Well, how do I bear with immature Christians?

Question is relevant to all maturing Christians, but today it comes from a listener named T.J.

And I assume T.J. is a young pastor.

He writes this, hello, Pastor John, thank you for this podcast.

When you were a pastor, how did you deal with the grief or burden you felt about the members

of your church that seemed to not live like Jesus?

How did you handle disappointment in people who are active participants in the church,

but who always seemed to lag far behind in personal growth and maturity?

Pastor John, what would you say to T.J.?

There are two kinds of challenges that I hear for the pastor or for the council of elders.

One is the discernment challenge and the other is the discouragement challenge.

The discernment challenge is discerning when a person is not just weak and struggling,

but is living out of a rebellious heart that looks weak and struggling.

But deep down is very resistant to God and His word to the church, church leadership.

It's not always easy to tell the difference between these two.

The sincere, humble, often failing, stumbling on the one hand and the person who's using

weakness as a cover-up for hard, resistant, insubordinate, heart of disobedience.

So that's the discernment challenge.

The discouragement challenge is handling the discouragement of pouring your life out

year after year and realizing that many in our congregation are not embracing the

biblical vision we preach, and they're not being transformed into more holy and loving

people that could be really discouraging.

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