The Divine Crash

Today I was in a parade.  It was an awesome parade. I also got to ride in a Mustang Convertible, with my name on it, and throw candy at small children.  After that I was ushered to the band stand and given the ability to make a speech and lead the town in prayer.  For my first week in town it was great and it can become easy to think that this was all for me.  But none of it was for me.  All of it was for the fourth of July celebration in my new hometown.  I was simply a small part in a much bigger event.

If I truly believed that all of this was about me, you would call me self-absorbed or arrogant.

As a pastor it can become very easy to become self-absorbed and begin to believe that it is all about me.  All I can see is what is around me.  It becomes easy to miss the rest of the world and what everything is really about.

Jesus.

As a pastor, I need to see the big picture, that it isn’t about me, the denomination, or the local church.  Instead it is about a bigger picture, a picture in which I am a small part and Jesus is the whole picture.

when we get Jesus wrong we will get everything else wrong.  When pastors put themselves in front instead of Jesus then everything else becomes wrong.  However, if we get Jesus right we may still get other things wrong but at least the most important part is right and we can point people to Jesus instead of ourselves.

So then, who (or what) do you point to? When you stand up and preach who is your focus? What do you use as an illustration?

Feel free to leave a comment and join the discussion.

Tags: jesus, pastor, perspective

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 6th, 2011 at 8:08 am and is filed under Pastoral Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.