In my earlier post on Porn as Liturgical Corruption, I described a process whereby a minister who has a private problem with porn makes more and more room for his own compromises in his preaching. This is of course one response, but there are others. One commenter asked about such a man, one whose opposition to what he himself is doing grows fiercer by the minute. It is the classic case of “protesting too much.”
It is the difference between morality and moralism. Moralism can be very hard and brittle, and it got this way by being constantly afraid that it would break. And of course the more afraid you are, the more brittle you get, and so on. Someone who is morally secure doesn’t want what is being offered. Someone who is moralistic wants it very much, cannot afford to admit it, and lashes out as a form of self-defense or possibly as a smoke screen to keep others from suspecting. This would be the minister who thunders against sins that threaten his soul. John Bunyan once said (in a better context) that as he preached liberty, he could hear the rattle of his chains.
Every minister is a sinner also, and every minister needs to know what it is like to preach to himself as well as to others. But regardless of whether the minister is also in the congregation, the message he preaches is to be found in the text, and not in his own panicked fear or sense of envy. You can repent out of a hole, but you can’t preach your way out.