The Pitfalls of Preachers

By Theo Ewoluwa

This book will make you certain about what the Christian message is; and what it is not.

It will bring home to you the Christian messengers often under-rated responsibilities and how to readily fall on their right side.

You will acquire a rational approach to accomplishing your objective as a messenger of Christ through reading this book.

This book will alert you to popular errors that are quietly creeping into even the most conservative church audiences.

It will teach you how to classify your church, and therefore make you see the urgent spiritual remedies required.

You will understand the dynamics of how churches fare well or fail by the Lords biblically revealed yardstick.

High-end spiritual poisons do take longer than one generation to gestate; so that the arrival of their ill-effects often take the new leaders in place by surprise. However, this book will show you a simple scriptural way to know spiritual poisons at first contact.

Many books give dozens of steps to take in order to accomplish desirable objectives, but this one will avail you of simple, easy to remember, but often overlooked principles that will
save you from deadly and pervasive hazards of preachers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Sep 18, 2012
• ISBN: 9781477248485

Theo Ewoluwa

Theodore Sillo Ewoluwa is presently involved in a travelling teaching ministry that goes by the name Christgrace since 2007. He was engaged as full time church Pastor for nearly 15years mostly in Lagos, and briefly in Rivers State, Nigeria. He experienced regeneration in 1975, as a practicing civil engineer when he was 26, and subsequently received ordinations between 1980 and 1998. He holds a Masters degree in theological studies (specializing in Christian Education) from the Evangel Theological Seminary, Jos, Nigeria.

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© 2012 by Theo Ewoluwa. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 08/06/2012

ISBN: 978-1-4772-4849-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4772-4848-5 (e)

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

Preface

Introduction

1 The Spirit Behind the Message

2 The Goal of The Preacher

3 Methods That Deceive

4 The Messenger’s Prayer Closet

5 Meals Sacrificed To Idols

6 How Unwholesome Meals Affect Congregations

Appendix A

Appendix B

Appendix C

Appendix—D

Preface

All of us, ministers of the Christian message, must come to terms with the fact that the original message of the Messiah Jesus is being surreptitiously tinkered with in a subtle way that robs it of its distinctive superiority over anything man had previously heard or can ever come up with. For example, it was from the beginning a message of the kingdom of God; but it has now largely become a message of transformation of the sinner’s existential (health and wealth) status and achievement in this world. Yet, friendship with this world has always been known in Christian circles to be enmity with God (Jas.4: 4).

This is happening as a result of attempts to undo previous misunderstandings that were introduced into it, especially during the years of Deism when the spiritual dimension of the message was altogether obliterated. This had the effect of making the invisible and spiritual God appear either obscure or non-existent.

In an attempt to reintroduce the power or dynamism of the gospel long suppressed by the ritualism of the dark ages, and entombed by the rationalists of the enlightenment church epochs, there has been a great zeal on the part of those who are eager for the cause.

Unfortunately their efforts have tended to create a new and damning error. This error works by making the main purpose of the message, which is to equip men with love for God, secondary to one of the equipments for achieving this purpose. The fall out of this error is that men are being taught to love their own person above everything else. With this outlook to life, sacrifice is outdated and the love of many have grown cold! This needs not be.

There is therefore an urgent need to recapture the authentic Christian message in a concise and current language, so that all may become acquainted with its aspects and with, more importantly, its fine and precise goal.

This has to be done without playing down the dynamism immanent in the gospel message (Rom.1: 16).

All efforts in writing this volume have been directed at accomplishing this goal.

May the Lord Jesus bless you as you read and meditate along.

And may the Lord find your work for, and acquaintance with, Him acceptable through the grace of the Lord Jesus the Christ.

Theodore Stephen Sillo Ewoluwa

March 2007, Lagos

Introduction

Preachers are, or at least used to be, understood to be messengers of the God whose message they preach. This work of relaying the message of the Lord is verily a profession, complete with all the perquisites and challenges concomitant with all vocations. And one of the challenges in any occupation is its hazards. The preaching vocation has its own hazards and they are the worst possible.

Messengers and Leaders

This assignment of relaying the will of the Almighty confers some leadership status on those who receive the calling. Leaders have the peculiarity of being able to lead people to lofty achievements and to glorious attainments when they lead aright. However, when they lead people into error, they cause total disillusionment and a huge sense of loss of hope to the generality of those being led astray.

To quote the scriptures, blind leaders will characteristically lead people into a ditch. We call leaders blind, who are unable to clearly see the goal to which they are supposed to be leading others. The ditch refers to an imprisoning situation where all the rights and liberties of those being led are unquestionably foregone.

Let them alone: they be blind leaders of the blind. And if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch.

(Matt. 15:14)

That the misleading leader will himself also fall into he ditch should be well noted.

David and Joab

There is a case in the Bible though, where a leader escaped the ditch because God sent him a prophet to correct him. In that particular case, a subordinate of the leader who should have drawn the attention of the leader to his error but did not do so, fell into the ditch while his superior, the king, escaped. Joab was that hapless subordinate leader that fell, and David was the leader king that escaped the ditch.

David in his weakest moments was trapped in a sin. This sin was begging for exposure and expiation, or in the alternative, duplication. David opted for the latter. This alternative involved his having to eliminate one of his military men in an attempt to conceal the shameful sin. In order to accomplish this, he needed the support of his commander who he duly detailed to see to it that the soldier to be eliminated was put in the worst front of the war in which the kingdom was engaged at the time. The commander Joab understood his master’s wish even though he knew that it was wrong. He carried out the assignment diligently not caring to remonstrate with his boss the king; this to the displeasure of God. The soldier died.

But God intervened, corrected and restored David the king, whose eventual repentance was not a secret in Israel. On the other hand, the Lord waited for thirty years for this diligent but blind leader of the army to repent. But when he did not, God judged him and he was executed by the offspring of that evil scheme, who by now was the reigning King, Solomon.

It is noteworthy that soon after Joab carried out the wrong wish of his master, he began to find good reasons to disagree with his every decision. The effect of this constant query of his master’s orders was that he aggregated needless curses upon himself. It was not surprising therefore, that it was this same king David who left a pre-mortem instruction that his successor son Solomon, should see to it that Juab was thus executed.

Inseparable Aspects; Leadership and Focus on Goal

Leaders are supposed to see ahead and focus on the goal of their leadership. With the Lord, this is not negotiable. In other words, leaders are supposed to be conversant with the goal of their leadership. For this to be, leaders are supposed to revisit their inaugural marching order from time to time, as well as constantly take renewed looks at the goal of their leadership. They should not bury their heads on the rather engaging squabbles and nitty gritty of the journey toward the goal as they are often tempted to do.

Messengers of God being in this category of leaders are supposed to adopt this attitude intoto. That way they can escape the bitter consequences of falling into the three major pitfalls of preachers.

There are many other pitfalls to which a messenger is prone but a careful analysis of them will reveal how they branch out from these three major hazards that form the subject of discussions in the following chapters of this booklet.

1

The Spirit Behind the Message

For the appeal we make does not spring from error . . .

(1 Thess 2:3, NIV)

Behind every message there is a spirit. There is no communication that has not come from a spirit being. Everyman speaks from his spirit because out of the abundance of the heart (the spirit of man resident in him) the mouth speaks. In the realm of salvation, there are only two spirits to reckon with namely

• the Holy Spirit, the spirit of liberty, and the

• anti-Christ spirit, from whose grasp men are to be saved. This is the Devil.

This is to say that any message claiming to come from God with regard to salvation or the divine intervention in the affairs of men could come from either of these two sources. As a result of this, a messenger or preacher must make sure of the spirit behind his message. We are here talking of the Spirit of truth and the spirit of error. The gospel of Jesus Christ has to do with the truth. For Jesus himself said that he is the truth. In other words, a preacher is either preaching from the truth or else by the spirit of error. The message of truth will set people free but the message of error will imprison its hearers.

Identifying Error

It is not always easy to know if a message is from the Spirit of Truth or from the spirit of error until after the repercussions of imbibing such a message begin to manifest. It is for this reason that the Lord mercifully gave us a clear way of knowing if a message is of the truth or not.

In going out to preach the Gospel, our aim is to dispense to our audience the saving power of Jesus Christ because it has been said that the way by which God’s saving power comes to men is by their hearing the good news of Jesus Christ (Rom.1:16). Hearing and believing what was heard will bring the power of God to bear on any listener to the gospel of Jesus Christ. Equally true is the