Christ Is Preached, and Paul Says He Will Rejoice About It

A pastor I love told me something once that cost him a lot to say, and he said it in a parking lot, and then he did not look at me for about a minute.

He said: when I hear that the church on the other side of town is full, something goes tight in my chest, and I have never told anybody that.

He is not a small man and he is not a jealous man. He had shepherded that congregation for nineteen years, through two building projects and a scandal that was not his fault and a decade of people moving away for work. He had prayed for that other church out loud, publicly, more than once.

And when the news was good over there, something went tight.

I want to be careful here because a lot of writing on this subject goes straight to rebuke, and rebuke is exactly what a man like that has already administered to himself about four hundred times. He did not need me to tell him it was wrong. He knew. What he did not have was anywhere to put it.

Paul had it worse and said something extraordinary

Paul is in prison. He is not on a sabbatical and he is not writing a strategy paper. He is chained, his ministry has been physically stopped, and he has just found out that some people on the outside are preaching more energetically now that he is out of the way, specifically to needle him.

Read what he does with that.

What then? notwithstanding, every way, whether in pretence, or in truth, Christ is preached; and I therein do rejoice, yea, and will rejoice. (Philippians 1:18, King James Version)

Whether in pretense, or in truth. He is not naive about the motives. He says out loud that some of them are doing it out of contention and to add affliction to his chains, and then he says he rejoices anyway, and then he says it a second time in the future tense in case anybody thought the first one was a mood.

Notice what he had to have settled to write that. He had to have stopped counting the work as his.

You have a stake in something bigger than your own room, and the stake was given to you at conversion rather than earned by the size of your congregation, and Philippians 1 has a chained man rejoicing over preaching aimed at hurting him. The Spirit is the one who produces that rather than a person's temperament.

The oldest version of this is in the wilderness

Two men are prophesying in the camp who were not at the tent when the Spirit came, and a young man runs to Moses to have it stopped.

And Moses said unto him, Enviest thou for my sake? would God that all the LORD's people were prophets, and that the LORD would put his spirit upon them! (Numbers 11:29)

Enviest thou for my sake. That question is doing something surgical. Joshua thought he was defending Moses. Moses names it as envy operating on his behalf, which is the exact form this takes in loyal people.

The tightness in a good pastor's chest is very often not for himself. It is for his people, for the work, for the years. And it is still the same thing wearing a coat.

You are not being accused when this gets named, and the naming is the beginning of the relief rather than a verdict on you, and Numbers 11 has Moses answering it with a wish rather than a rebuke, and it is His Spirit who does the untying rather than a person's resolve to feel differently.

And Jesus says almost exactly the same thing to the same objection.

Forbid him not: for there is no man which shall do a miracle in my name, that can lightly speak evil of me. (Mark 9:39)

Forbid him not. He does not argue the disciples into generosity. He removes the frame in which the question makes sense.

The scoreboard is the whole problem

Here is what I said to the man in the parking lot, once he could look at me again.

Nothing goes tight unless there is a scoreboard somewhere. And nobody installs a scoreboard on purpose. It gets built out of a hundred reasonable things: attendance being the only number anybody can measure, a denomination asking for figures, a hard year where the room looked thin and it hurt.

The tightness is not evidence of a bad heart. It is evidence that a scoreboard exists.

You have been measured by something God never installed, and He has never once counted a room (Mark 9:39), and that part belongs to the Holy Spirit, who takes down a scoreboard that a person cannot dismantle by deciding to feel better about it.

Which means the repair is not to try harder to feel glad. That never works and everybody who has tried it knows. The repair is to have the scoreboard taken down, and that is not something a person accomplishes by deciding.

So then neither is he that planteth any thing, neither he that watereth; but God that giveth the increase. (1 Corinthians 3:7)

Neither is he that planteth any thing. That is stronger than modesty. Paul is saying the two named workers are not the operative factor at all.

You were never the increase, and being not-the-increase is a relief rather than a demotion (1 Corinthians 3:7), and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that land in a man who has carried a room for nineteen years.