The Pastor's Wife Is a Pastor's Wife

"There you are," a woman whispered in my ear as she grabbed my elbow during a church gathering. "I've been looking everywhere for you!"

I braced myself. You never know what a statement like that could mean---especially at a church gathering.

Did I leave my car running in the parking lot? Did one of my kids have an accident involving bodily fluids? Or horror of all horrors---is my husband's zipper down while he's preaching?

The woman led me from the back of the meeting room where I was standing into the lobby area.

Was there someone critically in need of prayer? Is there a baby being born in the lobby? Did someone leave a pumpkin latte out here with my name on it?

The woman urgently pointed to the ceiling. "Look! The air conditioning isn't cold enough. You have to fix it."

I breathed a sigh of relief and gave her a quick hug. "The air conditioner? I don't know how to fix the air conditioner. I barely know how to read a Celsius thermostat."

She thought about this for a second and chuckled. "But you are the pastor's wife."

My Biggest Fear as a Pastor's Wife  Continue at Gloria Furman

Satan's Great Desire

I have been engaged in a study of the second half of Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, and, not surprisingly, the themes from that letter have been resonating in my mind over the past few weeks. I have been struck by Paul’s emphasis on the importance of love and unity in the local church. On the one hand it’s kind of obvious—we need to love the Christians around us—but on the other hand, the personal implications are profound. I’ve always known that God calls me to love the people I covenant with in my local church, but until now I haven’t been quite so aware of the danger of falling out of love.

Paul did not seem to have any particular concern with the unity of this church in Ephesus. As far as we can tell he wasn’t writing because the church was splintering apart or because he had heard rumors of their disunity. But perhaps this was even more reason for him to address the issue. Paul knew that Satan is the great enemy of God and his people, and one of his enduring tactics to disrupt the church and to hinder our witness to the world is to bring about disunity. How does he do this? He does it by first eroding the love between brothers and sisters in Christ.

Wherever there is disunity there will first be the absence of love and the presence of pride. Satan’s great desire for your church and for mine is to fracture the people in those churches into camps, into groups built along lines that have no business dividing us. We may know this in the abstract, but we need to make it personal. Here is what we need to see: God wants me and commands me to love the other people in my church; Satan wants me to hate them. God wants me to feel a great deal of unity with those people; Satan wants there to be an issue between us—something, anything, to drive us apart. Continue at Tim Challies

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