Truths That Drive Deacons Mad

If you're a pastor, you will know this statement to be true. Most of the trouble you will encounter in your church will arise from your good deacons. They'll fight you tooth and nail, and they will get you fired if you go against them.

And if any God-sent evangelist knows that if he obeys God in the message he brings before the visiting congregation, that if discord arises, it will begin in the deacon body. I've had deacons threaten me to my face when I preached hard on repentance. I've seen the fire in their eyes as they stood before me fighting mad.

My pastor buddies that have lost their church did so because some wicked deacons drove them out. Now, why is this so? I believe the main reason is that we appoint men to be deacons based on their prominence within the business community and their prominence with men rather than their prominence with God. We like men who own big businesses, and we want those men because they are influential within their community.

We don't choose deacons based on their prayer life or their holiness unto God. Most deacons I've known have had some of the filthiest mouths you'd never want to hear. Now I know some godly deacons, and there are many of them out there, but they are in the minority.

Churches want men of influence with big bank accounts to serve on deacon committees. So you typically end up with worldly men full of themselves who just want more power to push others around. That's why there's always a fight when they are confronted with the unvarnished truths of the Bible.

I'm going to list 10 truths that drive deacons mad. At least I found this to be so. Put on your seatbelt, friends, for here they are.

1. God is a God who must punish sin, and God is the one who sends sinners to hell. The biggest fight you'll face in a church is that one because the gospel of our day teaches another Jesus other than the one found in my Bible. 2. If you're saved, it's because God gave you saving faith.

We have shrunken God down to man's size today and have taken salvation out of the hands of God and placed it in the hands of men. 3. The only believed gospel is a lie, for unless you repent, you will surely go to hell. The day the church quit preaching man's need of repentance in order to be saved was the church quit preaching the gospel of the Son of God.

4. You must experience a work of grace by the Holy Spirit in regeneration to go to heaven, which is to be born again. Your little decision for Jesus won't keep you out of hell if you've never experienced the supernatural act of regeneration upon the heart whereby God takes the heart of stone and makes it a heart of flesh. 5. Man is born with a ruined nature and bent towards sin, and man hates God and all things holy.

Now most church folks have a good opinion of themselves, and that is why they are resting on for their salvation. But you are not a sinner, friend, because you sin. Rather, you sin because you are a big sinner.

6. Good people don't go to heaven. Only forgiven people get to go there. Every mother's son will one day be held up to the strictness and severity of God's holy law, and if you stand there in your own merits, you will fail that test and stand guilty as charged as a lawbreaker because of sin, and the sentencing of the law must be carried out by a just judge who hates sin and who is angry with the wicked every day.

You need a sin substitute in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ, or you will go to a devil's hell. 7. You must be awakened to your lost condition through Holy Spirit conviction. Apart from which, no one can be saved.

You must feel your need of a remedy for sin and take your place at the foot of a bloody cross and a crucified Christ and become a seeker of God and a beggar for mercy until you find Christ, because if you miss Christ, you miss heaven. 8. If you are saved, you have implanted within you, by the Holy Spirit, a new disposition for holiness. A Christian obeys God's commands and pursues a life of holiness unto God, for without holiness, no one, not even the chairman of the deacons, will see the Lord.

9. To be a Christian means that self has been dethroned and another one enthroned there in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ. There must be a forsaken of all sin, a throwing down of all rebellion at the foot of a sovereign and an utter surrender to the Lordship of Jesus Christ in your daily living, or you are just fooling yourself and rest upon a rotten plank board. That will soon break and you will then tumble down to hell.

To be a Christian means one must pick up his cross daily in a life of discipleship, because a crucified Christ has crucified followers. You were bought with a price. Your body is not your own.

Your money is not your own. Your time is not your own. Christ must be a complete master.

Those are ten truths, friends, that drive deacons mad, and I'll probably have a fight on my hands, but I'd rather be honest with you and be true to your soul, so that when I see you at the judgment, I'll be free from your blood on my hands. Let us pray.