Pray for our nations preachers ..Ps Israel.
A few weeks ago I was attending an AFL game watching two teams of professionals ply their trade. Sitting behind me was a fairly critical and abusive ‘fan’ who constantly hurled abuse at the players for their errors – these were players of the team he supported. A common comment he uttered was that “even I could do better than that!” The simple truth is, he couldn’t, because in order to ‘do better than that’ he needed to actually be a participant in the game (an achievement requiring considerable skill and fortitude in the first instance) and not an abusive onlooker.
As I considered this experience, I realised that I can often be guilty of the same. As a regular practise I podcast numerous messages weekly from various pastors around the globe. I listen for personal edification spiritually but instead often find myself becoming fairly critical – usually for purely trivial and personal reasons. I don’t like their style, illustration, tonal inflection, word choice etc. Perhaps you can relate? Have you ever found yourself sitting in the pew thinking that the preacher is out the front on stage so that you can take a better aim? Guilty as charged. What we fail to see when we do this, is that we are actually shooting a fellow soldier in the back whilst they are on the front line of the battle that is raging for lost souls between the Kingdom of God and the kingdom of darkness.
Instead, may we seek to love our preachers, pray for our preachers, and seek to learn from our preachers. Perhaps the words of the famous preacher Charles Haddon Spurgeon (someone fairly familiar with criticism during his ministry) can assist us in this:
Many hearers lose much blessing through criticizing too much, and meditating too little; and many more incur great sin by calumniating those who live for the good of others. True pastors have enough of care and travail without being burdened by undeserved and useless fault-finding. We have something better to do than to be for ever answering every malignant or frivolous slander which is set afloat to injure us. We expected to prove our ministry “by evil report and by good report,” and we are not therefore overwhelmed by abuse as though some new thing had happened unto us; and yet there are tender, loving spirits who feel the trial very keenly, and are sadly hindered in brave service by cruel assaults. The rougher and stronger among us laugh at those who ridicule us, but upon others the effect is very sorrowful…
As ministers we are very far from being perfect, but many of us are doing our best, and we are grieved that the minds of our people should be more directed to our personal imperfections than to our divine message…
Filled with the same spirit of contrariety, the men of this world still depreciate the ministers whom God sends them and profess that they would gladly listen if different preachers could be found. Nothing can please them, their cavils are dealt out with heedless universality. Cephas is too blunt, Apollos is too flowery, Paul is too argumentative, Timothy is too young, James is too severe, John is too gentle…
Well then, let each servant of God tell his message in his own way. To his own Master he shall stand or fall… Judge the preacher if you like, but do remember that there is something better to be done than that, namely, to get all the good you can out of him, and pray his Master to put more good into him (pp 13-14, 37, 104-5, Eccentric Preachers, London: Passmore & Alabaster, 1879). Pastor Israel..