Video Transcript: Problems with People and Honest Mistakes

This is lecture 32 in the practical ministry skills course. We're talking about  problems with people and honest mistakes and some of this. The first part is in  chapter 18 in the pastoring the nuts and bolts book, and some of it is not in the  book, our key verse is one that is a very good thing for us to keep in mind, to  remember as Christians, always, but especially as ministry leaders, we are not  fighting against flesh and blood enemies, but against evil rulers and authorities  of the unseen world, against mighty powers in this dark world, and against evil  spirits in the heavenly places. Ephesians 6:12, and there's no point here. The  point is not trying to break down those three categories of the things that we are  fighting against, but the point is that we are not fighting against flesh and blood  enemies, the people who are causing us so much trouble sometimes are not the real enemy. They're just being used by the enemy. The first word of advice is,  don't try to deal with every problem all by yourself. Even Jesus sent the apostles out two by two the disciples, two by two, where possible and appropriate, enlist  the aid of your leadership team or other mature Christians in dealing with  problem people in your ministry, in some cases, depending on what kind of an  issue it is, it might be helpful or even necessary to call for support from other  local pastors or denominational leaders, association Leaders, whoever you have that you can turn to for support, and you definitely need to have those kinds of  people. Chapter 18 of the book has a section dealing with sin in the church, and  it's pretty much the same material we went over in dealing with leaders who do  wrong. So you can read it there. I'm not going to go over it again here. I want to  talk about problem people, because even Jesus had his Judas, everybody is  going to have problems, or there are every church is going to have, yeah,  everybody is going to have problems, and every church is going to have people  who are going to be the conveyors of those problems, in some ways, even after  they come to Jesus, you say how can Christians aren't supposed to be causing  people trouble. But even after they come to Jesus, new Christians, and  sometimes some not so new Christians, tend to do things in church the same  way they've been used to doing them in the world. Ideally, as they grow under  your ministry, they'll learn more Christ like ways of behaving, but you still have to deal with them until they do. And some never do. Some will try to control the  church with their money. We've talked about that. Some try to control the church  with their influence. We talked about that, so I'm not gonna go over those again.  Some people are just chronic complainers. They complain about everything. If  they and I, we used to have a person like this who lived near us, the kind of  person that if it was sunny, she was complaining that her garden needed rain. If  it was raining, she was complaining that she couldn't go out in the sun. It got to  be I mean my wife and I, this was shortly after we were married, and we  discovered that if we let her around us very much, we would really she would  bring us down. It got to the point where, when we saw her coming up the  sidewalk, we would hide and pretend not to be home. But as a ministry leader, 

you can't always hide from the complainers in your church, so you need to find  ways to recognize because there were not every complaint is groundless, and  there will be people who will bring things to your attention that you really need to know and you need to take care of. But those are not the problem people. The  problem people are the ones who are always complaining and always trying to  the essence is that it or the effect is that it drags everything down. And if they're  not complaining to you, they're. Complaining to other people, and maybe they're complaining to visitors or people that might consider visiting the church. The  Bible talks about complainers as not a good thing. And if you get into some of  the passages where it lists the sins, it lists complaining right up there with some  of the other ones. I don't have it off the top of my head. I just thought of that as I  was was speaking here. So I don't have that prepared. But you can find those  passages, gossips, also the again, the Bible, there are lists of sins, you know,  where Paul says the these are the things that non Christians do that people  don't know the Lord do, and it lists this and that, and this and that, and gossip is  right in there. Gossip is just a way of spreading things that are not true and  tearing people down. And you will have some people who are just chronic  complainers, and you'll have some people who are chronic gossips, and you try  to help them understand and change their mindset and develop a more positive  attitude. But in the meantime, learn not to take what they say too seriously.  Ministry leaders, ministers tend to want to make everybody happy. We want  people to like us. We want people to be happy. And so when somebody  complains, we tend to take it very seriously, and it really can tear us down. You  could preach the most wonderful sermon, and you could have 99 people tell you what a great sermon it is, and one person tell you some complaint about it. And  most of us would spend most of our time later that afternoon after church  thinking about the complaint instead of about the compliments. So we need to  learn how to deal with those people. Some of them may come under the  category of what I call drainers. There are some people that will just constantly  drain your energy. They, they're coming to you, and they need this, and then  they need that, and then they need something else. And they're, they're never  satisfied. Whatever you do for them, they want more, and they will just  completely drain your energy. Learn to recognize them. Set boundaries, I'm not  saying cut them off completely. If you set appropriate boundaries, the worst of  the drainers will discover that they can no longer drain from you, and they will  leave you and go to another church and try to drain from another minister. But  recognize the drainers now, there are some people that are just a minor amount  of drain, and there are other people that really energize you, and so alternate  those, you know, if you have to deal with people that you know all this, I mean, it might be just a minor thing, somebody that just talks a lot, you know, and, you  know, oh, boy, I know. I have to ask this person a question, and I have to listen  to half an hour of talk before I can get an answer. And that, that wears me out, 

that's that's not the kind of person I'm talking about. Recognize those people  and alternate that. But go to go to visit somebody else who builds you up and  restores your energy, or do something that restores your energy, but I'm talking  about the people that will just suck you dry and leave you with nothing left to  emotionally, energetically, to give to anybody else. There are con artists, and we talked a little bit about recognizing con artists, self appointed prophets and  teachers. You may have a situation where somebody comes into your  congregation, comes into your ministry, and introduces themselves as Prophet,  so and so, or apostle, so and so, or whatever. And there are, I understand, and I believe that there are prophets and apostles nowadays, but if somebody just  decides I'm going to call myself this, and therefore, because I'm calling myself  this, I'm going to go in this congregation and everybody has to kowtow to me  and bow to me and and I get to throw my weight around. That's the kind of  danger that I'm talking about. So just because somebody introduces themselves as apostle, so and so, it'll be nice to them and give them the respect at the  beginning, but watch and see, because if they truly are a mark of a true apostle  or prophet, is one of the marks is humility and not demanding that everybody  look up to them and give them the best seat. What do you do when you have  people in your congregation who see things differently than you do? A certain  matter of biblical interpretation, a certain matter of how you do certain things. It  may be that they grew up in a different kind of a church, or they've come to  yours from a different place, and these are within the realm of acceptable  Christian practice. It's just not the way that you happen to see it. For instance,  what if you are one who believes that infants can be baptized, you can baptize  babies, and then you give them their opportunity when they get older to claim  that for themselves through what is usually called confirmation. I see that as the  second half of baptism, but, and I don't want to go into all of that stuff, but that's  an easy illustration, because that's one where either you do or you don't, okay. I  mean, obviously if you baptize babies, you will also baptize people at any age,  but if you are one who believes and there many good, sincere Christians who  believe and can support from the Bible, just as I believe I can support the other  from the Bible, but, but who believe that baby should not be baptized? And so  what if you have somebody in your congregation who starts to starts to raise a  ruckus about that, and tries to instruct you that you're wrong and babies really  should not be baptized. I don't know why they are still coming to your church.  Maybe they didn't realize that you baptize babies when they came to your  church. But anyway, you this is just an example. There are all kinds of things like that. What do you do with the conflicting interpretations or practices? And they  will happen from the back of the congregation. Is this loud, oh, and the if you  can't read at the bottom says, occasionally Pastor Westcott's interpretation of  Scripture conflicts with the footnotes in Mel's Study Bible. And so Mel is reading  his study Bible along during the sermon, and the pastor says something that is 

not the same as the Study Bible. Says, Well, you can find, I'm sure the pastor  had a study Bible that said what he said. But because all the study Bibles don't  say the same thing, what do you do? What do you do with these conflicts? Well,  first, people need to understand the concept of unity. Unity does not mean  everybody agrees on everything. Unity doesn't mean everybody's always doing  exactly the same thing. I gave the illustration of the tree where the branch facing north grows North moves north. The end of the branch moves north as the tree  grows, and the branch on the other side of the tree facing south as the tree  grows, that branch moves south. They're moving in opposite directions, but  they're still united in one tree. They're not doing the same thing, but they're  united in one tree. A common illustration is a symphony where you have a lot of  different instruments playing a lot of different notes, a lot of different music lines  at the same time, harmonies and melodies and counterpoints, and they all come together in the unity of the beautiful music. But they're doing different things, so  people need to understand the concept of unity. Use the Bible responsibly, and  we talked about how to do that a couple other times in how to prepare sermons  and so on. Prayerfully examine your own motives. Why am I having this  discussion with this person? Is it just that I like to debate and like to win  arguments that used to be me, and I was quite aware of it and and  acknowledged it, but I finally discovered that even though I thought it was fun, it  wasn't always the best thing for the church, for me to be engaging in those kinds of things. Don't be dogmatic where the Bible is not dogmatic. Avoid the  temptation to take passages out of context, proof texting. We talked about that  and if the Bible is not clear to consider tradition, reason and experience, but the  main thing is disagree agreeably. We saw this before Saint Augustine in  essentials, unity in non essentials, Liberty in all things love. Now I want to move  into something that I did not cover in the book, but I think it's a helpful thing, and  hopefully you're taking other classes that will fill this in for you and give you  much more depth on these things. But there are conflicts and ideas and  opinions that people come up with that are not within the accepted realm of  interpretation, various interpretations within Christianity, but they fall outside of  those essentials. See what we were talking about before, are the non essentials, where you have liberty, but there are things that fall outside of that. They are  essentials, and people have ideas that contradict those essentials. What do you  do then? Well, first, let's look at trying to recognize some of those because the  technical term for a religious view that contradicts the accepted orthodox  teaching is a heresy, something that is wrong, something that the church has  decreed to be false, is a heresy, and nobody ever set out to invent a heresy. I'm  convinced that all of these things came from people honestly trying to  understand and trying to come up with something that makes sense. So I'd like  to go quickly through some of these where it's easy for people to come up with  wrong ideas and contrast it with the truth. Because, as I had mentioned 

previously, part of your role as a minister is to be able to recognize when  somebody who's leading a Bible study or something like that comes up with  some of these things and starts off into an area that could develop into  something that could become harmful. So the first one is the nature of God. And  the Bible talks about the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and it's easy. It  sounds logical for people to understand that as three different Gods, but the  church has made clear that, no, that's not the case. That's not what the Bible  says. And it's if you look through the Bible thoroughly, I mean, it's not just the  church being some high and mighty person made a decision. It's the consensus  of Christian people through the ages who have studied the Bible have come up  with the the understanding of the Bible that this is what the truth of the Bible is,  is that the Father the Son and the Holy Spirit are not three gods. There's only  one God. So the next logical thing is, well, does that mean? And sometimes God is the Father, and sometimes he's the son, and sometimes he's the Holy Spirit.  And no, that's that. Again, sounds logical, but no, because, among other things,  if sometimes God was God the Father, sometimes he was the son and  sometimes he was the spirit, then if he was being God the Son, and he died on  the cross, then there was nobody left to raise him from the dead. So God is not  sometimes one or another. God is always all three in one God, the Trinity, a  similar mistake about the nature of God, a more modern one, is that people  sometimes look at the Old Testament and the New Testament, and they seem to think that they say different things, so much different that they will say that the  God of the Old Testament is different From the God of the New Testament. Well, that's not the case, I would say, obviously, except that some people seem to  think it is, but that is not the case. There's just the one God, Father, Son and  Holy Spirit in one throughout the entire Bible. Another. Area that is easy to make  a confusion is the nature of Jesus, the dual nature of Jesus, that Jesus is God  and Jesus is human. And so some people tried to resolve that by saying, well,  he just pretended to be human. But if he just pretended to be human, His death  on the Cross would not have done us any good. Or they say he was a human  being who became a god. And then there are sects and cults that develop from  that that say that in the same way, any human being can become a god, that is a teaching of Mormonism, for instance. I'm not sure most Mormons know that, but  that's that's what their teaching is. So the truth is that God is fully Jesus was fully God and fully human at the same time. And the way I've heard it said is that he  was as much a man as if he was not God at all. And at the same time, he was  as much God as if he was not man at all. Say, I don't understand that. That  makes my head hurt. Well, that's okay, as I said, before we could understand  everything about God, he wouldn't be worth worshiping. The nature of human  beings. We talked a little bit, I think about the idea that humans are just spirits  trapped in bodies, and therefore what the body does doesn't matter. The truth is  we are spirit, soul and body in one human Trinity, and all are intermingled and all

affect each other. And the importance of all of that is shown by the incarnation of Christ, the fact that Jesus took on flesh and became one of us, how we know  things, the mistakes are that some people think that science trumps Revelation.  Well, science has discovered this, and it contradicts the Bible, and therefore the  Bible is wrong, because we all know that science knows more than the Bible  does. Well, that's not the case. First, science is always changing its mind about  things. And second, if you see a contradiction, as I said, You're  misunderstanding one or the other. But the Bible's not wrong. There is another  idea that subjective revelation trumps the Bible. In other words, I was praying,  and I the Lord told me this. I got this prophetic word about that, and it's that  doesn't go it contradicts the Bible, and therefore the Bible is wrong, because I  heard from God directly. That's not true. That's not true. Or another. Another  common one is my experience doesn't line up with the Bible, or the Bible doesn't make sense to me. The way I reason things out doesn't match the Bible, and  therefore the Bible must be wrong. Well, that's just putting yourself above God.  The truth is, God loves us. God is love. God loves us. God knows everything.  God always wants what's best for us, and part of that is that he wanted to  communicate all of that to us in a way that would provide a lasting, objective  standard available to everyone. He wanted to communicate his love and his  knowledge and his good will for us in a way that would provide a lasting,  objective standard available to everyone, and the best format for that kind of  communication down through the ages has proven to be write it down and put it  in a book. God gave us such a book, and we call it the Bible. So therefore our  primary source for spiritual truth and revelation about God is the Bible. Last area I want to mention is what it takes to get to heaven. Some people read the Bible  and they get into the Old Testament, and they start thinking, Oh, my goodness, I  have to keep the Old Testament law in order to get to heaven, I can't eat pork.  Others will say, Well, it's good deeds that gets us to heaven. All I have to do is  enough good deeds. Some even think that God grades on a curve as long as  I'm better than that person, you know, or if I'm in the. Top 50% of goodness  that'll get me to heaven. That's not what the Bible says. Others have a kind of a  grasp of the gospel, but they take it wrong, and they say Jesus fulfilled the law.  So that means I can do anything I want to. I don't have to. Jesus fulfilled it. I  don't have to. I can do anything I want to. Others would say, God's too nice to  send anyone to hell, so therefore I can do anything I want to. Doesn't matter any religion I want, no religion. God's too nice to send anybody to hell. We'll all wind  up in heaven. That's not true. And others say that, well, I'm going to be tolerant. I believe this religion, I like this religion, but if you like that religion, then that's fine, whatever works for you, and that leaves apart. The whole leaves aside, the  whole idea, the whole fact that it's not us and our faith and our decisions that  makes the decision who gets to heaven, that decides whether we get to heaven. If it's all up to us, then we're putting ourselves in the place of God, the truth. And 

I'm sure you know this, but it never hurts to go over it. God saved you by His  grace when you believed. And you can't take credit for this, it's a gift from God.  Salvation is not a reward for the good things we have done, so none of us can  boast about it. God saved you. You didn't save yourself by your works. You  didn't save yourself by being smart, being holy, by His grace when you believed.  And you can't take credit for this. But at the same time, just as the body is dead  without breath, so also faith is dead without good works. So just believing is not  enough, and I didn't put it on a slide. But of course, Jesus said, I am the Way  and the Truth and the Life. No one comes to the Father, except by me. God  saved us through faith in Jesus Christ, by His grace, and the way that shows  itself is through us, having a changed life, doing good works. I already covered  this before, but I want to go quickly through the apostles creed as a way of  again, making sure that you don't fall into any of these mistakes, that none of  your people fall into any of these mistakes. I believe in God, the Father,  almighty, creator of heaven and earth. I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, excuse me,  suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died and was buried. He  descended to the dead. On the third day, he rose again. He ascended into  heaven. Is seated at the right hand of the Father, and will come again to judge  the living and the dead. I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy, universal Church,  the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body  and the life everlasting, amen. And that wraps us up for this time. I'll see you  next time