Shownotes
While secretly carrying on an adulterous affair that lasted five years, Steve Lawson stood before a room of students and warned them that sexual immorality would cost them their ministry, their marriage, their family and the respect of everyone they loved. Two years after that sin came to light, he has written a book about it: Mercy in the Wilderness: How I Fell and What I Found.
Justin Peters is joined by pastors Jim Osman of Kootenai Community Church in Sandpoint, Idaho, and Steve LeBlanc of Sherman Bible Church in Sherman, Texas, to ask whether this book should ever have been written. They play the clip of Lawson's purity warning, and Peters asks plainly how it is not Titus 1:16: they profess to know Him, but by their deeds they deny Him.
The three men explain why adultery permanently disqualifies a man from the office of pastor and elder, drawing on Proverbs 6:32-33, 1 Corinthians 6:18 and the qualifications in 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1. They answer the usual appeals to David and Peter, challenge Lawson's comparison of his wilderness to that of Moses, Elijah and Jesus, weigh whether he could ever teach a Sunday school class or a men's Bible study, and question the motive of selling the book.
This is not personal hostility. It is a loving warning to the sheep that giftedness never entitles a man to a platform, and that true repentance looks like quiet faithfulness, not a comeback.
