no preaching at home.
If you are planning to minister, please do not do it right at home, some people will use your newly acquired status career against you, I once conducted a morning prayer and bible reading sessions for my classmates for a few months, from this experience as I remember correctly, an individual would come and take my stationery without my knowledge and when I asked them to give it back, they’d say, “you call yourself a minister of the word, you read bible verse to others each morning and even pray earnestly for them, yet you are so selfish, you can’t share with me your pen”, their words stunned me, there was no way I could reply back to them correctly and there was nothing I could do either, they practically robbed me without tying my hands, there is a day I went back home with an empty bag completely swept clean by the class marauders, when it’s the pastors bag, everyone can take anything they want with no fear of repercussion or potential confrontation, I hid from my family members for weeks until when my mother’s watchful eyes noticed them one day, she scolded me fiercely for this, I was being too careless, according to her opinion, all these troubles forced me to stop my small ministerial work , I had to do it for it was proving too costly, imagine some nerdy kid would just hit you with a ball and expect you are automatically going to pardon him because you are the class pastor, he had no fear because he does not expect a fight back.
Many pastors and ministers of the word today I believe they are going through the exact same challenges, together with their families. Their friends and neighbors constantly put them to the test, they use their public status to take advantage of them, to manipulate them, when a minister gets into a problem word moves fast, really fast, In the news headlines the offences committed by the pastors are put above all the other offences, and written in bold ink. “It’s the pastor’s child that is causing trouble in school, it’s the pastor’s wife that is sleeping around, and the pastor is practicing corruption, yada yada yada…. The list is endless.
A man was engaged in a bitter argument with a minister of the word after which he ultimately swore never to attend his services, “all right then,” said the pastor, “go in peace, if you decided to discontinue your attendance to my church, I have no qualms, all you need to do is to buy yourself a copy of the scriptures, read it day and night, do everything that is written in it and you have salvation, you do not need to come to my church, you have got eyes and ears right? You can read for yourself, you don’t need anyone help you study, that was to be my job, to help you learn the scriptures, but since you claim you can do everything for yourself and have professed your hatred for me, please don’t turn it into a hatred for the scriptures, I will get out of your way if you wish it so,”
If people have decided to speak so condemningly of the God’s chosen, they pay attention to what they do rather to what they say, then it’s only when the lord himself comes to preach to them are they going to listen.
Once a hardworking student form a humble background got a scholarship to study in a foreign country, five years later he returned home to his family who had him welcomed warmly, they prepare a great banquet for him, when he delivered the news to his parents that he was going into evangelical work from now on, his parents were greatly annoyed, their joyous celebration quickly turned into a sad ceremony, his brothers and sisters too did not take it lightly, “you have more serious and emergent matters you need to attend to,” his parents said to him, “how could we have worked so hard all these years, believing that one day in the future you are going to hold the pillar for your siblings, instead of coming back with enough money to sustain us and get us out of this miserable poverty, you are returning with more scriptural books of which you left tons of them here, please clear your mind, try to think more reasonably,” they insisted.
No matter what his parents said, they boys mind was already made up, there is nothing they could have said that that might change him.
Some years later, he was back at home and on the streets doing his evangelical work, some of his father’s friends and relatives saw him and came home with these statements,
“Since when did your son become a minister of the word? When we heard that he was travelling abroad for further studies, we thought that he was going to bring us lots of expensive gifts, money and presents, not this white cloak, we have a thousand pastors in our small dwelling alone, too many for such a small town, their megaphones make so much noise day and night we hardly sleep, we thought he was going to be among the few people who were to bring growth and development to our village, now he has return with a white cloak, we are heartbroken!
Nearly everyone here has become a minister, if everyone has decided to become a shepherd who therefore can be the sheep?”
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