We have an email from Loretta, who lives in London, and she asks, "Pastor John, do you think technology is threatening the submission of a congregation to their pastor, in that people have so many choices of online teachers?" Well, first let me affirm her concern. I really appreciate anyone who wants to highlight the biblical conviction that pastors are leaders by God's appointment and should be biblically followed.

Hebrews 13, 17, "Obey your leaders, submit to them, they are keeping watch over your souls." They're gonna have to give an account. Let them do this with joy and not groaning, because that's no advantage to you. So this beautiful portrayal of happy pastors doing their work with joy, and people happily supporting, that's right.

She should be concerned about that. Or 1 Thessalonians 5, "We ask you, brothers, to respect those who labor among you and are over you in the Lord." They're your leaders, they're over you, they've been put by God in a place of authority and spiritual leadership, and you should respect them and esteem them highly for their work, for love's sake.

So yes to the concern. Now that raises the question, what does submission mean and what does it not mean? And then we can ask how does the Internet affect that? Because submission to a pastor or a group of elders does not mean the pastor is infallible, or the pastor is the ultimate authority.

The Bible is the ultimate authority and is infallible, not the pastor, not the elders. And it doesn't mean that you believe everything he says without examining it, but rather you go to the book of Acts and you see in Acts 17 that the Bereans were more noble than those in Thessalonica because they examined the scriptures daily to see if these things were so when an apostle was speaking to them.

So it's not wrong for a people to love their pastor and submit to their pastor and still make sure that from the Bible what he is saying and how he's leading squares up with scripture. So positively I would say that that submission to pastoral authority involves respecting them, having a high esteem for their office and calling, giving them the benefit of the doubt, not becoming cynical and skeptical about things that they say, supporting their plans and their vision for the church, throwing yourself into the life of the church in any way you can without sinning.

In other words, your basic disposition towards the leadership is, "Yes! Let's go! Let's support them!" just like a wife's basic disposition towards her husband should be, "I just love it when you lead! Any way I can support your leadership that's not sinful, I'm gonna be right there by your side supporting you." I think that's the way we should feel about our our pastors.

Now, the Internet, with all of its teachers out there that people can listen to, is one more step in people's access to truth other than their preacher. And error too, but truth I'm thinking right now. So I'm thinking when I say one more step, the first step was translating the Bible into a language they could read, and that got some of them burned at the stake.

The pastoral authority was so threatened, "If you read your English Bible, I'm gonna burn you at the stake," and they did. And the next would be books and magazines, the next would be radio, the next would be TV, and now we've got Internet, and all of those give access to more and more teaching that might or might not be different from what we're hearing.

Now the question is, is that a bad thing to have exposure to knowledge that might reveal unhelpful things in your pastor? And my answer is, it may be a bad thing, or it may be a good thing. I would say if it makes the pastor acknowledge that he has to make a good case so that people can see in the Bible what he's really saying is really there, and that his plans for the church are really biblical, then that's a good thing for him to feel that pressure.

But if what's going on in the Internet makes a person or a family disrespectful to their pastor, or cynical to their pastor, or disengaged from their church, then I think it's hurting them and not not helping them. But if it leads the pastor to be more vigilant and leads the people into a careful consideration of what's really biblical, then I would think that would be all for the good.

It might create some relational tensions between what they're hearing in the Internet by some preacher and what they're hearing at the church, but I think avoiding those kind of tensions by hiding from truth is probably not going to honor God, the God of love and the God of truth.

Thank you, Pastor John, and thank you for listening to this podcast. Please email your questions to us at askpastorjohn@desiringgod.org. At DesiringGod.org you'll find thousands of other free resources from John Piper. I'm your host Tony Reinke, thanks for listening.