 Whether it's James McDonald, Carl Lentz, Jerry Falwell Jr., now Ravi Zacharias, Eddie Long, there's always somebody, there's always some preacher, some man of God, supposedly man of God, who is falling. You ever wondered why? Welcome back, smart Christians. My name is Cory Miner, and if you haven't done so already, please be sure to hit the subscribe button, as well as the bell notification, also so that YouTube can kind of push this thing out according to their little algorithm. Please remember to hit the like button. All throughout the Christian world, especially on YouTube, one of the main or trending topics that you're going to see is something having to do with Ravi Zacharias. You're going to see that every now and then, it just kind of seems to happen all the time where some man, some leader, happens to fall. The question's got to be, after we've got through the juicy part of it all, after going through all of the gossip being and talking, the question has to be why? Why does this happen? Why do men in leadership positions fall? So in this video, we're going to talk about what causes this to happen, because as many of you know, I can actually identify with them. Being in leadership for some time, I can testify as to what they've gone through, and even what caused it. You need to understand there are two types of leaders who fall. One will deal with more in depth in a second, and in the second one, which we'll just kind of just touch on, those are the men who never should have been involved in ministry in the first place. Those are men who have no purpose in being in ministry, but only do so, as the Bible would say, as a means for gain. Their single and sole purpose is to promote themselves, to get what they can get out of it, not necessarily caring how they are deceiving others all the while being deceived themselves. And so we're not going to talk too much about them, because it's obvious as to how God brings about their fall. But what about the men who start off with good motives, with honest, sincere motives? Men who want to promote God, who want to promote the gospel? Why do they fall? Whenever we start off in ministry, the goal is to promote God, to let people know about the goodness of Jesus, to bring them closer to Him, to also to teach and to educate. And there's different types of ministry, but what ends up happening, if a man becomes effective in that inevitably, what's going to happen? Somebody's going to pat him on the back. His star is going to get bigger. And I don't know if any of you all understand how much that actually goes to your head. You don't intend on accepting accolade and praise, but it can become a bit intoxicating. As a matter of fact, not a bit intoxicating, it becomes intoxicating. When someone tells you how smart you are, or how good you are at this, and pat you on the back and tell you how the Lord is using you, after a while, you start feeling it yourself. You start thinking, yeah, they're right. God is working through me. And you start feeling as though you're bigger than what you really are. Paul gives a warning where he says, not to think any higher of ourselves than we ought to. As hard as it is already, as difficult as it already is, when you have other people thinking that you are better than that, not knowing really what's going on behind closed doors, what's going on behind the scene at home or in your personal life, it's real easy for you to forget about the imperfect you and focus on the good you. Oftentimes you see men fall because of a sexual sin, because the women see a man who is on stage or in front of the camera who's speaking, who's fame is growing, and they may want to be a part of it. They may actually have good intentions, they may have bad intentions. The issue won't be for this video's sake, won't be on them, but it'll be on the men. Men, I don't care what man it is, likes the attention of other women. It's just natural. Whether they even mean anything negative or bad by it, people like to be thought of in a high regard, right? A story. I had a former pastor who went to the hardware store to get some nails and hammers and things like that. And while he was checking, and this was an older man, and while he was checking out the cashier said to him, who was a lady, I just like a man who knows how to fix things around the house. And he said that he went back the following week, not needing a hammer, but buying a hammer anyway, just because of how good it made him feel. And so people, after maybe being beaten down throughout the week, what have you, like to feel like they're not as bad off. And so when a woman gives a man a compliment, if he's not careful, it will go to his head. But not just women who can be the problem. Don't fool yourself. Heterosexual men also like the praise and applause of other men. All our lives, we've looked for it and we've fought for the attention of other males. Ever since we were boys, we wanted to see who was the strongest, who was the tallest, who was the smartest, who was this, who was that. And so as we get bigger, it's not strange to see men jockeying for attention with other males. And so now because we're worried about how people are seeing us. And you might have a good intentional on wanting your, your brand to look good because you don't want the messenger to taint the message. But sometimes it kind of gets flip flopping. Instead of focusing on the message, we focus too much on ourselves, the messenger, and we're worried about how do we look, how do we sound, how do we come across. And then the selfish aspect of living just comes in. We start worrying about what is doing for us. What is our bank account looking like? How many followers nowadays or how many likes? And it's not just about this age because it's happened in the past as well. And what ends up happening is that God's purpose takes a backseat to our purpose. Some of you would say that that's not me. That would never happen to me. There's something wrong with these men. No, no, this is something that's natural to all mankind. The only person who didn't have to worry about this, who didn't have to deal with these sort of temptations was Jesus. But as we said, the Bible is full of men who have fallen for whatever reason. Think about David. Think about people that you don't even think about having fallen because of some sort of character flaw. What about Joseph? Joseph was a little bit arrogant. And so God had to take him through a time to kind of grow him out of that. What about Paul? Paul tells us why he was given this thorn in the flesh so that he wouldn't exalt himself. What about Peter? The Bible is again, it's full of men who had these same issues. And these were men who were used mightily by God. What about Samson? So my point is this, don't you start thinking again, as he says that you are, that you're so ready for this. Again, if any man thinks he stands, take heed lest he falls. Most of us, our problem was we thought that this couldn't happen to us. We might look at some other man who's fallen and think it's not going to happen to me. Some other man cheated, not going to happen to me. Some other man took some money, not going to happen to me. Some other man started making it all about him in ministry. It's not going to happen to me. Well, again, it just might. And the moment you think it won't is about the time when it's about to. But now when a man falls, is that the end of the story? Well, God, I hope not. Because again, I identify with these men, I fall. My story is that I've been in ministry and was doing pretty well in ministry, but also started a business and was doing very well in that. But then I got sidetracked and I won't get into it too much. But I want to talk about what happens when things start falling apart. Oftentimes there are warning signs when the bottom is about to fall out. Just like with David, before he slept with Bathsheba, someone told him, hey, no, that's someone else's wife. As a matter of fact, that's one of your main men. That's one of your, that's one of your general's wife. You know, one, you know, the guy that's out there in the front lines fighting for you, that's his wife. And so what do men who are about to fall? What do they do? We ignore the warning signs. We can come up with some sort of justification as to why I ought to have it. God wants me to have this. Because remember, we're starting to think that we're next to God. We start smelling ourselves and we start believing our own press clippings and we think that God is really behind us. And so if God is for me, who could be against me and who could resist me? Including her, including them. But I want you to notice what happens when David falls. The Bible said that God resists the proud but gives grace to the humble. You need to understand something about humble. Humble has a cousin that works the same way. That cousin is humility or humiliation. And they both work the same way. If, if you let it, if your heart is right, they work, they work out perfectly for you. What happened with David as he was humbled, or I should say after he was humiliated, you see his heart. You see the famous prayer that comes about in Psalm 51 where he's asking the lawyers to clean them, to purge it. And I don't know if any of you've ever been purged. Trust me, it ain't a good feeling. The man who hadn't quite figured that out yet, that's a couple of things that he's going to do. The first thing that a man who falls or is caught does, I did it, is you make excuses. Well the first thing, actually I'll take that back. The first thing you do is you lie. You cover it up. Who? Me? What did, what did Cain do when God came looking for Abel? He played dumb. I don't, I don't know where, Abel who? That's what we do. We cover things up. We lie and lie and lie until there's no more way to lie. And then after that we make excuses. We start blaming other people. There was a young man who was confronted about his false prophecies. I'm not going to go into his name, but who was confronted about his false prophecies about the presidential election. And so when confronted, what did he do? He started focusing more attention on what the prophecy was and how it should have happened. Instead of taking the loss, instead of taking what should have been the right road, just to humble himself and say I was wrong. And when a man can get past making excuses, there's another obstacle that comes up that something that he tends to do, that we tend to do. That is, we're willing to take the discipline as long as it's not a long discipline. You want it to hurry up and get it over with. Go ahead, I'll go ahead and take the, I'll sit down for a second. I'll take a break. I'll sit down for about a week, two weeks, right? That's not what God is after. God is not trying to give you something just for looks. God is trying to fix something in our heart. And so what happens is we want to, we want to go through it, but we want to go through it quickly. We want to, we want to be restored in a fast amount of time. But wait a minute, what you did to bring Shane to the name, to the church and to your own self didn't take a week's time, didn't take two weeks time. It's going to take a little bit of time to kind of root that sin out of you to kind of get yourself in a position where God can use you and it's no longer you anymore. And I know that waiting a week, two weeks, three weeks, I know the shame and embarrassment, a public embarrassment is not what you look for, but that's just the first step. And so we're real quick about getting the discipline over and about being restored quickly. Why? Because we want people to forget about the sin that we committed and move forward. I'll give you all a little bit of a tip, especially if you're a man or a woman who has fallen and is trying to move on. Notice I didn't say move past. I think it's a good idea to embrace the sin that you committed. I don't want you to stay there, but I want you to think about what it was that you did and how you can, how God can use you to help other folks who've overcome that same sin. Remember in Galatians when Paul says, if anyone has been overtaken by a sin, that we who are spiritual should restore such a one. And he says to do so lovingly, also considering how we once were. Well, the beauty about falling is that when someone else has fallen, you can identify with them and you can actually show them the road to get out. But we want to be restored so quickly and we end up wanting to skip steps that causes good, healthy growth as well as making sure that we're sorrowful and that we're repentant. Because oftentimes men who fall can fake the repentance part, I'm sorry, cry, what have you, because you do feel guilty and you do feel bad for the moment, but that doesn't mean that the sin that was in you, that whatever it was, a character flaw that caused you to fall in the first place is gone. It's like when the doctor gives you medication to take it, you take about half of the pills or half of medication because you're feeling better and then a week or two weeks later, the symptoms come back. That's because you didn't finish taking it all and it may not taste good or feel good, but you need to take all of it in order for the whole thing to take effect, right? But one of the surest signs that you can tell about a person who has fallen, if they're ready or not, is if they're talking. Men who fall, who haven't learned their lesson, tend to talk and I mean talk a lot. It's a technique called deflecting. You are deflecting attention away from the real issue onto something else. They're talking about other people. They're talking about their past. They're talking about their future, what God is doing. They're even talking about God and it seems like, yeah, this person may have it right. No, no. I had a guy, I had a young man who was in a choir and I told him, you can't sing. The reason why, because he had gotten involved in some homosexual behavior and I said, no, we're not, we're not doing this. Well, I've learned my lesson and God is working with me and I'm not gonna, I'm an overcomer. I know you are. I know you will be, but not today. You're not, you're going to sit down and his thought was, no, I'm gonna get up there and I'm gonna sing. I said, okay, that's fine. Since you're such a hurry to get over and past your sin, we're gonna help you before you utter a word. I'm not gonna fight you, have you physically removed before you get up there to utter one song, one sound. We'll ask the church what they think because many of the church don't know it. What do you think he did? Oh, he voluntarily sat down there and what happened was we kept him down for a long time. What happens is you've got to give God time to work in you. I needed that. When I was caught in sin and when I fell, and I mean fell hard and when I went before the judge, I'm thinking a year, maybe two years, maybe even probation. Well, God had something else in mind. And so when the judge said 20 years, I fell out, not physically, but inwardly. And the question was, why do you think the judge gave you that much time? Well, because I needed that much time. I didn't serve that much time, but the fact that you get that and you got time to spend with God, that was so therapeutic. And what it gave me the opportunity to do was to finally shut up and listen to God. James 3 tells us that many of us should not desire to be teachers or leaders in this case because there's a stricter punishment. And God will definitely try to make an example out of you if you sully his name, not because he takes pleasure in punishing you because he wants to bring about repentance and he wants to bring about a change and to use you. And so I could no longer, nor could any other man, no longer be concerned about my glory over God's glory. And we didn't realize how we got that kind of backwards. It was easy to sort of think about ourselves because everyone else is talking about me. Peter and Paul give us two very good examples of how you should maintain and act if you are a man being used by God, how you should maintain humility. When they're thinking that Paul and Peter are both something to behold, what is their response? In Acts 10, you see Peter's response saying he's deflecting attention off of him back on the God. And then in Acts 14, Paul does the same thing when they thought that he was something great, that he was like a zoos or some great God. And Paul, no, this is about God. This is not about me. Whereas we contrast that to the sorcerer in Acts 8 who wanted to get the same sort of power that he saw when the Holy Spirit fell upon the Samaritans, well, those kind of people will have their rewards coming. And if your heart is not right, if you're not in the Lord, I can promise you the fall is going to be severe, may not be swift and coming. Let me give you a passage to think about as we leave. In Leviticus 10, recall the story of Nadab and Abihu. These are Aaron's sons who approached God in their own fashion with this strange fire. And scholars debate as to what that really meant. Was it the wrong sort of fire, the wrong time? Was it the wrong influence? Was it their own way of doing things where they drunk? Doesn't matter. But whatever it was, they did not regard God a particular way as who he is. And so Moses comes to Aaron after he's lost his son's grieving still. And he says something to Aaron that we should all be mindful to he. He says this, By those who approach me, I will be regarded as holy. God is not some toy to play with. God is just not somebody who he's your buddy whenever you want to. You can just call on him. No, he's God. He's holy. And you would do well. I would do well. We would all do well to treat him as such. So what is happening now? And this is the sad part. This is the scary part. We've got a lot of men on YouTube, on in church today, all across America and in the world who are using the Ravi Zacharias scandal as a means to promote themselves. I've seen some bad behavior and I've seen some people who felt like that this couldn't happen to them. Remember, if any man thinks he stands, take heed unless you fall.