The gospel of Jesus we preach to others is first and foremost for us. Treasure it by treasuring him. Fuel your passion for ministry by filling your soul with gospel grace. It would be the ultimate tragedy to come to the end of your ministry only to realize that you had labored in vain because you had not mined the depths of the riches of Christ and his grace toward you.

Take heed to yourselves, lest you be void of that saving grace of God which you offer to others.
I entered seminary as a naive and idealistic young man with grand designs and enormous hopes about future pastoral ministry. Between proper training and my passionate heart, nothing would stand in the way of me reaching souls for Christ — or so I thought.
I eagerly devoured every book assigned. Whether out of uncritical focus or predetermined agreement, everything I read affirmed that I was thinking correctly about what it took to succeed in ministry. I knew I was getting all I needed to be a great pastor.
Then I met Richard Baxter.
Of course, I mean the Richard Baxter who ministered in Kidderminster, England, from 1647 to 1661. That’s the power of words and sentences — you can actually meet and learn from someone who has long since died. And make no mistake: although dead, he still spoke to me and challenged me in a way that fundamentally altered my ministry.
Neglecting the Christ We Preach
I remember sitting in my seminary library, eager to dive into Baxter’s book The Reformed Pastor. All my classmates raved about it. I opened to the first chapter anticipating confirmatory words that would strengthen how I thought about ministry. To my surprise, I was stopped dead in my reading tracks.
Take heed to yourselves, lest you be void of that saving grace of God which you offer to others, and be strangers to the effectual working of that gospel which you preach; and lest, while you proclaim to the world the necessity of a Savior, your own hearts should neglect him, and you should miss of an interest in him and his saving benefits. (17)
Baxter’s words landed on me like a ton of bricks, and my heart was pierced with conviction. No one had ever challenged me to search my own heart for the very grace that I was so passionate to offer others. For the first time, I had been warned to “take heed” to my own heart for fear that I might miss out on “the effectual working of the gospel.”
Covering Dullness with Ministry
As I pored over Baxter’s words, it became clear to me that it was my own sanctification that was being challenged. I was still confident I was saved through faith, but I had assumed that my desire to preach the living waters of Christ meant that I had been drinking deeply from his well. The line “Take heed . . . lest you . . . be strangers to the effectual working of that gospel which you preach” splashed upon my soul like a bucket of cold water, waking me out of the state of spiritual slumber in which I had lived and studied.
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Eccher offers the reader five theses that he hopes “will guide you in your own remembrances of a vilified and lauded Reformer” (p. 201). To be sure, when one reads of a figure like Zwingli, there are times of both inspiration and horror. In a day when diligent study can sometimes be taken less seriously, one can be inspired by Zwingli’s strident work in studying the Scriptures in the original languages. Zwingli, as a Renaissance humanist, embodied the often-coined mantra ad fontes — an ongoing call to consistently return to the sources, to return to the Scriptures and to faithfully study, read, and preach them. Yet on the other hand, one also reads of the lengths Zwingli went to bring the reform he envisioned. Such a vision led him to stand idly by as his former friend —Felix Manz —was drowned for his Anabaptist beliefs. Zwingli wanted reform, but he wanted it on his terms.

It may be tempting to think that the year 1517 — when Luther famously wrote his Ninety-five Thesis — brought about the Reformation and hence clearly demarcated a unified Protestantism from Roman Catholicism. It may be tempting to think this way, but it is not accurate.
The Reformation was far more complicated. For one, the first Reformers were not actually looking to break away from the Catholic Church, but to reform it. It would only be many years later that such reform was unrealized, and a subsequent break ensued. Secondly, the Reformation was bigger than Luther and Wittenberg, Germany — others across Europe were looking to bring reform independent from Luther’s leadership and theology. The Reformers did not always see eye to eye, and this led to different movements and hostility between these movements. One contemporary of Luther who had his own vision of reform was Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531), and he wanted to see this vision take shape in Zurich, Switzerland.
In Stephen Brett Eccher’s recent book, Zwingli the Pastor: A Life in Conflict, Eccher looks to add to the scholarship on Zwingli studies, an influential and important first-generation Reformer. Eccher is clear to state that this book “is not a traditional biography” but a study of Zwingli’s ministry as a pastor in Zurich, with attention given to “how conflict shaped and informed his pastorate, while also providing the context for his developing theology” (p. 4).
Following a biographical sketch in the introduction, the book is divided into six chapters. Chapter one is on Zwingli the preacher. Eccher highlights the central place of the Scriptures in Zwingli’s reform work and his commitment to preach lectio continua (through books of the Bible) rather than according to the liturgical calendar. This continual, faithful preaching of Scripture was central to Zwingli’s ministry. As Eccher succinctly put it, “Gospel seeds sown produced Reformation fruit” (p. 36).
Chapter two is on the changes Zwingli made to the worship practices more generally. Here one reads of Zwingli slowly and progressively looking to bring reform as he moved the church away from Catholicism and toward the Reformed faith. This change was not something that happened overnight. One significant shift came about through Zwingli’s iconoclasm. Zwingli worked with the Council as the “shared commitment to remove images was to be carried out in an orderly manner” (p. 67). Another thing of note is that, by 1525, Zwingli stopped using public singing.
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The science we never share risks being a finding we never found. As the pile of unshared science grows, our scientific understanding of crises like pandemics suffers from the attrition of the science it doesn’t know. It should be in the interest of all scientists to facilitate the sharing of scientific ideas to ensure no science goes unshared from fear of ridicule or public execution. 

Early in the Covid pandemic, Michael Levitt noticed a gradual decay of case growth rates over time in Wuhan, and many dismissed or ignored his observations on account of what they viewed were improper credentials and unconventional mathematical methods (Gompertz curves, as opposed to conventional compartmental models in epidemiology).
Some researchers went so far as to call Michael Levitt’s work “lethal nonsense,” saying he was being an irresponsible member of the scientific community by not being an epidemiologist and presenting work that Levitt’s critics believed downplayed the coronavirus.
On March 17, 2020, John Ioannidis argued that Covid severity was uncertain and extreme containment policies such as lockdowns could possibly cause more harm than the pandemic itself, provoking a persistent culture of animosity towards Dr. Ioannidis, from false claims of conflicts-of-interest in 2020 to people accusing Ioannidis of “horrible science” and more.
My Experience as a “Deviant” Epidemiologist
As a mathematical biologist studying viruses jumping from bats to people for a few years prior to Covid, and as a time-series analyst with nearly a decade of experience forecasting by early 2020, I was also studying Covid since January 2020.
I noticed the wisdom of Levitt’s Gompertz curves – Levitt found an observation I myself had found independently, of regular decays in the growth rate of cases well before cases peaked in Wuhan, and then in early outbreaks across Europe and the US. In my own work, I found evidence in February 2020 that cases were doubling every 2-3 days (midpoint estimate 2.4 days) in the early Wuhan outbreak at a time when popular epidemiologists believed Covid prevalence would double every 6.2 days.
We knew at the time that the earliest cases were exposed in late-November 2019. Suppose the first case was December 1, 2019, 72 days prior the approximate early-2020 peak of cases in China on February 11, 2020. If cases strictly doubled every 2.4 days over that 72-day period, as many as 1 billion people, or 2/3 of China, would have been infected. If, instead, cases doubled every 5 days, we’d expect roughly 22,000 people to be infected in China.
If cases doubled every 6.2 days, we’d expect 3,100 people to be infected in China. The slower the case growth rate one believed, the fewer cases they expected, the higher the infection fatality rate they estimated and the more severe they worried the Covid-19 pandemic would be. These findings led me to see the merit in Dr. Levitt’s observations, and to agree with Dr. Ioannidis’ articulation of the scientific uncertainty surrounding the severity of the Covid pandemic the world was about to experience.
However, when I saw the world’s treatment of Levitt, Ioannidis, and many more scientists with contrary views that mirrored my own, I became fearful of possible reputational and professional risks from sharing my science. I tried to share my work privately but encountered professors claiming I was “not-an-epidemiologist”, and one told me I “would be directly responsible for the deaths of millions” if I published my work, was wrong, and inspired complacency in people who died of COVID.
Between these personal encounters from scientists in a variety of positions and the public stoning of Levitt and Ioannidis, I worried that publishing my results would result in me being publicly called not-an-epidemiologist like Levitt, and responsible for deaths like both Levitt and Ioannidis.
I managed to share my work on a CDC forecasting call on March 9th, 2020. I presented how I estimated these fast growth rates, their implications for interpreting the early outbreak in China, and their implications for the current state of COVID in the US. Community transmission of Covid in the US was known at the time to have started January 15th at the latest,
I showed how an outbreak starting in mid-January and doubling every 2.4 days could cause tens of millions of cases by mid-March, 2020. The host of the call, Alessandro Vespignani, claimed he didn’t believe it, that the fast growth rates might just be attributable to increasing rates of case-ascertainment, and ended the call.
Just 9 days after I presented on the CDC call, it was found that Covid admissions to ICUs were doubling every 2 days across health care providers in New York City. While case-ascertainment could be increasing, the criteria for ICU admission, such as quantitative thresholds of blood-oxygen concentrations, were fixed and so the ICU surge of NYC revealed a true surge of prevalence doubling every 2 days in the largest US metro area.
By late March, we estimated an excess of 8.7 million people across the US visited an outpatient provider with influenza-like illness *ILI) and tested negative for the flu, and this estimate of many patients in March corroborated a lower estimate of COVID pandemic severity.
Having watched Levitt, Ioannidis, Gupta and more get mobbed online for publishing their evidence, analyses and reasonings for a lower-severity pandemic, I knew that publishing the ILI paper was an act of deviance in an extremely active online scientific community.
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