We Wear the Mask

I had a conversation with my wife over the weekend about the difficulty Pastors and Ministers have with being transparent. On the one hand we're expected to be human, but on the other hand, not as human as everybody else. What an oxymoron!

Truthfully, the reason that many of us wear the mask is not because we desire to be pretenders, but because most people just can't handle the real thing. Actually, if they ever got a glimpse of it they would chalk us up as being phony, not a "real preacher," or my favorite, "just like all the other preachers."

On the surface and underneath the surface we are actually real people! We're just ordinary people drafted by God not because we were better suited than any other person, but because God chose to glorify Himself through us despite our faults. Preachers and Pastors are not just ex-gangbangers, ex-drugdealers, ex-playboys, etc... Some of us have it in our past but still struggle to overcome it in our present. The title "reverend", "pastor", "bishop", or "minister" does not somehow make us more resistant to temptation, neither does it nullify the flesh that we battled with before acknowledging the call.

Sadly, some very gifted brothers and sisters have left the ministry or been dismissed from their place of service because their imperfections were unmasked. Ultimately we're just real people who feel every emotion that everyone else feels. We get angry sometime, we don't see eye to eye with our spouse sometime, we lack faith sometime, we neglect our prayer time sometime, we lust sometime, we drink too much sometime, we overeat sometime, we're jealous of other people sometime, we're selfish, prideful, and arrogant sometime. But God grants us the same grace as He does every other Christian when we come to Him in repentence.

Throughout my first year of Pastoring, I've been so bent on not being like certain Pastors that I know, but as time has passed and left behind it more wisdom through experience, I've discovered that it's arrogant and presumptuous of me to ever believe that I'm any different.

I used to speak of what I wouldn't do, now I think the more appropriate statement is "what I don't want to do" and "what I haven't done." I now realize that much greater men and women than I have fallen to all sorts of temptations, and made all sorts of bad leadership decisions.

I now realize that when I get to the end of my career and life it's less important that I present to God a perfect preacher (Calvary has already taken care of that), it's important that I present to him a completed work.

The Apostle Paul summed up the close of his ministry this way,

"I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith: Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, shall give me at that day..."

Please add Ministers and Pastors to your prayer list



The Holy Bible : King James Version. electronic ed. of the 1769 edition of the 1611 Authorized Version. Bellingham WA : Logos Research Systems, Inc., 1995, S. 2 Ti 4:7-8