Pastors, we are the hellish heaven bound!

Pastors are paradoxes. 

In the exercise of pastoral duties on Sundays at services, worship leaders and preachers muster up what sometimes passes as appropriate passion and verbiage in order to get a passing grade from parishioners. In the process, we not only deceive our people but we also trick ourselves into thinking that what we offer is pure.

At best the motivations and machinations of ministers are mixed. Because the best of men are men at best. Fallen ones at that! 

What must God think?

The disingenuous part of us that produces a mere people-pleasing performance gives God groans. This is the worship He rejects.

But if He is to be praised at all, He must embrace the duplicitous doxologies of His people. He knows, even if we don't, that it's our heads that are filled with the rocks that praise Him.

God's glory is made more manifest in that, though we are dust, when His Spirit blows across our lives there lies within that dust nuggets of divinely-implanted gold. This is the worship He accepts.

Every worship service is led by those who are at once filled with depravity and dignity. In our fallen humanity, we must admit, embrace, and leverage them both. 

Minimizing our depravity and maximizing our dignity makes us tyrannical. Minimizing our dignity and maximizing our depravity makes us timid. Humbly acknowledging both makes us trustworthy.

Depravity and dignity wrapped up in every leader every Sunday? Yes. No wonder we leaders need even more grace than those we lead! 

We are filled with paradox. We are the hellish heaven-bound. We are the fleshly Spirit-led. We are the old man living new. At the same time! Admit this we must. 

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Oh man, how great, how little thou!
Oh man, slave of each moment, Lord of eternity!
Man was made for joy and woe;
And when we this rightly know
Through the world we safely go.
Joy and woe are woven fine
A clothing for the Soul divine;
Under every grief and pine
Runs a joy with silken twine.

William Blake