HI PASTOR JOHN\u00a0\u00a0 I HAVE A QUESTION.I AM ALITTLE CONFUSED, I HAVE HEARD SOME PEOPLE SAY THAT PREACHERS IN CHRISTIANITY ARE THE DEVILS CHILDREN. BUT THEN SAY THEY ALSO ARE GODS CHILDREN. I KNOW WE NEED TO LOVE THEM AND PRAY FOR THEM,BUT IF THEY ARE THE DEVILS CHILDREN ARENT WE TO NOT HAVE FELLOWSHIP WITH THEM.HELP ME TO UNDERSTAND BECUASE IM CONFUSED.\u00a0\u00a0 THANK YOU GOD BLESS YOU ALL\u00a0\u00a0 THOMAS C——-<\/p>\n
================<\/p>\n
Yes, Tom, you certainly are confused.\u00a0 Let me try to help clear these things up for you.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n The Greek word often translated “minister” in the Bible means “server”, or “table waiter”, just like the waiters who work in restaurants everywhere.\u00a0 When you go to a restaurant, and the waiter serves you food from the restaurant’s kitchen, he is “ministering” the food to you, or “serving” you.\u00a0 This is, in a spiritual sense, what “minister” means in the Bible. A “minister of Christ” is someone who brings you food that has been cooked in God’s kitchen (so to speak) by Jesus.\u00a0 We “minister” Christ to people when we serve spiritual food to them that truly is from Christ.\u00a0 You may recall that in the Bible, God often speaks of His servants (ministers) “feeding” His people.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n But, Tom, when we feed people spiritual food that does not come from God’s kitchen, we are not ministering Christ to them.\u00a0 Instead, we are serving them spiritual food that someone else has cooked, either a man or an unclean spirit.\u00a0 The scriptures speak of both “doctrines of men” and “doctrines of demons”.\u00a0 God considers it a very grave offense for a man to serve His children spiritual food prepared by anyone other than Him.\u00a0 If we are teaching God’s children things that come from the devil’s kitchen, we are become ministers of Satan instead of ministers of Christ.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n To answer another point you brought up, there can be an enormous difference between being a “minister of Satan” and a “child of the devil”.\u00a0 If anyone has ever said that all Christian ministers are “children of the devil”, he was wrong to say so.\u00a0 I know some Christian ministers, and they seem to me to be wonderful children of God.\u00a0 A minister of Satan is someone who is serving spiritual food that the devil has cooked.\u00a0 But he may be doing it ignorantly, Tom.\u00a0 This is the case with many Christian ministers.\u00a0 In time, because those ministers truly love the Lord, they will discover their error and will start feeding people healthy spiritual food instead of feeding them the traditions and doctrines of Christianity.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n Along the way, as I have grown in Christ, there have been times when I discovered that some of the spiritual food I was serving God’s people was of the devil, not of Christ.\u00a0 And as soon as I learned of it, I repented and stopped serving that poison to God’s people.\u00a0 I didn’t want to be a minister of Satan, and it hurt to realize I had been such a minister — to the extent that I was serving Satan’s food to the people I loved.\u00a0 I confessed my error to them so that they could be healed, and I never fed them that food again.\u00a0 Until a man possesses the knowledge of God, Tom, he may qualify as “a minister of Satan” simply because he believes something is right when it is not.\u00a0 But God is patient with us, and very merciful.\u00a0 And when that man learns the truth, he can repent, and from that time, be a minister of Christ instead.\u00a0 Our goal is to be nothing but a minister of Christ.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n On the other hand, to be what Jesus called a “child of the devil”, a person must actually be like Satan in his heart.\u00a0 Jesus said that the devil “did not stay in the truth”, and there are some of God’s people who, like Satan, have not stayed in the truth that Jesus gave them.\u00a0 So you see, Tom, for a person to qualify to be a child of the devil, a person must first be given the truth and then do what the devil did; that is, depart from it.\u00a0 In other words, as strange as it may at first sound, to qualify to be a child of the devil, a person must first be a child of God.\u00a0 This is true because it is impossible to forsake the right way, as the devil did, if we have never been in it.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n I should warn you about making hasty judgments.\u00a0 Please do not think of all of God’s wayward children as “children of the devil”.\u00a0 That title only applies to those who have been in the truth and have turned so far from it that they have become like the devil in their hearts.\u00a0 And who among us can judge such things but God?\u00a0 In the main, it is best for us to simply to pray for all who have gone astray, and leave the final judgment to God.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n Thank you for your questions.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n Pastor John<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" HI PASTOR JOHN\u00a0\u00a0 I HAVE A QUESTION.I AM ALITTLE CONFUSED, I HAVE HEARD SOME PEOPLE SAY THAT PREACHERS IN CHRISTIANITY ARE THE DEVILS CHILDREN. BUT THEN SAY THEY ALSO ARE GODS CHILDREN. 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