Sermon Preached February 27, 2011 by Pastor Spaude

Lord, Give Us Faithful Pastors - 1 Corinthians 4:1-5

In the name of Christ Jesus, the Lord and Captain of the Church, dear fellow redeemed,

  Are you familiar with performance reviews? We all undergo them. Some performance reviews are quite formal like the kind in the workplace where you sit down with a supervisor and review your performance over the past year. Students have regular performance reviews; they’re called quizzes and tests. We have performance reviews at home as the members of our family let us know how well we’re doing at being a parent or grandparent, a son or daughter, a husband or wife.  Pastors, too, undergo performance reviews. Members have opinions about our preaching, our teaching, our counseling, our leadership style, the visits we make or don’t make, and our bedside manner at the hospital. And they should. It would be odd if they didn’t. But how should you judge your pastors’ performance? What criteria should we use?  Paul explains what is most important when it comes to a pastor’s performance. We’ll summarize Paul’s words in the form of a simple prayer that will serve as our theme today: LORD, GIVE US FAITHFUL PASTORS 1) who are servants of Christ; and 2) who are stewards of God’s secrets.

1) Who are servants of Christ

 The members of this Corinthian congregation offered a performance review for their pastors. In chapter 1 Paul says: “My brothers, some from Chloe's household have informed me that there are quarrels among you. {12} What I mean is this: One of you says, ‘I follow Paul’; another, ‘I follow Apollos’; another, ‘I follow Cephas’...’" Paul was the first pastor there and Apollos followed him.  Did you catch on what this congregation base its performance review- on their preaching style and their personalities?  The Greeks loved highly skilled speakers who wowed their audiences with the latest tidbits of wisdom. They wanted their pastors to be the Joel Osteen’s of their day; pastors who could “pack em in.” Maybe we have thought about it. Maybe we think our pastors would be better off imitating the well-dressed evangelists we see on TV who fill huge auditoriums with crowds that hang on their every word. They speak so well and on such a wide variety of topics that people find so interesting and pertinent. Why can’t our pastor be more like them? Why have plain microwave popcorn when can have the buttered and salted popcorn?  Why have just the steak when you can have sautéed onions and mushrooms on it? So members can be disappointed when pastors do not live up to these expectations. And pastors can be either driven to despair because they don’t live up to these expectations or driven to change what they do and how they do it!

It’s not my purpose today to compare our ministry to that of others or to critique anyone else’s methods or motives in ministry. I simply want to illustrate how tempting and perhaps how easy it is to come up with our own standards for conducting a performance review of pastors. We all have our own ideas about what a pastor should be. But the Apostle Paul tells us today that our ideas, yours and mine, do not matter whne it comes to reviewing your pastor’s performance. “I care very little if I am judged by you or by any human court; indeed, I do not even judge myself...It is the Lord who judges me” God’s ideas are the only ones tha matter and today He is handing you, the members of St. Peter, a sheet of guidelines for reviewing your pastor.  First on the list: “So then, men ought to regard us as servants of Christ...”

The word “servant” here tells the story. In fact the Greek word describes a very particular kind of servant - one that is an “under-rower.” Picture in your mind’s eye a Roman battleship with its lowest deck just a foot or so above the waterline. On that deck were the seats of the rowers, men chained to their stations with a tight grip on the oars, rowing methodically to the booming beat of a drum. They don’t decide for themselves when to row, when to rest- the captain issuing orders to the drummer did. Being a under rower meant there were other rowers above them. Since toilets for rowers on ships were buckets you can imagine what it meant to be an under-rower when the bathroom buckets were emptied by being thrown overboard!

It’s a fitting picture- not the being dumped on part---but the symbol of the church as a ship, a ship with just one Captain – the Lord Jesus Christ. As it was in Paul’s day, so it is in ours – pastors are not called to be “CEO’s of the congregation” or “movers and shakers”, but rather servants of the Lord – under-rowers in the Church of Christ. Not above-rowers but under rowers.  It is their work to carry out the Master’s mission.  What is their Master’s mission? Paul describes this task when he says: “So then, men ought to regard us as...those entrusted with the secret things of God.”  

 2) Who are stewards of God’s secrets.

Stewards are entrusted with someone else’s possessions. In this case, pastors, God’s managers, are entrusted not with money or piece of property, but rather with “the secret things of God,” or as the Greek describes them, God’s mysteries. What’s “God’s secret?”  It’s something that cannot be discovered by human wisdom or human reason. When I was a missionary in Africa the people there believed that they could get to heaven by pleasing the spirits that hovered between this world and heaven.  They wore charms to protect against the evil spells sent by bad spirits.  They would look at the fresh ground covering the grave of a newly buried person to see what creature’s tracks were on the dirt- indicating what creature that person’s spirit had just inhabited.  Muslims believe that only by fearful obedience to the laws written down in the Koran (and Haddith) can they have a chance to get into heaven.  But Allah is so far removed and uncaring that even perfect obedience to those rules won’t guarantee heaven.  Indiscriminate killing of unbelievers, even women and children, in the name of Jihad, though, will almost guarantee heaven and the 70 virgins.

Contrary to popular opinion, human reason can only do so much for us. From the law God has written in our hearts and the voice of conscience he has placed in our heads, human reason tells us that we are sinners who displease and anger God with every commandment we break. Human reason leads us to fear God’s wrath and dread the punishment we have coming from him. But that’s it. Beyond that human reason cannot serve us or save us. Oh, it tries. Human reason suggests we try to work our way into God’s good graces – from telling Zambians to wear charms to telling Muslims to blow themselves up to telling you that you need to be a better husband, wife, parent, child, student, employee or employer, a better friend, a better citizen, be a better person, a better pastor.

But none of those things work.  They don’t calm the conscience cowering in worry because of its sin.  They don’t give peace before God’s presence.  They don’t restore sagging self-esteem or drown out the demons of despair inside of us.  But here’s a secret for you—God’s secret: What we sinners cannot do for ourselves, the Lord Jesus Christ has done for us. Jesus is your perfection. How? I don’t know. It’s a mystery to me and I suspect a mystery to you too. We can’t begin to comprehend the how or the why of it all, but we don’t have to. It’s God truth just the same. When God sees you, you are in every way perfect.

“But what about my sin”, you ask, “the sin I was born with, the sin that comes out of my mouth and fills up so much of my day?” It’s all gone! How? That’s another mystery. I don’t know how he did it, but as he hung dying on the cross, Jesus who is not bound by our time or space, reached through the centuries of our time and space and grabbed every sin from your entire life, the part of your life you’ve already lived and the part yet to come; and when he had all your sin firmly in his grasp, he pulled it all back to the cross, back to himself and then carried it all into the fires of hell, until it was all burned away and there was nothing left for Jesus to suffer, nothing left for him to conquer except the last enemy, death.  So he cried out “It is finished.” Then he went on to conquer that last enemy, death, by rising from the dead.

   All this is a mystery, a deep secret to our human reason, which we could never in a million years stumble upon. So God wrote it down for us in a book we call the Bible. Written over a 1600-year span.  Written in three languages.  Written by almost 30 different authors- most who never met each other.  Written in eight different countries. Wouldn’t you think that there would be vast differences and completely contradictory messages?  Yet from Genesis to Revelation it proclaims one consistent message: there is a cure for the cancer of sin and it’s Jesus, Jesus and only Jesus!

The reason God sends pastors is to make sure that his people hang on to this great mystery. Pastors are just “under-rowers” who are to serve you by rowing the boat of the church you are in until you get to heaven.  They are to continually and consistently bring this truth of God’s constant forgiveness to you and so supply you with the strength you need to live a life of love and thanks as you await your Savior’s return. This is why God’s messengers must prove faithful – the message entrusted to our care is the difference between eternal life and death for every one of you and for billions more throughout the world. Nothing we could tell you on any given subject on any given day is more important than the message of Christ crucified for sinners. And so we pray:  LORD, GIVE US FAITHFUL PASTORS 1) who are servants of Christ; and 2) who are stewards of God’s secrets. Amen.