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by Pas­tor David Cox

See also my tract G16 The Exam­ple of the Man of God

Knowl­edge is not equal to Spirituality

The first grave prob­lem that shows that Chris­t­ian uni­ver­si­ties are work­ing totally out­side God’s frame­work, is that there is a pre­sump­tion that knowl­edge is or gives spirituality.

Gen 3:1 Now the ser­pent was more sub­til than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the gar­den? 2 And the woman said unto the ser­pent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the gar­den: 3 But of the fruit of the tree which [is] in the midst of the gar­den, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, nei­ther shall ye touch it, lest ye die. 4 And the ser­pent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, know­ing good and evil.

Satan’s astute­ness is pointed at “edu­cat­ing” Adam and Eve with knowl­edge. Satan’s temp­tion of Eve, the first sin com­mit­ted among mankind, was over knowl­edge, get­ting an edu­ca­tion was the thing that pulled Eve into sin­ning. God had a per­sonal fel­low­ship with man (walk­ing en the evening of the day with God to learn of Him), and Satan deceived them into going off to get an edu­ca­tion that would make them gods. There is noth­ing wrong with learn­ing, but true spir­i­tu­al­ity and piety takes time and a lot of effort. Sit­ting under some great teacher under a com­pressed sit­u­a­tion of inten­sive learn­ing will not make you super-spiritual, super smart, not a bet­ter Chris­t­ian. The process must take it course, over time, with the indi­vid­ual med­i­tat­ing on these spir­i­tual truths of God’s Word, and then he must repent and respond to these truths, chang­ing his life to make him­self more Christ­like through the work­ing of God’s Holy Spirit in your life. A lot of facts and knowl­edge will not do this by itself.

We as Chris­tians should not be igno­rant, but nei­ther should we be deceived into think­ing that an edu­ca­tion will make us more spir­i­tual, or more obe­di­ent.  But we must clearly sep­a­rate  spir­i­tual obe­di­ence from spir­i­tual knowl­edge. Knowl­edge “puffs up” but love pleases God. Search the Scrip­tures and find one haughty, arro­gant, proud per­son iden­ti­fied as a believer. They don’t exist in Scrip­ture. Hum­ble­ness, meek­ness and gen­tle­ness, are the req­ui­sites for draw­ing near to God. God’s threat is that He per­son­ally will throw down the haughty and arrogant.

Con­trol Tech­niques of Exalt­ing Titles

Job 32:22 For I know not to give flat­ter­ing titles; [in so doing] my maker would soon take me away.

Matt 23:9 And call no [man] your father upon the earth: for one is your Father, which is in heaven.

The cor­rect expo­si­tion of Matthew 23:9 under­stands that this is not being applied to a son and his bio­log­i­cal father, but rather peo­ple who pre­sume to take the posi­tion of a rabbi, or a spir­i­tual guru over the lives of the brethren. The strictly con­demns this haughty, arro­gance, of exalt­ing one believer over another because of his sup­posed “spir­i­tual exper­tise”.  The Bible sets our bilat­eral rela­tion­ship within the body of Christ as being a fam­ily, and in that teach­ing, nobody is “papa” over the rest. Every Chris­t­ian has to take issues to the Scrip­tures and only what God has clearly revealed is oblig­ing upon the rest. A lot of Pas­tors of local churches don’t under­stand that their lead­er­ship style is set by God as being an exam­ple to the flock of God, not lord­ship and domin­ion (1Pet 5:1–5).

Gal 2:4 And that because of false brethren unawares brought in, who came in priv­ily to spy out our lib­erty which we have in Christ Jesus, that they might bring us into bondage:

Gal 5:1 Stand fast there­fore in the lib­erty where­with Christ hath made us free, and be not entan­gled again with the yoke of bondage.

Roman Catholics and many sects and cults do just the oppo­site of this. They use con­trol tech­niques to con­trol the spir­i­tual lives of oth­ers, and God specif­i­cally com­mands us NOT TO ALLOW OURSELVES TO FALL UNDER THE CONTROL OF SUCH PEOPLE.

One of these prac­tices or con­trol tech­niques is the exal­ta­tion of the per­son of a Bible teacher. So many young and spir­i­tu­ally igno­rant Chris­tians want to exalt these famous Bible teach­ers and even preach­ers, evan­ge­lists, and pas­tors to a point of accept­ing what­ever they say as being the same as the Word of God. Respect is due your pas­tor, but even then, you must gauge your respect based on how well he obeys the Word of God (and explains his life in the light of Scrip­ture) and how well he actu­ally lives what he preaches.

In Chris­t­ian Col­leges, there is a dual set of Chris­tian­ity much like the clergy and lay­men type prob­lems that were cre­ated by the Roman Catholic church. When a lowly lay­man of a church says that some­thing is wrong, and bum­bling he gives a pas­sage of Scrip­ture which defends his posi­tion, most will laugh at him and not take him seri­ously. But let a Chris­t­ian pro­fes­sor, with a Bachelor’s degree, a Master’s degree in Bible, a Mas­ters of Divin­ity degree, and sev­eral doc­tor­ates say, “I think it is so and so…” and every­body pre­sumes that you can­not dis­agree with such a state­ment. His much study­ing and titles of exal­ta­tion make him untouchable.

Just pick up any Bible School cat­a­logue. Look in the back at the list of teach­ers, and ask your­self, “What are these people’s qual­i­fi­ca­tions for teach­ing the Bible to me?” You will find a list of alpha­bet soup, people’s names with their degrees after them. In the Bible, God tells us to demand and insist on see­ing a godly, pious life in your Bible teacher, not other men’s recognition.

In con­trast to this, the Bible puts forth a great impor­tance on a liv­ing exam­ple of a faith­ful Chris­t­ian life that gives bib­li­cal rea­sons for what one does.

Why sin­gle men can­not be pastors

Have you ever stopped and tried to under­stand why God gives the requires he gives in 1Tim 3:1–7 and Titus 1? One of the require­ments is that he be mar­ried, and another is that he have his chil­dren under con­trol. Why are these even given as require­ments for a man of God that teaches you the Bible, and in which you go under his “reli­gious gov­ern­ment” (a sheep is under the reli­gious gov­ern­ment of a pas­tor, and this is the only bib­li­cal exam­ple that we have of this)?

The rea­son lies in the fact that you as a stu­dent MUST SEE HIS PERSONAL LIFE BEFORE ACCEPTING HIS SPIRITUAL TEACHING! Indeed I have seen sit­u­a­tions where a man is extremely “extrem­ist” in many points of his life, and when you actu­ally do see his rela­tion­ship with his wife and as par­ents their gov­ern­ment over their chil­dren, it is noth­ing exam­plary. It is a disaster.

Every­body that gets mar­ried has some prob­lems every now and then. Two peo­ple liv­ing together have these. It is not the exis­tence of dif­fer­ences of opin­ion that is impor­tant, but the res­o­lu­tion of those dif­fer­ences (or the con­stant nag­ging prob­lem of them) which speaks to the spir­i­tu­al­ity of the two, or the lack of it. Equally all par­ents have prob­lems with their chil­dren, and it is impor­tant to God that these sit­u­a­tions be worked out and resolved in such a way that they give tes­ti­mony to the spritu­al­life of the pas­tor. This comes through very strongly in these require­ment passages.

Study­ing the per­sonal moral­ity and piety of your Bible teacher

Why is it impor­tant that a stu­dent see the moral­ity prac­ti­cally lived of their Bible teach­ers? It is because this is where they con­clude that it is fully pos­si­ble to live a good Chris­t­ian life, or that a par­tic­u­lar teacher is just a hyp­ocrite (and this abounds in Chris­t­ian Uni­ver­si­ties). Per­son­ally, I don’t put any esti­ma­tion of good on any “Chris­t­ian teacher” that isn’t per­son­ally involved in a local church, attend­ing, teach­ing, par­tic­i­pat­ing, and espe­cially going out every week wit­ness­ing. Schools require the stu­dents to do “Chris­t­ian ser­vice” but never require the teach­ers the same thing, why? Is their exam­ple of no effect? No, it would be great to have their teach­ers out door to door knock­ing on doors and pro­mot­ing God’s salvation.

The point is that the school puts so much pres­sure on these teach­ers that their pri­or­i­ties are all head knowl­edge, infor­ma­ton that hasn’t been per­son­ally assim­i­lated into their life, and prac­ti­cally there is lit­tle that can be grasped on a real level. They know well, but live lit­tle. This sit­u­a­tion cre­ates what is know as an actor (many Chris­t­ian schools have great drama groups because the teach­ers are great “actors”). An actor is some­body that is an expert at pre­sent­ing them­self to be what they are not really. Think about that! Do you really want to learn moral­ity from some­body who is an expert Shake­spearean actor? Does that kind of go against your yea, being yea, and your no, being no?

The very same schools will tell you that 50% of a lec­ture is for­got­ten by the end of the day, and around 5%-10% is retained by the end of the week, and it is a mir­a­cle if any­thing is retained by the end of the semes­ter. So why sweat the stu­dents with all this fac­tual down­pour­ing of infor­ma­tion? This is the great fault of the Bible school sys­tem. They address the spir­i­tual ignor­nace of God’s peo­ple by teach­ing facts and fig­ures when they should con­cen­trate on liv­ing what they know. This is the great spir­i­tual chaos of Chris­tian­ity, because we have never had so many experts before in the his­tory of Chris­tian­ity, and so lit­tle spir­i­tu­al­ity and holiness.

God’s way is slow, sure, but true.

Each week a cou­ple of ser­mons or teach­ings are pre­sented in the typ­i­cal church where the per­son can comtem­plate only a few basic, cen­tral teach­ings from the Bible, and dur­ing the week he puts them into prac­tice in a prac­ti­cal daily way in his life. This is the way God has given us to learn moral­ity. At the heart of this moral­ity teach­ing is the pas­tor and the Bible teacher. These are men who ded­i­cate their lives to obey­ing God’s word in their own per­sonal life. I don’t know if my Bible pro­fes­sors at Bible Col­lege were godly men or not, because I was con­stantly pre­vented from any inter­course, con­ver­sa­tion, or view­ing of their per­sonal lives. All I saw of them was them teach­ing in front of the class, and nor­mally none of them allowed per­sonal exam­ples to come forth in their lec­tures. So how could I have know any­thing really about them? They don’t even tell us where they went to church or even if they went.

1Tim 3:6 Not a novice, lest being lifted up with pride he fall into the con­dem­na­tion of the devil.

1Tim 3:7 More­over he must have a good report of them which are with­out; lest he fall into reproach and the snare of the devil.

I won­der at this verse greatly. The Bible requires that a pas­tor (spir­i­tual teacher) not be a novice because novices are always falling into the ten­dency and error of arro­gance. (1) a “novice” is a per­son that does not have a whole lot of expe­ri­ence, and that may know a tremen­dous amount of “facts” but can­not han­dle the cor­rect extrac­tion of spir­i­tual prin­ci­ples and appli­ca­tion of those prin­ci­ples cor­rectly to the sit­u­a­tions of life. (2) The visual, seen rep­u­ta­tion of the Bible teacher must be stub­stan­ti­ated through pub­lic view­ing of his life.

In Chris­t­ian schools, the teach­ers have tremen­dous head knowl­edge of the Bible, but where is the prac­ti­cal extrac­tion of prin­ci­ples that are applied to var­i­ous sit­u­a­tions. We would sup­pose that they have their own lives as liv­ing exam­ples of Christ (we would have to say “sup­pose” because they are by rule sequestered from our view, and only the Uni­ver­sity sup­pos­edly knows their true life style).  How would these peo­ple actu­ally get the vast expe­ri­ence of apply­ing Scrip­ture prin­ci­ples to indi­vid­ual sit­u­a­tions? Well a pas­tor of a local church does this on a mas­sive basis con­stantly. He vis­its per­son­ally and indi­vid­u­ally his sheep, and dis­cerns their indi­vid­ual prob­lems, and goes to his study and pre­pares his ser­mons based on what he dis­cerns from their sit­u­a­tions and the Word of God. Again, seques­ter­ing the Bible teacher in ivory tow­ers where they are kept from real con­tact with the world sim­ply is not the exam­ple for teach­ers of moral­ity that God has given us.

A Chris­t­ian School pro­poses that they are the best solu­tion for teach­ing moral­ity to our peo­ple, when they are the sim­ply out­side of what God wants.

Fol­low­ing the faith and con­ver­sa­tion (conduct)

Heb 13:7 Remem­ber them which have the rule over you, who have spo­ken unto you the word of God: whose faith fol­low, con­sid­er­ing the end of [their] conversation.

The prin­ci­ple here is that we are to imi­tate the doc­trine and spir­i­tual exam­ple of those (1) who have the rule over us (our sub­mis­sion to a spir­i­tual author­ity has to be on the basis of that author­ity liv­ing the bib­li­cal exam­ple), (2) who have spo­ken unto us the word of God, (3) con­sid­er­ing what is the final result of their Chris­t­ian life. God has estab­lished a spir­i­tual prin­ci­ple which can­not be over­looked, which is that a per­son can only learn true moral­ity through see­ing a liv­ing exam­ple teach it (via the­ory and prac­tice). This con­di­tion is very crit­i­cal in the trans­mis­sion of moral­ity, and God has focused that the legit­i­mate spir­i­tual author­ity (humanly speak­ing) is the godly pas­tor of your local church. Hypocrisy is extremely dam­ag­ing to the trans­mis­sion of true moral­ity from one gen­er­a­tion to the next.

The entire setup of a Chris­t­ian uni­ver­sity is to iso­late the teach­ers (and their per­sonal lives, tes­ti­monies, etc) from the com­mon view of the stu­dents. Stu­dents “are not to bother the teach­ers” in their per­sonal lives. Few Chris­t­ian uni­ver­si­ties seem to have much use for local churches except as a milk cow, from which they milk all the youth away. Where do the major­ity of the stu­dents sit beside their Uni­ver­sity pro­fes­sors on Sun­day morn­ing, see­ing the pro­fes­sors “way of life” with their own spouse and kids? As a rule, the school sep­a­rates the stu­dents from the “nor­mal” lives of their teachers.

But that is the very essence of teach­ing moral­ity accord­ing to the Bible. Here we have heard stu­pid dec­la­ra­tions from even some pas­tors that are fan­boys of the Uni­ver­si­ties. “We shouldn’t look at God’s ser­vants, but at Christ. If you fol­low a preacher (pas­tor is their real intent), then he will always lead you wrong. You have to put your eyes on Jesus.” All that sounds pious, spir­i­tual, and it “sounds” bib­li­cal, but it is com­pletely wrong.

1Pet 5:1 The elders which are among you I exhort, who am also an elder, and a wit­ness of the suf­fer­ings of Christ, and also a par­taker of the glory that shall be revealed: 2 Feed the flock of God which is among you, tak­ing the over­sight thereof, not by con­straint, but will­ingly; not for filthy lucre, but of a ready mind; 3 Nei­ther as being lords over God’s heritage, but being ensam­ples to the flock. 4 And when the chief Shep­herd shall appear, ye shall receive a crown of glory that fadeth not away.

We find that the pastor-elder is the one who has spir­i­tual over­sight of the flock of God, and their over­sight and teach­ing is via “being a per­sonal exam­ple to the flock.” This clar­i­fies Hebrews 13:7, as to whom the spir­i­tual rulers over God’s peo­ple are. They are not Chris­t­ian uni­ver­si­ties, but pas­tors of local churches who feed them and spir­i­tual care for them. Acts 20:28 also links the elder-pastor as the spir­i­tual care­taker of the flock of God. More­over, God instructs us to “exam­ine the fruit” of min­is­ters’ lives to see what they spir­i­tu­ally pro­duce through their life and ministry.

Matt 7:15 Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s cloth­ing, but inwardly they are raven­ing wolves. 16 Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of this­tles? 17 Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a cor­rupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit. 18 A good tree can­not bring forth evil fruit, nei­ther can a cor­rupt tree bring forth good fruit. 19 Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire. 20 Where­fore by their fruits ye shall know them.

We can only dis­cern the true from the false in some cases by see­ing the spir­i­tual fruit of that minister’s life. How does that work in a typ­i­cal Chris­t­ian uni­ver­sity set­ting? I would under­stand this “fruit” that Jesus spoke of as being (1) the char­ac­ter of the Holy Spirit liv­ing within that per­son (like as in Gal. 5:22–23), (2) the fruit of saved souls, or (3) the fruit of their min­istry, as in a man goes to a town and evan­ge­lizes and starts a local church. The per­sonal char­ac­ter of a Uni­ver­sity pro­fes­sor is sel­dom seen. How is he with his wife, kids, neigh­bors, in non-formal set­tings? Nobody knows, and the false prophet will always be able to deceive for one joint “teacher-student” get together once a year. Sel­dom will the con­gre­ga­tion not know the spir­i­tual fruit of their pas­tor. They see him with his wife, his kids, at church meals, in coun­sel­ing, some­times they are even in infor­mal kids’ type set­ting with him (soc­cer prac­tice, bas­ket­ball, com­mu­nity projects, etc). All of this estab­lishes the pastor’s moral qual­i­fi­ca­tions to teach. This is where the con­gre­ga­tion can clearly see if what he teaches he prac­tices, or not.

Instead of think­ing that we need “x” amount of spir­i­tual knowl­edge about the Bible, who wrote each book, in what cen­tury, in what town, where even Bible city men­tioned is found, etc. we need to think, our young peo­ple and new con­verts need to live a godly life. That is spir­i­tual edu­ca­tion we need to give to them. For all the won­der­ful things that they teach you in a Bible col­lege, 95% will be for­got­ten before grad­u­a­tion. So what are you left with (besides a big bill)? Sup­pos­edly the Chris­t­ian uni­ver­sity is giv­ing their stu­dents an edu­ca­tion in moral­ity, but moral­ity is only learned by see­ing it prac­ticed con­stantly and in daily exam­ples as it is the­o­ret­i­cally taught. If you ripe the the­o­ret­i­cal and con­cen­trate it in a Chris­t­ian Uni­ver­sity, you don’t teach moral­ity, but hypocrisy.

2Thess 3:7 For your­selves know how ye ought to fol­low us: for we behaved not our­selves dis­or­derly among you; 8 Nei­ther did we eat any man’s bread for nought; but wrought with labour and tra­vail night and day, that we might not be charge­able to any of you: 9 Not because we have not power,but to make our­selves an ensam­ple unto you to fol­low us.

Per­haps the typ­i­cal con­gre­ga­tion will not have the minute details that a Ph.D. grad­u­at­ing from a Sem­i­nary would have, but spir­i­tu­ally, they are not as proud and arro­gant as the typ­i­cal PhD either. Paul’s teach­ing in 2Thess 3:7–9 has that under­ly­ing prin­ci­ple that moral­ity is only caught or taught by fol­low­ing a per­sonal exam­ple of a highly moral per­son. When preach­ers and col­lege pro­fes­sors under­stand that moral­ity is some­thing that is passed from one per­son to another sep­a­rate from and apart from head knowl­edge, then we will have achieved some­thing. This teach­ing of moral­ity absolutely MUST come from a local, know and ver­i­fied indi­vid­ual. This is why God has set up the divine pat­tern of a local church, with a man of God as the pastor-spiritual care­taker over the flock. This is how moral­ity is passed from one per­son to another. You can­not cut this process short, and as much as we may think con­cen­trat­ing the the­ory in a class­room set­ting, God thinks oth­er­wise.
Per­son­ally I have a Mas­ters in Bible, and a Mas­ters in Edu­ca­tional Admin­is­tra­tion and Super­vi­sion. My idea was to come to Mex­ico and start a small “Bob Jones Uni­ver­sity” here.  Through a lot of think­ing, med­i­tat­ing, and allow­ing God to change my ideas as He desires, I finally came to under­stand that this was wrong. The bib­li­cal method is a local church, not a school. So I con­cen­trated my efforts in build­ing a local church, but again the school men­tal­ity came in, and I wanted to make classes for my peo­ple. Again I had to “undo” my think­ing. The slow method­i­cal teach­ing of one pre­cept over another each week by some­body who is liv­ing these pre­cepts is how peo­ple learn moral­ity. There is no other way. You fill a person’s head with the­ory, and they have no way of prac­tic­ing all they learn. It must be like Isa­iah writes,

Isa 28:10 For pre­cept [must be] upon pre­cept, pre­cept upon pre­cept; line upon line, line upon line; here a lit­tle, [and] there a little:

The idea of Isa­iah 28:10 is that moral­ity is learned slowly. We can try to rush the process, but what hap­pens is that the stu­dent gets haughty in his advanced “knowl­edge” of Scrip­ture, and their edu­ca­tion brings more prob­lems that it helps. I have peo­ple here want­ing to learn Greek from me. But what I see is that they want to use the fact that “they know Greek” to silence their oppo­nents in their argu­ments. There is no real seri­ous desire to under­stand bet­ter the Scrip­tures through know­ing the orig­i­nal lan­guages. The motive and acti­tud of the stu­dent is extremely crit­i­cal in deter­min­ing the ben­e­fit or dam­age an edu­ca­tion will cause the stu­dent.
When we see Chris­t­ian uni­ver­sity pro­fes­sors that boast their advanced knowl­edge of Scrip­tures, what are they teach­ing by their exam­ple? Arro­gance? This spir­i­tual atti­tude is eas­ily picked up by the major­ity of the stu­dents, and they “want to be like their pro­fes­sors!“
The entire con­cept of fol­low­ing Christ, being like Christ, imi­tat­ing Christ is not found in the use of advanced spir­i­tual knowl­edge, the deep­ened under­stand­ing of an expert teacher, nor the expert abil­ity to debate. What we find in the exam­ple of Christ is humil­ity, com­pas­sion, ser­vice. To serve instead of be served. This is what is the essence of moral­ity, and unfor­tu­nately it is very lightly treated in “Chris­t­ian edu­ca­tion” of today. The empha­sis is always on more knowl­edge, bet­ter use of abil­ity to defend one’s posi­tion. That is good to some extent, but most of the time, it leads to the sin of arro­gance which is just as bad as any error or heresy in God’s eyes.

Eph 5:1 Be ye there­fore fol­low­ers of God, as dear children;

1John 2:6 He that saith he abideth in him ought him­self also so to walk, even as he walked.

John 13:15 For I have given you an exam­ple, that ye should do as I have done to you.

1Pet 2:21 For even here­unto were ye called: because Christ also suf­fered for us, leav­ing us an exam­ple, that ye should fol­low his steps:

The con­cept of fol­low­ing God by fol­low­ing good moral exam­ples is def­i­nitely bib­li­cal. This is why God puts so much empha­sis in a pas­tor being qual­i­fied. It (along with dea­con­ship, or offi­cial church ser­vice) is one of the few min­istries or posi­tions that have a list of require­ments as nec­es­sary before and dur­ing ser­vice. If God had the con­cept in mind of Chris­t­ian uni­ver­si­ties being a viable and blessed min­istry, won’t He have equally made require­ments for Chris­t­ian uni­ver­sity professors?

There is a prob­lem here, that of a false prophet. The false prophet is seen in Scrip­tures as a per­son of dou­ble stan­dards, an actor, or a hyp­ocrite. He makes one set of stan­dards “for the flock” and another for him­self. Sounds like the typ­i­cal Chris­t­ian uni­ver­sity. The stan­dards for the teach­ers and staff are “looser” than for the stu­dents. Why the dou­ble stan­dard? This is part of the stu­dents’ “edu­ca­tion”, that things are dif­fer­ent for them so that they can learn. But what do they learn by going through the process of a Chris­t­ian col­lege? But the dou­ble stan­dards of a Chris­t­ian uni­ver­sity are just “part of the sys­tem” supposedly.

What hap­pened to fol­low­ing the exam­ple of a “man of God”? This is def­i­nitely not what Chris­t­ian Uni­ver­si­ties teach, because (1) they hide the daily lives of their teach­ers and staff from the com­mon stu­dent, and (2) they freely set up dou­ble stan­dards all around the teach­ers and staff. When a Chris­t­ian Col­lege Pro­fes­sor says he is a spir­i­tual exam­ple to the stu­dents, in what way is that true? What does he mean? How can you imi­tate what you can­not see and do not know? I remem­ber hear­ing a com­plaint against Dr. Bob Jr’s auto­bi­og­ra­phy, and they said that as he related the most cher­ished expe­ri­ences of his life, there were no “nor­mal” church expe­ri­ences. He doesn’t talk about attend­ing Sun­day School as a child or youth, nor church youth activ­i­ties, etc. For that mat­ter, do you see Chris­t­ian col­lege pro­fes­sors out evan­ge­liz­ing? No. Why not? The stu­dents are sup­posed to do this because all good Chris­tians do this, but do the pro­fes­sors and staff go out with the stu­dents? They are exempt because they are an “upper tiered Chris­t­ian”, a Chris­t­ian with spe­cial priv­i­leges.  It is a very inter­est­ing com­par­i­son to com­pare these spir­i­tual lead­ers with the life of the Apos­tle Paul, Peter, or Christ. Peter and Paul were Chris­t­ian teach­ers, but their teach­ing never took them out of their local church min­istries of preach­ing and teach­ing. That was where they did they teach­ing and preaching.

Did Christ wit­ness to peo­ple, com­mon peo­ple? Of course he did. Did Christ teach peo­ple? Yes. But look at how he did it. He had his dis­ci­ples with him almost day and night for the entire min­istry so that they would learn their moral­ity lit­er­ally at the feet of (in the actual pres­ence, wit­ness­ing first hand every­thing) of Jesus the master-teacher. Although this dis­ci­ple­ship method isn’t very vis­i­ble in the rest of the New Tes­ta­ment the other state­ments of learn­ing by spir­i­tual exam­ple come through very clear that this is the prin­ci­ple we should fol­low, and not some man-made construction.

1Cor 11:1 Be ye fol­low­ers of me, even as I also [am] of Christ.

Par­ent Page:

• What’s Wrong with the con­cept of a Chris­t­ian University?

Pages in this series:

• Only a liv­ing exam­ple can teach morality
• The Church: the Genius of God
• Invest­ment of tithes in “God’s work”
• Excel­lence is not greater than faithfulness.
• The sin of “min­istry for hire”