Jesus answered this question about the most respected Bible teachers of his day. He told the crowd to do what the scribes and Pharisees taught but not to copy how they lived: “for they say, and do not” (Matthew 23:3). Correct teaching and a crooked life can live in the same person, and Scripture names that split as a failure. The church keeps missing it because words are easy to hear on a Sunday, and lives are harder to see.
Dr. Maliek Blade has watched this play out among pastors. He leads The Whole Brother Mission, which connects Black men and their families with culturally competent mental health professionals, and he counsels pastors or works alongside them. His diagnosis is blunt: “we do a disservice to our churches and our members and our pastors by just allowing their preaching ability to be the litmus test for whether they’re doing good or not.” The question is whether Scripture backs him up. It does, and more precisely than most people expect.
Where the Bible Names the Failure
Matthew 23 is the clearest case, and it is often read too quickly. Jesus speaks “to the multitude, and to his disciples” about teachers who sit “in Moses’ seat” (Matthew 23:1–2). That phrase describes their role as recognized teachers of the law. Then comes the surprising instruction:
“All therefore whatsoever they bid you observe, that observe and do; but do not ye after their works: for they say, and do not” (Matthew 23:3).
Jesus separates the content of their teaching from the pattern of their lives, and he locates the failure in the second. The rest of the chapter fills in that pattern: heavy burdens laid on others, religion performed to be seen, and close attention to small rules while neglecting “judgment, mercy, and faith” (Matthew 23:23).
Interpreters differ on how far verse 3 reaches. The most common reading is that Jesus endorses their teaching insofar as it faithfully passes on the law of Moses, since later in the chapter he criticizes some of their teaching too. Other readers hear verse 3 as irony that sets up the critique to follow. Either way, the core observation holds. A person can occupy the teacher’s seat, say true things from it, and live a contradiction Jesus refuses to overlook.
Paul confronts the same pattern in Romans 2, writing to someone confident in his grasp of the law: “Thou therefore which teachest another, teachest thou not thyself? thou that preachest a man should not steal, dost thou steal?” (Romans 2:21). In Titus he describes people who “profess that they know God; but in works they deny him” (Titus 1:16). Gospel narrative, a doctrinal letter and a pastoral letter all reach the same verdict about right words paired with a wrong life.
Why Knowing the Right Thing Falls Short
James is the natural home for Blade’s point. He writes as a pastor to scattered believers, and his concern throughout is faith that never reaches the hands:
“But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves” (James 1:22).
The last phrase matters most. Hearing without doing deceives the hearer. The person with the right answers is the one most likely to believe he is fine.
James follows with an image: someone looks in a mirror, walks away, and forgets what he looked like (James 1:23–24). Information came in and nothing changed. Blade reached a strikingly similar definition from his doctoral coursework on what learning is: “true learning has not taken place until the information is properly applied.” He applies it to the pulpit. Preachers are often tested on whether they say the right thing, and by his definition that measures recall.
James presses further: “Thou believest that there is one God; thou doest well: the devils also believe, and tremble” (James 2:19). James calls correct belief about God good. He also notes that demons hold it. Orthodoxy alone does not tell a disciple from an enemy of God.
James is sometimes read as setting works against grace. In context he describes what real faith looks like once it exists, which matches Paul’s order in Ephesians 2. Salvation comes by grace through faith, “Not of works, lest any man should boast” (Ephesians 2:9). The next verse adds that “we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them” (Ephesians 2:10). Grace comes first, and works follow as its intended result. James’s warning lands on a faith that never produces that result.
Lisa Fields, founder of the Jude 3 Project, describes the human side of this: “there is a gap oftentimes between what we know in our head and what we know in our heart.” She observes that people in theological training often “equate head knowledge with belief,” expecting knowledge to transform them automatically. She recalls a line from a book she read in seminary, that “any truth that we get must go into a battle” before we know whether we really believe it. James opens his letter on the same note, with trials that test faith and produce endurance (James 1:2–4). Belief is proven under pressure.
Why the Church Keeps Grading the Sermon
Blade traces part of the problem to seminary culture, where in his experience “the focus just becomes about having right belief.” He calls belief important. His concern is what happens when it becomes the only thing measured. He has seen people in ministry known as solid preachers with good theology who lack the character or emotional maturity to match. His seminary president, Danny Akin, used to tell students he would rather see an A at home and a C in class than the reverse.
Paul met a version of this in Corinth. Some believers there had correct theology about idols: an idol is nothing, and there is one God. They used that knowledge in ways that wounded weaker believers, and Paul answers sharply: “Knowledge puffeth up, but charity edifieth” (1 Corinthians 8:1). The knowledge was accurate. It inflated the knower and harmed his neighbor. Five chapters later Paul pushes the point to its limit:
“And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing” (1 Corinthians 13:2).
Read in context, 1 Corinthians 13 corrects a gifted, knowledgeable church that had started ranking people by their spiritual abilities. Paul says that way of measuring misses what God values. That is the habit Blade describes: giving a pastor an A for the preaching while no one asks what happens after the sermon ends.
Fields has seen what that habit hides. She has met people who impressed her at first because they knew the right things, and then found unprocessed childhood trauma beneath a strong ability to communicate. Outsiders call such a person theologically sound while those closest to him say he is not kind, and nobody looks further, because the only test was knowing the doctrines and quoting the verses. Scripture warns against this kind of judging: “for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the LORD looketh on the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7). Blade makes the same point: “God is interested in the heart behind what we do, not just what we do.”
How Sound Teaching Coexisted With Slaveholding
Blade borrows two words he credits to Carl Ellis: epistemology, meaning right belief, and ethics, meaning right behavior. “We have to have our epistemology and our ethics match,” he says. His sharpest example is historical. He points to white evangelical circles that held what some would consider sound teaching alongside slaveholding and racism.
Scripture explains how that is possible. If the only test of faithfulness is what a person confesses about God, then how he treats the people in front of him never enters the evaluation. John closes that loophole:
“If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?” (1 John 4:20).
John treats love for a visible neighbor as evidence about love for the invisible God. A confession that leaves a neighbor in chains fails John’s test, however carefully it is worded.
Blade does not stop at that history. He turns the lens on Black churches, because the same failure can happen wherever a preacher is judged by the preaching alone.
What Scripture Asks of Leaders
The New Testament already provides a better test. Read the qualifications for overseers in 1 Timothy 3:1–7 and count. Nearly every item concerns character and conduct: self-control, hospitality, sobriety, gentleness, freedom from greed and violence. Being “apt to teach” appears once. Teaching ability is required, but it is one line in a list dominated by the shape of a life.
The list reaches into the home:
“One that ruleth well his own house, having his children in subjection with all gravity; (For if a man know not how to rule his own house, how shall he take care of the church of God?)” (1 Timothy 3:4–5).
Paul treats the household as the place where a leader’s fitness becomes visible. Blade puts it plainly: “So what’s being preached in the pulpit needs to be matched at home.” A pastor who teaches parents how to raise children cannot be blowing up at his own daughter and provoking his own kids. Paul says the same to every father: “And, ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord” (Ephesians 6:4).
First Timothy 3 sets qualifications for church leaders specifically; it is no entrance exam for being a Christian. Its principle still reaches past the pulpit: a life gives evidence a sermon cannot. Blade applies it to everyone, asking what in each believer’s life shows that what he says is true.
Does This Make Doctrine Less Important?
This is the strongest objection. If right belief does not guarantee a right life, why invest so much in theology?
Scripture commands both together:
“Take heed unto thyself, and unto the doctrine; continue in them: for in doing this thou shalt both save thyself, and them that hear thee” (1 Timothy 4:16).
Even Matthew 23 tells the crowd to observe what is rightly taught. The failure these texts expose is treating doctrine as the whole of faithfulness. Doctrine itself stays essential.
The passages have limits too. They do not let anyone judge a person’s salvation from a distance, and they do not turn every struggle into hypocrisy. Blade insists that some distress is depression or another medical reality, and treating it as hidden sin causes real damage. The contradiction Scripture condemns lies between what someone teaches and how he chooses to treat people. A believer who is ill or hurting is in a different situation.
The gap can also hide inside work that looks faithful. Blade warns that “we can do things that we say are for God, but the motive is impure.” He describes someone who began watering down his messages because attendance improved. By the usual measures, the ministry was succeeding.
When the Gap Is Exposed
Paul gives the posture:
“Brethren, if a man be overtaken in a fault, ye which are spiritual, restore such an one in the spirit of meekness; considering thyself, lest thou also be tempted” (Galatians 6:1).
The verse sets the goal and the manner. It does not say a restored teacher returns to teaching, though churches often assume it does. Blade observes that “a lot of times the assumption is restoration means he gets to preach again.” Sometimes, he says, restoration means never again being placed over certain people, and “it’s ultimately at the core gonna be about being restored to God” first. Fields frames it this way: “restoration is not about restoring people to a position, but restoring them to a path.”
The warning in Galatians 6:1, “considering thyself,” turns the passage back on the restorers. Blade sees churches drift into damage control, behaving like a company managing bad press: “We’re trying to protect the business rather than looking at the wholeness and the wellness of the individual.” He also reminds congregations that “pastors and leaders are still humans too,” and that churches demanding constant output from a pastor, with no one checking on him, help produce the gap they later act shocked to find.
Paul’s instruction makes the fall of a teacher a test for the whole church. A congregation that wants its preacher restored only to the pulpit has graded him on the sermon again.
