ADULTERY
Recently Leadership
Magazine commissioned a poll of a thousand pastors. The pastors indicated that 12 percent of them
had committed adultery while in ministry – one out of eight pastors! – and 23 percent had done something they considered sexually
inappropriate. Christianity Today surveyed
a thousand of its subscribers who were not pastors and found the figure
to be nearly double, with 23 percent saying they had had extramarital
intercourse and 45 percent indicating they had done something they themselves
deemed sexually inappropriate. One in
four Christian men are unfaithful, and nearly one half
have behaved unbecomingly! Shocking
statistics! Especially when we remember
that Christianity Today readers tend to be college-educated church
leaders, elders, deacons, Sunday school superintendents, and teachers. If this is so for the
Church’s leadership, how much more for the average member of the congregation? Only God knows!
R. Kent Hughes
Disciplines of a Godly Man, Crossway Books,
1991, p. 21-22.
It is a
morbid and depressing fact that when it comes to adultery, there are too many
casualties among pastors. Ministers are
just as vulnerable as others. No area,
no country, no denomination is immune.
The damage done in each case is irreparable: the breakdown, as far as
ministry is concerned, final. This is a
distasteful subject, but we cannot shirk it. The matter demands faithful
treatment. Let him who thinks that he
stands take heed lest he fall.
Erroll
Hulse
The Preacher and Preaching, ed. Samuel Logan,
p. 75-76.
In its most
technical sense, committing adultery refers to sexual intercourse between a man
and woman when one or both of them is married.
John MacArthur
Matthew 1-7, Moody, 1985, p. 302.