A few years back, I served as an adjunct professor for a communications course. In that one semester, I learned two important things about teachers. 1. They are totally underappreciated. Wow, is that a tough job! 2. They don’t’ know it all.

As I stood there every Wednesday night, it became more and more clear to me that as an “authority” on communications I was expected to know all the answers and to have it all figured out. I didn’t. Not even close. Nor does any other professor or instructor who graces the classroom, no matter how experienced and educated he or she may be.

This is important because it reflects how many of us look for God. We look for him in authority figures, or unassailable icons like Billy Graham. We hang our spiritual hats on the religious leaders and “prophets” of our time. We expect they will have all the answers, and that they will guide us to a better place, closer to God.

This is why many of us have our faith shaken at its very foundation when a priest inappropriately touches an altar boy or a pastor is exposed for having an affair. Or even as simple as a church elder wronging us in some way or showing up as “unchristian” in some scenario. Putting this much pressure on spiritual leaders is as wise as expecting the same from our athletic heroes, who routinely show up in strip clubs with trash bags full of cash, drive their cars off cliffs, assault their wives and girlfriends and get publicly humiliated for having more mistresses than clubs in their golf bags.

Ecclesiastes 7:20 – For there is not a just man on earth who does good and does not sin.

Powerful verse if you are paying attention to it. I’m not suggesting that it’s perfectly okay that a man of God sins in a way that not only impacts himself and his family but potentially everyone who holds him in high regard. Or that our spiritual leaders are having a tough time taking a higher moral ground than our celebrity athletes. But I am suggesting that each and every Christian leader  you choose to follow is flawed. He may not be pistol-whipping people in a back alley or juicing with performance enhancing drugs before taking the pulpit, but everyone has demons, wounds, internal battles that can easily spill into external wars.

Men and women who share the word of God and lead congregations have special assignments from on high. However, we shouldn’t hold them accountable to the standards forced upon them to be perfect, when the Bible clearly states in multiple places that the potential for perfection in man does not exist.

So we should be forgiving of their sins and learning from them.  Even though they typically are more sensational, with higher impact and much greater visibility than when we mess up, these leaders are after all human. We should never lose sight of that truth as we follow them.

Additionally, we shouldn’t take every word and message verbatim with no questioning or no seeking on our part to define what is true for us. We are all tour guides who haven’t actually been to the place we’re talking about. Who knows how wrong we’ve got parts of it. I’m not saying that no one out there has insight, or that no one knows anything. I’m not saying that God hasn’t shared wisdom with us, directly and indirectly, through His word.

I’m just saying that God wants to speak to us individually and if we open ourselves to Him, insight will come. We need to spend less time wandering around and showing up like sheep hoping some smart or inspired person will lead us to a deeper relationship. God doesn’t call us to be spoon fed by corporate worship. He calls for a one-to-one relationship.

1 Corinthians 1:20-22 – Has not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world through wisdom did not know God, it pleased God through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe.

And finally, we should not limit our search for God among people who “know it all.”

In the past year, I’ve been introduced and exposed to Christians who are struggling with sins and circumstances in their lives, including infidelity, sexual addictions, dependencies on drugs and alcohol, depression, anxiety, foreclosure, bankruptcy, abuse, neglect, abandonment, criminal activity, divorce, death, unemployment and sickness. You could easily draw the conclusion that these people can’t teach us much about God. They definitely don’t have all the answers. In fact, they probably don’t have ANY of them.

And you’d be sorely misguided in that assumption. In these beautiful and broken people, in each and every one of them, I’ve seen God, I’ve seen Him work, I’ve seen Him redeem and be glorified. And I’ve seen it in a way that traditional worship and corporate religious experiences can’t, and probably won’t, show me.  Go back and review the history of how God has shared His heart with His people. He has most commonly used busted, broken, fatally flawed men like the disciples and the most ordinary, unassuming and sin-pressed people He could find.

So, why is it that today we place unrealistic expectations upon our Christian leaders and demand that they successfully live out a fairy tale, Hollywood existence where they shower us with perfect prophecy and guide us perfectly down a golden path to God? The higher the pedestal, the farther the fall. Might I suggest we recognize that our leaders have a critically important role, but not an all-encompassing one? That we remember to err is human? That we take more responsibility on ourselves to see God as He intended? Through personal relationship and totally unvarnished gritty, real and redeeming experiences with the battered, the bruised and the broken around us.