Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals

Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, Inc: Welcome. The following message is a ministry of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals. The Alliance is known for ministries such as the Philadelphia Conference on Reformed Theology, as well as nationally syndicated radio programs like The Bible Study Hour, Every Last Word, and Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible. Our purpose is to promote a biblical understanding and worldview. Thank you for listening.

Guest (Male): Isn't it a conundrum when a pulpit is big, but not quite big enough to have a Bible and then two sheets, and so you put the Bible on the side? It always makes me feel uncomfortable. But it's on my mind all the time, and we'll actually open it and everything.

I'm sorry I couldn't join you earlier in the weekend. I would love to have, but it just wasn't meant to be. But I have heard what this conference has been like already. I hear that Tim Witmer was very helpful and that Ed Welch was good and consoling and insightful, as usual. I heard that Harry Reeder was really good.

I really wanted to come and hear Harry Reeder. I had only heard him once years ago. When I got the brochure and saw the "embers to a flame" words on there, I really didn't have time to read the brochure, and I assumed that what it was was that Mr. Reeder was going to speak on the same topics I've heard him speak about before. That is his famous anti-smoking sermons.

I don't know if you're familiar with them, but at least in my circles, that's what Mr. Reeder is primarily known for. It comes, of course, from that classic text in Proverbs 16 where the writer says that a wicked man digs up evil and a burning fire is on his lips. That has been a powerful tool. But it's my understanding that over the years, Mr. Reeder has remarkably progressed in his hermeneutics, and I'm just really encouraged deeply by everything I'm hearing coming out of this conference.

Anyway, you do need to know that I am exquisitely aware that I am a minister speaking to ministers, meaning that any one of us could get up here and talk on this subject that I've been asked to speak about today, and that is ministering to angry sheep. I know that, and I can honestly say I would rather hear you talk about it than talk to you about it. I would. But I happen to know Ron Evans, who is one of the organizers, and he asked me to come and speak about it.

To dwell above with saints we love, oh, that will glory be. But to dwell below with saints we know, well, that's a different story. Of course, we know that. So may I give you some reminders, and I do take them as reminders rather than anything new to any of us, from the Bible about what Scripture says about this sort of thing. Jesus, help me speak to these brothers and sisters who have been so encouraging to me just sitting at tables eating breakfast and ice cream and so forth. Please make yourself be big, too. Amen.

The first thing I'd like to say is this: whatever your ministry, some people will get angry with you, and this will make you angry in return. If you're new to a church staff, like when we hire support staff, they are often very surprised at this. Usually, we take them aside and say, "Listen, you probably haven't had a chance to see the underbelly of a church yet, but there is one in every church and it's difficult."

Perhaps if you're a pastor, you always thought that your job would be reviewed annually by the elders instead of weekly in the parking lot, and you just didn't know that it was coming. But over time, it really doesn't take long, does it, to get your first verbal mugging in the lobby, or to get ambushed in the parking lot, or to find a zippy email your way from some irate parishioner, or a nastygram in your mailbox, anonymously, preferably. Or it is handed to you usually right before you go into the sanctuary for the second service.

How could you possibly not perform the wedding of my daughter simply because you think her fiancé is not a Christian? I think he's a Christian. Or how could you possibly ask to postpone the confirmation of my son because you don't think he can give a credible profession of faith yet? I live with him, and I know he can give a credible profession of faith. Why do we have so many hymns and not enough guitars? And the next week: why are there so many guitars and not enough hymns?

You know about these things. This is why we could stand up and tell stories here, and this is when it would get awfully interesting and awfully long. I know that. We never hear a sermon on family life. We never hear a sermon on single life. We never hear a sermon on abortion or on patriotism or on the topic of whatever their favorite radio preacher is. The fact that the Gospel of John, which you're working through, doesn't happen to address that topic this particular month is an irrelevant fact to them. You know what this is like, don't you, if you're in the pastorate?

More painfully is when your motives are attacked. If you ever get the church disciplined, which if you have been a pastor for any length of time you most assuredly will or should, you get this kind of stuff.

Guest (Male 2): Recorded January 12th at 9:57 AM. Steve, I got your message from yesterday and let me tell you something. I hesitate to say this, but you've really pissed me off. And I'll say this: get yourself a good attorney. Not just the church, you get yourself a good attorney because I guarantee you, if you say a word about me Sunday without evidence, without a statement acknowledging that I am willing back when I joined the church to submit myself to church discipline or anything else, I promise you, I promise you, I promise you, I am seeking damages.

I will seek damages not just from the church, but from you personally. Now your tone sucks as far as I'm concerned, just like mine does right now. How dare you talk to me in that tone of voice? How dare you talk to me? And I'm begging you, I'm begging you under the authority and the jurisdiction of the civil laws of this state of Pennsylvania, don't, don't get involved in defamation of character, slander, libel, or any of this other stuff. Don't.

I warn you, Steve, if you guys do something, you do it right. You do it by the book. The fact that you don't have the courtesy or the decency, whether this girl's a pagan or not, to allow me to be committed to this thing that I said I'm committed to, but I'm not willing to agree or I'm willing to modify a timetable by two or three days. Well, as far as I'm concerned, screw you and the elders. It's off, everything's off. I'm not meeting with Paul, I'm not dealing with you anymore. I officially resign from the church. If you have a problem with that, that's too bad. But don't get your name in the paper because of the mistake you make Sunday. Good day.

Guest (Male): But I know, I know many of you have gotten calls just like that, or ones waiting for you now when you get home. Thus, this is how you always feel. You feel like the fish in the blender. You're scared to open your email. You're scared to pick up the telephone. You don't want to run into anybody at Walmart because you just don't know when this is going to happen, and you surely don't want to check your mailbox right before the second service. You don't.

Years ago, I was at a preaching conference by James Boice, and at the end of the Q&A, somebody asked him, "Could I ask you, Dr. Boice, what do you think is the most difficult part of the Christian ministry for you?" Without batting an eye, in less than a nanosecond, he answered, "Criticism." Which makes us think of the quote by Martin Luther that many of you are aware of, doubtless. "Oh," Luther said, "to be able to look into the friendly eyes of animals," he said, in contrast to the people of his church.

Now, the issue here is this, then. Here we're talking about you becoming, I mean, people becoming angry at you. But what happens is, because they're angry at you, of course you, in turn, if you're human, become angry at them. It's unavoidable. Paul said don't let the sun go down on your anger, and you find yourself praying, "Oh Lord, like Joshua, please don't let the sun go down now, not now," because you need a little more time to work it out, do you not?

Of course, anger is not always sinful. You know that. Jesus is at Lazarus' tomb, and it says that Jesus, having seen Mary weeping, was moved with indignation or deeply moved in spirit. Embrimaomai, many of you are familiar with that word. Thayer writes it that it is moved with indignation and very angry. Liddell and Scott talk about secular Greek where it was used at least once of horses snorting. This is Jesus, angry in his soul.

Anger is not always wrong. Do you remember when in 1 Samuel when the Ammonites were attacking Jabesh-Gilead, besieging it, and they said, "The only way we'll spare your life is that if every man of you comes out," Jabesh-Gilead being Israelites, of course, "and we put the right eye of each of you out, we'll spare your lives." And when Saul heard about it, we read, "When Saul heard about these threats, the Spirit of God came on him in power, and he burned with anger."

Isn't that a fascinating juxtaposition? It is not wrong to be angry all the time. In fact, David Powlison asks, and I'm sure many of you have heard this, "Who is the angriest person in the Bible?" God is the angriest person in the Bible. Yes, he is. We tend to think, Powlison said, of a spectrum like this: that there is anger on the one side and then opposite of that is niceness, and that's where we're supposed to be.

But he said, now think about it. If you take all the biblical data together, you get something more like this: that on the one side is sinful anger, and the opposite of that is indifference, which is where many of us are most of the time. Godly anger is often right in the middle of those two. It is okay to be angry. If a child is abused, you surely ought to be angry. What do you think drives undercover cops who have to mix with this seediest lowest life on the food chain in order to bring these guys down? It's their anger at what they do that drives them. Otherwise, they couldn't keep going. They have to have it.

God assumes that you and I will be angry when he says, "Be angry and yet do not sin." All anger is not sinful. But all anger is dangerous. Therefore, my goal today is to expose the danger of anger in the ministry and to try to give us a few channels to help control it. What I've been saying so far, then, is this: in any ministry, people will become angry at you, and their anger is going to make you angry in response.

Secondly, people who angrily sin against you are, more importantly, sinning against God. Here you have David, highly wronging Bathsheba, more highly wronging even her husband Uriah. After that adulterous and murderous affair, David prays to God, as you well know in Psalm 51, "Lord, against you and you only have I sinned." Why? What would make him say that? Well, it's because, of course, in comparison, his sin against God is infinitely greater than his sin against these two people, even though those sins were so very serious. That's how God looks at it.

When somebody is angry at you, particularly sinfully, somebody's really hot at you, there is a bigger player in the room than the two of you. There just is. But it's hard to remember that because one of the three is invisible. This is especially true when people are angry at their leaders. You recall Samuel. Samuel poured out his life, all his life, for the people of Israel. You recall one time when the Philistines attacked and then he prayed and God sent a thunderclap and absolutely routed them in 1 Samuel 7.

We read then that throughout Samuel's lifetime, this is 1 Samuel 7:13, throughout his whole lifetime, the hand of the Lord was against the Philistines. He was their father. He was their prophet. And yet, at the end of his life, they banged the table and demanded a king instead of another judge-prophet. Samuel was highly displeased, of course. He prayed to God about it in 1 Samuel 8, and God's reply was this remarkable sentence in 1 Samuel 8:7. The Lord told him, "It is not you they have rejected. They have rejected me as their king."

It's not about you, God says. What you and I take so personally are often things between people and God, and you, unfortunately, just happen to be in the neighborhood. That's really what's going on. Let me give you an illustration of this if I could. Many of you have been youth directors before. I was a youth director in a number of different churches beforehand, and you can relate to all of these, I would imagine.

A youth director really takes it on the chin from some parents regarding his youth ministry. Now, it may be your fault, and there are times you have to say, "You're right, I blew it there." But a lot of times, here's what's going on instead. Here's the real cause behind the complaint. First, it's love of reputation, often. That is, a parent says in his heart, "My kid is embarrassing me the way he or she is acting right now, and you aren't fixing him. And so I feel like a fool, and it's that's what's driving rather than any kind of godly response."

Or it may be driving a parent is a love of comfort. The cops are calling, the principal's calling, and there is no peace in the house. It's like what Bill Cosby said: parents aren't interested in justice. They're interested in quiet. And if you're not giving that quiet, you're jolly well going to find somebody's going to give it to you and it's the youth director. If he doesn't do it, well, he's going to get grabbed by the throat and have some white-knuckle marks there.

Or it could be that fear is driving a parent. That for the first time in those parents' lives, they cannot control their children. So their control need starts to really surface. Knock-knock. Control freak. Now you say control freak who? Well, that's the idea, you see. Of course, as a parent, you've been used to dragging this kid around by the hair for all these years, and now suddenly he's not going to be dragged by the hair, and what are you going to do? And so he comes after the youth director.

Or a parent just simply cannot accept God's sovereignty over his own. That God may have a timetable to mature his teenagers that is not the parent's timetable, and they can't stand that. You happen to be the youth director in the crosshairs at that moment. In summary, what I'm saying is: when folks slander you and criticize you, they are wrestling with their own sins often, their own comforts, their own idols, their own gods. You happen to be in the neighborhood.

Let me give, if I could, two illustrations from the Bible about this idea that God is the real object of people's problems, not you, often. First comes from the incident of the Golden Calf in Exodus 32. Remember that Moses is on the mountain, he's up there for a long time, people are down there, they're getting artsy. God says to Moses, Exodus 32:7, "Go down because your people, whom you brought out of Egypt, have become corrupt." It's that pronoun, isn't it, that really is quite nervous-making?

Now, what's God doing here? Well, of course, he's distancing himself from these people whom he's about to throw into a fiery pit. He's also testing Moses to see if Moses thinks this is about him. And so Moses replies in Exodus 32:11, this brilliant reply, Moses said, "O Lord, why should your anger burn against your people, whom you brought out of Egypt with great power and a mighty hand?" What he is doing is he is absolutely getting himself out of the middle of these two great players.

This is what you need to do and I need to do, of course, not literally, but in our mindset. To realize that something bigger is going on than the discomfort that I am feeling, that their horizontal problem with me is ultimately a vertical problem with God.

Second place from the Bible that illustrates that God, I think, is often the focus of people's problems and not we ourselves, and it has to do with the book of Numbers and the Israelites complaining in the wilderness. Oh my goodness. You remember at first it was just the minority, just the chronic complainers who said, Numbers 11:4, "The rabble began to crave other food and started wailing and said, 'If only we had meat to eat.'"

So later, of course, the poison quickly spreads. Now by Numbers 11:10, Moses heard the people of every family wailing in their tents. Eventually, it reaches the leaders. And so we have Moses' own brother and sister in Numbers 12:1. Miriam, his sister, and Aaron, the high priest, began to talk against Moses because of his Cushite wife. How about that? And later, you have the spies, they give their discouraging report, and now we have this kind of language. The whole assembly said to them, "If only we had died in Egypt or in this desert. That is, we would prefer to fall into the sand under the scorching sun, die of thirst, and have our tongue swell up in our mouth than to endure one more week of your inept leadership."

Am I speaking to anybody here? So there was a movement to replace Moses. Numbers 14:4, they said to each other, "We should choose a leader and go back to Egypt because obviously we don't have a leader now." And finally, they contemplate murder. Numbers 14:10, the whole assembly talked about stoning Moses and Aaron.

Now all this feels like the people's animosity toward Moses. But how does God view their complaints? Numbers 14:26, the Lord said to Moses and Aaron, "How long will this wicked community grumble against me?" When is the last time that that thought really worked its way inside your mind and your soul? It's a difficult thought to work way down there, and it's a difficult thought to keep down inside there, it really is, isn't it?

And so God reacts. Numbers 11:1, when God heard them, his anger was aroused, and fire from the Lord burned people along the outskirts of the camp. Or Numbers chapter 11 verse 10, Moses heard the people of every family wailing, and the Lord became exceedingly angry. Numbers 12:2, the Lord heard Miriam and Aaron complaining, and God said to Miriam, "Why were you not afraid to speak to my servant Moses this way?" And he struck her with leprosy on the spot.

When the people talked about stoning God's man down here, Numbers 14:11 and 12, the Lord said to Moses, "How long will these people treat me with contempt? I will strike them down with the plague and destroy them." And Moses interceded for them, and that's the only reason God didn't do it. So, after all this, I might be tempted to think, and perhaps one or two people in this room might be tempted to think, that God's primary interest in such conflicts is to protect his servants against complaining, angry congregations. Not a chance.

Point three: God will often deal with you if you make yourself the issue when others sin against you. I can't think of a better way to illustrate that than the two instances of Moses getting water from the rock. First time, of course, was Exodus 17, where we read verse 4 and following, Moses cried to the Lord, "What am I going to do with these people? They're almost ready to stone me." And God said, "Strike the rock, and water will come out of it." Fine, a great day. Everybody threw up their hats and marked it on their calendars.

Now the second time, of course, is in Numbers chapter 20. They're thirsty again. It's a big desert, been out here a long time. And so the people get desperate, they are highly upset, and in Numbers 20:7, God says to Moses, "Speak to that rock before their eyes and it will pour out its water." All right. Now what happens there is then they're all assembled near the rock, we read, and Moses is ticked off at them, and Moses says in Numbers 20:10, "Listen, you rebels, must we bring water out of this rock?" And Moses raised his arm and he struck the rock twice with his staff.

The result was, of course, it says the water gushed out, and there was a terrible price to pay. Numbers 20:12, the Lord said to Moses and Aaron, "Because you did not trust in me enough to honor me as holy in the sight of the Israelites, you will not bring this community into the land that I gave them." This is one of the places in the Bible that makes me want to weep. You've heard what Moses went through with these people. You think about fleeing for his life, 40 years as a shepherd in middle of nowhere, swallowing hard when he's told to walk back into Pharaoh's palace and put your finger in his chest and tell him a couple things.

All those plagues, all the people in Egyptians hating him, Pharaoh hating him, his own people, the Israelites, hating him, taking them through all the desert, all the snake bites, all the manna, all the quail, all the dying, and people offering fake incense to the Lord and the ground opening up and swallowing people, it's just a nightmare. And then after all that, as God has, as it were, baited him with the Promised Land, God says you will never see that land or set foot on it once.

So we read that in Deuteronomy 3, verse 23 and following, Moses said, this is Moses at the end of his life talking to the Israelites, recounting it, he said, "At that time I pleaded with the Lord. 'O Sovereign Lord,' he said, 'let me go over and see that good land behind the Jordan, that fine hill country and Lebanon.'" You can just feel it, can't you? You can hear it. The man is, I suspect, he's weeping. I don't know. And then Moses says to the Israelites, recounting that, "But because of you, the Lord was angry with me."

That is enough, the Lord said. Do not speak to me anymore about this matter. And so came true the words of Psalm 106:32 and 33. By the waters of Meribah, they angered the Lord, and trouble came to Moses because of them, for they rebelled against the Spirit of the Lord, and rash words came from Moses' lips. Here, when I read this, I feel like I am standing on ice a sixteenth of an inch thin when I walk into my church sometimes.

Why would God do this to Moses, the most meek man on the face of the earth? And why would God do similar things with you, his servant, who has slogged away for years in difficult places of ministry? Well, that's our point number four. By making yourself the focus when people you minister to are angry, you unknowingly detract from what God is doing. Let me put it another way. By making yourself the focus, you unknowingly rob God of glory.

Moses' anger robbed God of his glory. And let me suggest at least two ways, or probably more than this. One is this: Moses' anger gave people an excuse to sin. I mean, because if he's going to sin, why can't they sin? For crying out loud, it's his job. Moses is paid for being good. These people are good for nothing. That's how it works.

So here's the idea. Apparently, it seems to me that the Israelites knew that Moses had been told by God to speak to the rock the second time. The Bible doesn't say it in so many words, but it seems to imply to me because when God says in Numbers 20:12, "You didn't trust me enough to honor me as holy in the sight of the Israelites," God took high offense to the way that the Israelites were viewing the situation there. I think the Israelites knew what was going on.

So they see a leader get angry and ticked off, and this gives them the license to go because, as you know the principle, people in your church or people in your ministry or unbelievers near your church or near your ministry can be 99% in the wrong and you can be 1% in the wrong. But people will avoid repenting before God until you repent before them, even if your offense is much smaller. Have you not seen that many times? People will avoid repenting before God until you repent before them, even if your offense is much smaller, because you are the leader.

All right, that's the first way Moses robbed God of his glory. He gave people an excuse to sin. But there's a second way, and to me, this is the really breathtaking one. It seems to me that what Moses did when he struck the rock the second time is that he short-circuited what God wanted to teach the people. Now let me clarify. When I say that Moses short-circuited what God wanted to do, I'm using the same kind of language the Bible uses in many places, but we all know what it means. God always eventually gets done what he's planning on doing, and he does it through a route that in the end glorifies him the most. But he truly does take our sins seriously, and he says that we put road blocks in what he's doing. That's the way it comes across from a human level.

I believe these things. I sleep with a copy of the confession under my pillow, I really do. What was it that God was teaching at the rock that Moses got in the way of? Well, he certainly was teaching a lot more than just physical water. You remember what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 10:4? He says the people of Israel drank from that spiritual rock which followed them, and that rock was Christ. Clearly, this was pictorial of our Savior whether those people realized it at the time or not.

Do you remember then in John 7 where Jesus is at the Feast of Tabernacles? The same idea is there. The Feast of Tabernacles, you may recall, was given to commemorate God's taking care of the people through their wilderness wanderings. They'd sleep in booths to remember what it was like, and they would recount the manna and the water, and they pour out water at that feast. This was not required in the Bible; this came later to show God providing the water in the desert.

As the water is poured out, somewhere along there, Jesus stands up and he says, "If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink." This is the whole idea behind this water in the Old Testament. Now think, though, think about how the two-rock problem, what it did to that picture. Here's the first rock. The first rock, how is Moses to get water out of it? He was to strike it. He was to strike it with what? With his staff.

Exodus 17:5 and 6, the Lord answered Moses, "Take in your hand the staff with which you struck the Nile and strike the rock." This staff is not some kindly shepherd's crook. This is the absolute rod of judgment that God has used throughout. So in Exodus 7:19, back in Egypt, the Lord says to Moses, "Tell Aaron, take your staff, stretch it over the waters of Egypt, and they will turn to blood and blood will be everywhere."

Exodus 8:5, God says to Aaron, "Stretch out your hand with your staff over the streams and canals and ponds and make frogs come up on the land of Egypt." Exodus 8:16, "Tell Aaron, take your staff, strike the dust of the ground, and throughout the land of Egypt, the ground will become gnats." Now by the time we get to the Book of Revelation, this rod of Aaron has become the scepter of the King of Kings by which he crushes the nations.

Revelation 2:27, "He will rule them with an iron scepter. He will dash them to pieces like pottery." The point is this: the rod is the rod of the judgment and anger of God, and water came to the people by the rock Christ being smitten by the judgment rod of God. If that's not a clear picture of what happened at the cross, nothing in the Old Testament is, nothing.

Now we get to the second rock. And here comes the question. How often must our Savior receive the stroke to pay for all this gunk inside my heart and yours? Hebrews 7:27, he sacrificed for their sins once for all when he offered himself. Hebrews 9:12, he entered the holy place once for all by his own blood, having obtained eternal redemption. Hebrews 10:10, we've been made holy through the sacrifice of the body of Jesus once for all.

And thus, God commanded Moses to speak. Why? Because once Jesus dies, how do we get the grace of Christ? We get it by speaking to Christ. We get it by confessing his death and resurrection. We get it by pouring out our words of repentance. We get it by praying in faith. By striking the rock once, Moses preached the gospel. And by striking the rock twice, Moses shamed the gospel.

And thus, I would propose to you that he cast a shadow of what was meant to be, from a human level, probably one of the most important symbols of the death and work of Christ in the entire Old Testament. And thus Moses robs God of glory, and he did it because he got angry at people who were angry at him. Isn't that breathtaking? Now, of course, Moses wasn't thinking about all this. He was just thinking about how ticked off he was at Mr. So-and-So because of the note he found in his mailbox. And of course, nine times out of ten, we are not thinking about these things when we get our finger on that trigger. We're just not thinking about it.

Something bigger was happening than he knew. What was the bigger thing that Moses' anger hid? What is the bigger thing that our anger will hide? I might put it this way: what is it that God was doing and is doing in church conflict? This is what God is doing, point number five. What is God doing when he lets people become vitriolic toward you? He is maturing you, and he is healing the sins of others who make your life hellish.

That he's maturing you, we can't linger there. That's such a theme throughout all the Bible that's so very clear as you think about the topic of suffering. But that he is healing the people who make your life miserable, oh, this dynamic, of course, is an exact picture. It's a reflection, it's a mirror of the whole dynamic between Jesus Christ and us, as shown in 1 Peter 2. In 1 Peter 2:23 and following, we read this.

When they hurled insults at him, he did not retaliate. When he suffered, he made no threats. Instead, he entrusted himself to God who judges justly. He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, so that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds, you have been healed. May I draw a little picture that the concept, at least, I can't remember if I saw the picture came from Bill Gothard back in the 1970s, it was very helpful.

Picture a soldier whipping Christ here, because it was talking about the wounds of Jesus. Now, really, when the soldier whips Christ, whose sins are behind it all that cause that soldier to whip Christ? Well, my sins and your sins. So you might say behind this that, really, we are behind that soldier. We are the soldier whipping Christ. Can you understand why I say that? It's our sins that put him there.

Now, having said that, the Bible says in 1 Peter 2 that by his stripes, in other words, he is wounded, and by those stripes, we are healed. The idea is that as our sins caused Christ to suffer miserably on that cross, as he embraces that suffering that his Father has called him to do and says, "Not my will but yours be done, let this cup can pass from me, please take it, but not my will but yours be done," that act is what makes it so that our sins are healed.

Because the stuff that came out of our hearts that put Christ on the cross is the same DNA as the stuff that people are vomiting from their mouths against you in the hallway and in their zippy little nastygrams. It's the same stuff. But you've been healed from it by a Savior who took it and bore it. And now we read in 1 Peter 2:21, to this example, you were called. The same thing.

As people put their stripes on you, and as you commit your cause to God, and then God uses that to get inside their consciences and heart and heal them. I think this is part of what Paul was talking about when he says in Colossians 1:24 that we fill up what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ. It's something along these lines, at least partially. So in summary, what I'm saying is this: what is God doing with people who are just putting you in bed with depression and making you lose weight and giving you headaches and stomach aches? He's maturing you, and he is healing their sins through the way you react.

Now if I could just spend the last few minutes speaking about a few practical suggestions of what this might actually look like in the coming weeks. These thoughts are not in any particular order. I've really gone over and over and thought, "Is there a better order to put these in?" I just can't think. I don't know. You would spend them differently than I would, so that's all right.

First, I would suggest this to you: when you have people driving you crazy in your church, pick a very small number of people, two or three perhaps, maybe your elder board, probably your spouse, a good friend, I don't know, but a very small number, and confide in them and limit your confiding to them. What that will do is this: it will give you some people to just spill in front of, and they will sympathize with you. And if you're sinful in the way that you're going about it, they will be kind enough to tell you, but they will tell you graciously, and it will keep you gossiping from everybody that walks by all over the place. You will avoid a lot of sin. You will be able to relieve your heart of the story, and you will have some people to walk through it with you without dragging a whole church down or a whole group of people. That makes sense?

Second, pray for them. And I mean pray blessings down on their heads. Jesus says pray for people who despitefully use you is what he said in the Sermon on the Mount. What does he mean? Dear God, I pray that you would give that man a great relationship with his wife. I pray that she would love him and be the best wife he could imagine. I pray that you would make their marriage sing. God, I pray for their kids. I pray their kids would really obey their parents and grow up to please them and make them proud, and may you help those kids succeed in life and so forth.

Lord, I pray for their health. I heard the guy has a little bit of a problem with his back. Would you help him with his back today? Listen, these are prayers that you just don't want to pray, are they? You pray them through gritted teeth a lot. And then pray for their finances. Lord, I pray that he'll get a raise this year. Please give this man a raise this year, if you would consider it and it would be good for your kingdom, would you give this man a raise this year?

You see where I'm going. That's what your prayers are going to be like if they're honest at all. You're going to have to reel in half of what you said. That's okay, that's why you have a Savior. He has blood to scrub it all up, and then he will take that prayer and he will edit out all the junk and all the bile. By the time it gets to the Father, the Holy Spirit has edited your prayers. You know what it's like. It's pure, it's rich, it's humble, it's sincere. And God will bless that man, and maybe God will bless that man with a bad conscience for the way he's been treating you. But if he doesn't, God who sees in secret will reward you openly.

Another suggestion: where possible, and where you can do this honestly, praise this person to other people in ways where he's good. This guy may be the worst person who ever crawled under a sink. But he's a good crawler. So you find what you can say about him and look for ways to say, "Man, you know, I noticed the other day that Fred, that guy has such a quick mind, you know? Or that guy really is a hard worker, isn't he? Or you know, that guy's been coming to church for 18 years, and I don't think he's missed many once."

Those kinds of things, say them. Because as you say them, God will sometimes let them work their way into your mind and you really will see: are any of us all good and all bad? We're not. Neither is that person. Do not be overcome by evil. That's what I think Romans 12:21 is saying. Do not be overcome by evil; overcome evil with good. If you have a chance to put your hand on that guy's shoulder and say, "I'm glad you're here today," any little acts of kindness and words of kindness. If he does something in your church that is helpful, write him a little note. Fred, I really appreciate what you did the other day. Bam, and drop it off to him. Handwritten is better.

Please don't ever write to him about his problems. Because I know that you would always say positive things in writing, but that you would always say negative things face-to-face and never write them. Am I true? I wish I had 20 minutes to elaborate on that one. Why do you never write negative things to people? They're going to pass them around. What you write, they can't read your tone of voice. They can't see your facial expression. They can't see your face. They can't read your body language.

One time I got a note in my mailbox from an elder, and I read it right before the second service, the dumbest thing in the world. I was bleeding all over the rug as I was walking up to the podium. It was awful. And so I decided I would call him that week. So I called him that week, and I said, "Fred,"—this guy Fred's a real loser—I said, "Fred, I got your note, and boy, I know that you're really angry with me, and I just want to talk about it." "Angry?" he says. "No, I wasn't angry. No, I wasn't angry. No, I just wanted to point out A, B, and C." He's an engineer, but you get the idea. He just wrote it like that, and I didn't know how to read it because he had written it. Don't write anything negative, please. And you're going to go home and think, "Well, I have a situation that's the exception." That exception situation is exactly the situation I'm talking about.

All right. Another suggestion if I could. All these are about how to try to love people that are driving you crazy. But I remember being in bed two or three days, I was so depressed for two or three days one time about a situation in church. I could not get out of bed. I lost 17 pounds in two weeks. You know what this is like. And the thought of trying to love, love, love somebody was what I was trying to do is avoid murder. If I could just avoid murder.

So what I'm saying is, just like it says, Zechariah 4:10, "Do not despise the day of small things." If you can't just love, love, love the guy, try not to cuss him out. Seriously, if you have to go to the lowest level, start there. God knows where you are. He knows your frame. He remembers that you're dust. "Lord, just get me through the next five minutes without actually putting my fingernails in his eyes, please." And then work up from there. Don't despise the day of small things. God sees you when you are making these little efforts. Aren't most of the efforts of the Christian life tiny little pathetic steps of obedience? Aren't they? They're like your little kid. When your little kid comes and he picks dandelions and weeds and he brings them to you, "Happy Mother's Day, Mom," and you're allergic, what do you do? You say, "Thank you."

Well, that's because you're made in the image of God. That's why you do that. And that's what God says to you when you do not murder him afterwards. He says, "Thank you, there was no murder here today. This was a very good start, and we're just going to work on it from there." That's the kind of Savior you have. He's very tender. He does not drive the sheep that are with the young harshly.

Two more, I think. Is it? Here we go. The next one is this: there is almost always a kernel of truth in their criticisms of you. And if you don't find that kernel of truth, you will miss one of the big things God's doing through your critics. I work hard at my relationship with people. I do. I've never found that difficult. I just am impelled to, I have to. But the exception with Bob—Bob, who introduced me.

What happens is, because I find that relatively easy to do with people, I was stunned many years ago when we had a very difficult situation in church. And in the middle of that difficult situation, the elder said to me, "Steve, you are way too detailed with people, and sometimes we think you frustrate people." Honestly, it frustrated me to hear that because I worked so hard not to frustrate people.

So I went to John Butler, who was the head of the Christian Counseling Educational Foundation, and just talked to him about it. And he said, "Steve, I would just listen to those guys. If you can, I would just listen to them." So I went and I talked. I went to every member of our church staff and I said, "Can I ask you, are there ways in which I frustrate you that I might be blind to?" And I called everyone who had ever worked at our church over the years.

And it was an interesting experiment. Many of them said, "Steve, you never frustrated me," which was really good to hear. But a couple said the opposite. And one lady said, "Steve, I liked working with you, many things about you, blah blah blah. But do you remember the time when..." And she explained to me a time when she had blown it, really blown it, for a dinner and got the dinner there late and it just made the whole dinner collapse. And I went in the next day and was helpful to give her about 14 steps of how to do it the next time. And she said, "Could you just not have said, 'Steve, it really made the dinner crash and burn'?"

How eye-opening. I would never have known that had those elders not spoken to me and had I not called her. There's almost always a kernel of truth in people's frustrations with you. By God's grace, find it, because grace flows to the humble. God resists the proud; he gives grace to the humble. Humble yourselves in front of the people who frustrate you. They're the hardest people to humble yourself in front of. They're the most valuable people to humble yourself in front of. They're the people you'll learn the most from because your fans are just going to tell you how great you are.

Lastly, there really is a place for being a tough guy in church, which is the balance to everything I'm saying. There really is. There is such a thing as godly stubbornness. There is such a thing as gracious tenacity. A fellow pastor of James Boice once said to me near the end of Boice's life and career, he said, "James Boice had many enemies, but he just outlasted them." And I thought, "Yes."

Another church leader once said to me, he said, "Listen, somebody, somebody is going to run your church. It might as well be you." And I thought, "I don't know where that is in the Bible, but I'm going to find that apocryphal book and I'm going to lobby for its inclusion in the canon." Because there is a real truth to it. There really is. In other words, it's not just you always defer, always defer, because sometimes you will be deferring to people who will do nasty things in your church. And there are times you have to be a brick wall and stand up and be a velvet-covered brick and be kind but tough. You really do. And so there are times when it takes church discipline and that sort of event. Jesus said, "I am sending you out like sheep among wolves. Be innocent as doves, but be shrewd as snakes." Don't be stupid and just roll over and play dead and be a wimp and a wuss and a pansy. I'm not talking about that. There are times you're going to have to stare people down and say hard things in person. There just are.

So let me tell you the result of this kind of stuff to me. The man that you heard at the beginning of the talk here was a man that our elders had spent not hundreds but thousands of man-hours with him and his family. And when he finally was facing church discipline, that's what you heard. And I really did expect to hear from an attorney any day. But several years later, after he was excommunicated, at his restoration service, this is what we heard. Next slide, please.

Guest (Male 3): Yeah. How would you describe your interaction with the elders of the church over that period of time?

Guest (Male 2): I would say the first word that would come into my mind was arrogance, extremely disrespectful. I said I was talking with Verna on the telephone, I think it was last night or the night before, and trust me, she didn't pay me to say this, but I said that with the elders that are at this church, I have a hard time now understanding why anyone would have difficulty following their leadership. But at that time, I was defiant, I was arrogant, I was angry, and I didn't...

I do know the pain, certainly not the depth of it, but the pain and the hardship that I brought into the lives of my kids and kids. And I certainly ask forgiveness from all of you, and especially the elders, for my arrogance and from my contempt, my disrespect.

Guest (Male): That's good. We can hit it off, I think. Thank you. This was a glorious service. Out of seven people that have been excommunicated in our church, four we've had confetti parties for when they came back, because they do come back some. God in his mercy will use your humility, your asking about your own sins, your praying for people, your self-examination. And I can say he will even use your screw-ups and your sins as you do it for good, because you will screw this up and sin. If your boots are not dirty in dealing with people, the only reason is because you're not out there in the war. You're in some office doing nothing. If you get out there and do anything, as you know, you will sin and blow it and have your boots dirty. But that's why we have a Savior, don't we?

May I pray for you before we go? Lord Jesus, I've only met a few of these people, but I really like whom I've met, and I've heard about others. And I see the way they're living and the people they minister to and the situations they're in and they're not easy. God, would you give these brothers or sisters of mine help from heaven, humility before people that disrespect them, wisdom, quickness on their feet, shrewdness as snakes but harmlessness as doves. And would you please make your cross and your kingdom large and glorious. And God, may people forget us at the end of our ministry. But may the lingering savor of Christ just waft in the room, and may people be irresistibly drawn to you. And may we enjoy seeing one another in heaven and tell a lot of stories about how you used us through difficult situations. Amen.

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