Stick, dead horse, you know the drill.

Things have been busy, and activities like blogging which are on the fringe of my priorities end up demonstrating just how incompetent I can be. Being reminded of faults is never a bad thing if one uses it to highlight new areas to grow or develop.

One thing I want to ask for, if anyone is actually reading this, is to let me know how I can pray for you. I have an email listed up and to the right, and I think the comment section still works, but if there's something you need prayer for, please let me know and I'll pray for you.

Now, a few months ago, we joined a newer local church that was struggling, and due to my particular set of skills and abilities, and the natural desperation that can come from a church struggling to get its footing, both myself and my wife have been quickly accepted into the family and tasked with serious responsibilities. For example, I'll be preaching a sermon on the 15th, I am working with the head pastor to develop our membership classes, and I lead a small group out of my home. My wife is helping administrate and develop the childcare offered on Sunday morning.

My wife is also pregnant, so should God bless us with this child, we'll be well into the "you have how many?" territory, given the fertility rate for our state. We've never had to struggle with the loss of miscarriage, but we're praying that God's plan for our lives is that the struggles we face are oriented towards raising this new child, and not in learning to live with having lost one. A selfish desire, certainly, but this isn't a new boat or a bigger house or a fancier smart phone, we're praying that God would trust us with the burden of raising this child that has been conceived.

Thanksgiving was a mess. The event itself went well enough, I created a new green bean casserole dish on a whim and it turned out good enough that folks didn't like it as part of the overall meal because it didn't mesh well with other traditional dishes that were prepared. I made a good dish, but it didn't fit with thanksgiving, and so that's why people didn't like it as much as my more traditional green bean casserole.

These same folks then pressed my wife and I later on in the evening to explain why we don't celebrate Christmas anymore. I explained that we don't celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ on December 25th, or participate in the various rituals and symbols that have become common with Christmas, in large part because none of it is actually "Christian" in nature, and so little good can come of participating in it. At best, it's a vain and frivolous celebration at face value, and Christians are supposed to be worshiping God with everything.

Somehow, for some folks, there's something left over from "everything" where fruitless tasks can still dictate their behavior and somehow this still makes sense.

Mind you, it's not that we don't celebrate anything at all. God never commanded us to never gather with family, to never feast, to never give gifts, etc.

What God did request is that we show some creativity and stop doing exactly what we did for other gods "in Jesus name" and instead worship God has he requested: in spirit and in truth.

Jesus Christ wasn't born on December 25th, year 0 AD. To act as if we need to put the "Christ back in Christmas" when people are participating in lies and deceit is not honoring to God.

December 21st, or 22nd, are the shortest days of the year in the northern hemisphere, the least amount of light and the most amount of darkness.

So what I decided was that on the 21st of December we would celebrate "the light" of the world who came and saved us from darkness. There are many different passages in the Bible which already address this symbolism and explicitly use that metaphor, so what we're remembering and honoring and celebrating is true. And, like the feasts that God declared for Israel, we are gathering family together, eating and drinking to the glory of the Lord, and sharing gifts and so forth, just like how Jesus Christ, the light of the world, has brought us the greatest gift we could ever receive.

Here's the thing: Jesus' birth was nowhere near as significant as his death. This is explained by Jesus Christ's prayer in the garden, prior to his crucifixion.

Up until that point in his life, Jesus' work on earth hadn't been completed. In the garden, beset with stress and anxiety, Jesus Christ prayed to God to "let this cup pass from my lips, but not my will, your will be done." You see, even if Jesus Christ had been born, but did not die for our sins on the cross, his birth would be entirely irrelevant. Yes he had to be born as part of the prophesies, but do we worship the fulfillment of prophecy or the God who provided such prophetic revelations in the first place?

So on the 21st of December we will gather for a meal, I will read passages relevant to how Jesus Christ is our light in darkness, and the children can be given gifts as an echo of what God did for us.

And then we can do the same thing in June during the summer solstice, because while we have much light physically, Jesus Christ is the greater light, and now folks who are in different hemispheres can be united in celebrating the same thing at different parts of the year, the thing being celebrated is true, and it's grounded in the existing symbolism that God provided without fixating on the symbols instead of the God that those symbols intended to describe something about.

The discussion didn't ever get that far on Thanksgiving.

Instead it ended up being a pathetic game of "well that's fine for you and your convictions", as if somehow the truths I was sharing were "mine" in any way.

I got an earful of subjective morality, where folks can do whatever they want, so long as they can justify it to themselves sufficiently.

I was told that because passages like Jeremiah 10 aren't specifically about Christmas tress, but idols made from wood and then decorated with silver and gold, that the fact Celtic druids used to worship trees as idols is irrelevant somehow. That going from a specific example to a broader category that the specific example still fell under somehow meant the "Christmas tree" tradition was fine, despite having roots in pagan practices.

I was told sarcastically that "I am apparently just not smart enough" on topics that are painfully simple to explain in a few sentences.

I was told that over a decade of research into the topic negated that simple truths had been missed that entire time because folks were more interested in justifying their existing behavior than in trying to align themselves with what God would desire from them.

I have never lost respect for someone so fast as I did during that conversation.

I had never seen someone trying so hard to avoid accepting that they'd been doing something inappropriate, swallowing their pride and then moving on.

Then again, these folks attend a church with a morbidly obese pastor. Gluttony is just as sinful as fornication, but hey, let's pick on the LGBTQA+P folks who want something we think is clearly icky and gross, so we're clearly more righteous than them, right?

People don't understand that judgment is applied inwardly to the church, not outwardly.

I wrote to you in my epistle not to keep company with sexually immoral people. Yet I certainly did not mean with the sexually immoral people of this world, or with the covetous, or extortioners, or idolaters, since then you would need to go out of the world. But now I have written to you not to keep company with anyone named a brother, who is sexually immoral, or covetous, or an idolater, or a reviler, or a drunkard, or an extortioner—not even to eat with such a person.

For what have I to do with judging those also who are outside? Do you not judge those who are inside? But those who are outside God judges. Therefore “put away from yourselves the evil person.” - 1 Corinthians 5:9-12 (NKJV)

Of note, I won't be preaching on this on the 15th. That one will be about how "Desires forge division."

I'll try and get a copy of it and post it in various places online, and see if I can embed it here.

Till next time, take care!

Step away from the table and the pulpit

Starting off, here are two common passages cited when defining the qualifications of a leader in a church, with a tangential third as follow-up that is also related:

For this reason I left you in Crete, that you should set in order the things that are lacking, and appoint elders in every city as I commanded you— if a man is blameless, the husband of one wife, having faithful children not accused of dissipation or insubordination. For a bishop must be blameless, as a steward of God, not self-willed, not quick-tempered, not given to wine, not violent, not greedy for money, but hospitable, a lover of what is good, sober-minded, just, holy, self-controlled, holding fast the faithful word as he has been taught, that he may be able, by sound doctrine, both to exhort and convict those who contradict. - Titus 1:5-9 (NKJV)

This is a faithful saying: If a man desires the position of a bishop, he desires a good work. A bishop then must be blameless, the husband of one wife, temperate, sober-minded, of good behavior, hospitable, able to teach; not given to wine, not violent, not greedy for money, but gentle, not quarrelsome, not covetous; one who rules his own house well, having his children in submission with all reverence (for if a man does not know how to rule his own house, how will he take care of the church of God?); not a novice, lest being puffed up with pride he fall into the same condemnation as the devil. Moreover he must have a good testimony among those who are outside, lest he fall into reproach and the snare of the devil. - 1 Timothy 3:1-7 (NKJV)

My brethren, let not many of you become teachers, knowing that we shall receive a stricter judgment. - James 3:1 (NKJV)

There are many facets to qualification, and in turn disqualification, but focus on the dynamics of discipline and self-control, especially as it concerns health and wellness, given the following:

Or do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and you are not your own? For you were bought at a price; therefore glorify God in your body and in your spirit, which are God’s. - 1 Corinthians 6:19-20 (NKJV)

And let's also take a detour to the Old Testament and understand the context that such advice would have existed in relating to how much one eats:

Do not mix with winebibbers,
Or with gluttonous eaters of meat;
For the drunkard and the glutton will come to poverty,
And drowsiness will clothe a man with rags. - Proverbs 23:20-21 (NKJV)

Whoever keeps the law is a discerning son,
But a companion of gluttons shames his father. - Proverbs 28:7 (NKJV)

When you sit down to eat with a ruler,
Consider carefully what is before you;
And put a knife to your throat
If you are a man given to appetite. - Proverbs 23:1-2 (NKJV)

And continuing the theme:

And they shall say to the elders of his city, ‘This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious; he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton and a drunkard.’ Then all the men of his city shall stone him to death with stones; so you shall put away the evil from among you, and all Israel shall hear and fear. - Deuteronomy 21:20-21 (NKJV)

All this to say that gluttony is no small sin, and while it does not appear to have such a significant penalty to participation in it as other sins such as adultery or murder, gluttony is essentially the same type of sin as those, manifested differently.

Adultery, and even just fornication, are the result of succumbing to desires of the flesh as related to sex. The feelings produced by such activities are so enjoyed, and so overwhelming to the individual, that when opportunities to experience such feelings arise, they cannot resist them.

This dynamic is not something which "goes away" even after having walked in repentance for some time, because the flesh that lusts after such things is not destroyed when we place our faith in Jesus Christ, but it is simply given competition. The flesh and Spirit rage throughout the rest of our lives, and if it did so for Paul who wrote a large portion of the New Testament, then the same is all the more true for us:

I say then: Walk in the Spirit, and you shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh. For the flesh lusts against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; and these are contrary to one another, so that you do not do the things that you wish. - Galatians 5:16-17 (NKJV)

We still are still living in the flesh even if walking by the Spirit.

So what this means is that even elders will fail, will sin, but that alone is not a disqualification, because we are all fallen and we have all sinned.

Instead, what it means is that how a church reacts to any sin on the part of its leaders and teachers is of great importance:

Let the elders who rule well be counted worthy of double honor, especially those who labor in the word and doctrine. For the Scripture says, “You shall not muzzle an ox while it treads out the grain,” and, “The laborer is worthy of his wages.” Do not receive an accusation against an elder except from two or three witnesses. Those who are sinning rebuke in the presence of all, that the rest also may fear. - 1 Tinothy 5:17-20 (NKJV)

The double measure of honor does not come without a price, or without requirement, merely because a man placed a label upon himself as "teacher". Along with that greater honor comes greater scrutiny and lack of privacy relating to unrepentant sin.

A church that I used to attend had conflict with the behavior of its head pastor. The pastors which I interacted with tried to make a case for there being systems of accountability in place, and that any corrections would be dealt with in that private and more intimate setting.

Likewise, there have been people I've read or listened to on social media and blogs who take a "public support, private criticism" approach regarding their associates.

The problem here is that correction and censure do not occur where such correction would teach all. Individuals may be singled out and criticized for their flaws, but when it comes to central figures and leaders, somehow they are to be granted extra leniency in the error of their ways?

According to scripture, that is wrong. People should fear taking on such responsibility, such a position in the social dynamic, because instead of having extra leniency, they are instead granted less. If all leaders were being held to a higher standard, we would not be where we are today.

There would be fewer fools or schemers rushing to the protection and position of leadership, because to do so would expose them to their enemies, lay their own selfish plans bare before all. It's when such positions provide insulation that they are brave enough to seek them.

So look at waistline of the man who preaches to you, of the authors you read, of the people who have placed themselves in positions of honor. The consequences of their sin is so much harder to hide, and as such, calling it out should be of little consequence or controversy. The goal isn't to remove them forever, unless they are unrepentant.

Now, you might be wondering, why is this so important? Why is "sin sniffing" so often ridiculed while we're yet commanded by God to hold leaders to a higher standard?

People have difficulty convicting themselves. If I am guilty of a particular kind of sin, my instinct from my flesh will be to hide it away, diminish it, and in so doing try to mitigate the consequences of sin by my own efforts instead of relying on Christ's work on the cross. Such a pattern of behavior creates exploits which people can leverage to mitigate their own sinful behavior.

Not seeking to repent, but to mitigate.

Mitigation circumvents Jesus Christ's work on our behalf, and Jesus is the only path to God, so there will be many who believe they have been saved, but are instead still living in sin without the Spirit to guide them away from the desires of the flesh. We make less of Jesus when we make less of the sin among us, to treat it as middling or trivial.

For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. - Romans 6:23 (NKJV)

Repent of your sins, confess them and rely on the Spirit to guide your path away from temptation and evil.

Listen to those who do the same.

Reject the council of those who are still enslaved to the satisfaction of their desires.