I’m not a pastor, but I’m afraid that as a layman I have just as much of a tendency to want to appear like I’ve got it all together, that I have the answers, and why can’t everybody else just smarten up and do like I do. Deep down I know that doesn’t work. I know I have been more useful to others when I can abandon that attitude. Thank you for another reminder.
J.S. Park: Hospital Chaplain, Skeptical Christian

I get a little nervous when a preacher only preaches his hero-stories, when he seems to be his own marketing guy saying, “This is what Jesus does, and if you do what I’m doing, you’ll make it.”
But I always lean in when the pastor tells me about his failures. When he’s really for real. That time he blew up on someone in traffic. When he lost it with his family. When he quietly refused to help a homeless guy. His sudden shopping spree. Those seasons when he stopped praying and reading the Bible because he was so jaded and burnt out. His frustrations with the church culture, not in a sneering way that points out any one person, but really grieving over our collective lack of passion. The times when he doubted himself, when he doubted God.
It doesn’t mean we imitate all of the above, and pastors are…
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I don’t think there is anything wrong with perfect holiness because without it no one will see the Lord and it pains me that this generation has done its best to kill the perfection process of sanctification to satisfy their false doctrines of “never being perfect.”
Well . . . there is genuine, Holy Spirit-led sanctification and genuine, Holy Spirit-led humility. They are simply different aspects of the Spirit-filled life. There can also be self-made sanctification and self-made humility. Self-righteousness may manifest itself in either form. I think the point of the article is the futility of pretending to a level of spirituality that is not genuine.