5. The tendency to use people who can help you and discount all others.
If this successful and acclaimed messenger of God happens to be a local church pastor, do not look for him to show up in your hospital room when you’re having surgery. He has underlings to handle such nitty gritty of pastoring. He’s interested only in the glory work, the television cameras and the crowds and the big numbers.
Such a minister — to use the word loosely — hones in on people with talents he needs and money he can get to.
Any pastor who has been in the Lord’s work for a decade or more has seen the type, and is sickened by it.
My brother was pastoring a church in Alabama and invited a well-known preacher to do a meeting of several days in his church. He arranged for a fine family in his congregation to host the guest preacher. However, the first day he was in town, the guest was introduced to another family in the church with big money. My brother was chagrined to learn hours later that the guest preacher had moved out of the home where he had been placed, and moved into the million-dollar home of the family he had just met. He never invited that man to his church again.
Many years ago, when I was a pastor in my late 20s, we were having a good deal of success reaching the teenagers of our city and encouraging those in other churches. On one occasion, we scheduled a youth rally at the courthouse square and invited a popular young evangelist — really young, he was barely 18 years of age! — to speak to the crowd from the courthouse steps. He accepted, came, did the assignment and left. The event went off fine. But I have never forgotten one thing the young, popular preacher said.
With a grandiose manner, he exclaimed, “As I travel around this great world of ours …”
He’d probably not been out of the Deep South. I said he was 18 years old.
I wonder sometimes what ever happened to him.
Let the preacher say with John the Baptist, “He must increase; I must decrease.”
