I’ve wanted to post about this bad memory for quite a while.

I remember one time a pastor encouraged about four young ambitious Christians in his church to compete for an open youth pastor position. This ambitious man openly argued that we should be competing for the position, as if the church was his personal business. I argued about this but quickly threw in the towel, the winner of that completion was the most assertive, the most brazen and the least spiritual one of the lot.  The most qualified person by far (who was not me) left in frustration, never to preach again.

Pastor’s who openly encourage competition at their church (and I know more than one) and against other churches are fleshly and confused about who the church is and how God wants his people to interact with one another.

The  body of Christ is literally a body, a living being, and it is not in competition with itself. We who are the church are literally Jesus Christ on the earth. His body, his ladder to the earth, healthy bodies do not compete against themselves.

When a physical body does fight against itself we call it an auto-immune disease. Auto-immune diseases are serious and can be deadly.

Jesus Christ does not have auto-immune diseases and he is not suicidal.  So those who compete, teach, encourage factions and self-promotion within the body of Christ are acting out of the flesh, out of selfish humanistic ambition. They depart from his body, they depart from Jesus Christ himself. And their followers cease to function as the church at all.

They become something else entirely, something of fallen mankind, something akin to any other religion of the world.

The measure that one acts out of selfish ambition is the same measure that one resists the Lord ship of Jesus himself.