There was no questioning his skill. He was an exceptional communicator: direct, listenable, insightful, having no trace of preacherly affectations, compellingly conversational in tone without being flip. It was a master’s class in how to give a series of talks.
So what didn’t I like? The first thing he did when getting to the pulpit was take several strides away from it and then stand there in plain view to give his message. The only motive for this move, it seemed, was to show us that he was speaking without notes. Later that day my gym teacher (yes, we had gym) said, “Wasn’t that a great sermon? And I can’t believe he did the whole thing without notes!” Cynical young me (who later morphed into cynical old me) thought, Of course. That’s exactly what he wanted you to think. He made sure we all knew he had the ability to deliver a message stored in his brain as effortlessly as Mozart stored a concerto.
Perhaps that is a mere quibble. But there’s more. Repeatedly during the course of that week he told stories that reflected well on himself and his example. He was, by all accounts (well, by his own account), an amazing family man. A colleague had asked him: “If the devil were to take you down, how would he do it?” – a provocative jab intended to reveal some vulnerability where he would need to be on guard. He dodged that challenge brilliantly by replying, “Well I know how he wouldn’t do it. He wouldn’t get me through my family.” That was because he was so great with his wife and kids. He prioritized them even above his ministry, and everyone could see that about him.
He went as far as to tell us (holy COW was this a red flag) that someone said to him, “The women of this church love you.” They saw how attentive he was to his family, and they delighted in the example he set for their husbands. He explained that he never sat in a chair up on the platform before it was time to preach: he sat in the pew, with his family, arm around his wife, stroking his son’s earlobe. The whole congregation would see that and think, “Now THAT’S a man who gets it right with his wife and kids.”
I cannot say that I was shocked when, six years later, Gordon MacDonald resigned as president of Intervarsity because of an extramarital affair. That affair went on for months even while he was writing his bestseller “Ordering Your Private World.” No! Him??? How could a man who was so great with his family that women loved him possibly fall into adultery?
Sometime later MacDonald was restored to the pulpit of the church he betrayed. (It appears that the fact that his return deeply divided that congregation did not weigh so heavily on his conscience as to prevent his resumption of the pastorate.) In the ensuing years whenever I had occasion to hear him I could not help but notice that he was still indulging the habit I detected nearly 40 years ago: telling stories where he was the hero. He was having lunch with a friend and he said just the right thing. He gave an apt word of encouragement to a troubled person that turned things around. He sacrificed comfort to come to the aid of someone in distress. He had a brilliant reply to someone who had tried to trip him up. Even his adultery was put to good use: it equipped him all the more expertly to steer fallen souls (like Bill Clinton!) through the treacherous waters of repentance and restoration.
The “And-here's-another-time-I-excelled” brand of illustration is one that characterized the preaching of disgraced fraud Ravi Zacharias. I was never a close follower of him, but he was impossible to avoid in the circles of Evangelicalism in which I have walked. And in the bits and snatches of his sermons that I heard over the years, I don't think I’m exaggerating when I say he couldn’t go 15 minutes without relating some story in which he refuted a skeptic, or wrested respectful acknowledgement from an opponent, or sparked a revival, or gave a clarifying insight to some poor muddled soul. Now that so many of his lies have been documented in gory detail (the man claimed to be a professor at Oxford when he was never even a student there!), one begins to wonder if any of his self-flattering stories were true.
But even if they were all true, the Bible still says, “Let another praise you, and not your own mouth; a stranger, and not your own lips.” (Proverbs 27:2). A faithful servant of God is far more likely to tell you about the time a stranger showed him kindness than about the time he showed kindness to a stranger. He will relate wise counsel that somebody gave him more willingly than the wise counsel he gave someone else. He remembers with photographic clarity the times he was forgiven, but is extremely forgetful about the times he forgave. He will extol others’ charitable acts, but his own you will never discover until someone else reveals them.
I am not saying it is always forbidden to draw attention to your example. St. Paul himself did so in 1 Thessalonians 2:9-10 among other places: “Surely you remember, brothers and sisters, our toil and hardship; we worked night and day in order not to be a burden to anyone while we preached the gospel of God to you. You are witnesses, and so is God, of how holy, righteous and blameless we were among you who believed.” It is appropriate to do that sometimes, especially when responding to false accusation. I believe it is a matter of degree, quantity, frequency, motive, and bearing. I am reminded of D. A. Carson’s perceptive comment about the apparent retrograde slippage of Nehemiah’s character as revealed by the fact that four times at the end of his book the Israelite administrator called upon God to remember him with favor for his good works, and to remember with disfavor his opponents for their bad works. (Nehemiah 13:14, 22, 29, and 31). Once is ok. Even two we’ll let pass. But four times? At some point we seem to cross a threshold that marks a descent into self-centeredness and self-aggrandizement.
What I have to say to fellow evangelicals is essentially this: we have been deceived so, so many times in recent years by celebrity evangelical evildoers that the time has come to ratchet up our standards and heighten our sensitivities to the telltale signs of fraud. Put this one on your list. Be on your guard against preachers who keep telling you what great things they have said or done.
