When the Salt of the Earth Needs Sweetening

While researching a subject online, I found myself reading some attacks on ministers from fellow ministers. These men of God, assuming that’s what they are and I’m not saying one way or the other, were taking no prisoners.

“That pastor is a liar!” “Preachers lie to you when they say….” “Ten lies preachers tell you.” “That preacher is an agent of hell!”

It was painful.

When those sent by the Father as shepherds of His sheep use such blistering rhetoric, we fail our assignments in numerous ways: we dishonor the Lord, shame the church, needlessly slander our brethren, set poor examples for the people in the pew, and we hold the gospel up to ridicule by the world.

How about a little sweetening, I wonder. And then I remember something.

A friend says there are two kinds of preachers: those who enter the ministry whole and those who enter in order to become whole.

Give me the first kind any day of the week. The second group can be scary and dangerous.

The second group, I believe, is composed largely of ministers with bad mental health.

Here is what bad mental health looks like in the pulpit on a Sunday morning—

1) It’s mean-spirited.

One text you will never hear such a preacher proclaiming is Colossians 3:12: “Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly beloved, clothe yourself with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience.”

Somewhere along the way these caustic preachers became convinced that their task on Sundays is to “open the wound and pour on the salt.” They are harsh, unloving, unkind, loud, and uncharitable. And they do it all in the name of the Lord.

When someone tells the pastor he ought to “preach against sin more,” in my opinion they’re asking for this kind of harsh preaching. But this hurtful rhetoric helps no one. What such preaching does is cater to the lower nature of our flesh that exalts itself by slamming others. When I make your sin out to be the worst ever, the idea is often to minimize my own failures.

2) It’s negative and selective in its condemnations.

In the 1950s and 1960s, I was brought up in a rural tradition that produced preachers more intent on dictating the styles of women’s hair and the length of their skirts than proclaiming the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. They would send people to hell for certain kinds of sin while overlooking other, more respectable, kinds. Not once did I hear a sermon on racism, on prejudice of any kind, of shady business deals, or of sexual harassment.

It was easier to slam the alcoholic, the divorced, the homosexual, and the criminal than the racists in the pews, the adulterers in the choir, and the cruel business practices of the factory owners among the deacons.

Those who think of the church a half-century ago as the Golden Age should have been there. It wasn’t.

3) It’s egotistical.

The bad mental health preacher seems to be of the opinion that he alone has the truth, no one but he and a few he approves are doing the Lord’s work, and all others–especially those pastors whose churches are large and they well-known–are compromisers.

Listen to them and it’s “the Lord said to me” and “the Lord told me to tell you” and “I had this revelation from the Lord.”

Such preachers don’t need the Bible; they have a direct line to heaven’s throne room.

Run in the opposite direction as fast as your feet will take you.

4) It’s anti-authority.

In my observation, preachers with bad mental health gravitate toward independent churches. No doubt this is because they refuse to put themselves under the authority of a denomination, bishop, or a ruling group of their peers.

There is a complete absence of humility and submission. They do preach those traits, of course, as how others should submit to them.

The preacher who is accountable to no one and who will accept reproof from no group is himself the problem in his church.

5) It’s legalistic.

Those who preach “the law of the Spirit of life” instead of “the law of sin and death” (Romans 8:2) are liberating the people. Whoever proclaims the law is enslaving them.

Something unloving and shallow inside us wants the Christian life reduced to a series of rules and prohibitions. Do this, don’t do that, do the other, and you’re in. It sounds great to our pygmy souls.

God in heaven is not having any part of that of that foolishness. Jesus said, “The words that I speak unto you are spirit and they are life” (John 6:63).

I love how the incredible 8th chapter of Romans begins…

There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit of life has set me free from the law of sin and of death.

For what the law was powerless to do in that it was weakened by the sinful nature, God did by sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful man to be a sin offering (Romans 8:1-3).

Why then do some preachers still persist in preaching the law, condemning every instance of lawbreaking they come across, sending lawbreakers to hell, and spewing venom on those who preach God’s grace and His everlasting love?

There are several answers, of course. Here are some….

–first, bad mental health. With something afoul in their own emotional being–a parent was absent, a teacher was cruel, someone abused them–they do not see spiritual matters correctly but with a skewed, distorted slant.

A staff member of my church spoke up as to why a certain man should not be ordained to the ministry. Someone had said there was nothing in Scripture to forbid it.  He answered, “How about bad mental health?”  And that settled it.

–they have seen some liberal, modernistic preachers cast the Bible aside and preach their own psychology in place of the Word, and are reacting against it.

–negative preaching has its supporters. You can build a congregation of misfits on it. Anyone doubting that has merely to look around. Almost every city of any size will have at least one huge church made up of “nattering nabobs of negativism,” as someone called it.

The dead giveaway to the faulty makeup of that church is that even though they will speak much of Jesus, as soon as the fault-finding preacher steps down from the pulpit that church disintegrates. It was built on a fault, and I don’t mean the San Andreas.

Lord, give us preachers like Jesus, shepherds who love the people and want to see them well and strong. Make healers and blessers of us. In Jesus’ name.

(Editor's Note: This blog was posted first on Dr. McKeever's blog site HERE.)