Rather than humbly standing before the honest assessment of the Bible mirror, I looked into carnival mirrors. The problem with the carnival mirror is that it really does show you, but with distortion. You don’t actually have a 20-inch neck and a 6-inch torso. Yes, it’s you in that concave mirror, but it’s not showing your actual appearance.    

I wasn’t consciously proud. Maybe most proud people aren’t conscious of how proud they really are. But I felt that I had arrived. In ways that now shock and embarrass me, I thought of myself as a grace graduate. I didn’t minister out of my own need. I had done very well in seminary. I had planted a church in a very hard place. I had founded a rapidly growing Christian school. (Both the church and also the school were founded with others, but I didn’t look at it that way.) I was getting invitations all over the place to speak. I often looked at the people I was ministering to with a self-congratulatory pity—assuming, of course, that they were essentially different from me. No, I didn’t make fun of people, and I didn’t spend my time bragging about my accomplishments, but an attitude of arrival still shaped my ministry.   

I was incredibly impatient and often quietly irritated. I found it hard to delegate ministry to others. I wanted more control than was actually necessary and productive. I gave my opinion way too often. I treated the ministries God had called me to as if they belonged to me. I wanted people to quickly sign on to support my brainstorms. My sermons were rather arrogant lectures—you know, the final word on the topic or the passage. I once preached what I thought was the ultimate sermon on pride that was actually a living example of the same! My preaching and teaching was more law than gospel. This is typical of people who think they are law keepers.   

Mistaken Self-Assessment

As a pastor, I was making a dangerous self-assessment mistake. I had bought into a fallacious, distorted view of my spiritual maturity. This view is both tempting and comfortable for people in ministry. Rather than looking at myself in the accurate mirror of the Word of God, the only place where you will get both an accurate definition of spiritual maturity and a reliable read on your own spiritual condition, I looked elsewhere.

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