Standing With Your Pastor

Standing With Your Pastor

• Let him know if his preaching is a help to you.  Point out something specific God spoke to you about.

• Assure him of your prayers for him and his family.

• Show open support for projects he has prayed over and believes God wants the church to do.

• Be slow to criticize him.  He will make mistakes.

• Realize that a true Under-shepherd would rather die for the sheep than knowingly hurt them.  Deal with him from this premise.

• Pray for God's hedge of protection around his family.

• Tell him of the blessings of God in your life.  Your faith and victory will strengthen his faith immeasurably.

• Understand that one of the main ways he stays in touch with you personally is around the services of the church.  Many communication issues can be handled after a church service.  If you work in some capacity in the church, be sure to touch base with your Pastor before you leave.

• Receive his admonitions with grace.  The unique responsibilities of a Pastor involve many things in addition to preaching.  Your Pastor's work out of the pulpit consists of many unseen efforts in dealing with individual needs and problems.

• Know that God in His kindness to you has put it in the heart of one of His servants to watch for your soul.  He is one of God's gifts of grace to you intended to bring your family eternal profit by his preaching and teaching, as well as his shepherding.

"Obey them that have the rule over you, and submit yourselves: for they watch

for your souls, as they that must give account, that they may do it with joy,

and not with grief: for that is unprofitable for you."

Hebrews 13:17

–Tim Cruse

Understanding Your Pastor

Understanding Your Pastor

There will be times when:

• You will not understand or agree with a decision he must make.

• He must be willing to be misunderstood or misjudged in your eyes because he cannot divulge certain confidences.  You see the part.  He sees the whole.

• The only thing you have to go on is faith in God and in your Pastor's integrity to do the right thing.  It is a matter of trust.

• Because of providential circumstances, He will not be able to do some things you would expect him to.

• His love for your family should not be put on trial because of perceived oversight on his part in a particular matter.

• His forbearance of you will out-weigh your forbearance of him.

• He will be the first to forgive and the last to be forgiven.

• His family is suffering silently with him in a certain matter while others suffer openly and receive necessary reassurances.

• He will not ask you to sacrifice in a matter that he has not sacrificed in already.

• Your burdens are on his heart while he is riding down the road, awake in the middle of the night, working at his desk, knocking on someone else's door, walking down a hospital stairwell, listening to the choir sing, playing with his children, or at any other place at any other time of any other day.

"And we beseech you, brethren, to know them which labour

among you, and are over you in the Lord, and admonish you:

And to esteem them very highly in love for their work's sake.

And be at peace among yourselves."

I Thessalonians 5:12, 13

–Tim Cruse

A Life That Matters

A Life That Matters

“Therefore their days did he consume in vanity”

Psalm 78:33

We only pass through life but once. Many of us already have a number of miles under our feet. We do not know the measure of our days and surely do not want to waste the ones we have remaining.

Charles Spurgeon said, “None live so fruitlessly and so wretchedly as those who allow sense and sight to override faith, and their reason and appetite to domineer over their fear of God.” Unbelief, pride, and self-will when added together equals emptiness and multiplies sorrow.

“What a nothing is our life” apart from divine grace and purpose. God help us to get a hold of His will and live a life that matters. Every day spent in His service can be filled to overflowing.

“According to my earnest expectation and

my hope, that in nothing I shall be ashamed,

but that with all boldness, as always, so now

also Christ shall be magnified in my body,

whether it be by life, or by death. For to me

to live is Christ, and to die is gain.”

Philippians 1:20, 21

–Tim Cruse