August 12, 2015 @ 7:00 AM
In light of megachurch Pastor T. D. Jakes’ announcement of his “evolving” position on same-sex marriage, a position that has evolved from opposition to support, my wife recently asked me why so many megachurch pastors are beginning to skirt the Scripture―biblical correctness―in deference to political correctness. I explained to her that today's megachurch pastors, like Gideon of old, are finding themselves snared by their own ephods. In Judges 8:22-27, the Israelites asked Gideon, a previous nobody who had been miraculously used by God to whip Israel's enemy, the innumerable Midianites, with a nothing army of 300 soldiers, to be king of Israel. To his credit, Gideon turned down the throne explaining to his fellows that to exchange the divine ruler for a human potentate was to be horribly short-changed. In response to his countrymen's insistence upon doing something for him, Gideon requested gold from the Midianite spoil. With this gold he made an ephod, which he set up in his hometown of Ophrah. I have no doubt that Gideon set up his ephod to honor God as a memorial of God's miraculous deliverance of Israel from the Midianites. However, once set up, Gideon's monument to God had to be maintained, requiring both time and energy that could otherwise have been spent in the actual service of God. In addition, Gideon's ephod eventually ended up being worshipped in the place of God rather than pointing people to God. Gideon, despite his good intentions, ended up ensnared by his ephod. Not only did he end up spending time maintaining his ephod rather than ministering before the Lord, but his ephod ended up being worshiped by others in the place of God.
I have no doubt that many a modern-day pastor started out to build a megachurch in honor of Christ. However, once their megachurch was set up, the maintenance of it began to demand not only their time and energy, but the time and energy of many other Christians as well. In the end, service to the church was substituted for service to Christ, though many a megachurch minister and member would argue that the two are synonymous. In addition, megachurches often fail to lead people to a life of devotion to Christ, but become the object of people's devotion themselves. For instance, how many times have you heard someone glorifying their church rather than their Savior and inviting others to come to their church rather than to Christ?
When it comes to maintaining megachurches, it is imperative that their pastors keep those "cards and letters" coming in. We all know that it takes millions of dollars to keep a megachurch afloat.Thus, in these politically correct times, when men are becoming more and more intolerant of sound doctrine (2 Timothy 4:3), megachurch pastors can ill-afford to offend others with biblical truth lest they run the risk of less dollars being put in their offering plates. When you add to this the possibility of churches soon losing significant revenue over losing their tax-exemptions for toeing the line on biblical marriage and refusing to condone homosexuality, today's megachurch pastors find themselves caught in the perfect spiritual storm. They either compromise the Gospel in hopes of keeping their megachurches afloat or stay true to the Gospel and run the risk of offending donors and sinking their churches into insolvency. Ensnared by their ephods, many megachurch pastors, like T. D. Jakes, are feeling forced into "evolving" positions on the Bible's unequivocal truths.