Pedestal Dynamics

I recently posted on the devil as a hunting lion and want to give us an example or two of that.

A lion must separate a herd to be able to capture and kill any game.

Do you realize that that is the devil’s most successful strategy?

Let me give an analogy.

Several young men are growing in their faith very well. Their ministry thrives wherever they go as God honors that unity and desire to grow.

Then a church picks on one of them and makes him a pastor.

Then a company picks on another and gives him a very good job.

Then a girl in the group gets a good marriage proposal. And so on.

In a short while the group stops meeting as there simply is no time.

In a few years you may start hearing things from most of them, things with no reference at all to their once vibrant faith.

There is nothing wrong with growth or upward mobility. But it is important to realize that extreme wisdom and discernment is needed to distinguish between the world doing the lifting and God doing it.

Now with examples.

Ever realized that very few, if any, musicians start outside church? And I am talking about since very long ago.

The church nurtures music as people thrive when singing and playing instruments in church choirs.

I once heard a young girl wondering why she should pay to go to a media school when she could get those skills and more in church for free.

That is the church for you.

What happens thereafter is the distinction.

As a choirmaster of yore I realize that some songs require a single voice (a soloist).

What happens after a soloist becomes outstanding is that the song becomes theirs. Of course many other people want their songs to feature that soloist.

The soloist is therefore snatched from the choir that nurtured and exposed them, many times looking for backup singers to prop them up. They then become an item not subject to anybody.

Does it take much effort to bring them down to the world and sin?

It is the same with instrumentalists.

Sadly, it happens a lot with good pastors. They are taken from the congregations where their spirituality was honed and taken to churches that boast of having the who is who in society and isolated from those they grew up with.

I know of pastors who blocked their old friends and ministry partners when they ‘arrived’.

Without the herd, whether it is the choir or old friends, there simply cannot be any accountability. The pedestal is a fertile breeding ground for pride that is the most potent temptation for anybody. And the devil will start by whispering to you that you must have been the best to have been picked from that crowd.

It becomes easy to then be captured by irrelevance and secret sin as the ones who isolate you are not interested in your spirituality. They are interested in the opposite whatever they say.

Gospel music has become irrelevant because the herd has been replaced by the star; the choir has been replaced by the soloist; the band has been replaced by individual stars; elders have been replaced by the senior pastor or bishop.

Let me repeat. An effective hunter first separates the prey from the herd. Then when it is alone and outside their vicinity it surrounds and simply and easily kills it.

Think about that in your upward mobility.

Take heed, brethren, lest there be in any of you an evil heart of unbelief, in departing from the living God. But exhort one another daily, while it is called To day; lest any of you be hardened through the deceitfulness of sin. (Hebrews 3: 12, 13)

Or do you not wonder how a ‘worship leader’, pastor or other minister can proudly confess to being a homosexual. Do you think it happened overnight?

The pedestal got them out of the accountability growth group first. Then gradually used their ego against them in pride until God and His word become irrelevant in their experience and confession.

Think about this

God bless you.