As the wicked queen gazed into the magic mirror she repeated the familiar couplet: “Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?” The mirror, having only the face of the queen as a reference, told her exactly what she wanted to hear. She was fairest of all.
Then one day the wicked queen’s beautiful stepdaughter looked into the mirror and suddenly the mirror had another standard by which to judge beauty. The next time the queen asked the mirror who was fairest, it replied that the princess was most beautiful of all.
Like the wicked queen, human beings, even Christian ones, sometimes want to establish ourselves as the standard by which others are to be judged. This arrangement is to our liking — and certainly to our advantage!
It means the only correct opinion is mine. If you believe differently, you are wrong.
A person with this attitude might say “If we believe different things we both can’t be right. And since I know I’m right, you have to be wrong!”
While there is an element of logic in that statement, it can be a camouflage for unhealthy feelings about one’s self, about others and about the church.
Setting ourselves up to be the standard — of the right attitudes, of the right doctrine, of the right actions, of the right (you can fill in the blank) — is decidedly against biblical teaching.
Nevertheless, it is appealing because we never have to challenge our own views or admit that we may be wrong. We can’t fail to measure up if we are the measure!
We never have to open ourselves to the possibility that we may not be the fairest in all the land. Paul wrote to the Christians in Corinth about such people. “What fools they are to measure themselves by themselves, to find in themselves their own standard of comparison!” (2 Cor. 10:12, New English Bible).
Such reasoning is not completely foreign to Baptists, or deacons or even pastors. Ironically, when we set ourselves as the standard by which to judge ourselves and others we injure both ourselves and them. We fail to challenge ourselves to grow beyond our present levels and we assume that everyone else should be like us rather than as God created them to be. We deprive them of their freedom to respond to their own beliefs because we try to impose ours.
As spiritual leaders in our congregations, deacons (and pastors, too) will need to guard against this kind of an attitude. It reveals haughty and arrogant spirits — exactly opposite of the servanthood expected of church leaders.
When we measure ourselves (and others) by ourselves we fail to appreciate our differences. We become intolerant of those who express different opinions in a business meeting or who interpret a scripture differently in a Sunday school class.
This is not to say, of course, that there is no standard by which to judge — by which we all will be judged. There is. But the standard is the perfect image of the Son of God, not the distorted fun-house reflections we humans project. It is the difference between Jesus and others that should determine their shortcomings — not the difference between us and them.
All this is to say that church leaders need to extend grace to each other and to others in the church. Paul was mindful of this when he wrote that he needed to exercise care lest after exhorting others he should yield to sin (1 Cor. 9:27).
Humility says, “My opinion could be wrong.” Arrogance says, “My opinions are right!” In Romans 14, Paul reminds us that fellow church members may hold to differing opinions or practices out of a sincere belief that they are being faithful to biblical teachings. “Who are you to judge the servant of another? To his own master he stands or falls; and stand he will, for the Lord is able to make him stand” (v.4, NASB).
Maybe it isn’t the Lord’s will that others be like me. In fact, perhaps it isn’t even the Lord’s will that I be like me.
Still, there are times when a church member’s actions or lifestyles require leaders to take issue with them. On one occasion, when I served as a pastor, the deacon chair and I had to speak with a deacon about an affair he was having with a woman in the church.
We approached this deacon privately and with a sense of sorrow we laid out the facts as we understood them. He admitted what he had done, sought forgiveness from his wife and resigned his position as a deacon even before we required it. In this, his actions were clearly wrong and they could be judged by Scripture. We also judged that his actions had disqualified him from service as a deacon — at least until at some future time he had proven himself to be ready and capable to assume that position again. But we could not judge the man. That was for the Lord to do.
Mirror, mirror, on the wall? Who’s the fairest of them all? For deacons and pastors there can be no doubt.
Fairest Lord Jesus, ruler of all nature,
O thou of God and man the Son,
Thee will I cherish, Thee will I honor,
Thou, my soul's glory, joy, and crown.
Jim White is editor of the Religious Herald.