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October 11 - November 12, 2024
God has set up the body of Christ to function as an instrument of seeing in our lives, so that we can know ourselves with a depth and accuracy that would be impossible if left on our own.
I am more and more convinced that what gives a ministry its motivations, perseverance, humility, joy, tenderness, passion, and grace is the devotional life of the one doing ministry.
Autonomous Christianity never works, because our spiritual life was designed by God to be a community project.
Bad things happen when maturity is more defined by knowing than it is by being. Danger is afloat when you come to love the ideas more than the God whom they represent and the people they are meant to free.
I wanted my students to understand that they are called not just to preach exegetically correct and theologically precise sermons but also to pastor people, to walk, live, support, and suffer with them. I wanted them to know that they are called to be more than local-church theological instructors; they are called to be Christ’s ambassadors, to be the look on his face, the touch of his hand, and the tone of his voice.
I longed for them to understand that they aren’t called just to teach theology to their people but also to do theology with their people.
theologeeks, the guys who see theology as an end in itself rather than as a means to an end. They love the academy and would unwittingly drag the academy into the local church and preach sermons that are more theological lectures than gospel meditations.
All creation is meant to be a finger pointing us to ultimate glory, the only glory that can ever satisfy the human heart, the glory of God.
Could it be that many students in seminary are too academically busy to sit before the Rose of Sharon in awe, love, and worship?
When the Word of God, faithfully taught by the people of God and empowered by the Spirit of God, falls down, people become different.
The ultimate purpose of the Word of God is not theological information but heart and life transformation.
Biblical literacy and theological expertise are not, therefore, the end of the Word but a God-ordained means to an end, and the end is a radically transformed life because the worship at the center of that life has been reclaimed.
it is dangerous to teach, discuss, and exegete the Word withou...
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Over the years more and more professors came to the seminary classroom with little or no local church experience. They got to the classroom not because they were successful pastors and therefore equipped to train and disciple the next generation. No, they got to the seminary classroom because they were experts in their field. So the energy in the classroom was not cloning a new generation of pastors but cloning experts in apologetics, ethics, systematics, church history, and biblical languages. It has been a subtle but seismic change in the culture of the seminary and the kind of results it
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Academized Christianity, which is not constantly connected to the heart and puts its hope in knowledge and skill, can actually make students dangerous. It arms them with powerful knowledge and skills that can make the students think that they are more mature and godly than they actually are. It arms students with weapons of spiritual warfare that if not used with humility and grace will harm the people they are meant to help.
no one gives grace better than the person who is deeply persuaded that he needs it himself.
We swindle ourselves into thinking that things are better than they are, and in so doing we compromise the calling and standards of the God we say we love and serve.
it is absolutely vital to remember that a pastor’s ministry is never just shaped by his knowledge, experience, and skill. It is always also shaped by the true condition of his heart. In fact, if his heart is not in the right place, all of the knowledge and skill can actually function to make him dangerous.
The pastor must be enthralled by, in awe of—can I say it: in love with—his Redeemer so that everything he thinks, desires, chooses, decides, says, and does is propelled by love for Christ and the security of rest in the love of Christ.
it is only love for Christ that can defend the heart of the pastor against all the other loves that have the potential to kidnap his ministry.
It is only the glory of the risen Christ that will guard him against the self-glory that is a temptation to all who are in ministry and that destroys the ministry of so many.
The heart is the inescapable X factor in ministry.
Ministries are derailed because leaders begin to think they have arrived and don’t do the protective things that they warn everyone else to do. It’s naive to think that pastors are free from sexual temptation, fear of man, envy, greed, pride, anger, doubt of God, bitterness, and idolatry. It is vital to remember that every pastor is in the middle of being reconstructed by God’s grace.
whatever rules his heart will direct his life and his ministry.
who is my pastor, and what does he need in order to remain spiritually healthy and grow in grace?
What the writer of Hebrews is crushing with this warning and call is any allegiance we might have to an isolated, individualized, “Jesus and me” Christianity. He is arguing for the essentiality of the ministry of others in the life of every believer. Obviously, this includes the pastor. None of us is wired to live this Christian life alone. None of us is safe living separated and unknown. Each of us, whether pastor or congregant, needs the eyes of others in order to see ourselves with clarity and accuracy.
no one gives grace better than a person who knows he desperately needs it himself.
Yes, a pastor needs to be wise in what he discloses to whom, but he must not wall himself completely off from the body of Christ and name that as the cost of the ministry to which he has been called.
Doesn’t every member of the body of Christ need the ministry of the body of Christ, including the pastor?
several steps that can work to bring pastors out of isolation and into more regular contact with the essential and normal ministries of the body of Christ.
1) REQUIRE YOUR PASTOR TO ATTEND A SMALL GROUP HE DOESN’T LEAD.
2) PASTOR, SEEK OUT A SPIRITUALLY MATURE PERSON TO MENTOR YOU AT ALL TIMES.
make sure you are being pastored the entire time you are pastoring others.
3) ESTABLISH A PASTORS’ WIVES’ SMALL GROUP.
4) PASTOR, BE COMMITTED TO APPROPRIATE SELF-DISCLOSURE IN YOUR PREACHING.
5) BE SURE THAT YOUR PASTOR AND HIS FAMILY ARE REGULARLY INVITED INTO THE HOMES OF FAMILIES IN YOUR CHURCH.
6) MAKE SURE THERE IS SOMEONE WHO IS REGULARLY MENTORING YOUR PASTOR’S WIFE.
7) MAKE SURE YOUR PASTOR AND HIS WIFE HAVE THE MEANS TO BE REGULARLY OUT OF THE HOUSE AND AWAY FOR WEEKENDS WITH ONE ANOTHER.
8) MAKE SURE COUNSELING HELP IS ALWAYS AVAILABLE TO THE PASTOR, HIS WIFE, AND THEIR FAMILY.
Pastors, be honest about the condition of your heart and seek help quickly and willingly when needed.
I was raised in the “Jesus and me” privatized, individualized Christianity
It was Christianity devoid of Ephesians 4, 1 Corinthians 12, and Hebrews 3:12–13.
the greatest danger in my life exists inside of me and not outside of me,
what methodology has God chosen to employ to guard, grow, and protect us? It is the public and private ministry of the Word.
Because it ascribes to the pastor the responsibility of training God’s people for their member-to-member ministry function, I am afraid that we have unwittingly concluded that the pastor is above a need of what the rest of the body needs and does. But the passage never teaches this; it actually teaches the opposite. The pastor is in the unique position of not only training the body for this ministry but also of personally needing the very ministry for which he trains them.
if Christ is the head of his body, then everything else is just body, including the pastor, and therefore the pastor needs what the body has been designed to deliver.
teaching enables you to see life God’s way. It is embedding the story of life in the larger story of redemption. Admonishing is helping you to see yourself God’s way. It is standing you before the perfect mirror of God’s Word so that you are confronted with the reality of who you really are.
Often the pastor leaves convinced that his problem is not that he struggled with areas of sin but that he was naive enough to confess, and he silently determines he’ll never put himself in this situation and do that again.
As a pastor, you’d better be ready to fight for the gospel, but you’d better also be ready to war for your own soul.
pastoral ministry is war and that you will never live successfully in the pastorate if you live with a peacetime mentality.
