A Pastoral Warning

I recently read the following convicting words of Jim Scott Orrick to preachers. Let him who has ears to hear . . .

"My fear is not so much that you will end your ministry by plunging headlong into a sea of scandalous sin. You may. But it is far more likely that you will waste your life slowly dissolving in puddles of mediocrity when you might have been great in God’s kingdom. I fear that you will continue to fritter away precious, irretrievable hours watching inane videos on the Internet and playing video games. I fear that you will spend your lives creating and maintaining a pseudo-self on social media, and on your deathbed, you will realize that you have lived a pseudo-life. I fear that your marriages will be plagues and your views of women are being irreparably perverted because your mind is full of images that degrade women, and degrade intimacy, and degrade you—images that can continue to enthrall you only because you continue to think of yourself and of women as if you were no better than animals, and not sons and daughters of the kingdom. I fear that you will realize too late that the thing you settle for will crowd out the thing you might have done, and that the trivia movies you watch and the trivial music that you listen to will seep into the well of your soul until you become a trivial man. I fear that you will live your life in the fleshly, man-centered morning of Caesarea Philippi and you will never see the Mount of Transfiguration and hear the voice of God."

Jim Scott Orrick, Ryan Fullerton, and Brian Payne, Encountering God through Expository Preaching: Connecting God’s People to God’s Presence through God’s Word (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2017), 210.