Was aware of the Lord highlighting almost with a sense of fear Paul’s words to Timothy as I read them this morning, as words which should be given to anyone setting out on pastoral ministry with all its encounters with people in situations of vulnerability: “Do not rebuke an older man but encourage him as you would a father, younger men as brothers, older women as mothers, younger women as sisters, in all purity.”

The sense of the fear of the Lord stayed with me for hours for reasons I could not understand. Have just heard of the possible fall of another minister through inappropriate behaviour. I say it not in judgment. “Let him who thinks he stands take heed lest he falls…”

Perhaps you are a pastor who right now are on the border of inappropriate behaviour. You may have crossed the border. Come clean now… you owe it to the Church, yourself, the honour of Christ, and to any people you have wronged and damaged in the process. Don’t let it emerge after your death…it will cause even more devastation to many then than if you come clean now.

If you have not quite crossed the border, stop sailing as close to the wind as you can. Stand back from the fire before you are burned.

Perhaps you need to at true accountability in place for your own safety, not just the formal legal type that may be there in the official structures of the church you are in which tends only to swing into action after an offence is discovered. Some of those I know who have fallen sexually and relationally walked away from accountability just before their fall…

For you perhaps this may fall into the category of “Faithful are the wounds of a friend.” I hope so and yet hope not so at the same time, if you know what I mean, and you will if you know me…

God bless

Kenny