Being Very Serious (Part 48)

The worst pain in the world is not from a heart attack or a stroke, but from a lie that has been told about you or to you. Trust and integrity is vital if we are in the ministry or if we claim to be Christians. When that trust is broken by some one who is a peer in your profession or some one you look up too, it shakes the very foundation of what you believe and makes you wonder if everybody is doing it. Lying has become acceptable in life as a necessary evil for survival in the past 25 years. Truth and justice seem to have taken a back seat to vicious gossip and rumors that destroy or damage people's lives and reputations.

Pastors are put in unique situations from time to time. I have joked about it, but I have found myself in situations where I had to be careful what I said or it would have offended someone and caused me great difficulty. In fact, I probably did say some things that I had to repent of not realizing what I was doing until after the fact. There have been times when someone showed me their new born baby and told me how beautiful everybody thought the child was. Down deep inside I thought to myself, "How ugly can you get?" Of course, I couldn't say that out loud so I would try and be kind with my remarks, but then change the subject. Or when someone sang in church and they were in a different key than the musicians and members of the congregation were telling them how wonderful they sang after the service. Sometimes I just wanted to scream, "No-you didn't hear the same person I did!"

Blatant lies put people's lives, ministry, and their future in jeopardy. I've been a victim more than once in my ministry because I trusted in my peers and their statements as truth. It was because of this trust that I put myself in church situations I should never have been in and the stress from them robbed me of my health. I said to my wife even recently, "But these were my brothers in the ministry. How could they do me this way?" I know personally that I'm not the only one that's been in that situation. If you pastor long enough you discover that when someone wants to change churches they will say anything to any official to get out of a mess they have created or inherited. My dad faced this one time in particular in his ministry before he passed. He was asked to switch churches with a pastor who was dealing with a huge mess in his church by an overseer, but my dad was not told about the entire situation. When my dad found out the truth and tried to refuse the move, he was told that there was no backing up or changing his mind. He had to make that move. It was at that church that his health begin to deteriorate due to the situation he inherited.

I know that churches get a bad reputation sometimes because of things they don't know that happened in a moving process. When the new pastor coming in has gotten bad information, inflated stats, or half of a story by someone desperate to move, it changes their perspective when the situation is not what they've been told. I have spoken things in a confidential conversation with some of my peers and then a story begin to circulate that I was preparing to take some one in ministry down. At one church I had a member use my name in a lie to make a younger man think I was going to discipline him, when he was telling the lie himself because he didn't like him. I didn't know anything about the situation until the next week. Dealing with that situation probably brought on my stroke a few days later.

Lying is lying whether you're a minister, member of a church, or claim to be a Christian. The worst lie you can tell yourself is that you can never sin or make a mistake after you get saved. We have people in the COG and in other denominations that think they can talk junk and be justified. I'm not going to pretend to be a saint and say I've never been involved. Yet, I can report that if I did commit a transgression I repented and tried my best not to do it again. The best cure for lying is to be honest with yourself and realize that only by the grace of God is there mercy for any type of sin. The Bible says that all liars shall be condemned to torment for eternity. That's not a place I want to go to and I hope neither do you. Honesty is the best policy, but lying will bring your downfall. You may not get yours in this world, but if you don't repent and stop you'll get it in eternity.