How Not to Repent

I'm on vacation for the next couple of weeks.  I will try to post something more positive before Christmas.

Meanwhile, mega-church pastor and sexual deviant, Ted Haggard, shows us how not to repent.  This is a little like what I was talking about yesterday.  The Aquila Report goes through the points in detail and is interesting reading.  What is particularly grating to me is bullet #2:

My problem was not spiritual. ”The therapeutic team that dug in on me insisted that I did not have a spiritual problem.”

While I do not doubt that Haggard may have been molested as a child or something, he had and has a serious spiritual problem.  A person is not a spiritual failure because he needs therapy or medication to deal with childhood trauma or a biological imbalance.  But Haggard pretended to be living as a Christian, and not just any Christian, a shepherd, teacher, and leader, while doing drugs and engaging in deviant behavior he would have rightly condemned from the pulpit.  A person of genuine faith who rightly understood the work of Christ and the power of the Cross would not have continued living that way. He would have faced up to his compulsions, gone to therapy, and dealt with his problems openly and honestly. 

How is that not a spiritual problem?

His wife might be doing the right thing to stick with him, but he should be flipping hamburgers for a living.  His congregation is composed of saps and suckers.