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A GIFT-WRAPPED PREACHER

There was a poignant little cartoon in a recent copy of Leadership magazine, and it showed a table with a big sign on it: "Criticize the Pastor: $5." Well, you could probably add a couple of zeros there, and still have some takers, but at five bucks a shot, there on the table were piles and piles and mega-piles of money. And a lady sitting there is saying to a man with a stricken, beat-up look on his face — obviously the pastor in question — "Well, we got the church paid off. You want to try for a women's fellowship hall too?"

Well, friend, seeing as how I'm a preacher too, I can show you some of the black-and-blue marks where somebody thought that Pastor Melashenko would make a good punching bag. And even people I thought loved me have, on occasion, taken Proverbs 27:17 a bit too far. That's the one where it says:
"Iron sharpeneth iron; so a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend."

And I've felt like saying to them, "Why don't you sharpen up your sword on some other Melashenko? Go improve my brother Eugene for a while, and leave me alone." So today, as we continue here in this amazing book of the Bible, Paul's epistle to the Ephesians, I'm very thankful to find a word from the Lord commending the preachers.

We're here in chapter four, which has been a wonderful field of study, and now as we get to verse 11, I get some comfort from the fact that my chosen profession is specifically mentioned by Paul. Here's the passage:
"And He [Jesus] gave some, apostles; and some, prophets, and some, evangelists; and some, PASTORS and teachers."

Right away we notice something interesting. Clearly Jesus is involved in the process of men and women moving into these five roles: apostle, prophet, evangelist, pastor, and teacher. There's an old book in the archives of my denomination which suggests that Satan hates preachers. So it's good news to hear that Jesus cares about them. And we wonder: does Christ give a person the gift of being a pastor, or does He give the pastor to the church — as a gift? Or both? And from the context of Ephesians 4, it's plain that the answer IS both. We studied last week, going back to verse 8, that the ascending Jesus Christ, after His resurrection, gave gifts to men, meaning to His Church. Friend, if there was a godly person standing in the pulpit of your church last Sabbath or Sunday morning, it's because God gave that person the gift of pastoring, and then gave that pastor himself, or herself, to your congregation.

We've been borrowing very thankfully in this Ephesians series from the Tyndale New Testament Commentary, which, for this particular epistle, was authored by a Dr. Francis Foulkes. And he quotes from the reformer John Calvin, who says this:

"To Christ we owe it that we have ministers of the gospel."

That's something to think about, isn't it, the next time you're tempted to spend five dollars slicing up the preacher. And I also appreciate what Dr. Foulkes himself adds, when he writes:
"The Church may appoint men to different work and functions, but unless they have the gifts of the Spirit, and therefore are themselves the gifts of Christ to His Church, their appointment is valueless."

Is it possible that a person might receive — from God — a gift in one of these five areas . . . and yet the Church itself, the conferences and presbyteries and dioceses and hiring boards, when God intends to give that person as a gift to the Body of Christ, fails to receive it? Could we misread God's signals and not accept a preacher whom God intended to be a preacher? I'm sure that has happened many times in this imperfect science of knowing the will of our heavenly Father.

By the same token, have there been times when we frail and faulty human beings have seized upon a certain person — noting their good looks and their eloquent tongue and their ambitions — and decided on our own that they should be a preacher or an evangelist or a priest who ministers to fragile young children . . . and missed the fact that God had not done His own Ephesians 4 work in their lives? Yes, that has happened too. I'm sure we can all think of times the Church has had to backtrack and say, "Perhaps we misread the signals here."

But you know, friend, instead of spending our $5 at the Complaint Table, would we perhaps do better on this Monday to put that money in the offering plate as a love gift to Jesus to thank Him for the miraculous gift of His interest in His Church, and the many times that this divine process does work? I want to tell you something, neighbor — it sobers me to realize that the King of the universe was interested enough in me to say, "Lonnie, I've chosen you to be a preacher. I'm going to give you the gifts for the job, and then I'm going to give you AS a gift to the Church I love." Does that make a man proud . . . or humble? Well, it certainly made Paul humble, and, as we pointed out last week, Paul himself was all five of these things: apostle, prophet, evangelist, pastor, teacher. He had it all, and he received those five endowments in the proper spirit. That Dr. Foulkes, in his Tyndale essay, wisely dips into another Ephesians study guide, this one called the "Torch Bible Commentaries," written by J. A. Allan back in 1959. And this good man of the cloth writes:

"The expression [gifts of Christ to His Church] also ‘serves well to remind ministers that the gifts of the Spirit are not for the enrichment of oneself but for the enrichment of the Church.'"

Friend, as a lay person you probably have some thoughts about that, sitting in your "radio pew" this Monday. I can tell you this: the preacher thinks about it too. When I'm tempted to enrich myself — by autographing books, by traveling to a nice place, by putting a price tag on pastoral services — it's very helpful to remember that a pastor gets his gifts from Jesus. And just as the faithful steward in some of Jesus' parables asks for an accounting of those gifts, that happens here too.

We want to spend the rest of this week considering together what the Lord wants His Church to experience as a result of this double-gift program.

"Preparing us for service." "Building up the Body of Christ." "A knowledge of the Son of God." "Making us mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ." And so on. But for today, friend, let me just invite you to do this: go to church, and be a part of church, with a renewed awareness of the participation and the will of Jesus Christ in this gifting process.

If you were in church last weekend, let me ask you this: did you listen to the Sabbath School or Sunday School teacher with the idea in mind that Jesus had gifted them to teach that class? Verse 11 says: "He gave some . . . to be pastors AND teachers." Did you pause to think that, first of all, Christ had moved upon their mind, and given them insights and opened up the Scriptures to them? And that, secondly, Jesus had given your class that teacher on that particular day of worship? That's an incredible thought, isn't it . . . and maybe YOU were that teacher! What an exciting idea: that Jesus Himself saw a vacancy and, with full intentionality, plugged you into that slot. Listen, that gives the teacher something to think about, and it gives the class member something to think about too. Did you show up that morning ready to receive the gift God put together for you to take home with you? Were you prepared through your own study? Did you listen to the sermon with an awareness that the Son of God put that preacher in the pulpit and gave him a message?

Let me close with this thought. Maybe you remember that old country song, "Oh, Lord, it's hard to be humble when you're perfect in every way." Actually, it's hard NOT to be humble — in fact, we can't be anything BUT humble — when we realize that Jesus Himself is the head pastor in our ranks. That's right. In the Word of God, a preacher's main function is to be a shepherd of the flock, to care for and feed the sheep. And Jesus, in John 10, says about Himself:

"I am the Good Shepherd: the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep."

Hebrews 13:20 closes with this magnificent benediction:
"May the God of peace, who through the blood of the eternal covenant brought back from the dead our Lord Jesus, that great Shepherd of the sheep, equip you with everything good for doing His will."

And Dr. Francis Foulkes, picking up on those verses, admonishes us:
"[Jesus] is ever the CHIEF Pastor under whom men are called to ‘tend the flock of God.'"

With a boss like that, I don't suppose a few black and blue bruises, or e-mails from the $5 Complaint Table, are going to hurt too much.