The Pastor's Justification: Applying the Work of Christ in Your Life and Ministry - Softcover

Wilson, Jared C.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1433536641 ISBN 13: 9781433536649

Publisher: Crossway, 2013

Synopsis

Ministry can be brutal. As leaders, we face discouragement, frustration, and exhaustion―and many times we face it alone. Helping us to refocus our gaze on the gospel, pastor Jared Wilson offers here practical insights, real-life anecdotes, and in-your-face truth related to the ups and downs of pastoral ministry. Honest yet hopeful, this creative fusion of biblical exposition and personal confession will help pastors weather the storms of ministry by rooting their identity in Christ.

About this title

About the Author

Jared C. Wilson is assistant professor of pastoral ministry at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and director of the Pastoral Training Center at Liberty Baptist Church in Kansas City, Missouri. He is a popular author and conference speaker, and also blogs regularly at Gospel Driven Church, hosted by the Gospel Coalition. His books include Gospel Wakefulness; The Storytelling God; and The Wonder-Working God.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Pastor's Justification

Applying the Work of Christ in Your Life and Ministry

By Jared C. Wilson

Good News Publishers

Copyright © 2013 Jared C. Wilson
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-4335-3664-9

Contents

Foreword by Mike Ayers, 
Introduction, 
PART 1 THE PASTOR'S HEART, 
1 The Free Pastor, 
2 The Holy Pastor, 
3 The Humble Pastor, 
4 The Confident Pastor, 
5 The Watchful Pastor, 
6 The Justified Pastor, 
PART 2 THE PASTOR'S GLORY, 
7 The Pastor and the Bible, 
8 The Pastor and God's Grace, 
9 The Pastor and His Faith, 
10 The Pastor and the King, 
11 The Pastor and Glory, 
Conclusion, 

CHAPTER 1

THE FREE PASTOR

Shepherd the flock of God that is among you, exercising oversight, not under compulsion, but willingly, as God would have you; not for shameful gain, but eagerly. (1 Pet. 5:2)

The best and worst of times. Now you know what pastoral ministry is.

Becoming a minister is easy. At the very most, you will need multiple years of formal theological training at great financial, mental, and emotional expense to you and your family, an official approval from your denomination's ordination committee or assessment council, and a divine call from God. Piece of cake. It's being a pastor that is harder than all get-out.

There are lots of things they might teach you in seminary but you don't actually learn until you're nose deep in them. Things like:

• Churches really do split over carpet color.

• Firing volunteers is the pits.

• Leading formal church discipline against a friend is worse.

• Some women will be forever hurt that your wife doesn't want to be BFFs with them.

• You will have some meetings that you're not sure you will survive. Literally. Like, you might want to review your theology of self-defense and/or revisit your life insurance policy.

But also things like:

• Seeing enemies reconcile on the basis of the gospel is incredible.

• Counseling broken people into a time of healing is beautiful.

• Hearing people profess faith in Jesus is exhilarating.

Pastoral ministry is a trove of glories and deaths. It is the kind of cross- taking nothing can prepare you for except just doing it. John Newton conjures 2 Corinthians 6:10 in one of his poems:

What contradictions meet
In minister's employ!
It is a bitter sweet,
A sorrow full of joy.

The pastor can be the loneliest soul in the congregation, wandering out in the point man position, scoping the land for danger all by himself, yet always feeling the tug of those needing his attention on the back of his coat. The pastor is a multitasker not just of duties but of personalities and problems. Many Christians are focused on their own journey; the biblical pastor is too, but he's also focused on yours. And his and hers and the next guy's. In one day he might hold a dying woman's hand, grieve in the office with a couple on the verge of divorce, celebrate one hundred days of sobriety with someone, and then go home and laugh with his wife and kids at a Munsters rerun. The pastor is ministerially multipolar.

The vantage point of pastoral ministry is a heavy and secret thing. Good pastors aren't always spilling everybody else's guts, so one hour he may be rushing out on a benevolence call on his day off, and the next hour hear from another the accusation that he is selfish. (True story.) The accuser knows nothing of the benevolence call, and the good pastor does not feel compelled to defend himself using it as evidence. He has his own perspective and trusts God will vindicate him in due time when all things are revealed. The recipient of the benevolence has his perspective too. And the next day he may be asking, "But what have you done for me lately?"

Sister Serious is concerned about the way Sister Broken lets her son squirm during the worship service without disciplining him. But the pastor knows that Sister Broken is recovering from an abusive ex and is growing in Christ, and that to clamp down on her about her squirmy son at this point would risk further bruising a heart in need of healing. (Also, good pastors know that little boys are squirmy.)

Very few people lose sleep over "the way the church is going." But the pastor does.

The pastor and his flock are on cross-paths all week. Monday through Saturday, the laity are being drained from the pressures of daily life: jobs and families and shopping and just being human. The pastor runs counter. Monday through Saturday, he is being drained by the same daily life pressures, and besides that he is pouring himself out in grace as often as he can for the flock. But he is also constantly seeking to be filled up at every available opportunity, so that on Sunday, when his people enter the house of worship empty from the week's toil, he is full to the brim with the glory of God in the gospel of Jesus Christ. Then, in preaching, he is broken open upon the rock of Christ that the living water of Christ might flow out freely and flood the valleys of his people. The laity starts Monday fresh, filled. The pastor starts Monday exhausted, empty.

This is a difficult arrangement week in and week out, mitigated wonderfully by a community of believers empowered by the Spirit to carry each other's burdens and to encourage and edify each other outside the walls of the assembly, but it is still a difficult navigation, and many pastors and their congregations wind up too often as the proverbial ships passing in the night.

And yet, let's not overthink it, brothers. Let us not think more highly of ourselves than we ought. Oh, we poor pitiful pastors, we sorry lot, we put-upon unprevailers! We special class, whatever will we do with ourselves?

We can nail self-pity to the cross, first off.

Deflated and Puffed Up

What do we do with this sorrowful joy? We pastors, like other normal human beings, run one of two ways, generally.

First, we wallow. We feel deflated so we act deflated. We tell ourselves we are just being honest and transparent and authentic. Really we are throwing a pity party in our own honor. Twitter and Facebook have become the new arenas for public lament, and these days we get to see just how similar some pastors are in temperament to teenage girls. But even without the spectacle of social media, it is quite possible for pastors to see themselves as merely husks of men, empty shells wafted by the wind this way and that. Always tired, always empty, menial, miserable. Swing low, sweet chariot; nobody knows the trouble pastors have seen.

But for all the brought-lowness of the minister's task, this is not the way of pastoring. This is not the "boasting of weakness" Paul goes on about in 2 Corinthians 11 and 12. In 12:7 he says the weakness was given to him to keep him from being conceited! Not so that he would think less of himself, to paraphrase C. S. Lewis, but so he would think of himself less. This is how Paul sums up the purpose of weakness and suffering in pastoral ministry:

But he said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong. (2 Cor. 12:9–10)

At the same time, we are learning from Paul that contentment and strength is not about pulling one's self up by the bootstraps. If a pastor does not react to the peculiar anxiety of his ministry in the manner of a milquetoast whiny-pants, he may instead swing to the other extreme. Not deflated, he is instead puffed up.

The stereotype of the arrogant, narcissistic pastor is a stereotype for a reason. You and I have likely both met him. We have likely at times been him. I remember working at a Christian bookstore for several years while in college; the absolute worst customers were pastors. This constantly confounded me. Time and time again, my coworkers and I were subjected to some of the most unchristian condescension we'd ever experienced. We were regularly confronted by ministers accustomed to commanding the rabble in their congregations, and so they thought nothing of commanding us. Congregational deference had turned them into hard-hearted idols — at least on shopping day — and they lorded themselves over us, flabbergasted that we could not invent products they imagined or order products they could not describe or hand out extra-percentage discounts due those of their elevated status. "Do you know who I am? I'm kind of a big deal. People know me." They were terrible advertisements for their churches, not to mention pastoral ministry in general.

It is devilishly easy us as for pastors to believe our own hype.

Leadership Directives

Pastoral ministry is a peculiar anxiety. We've established that. Whining about it isn't proper. Neither is becoming a self-important blowhard. What will help us, then?

Enter the leadership cult. What we need is know-how, the publishing Powers-That- Be reason. We lack skills, practical helps, and insider tips, and they've got just the evangelical gurus to deliver the goods. Don't you want to leverage your synergy and catalyze your visioneering? Don't you want to know the seven highly effective and irrefutable laws of unlocking the mystery of who moved your cheese's parachute? Are you a starfish or a spider? This is all key to revealing the quality ministry hidden inside of you and to taking your church to a whole 'nother level.

Whatever that means.

David Hansen calls this "trend-driven ministry." Syndicated radio host Brant Hansen has skewered the evangelical leadership cult well in his blog series "The 417 Rules of Awesomely Bold Leadership." Here is one excerpt:

Rule #398 — Leave a Legacy of Awesomeness in Leadership

... so General Powell looked at me, his eyes welling, and said, yes, sure, there are leaders. But who is leading them?

Then he realized that okay, there are lot of people doing that. But who is leading those people, the ones who are doing that?

Well, yeah, some people are doing that. But — and here was his real question — who is leading THEM?

Well, I am.

But here's another question, friends: Who is going to reach the next generation of leaders, and empower them to be led by someone awesome? We have a crisis here. Who will lead leading leaders when I die?

Answer: My books and CD's, that's who.

Books and podcasts and conferences from the leadership cult bid us to believe that pastoral ministry is a technology, that our churches are businesses, that our flocks are customers. The answer to the sorrowful joy of pastoral ministry is not apparently "counting it all joy" but finding the sweet spot in our ministry style. People are problems to be figured out, and if they cannot be figured out, they are to be sorted out to others, and if they still cannot be figured out, they are liabilities. They simply didn't "get the vision."

The professionalization of the pastorate is killing the spiritual life of congregations, even congregations seeing an increase in attendance to Sunday worship. Despite the intricacy and efficiency of applied systems, many attenders of the consumer-driven church get everything they want except pastoral care. More and more, this is appearing to be by design, as more and more "awesomely bold leaders" denigrate any layperson interested in being fed and cared for. They are called babies. They are told to grow up. They are told that the church is not for them. They are called Pharisees or eggheads or "religious" jerks. A sheep who wants to be fed is seen as somebody in the way of the vision.

Mind you, it's not that we can't learn anything good from the titans of pastoral industry. It is just that more often than not, the good we find in them is not original, and the original we find in them is not good. Furthermore, too many of these experience-driven, management-minded promoters of ministerial technology seem pathologically unable to stick to the Scriptures. "You must be the Bible guy," one conference speaker said to Matt Chandler in the green room. Matt replied, "Shouldn't we all be the Bible guy?"

Brothers, there are aspects of professionalism that make sense in our modern ministry contexts, but when all is said and done, we are not managers of spiritual enterprises; we are shepherds. And shepherds feed their sheep (Ezek. 34:2–3; John 21:15–17).

Our lack of knowledge in practical pastoring is not for lack of divine revelation about the matter. The New Testament gives us plenty to work on (though never master). As I noted earlier, I'm going to walk through 1 Peter 5:1–11 in the first part of this book. It is quite likely that we need (daily) a practical "shift of vision," but this daily process begins and ends with — and is held together throughout — by the ultimate vision of how God sees the Christian: with approval and delight, as one clothed in the righteousness of Christ. It is only from the grounding of the gospel of Jesus that the evangelical pastor is set free to pastor freely.

We will come back to the grounding gospel of 1 Peter 5:1 later, but for now let's not gloss over the introductory charge. "So I exhort the elders among you" is a continuation of Peter's thoughts in 1 Peter 4 on judgment for sin and on suffering. He then commands us to respond, beginning with the elders. Who goes first? The pastors, that's who.

In 4:17 Peter quotes Ezekiel 9:6, reminding us that judgment begins at the house of God, and if judgment begins at the house of God, it would stand to reason that judgment of the house of God begins with those in authority. With the double honor of 1 Timothy 5:17 is the double responsibility of James 3:1.

The primary problem in pastoral ministry, brother pastor, is not them. It's you. You are your biggest problem. And so what we see throughout the New Testament's practical instructions to elders is the primacy of personal responsibility. God does not chiefly tell elders how to sort out the problems of others; he primarily tells elders how to get their own lives in order. In the introduction to his excellent book Jesus-Driven Ministry, Ajith Fernando writes:

You will see that most of the ministry basics discussed here have to do with personal lifestyle. I make no apologies for this. There is a great interest in ministry technique today, and technique is important. In a world that places high value on excellence and quality, our ministries must reflect a professional excellence that will favorably adorn the gospel and commend Christ to this generation. Paul also recommended excellence in ministry to the young minister Timothy (1 Tim. 4:11–15). But I believe the greatest crisis facing Christian leadership today concerns lifestyle — always the burning issue. The well-known evangelist D. L. Moody is reported to have said that he had more trouble with D. L. Moody than with any other person he met!

We will not neglect the practical matters of pastoring, because the Bible doesn't do that. But we will wrestle with them under the two-fold acknowledgment that (1) commands are first for us before they're for others, and (2) the power to obey comes from God's grace, not ourselves.

Let's turn to the first divine directives.

Shepherd the Flock of God That Is Among You

In 1 Peter 5:2, the apostle instructs, "Shepherd the flock of God that is among you." Well, of course. What other flock would we have? I will tell you.

We get ahead of ourselves in thinking of our churches as our churches. They are God's churches. We shepherd these congregations as under shepherds of the Good Shepherd. The flock among you is not immediately your flock — these people are God's flock. These people aren't your people before they're God's people. (This mentality does wonders for pastoral elitism and arrogance.) Time and time again we think of our flocks as needing to answer to us. But this is not any more true than our needing to answer to them. And in the end, our local church has been given to us to steward humbly and wisely; we will have to answer for how we shepherd them.

And let's not miss the importance of the seemingly obvious phrase "that is among you." We frequently find ourselves trying to shepherd the flock of God that we want, the one we imagine them to be, the one we want them to be. But God through Peter commands us to shepherd the church we've actually got.

Pastor, the people you currently have in your congregation are those whom God in his wisdom has dispensed to you. They might not be the people you'd handpick if you had your druthers, but be measured by the fact that God handpicked you to be a citizen of his kingdom. What on earth was he thinking?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer cuts to the heart in Life Together:

If we do not give thanks daily for the Christian fellowship in which we have been placed, even where there is no great experience, no discoverable riches, but much weakness, small faith, and difficulty; if on the contrary, we only keep complaining to God that everything is so paltry and petty, so far from what we expected, then we hinder God from letting our fellowship grow according to the measure and riches which are there for us all in Jesus Christ.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Pastor's Justification by Jared C. Wilson. Copyright © 2013 Jared C. Wilson. Excerpted by permission of Good News Publishers.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: Crossway
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1433536641
• ISBN 13: 9781433536649
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 192