Preventing a Famine
Imagine living through a famine. You never have enough food to eat and maybe not even enough water to drink. You grow more and more weak without the most basic of needs. Quite frankly, I can’t imagine it nor do I want to experience it. But imagine another famine, a famine of a lack of preachers preaching God’s Word faithfully. That’s exactly what the prophet Amos predicts will happen in Amos 8:11-12:
“Behold, the days are coming,” declares the Lord God, “when I will send a famine on the land— not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord. They shall wander from sea to sea and from north to east; they shall run to and fro, to seek the word of the Lord, but they shall not find it.”
While some scholars say that this happened during the 400 years of silence between the Old and New Testaments, Paul was seeing the danger of it happening in his own time (and we will continue to, until Christ returns) when he instructs Timothy to preach the Word in 2 Timothy 4:1-4:
‘I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by His appearing and kingdom: preach the Word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort; with complete patience and teaching. For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths.’
The NUMBER ONE duty of the Lead Pastor is to teach and preach the whole counsel of God.
‘Let the Elders who rule well be considered worthy of double honor, especially those who labor in preaching and teaching.’ (1 Timothy 5:17)
In my forty-two years of pastoral life I have seen the devastation that comes when pastors’ slide into using Scripture to emphasize their own agendas or to support their own thoughts as to what their congregations will best tolerate. It’s like giving their congregations cotton candy instead of the meat of the Word.
Thankfully, SRBC has a history of preachers who have preached the Word, as proven by the MIT survey in which the people’s number one priority showed the desire for excellence in preaching and worship of God. Karol and I continue to pray for that priority to be foremost out of the many desired qualifications that the Search Team seeks in ‘Pastor Next!’
Please, I challenge all of you, PRAY DAILY for our Search Team; that they will understand God’s will and that He will give them His wisdom, discernment, dependence, and strength to persevere in this search for God’s man for SRBC.
-Pastor Terry Schoenfeld