“Did I ever get up and preach while struggling?” Lentz went on to say. “Only every time I ever preached.” He elaborated:
Because it’s not about hidden sin—it’s about sin. If you’re a preacher and you don’t get up and feel the weight of your humanity, you shouldn’t be preaching. Even before I had something that was hidden and buried that I built on top of—which is the best way I can describe some of the habits I had—it was like, “I’m going to fix this. This is done. I’ll get around to this.” Buried. And as we know, nothing ever gets buried. When you put something in secret, it expands. It was this progression of things I thought I was over, and every time they showed back up, they were worse. They were bigger.
Toward the end of his time as Hillsong East Coast’s pastor, Lentz admitted his dual life was getting to him. “Unless you’re just a horrible person,” he said, “I think God loves us too much to allow us to live in duplicity. It makes you want to go crazy. I was definitely there, because the lies you tell yourself—right or wrong—you don’t know what to do.”
Before getting emotional and sharing about a time he struggled with preaching, Lentz criticized churches for scrubbing the internet of fallen pastor’s sermons. He said:
What are we saying when we do that? All this man’s sermons that changed the world are suddenly no longer usable because his sin is now public? So what does that mean? What’s the inference? Are we saying that the guys preaching now have no sin? Or that it’s acceptable sin? Or it’s not known sin? It’s such a hypocritical, faulty logic line that I just—I have yet to really address it. I will, because I have some thoughts on it.
There was one service where the worship team was forced to play a 20-minute song, Lentz recalled, because “I couldn’t do it. I just thought, I can’t do this.”
“The weight of that is severe. Anybody who is in sin and thinks they’re getting away with something—you’re in a pain nobody can know,” Lentz shared. “Nobody gets away with anything. Just because you haven’t been caught doesn’t mean you’re not paying the price.”
He continued, “I remember that day vividly—thinking something has to give, because I’m going to go up and do my job, which is to deliver the gospel.” Lentz added, “Thank God he uses broken preachers, because we’re all broken, and he can still do that. But I was thinking in my own heart, I don’t know how much longer I can do this.”
Lentz continued:
So yeah, I remember times where it was almost impossible to even preach because there was so much on fire in my own soul. And by the grace of God, he still used it all—and is still using it all. That’s the beautiful thing about reminding people on this side of the tracks: You’re not done unless you say you’re done, because God never is. That’s a promise. That’s what Jesus does. He redeems broken things. So to pretend that anybody’s disqualified or marginalized because of what they’ve done—I don’t know what world they live in. I don’t live in that world. I serve Jesus. And he’s telling me to follow him through rise, fall, public humiliation, public praise—whatever it may be. The consistent track in my life has always been Jesus. Never changed. Never, ever changed.
