1825. Church Involvement

Welcome to The Daily Platform from Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina. Today on The Daily Platform, we're continuing a study series about the role of the Church called Christ's Body, the Church. Today's message will be preached by Dr. Nathan Crockett. Dr. Pettit has asked me to speak on Church involvement. I realize that that has been covered in many ways in these four sermons we've already heard. And in praying about this, I tried to decide should I do sort of a shotgun message that just talks about a thousand and one ways to be involved in the Church, and decided that I think the Lord would actually have me preach a message that's a little more like a sniper rifle, focusing on one particular aspect of our Church involvement. And I think back almost exactly a year ago today to standing in an auditorium and preaching the most difficult sermon of my life. It was part of the eulogy for my dad's funeral. After 30 years of ministry, God took him home.

Thirty years of pastoral ministry, he was in the ministry before that as an evangelist. And I've had many of you, probably most of you in class before, and usually on the first day of class I have you take out a half sheet of paper and ask you lots of questions about yourself. And the final question is always this, how would you describe yourself in one word? And giving my dad's eulogy, I tried to think of what word would best describe him, and three words kept coming back to my mind. The words husband, father, and pastor. Today I would like to speak to you on this singular biblical truth. What should be your biblical response to your pastor? And providentially I think maybe I'm in a somewhat of a unique position to preach this message. The four other men who've preached in this series have all been pastors. You've maybe never even heard a message like this from your own pastor because it's hard for a pastor to stand up and tell you that he is God's gift to the Church. But providentially, though I've served as a youth pastor and an interim pastor, I'm not currently a pastor. And this is not currently a church. But I think it's very important for us to be biblically informed about how we respond to the men God has placed in spiritual authority over us as our pastors.

I am a PK. My wife is also a pastor's kid. Her grandfather was a pastor. My grandfather, one of them, was a missionary. All three of my brothers are in the ministry too as pastors. One is a missionary. I've had the privilege of knowing hundreds of pastors preaching in many of their churches. I've had the privilege of helping train hundreds of future pastors.

And this is something that personally I'm really burdened about even for myself. I think in Christianity we see these pendulum swings and I think maybe there was a previous generation with almost idolized pastors that set humans on an unnatural, ungodly footstool and just worshipped their pastor. And we saw history oftentimes of pastoral abuse, both emotionally and physically, and some major, major, major problems with that kind of wrong pendulum swing.

And yet I think maybe for our generation the pendulum tends to swing the opposite direction. Where we tend to really resist any kind of authority, whether it's pastoral authority or any authority in our lives. And yet the Bible gives us specific commands as to how we're supposed to respond to the pastor God's given us. It's easy for us to think about being a sheep. The Bible often refers to us as sheep and even pastors themselves, they're sheep. They're also an under shepherd but they ultimately serve the great shepherd of the sheep. I tend to think of sheep, I think of lambs as being cute and cuddly and white and woolly. My wife and I for a while thought about getting some sheep. And then we visited Colonial Williamsburg and spent some time actually watching adult sheep.

And they're not cute and cuddly and white, they're dirty and stinky and dumb. And probably a pretty apt analogy of how I often act as a sheep, as a follower. God has given us pastors and again there may be some of you and you're in a situation where your pastor does not fit the biblical description of being a shepherd and an overseer and an elder. But for many of you your pastor does. And I want to talk about four specific things and just look at passages for each of these. You're in Hebrews 13. The first thing I want to look at is that we are called upon to support our pastors.

To support our pastors. Listen to 1 Timothy 5, 17 and 18. 1 Timothy 5, 17 and 18. Let the elders that rule well be counted worthy of double honor, especially they who labor in the word and doctrine. For the scripture saith thou shalt not muzzle the ox that treadeth out the corn and the laborer is worthy of his reward. The first part of his quote there is from Deuteronomy that if you have an ox and he's helping you tread out the corn you shouldn't put a muzzle on him, he should at least get to eat some of it.

The laborer is worthy of his reward. Paul is even more specific in 1 Corinthians 9, 13 and 14. Do ye not know that they which minister about holy things live of the things of the temple and they which wait at the altar are partakers with the altar? Even so hath the Lord ordained that they which preach the gospel should live of the gospel. Surveys show us that a large percentage of pastors feel underpaid. That many pastor's wives are working sometimes full time jobs just to provide for their family because sometimes churches don't really support their pastors even financially. I think our support should extend beyond financial support to taking the gift God has given you or the gifts and plugging them into a local assembly.

I thought about preaching on that today using your gift in the body of Christ. Do you support your pastor? Secondly, do you imitate your pastor's faith?

Do you imitate your pastor's faith? Look at Hebrews 13 verse 7. This in context is referring to people who are now with the Lord, many of them as martyrs. Remember them which have the rule over you, and the Greek idea here is who have had, past tense, the rule over you, your spiritual teachers. Who have spoken unto you the word of God whose faith follow considering the end of their conversation. And the word there for follow is a Greek word that sounds a lot like our English word mimic.

It's the word for imitate. To examine the outcome of their life, their way of life, their death, their martyrdom, and to realize that you're supposed to be following that. This doesn't mean you have to dress exactly like your pastor dresses or wear your hair the same way your pastor wears his hair. But as you look at a godly path of his life, that sets an example for you.

I think it's fascinating that the next verse in Hebrews 13 is verse 8 that Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever. And I think the reminder is that the same Christ who led your spiritual leader all the way to his godly death can lead you that way as well. Paul actually frequently makes these statements to be followers of me even as I also am of Christ. These statements are throughout the Pauline letters. Paul's going to tell us that we should respect or highly esteem our pastors.

I didn't put it on the screen, but listen to 1 Thessalonians 5, 12, and 13. And we beseech you, brethren, to know them which labor among you and are over you in the Lord and admonish you, and to esteem them very highly in love for their work's sake. Do you esteem your pastor?

Do you seek to imitate his spiritual progress? And I realize that to have a pastor you respect, you need a pastor who acts respectable, right? And that's a clarion call for anyone who's training to be a pastor.

You see, Lo Baxter said, no man who is full of himself can ever truly preach the Christ who emptied himself. And it's not a news flash to you this morning that pastors are not perfect. I've adapted from what someone wrote about pastors. There's a lot of truth to this. The pastor teaches.

Those students are not required to come. He heals with the Bible rather than the scalpel. He's sometimes a lawyer, often a social worker. He feels the need to be a marketer.

He's expected to be a scholar. He visits the sick, buries the dead, and marries the eligible. He tries to console those who sorrow and confront those who sin and seeks to remain upbeat when he's chided for not doing enough.

He plans programs, appoints committees, counsels the needy, and spends a lot of time trying to keep people out of each other's hair. The pastor prepares two to three sermons a week and preaches those sermons to anyone who happens to decide it's important enough to come. Then on Monday the pastor smiles when some well-meaning person from his congregation remarks, wow, you have such an easy job, only one day a week. This past Friday in the ministry class, Pastor Tim Potter said shepherding a church is a glorious agony.

It's glorious, but there's difficulties. Do you desire to imitate your pastor? And I realize that for many people, and even recently, I've been in a number of conversations where people have said, I just wish my pastor communicated better. Maybe that's communication through sermons. Maybe that's just not even sermons, just communicating the vision for the church. And probably any pastor wishes that of himself, that he would communicate more clearly. And maybe you say, well, how can I even imitate my pastor?

I don't even know where he's going. I wish he would communicate more clearly. I think the older I live, the more I realize how difficult communication is, particularly with children. I am blessed to have three amazing children. Shepherd's three and a half, Lillian is two, and Christian is now seven months, though he was younger than that in this picture.

And I'm going to tell you a quick story about my kids. Shepherd really enjoys running. Some of you that work with him the couple days he's in the daycare here, he challenges you to races probably all the time. He loves to run, and one thing that Shepherd and I enjoy doing is I like setting up obstacle courses for him. So I'll take things from around the house, and we'll set up sawhorses that he has to run under, chairs he has to jump on.

We'll put these outside, and he'll have this big course all around our house, and he loves that. And I go through with a stopwatch, and I time him, and when he jumps on the final plank that is the finish line, if he sets a new record, I'll tell him, new record. He really, really enjoys that, and I've noticed that sometimes when I'm not there with the stopwatch, if I'm out mowing or whatever, if we left up the obstacle course, he'll be running it on his own, and he'll jump on the plank and just shout, new record, assuming that he set a new record. And sometimes Lillian, my two-year-old daughter, will actually follow behind him, but she doesn't crawl under things and over things. She just kind of meanders her way through the course right to the finish line and jumps on it and says, new record!

She's not very interested overall in obstacle courses. Well, the Saturday before last, I was setting up an obstacle course for Shepherd, and I asked him if he would help me get some of the things, and so he's getting materials for me from around the house, and I'm setting it up, and the more it starts to develop, he just gets too excited to even help me anymore, and he starts doing this chant and going around the house in a big circle saying, obstacle course, obstacle course, obstacle course! And what really shocked me, that didn't shock me at all, that's pretty typical for Shepherd, but what shocked me is that his two-year-old sister, Lillian, is following behind him doing the same chant. And I'm thinking, my daughter's going to be athletic after all.

I've got a future brew in here, right? And then I listen more closely and realize that she's not chanting obstacle course. She's saying, popsicle horse, popsicle horse, popsicle horse! And Shepherd realizes it about the same time I do, and he sits down with her and he says, Lillian, we're not having popsicles, and there's no horses, it's an obstacle course! And she says, uh-uh, Shepherd, you were wrong. Daddy said popsicle horse. So I sat down with my two-year-old and explained that we weren't going to be having popsicles.

I don't know if she envisioned a horse made out of popsicles, or riding a horse and eating popsicles, but had to clarify that miscommunication. It's difficult to communicate, sometimes we just need to go the extra mile with our pastor and be understanding. Thirdly, not only should we support them and seek to imitate or follow their faith, but we should obey them.

And I realize, again, you're thinking, what? Not obey them when they're unbiblical, not obey a pastor. I mean, we know we should obey God rather than man. When they preach something to you from Scripture, look at verse 17 of Hebrews 13.

Verse 7 dealt with deceased spiritual leaders, now this verse deals with living ones. Obey them that have the rule over you and submit yourselves. Those are not popular words, are they? Obey, submit, why? For they watch for your souls as they that must give account, that they may do it with joy and not with grief, for that is unprofitable for you. Those words probably don't sit comfortably with lots of us.

Our society is not big into obeying and submitting. Last week I had a long walk across the backside of campus, and as I was walking, this thought went through my mind, why am I doing this? I was walking to get a flu shot.

I was taking time out of a fairly busy schedule. I was going to go through a little bit of inconvenience of trying to roll my shirt sleeve all the way up. I was going to feel a little bit of a prick, and for the next few days my shoulder would be a little bit sore. Some of you have sat under a surgeon's scalpel and had them remove a tumor.

Why did you do that? It was painful. It was difficult.

It certainly wasn't something that you got pumped about. But we sometimes do medical procedures that are painful or annoying or perhaps frightening because we actually submit ourselves to the authority of the doctor and figure that he has our best interest in view. And when you're sitting under your under-shepherd, your pastor, you need to realize that as he preaches God's word to you, it's for your good. It might be painful.

It might be difficult. You might not be chanting anything as you leave the church auditorium. But God calls on us to obey and to submit to godly authorities in our lives. Do you support your pastor? Do you seek to imitate his faith? Do you seek to obey him as he teaches you scripture? And fourthly, do you pray for him? You're in Hebrews 13, 17 where it talks about obeying and submitting. Look at the very next verse, verse 18. Pray for us.

For we trust we have a good conscience and all things willing to live honestly. Paul frequently, and we don't know if Paul wrote Hebrews, but Paul frequently calls on people to pray for him. Robert Murray McShane said, What a man is alone on his knees before God, that he is and nothing more. Do you pray for your pastor? I recently read a letter from a pastor who doesn't live too far from here, writing to someone in his church, telling about the difficulties, talking about how hard it is to be on call 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, the emotional toil of feeling somehow responsible for the spiritual condition of every single member of your church, the expectation of spending hours in your office studying and hours praying for your people and hours visiting every sick person or every relative of every sick person, to be available at a moment's notice for counseling, to spend hours developing a vision and a plan for the church, to spend hours administering a church, while not neglecting your own personal walk with God.

He said it was an incredibly heavy, constant weight on his shoulders. Do you pray for your pastor? Do you pray that God would help him deal with being misunderstood and coping with criticism and being faced with an overwhelming task and pray that God would help him to resist the manipulation of individual people in the church, that God would help him on the sometimes emotional roller coaster that being a pastor becomes, that God would help him cope with disappointment ministerially and personally, that God would help him deal with satanic attacks?

Do you pray that he would persevere in the faith? Pray for your pastor. Pray for your pastor's wife. Pray for your pastor's kids. Samuel Chadwick said, the one concern of the devil is to keep the saints from praying.

He fears nothing from prayerless work, prayerless study, prayerless religion. He laughs at our toil, mocks at our wisdom, but trembles when we pray. I remember my junior year traveling on a drama team for Bob Jones and there was a young couple that was leading the team and there were two girls on the team and two guys and both of us guys were planning to be pastors. I remember staying at a church in a Midwest town.

It was probably a church of about 150 people and I remember staying at a deacon and his wife at their home and I remember at the dinner table they started talking about their pastor and kind of running down their pastor and we felt uncomfortable. We weren't sure what to say. And then they said, well he's almost been here four years. And we said, well what does that mean? And they said, well after four years the deacons always vote out our pastor. We almost smiled at first. We thought they were joking and then we realized they were serious. And they said that that deacon board just figured that after four years they learned pretty much everything a pastor had to teach them and he might start reusing some of the same illustrations so they would vote him out and bring in a new pastor.

And that's probably an extreme example. But is that your heart's attitude towards your pastor or is this a man that you pray for? Do you pray that God would keep him holy and pure and faithful to his wife? Do you pray that God would protect him from Satan and guard against temptation and allurements? Do you pray that he would have quality time with his family?

That his children would grow up to be passionately in love with Jesus Christ? Do you pray that his wife would not be overwhelmed with the pressures of the ministry? Do you pray that God would give him a soft heart even in dealing with hard, difficult people? Do you pray that God would help you know how to best encourage your pastor? Do you pray for his own personal growth in the sanctification process? Do you pray that he would have daily times of rich fellowship with God? Do you pray that God would give your pastor boldness to evangelize and boldness to preach with conviction and clarity and compassion? Do you pray for his perseverance? For his emotional and spiritual endurance? Do you pray that God would give him adequate study time? That God would give him sufficient rest? That God would help him sleep well at night?

Do you pray for your pastor? My son, Shepherd, is to some degree obsessed with superheroes. This is maybe a common thing for three-and-a-half-year-old boys.

I'm not sure. Sometimes he comes up and asks me about someone like the Green Lantern, and I have no idea what he's even talking about. I have no idea how he figures out about these superheroes, but he finds out about them, and he's always inventing for himself new superpowers. We, a few weeks ago, actually bought him this suit.

It's called a Mr. Incredible suit, I guess, and that was a picture I snapped with my cell phone right after he first got it. He immediately went into this power pose, and he found out about Dash, who's the little Incredible that can run fast, and Mr. Incredible, I guess, has superhuman strength, so he likes us to call him Mr. Incredible Dash because he says he can run fast and is strong. In fact, probably a week or two ago, he was visiting Abigail up in her office in the exec wing, and he wanted to visit a bunch of his friends there, including Mr. Marshall, Marshall Franklin, who's one of Shepherd's best friends. And I guess when he was in there with Mr. Marshall, he was telling Mr. Marshall that when he puts his suit on, he becomes incredibly strong, and he can even pick up empty laundry baskets.

And how impressive is that? So Shepherd loves superheroes, and we have this nighttime routine where Abigail is putting Christian to bed, and I put Lillian and Shepherd to bed, and after we read stories and stuff together, we usually try to start the routine at 7, and it probably lasts about 45 minutes on average, but I turn off the lights, and we all get in Shepherd's bed together because Lillian has a crib, and we can't all fit in there, and I hold Lillian, and Shepherd lays next to me, and I put my arm around him, and I ask them what story they want to hear, and so Lillian will give me a few characters, or she wants a puppy or whatever, and Shepherd wants a dinosaur or crocodile, and so I'll come up with some story with whatever they told me, and we'll tell a story, and then we'll sing some songs together, and we'll pray, and I'll pray for each of them, and then I'll put Lillian in bed, give her a hug and kiss, put her in her crib, pat her to sleep, and I'll go back and get in Shepherd's bed for about five minutes, and we just talk about the day. We whisper, so we don't wake up Lillian. And it always usually starts with Shepherd asking me if I have any questions, and so I ask him what was his favorite thing he did that day and that sort of thing, and who's his favorite person, and sometimes he'll say Daddy, or sometimes he'll say one of his other friends and laugh and tickle me. He says, not Daddy tonight. But then he asked me questions, and he just kind of asked whatever was on his mind, and they're usually pretty random. Last night he asked me what's paint made out of. A couple nights ago he asked me if clouds were made out of marshmallows. He asked me how our skin stays on, or what are bones, why is blood messy, just random things like that. You never know what he's gonna ask, and I never necessarily have a good answer. And sometimes he asks things about God.

Well, a few nights ago he combined these, and he asked me, first of all, he had been talking about his Mr. Incredible outfit, and he said, Daddy, are superheroes real? And I said, no, Shepherd, they're not real. They're just fake. They're pretend.

They're not for real. There's not people with laser vision and superhuman strength and so on. And he seemed kind of disappointed, like he'd probably figured that out on his own. And then he asked me this, he said, Daddy, why didn't God put any real superheroes on this earth?

At first I just said, well, because he decided not to, kind of a cop-out answer. And then I thought about it, and I described Jesus Christ to him, and how Jesus Christ could work miracles and had amazing powers, and how Jesus was actually God. And I patted him, and we hugged and kissed, and we ended our nighttime routine, and I walked out of his room, and I was talking about his question, why didn't God put any real superheroes on this earth? And I thought about the ministry of the apostles, but I thought that was abnormal. And it really hit me with kind of an amazing clarity that God chooses to magnify his strength through our weakness, that God chose to work through broken things, that God chose the unlikely, the weak, and he devised things of this world to carry an incredibly powerful message, a gospel message that is superhero-worthy. And it shouldn't surprise us that the God who often chooses to speak in a still, small voice, rather than a whirlwind, would entirely overturn our natural expectations.

Ordinary men with an extraordinary message. The God of limitless resources chose an ironic twist that would have shocked the best of novelists. There was everything in heaven and earth at his disposal to reveal his mind to us, yet he chose unlikely heroes.

No sermons written in the clouds, no crystal balls rising from the center of the earth, no firework messages emblazed across the sky, no talking dragons, no volcanoes, no earthquakes, no lightning bolts, no angelic hosts with booming voices, no man with a book. A feeble man with an ancient book, yet that book has revolutionized the world and feeble men have preached the message century after century after century, and this unstoppable church just keeps going as it endures all the skeptics and all the haters and all the doubters. The God of infinite creativity chose ordinary men to herald an extraordinary message. God uses flawed instruments with faltering mouths and imperfect lives.

And God's power to make a masterpiece out of the most unlikely of materials points to his sovereign ability and his magnificent artistry. God often uses unlikely heroes. And in his providence and grace, God has chosen to give us pastors. Some abuse the office, others misuse it, but many of you come from churches with sincere, dedicated, godly men who desire to be approved under-shepherds for that great shepherd of the sheep. These unlikely heroes sometimes appear in the most surprising places.

A storefront in a downtown metropolis, a lunchroom in a public school where a new church meets on Sundays, a remodeled barn in the middle of nowhere in the western U.S., an underground church in the heart of China, a remodeled restaurant, a former warehouse, a high school gymnasium, or a secretive gathering in the Middle East. On Sunday mornings all across this world, God has ordained that men stand behind pulpits and lecterns in apple crates and outdoor marketplaces to proclaim a glorious message. God has ordained that those men oversee and teach and counsel and shepherd his own flock that he purchased with Christ's blood. Admittedly, pastors are unlikely heroes. They're not perfect.

Like the just man of Proverbs, they fall and rise up again. But if you're privileged to have a pastor who loves God and loves you and is faithfully doing his best to serve where God has called him, that's a great gift. You should be profoundly grateful to God for giving you a godly pastor like that, for giving him to the church corporately, for giving him to you individually. And I think that this morning it would be appropriate not only to thank God for a pastor like that, but maybe to send a quick word of thanks after chapel to the man who's invested so much of his life into yours. Your pastor is ultimately just a tool in the hands of the master.

But he's an important tool and one for which you should be very, very thankful. Do you support him? Do you seek to imitate and follow his faith? Do you obey God's word as he preaches it to you? And do you pray faithfully and fervently for this man that you are privileged to call your pastor?

Let's pray. Father, we thank you for the way you choose to use weak things, and you choose unlikely heroes. Father, we individually thank this morning of the contributions to each of our own lives from our pastors. I pray for some students who maybe have had the unfortunate experience of being under the ministry of an abusive pastor. But Father, so many of us have been privileged to have pastors that, though they were not perfect, were godly men who spoke your truth into our lives. And many of these students have pastors like that right now, both in the Greenville area and back home at their local church. And so we pray, Father, that you would help us to have a biblical response to these faithful men. We pray this in Christ's name. Amen. You've been listening to a sermon preached at Bob Jones University by Dr. Nathan Crockett, which is part of the study series about the Church, titled Christ's Body, the Church. Join us again next week as we continue this series here on The Daily Platform.