Keep Watch
“Keep a close watch on yourself and on the teaching. Persist in this, for by so doing you will save both yourself and your hearers.” — 1 Timothy 4:16
One of my heroes in the faith went public about an affair yesterday. A screenshot of a note on his church’s website went viral, the news ripping through social media like a California wildfire. I’m not usually one to name names, but it doesn’t seem like much of a tell at this point. Steven J. Lawson was a bright light in reformed circles from before the time I heard his preaching. In the aughts, when I first heard of him, he was pastoring Christ Fellowship Baptist Church in Mobile, AL, and before that, he pastored in Arkansas. Lawson’s preaching reflected how Martyn-Lloyd Jones’ described preaching: logic on fire. Up until that point in my young Christian life, there were few, if any, more faithful to the text, and nobody I’d ever heard with a more passionate delivery.
I was introduced to him in 2008 at Grace Community Church in LA where he preached one of the keynote sermons at the Shepherd’s Conference. The sermon was titled, “The Preacher’s Invincible Weapon.” I had never heard preaching like that. After coming back home, I began listening to his recorded sermons on the Book of Hebrews. I binged half of the sermons on the Christ Fellowship website—at least a hundred sermons, each of which stoked my desires to pastor and preach God’s Word.
I suppose there’s no one whose preaching ministry, except maybe that of John MacArthur and after him, Mark Dever, who has influenced my own preaching more than Lawson. There was also that time when at the Expositor’s Conference at Christ Fellowship—a small, intimate gathering of aspiring pastors and preachers in Mobile, I asked him for advice at an important turning point in my life. While pondering the transition from policing to ministry, he strongly encouraged me to pursue holiness and press on in knowing my Bible. After I mentioned that I was engaged to a woman in my home church who preferred me not to pursue ministry with the passion and commitment that was driving me to consider seminary training out of state, he told me to pursue the training, and if she was the right one for me, it would work out. As it turns out, I ended up breaking off the engagement and heading to Louisville, KY to attend Southern Seminary in no small part because of Lawson’s advice. Needless to say, early on, he was a huge inspiration to me.
Yet, here we are, almost 20 years later—he’s 73, and in what should be the crowning years of his ministry, he confesses to a relationship with a woman outside of his 40 year marriage. It doesn’t seem real. Many are shell-shocked. For some, it will be an excuse to seethe with cynicism and harden their hearts against Christ and the church. Who knows what it means for Lawson? Only God knows.
This is something of what Paul had in view in writing to his own mentee in the ministry, Timothy. He urges him to keep a close watch over his life and teaching. Another way to put it—never lose sight of your devotion and doctrine. Because if you fail to prune them as one cultivates a vine—they will grow wild. Your life, unguarded by prayer, exposed by neglect of the Word, or the absence of Christian fellowship will easily give way to temptation. Likewise, teaching that’s untethered to orthodoxy yields not only false doctrine, but makes room for scandalous sin. And so, keep watch on your devotion and doctrine as though your life depends on it—because it does. But further, so do the lives of the people who listen to you. Because when Christian leaders fall, many are made to stumble. J.C. Ryle offers insight into how things like this happen:
“We may be very sure that men fall in private long before they fall in public. They are backsliders on their knees long before they backslide openly in the eyes of the world. Like Peter, they first disregard the Lord’s warning to watch and pray; and then, like Peter, their strength is gone, and in the hour of temptation, they deny their Lord. The world takes notice of their fall, and scoffs loudly. But the world knows nothing of the real reason.”
Pray for Lawson, his wife, his grown children, and their children. Pray for the woman and her family. Pray for the church who just lost a pastor and for the thousands of people he influenced, that their hearts will not grow cold on account of his sin. Pray for true repentance and restoration. Pray that somehow, some good fruit that comes from this. Perhaps the fruit of vigilance. May we not be shocked when mere men fall—may our hope always be in Christ. And may we keep watch, as Ryle suggests, when nobody but God is watching.
