Christian ethics - ⑦ honor, spiritual exhaustion and money

Christian ethics - ⑦ honor, spiritual exhaustion and money

Christians, including pastors, live their lives faithfully before God, while pursuing honor on the one hand will not be a sin. Rather, pursuing honor in its purest sense is something that should be encouraged to lead a holy life. If you do something hypocritical for honor, or if you focus only on gaining honor rather than living a true life of faith, then you are definitely on the wrong path. When you lead this wrong life of faith, you will experience the spiritual exhaustion of Christians. Most Christians believe that there is a God. However, since our God is not a visible God, we often act'as if there is no God'. Christians are spiritually exhausted, especially when they are plagued by people in church or social life, and when they do not know their sincerity and condemn them, or when they have lived sincerely, but only when adversity and suffering continue in their lives. However, these problems arise when faith is weak. When faith is strong, suffering is not considered suffering. When we sincerely put everything down in front of the cross and repent, we experience surprisingly sublimation of suffering. The Bible proves that “And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope,” (Romans 5:3–4)  It is that suffering is the basis for fulfilling hope. Proper religious life prevents spiritual exhaustion.

In the case of money (goods), it can be said to be a very important and serious problem because it actually decides whether or not to continue pastoral ministry. While attending church at a late age, I have seen a lot of conflicts in the church. It is even divided into elders and pastors, engaging in lawsuits against each other, and doing things that people outside the church will not do. Mostly it was a monetary problem, but once a fight has taken place, it is impossible to recover again. If the other party is different from his/her own thoughts, he mobilizes the manpower to occupy the opponent's pulpit, defend the chapel, and stand up to the point of disrupting worship. The money problem is, of course, serious, but the constant fighting within the church makes it harder for ordinary believers. This has happened in the church I've attended for a long time, and now they are fighting in factions. The church was a church with more than 8,000 officials, so money was plentiful until the battle broke out. There was no shortage of money for pastoral rewards, missions, education, relief, and other church activities. Rather, a lawsuit was filed to spend money on the wrong side. It happens because each person thinks of the money of the church as their own money. However, I had a similar situation here in North America. The reality of immigrant churches is that most of them are financially difficult and there are few church members, so pastors often have difficulties. There are large churches, but most of them are difficult due to lack of membership. In this small church, however, it is not enough to have a consensus among the members of the church. Again, most of the money-related quarrels. We envy the members of the Early Church in history. They lived a life of faith, comforting and encouraging each other, even if they were poor or lacked food. Amen

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