Preachers are human beings. They don’t have special blood running through their veins. They don’t have a specially-granted superior status from God or from the church. They are men, like any others. Unfortunately, we have a tendency to lift up certain individuals and put them on a pedestal. No Scripture authorizes the church to elevate a preacher above others, nor to give him any special title. Yet it still happens. Consider some Biblical insight.
Many of God’s greatest men in Scripture are shown to make mistakes in their lives and to sin (even grievously) against God. It is hard to not immediately think of King David. Holding the unique designation as “a man after [God’s] own heart” (1 Sam. 13:14; Acts 13:22), David was anything but perfect. The sinfully-saturated episode with Bathsheba and Uriah is evidence of that. The great apostle Paul wrote of his own struggles with sin, “For the good that I will to do, I do not do; but the evil I will not to do, that I practice…O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” (Rom. 7:19, 24). Sounds like any (or all) of us!
Keep thinking of other great Bible leaders. One of Jesus’ closest friends, Simon Peter, denied that He knew Jesus three times (Matt. 26:69-75) and later needed Paul to withstand “him to his face, because he was to be blamed” for playing “the hypocrite” in his relationship with the Gentiles (Gal. 2:11-13). Even Moses, at nearly 120 years of age, rebelled against the simple instructions of God and “struck the rock twice” instead of speaking to it, as God commanded, and he was not permitted to enter the Promised Land (Num. 20:7-12).
What’s the point? God shows that no one should be elevated above others, as being in a special class. Instead, Scripture gives some clear insights into the qualities that a preacher of God is to possess and exhibit. Do these sound like they are describing the flashy celebrity of the church? In inspired preacher-to-preacher letters, God said that preachers are in need of His “mercy,” “grace” and “longsuffering” (1 Tim. 1:13-16), that they are to be “a good servant” (1 Tim. 4:6), exercising “godliness” (4:8), “laboring” to the point of exhaustion (4:10), like a “hard-working farmer” (2 Tim. 2:6), as servants who “must not quarrel but be gentle to all” and “patient” (2:24), “ready for every good work…showing all humility to all men” (Tit. 3:1-2). They are to be humble servants!
Some preachers behave like an elite superstar, and unfortunately that is because a church has put them in that position. Let us simply be “God’s fellow workers” (1 Cor. 3:9), “with one mind striving side by side for the faith of the gospel” (Phil. 1:27). That’s all that matters!