What Does God Hate?

I watched the session of the Southern Baptist Convention last night as it was being broadcast live by Daystar. The session that was televised was themed "A New Awakening" and was built around the verse, "If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land" (2 Chronicles 7:14).  

The session consisted largely of seasons of prayers of confession and repentance for various sins including racism, cultural divisions, as well as a whole hosts of other things that need to be confessed, repented of and forgiven if we are to go forward with the Gospel in our world. I applaud it all. 

As he introduced the session Ronnie Floyd spoke of the fact that we had mastered the art of marketing but lost our sense the power of God. I think I could write a book on this but it is not what is on my mind right now.

I was taken by what was not included in the call to repentance. . . . the thing that I think is at the core of where we are as Baptist and Christians as well. I have been retired for 10 years now and out of the mainstream of denominational life. However, from the 1960's until 2005 I was as involved in Baptist life as the next pastor and more than some.  

I served on local and state committees and boards; I worked on international mission projects; I attended State and National conventions and meetings; I challenged leadership when  I thought they were crossing the lines of Christian ethics and morality in relationships, with employees and with each other; I lived through the "Battle for the Bible" travesty and attended many an ad hoc meeting related to how we should proceed in that battle. . . . To say the least I was involved. The end result was the formation of a competing group of churches who called themselves the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship 

Stay with me, I am going to soon get to my point. I  have said all of the above because I believe as wonderful as that meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention was one essential thing was glaringly absent. We prayed for forgiveness for a whole range of our attitudes and actions that needed to be acknowledged (confessed) and cleansed (forgiven).  I would not remove a single one of them. If we are going to have a great outpouring of the Power of God then we need to get all of those things out on the table and resolved.  

But one thing was missing and that was the need to confess that we were guilty as a denomination and as individuals involved in the Battle for the Bible of what might be the most egregious of our sins.  

I remember when I was just a youth that my pastor preached a series of sermons based on the text of Proverbs 6:16-19 "There are six things the Lord hates, seven that are detestable to him: haughty eyes, a lying tongue, hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked schemes, feet that are quick to rush into evil, a false witness who pours out lies and a person who stirs up conflict in the community." 

Each week he dealt with one of those items that God hates. However when he came to the last (seventh item) he pointed out a significant difference in it and the previous six. To be sure it is still included in what God hates. He shared that the first six can be isolated as attitudes that people can have or actions that people can take. However, the seventh item is not like the first six. Instead of the attitude and/or action people can have it is the person taking the action. The person God hates is the person who draws others into discord or strife. This may well be the only time God is said to hate a person. 

The Hebrew word for hate used is the word  שָׂנֵא   and means to have a feeling of open hostility, intense dislike and a of lack of any feeling of love and compassion for an for the object of His hate. The result of this kind of hate is a refusal or shunning of any relationship with the one hated. Simply stated, the person who goes about disturbing the peace and fellowship among God's people is completely alienated from God. 

Oh, I can hear it now. "God doesn't hate anyone. He loves everybody. What He hates is their sin but not them." But is that what the text says?  Whatever else this verse means it means the sowing discord in the household of faith (church: body of Christ) is so serious to God that He is spoken of as hating not just the action but the actor as well. 

Now what has that to do with an effort at bringing about a new awakening of the power of God among his people and a great outbreak of soul saving revival? Remember our starting verse: "If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land" (2 Chronicles 7:14).   

We do well to confess our sins of prejudice, bigotry etc but unless we get to the one sin for which God wants to hear a confession and see evidence of repentance we will not see a mighty moving of the Spirit of God or God acting in great power among us. I believe the great rift in the Southern Baptist Convention in the 1980's constituted a sowing of discord of on an enormous scale among the brethren.  

Remember, I was there. I sat in the meetings; I heard the defamation of character and the slander; I felt the pain of relationships broken as the house became divided. Until that broken relationship and the fellowship of the faith that it fostered has been restored through confession and repentance there is little hope of any great awakening among Baptist.  

As I watched that broadcast and joined in the prayers of confession and repentance I kept thinking, "Any minute now we will get to the one that set brothers against brother . . . the sowing of discord. But alas it never happened.  I suppose they thought that was a previous generation's doing and old wounds need not be reopened. Two thoughts on that: First, sometimes the wound has to be opened to clean out the poison and second, "The LORD is slow to anger, abounding in love and forgiving sin and rebellion. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation" (Numbers 14:18). 

We need to keep in mind that we think in terms of generations while God works in terms of eternity.  Israel was enslaved in Egypt 400 years before God sent Moses to deliver them.  Then the Hebrew Children wandered in the wilderness for 40 years and only a handful of those who started the journey entered the promise land with Joshua. 

We have confessed sins of which of which I am not personally guilty but those who came before me were and some around me still are. They are all sins of our fathers and the truth is they are all a part of that greater sin of sowing discord among the brethren. Until the core of our collective sin is dealt with we may never see another mighty moving of God the people called Southern Baptist. 

I have had a few people over the years in churches that I pastored come to the alter to confess and be forgiven of every kind of sin you can imagine. Week after week they came and the confessed but they never had the peace they were seeking. Why, because they were not willing to deal with the issue God was focused on in their lives. When they finally swallowed their pride and over came their fear and confessed the sin God was focused on they went away with peace in their heart and seldom had to make that long hard walk down that aisle.  

Indeed, one man asked to share his testimony realizing that the speaker stand had been place at the very spot he was standing when he finally dealt with the issue God was dealing in his life, picked up the stand moved it a few feet and said, "That's were I finally laid my burden down I don't want to chance standing there and getting it back." 

Such a confession and repentance would mean restoration but not necessarily reunification. It means a restoration of fellowship and joint commitment to carrying out the Great Commission. Will it ever happen, I hope so but I am not optimistic. I am afraid our pride in this area will get in the way. Like I said, it is not a call to reunification is is a call to repentance for all the anger, hatred, slander and just plain mean spiritedness toward one another. It is a call to restoration around the answer to the question, "Jesus, whom say you He is?" The answer, "He is the Christ, the Son of the Living God." On this we are agreed and in this agreement we should be able to walk together having been saved by His grace through His blood and commissioned to take the message of redemption to a lost and dying world.

By the way, the same thing applies to the Baptist General Convention of Texas and the Southern Baptist of Texas groups.

Pastors Get Depressed Too

 A headline in a recent edition of the Baptist Standard caught my eye and got my attention. It read, Denominational leader, pastor Phil Lineberger dead at 69.  The reason it caught my eye was that I had met with Phil Lineberger over the years. Oh, we were not friends . . . . but we were colleagues and we are about the same age.  

At any rate it got me to thinking about pastor's and the "fish bowl" lives they live. The high expectations to which congregations and they themselves hold them. I remember many years ago reading the following description of the ideal pastor. It read: 

The "Perfect Pastor the mind of a scholar, the heart of a child, and the hide of a rhinoceros. He preaches exactly 10 minutes. He condemns sin roundly but never hurts anyone’s feelings. He works from 8am until midnight and is also the church janitor. The perfect pastor makes $40 a week, wears good clothes, drives a good car, buys good books, and donates $30 a week to the church. He is 29 years old and has 40 years’ experience.  Above all, he is handsome. The perfect pastor has a burning desire to work with teenagers, and he spends most of his time with the senior citizens. He smiles all the time with a straight face because he has a sense of humor that keeps him seriously dedicated to his church. He makes 15 home visits a day and is always in his office to be handy when needed. The perfect pastor always has time for church council and all of its committees.  He never misses the meeting of any church organization and is always busy evangelizing the unchurched. The perfect pastor is always in the church down the street! 

I think what this humorous piece describes is a part of what drives a pastor, even a successful one like Phil Lineberger, into depression. Most of the time these amount to little more than mood swings. It has been said that every pastor resigns on Monday but come Tuesday he's is back in the saddle.  

However, what Phil suffered from was not just a case of pastoral blues it was trying to function in a very public forum at a high level of performance while personally living in a very dark place from which he could see no light or hope. A friend of mine spoke of it as being in this darkness that "you just feel that's it's swallowing you ! And this intense feeling of unbearable sadness. A pain of the soul! No wonder the early Fathers of the Church thought of it as demonic." 

There is a sense in which it is better to have sinned than to become enveloped in such a darkness. At least with sin there is the hope of forgiveness and restoration but with this darkness of the soul one can see neither. It is as if they are enveloped in darkness and the only hand that can help is lost in the darkness. They try and try again to reach out and find the hand but it cannot be found and soon they give up all hope. 

Perhaps some of this darkness is the result of the rate at which pastors are reducing the number of close friends that they have. There was a time when we ministers (Preachers & Pastors) had a handful of close friends with whom they regularly spoke or met and with whom they prayed. But today's corporate model for doing church has robbed us of that kind of friendship in the ministry. Now we relate "professionally."  No pastor would in today's church environment bear his soul to a colleague  and especially if he were suffering from depression least it come back and hurt him as he climbs what one preacher referred to as "destiny's ladder.  

Another thing that has changed about church is the daily demands being placed on most pastor's in today's church. I have worked as a hourly laborer and as an executive in the corporate world and I also spent 40 years as a Baptist pastor. From that experience I can honestly say I know of no other profession that places more demand on your time, requires constant functioning at the highest levels of one's cognitive skills, demands the highest of relationship skills and the constant public exposure of both public and private life.  

This is not to imply that pastors have never had these kinds of pressures or even that other don't have similar pressures. It is to suggest that these demands have cut into what I refer to has the pastor's "closet" time and personal spiritual development time. 

I used to teach a workshop about how Satan is able to gain entrance into our lives and cause us to stumble. In that workshop I simply stated that one of the Devil's most powerful weapons was to do nothing at all. He just leaves us alone to our own devices. It is not long before we began to believe we are invincible and our prayer life and our personal spiritual development take a back seat to all the other things that we are doing to grow the kingdom. It is then, when we are spiritual anemic, that Satan attacks us at our most vulnerable spot.  I believe this is a major cause of so many (and there are far more than you may imagine) pastors struggle with depression.  

Pastors need to be made aware through their training that personal prayer and spiritual development are more important than theological education. We must first and foremost understand that we must as a pastor have a clear sense of calling from God.  If one does not have that assurance in his heart and mind he is set up to spiral into the darkness in a pit of depression. Having that call will not prevent depression  but it will help minimize the chances of depression.  It is imperative that every church explore this calling with any candidate for pastor in their church regardless of their age or years in the ministry. A specific calling from God is the essential foundation for one being a pastor. 

As a pastor you need a friend. I realize and acknowledge that, "There is not a friend like the lowly Jesus, no not one" and that as pastor you need to "Take your burden to the Lord and leave it there." But, you also need a human friend with whom you can "Bear one another's burdens."  I was blessed that in most of the churches I pastored there was one layman in the church who was "my" friend. In a couple of cases they were deacons in in others laymen. They loved me, counseled me, knew my struggles and sustained me with the care, concern and compassion I needed. Sometimes it was their quiet assurances of, "Pastor I am praying for you today." 

The pastor and the church need to understand that while all the programs, activities and services of the church in which the pastor is involved (that will just about everything for most churches and pastors) come after the pastor has blocked time to devote to his own personal spiritual vitality.  This need was recognized from the earliest days of the church as evidenced by the Apostles instruction to the early church in Jerusalem, “So the twelve summoned the community of disciples and said, 'It is not desirable that we neglect the word of God to serve tables. So, brothers, select from among you seven men of good reputation, full of the Spirit and wisdom, whom we will put in charge of this need. But we will devote ourselves to prayer and to the ministry of the word.'" And the statement pleased the whole group, . . .  ." (Acts 6:2-5) 

The church needs to provide adequate financial support for the pastor and his family so that he does not have to be constantly trying to find sources of income to meet the cost of living for his family. Churches are doing better at this in our time than has been historically true. 

One of the reasons I suggest this is of course to remind us that our pastor's need to be adequately paid. I also want to suggest to you that because most pastor's do not pastor in a mega-church they end their active ministry with very little retirement. I want to suggest you consider supporting Mission Dignity. This is a part of GuideStone Financial Services that provides stipends to retired pastors  the widows of pastors who have very minimal incomes.  

I cannot promise that doing any or all of these will prevent depression from developing in your life. But I can promise you that even when you find yourself in the wilderness that God has go you by the hand and is leading you to the promised land. And if you just can't see the light at the end of the darkness by all means ask for help.  

I have tried to share some of my thinking on depression among pastors. I do not mean to imply others do not suffer from depression as well. They do. All the things I suggested may also be helpful to anyone suffering with depression. Please, if you are struggling with depression or think you might be on the verge of drifting into that dark abyss we call depress call someone and get help.

Interested in what Phil had to say on the subject? Check out his Eulogy for his friend John Petty.