Pastors and scripture

God is in heaven and does whatever he desires.  I read that in Psalms a while back.

Lately (by which I mean the past 10 years) I've been wrestling with biblical authority, preaching, and pastors who don't know what they are talking about.

I hold to the deepest, most specific view of inspiration - that all scripture is inspired by God, or God-breathed (Timothy passage).  I take that to mean that if God takes the time to breathe scripture, he is also going to take time to do it exactly as he desires, meaning pick the ideas, concepts, phrases, and words he wants to use.  He uses human hands, but ultimately it is his eternal Word and even the smallest letter will disappear from it.

When pastors preach, they proclaim the Word of God.  They study God's Word (scripture) and they hear God's Word (his voice, leading, etc) by praying and listening.

What about pastors who preach, but say things that aren't true?

 Sure, that's a wide spectrum for wrong versus right, with lots of grey and room for debate.  When I say wrong, I have a specific situation in mind:

A pastor was teaching through the book of Job, and was talking about suffering.  He made a comment that he did not believe God curses people for any reason, because God isn't like that.

Apparently this pastor has not read much at all of the Old Testament because it is such a vastly dominant theme that I knew about blessings and cursings years before I even went to seminary. Well, I was there, and I was going through a large number of serious issues all within the same week, so I suppose I was suffering in a sense.

What I heard was "Basically, I don't know anything at all about the Old Testament, so I will make something up that's not true.  Now let's talk about how I studied this book here in Job."  So I left, because my heart was torn, and I was not willing to listen to poor teaching particularly when it was relevant to me, but not taught faithfully to scripture. If the pastor was wrong about that, who knows what else he could be wrong about?

Afterwards I came back in, mentioned my life was falling apart, and he prayed for me.  Not just a mere prayer to get me to leave him alone, but truely prayed for me.  Seminary has taught me there are two kinds of knowledge - head knowledge and heart knowledge.  He had clearly studied, but just didn't know what he didn't know about scripture.  He deeply cared though, and deeply showed the love of Christ.

So, to all those pastors out there who long to be faithful to scripture, and preach from the depths of its riches and proclaim the vastness of the glory of God....  You need both, though generally people will care more about heart-knowledge.  They care more that you pray and listen to God's voice than that you studied for 20 hours and know everything there is to know.

But don't neglect the Word, because heart-knowledge flows out of knowing who Christ is, how vast the depths of sin we were in, and how glorious the redemption through God himself paying the price of our sin.