THE URGE TO REBUKE

BY STEVE DUNN

Sooner or later most pastors are seized withe urge to rebuke.  Being nice is not good enough.  People are hearing messages clothed in graciousness and adorned with gentle prodding and they are not even remotely under conviction.  The Holy Spirit may be knocking at the door but the music of their denial is too loud to hear it.

Those of us entrusted with the Word of God know fully well that rebuking is one function we are to carry out.

"All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness,  so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work." - 2 Timothy 3.16-17

We all know preachers who thrive on beating up on their flocks--who critique, criticize; who ignore any dimension of goodness and withhold encouragement.  And then we know of pastors who preach around every short-coming, rationalize away their peoples' sins, and affirm peoples' goodness to point of enabling mass denial.

When you see the need for rebuking and summon up the courage to do so, here are some things to remember as you craft that message,

1. Make sure your rebuke comes from the Word of God and is appropriate to the situation. The rebuke should be for ignoring God's standards and expectations--not your personal prejudices and your culture's world view.

2. Make sure that your motivation is God's prompting not your frustration or impatience.  "Quick to listen, slow to anger, slow to speak."

3. Don't rebuke a whole congregation for a few people's disobedience.  Too many pastors fight personal battles from the pulpit.

4.Always provide a clear way to apply and embrace the truth.  Problems without solutions tend to provide frustration or worse.

5. Remind the people that you are speaking the truth in love.  You are on their side and your rebuking them because they will not be able to be the persons God created and redeemed them to be. (Ephesians 2.10)

Do you have other words of counsel?

© 2016 by Stephen L. Dunn.  You have permission to reprint this provided it is unchanged, proper authorship is cited, it is in a publication not for sale, and a link is provided to this site or to www.drstevedunn.com. For all other uses, contact Steve at sdunnpastor@gmail.com 

SO BIBLICAL THAT IT'S UNBIBLICAL

I came across this post from Thinking Christian via Greg West's excellent apologetics blog called The Poached Egg. (Both blogs are on the blogroll for this blog).  I would be interested in your feedback.


Justin Buzzard tells this story:

About ten years ago I heard Ben Patterson, campus pastor of Westmont College, say something that I will never forget. Ben told the story of a retired pastor who began noticing that his former congregation was sliding away from orthodoxy. The pastor saw this as his fault, noting the one thing he thought he did most poorly as a pastor. The pastor stated, in two sentences, his great failure as a pastor:

I always told people what to believe. My great mistake is that I never told my people what NOT to believe.

It’s possible to be so “biblical” that we’re unbiblical.

I’m referring to pastors, churches, and individual Christians who say, “we’re sticking to the Bible, and we don’t ever need to study anything but the Bible.” The great men and women of the Bible didn’t say that. They didn’t just preach in support of God’s truth. They knew the lies that were current in their cultures, they named those lies—with very contemporary examples—and they exposed what was false about them. When Isaiah ripped apart idol worship so sarcastically in Isaiah 44:9-20, he knew what he was talking about. So those who only study the Bible are failing to follow its example!

We don’t need only to learn God’s truths. We also need to un-learn the lies we’ve taken into ourselves. Some of that un-learning happens along the way, as a matter of course, as we study the truth; but some of the lies we’re afflicted with are so ingrained, so much a part of us, that it takes real focused attention to discover where they reside inside of us, and to sort out what’s wrong and what might still be right. Sometimes we need to study and learn what not to believe.

Of all the un-learning required today, nothing is more crucial than “truth is relative, and it’s immoral to believe otherwise.” Western students “know” this to be true. Pastors and parents must understand this belief well enough to disarm it. Otherwise, though we may be successful in persuading students Christianity is true, they’re bound to mix it with other “truths” they believe, just as the Israelites mixed true worship with idolatry.

This applies to each of us individually, in our families, and in our churches; and in a parallel way it also applies to our encounters with culture. We need to know our culture’s falsehoods, not to participate in them but to be able to name them and to contrast them with God’s truth. Our friends and neighbors have a lot of un-learning to do, too, and we need to be equipped to help them—winsomely and effectively—so they can better grasp and follow God’s truth, revealed to us in his Word.