DEDICATED TO ALL IN PASTORAL, TEACHING AND CHRISTIAN MINISTRY
I find it very relevant and most instructive to all those involved in pastoral work, teaching ministry, and all forms of Christian ministry: The address given to all parts of the ministerial office by Richard Baxter in 1655, printed in the book “The Reformed Pastor”. More than ever, what was in this address is so much needed for the church in today’s context.
The address is considered powerful, pathetic, pungent, heartpiercing – there is no address comparable to this on the work of the pastoral office. The reasonings and expostulations of the author would be felt to be altogether irresistible, and hard must be the heart of the minister who can read it without being moved, melted, and overwhelmed, under a sense of his own shortcomings; hard must be the heart, if he be not encouraged to greater faithfulness, diligence, and outreach in winning souls to Christ.
At best, I can only quote only some of this address by God’s servant, Richard Baxter, what I consider most relevant and needful for our times, both for those in ministry, and also the church of Christ.
ON THE WORK OF THE MINISTRY
“Too many who have undertaken the work of the ministry do so obstinately proceed in self-seeking, negligence, pride, and other sins, that it is become our necessary duty to admonish them. If we saw that such would reform without reproof, we would gladly forbear the publishing of their faults. But when reproofs themselves prove so ineffectual, that they are more offended at the reproof than at the sin, and had rather that we should cease reproving then that themselves should cease sinning, I think it is time to sharpen the remedy. For what else should we do? To give up our brethren as incurable were cruelty, as long as there are further means to be used….
To bear with the vices of the ministry is to promote the ruin of the Church, for what speedier way is there for the depraving and undoing of the people, than the depravity of their guide? And how can we more effectively further a reformation, than by endeavouring to reform the leaders of the Church?
..Because our faithful endeavours are of so great necessity to the welfare of the Church, and the saving of men’s souls, that it will not consist with a love to either, to be negligent ourselves, or silently to connive at negligence in others. If thousands of you were in a leaking ship, and those that should pump out the water, and stop the leaks, should be sporting or asleep, or even but favouring themselves in their labours, to the hazardings of you all, would you not awaken them to their work and call on them to labour as for your lives?….
The work must be done, or we all dead men/ Is the ship ready do sink, and do you talk of reputation? or had you rather hazard yourself and us, than hear of your slothfulness? The work of God must needs be done. Souls must not perish, while you mind your worldly business or worldly pleasure, and take your case, or quarrel with your brethren!,,,,
I find it will be impossible to avoid offending those who are at once guilty and impenitent; for there is no way of avoiding this, but by our silence, or their patience: and silent we cannot be, because of God’s commands; and patient they will not be, because of their guilt and impenitence….
But it is the mere necessity of the souls of men, and my desire of their salvation, and of the prosperity of the Church, which forceth me to the arrogance and immodesty, if so it must be called. For who, that hath a tongue, can be silent, when it is for the honour of God, the welfare of the Church, and the everlasting happiness of so many souls?
And now, brethren, I earnestly beseech you, in the name of God, and for the sake of your people’s souls, that you will not slightly slubber over this work, but do it vigorously, and with all your might, and make it your great and serious business.. Study therefore, beforehand, how to do it, as you study for your sermons.
It is a fearful thing to be an unsanctified preacher. Doth it not make you tremble when you open the BIble, lest you should there read the sentence of your own condemnation? When you pen your sermons, little do you think that you are drawing up indictments against your own souls?…
A graceless, inexperienced preacher is one of the most unhappy creatures upon earth and yet he is ordinarily very insensible of his unhappiness; for he hath so many counters that seem like the gold of saving grace, and so many splendid stones that resemble Christian jewels, that he is seldom troubled with the thoughts of his poverty; but thinks he is ‘rich, and increased in goods, and stands in need of nothing, when he is poor, and miserable, and blind and naked.’
..Alas! it is the common danger and calamity of the Church to have unregenerate and inexperienced pastors and to have so many men become preachers before they are Christians; who are sanctified by dedication to the altar as the priests of God, before they are sanctified by hearty dedication as the disciples of Christ; and so to worship an unknown God, and to preach an unknown Christ, to pray through an unknown Spirit, to recommend a state of holiness and communion with God, and a glory and a happiness which are all unknown, and like to be unknown to them for ever…
Nothing can be rightly known, if God be not known, nor is any study well managed, nor to any great purpose, if God is not studied.,,,”
FURTHER THOUGHTS FROM ‘REFORMED PASTOR’
More sharings directed at those in ministry from Richard Baxter
I quote: “When I let my heart grow cold, my preaching grow is cod; and when it is confused, my preaching is confused; and so I can oft observe also in the best of my hearers, that when I have grown cold in preaching, they have grown cold too; and the next prayers which I have heard from them have been too like my preaching. We are the nurses of Christ’s little ones. If we forbear taking food ourselves, we shall famish them; it will soon be visible in their leanness,and dull discharge of their several duties. If we let our love decline, we are not like to raise up theirs. If we abate our holy care and fear, it will appear in our preaching: if the matter show is not, the manner will. If we feed on unwholesome food, either errors or fruitless controversies, our hearts are like to fare the worse for it……
Watch therefore over your own hearts: keep out lusts and passions, and worldly inclinations; keep up the life of faith, and love, and zeal: be much at home, and be much with God…Above all, be much in secret prayer and meditation…For your people’s sake, therefore, look to your hearts. If a pang of spiritual pride should overtake you, and you should fall into any dangerous error, and vent your own inventions to draw away disciples after you, what a wound may this prove to the Church, of which you have the oversight; and you may become a plague to them instead of a blessing, and they may wish they had never seen your faces.
…Take heed to yourselves, lest your example contradict your doctrine,and lest you lay such stumbling-blocks before the blind, as may be the occasion of their ruin; lest you unsay with your lives, what you say with your tongues; and be the greatest hinerers of the success of your own labours.
….It is a palpable error of some ministers, who make such a disproportion between their teaching and their living; who study hard to preach exactly, and study little or not at all to live exactly. All the week long is little enough, to study how to speak two hours; and yet one hour seems too much to study how to live all the week…they that preach precisely, would not live precisely! What a difference was there between their pulpit speeches and their familiar discourse?…
A practical doctrine must be practically preached. We must study as hard how to live well, as how to preach well. We must think and think again, how to compose our lives, as may most tend to men’s salvation, as well as our sermons.”
You may notice that the expressions of this reformed pastor seem rather ‘archaic’ in the use of his words in his communication. But the advice and instructions he gave to those in ministry are precious and can only be considered as excellent.
There is no class of the community on whom the spiritual prosperity of the church of Christ depends as on its ministers and teachers. If their zeal and activity languish, the interests of religion and spirituality are likely to languish in proportion while, on the other hand, whatever is calculated to stimulate their zeal and activity, is likely to promote, in a proportional degree, the interests of God’s work. Hence how important, then, must it be to stir them up to holy zeal and activity in the cause of the Redeemer!
I close this sharing with a further quotation from this pastor:
“Can any reasonable man imagine that God should save men for telling others those truths which they themselves neglect and abuse? Many a tailor goes in rags, that maketh costly clothes for others; and many a cook scarcely licks his fingers, when he hath dressed for others the most costly dishes. Believe it, brethren, God never saved any man for being a preacher, nor because he was an able preacher; but because he was a justified, sanctified man, and consequently faithful in his Master’s work.”
Ponder also on the words of apostle Paul:
“Therefore do not run like someone running aimlessly; I do not fight like a boxer beating the air; No, I strike a blow to my body and make it my slave so that after I have preached to others, I myself will not be disqualified for the prize.” (1 Cor. 9:26-27 TNIV)
THE TRUE STORY OF GOD’S GRACE IN CHRIST
In Jesus Christ, God has given the world a Saviour whose great salvation more than matches man’s great need, and whose great love (gauged from, and seen at, the cross) will not be daunted or drained away by our great unloveliness. This is the real true story of “Good Friday” and “Easter”.
Jesus is set forth as prophet, priest, and king; teacher and guide; mediator and intercessor; master and protector – and the focal point of his saving work is identified as his cross, concerning which each Christian can say like apostle Paul, that he “loved me and gave himself for me” (Gal. 2:20).
Christ’s death was an act of righteousness, for he endured it in obedience to his Father’s will (he could have called for a legion of angels to deliver him and to destroy his enemies). As such, it wrought redemption, freeing us from the curse of God’s law – that is, exposure to divine judgement (by being a ‘curse’ for us) at the cost of Christ’s own suffering. His death was redemptive because it achieved an act of propitiation, quenching God’s wrath by dealing with the sin that evoked it. It propitiated God by being an act of substitutionary sin-bearing, in which the judgment which our sins deserved was diverted onto Christ’s head – from the cross to the risen Christ’s gift of permanent new relationship with God, which the apostle analyses as justification (pardon plus a righteous man’s status) and adoption (a place in the family with certainty of inheritance), and the writer to the Hebrews calls sanctification (acceptance by God on the basis of consecration to him).
With this new status is given new birth, the indwelling Spirit, progressive transformation into Christ’s image, and glorification – in short, comprehensive subjective renewal.
God’s goal in all this is the perfect bliss of sinners, and the gospel call is an invitation to faith in Christ, through which all these gifts come to us, from the Saviour’s own hand!!
All these came to pass with Christ’s death on ‘Good Friday’ and his resurrection on ‘Easter’.
Oftentime, when we meditate on the above, we may feel emotionally moved and ‘sentimental’. The starting point however is the certainty that the mind must be instructed and enlightened before faith and obedience become possible. “Ignorance is almost every error,” wrote Richard Baxter (a prominent Puritan Pastor) and one of his favourite maxims about preaching was “first light – then heat.” Heat without light, pulpit passion without pedagogic precision, would be of no use to anyone. Unwillingness on the part of church attenders to learn the faith and accept instruction from sermons and teaching is a sure sign of insincerity.
“If ever you would be converted, labour for true knowledge,” Baxter told his working class congregation and when they objectied, saying, “we are not learned, and therefore God will not require knowledge at our hands,” he replied in part, “If you think….that you may be excused from love and from all obedience: for there can be none of this without knowledge.”
When men feel and obey the truth they know, it is the work of the Spirit of God but when they are swayed by feeling without knowledge, it is a sure sign that the Devil is at work, for feeling divorced from knowledge and urgings to action in darkness of mind are both as ruinous to the soul as is knowledge without obedience. So the teaching of truth is the pastor’s first task, as the learning of it is the layman’s.
Bible study and teaching sessions are not meant for everyone to speak and to express their own thoughts (which often are without knowledge); it would be no different from secular lectures and discussions – wholesome study must give way to wholesome applications of the truths (based on true knowledge) -otherwise it is invariably a waste of precious time and interaction, for it just stops at everyone expressing their own opinions not based on the teaching of God from Scripture.
One main application from the true story of the sacrifice and resurrection of Jesus Christ for believers is “we who live might no longer live for ourselves but for him who for our sake died and was raised” (2 Cor.5:15).
If we claim to be Christians, and each time we think of what Christ has done for us, and we become emotional for the moment; and then we continue to live for ourselves and not for the Lord, we have not grasped this truth for our lives.
The Pharisees saw what Jesus said and did; however, they were concerned as to what would happen to their positions if everyone were to follow Jesus.
Balaam was angry with his donkey because it refused to move; but the reality is that the donkey saw the angel with the sword blocking their way and the donkey did the most appropriate thing and saved itself and its master. God made the donkey speak the truth to Balaam regarding the reality. Some servants of God may not hold prestigious positions in the Christian world and church; but if God makes them speak the truths, do we refuse to hearken because the speakers do not command our respect and are not of high-ranking officials like the pharisees and sadducees in the the time of Jesus??
TAKE THE HOLY SPIRIT SERIOUSLY IN ALL REALMS OF LIFE
Some 50 years, when I was a young Christian, little was said or written about the Holy Spirit; so little that the Spirit was sometimes referred to as the displaced person of the Godhead and the Cinderella of theology.
That has changed: Trinitarian thinking has revived among theologians, charismatic renewal has touched and challenged the whole Christiann world, and aspects of the doctrine of the Spirit are nowadays frequently discussed.
So we may wonder whether the question “Do we take the Spirit seriously enough” is still valid today?
For one thing, over the years, the depersonalised theology (on the Spirit and other theological issues) of Liberalism has throttled the thoughts of serious Protestants. The ‘Incarnation’ has been reduced to a special case of divine influence in a human life; the Spirit to a name for the unipersonal God in action – the ‘liberal thinking’ is, in a sense, unwilling to speak of God as personal at all. Liberalism has often identified the Spirit’s renewing work with some form of cultural transformation – evolutionary or revolutionary – in human society, as opposed to the regenerative transformation of individuals brought to know Jesus Christ; and this identification has constantly obstructed and prevented the necessary assertion that God’s basic method of changing society is to change the individuals who compose it. In other words, the Holy Spirit, to the Liberals, is not and cannot be taken seriously, and this is so as long as the Spirit is thought of in the liberal way.
Christians also have failed to take the Holy Spirit seriously because they have institutionalised Him. This takes place the moment God’s people, on whatever grounds, allow themselves to assume that their own current practice is a guaranteed vehicle of His presence and power. When Christians continue unconcerned in church situations unmarked by changed lives, joy in worship, and zeal in witness, we show ourselves to be falling into the trap and making the same mistake of institutionalising the Holy Spirit. If we look to our own good organisation and administration, alluring programs, stockpiled counselling skills, and ecclesiastical expertise in general as constituting sufficient proof that God is with us, and if we compile statistics, issue reports, and hire pastors on that basis, we are again making the same mistake – ecclesiastical formalism sets in, and the Spirit is institutionalised with disastrous consequences – and the church continues, oblivious that she has become triumphalist and complacent!
The Holy Spirit’s true work is to lead sinners to Christ and through Christ to God; to make individual believers Christ-like in love, humility, righteousness, and patience; and to animate the church corporately to offer praise to God, service and help to each other, and compassionate outreach to the world.
Institutionalising the Spirit in the way described above makes for apathy and indifference to spiritual quality so long as the ecclesiastical machine rolls on. This obstructs church growth and corporate advance towards the fullness of Christ (Eph. 4:15-16; Col. 2:19) and thus quenches the Spirit by not taking Him seriously. Complacency is the cause, and Laodicean lukewarmness the consequence.
The third thing to say is that taking the Holy Spirit seriously means that Christians must rediscover the naturalness of three things – worship, evangelism, and suffering.
Somehow, the art of true worship is at its lowest ebb, and has been replaced by the strange thing called the ‘program’. This word has been borrowed from the stage and applied with sad wisdom to the type of public service which now passes for worship among us.
Worship – in the sense of telling God his worth by speech and song and celebrating his worth in his presence by proclamation and meditation – has been largely replaced, by a form of entertainment calculated to give worshippers the equivalent of a sauna or Jacuzzi experience and send them away feeling relaxed and tuned up at the same time. Certainly, true worship invigorates, but to plan invigoration is not necessarily to order worship. As all that glitters is not gold, so all that makes us feel happy and strong is not worship. The question is whether the sense that man exists for God rather than God for man is cherished or lost. We need to discover once again that worship is natural to the Christian heart, as it was to the godly Israelites who wrote the Psalms, and that the habit of celebrating the greatness and graciousness of God yields an endless flow of thankfulness, joy, and zeal. Neither stylized charismatic exuberance nor conventional music-sandwiched Sunday-morning programs provide any magic formula for this rediscovery. It can occur only when the Holy Spirit is taken seriously as the One who through the written word of Scripture shows us the love and glory of the Son and the Father and draws us into personal communion with both.
The mainspring of evangelism among lay Christians in the early church was the naturalness of sharing Christ with one’s neighbour out of sheer excitement over the new life of hope one has found. The gospel spread like wild-fire, not primarily because of the quality of the preachers but because lay Christians kept ‘gossiping’ the gospel to their neighbours. And they did so spontaneously simply because they had been thrilled to the marrow by their own experience of God’s salvation, which had made them into conscious lovers of Christ and heirs of heaven, no longer victims and prisoners of the pains and pressures – physical and mental, secular and religious – that threatened them on earth.
But during the past century and years, Christians have become unbiblically, and indeed pathetically, earthbound, concentrating their hopes of happiness on the here rather than the hereafter. And so the glow of the hope of glory has faded, credibility has diminished, and the zeal for sharing Christ has waned. Meantime, evangelism has been institutionalised in various forms and programs of organised mission activity, thus becoming a duty rather than a delight. Only as the Holy Spirit is taken seriously enough for this overflowing to become a reality in our own lives will the naturalness of evangelism be discovered again.
As for suffering, all forms of pain, frustration, and disappointment -‘losses and crosses’, – the New Testament is consistent and emphatic in viewing this as the natural condition of Christians and churches as long as they are in this world. We follow Christ through humiliation here, sharing his sufferings, and thus arrive at glorification with him hereafter. Afflictions achieve ‘an eternal glory that far outweighs them all’, Paul tells us (2 Cor. 417), while the alternative is ‘no cross, no crown’ (see Heb. 12:7-14).
Suffering is the Christian’s road home; no other road leads there. But current Christians have come to think of a life free from pain and trouble as virtually a natural human right, and Christian minds have been so swamped by the thinking that nowadays any pain and loss in a Christian’s life is felt to cast doubt on God’s goodness. It is perhaps no wonder that our age has produced the gospel of health and wealth, promising that God will give us right now whatever we name and claim under either heading; no wonder, either, that the triumphs of the ‘power encounter’ between the Christ of the Gospels and the secular and satanic forces that he faces should be equated by some with supernatural leadings of the physical body rather than with supernatural transformations of the moral character. But if we can learn to take the Holy Spirit seriously once more, he will convince us afresh of the naturalness of suffering in the Christian life, probably by leading us into a higher degree of it than we have yet had to face.
Humankind’s need and evangelical responsibility are both great, and the call to take the Holy Spirit seriously, as the renewal of God’s people and the empowerer of their witness, is never more urgent.
And the word that bears on our unfinished task, as on Zerubbabel’s long ago, is, “Not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit,” says the Lord Almighty’ (Zech. 4:6). May the Lord God help us to hear it clearly!!
CHRISTIAN MINISTRY – WHAT IT OUGHT TO BE
The pastoral epistles of Paul give us apostolic instruction for life and ministry. At this point, let us focus on how Christian ministry is meant to be done and what it is supposed to be like. Paul expects us to pattern our ministry today on the principles he discloses in the epistles (with particular focus on 1 & 2 Timothy); he intends for what he says to be practiced in the churches everywhere (1 Tim. 3:14-15).
This is very important and relevant for us today as individual believers and churches – especially as two major errors have ‘damaged’ the ministry of the church over the past two hundred years or so.
FIRST ERROR
If the church is going to be effective as a witness to the world in its own time and era, its message must be changed.
It means that the message the apostle Paul used and wrote (in the inspired Scripture) will not work in our current setting and thus must change if the message of the Church is going to be effective.
SECOND ERROR
Although we do not need an updated message because the message is basically correct, yet we do need new methods if we are going to be successful to reach our world and our culture.
This means our approach in updating the methods holds the key to reaching our culture, and it assumes that our methods neither flow from nor are essentially related to our message. It actually divorces theology from methodology or inadequately relates them – and this is a ‘fatal’ error.
First Error – our message must change
We see this in the teaching of theological liberalism. During the Enlightenment, the culture had essentially adopted the outlook of the Enlightenment and rejected Christianity. Beliefs that Jesus was the only way, and vicarious substitutionary atonement, were eroded, and the liberal theologians decided that the message must change; otherwise it would fail to capture the culture. We must take note that these theologians were not consciously trying to destroy Christianity; in fact their motivation was missiological. They wanted to reach their culture, but they thought they had to change the message in order to do so. They ended up changing the substance of the message because they believed this to be necessary.
“But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel (or message) other than the one we preached to you, let that person be under God’s curse. As we have already said, so now I say again: if anybody is preaching to you a gospel other than what you accepted, let that person be under God’s curse!’ (Gal. 1:8-9).
Notice the seriousness of changing the message of the gospel; it is not a minor error – it has serious eternal consequences and has to face God’s judgment. We cannot ‘add’ or ‘subtract’ the gospel message to make it palatable to those in our culture. If ‘repentance’ and ‘faith’ are absent in our message, and often they are, if we scrutinise the preaching and sharing of the gospel closely, then we may end up with many “decisions’ and an increase in our statistics, but there are few genuine conversions from God’s point of view. If, on the other hand, we add some qualifications to the message to make it fall in line with our own church’s theology and practice, we are in effect changing the message of the gospel, and this is equally serious.
Second Error – our methods must change
This error is also in modern evangelicalism. It basically says the church cannot be built and it would not effectively engage its culture, unless our methods are changed. The key to the advance of the gospel, in other words, is identified with methodology. Generally, there is little or no theological reflection on this methodology, and the methods deployed are insufficiently related to the gospel itself. or to sound biblical theology. It ends up with having insufficiently contemplated methods in relation to the gospel and theology while it has been overconfident in methods (without dependent on the power of the Word and the Spirit). The argument is that if people are more open to receiving the gospel, the method is acceptable.
We then typically treat methodology as if it is utterly neutral, having no effect upon the message (but it is not, and to think so is naive). We spend little time in evaluating what methodology is consistent with our theology. We fail to insist that our methodology flow from our theology and from the gospel itself. We acted as if the medium has no effect on the message and as if all methods are equally serviceable for gospel ministry,
In other words, we can take the message and send it out any way we want without impinging upon the content, and almost any method is conducive to producing the ends contemplated in gospel-ministry.
And so we end up with many “rice-christians” and increase in the number of membership in the churches; we have ‘tares’ instead of ‘wheat’ because those who come in are not intending to be disciples of Christ but are ‘attracted’ by what they can ‘get’ and ‘receive’ by being ‘members’.
How we do ministry is related to the message. Methodology is related to theology. The message and our methods are connected. Indeed, our methods must flow out of and be consistent with our theology and the gospel itself. Also if our theology is not correct or is lop-sided, the methods that flow out of this theology would invariably be lop-sided and inconsistent with our proper gospel message.
If we pause, we would realise that unless we are discerning, we may end up thinking that all is well even though our message is changed and our methods are also changed.
If in our message we are committed to a God who speaks infallible truth – to a sovereign God, to supernaturalism and the work of the Spirit – yet we adopt a methodology that embraces skepticism, consumerism, and materialism, then our methods will positively undermine the message that we are attempting to convey to the world.
In other words, if we are calling people to come to Christ, deny themselves, take up the cross, and die daily (all in line with the Lords’ teachings and the call of the apostle in the pastoral letters), and we adopt a methodology to “bring them in” that says “have it your way”, then our methods will utterly contradict our message.
Our methodology will trump our theology. They will learn our real theology from our methodology rather than from our formal theology, which is not expressed in or consistent with our methodology. (however sincerely we may hold to that theology and however concerned we may be to convey it). What you win them by, you win them to – that is, our methods do matter. They teach our would-be-disciples what we really believe. And they are influential on the nature and quality of discipleship that will be produced in those that respond to our ministry.
The above are truly and sincerely my burdens and concerns regarding Christian ministry; what I often lamented upon and wrote may come across as being ‘critical’ and ‘pouring cold water’ but may I assure various ones that these concerns weigh heavily on me over the years the Lord has given me the privilege to be involved in Christian ministry. The consequences of ignoring these principles may be disastrous eternally when we face the Lord to give an account of our service and ministry. We are all in ministry in various forms although not all of us are called to certain specific ministries. Let us not conclude that since we are not in very responsible positions in ministry, we are exempted from being faithful to the Lord in our service and life.
Paul’s concluding words to Timothy which also apply to us in varying degrees:
“preach the words, be prepared in season and out of season; correct, rebuke and encourage – with great patience and careful instruction.”(2 Tim.4:2).
” I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race. I have kept the faith” (4:7).
God will build his church and that he has given us a gospel message and gospel means by which it is to be built. Our methods are to flow out of and are to be connected to that message and those means.
2Tim. 4:6-8: Effectively, Paul was telling Timothy (and us) “Fulfill your ministry,” for ” I have fought the good fight and finished the race.” He was saying, I am about to cross the finish line. You cross the finish line, too.
In other words, your goal is nothing short of that finish line. There is no temporary ministry or temporary success, there is no earthly satisfaction sort of that finish line that will do. Cross the finish line.
Paul is exhorting Timothy and us: “:By God’s grace I have reached the finish line, you get there too”.
And Paul was saying this at the end of a ministry filled with sufferings for the Lord and pain. Even in the closing note to Timothy, he shared that he was alone and all had deserted him. Being faithful in gospel ministry does not mean that you are not going to be left alone, abandoned, deserted, forsaken. Your Master, the Lord Jesus, was left alone. All his disciples deserted him. But press on, reach the finish line, cross it and the Master is waiting for you at the finishing line!