Monday, November 7, 2016
Now these are the gifts Christ gave to the
church: the apostles, the prophets, the
evangelists, and the pastors and teachers. Their responsibility is to
equip God’s people to do his work and build up the church, the body of Christ. This
will continue until we all come to such unity in our faith and knowledge of
God’s Son that we will be mature in the Lord, measuring up to the full and
complete standard of Christ. Then we
will no longer be immature like children. We won’t be tossed and blown about by every
wind of new teaching. We will not be
influenced when people try to trick us with lies so clever they sound like the
truth. Instead, we will speak the truth in love, growing in every way
more and more like Christ, who is the head of his body, the church. He
makes the whole body fit together perfectly. As each part does its own special work, it
helps the other parts grow, so that the whole body is healthy and growing and
full of love. Ephesians 4:11-16(NLT)
Paul lists
the church’s leader titles and their function, which is to build-up the body of
Christ to be mature in the Lord. This
unveils the purpose of the church, to be a mature, Godly, loving, and healthy influence
in the world, with this result: a
world turned to God’s purposes. You can’t do that without truth in every area
of life, words, deeds, and motives! Most
of us find that a tall order; most of us fall pretty far short of the goal.
There was
once a church that had fallen on hard times.
It was a large, growing church in the 1950’s and 60’s. Several misunderstandings, followed by church
fights and people leaving had decimated the church’s witness and ministry. They were down to trying to hold the doors
open and hang-on.
They brought
in a seasoned, but young minister whose ideas and energy helped revitalize and
re-focus the small, aging group. Within
a few years their numbers had grown, and it seemed they were headed for better
days ahead.
But a member
became somewhat slighted by the pianist’s friendship with another member, and
suggested to a friend that it was hard to sit in a church where the minister
would approve of his staff person being so insensitive. The friend told another friend, and word got
back to the church secretary. The secretary
knew this was the kind of thing that had caused trouble before in this church,
so she called the offended member and tried to “protect” the pastor by
convincing her to just forgive the minister and the pianist.
This led the
member to call her friend and share how it was just awful that the secretary
knew all about the pastor’s mean-spirited ways.
She didn’t want to, but she couldn’t help adding how she suspected the
pastor and the secretary seemed to spend too many hours together. By that afternoon the rumor mill had a
full-blown theory that the pastor and his secretary were leaving for Spain to
live together in a commune.
A few months
later that church was looking for a new pastor.
Stories like
this would be fodder for trashy novels if it were not for the fact that they
are all too often based in fact, and are certainly among the enemy’s chief
means of destroying the witness and ministry of many a hornet’s nest that used
to pass for a church.
What can be
done to head off that kind of horror story?
Speak the
truth.
Speak the
truth in a Godly, loving way.
Make truth
your motive no matter how you feel.
Speak the
truth with everything you do, say and think.
It’s that
important.
For You Today
Before you speak, before you
judge, and before you act, run it through the Apostle Paul’s filter…is
this the loving truth I will speak?
NOTES
