The great Christians have had great besetting sins.
— Mark Galli
He had been preaching in his church for years, but the longer he preached, the more discouraged he grew. People just didn’t get it. They gladly heard him, but instead of rising to discipleship, they slithered into lethargy. Everyone praised his preaching, but he complained, “No one acts accordingly, but instead the people become so crude, cold, and lazy that it is a shame.”
For instance, he started teaching that worship is primarily an act of gratitude to God. Attending worship, he said, did not earn points with God. People loved the new teaching. And worship attendance dropped.
At one point, he was so fed up, he announced he would no longer preach to his congregation; he went on strike.
The “necessity of preaching” couldn’t keep him away from the pulpit for long, but anger and resentment dogged him his whole life. A year before he died, while on a trip, he decided not to return to his home town or church. He wrote his wife, “My heart has become cold, so that I do not like to be there any longer.” People were indifferent to his preaching. Some had begun to mock him, asking him what gave him the right to question everything they had been taught.
“I am tired of this city and do not wish to return,” he wrote. He would rather “eat the bread of a beggar than torture and upset my poor old age and final days with the filth at Wittenberg.”
It took the determined efforts of city elders to convince Martin Luther to return.
This is not the Martin Luther we’ve grown to know and love. That Martin Luther boldly faced the ecclesiastical machinery of medieval Catholicism, not to mention the military might of the Holy Roman Empire, declaring, “Here I stand, and I can do no other!” That Martin Luther was a decisive and penetrating theologian who recovered the grand essentials: Scripture only, faith only, grace only.
But this Martin Luther? Saints aren’t supposed to be angry. Christian heroes aren’t supposed to give up.
And pastors aren’t supposed to sin as much as we do. In our honest moments, we admit that we are not the leaders others have come to know and love. They hear us proclaim righteousness on Sunday morning, but they don’t see us at the drug store when we peek at Penthouse. They know we counsel with empathy and compassion, but they haven’t heard us rage at our spouses in fits of temper.
As pastors, teachers, and Christian leaders, we each have a besetting sin: lust, greed, temper, sloth, whatever. We struggle to overcome it, praying, pleading, fasting, straining. But it doesn’t go away. It may get worse.
We begin to wonder what in the world we’re doing in ministry. “How can God use someone like me? How can I, with this persistent sin, make any contribution to the kingdom?”
As a pastor with my share of besetting sins, I thought long and hard and often about such questions. I found answers only when I began studying the lives of former preachers, people like Martin Luther and George Whitefield, great Christians with great besetting sins.
Angry Teacher of Grace
Luther, by his own account, was an angry man, though he chalked it up to providence: “I was born to war with fanatics and devils. Thus my books are very stormy and bellicose. I must root out the stumps and trunks, hew away the thorns and briar, fill in the puddles. I am a rough woodsman, who must pioneer and hew a path.”
We’re not surprised, then, by his views of Roman Catholicism: “We should take him — the pope, the cardinals, and whatever riffraff belongs to His Idolatrous and Papal Holiness — and (as blasphemers) tear out their tongues from the back, and nail them on the gallows.”
For this anger, we have some sympathy. Luther was grappling with a corrupt and entrenched church bureaucracy, and sometimes righteous anger seemed the only leverage: “I cannot deny that I am more vehement than I should be.… But they assail me with God’s Word so atrociously and criminally that … these monsters are carrying me beyond the bounds of moderation.”
Often, though, Luther’s anger was anything but providential or righteous. Take his attitude toward the poor.
In 1524, weary of oppression and enthused by Luther’s reforms, German peasants revolted against their lords. To help bring peace, Luther wrote, An Admonition to Peace, in which he blamed the unrest on the rulers, saying many of the demands of the peasants were just. He also warned the peasants that the gospel taught obedience to secular rulers and the humble suffering of injustice.
The treatise calmed little, and the peasant unrest spread. Luther was enraged, and he dashed off Against the Robbing and Murdering Horde of Peasants. In it he not-so-compassionately exhorted rulers to “smite, strangle, and stab [the peasants], secretly or openly, for nothing can be more poisonous, hurtful, devilish than a rebel. It is just as when one must kill a mad dog; if you do not strike him, he will strike you and a whole land with you!”
Or take Luther’s attitude toward Jews.
In 1543, he wrote one of his most disturbing tracts: On the Jews and Their Lies. Luther was deeply disturbed by Jewish unbelief. His pastoral solution? “Set fire to their synagogues or schools.” Jewish houses should be razed, and Jewish prayer books and Talmudic writings, “in which such idolatry, lies, cursing, and blasphemy are taught,” should be confiscated. In addition, their rabbis should be “forbidden to teach on pain of loss of life and limb.”
He urged that “safe conduct on the highways be abolished completely for the Jews,” and that “all cash and treasure of silver and gold be taken from them.” Though earlier he had criticized Catholics for treating Jews as dogs, toward the end of his life he said, “We are at fault for not slaying them!”
Finally, take Luther’s attitude toward his allies, his fellow reformers.
In the late 1520s, he got into a running argument about the Lord’s Supper with reformer Ulrich Zwingli. Zwingli believed that the bread and wine were merely symbolic of Christ’s presence at the table. Luther believed Christ was present “in, with, and under” the elements.
When a pamphlet war threatened to fragment the reformation movement, Prince Philip of Hesse became concerned. He wanted Protestants to present a united front against Catholics, especially if military action was initiated by Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor. So Philip sponsored a Protestant summit at Marburg in October 1529. He invited the leading reformers of Germany and Switzerland: Luther and his colleague Phillip Melanchthon, Ulrich Zwingli, Martin Bucer, and John Oecolampadius.
The participants quickly reached agreement on fourteen of fifteen theological points. But on the fifteenth, on the presence of Christ in the sacraments, the conference floundered.
When Zwingli put forth his symbolic interpretation, Luther quoted from the Latin Bible: “Hoc est corpus meum!” (This is my body). He took a piece of chalk and scribbled the words on the table.
John Oecolampadius offered a counter-text: “The Spirit gives life; the flesh counts for nothing” (John 6:63). Luther was unmoved: “Again and again the body of Christ is eaten, for he himself commands us so. If he ordered me to eat dung, I would do it, since I would altogether know that it would be to my salvation!”
Luther felt Zwingli acted “like an ass,” quoting biblical Greek whenever he had a chance. Zwingli, for his part, felt Luther was condescending. Soon, discussions broke off. Later in the day, Luther snapped to Martin Bucer, who leaned toward Zwingli’s theology, “It is evident that we do not have the same spirit!”
Eventually, a carefully worded compromise was reached (the sacrament was a divine gift of grace with a “spiritual benefit”). But within weeks, a split in the reformation ranks reopened. Luther summed up his feelings: “One side in this controversy belongs to the Devil and is God’s enemy.” He didn’t mean his side.
Thirteen years later, Luther continued to grumble about the conference: “I’ve bitten into many a nut, believing it was good, only to find it wormy. Zwingli and Erasmus are nothing but wormy nuts that taste like crap in one’s mouth!”
Though all of the reformers at Marburg share responsibility for the rupture, it’s clear that Luther was much less conciliatory than the others. This had disastrous consequences for the church. One historian notes that this “set a pattern for Protestant noncooperation that has lasted to today.… All genuine followers of Jesus Christ will sorrow for the chance for Protestant unity that was lost in the sixteenth century.”
In short, Luther’s besetting sin was anger. He was in many respects a violent, coarse, ill-tempered, cranky man. He was also used mightily by God to recover, oddly enough, the doctrine of grace.
Through faith by grace — this theme permeates his commentaries, which both Protestants and Catholics today draw on for insight. Take a passage from his commentary on Galatians:
“Christ, according to the proper and true definition, is no Moses, no lawgiver, no tyrant, but a mediator for sins, a free giver of grace, righteousness, and life; who gave himself, not for our merits, holiness, righteousness, and godly life, but for our sins.”
Grace saturates his catechisms, even where we don’t expect it. For instance, in his Small Catechism, he expounds on the first article of the Apostle’s Creed (“I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth”):
“I believe that God has created me and all that exists; that he has given and still preserves to me my body and soul, my eyes and ears, and all members, my reasons and all the power of my soul, together with food and raiment, home and family, and all my property; that he daily provides abundantly for all the needs of my life, protects me from all danger, and guards and keeps me from all evil; and that he does this purely out of fatherly and divine goodness and mercy, without merit in me.”
Grace accents his hymns, sung throughout Christendom today, especially his masterpiece, A Mighty Fortress Is Our God:
Did we in our own strength confide,
Our striving would be losing;
Were not the right man on our side,
The man of God’s own choosing.
Dost ask who that may be?
Christ Jesus it is He,
Lord Sabaoth His name,
From age to age the same,
And He must win the battle.
Through faith by grace: the great contribution of Martin Luther, the angry man.
Cold Evangelist of God’s Love
George Whitefield could preach. The skeptical Benjamin Franklin noted, “Every accent, every emphasis, every modulation of the voice, was so perfectly well turned and well placed, that, without being interested in the subject, one could not help being pleased with the discourse.”
Franklin should know. In his Autobiography, the frugal printer wrote, “I happened … to attend one of his [Whitefield’s] sermons, in the course of which I perceived he intended to finish with a collection, and I silently resolved he should get nothing from me.”
The collection was for Whitefield’s Georgia orphanage, which Franklin thought ill-planned, and he had told Whitefield so. Thus for some time, he had refused to give to it.
At this sermon, though, Franklin says, “I had in my pocket a handful of copper money, three or four silver dollars, and five pistoles in gold. As he proceeded I began to soften, and concluded to give the coppers. Another stroke of his oratory made me ashamed of that, and determined me to give the silver; and he finished so admirably that I emptied my pocket wholly into the collector’s dish, gold and all.”
Whitefield had amazing gifts of oratory, and he used those gifts mostly to tell millions — and tell them passionately and convincingly — of the warm, loving gift of God’s love.
On the other hand, he was a mess when it came to personal relationships, especially with women.
When the 25-year-old Whitefield met young Elizabeth Delamotte in England, he found himself falling in love. That bothered him. His passion for her, he felt, might steal the passion he felt for Christ. He became so troubled that, as he set sail for America in 1739, he decided simply to put her out of his mind.
When he arrived in Georgia, though, a letter awaited him. It was from Delamotte. He read it and became anxious again. He wrote her back, trying to keep a safe emotional distance: “What room can there be for God, when a rival hath taken possession of the heart?” Still, he had to admit he was attracted to her: “I could almost drop a tear, and wish myself, for a moment or two, in England. But hush, nature.”
In the next few weeks, Whitefield’s Journals report “unspeakable troubles and anguish of soul,” presumably as he debated whether he should ask for Delamotte’s hand. Finally, he concluded he should.
But even after that decision, he couldn’t bring himself to express simply and forthrightly his love for Delamotte. His proposal letters sound more like business transactions.
To her parents, he wrote, “I find by experience, that a mistress is absolutely necessary for the due management of my increasing family [orphanage].… It hath been therefore much impressed upon my heart that I should marry, in order to have a help meet for me in the work whereunto our dear Lord Jesus hath called me.”
When he wrote to Delamotte, he began by cataloguing the sufferings she would endure as his wife. He concluded with the less-than-endearing, “Can you, when you have a husband, be as though you had none, and willingly part with him, even for a long season, when his Lord and Master shall call him forth to preach the Gospel?”
And lest she be confused about his intentions, he made clear the role of romance in his offer: “I write not from any other principles but the love of God.… The passionate expressions which carnal courtiers use … ought to be avoided by those that would marry in the Lord.”
As one historian put it, “Had he tried to design his proposal in such a way as to ensure its failure, he could hardly have done better.”
In fact, Delamotte turned him down.
Still, Whitefield believed he was called to marriage, and when he mentioned this to fellow evangelist Howell Harris, Harris discerned “an amazingly providential solution.”
Harris had fallen in love with one Elizabeth James, a Welsh widow in her mid-thirties. Though her affection for him was equally strong, he, like Whitefield, wanted “no creature between my soul and God.” He had labored to break off the relationship but failed.
Harris arranged a meeting between Whitefield and James. Whitefield was impressed with her devotion to Christ, so both Harris and Whitefield wrote her, suggesting an exchange of suitors.
James was furious, writing Harris, “If you were my own father you had no right of disposing me against my will.” Still, she didn’t close the door to Whitefield, and as they corresponded over the next months, Whitefield became convinced the match was right. James “objected much,” Harris reported, because of “her regards to me and that she could not help it still.”
Yet, four days later, she agreed to marry Whitefield. At the wedding a few weeks hence, Whitefield allowed Howell Harris to give away the bride.
Whitefield had earlier vowed he “would not preach one sermon less in a married than in a single state,” and now he seemed intent on keeping the vow. During the week-long honeymoon in James’ home, he preached twice a day. That set a precedent: for the rest of his career Whitefield itinerated, for the most part leaving James to fend for herself in their London home.
In spite of feeling called to marriage, Whitefield found this most intimate of relationships an annoyance. Within two months of his wedding, he wrote, “Oh, for that blessed time when we shall neither marry nor be given in marriage, but be as the angels of God.” Certainly, when James died, he mourned her passing, but late in the marriage he still warned a young man, “Marry when or whom you will, expect trouble in the flesh.”
As for James, she was never emotionally satisfied with Whitefield. Her letters show it took her ten years to get over Harris. She suffered three miscarriages, and her only child with Whitefield, a son, died when four months old.
A man who lived with the couple during their last years said more than he intended when he wrote, “He did not intentionally make his wife unhappy. He always preserved great decency and decorum in his conduct towards her.”
Which was exactly the problem. Whitefield was a cold, aloof, awkward lover.
So guess how God used him: to spread with warmth and passion the intimate love of God. His preaching, in contrast to his love letters, brimmed with emotion:
“My friends,” he concludes one sermon, “I would preach with all my heart till midnight, to do you good, till I could preach no more. Oh, that this body might hold out to speak more for my dear Redeemer! Had I a thousand lives, had I a thousand tongues, they should be employed in inviting sinners to come to Jesus Christ!
“Come, then, let me prevail with some of you to come along with me. Come, poor, lost, undone sinner, come just as you are to Christ, and say, ‘If I be damned, I will perish at the feet of Jesus Christ, where never one perished yet.’ He will receive you with open arms; the dear Redeemer is willing to receive you all.”
This passion, unusual for that day, helped spark revivals in England and Scotland, and the Great Awakening in America. When Whitefield passed through communities, people were electrified. In October 1740, for instance, Nathan Cole, a Connecticut farmer, heard from a neighbor that Whitefield was scheduled to preach nearby. He later recorded his reaction:
“I was in my field at work; I had dropped my tool that I had in my hand and ran home to my wife, telling her to make ready quickly to go hear Mr. Whitefield preach at Middletown, then run to my pasture for my horse with all my might, fearing that I should be too late.”
As he made his way to Middletown, about twelve miles away, he saw hundreds of horses: “Every horse seemed to go with all his might to carry his rider to hear news from heaven for saving of souls.” He noted “ferry boats [on the Connecticut River] running swift backward and forward, bringing over loads of people.” Furthermore, “The land and banks over the river looked black with people and horses. All along the 12 miles I saw no man at work in his field, but all seemed to have gone.”
When Whitefield preached, he said, “He looked as if he was clothed with authority from the Great God, and a sweet solemn solemnity sat upon his brow, and my hearing him preach gave me a heart wound. By God’s blessing my old foundation was broken up, and I saw that my righteousness would not save me.”
This story was repeated thousands of times in Whitefield’s long evangelistic career. People adored his preaching and were enraptured with his every word. Through the preaching of an aloof lover, thousands came to know the tender, intimate love of God.
A Power Greater than Sin
The French mystic François Fénelon said, “I have found that God leaves, even in the most spiritual people, certain weaknesses which seem to be entirely out of place.” And the history of the church and the Bible are replete with examples. Time and again, God leaves in individuals a sin entirely out of place:
The cowardly Moses successfully leads a revolt from the greatest military power of the day.
The jellyfish Peter becomes the rock of the church.
The ambitious, adulterous, murderous David becomes the author of many Psalms, the most sublime of religious poetry.
It makes you wonder about your own besetting sin, or sins. Paul wrote, “I beat my body and make it my slave so that after I have preached to others, I myself will not be disqualified for the prize” (1 Cor. 9:27). And so, naturally, we will continue to struggle against the flesh.
But Luther and Whitefield, among many others, show us that we no longer need ask, “Can God use me, with this besetting sin? For a pastor, isn’t this so entirely out of place?”
Of course, and of course.
Copyright © 1994 by Christianity Today
