My Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
We need spiritual leaders and their spiritual
covering over our lives. We need pastors
and teachers who inspire us to love God’s word, seek God’s kingdom and
righteousness. We need spiritual leaders
who will inspire to hope and have confidence in God’s goodness when we face hardships
and difficulties in this world. We need
spiritual leaders whose examples are worthy to emulate in loving God and
serving people. We need spiritual
leaders in whose presence you find new level of joy and faith in following the
footpath of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Do you have such leaders in your life? Let me
share with you one example.
The other day, one of the senior pastors in the
city visited my wife and mother (mother-in-law, but we don’t use the language
of in-laws in our family). My father-in-law
was a wonderful man whose heart was for God’s kingdom. During his life time, he helped many pastors
and evangelists with financial assistance so that they could continue to work
in God’s kingdom. In God’s time, few
years ago his journey on earth ended. He
came to this city for treatment and within ten days departed from here. For reasons we cannot discuss here, we could
not take his body back to Manipur for the burial; we buried him here with the
promise that we will not leave him alone.
In the place he is buried, we shall establish a church that will last
till Jesus returns was our promise.
My wife is his eldest daughter but married a
Nepalese man outside the sanctity of her tribe!
Now, it is a universal knowledge that every tribe in the world thinks it
is the only best tribe in the world! It
takes a great deal of humanity to believe that all men are created equal.
Thus, this man of God visits the house of a
widow who lost her loving husband just a couple of years ago and a daughter who
married a Nepalese man; for him, something to despise in itself! Being the man of God he was; he started to
comfort these two women, one a widow and another married to a despicable people
in his worldview. To the widow mother he
said something like this; “your husband wasn’t a good looking man, physically
he was black and short” (as if physical look is what makes a person and to tell
the truth, I haven’t seen as good a looking man as my father in law was in the
whole of that tribe!) “and morally he was very proud and violent man” (in
reality, he was the kindest man that I had ever known and the whole village
that he administered as the chieftain can still testify about his kindred
spirit). His ways of comforting a
grieving widow was to say “good ridden, you are a free woman now” and then he
turned to my wife. He said, “if you love
your people, divorce your husband and come and live with your people”! My wife sat there without responding him; the
things is, whenever my wife is shocked, she becomes tongue-tied; does not know
what to say and he thought he had her convinced to divorce her husband.
You can imagine the mood in a family where we
value each other so dearly, so deeply that brothers, sisters, brother in laws
and sister in laws, nieces and nephews, aunts and uncles, cousin brothers and
sisters of many tribes and people feel so deeply connected as a family under
the headship of a man who may be absent physically but is very much alive and
present by his spirit and legacy.
We understand the mind of this man of God and
don’t hold any grudge against him for insulting us but we grieve for the people. If you are a spiritual leader, you need to know
whether you have the heart of God for the people or whether you are simply
driven by the desire to make a living in this world. Any spiritual leaders who is in the ministry
to make a living in this world will not be able to feed the people spiritually;
he will always be talking about the things of the world such as food, clothes,
name, fame, reputation, power, prestige and so forth. Most ministers in this part of the world talk
about “sponsorships”!!! But a spiritual
leader will inspire you to seek the things from above and make your life on
earth much more temporary so that even if you face hardship, you know it is
temporary. One such great spiritual
guide says to his believers, “Since, then, you have been raised with Christ,
set your hearts on things above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of
God. Set your minds on things above, not
on earthly things” (Col. 3:1-2). He knew
that when the believers set their minds on earthly things, they will be
discouraged and disappointed sooner or later but if they set their minds on the
things from above, they will never be discouraged. After all, our lives here on earth are for a
short period of time, it is just the rehearsal for eternity. Therefore, my brothers and sisters, follow
leaders that will inspire you to live for eternity instead of this world.
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