? If they be false, why do you needlessly trouble men with them, and put them into such frights without cause?

Do you "know the judgment of God, that they who commit such things are worthy of death;" and yet will you do them? "Thou that teachest another, teachest thou not thyself? Thou that sayest a man should not commit adlutery," or be drunk, or covetous, art thou such thyself? "Thou that makest thy boast of the law, through breaking the law dishonorest thou God?" What! Shall the same tongue speak evil that speakest against evil? Shall those lips censure, and slander, and backbite your neighbor, that cry down these and the like things in others?

Take heed to yourselves, lest you cry down sin, and yet do not overcome it; lest, while you seek to bring it down in others, you bow to it, and become its slave yourselves: "For of whom a man is overcome, the same he is brought into bondage." "To whom ye yield yourselves servants to obey, his servants ye are whom you obey, whether of sin unto death, or of obedience unto righteousness." O brethren! It is easier to chide at sin, than to overcome it. (The Reformed Pastor, [Carlisle, PA.: Banner of Truth, 1956 reprint], 67-68)