When We Idolize Church Positions

we get sicker and sicker

When we think that those who study the Bible and share what they’ve learned must undergo special training, when we believe that God has chosen one gender to do this and not another, when we think of the one who speaks from the Bible as a special position ordained by men . . . we may fall prey to thinking that we’re excused from the simple sharing of how God’s word is teaching us to our fellow Christians. We are not specially trained. We are not ordained. We are not the right gender. No one has given us this authority. Therefore, it must not be for us laymen to understand the Bible and share what we’ve learned with our friends. We’ll pay someone to do that.

When we deem that Christians need someone specially trained to give a convicting message in a church service, when we judge we can only receive a message from a man, when we judge a pastor’s ability to build up, equip, or shepherd is based on whether he knows Greek or Hebrew or has a Master’s Degree in Theology, when we assume God speaks to the pastor more than he speaks to us . . . we may fall prey to believing that the mature Christian can only receive messages from the Lord through a sermon from a very particular kind of person. We may begin to reject more and more of the Lord’s words to us because they were not said by the right person in the right way after the right kind of worship music. And we may stop believing the Lord speaks to us personally at all.

When we believe that we ought to hear a new interesting tidbit from the pulpit each week, when we believe we’ve moved on from the elementary truths of the gospel to the adult diet of complex theology and deep thought, when we feel that the salvation message is primarily for the unbeliever, when we begin to think a pastor is altogether different than an evangelist . . . we may fall prey to believing that we don’t need the same kind of medicine as the non-Christians. We may believe that it’s only the lost who need to see the heavenly doctor and that only those gifted in evangelism can explain that to them. We may then presume that we are unable to guide the non-Christian or even ourselves into God’s operating room.

To read more about how the Lord speaks to us and cures our illnesses through a healthy church body, click the link below.