Don’t Judge a Pastor by his Sunday

Ever heard the phrase, “don’t judge a book by it’s cover”? Sure.  This same truth is said by Jesus in John 7:24 (“stop judging by mere appearances, and make a right judgment.”)

These chief priests and Pharisees (experts of the Jewish Law) could not believe that Jesus was the Christ, the Messiah, because he seemed to violate laws like “no work on the Sabbath”, even though it was healing people of their diseases and deformities.  They also knew that he grew up in Galilee, which meant from Old Testament prophecy, that he couldn’t be the Messiah.

However, if they spent some time with him, they would have known that he was born in Bethlehem just as the prophets had predicted years in advance.  The book of Matthew is great at illustrating so many of the prophecies that Jesus fulfilled.  So many people made assumptions about Jesus and fought with those assumptions against Jesus rather than finding out what Jesus was really up to.

Jesus wanted to make sure his image was not perceived wrongly and spent the majority of his early ministry “not publicly, but in secret” (Jn. 7:10).  Pastors are similar. So much of their work is in prayer, study of the bible, planning and spending time with many other people, all behind the scenes of the public speaking of Sunday.  So “stop judging by mere appearances, and make a right judgment.” Your conclusions about someone else may be superficial and inaccurate, but it doesn’t have to be. Know a pastor today.