Jump Start # 1745

Jeremiah 6:14 “And they have healed the brokenness of My people superficially, saying, ‘Peace, peace,’ but there is no peace.”

  This week we are taking a serious look at how Satan tempts a church. It is important to see how valuable a stable and growing congregation is to our lives. It serves as an oasis in this crazy world. It reminds us that we are not alone in our journey with the Lord. Together with others, we blend our voices, talents and pool our money to help the kingdom grow and thrive. Things can be bad at work, but if we can find some peace and rest for our spirits when we worship with others, it becomes a balm for us. Things can even be bad at home and through the teaching of God’s word, the encouragement of others, we find hope. But when things are bad down at the church house, it affects us everywhere. That’s one place where we expect things to be good. In far too many places things are tense and an unsettled atmosphere looms over the congregation. We can be suspicious of each other’s motives. This disrupts our worship to God and we can leave feeling worse than when we came. It’s hard to sing, ‘Bless be the tie that binds our hearts…’ when we look around the auditorium and we are upset or mad at certain ones. Enough of that and folks either look for another place to worship or they simply quit.

Satan knows this. Attack the church and he hurts many families all at once. He can splinter and divide us. He can turn us on each other. We end up doing his work for him.

Our verse today, presents yet another way Satan tries to sneak in to the church and that is through the leaders. Paul warned the elders of Ephesus about this. He said, “among you,” men will arise speaking perverse things to draw the disciples after them. The failure of the leaders has been the death of too many congregations. Here in the Jeremiah passage, the brokenness was healed superficially.

• The NIV states this: “they dress the wound of my people as though it were not serious”
• Peterson says it this way: “My people are broken—shattered!  And they put on band-aids, saying, ‘It’s not so bad. You’ll be just fine.”

There were several serious problems facing God’s people. The leaders did not see it that way. They were not serious themselves. Maybe they were too busy with their jobs. Maybe they just didn’t want to do the hard work that it takes to heal serious problems. So, instead of addressing the problems, they denied them. They tried to convince the people that things were fine. “Go home and take an aspirin,” the doctor says, when you show him your broken arm. It’s late in the day and he wants to go home. He doesn’t want to deal with you and your problem, so he tells you that it’s not broken. In our medical world today, that doc would be in trouble. Yet, turn the situation around to a young couple who are having a marriage problem. Or, a man who struggles with pornography. A young lady and the bottle. A college student who takes the first steps toward atheism. A family who is drowning in debt. A man who has been fired for cheating at work. A teenager who is in jail. I could put names to most of these situations. This is today’s world. This is what God’s leaders face today. Messy. Detailed. Complicated. Time consuming. But fixable. With patience, teaching of God’s word, direction, all of these things can be changed. All of these can be righted. But it takes leaders.

Too often, leaders in God’s church would rather write checks and do the work that does not require their spiritual experience. They’d like to decide what colors to paint the classroom. They’d like to decide when to invite a guest preacher to come. They’d like to decide whether to lease or purchase a copy machine. These are the things that deacons can and ought to be doing. The shepherds need to be with the sheep. The sheep are broken and are needing help. Shepherds ought to consider why and how the sheep got broken and how to keep it from happening again. They need to mend the broken. They need to pour time showing compassion to the broken. This means they must do more than meet around a board room table once in a while. This means that they need to leave their warm homes on a Monday evening and go visit the home of the broken. This means that they must engage in deep and meaningful conversations.

I find it amazing how many leaders do not want to do this, nor, know how to do this. They are good at getting the snow off the parking lot. They are good at making sure the supplies are stocked. But in dealing with broken lives, they don’t like that. It seems such men ought to be deacons and not shepherds. It seems that they may not have understood what their job entailed.

Satan has a sure way in when no one is at the helm and no one is seeing after the people. Sheep without a shepherd is certain lunch for any wolf. Get the leaders preoccupied with trivial things and the sheep are not watched. Keep the shepherds busy being CEO’s of the corporation and very little vision takes place. The same ole’ things keep happening year after year. Little life. Little change. Little direction. Little hope. Without strong Biblical leadership, large, once powerful congregations can become unglued and start to fall apart. Members turn on each other. The work stops. Gloom and doom prevail. In a city not far from where I live, back in the 1960’s, there was a corridor of congregations that numbered 300 and 400. Several of them. Powerful. Large. Impressive. Today, some of those places do not exist. Others are on life-support, numbering 30 or less. Today they are struggling. Most of them are without shepherds today. What happened? People moved out. There was little progress. There was little vision. There was little change. A lot of brokenness. And many of those congregations died. They died a slow, ugly death because no one was there to heal the brokenness. It’s easier to say, “it’s not so bad,” than it is to do what it takes to turn things around.

In Jeremiah’s day, it was “peace, peace, but there is no peace.” Nationally, Judah was deceived and led into believing all is fine. The coming Babylonians changed all of that. The walls were crushed. The temple ransacked and destroyed. The people were killed or taken away as captives. There wasn’t a voice saying, “I told you so.” No, the voices before this was, “peace, peace.” Everything is fine. It wasn’t. Judah was crushed because of a lack of commitment to God and poor leadership.

Leaders today need to wake up. It’s time to turn off the auto pilot. It’s time to recognize the condition of the flock. It’s time to do what needs to be done to help the people become stronger and more spiritually minded. Sometimes surgery must be radical, intense and hard. It’s necessary to remove the deep tumors that can kill a person. Sometimes, spiritually, leaders must do what is radical and intense and hard to help remove the tumors of sin deep with the soul. Expert surgeons can do it. Expert leaders can do it. They do not work alone. With God. With God’s word, and with other godly people with them, today’s leaders in the kingdom can make powerful, life changing differences in our lives.

There is a responsibility upon the sheep as well. Some like being broken. They’d rather stay broken than do what is necessary to fix things. The shepherds can lead, but the sheep must follow. It comes down to, do you want to go to Heaven? How bad? What would you be willing to do to get there? Switch jobs? Change friends? Move? Give up a Monday night for Bible study? Oh, I want to go to Heaven, but how bad?

Shepherds, stay at your post. Don’t take your eyes off the horizon. Don’t settle for the quick and easy solutions. Do what is right. Do what God wants you to do. We need you and we are counting on you.

Roger