The Death of the Shepherds

"Once I was alive apart from the law; but when the commandment came, sin sprang to life and I died.  I found that the very commandment that was intended to bring life actually brought death. For sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, deceived me, and through the commandment put me to death." Romans 7:9-11

In an article titled, "Why So Many Church Leaders Struggle With Their Faith," author Carey Nieuwhof writes that one "of the most difficult aspects of Christian leadership is keeping your relationship with God fresh and alive." According to Nieuwhof, a Christian leader starts out in ministry with "enthusiasm and passion" and then following things begin to happen:

• You get 'burned' a few times by people and the challenges of leadership, and your heart grows a little hard.
• You confuse what you do (your work) with who you are (a follower of Jesus) and the line between what is personal and what is vocational become blurry.
• You end up cheating your personal devotions by reading the passage you're working on for Sunday. Or not reading much scripture at all.
• You end up so focused on strategy and execution that the mystery and supernatural aspect of Christian leadership get lost.
• The services you lead become technical and clinical rather than life-giving and awe-inspiring because you're focused on executing them well.
• You find yourself singing words that used to mean something and preaching words that once sounded more personal and alive than they currently do.
• You still believe in your head, but you've lost your heart.

Now, I am sure there are numerous, anecdotal pieces of evidence that can be given to support this list of reasons why a Christian leader loses their "enthusiasm and passion." However, taken as a whole, I see the problem being more of one of law versus grace or, more specifically, the lie versus the truth. That lie is that many Christian leaders have been eating from the "wrong tree" in their spiritual lives and believe that the Christian life is one of knowing good and evil and living accordingly. This is the same lie that Satan deceived Adam and Eve with back in the Garden of Eden.

In Genesis 3:5, Satan says to Eve, "For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” Today, many Christian leaders will repeat this lie by saying that Christians must be more "Christ-like" in their walk with God. Well, Jesus Christ is God, therefore, they are saying to "be like God." Secondly, in order to try and reach this goal, a person must put themselves under some form of law. Otherwise, how else do you define what is good and evil? Unfortunately, when you do this you are only setting yourself up for failure because God gave His law to lead us to Christ (Galatians 3:24-25), not to teach Christians how to live (Galatians 3:1-3). Therefore, like the Apostle Paul, you will soon realize that "the very commandment that was intended to bring life actually brought death." This is because the law's purpose is to create more sin in a person's life, not diminish it. 1 Corinthians 15:56 says, "The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law." Paul knew this and it is why he said, "Once I was alive apart from the law; but when the commandment came, sin sprang to life and I died." The more sin you try to identify and cease from doing, the more sin you will identify. It is a vicious cycle. The Bible reminds us of what happened to Eve in the Garden when Paul wrote, "But I am afraid that just as Eve was deceived by the serpent’s cunning, your minds may somehow be led astray from your sincere and pure devotion to Christ (2 Corinthians 11:3)." This may be why Paul told the Roman church that "sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, deceived me, and through the commandment put me to death." Like Eve, Paul was deceived into believing that living a life of knowing good and evil would give him life, when, in reality, it revealed his death. A friend of mine once said, in response to a disgraced pastor's fall from prominence, "Given what he was teaching, he needed a little sin in his life." This pastor was teaching a message of knowing good and evil and in order to escape from the impossibility of living that life, he tried to find relief in sin. The very thing he believed the law would steer him clear of, sin, led him directly to it. The truth is that “the righteous will live by faith (Galatians 3:11).” Christians, whether leaders or not, live by faith. We live in response to the truth the indwelling Holy Spirit is revealing to us. This leads to behavior changed by God from within, not from without by laws that only enslave us to sin. If you are a Christian leader and feel your relationship with God is no longer "fresh and alive," it may be due to you having been deceived into living a life under the law. The solution is to stop allowing Satan to deceive you into eating fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and start eating the fruit produced by the indwelling Holy Spirit of God.