Posted on Sunday, May 4th, 2008 at 1:44 pm
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Every Sunday after the second service I head over to the fellowship hall to meet with those who might want to have a word with me after the service. To tell you the truth this is the hardest part of the preaching job for me. I am an introvert and standing around talking is not something that I enjoy doing, particularly after a long morning (I usually get up at five on Sunday mornings) but it is necessary so I always do it.
This morning started out like most others, people saying hello, well-wishers, and a few people who, by some miracle, had been blessed by the sermon. The problem is that things didn’t stay that way.
The first problem was a young girl (early twenties I would guess) who began to question me about my commitment to repentance as part of the gospel. When I asked her exactly what she meant by “needing to repent of ones sins before a person could become a Christian.” She told me, in a rather long monologue about why repentance was needed; why it was particularly important for people in her age group; etc. When I told her that I, of course agreed that repentance from sin was important and that the way one lived after becoming a Christian indicated the truthfulness of one’s conversion she shot back “Why didn’t you even mention repentance in your sermon?” I told her that I couldn’t preach everything in one sermon, and she told me of her young pastor, a graduate of Dallas, whose sermons were on the web, maybe I could listen to some.
A couple of people later, it got worse. Much worse. A lady said that she wanted to ask me about something that I had said before today. What she meant was something that I had said months or maybe even a year and a half before today. She said that I had pointed out that both Mary and Jesus likely suffered shame as a result of the virgin birth. This, she said, was a new idea that had only come out in the last ten years, she had never heard Dr. Kennedy say anything like that, and this idea only came from seminary people.
I tried to tell her that the Babylonian Talmud has very specific stories about Mary’s lack of chastity and that it certainly was not written ten years ago, but that got nowhere. This afternoon I found an even earlier (350 a.d.) reference in a tract written by Origin against Celsus (1.28) Which says: “For he represents him disputing with Jesus, and confuting Him, as he thinks, on many points; and in the first place, he accuses Him of having “invented his birth from a virgin,” and upbraids Him with being “born in a certain Jewish village, of a poor woman of the country, who gained her subsistence by spinning, and who was turned out of doors by her husband, a carpenter by trade, because she was convicted of adultery; that after being driven away by her husband, and wandering about for a time, she disgracefully gave birth to Jesus, an illegitimate child . . .”
I tried to point out to here John 8:41 where Jesus is taunted by the words “we were not born of fornication” but that was seen as nothing. I tried to ask her what other people would have thought if Mary had turned up pregnant before or shortly after she and Joseph were married. She explained to me that the clothes that people wore in those days made it impossible to see that a person was pregnant.
Finally, I was at the end of my rope. I had been standing in the fellowship hall for at least forty-five minutes and I simply said to her, “Listen, if it’s that big of a deal to you then don’t believe it, I don’t care. Why is it so important to you that Mary never suffered?” By this time I had lost it. She said she knew that God would not put Mary through all of this and I asked her to show me that from the text. She didn’t have a Bible with her. I said something that I regret and wish that I had not said, “I am suspect of someone who wants to correct the minister/seminary professor but doesn’t carry a bible to church.”
I know, that was out of line, shouldn’t have been said, no excuse, and all of that. I was simply tired of going around about a point that seems very clear to me and not worth arguing about. She became hurt and started to walk away at which time I apologized but told her that I just didn’t think that I could do her any good. She exclaimed that she thought that I would at least have the decency to talk to her graciously about this, and then walked away.
I suppose I could make some excuses by saying that this has been an exceptionally long week. We have had, in addition to regular classes, an accreditation advisor with whom the faculty met several times, a potential new professor who came down to do some guest lectures, and the planning for the graduation in less than two weeks. All the while trying to prepare to preach one of the most difficult passages in the Gospel of Matthew.
All of that is just smoke really. What I truly wonder at times like this is whether or not God is telling me that I am in the wrong place. That maybe I ought not to be preaching on Sunday mornings like this. Maybe I am in the wrong place and am just fooling myself in thinking that I am doing the Lord’s will. It all seems so hard to figure out sometimes.
So now you know, it’s not just you. We all wonder if we ought to be doing something else every once in a while. One days like this, when I’m tired, I wonder it even more. But I don’t make any decisions on these days. I wait for a good night’s sleep and hope that things will look better tomorrow.
Seeking the New City,
DrSamLam
Posted on Sunday, December 30th, 2007 at 7:51 pm
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Church Leader’s Top 5 Weaknesses
Being a preacher at Coral Ridge and following Dr. Kennedy is a difficult position. I feel that I am never good enough, prepared enough, organized enough, or even spiritual enough. I stumbled across a recent list of the top five problems that most pastor’s feel in their work. One thing that helps me is the realization that I am not a senior pastor, but simply a cricket chirping while the Swanlike voice of Dr. D. James Kennedy remains silent. I am a fill in, and like most fill ins just do the best that I can under difficult circumstances. Every Sunday I walk out of the service thinking that no-one could have understood what I was trying to say. To my surprise, God in his graciousness uses even the voice of Baalam’s donkey,so perhaps I still have a chance.
The top five pastoral problems were these. I hate to say it but I find some of myself in each one of these problem areas. I appreciate your prayers and kind notes more than you all could ever know. I envy the new pastor because of the wonderful love that he will feel from such a wonderful congregation. I would appreciate any comments that you might have about these problems and any suggestions that might help me be more effective. Info Somewhat to their surprise, Thom Rainer and his research team found effective church leaders not only recognize and admit their mistakes, but they were happy to share those weaknesses. The top five weaknesses revealed are:
1. Pastoral Ministry - 3 out of 4 admit their number one leadership weakness is providing personal pastoral ministry. Pastoral ministry is defined as counseling, doing hospital visitation and performing weddings and funerals, to name a few of the responsibilities.
2. Lack of Patience - Another top weakness among effective church leaders is that they are task driven. More than 7 out of 10 indicate they are impatient to see objectives accomplished. Contributing to this dilemma is the fact that most American churches are notoriously resistant to change.
3. Dealing with Staff - 7 out of 10 considered their staff leadership skills to be weak.
4. Dealing with Criticism - Nearly 7 out of 10 effective church leaders struggle with handling or avoiding criticism.
5. Always Task-Driven - The dominant leadership style noted was “task-oriented.” Task-driven or oriented is defined as “high interest in production and getting things “done.” When a leader is always task-driven, sometimes to the exclusion of relational issues, there is a tendency to fail to take people’s feelings into consideration. It’s good to be task-driven, but it’s not good to be so driven that you forget about people.
Adapted from Lessons on Integrity:A Tribute to James Draper by Tom Rainer, Christian Post 8/13/07
Thanks for the suggestions to follow. I appreciate them greatly.
Onward . . .
DrSamLam 12/30/07
Posted on Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007 at 12:49 pm
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I have finished my course. . . The Apostle Paul
I have not written in a while because I have been thinking. I know that this can be dangerous, so I have decided that I should start writing again.
This is a picture of my son Josiah (not Joshua!) finishing up his latest cross country race. He is a great runner and a great son. I have a picture of my daughter Charity that I was going to upload, but she would kill me. It is not the best picture of her and I want you to see how beautiful she really is so I will take another picture an put it up later.
I have been struck lately by how much our lives are like a cross country run. The person who gets out in front first rarely wins. In fact you can almost always say for certain that the person who starts out in front will not be the one in front at the end of the race. The race comes with its share of difficulties and there are plenty of opportunities to quit. At times the the course seems tough, the elements seem to work against the runner and the pain of our bodies screams for us to just stop. But the good runners don’t. My son doesn’t; he finishes. That is why I am so proud of him. He is a young man who shows forth the work of the Spirit in his life in many ways, but one of the ways is that he realizes that life is not about doing the easy thing but the right thing. Sometimes finishing is really difficult, but it is the right thing.
I had a friend in college who was a cross country runner. His name was Tom Gould and he was also a wonderful example of a Godly young man. I remember one year when the great race was to be held on a cold rainy thanksgiving day (we never went home for thanksgiving at Bob Jones, mainly because most of us could not afford it). Gould was an all out favorite to win the race but then something happened. At the start of the race, when runners were jockeying for position, someone stepped on the back of Tom’s shoe and it came off. He couldn’t stop and put his shoe back on, but the ground was cold and it was raining. Most of those who saw what happened felt really sorry for Tommy. This was his day and his race and now it was taken away from him by some quirk.
In the yearbook that year there was a picture of a shoe in a puddle. It was Tom’s shoe. It sat there as if in triumph after Tom had won the race with only one shoe on. Whenever I am tempted to stop, quit, just say forget about it, I remember my friend Tom who pressed on in spite of difficulties that were not his fault and won because he refused to stop running. I want my son to be a person who refuses to stop running, no matter what God’s providence might send his way. I want him to be a runner not just in his life, but in his heart. Let us all strive to be cross country runners in our hearts if not in our lives.
Onward . . .
DrSamLam
Posted on Monday, August 6th, 2007 at 4:46 pm
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You might wonder, after reading of the difficulties in the life of A. W. Pink, why God would allow such difficulties in the life of his servant. Many great men have asked just that question. Why does God in his providence bring sorrows and troubles to men who seem to be trying to serve him? Why was Spurgeon so troubled (almost broken) by depression? Why was Pink reduced to the sidelines when he wanted so badly to be a preacher? Why was G. Campbell Morgan troubled all of his life by terrible headaches? Why has the Lord placed Dr. Kennedy at home in 24 hour care instead of in the pulpit?
These are perplexing questions, but Spurgeon took them on in a sermon. The sermon is reprinted in a small book that has just come out called The Suffering Letters of C. H. Spurgeon. The book also includes a number of unpublished letters that Spurgeon wrote while he was ill. I am anxiously awaiting my copy as I had to order it from The Metropolitan Tabernacle Bookshop ( http://www.tabernaclebookshop.org) in England. I do know, however, the answer that Spurgeon gives to the question.
Spurgeon says that God gives his servants troubles, and takes them out of the pulpit at what seems to be the worst times, to remind us that it is God and not the men who are doing the work. John Piper in his book on preaching reminds his fellow ministers that “God will hide much of the results of our preaching because he seeks to glorify himself and not us.”
Those who have been in the ministry know that it can be both a wonderful blessing and a terrible burden. There are those days when you feel like everything is going along right and the world is turning correctly and the church is just the most wonderful place in the world. Then there are those other days. The days when you wonder if you are really doing anyone any good; when you wonder if some person in the congregation, through sheer jealousy or meanness will bring down all that you have tried to work for in the last two or three years; the days when it seems like the job is too big and you are too small and that things never change; the days when the cares threaten to crush you underfoot and leave you broken and bleeding and for what?
For what? For the glory of God and the good of his sheep. That is what the minister is called to spend himself for; to stay up late at night for; to study and study and study for; even if they don’t know it and can’t appreciate the good food that they are getting, continue on. Keep feeding. We glorify not ourselves, but Christ Jesus. May it ever be so.
Posted on Thursday, June 21st, 2007 at 10:15 am
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I have a very quirky sense of humor. Those of you that know me find that no surprise. I really enjoyed the movie (though this is not an endorsement on any level for anyone else to watch it) “Little Miss Sunshine.” Please don’t watch it and tell me that it is not suitable for children or perhaps not suitable for some adults. I know that, but it is a profoundly moving film on several levels. In many ways it is a story of redemption in spite of failure and sin.
Toward the end of the movie there is a conversation about the writer Marcel Proust and how he dealt with the extreme difficulty in his life. I won’t spoil the conversation for you, but I will give you a line from Proust that may help you to understand his frame of reference:
“The only paradise is a paradise lost.”
Proust seems to be saying that without tragedy we do not appreciate the comedy. That we never really know about paradise until it is lost from us and we long for it. There is something of that in all of us. We know that the world should not be this way. That there ought not to be schools where students are shot for no reason; towers were planes fly in killing the innocent; and sickness that takes the lives of children before their time. We long for that city, as Plato did, where none of these things happen.
The great news of the Gospel is that there is not only a paradise lost, but that there is a paradise regained. That we are moving toward the city of hope and perfection where there will be no more crying; where the river of gladness will run through the middle to remind us that we are in paradise. We need tragedy to remind us of the coming comedy. Comedy in the truest sense, of the happy ending; of the ultimate wedding; and of living happily ever after.
C. S. Lewis reminded us that we desire that which we know exists: food, water, and the perfect city. We hunger and thirst for a city that is not here yet, but we walk on knowing that the road does not end at a cliff, but at a beautiful celestial city.
Walk on . . .
P.S. Thanks to Gideon for the question that prompted this blog.
Posted on Monday, June 4th, 2007 at 2:34 pm
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No one whom I have ever known as a great preacher has been happy with his own preaching. It seems that the task is too big and the time, talents, and intellect are just too small. Charles Spurgeon, the great pastor of a very large British congregation, suffered from very severe depression although he was, by all accounts, one of the greatest preachers the world has ever known.
Wise advice tells pastors to “never resign on a Monday.” No matter how bad one feels about the sermon yesterday, Tuesday always comes and a new sermon begs to be prepared. I suppose that we, like Chicago Cubs fans, are eternal optimists, hoping that next time something will get better; sometimes it does.
Then there are those rare and amazing days that almost every preacher, speaker, or teacher dreams of, but which come all to infrequently. Those days when the Spirit of God seems to infuse all that we do and everything works together in a way that we could have never expected, let alone planned, and we know that God has been there. We wish it could be that way all the time. We wish that we had some method or formula for making those days occur when we really need them. Alas, the Spirit, like the wind, blows where it will and try as we might we cannot control it. We are just thankful when we can be carried along by the breath and feel like a sailboat being whisked along rather than a broken tugboat being dragged. But this is Monday. Tugboat day. Tomorrow is Tuesday when perhaps, I pray, I will prepare and the Lord will visit in a special way, and the sails will be filled with breath from on high. Maybe . . .
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