We live in a world awash in words. The competition for your attention, your eyes, and your headspace — and that through your earspace — has never been more aggressive and ruthless. Our modern lives teem with digital and analog voices vying for our limited focus. They clamor for our money, our time, our energy, our love, our worship.

Oh, the countless, incessant voices of modern life, and with them, the unnerving lack of silence! Voices in the air, voices in print, the cacophony of voices that accompany and empower the endless scrolls and reels of images on our screens, moving and stationary. Yes, we are flooded in visuals as well, but our pixels do not thrive in silence. Even as loneliness becomes epidemic, few of the lonely know true silence and solitude.

In such times and spaces as ours, and at such an occasion as a new year, how might we learn to better drown out the remote, digital voices that have so few messages of importance for us, and better hear the near, precious, embodied voices? And in particular, what if the voice of Jesus carried the most weight of all?

Hear His Voice

Jesus says that his sheep will hear his voice (John 10:3), know his voice (John 10:4), and listen to his voice (John 10:16). As they read and reread and meditate on his word in Scripture, his people, illumined by his living and active Spirit, hear the voice of their living and active King, seated in power on the throne of the universe.

In his living and active word, they hear — we hear — his voice roar like many waters (Revelation 1:15) and console like the chords of many harps (Revelation 14:2). We hear his majestic voice thunder like a trumpet (Revelation 1:10), slicing through foes like a two-edged sword from his mouth (Revelation 1:16), and we hear him patiently, gently stand at the door and knock (Revelation 3:20), ready to perform the most exacting of life-saving surgeries with his verbal scalpel.

The very voice that said, “Lazarus, come out” (John 11:43), and cried aloud from the cross (Matthew 27:46, 50) — and one day will announce, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man” (Revelation 21:3) — this very voice continues to speak, even in 2024, through his written word and by the Spirit.

What might it mean for the voice of Jesus to genuinely be first in our lives? More than podcasts and radio and Spotify. More than television and movies. More than the voices on ESPN and Saturday Night Live and cable news and YouTube. More than the talking heads and hot takes of online influencers and endless political drivel.

What might it mean to really put his voice first?

First in Delight

Start with the heart. Our goal and deepest prayer is that we, like John the Baptist, would be among the friends who rejoice greatly at our bridegroom’s voice (John 3:29). This joy is what we aim at, long-term, with the fresh resolves and prayers of a new year: a better-conditioned heart, the slowly and stubbornly re-formed frame of our soul’s plasticity.

How often do we hear Christians concede (sometimes as a veiled excuse) to be “wired” a certain way? Indeed, there are some ways you’re wired. But often we talk about being hardwired in ways we’re actually far more plastic. And society’s not helping us with this. Our world has come to feign plasticity in precisely the places we’re hardwired (like biological sex) and to pretend hard-wiring in the places we’re plastic (desires and delights).

Mark this well for a new year: your desires, good and bad, are not givens. Now, you may not, in the moment, simply be able to will yourself into some specific delight, or disgust, but you can retrain your palate over time. In fact, with each passing day, you’re either solidifying and deepening your heart in its present desires and delights, or retraining it for different ones (Romans 6:19; 12:2).

So, this, among other designs, is what we aim at with new-year resolves and prayers: reshaping, reconditioning, retraining our hearts, to delight in what’s truly delightful (and so find appropriate disgust in what is truly disgusting). We seek to acquire new tastes, holy ones. And there is no person, and no voice, more worthy of our supreme delight than the voice of Jesus.

First in Deference

Next, as Jesus’s voice becomes the one we delight in most, so his voice comes to have greater functional authority and power in our lives. We grow in applying, and complying with, his word. Despite our old instincts as sinners, “in the midst of a crooked and twisted generation” (Philippians 2:15), we learn to defer to Jesus’s voice in Scripture over the chorus of other voices, including our own.

In times when many play fast and loose with truth in public, we might well rally afresh to truth even without bending our eyes and ears more attentively to the word of Christ. But as Jesus said to Pilate, “Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice” (John 18:37).

Are you really “of the truth”? Do you truly, practically, habitually listen to the voice of Jesus, and defer to his word, over your own preferences and partisan peers, when he says, on the one hand, “God made them male and female” (Mark 10:6), or on the other, “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you” (Luke 6:27)?

Do you hear him speak, and obey accordingly, when he says through his apostles that those who practice homosexuality will not inherit the kingdom (1 Corinthians 6:9; 1 Timothy 1:10), nor those who revile (1 Corinthians 6:10)? “Let marriage be held in honor” (Hebrews 13:4). Amen. And, next verse, “keep your life free from love of money” (Hebrews 13:5). Amen. On the one hand, “No longer walk as the Gentiles do” (Ephesians 4:17); on the other, walk “with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit” (Ephesians 4:2–3).

Deferring to the voice of Jesus will scarcely make us fit nicely into the secular parties of this generation. It will keep us on holy footing, rather than careening right or left with the swell of preferred voices. It will keep us from really finding a homeland here with the many faces of unbelief. The words of Jesus will be goads, on every side, to keep us from subtle worldly traps that would domesticate us to cities here (or prairies here), rather than to the city that is to come.

First Each Day

Finally, such delight and deference to Jesus’s voice will lead to a growing sense of need, and joy, to make his word a clear, objective, demonstrable priority in our lives — and that at the daily level.

I’m not interested here in suggesting any new laws about all true Christians doing morning devotions. Far and away, the testimony of saints throughout the centuries has celebrated the priority of starting the day, and setting the day’s mood and trajectory, with the voice of Jesus, but I can grant a few exceptions in some seasons of life.

Whatever we may claim about our bent or wiring, what we do first in the morning is telling. In some good measure, it reveals the priorities of our souls.

Strangely, most of us do go looking for words when we wake up, however consciously. This might be one of the things God has wired deeply in our human souls, to wake up looking for direction and nourishment, not just physical but spiritual. Tragically, many turn their morning hunger to notifications and news, to social media and news, to video clips and news. Some also turn to news.

But this hunger of soul you awake with every morning is not designed to feed on today’s news but on timeless good news. And that not just through our own rehearsals of gospel truths remembered from previous encounters, but through fresh communion with the God of the gospel, in his Son, by his Spirit, through his written word.

Now, “first each day” doesn’t mean “first only,” as if we might start with giving our attention to Jesus, then move on and scarcely ever have his person and voice return to our consciousness. We want his voice to abide, that is, remain, in us all day, not just in the morning (John 5:38; 8:31; 15:7; 1 John 2:14). So, we might ask about last each day as well. And in the middle. After all, that happy man of Psalm 1, whose “delight is in the law of the Lord,” not only seizes the mornings but “meditates day and night” (Psalm 1:2).

Resolved

Perhaps you’d resolve this with me for the new year: to put the voice of Jesus first. First in delight, first in deference, first each day. First in preference, in power, in priority.

Let’s resolve to have the very voice of God almighty, through his eternal Son, by the Spirit, in Scripture, dominate and liberate this new year. Through Bible reading, rereading, and meditation. Through sitting attentively under faithful preaching. Through committed engagement in the life of the church, with the people of the Book.

Resolved: to put the voice of Jesus first in 2024.

In our first session, we dealt with the heart of pastoral ministry: working from joy for the joy of our people. Then in the second, we reflected on the two main tasks of pastor-elders: teaching and governing. Now, in this final session, I was asked to address two specific practical issues.

At first glance, “husband of one wife” and “not quarrelsome” might seem like a random pairing, but interestingly enough at least two threads hold them together. First, both are particularly countercultural today (one has been for a while; the other, all of a sudden). Also (and this was surprising to me), both were live issues in Ephesus in the first century, when Paul gave the list of qualifications in 1 Timothy 3. Warnings against quarrelsomeness and disordered relationships between men and women is the focus of chapter 2, which leads into the elder qualifications in chapter 3.

First, Paul addresses the men in 2:8, “I desire then that in every place the men should pray, lifting holy hands without anger or quarreling.” Two quintessential dangers for men: anger and quarreling. May it not be so in the church. Then he turns to women in verses 9–15. Admittedly, the issues here are modest dress and proper submissiveness in the assembly, but we have here male-female, man-woman issues, which are related to (though not the same as) “husband of one wife.”

‘Husband of One Wife’

The qualification is literally “one-woman man” (miās gunaikos andra).

In 2015, Desiring God surveyed eight thousand of its users. The study found that ongoing pornography use was not only dreadfully common but increasingly higher among younger adults.

More than 15 percent of Christian men over age sixty admitted to ongoing use.
It was more than 20 percent for men in their fifties, 25 percent for men in their forties, and 30 percent for men in their thirties.
But nearly 50 percent of self-professing Christian men ages eighteen to twenty-nine acknowledged ongoing use of porn.

(The survey found a similar trend among women, but in lesser proportions: 10 percent of females ages eighteen to twenty-nine; 5 percent in their thirties; increasingly less for forties, fifties, and sixty-plus.)

Today the “one-woman man” may seem like an endangered species in some circles. In our oversexualized and sexually confused society, it may seem increasingly rare to come across married men who are truly faithful to their bride — in body, heart, and mind. It may seem even more rare to find unmarried men who are on the trajectory for that kind of fidelity to a future wife.

Of the fifteen basic qualifications for the office of elder in the local church, one-woman man may be the one that runs most against the grain of our society. We’re relentlessly pushed in precisely the opposite direction. Television, movies, advertising, social media, locker-room talk, and even casual conversations condition the twenty-first-century man to approach women as a consumer of many instead of the husband of one. The cultural icons teach our men to selfishly compromise and take rather than to carefully cultivate and guard fidelity to one woman.

But what’s rare in society is still easier to find, thank God, in biblically faithful churches. The true gospel is genuinely powerful and changes lives, even under such intense pressure from a world like ours. You can be pure. You can retrain your plastic brain. You can walk a different path by the power of God’s Spirit, even if that other path was once yours. In the company of others who enjoy pleasures far deeper than promiscuity, you can become the one-woman man our world needs.

For All Christians

Just because being a “one-woman man” is essential for church leaders does not mean it’s irrelevant for every Christian. The elder qualifications, as Don Carson says, are remarkable for being unremarkable. What’s demanded of church officers is not academic decoration, world-class intellect, and talents above the common man. Rather, the elders, as we’ve seen, are to be examples of normal, healthy, mature Christianity (1 Peter 5:3). The elder qualifications are flashpoints of the Christian maturity to which every believer should aspire and that every Christian, with God’s help, can attain in real measure.

God does not mean for us to relegate one-woman manhood to formal leaders. This is the glorious, serious, joy-filled calling of every follower of Christ. It’s a word for every Christian man (and every Christian woman to be a “one-man woman,” 1 Timothy 5:9). And it’s relevant for married and unmarried alike.

For Husbands and Bachelors

Clearly, “one-woman man” applies to married men. In faithfulness to the marriage covenant, the married man is to be utterly committed in mind, heart, and body to his one wife. Being a one-woman man has implications for where we go, whom we are with, how we interact with other women, what we do with our eyes, where we let our thoughts run, what we access on our computers and smartphones, how we use direct messaging, and what we watch on screen.

It’s also relevant for married men in the positive sense, not just the negative. A married Christian must not be a “zero-woman man,” living as though he isn’t married, neglecting to care adequately for his wife and family. If you’re married, faithfulness to the covenant requires your interests being divided (1 Corinthians 7:35), but only with your one woman.

Do you have to be married to be a one-woman man? The challenge to be a one-woman man applies not only to married men but to the unmarried as well. Are you a flirt? Do you move flippantly from one dating relationship to another? Do you enjoy the thrill of connecting emotionally with new women without moving with intentionality toward clarity about marriage?

Long before they marry, bachelors are setting (and revealing) their trajectory of fidelity. In every season of life and every relationship, however serious, they are preparing themselves to be one-woman men, or not, by how they engage with and treat the women in their lives.

Isn’t It ‘Husband of One Wife’?

At this point, you may be feeling the weight of this phrase “one-woman man” both for elder qualification and for Christian manhood in general. Don’t our English translations read “husband of one wife” in 1 Timothy 3:2 and Titus 1:6? That seems like a clearer box to check. It’s either true or it’s not — you’re either married to one woman or more — without any of these questions about whether your eyes and mind might be wandering unfaithfully or if your connections are shady. And nothing that might apply to the unmarried.

In a previous generation, this may have been the most debated of the elder qualifications. Some take it to require that church leaders be married; others say it bars divorced men who have remarried; others claim it was designed specifically to rule out polygamy. But one problem, among others, with each of those interpretations is that they make the qualification digital — that is, plainly true or false — rather than analog, like every one of the other fourteen qualifications.

The traits for leadership in the local church are brilliantly designed to prompt the plurality of elders, and the congregation, to make a collective decision about a man’s readiness for church office. Sober-minded, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable — these are analog and unavoidably subjective categories (not easy either-or questions) that require careful thought and evaluation.

I believe Paul intended us to read “one-woman man” as requiring the same spirit of discernment, not as a black-and-white, no-exceptions rule. Rather: Is this man today, so far as we know, through years of tested faithfulness, faithful to his one wife? Is he above reproach in the way he relates to women? Is he manifestly a one-woman man?

Ask Yourself

Brothers, ask yourself these questions, and be ruthlessly honest: Am I a one-woman man? What, if anything, in my life would call this into question? What habits, what relationships, what patterns do I need to bring into the light with trusted brothers, and ask God afresh to make me truly, deeply, gloriously, increasingly a one-woman man?

At the level of the public qualification, if you’re married, what is your reputation? Do people think of you — your speech, your conduct, your body language — as joyfully and ruthlessly faithful to your wife? Or might there be some question? Are you known for demonstrating self-control publicly and privately for the sake of the purity and fidelity of your marriage?

For the unmarried, what do your friendships and relationships look like with the opposite sex? Do you genuinely treat women “as sisters, in all purity” (1 Timothy 5:2)? Are you dabbling with pornography, trying to stop, but still allowing room for it? Or have you become tragically desensitized to impurity because of the boundaries being crossed on your screens? In your thought life, on the Internet, in your interactions, are you a one-woman man waiting for your one woman?

In Christ, we need not be satisfied with anything less. Try as hard as you can, you will not be satisfied. But in Christ, we are called to be one-woman men in a world that expects and encourages far less. And in Christ, you have the resources you need to see that fidelity become reality. This is what God expects and makes possible in the church and requires in its leaders.

And to end this section with a practical exhortation: Brothers, you are not a victim of your own heart. Seize it. Direct it. Renounce disordered desires. Resolve to cultivate new ones. How you handle your heart in individual moments forms a pattern that profoundly forms and shapes your plastic brain and desires. Do not pretend to adjust the fixed, objective world to your subjective, disordered desires.

Rather, take hold of your heart and tell it, “Heart, feel according to reality. Be shaped by truth. Learn to feel how you should feel about reality.” This is what wedding rings are for. They are fixed, objective, solid, near, on your very hand, to remind you of objective reality. You made an exclusive covenant. You vowed to her before God and your witnesses. Now, renounce sin, embrace righteousness, and grow your heart to flourishing within the life-giving tracks of the covenant.

Satan thrills to have you follow your sinful heart, whether you celebrate it full-on, like the world does, or whether you back into it by thinking there’s nothing you can do about it. Seize it in moments to form habits that mightily reform and reshape your heart over time. We tend to overestimate what we can do in the moment (and then get discouraged and give up), while we tend to underestimate what we can do, with God’s help, in the long run.

And all that happens within the matrix of God’s ongoing grace: his word, prayer for help, and accountability from brothers and your wife. This is not mere willpower, because God gave us his word and his Spirit. Word in hand, as your God-provided tool, and Spirit in you, go to work and conform your heart to reality.

‘Not Quarrelsome’

This brings us to “not quarrelsome.” Or, as the four-hundred-year-old King James Version (KJV) translates it with surprising timelessness, “not a brawler.” The best of the KJV qualifications are in verse 3: “Not given to wine, no striker, not greedy of filthy lucre; but patient, not a brawler.” (And verse 7: “He must have a good report of them which are without.”)

Of the full list of fifteen, “not a brawler” is one of just four negative traits. Modern translations say “not quarrelsome” (ESV and NIV) or “not pugnacious” (NASB), but the language of the KJV has endured. We still know what a brawler is, and it doesn’t take much foresight to recognize what a problem it would be to have one as a pastor — or, God forbid, a whole team of brawlers.

However, a nuance that “not a brawler” may lack is the distinction between the physical and verbal dimensions of combat. This is the upside of the term “not quarrelsome.” In 1 Timothy 3, the physical (if there were any question) has been covered already: “not violent but gentle” (“no striker,” KJV). What’s left is the temperamental, and especially the verbal.

We all know by the war within us how the flesh of man finds itself at odds with the Spirit of God. By nature, we are prone to quarrel when we should make peace, and not to ruffle feathers when we should speak up. And in a day in which so many are prone to sharpness online and cowardice face-to-face, we need leaders who are “not quarrelsome” and at the same time have the courage to “reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching” (2 Timothy 4:2). We need men who “contend for the faith” (Jude 3) without being contentious. We need pastors who are not brawlers — and yet know when (and how) to say the needful hard word.

We need men who know how to disagree without creating unnecessary division. We need pastors and elders with sober minds and enough self-control to avoid needless controversies, and with enough conviction and courage to move gently and steadily toward conflicts that await wise, patient leadership.

Men Who Make Peace

The flip side of the negative “not quarrelsome” would be the positive peaceable. Titus 3:2 is the only other New Testament use of the word we translate “not quarrelsome” (amachon): “Remind [Christians] . . . to speak evil of no one, to avoid quarreling, to be gentle, and to show perfect courtesy toward all people” (Titus 3:1–2).

James 3, which warns, “Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness” (verse 1), also directs us to “the wisdom from above,” which is bookended by peace:

The wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, open to reason, full of mercy and good fruits, impartial and sincere. And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace. (verses 17–18)

Healthy pastors are peacemakers at heart, not pugilists. Like Mufasa: “I’m only brave when I have to be. Simba, being brave doesn’t mean you go looking for trouble.” They don’t fight for sport; they fight to secure and defend true peace. They are not wolf hunters but competent defenders of the flock.

They know first and foremost — as Christ’s representatives to their people — that our God is “the God of peace” (Romans 15:33); our message, “the gospel of peace” (Ephesians 6:15). Our Lord Jesus himself made peace (Ephesians 2:15; Colossians 1:20) and “is our peace” (Ephesians 2:14), preaching “peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near” (Ephesians 2:17). Christian leaders want real peace — enough not to avoid the necessary conflict that may be required to secure real peace.

But making peace is not unique to Christian leaders. Rather, we insist on it in our leaders so that they model and encourage peacemaking for the whole church. “Blessed are the peacemakers,” said our Lord, “for they shall be called sons of God” (Matthew 5:9). “Let us pursue what makes for peace” (Romans 14:19). “Strive for peace with everyone” (Hebrews 12:14). “If possible, so far as it depends on you” — all of you who are members of the body of Christ — “live peaceably with all” (Romans 12:18).

This kind of peacemaking means not only leading our flocks in preserving and enjoying peace but also in making the peace that first requires confrontation. Some controversies cannot be avoided, and we engage not because we simply want to fight and win, but because we want to win those being deceived, and protect the flock from their deception. God means for leaders in his church to have the kind of spiritual magnanimity to rise above the allure of petty disputes, and to press valiantly for peace and Christ-exalting harmony in places angels might fear to tread.

What Brawlers Fail to Do

Paul’s letters to Timothy and Titus are particularly helpful in this regard, as the veteran apostle gives his counsel to younger leaders in the thick of church conflict.

Perhaps no single passage is more perceptive for leaders in times of conflict than 2 Timothy 2:24–26. More than any other, this charge expands what it means for pastors to be peaceable and “not quarrelsome.” Alongside 1 Peter 5:1–5, I would put this text as one of the most important words in all the Bible for church leaders:

The Lord’s servant must not be quarrelsome but kind to everyone, able to teach, patiently enduring evil, correcting his opponents with gentleness. God may perhaps grant them repentance leading to a knowledge of the truth, and they may come to their senses and escape from the snare of the devil, after being captured by him to do his will.

Paul fleshes out the negative “not quarrelsome” with four great positive charges.

First is “kind to everyone.” The presence of conflict does not excuse a lack of kindness. How pastors carry themselves in conflict is as important as engaging the right battles. And the Lord calls his servants not to be kind just to the sheep while treating potential wolves like trash, but to be “kind to everyone” — both to the faithful and to those who at present seem to be opponents.

Then comes “able to teach,” which, as we’ve seen, includes both ability and inclination (1 Timothy 3:2) and is the main trait that distinguishes pastor-elders (1 Timothy 3:1–7) from deacons (1 Timothy 3:8–13). In the previous verse (2 Timothy 2:23), Paul refers to “foolish, ignorant [apaideutos] controversies” — literally, “untaught” or “uneducated.”

How many conflicts in the church begin in, or are fueled by, honest ignorance, and need pastors to come in with kindness (not with guns blazing) to provide sober-minded clarity and instruction from God’s word? The people need patient teaching on the topic. Pastors, as we’ve seen, are fundamentally teachers, and Christ, the great Teacher, doesn’t mean for his undershepherds to put aside their primary calling when conflict arises. Conflict is the time when humble, careful, Bible-saturated teaching can be needed most.

Next is “patiently enduring evil.” Rarely do serious conflicts resolve as quickly as we would like. And whether some genuine evil is afoot or just an honest difference of opinion, good pastors lead the way in patience. That doesn’t mean resigning themselves to inaction, or letting conflict carry on needlessly without attention and modest next steps, but patiently walking the path of a process — not standing still and not bull-rushing the issue, but faithfully and patiently approaching the conflict one step at a time. The pastors should be the most patient and least passive men in the church — and therefore the most able to deal with conflict and make genuine peace.

The fourth and final charge from 2 Timothy 2 is “correcting his opponents with gentleness” (verse 25). In commending kindness, teaching, and patience, Paul doesn’t leave aside correction. God calls pastors to rightly handle his word (2 Timothy 2:15), which is profitable not only for teaching but for correction (2 Timothy 3:16). The goal is, first, protection of the flock from error, and then restoration of those in error “in a spirit of gentleness” (Galatians 6:1).

The pastor’s heart for peace, not mere polemics, comes out in the kind of soul that endures in needful conflict: we pray that “God may perhaps grant them repentance” (2 Timothy 2:25). We long for restoration, not revenge (Romans 12:19). We pray first for repentance, not retribution.

And we remember that the real war is not against flesh and blood — especially within the household of faith. There is a cosmic war that far outstrips any culture war. Our final enemy is Satan, not our human “opponents.” We want them to come to repentance — to “come to their senses and escape from the snare of the devil” (2 Timothy 2:26) — through kindness, humble teaching, patience, and gentle correction — remembering that “we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 6:12). We do not first want to be rid of our opponents but to win them back from Satan’s sway.

Hardest on Themselves

How, then, do pastors pick their battles? What foolish controversies do they wisely avoid, and what conflicts require their courage to address kindly, patiently, and gently with humble teaching?

First, as we have noted again and again today, pastors do not work solo in the New Testament. Christ not only put teachers in charge of his churches, but a plurality of teachers. And he intends for countless prudential issues in pastoral work to be worked out in the context of a team of sober-minded, self-controlled, self-sacrificial leaders who check one another’s blind spots, and shore up each other’s weaknesses. Together, such men learn over time to be hardest on themselves, not their flock.

The heart of Christian leadership is not taking up privileges, but laying them down; not gravitating toward the easy work, but gladly crucifying personal comfort and ease to do the hard work to serve others; “not domineering over those in [our] charge, but being examples” of Christlike self-sacrifice for them (1 Peter 5:3).

When trying to discern between silly controversies to avoid and conflicts to engage with courage, pastors might ask:

Is this conflict about me — my ego, my preferences, my threatened illusion of control — or about my Lord, his gospel, and his church? In other words, is this for my glory or Christ’s? Am I remembering that my greatest enemy is not others, or even Satan, but my own indwelling sin?
What is the overall tenor of my ministry, and our shared ministry as a team? Is it one fight after another? Are there seasons of peace? Do I appreciate peace, or does it strangely make me nervous and send me looking for the next fight? Do I need conflict because I crave attention and drama? Is securing and then preserving Christian peace clearly my goal?
Am I going with or against my flesh, which inclines me to fight when I shouldn’t, and back down when I should kindly, patiently, gently engage? As the servant of the Lord, not self, am I avoiding petty causes that an unholy part of me wants to pursue, while taking on the difficult, painful, righteous, and costly causes that an unholy part of me wants to flee? And here we might ask about online versus “real life” in our own churches as well: Is this conflict actually my responsibility and objective calling in my church, or am I neglecting my real-life church to chase my curiosities online?
Am I simply angry at my opponents, desiring to show them up or expose them, or am I compassionate for them, genuinely praying that God would free them from deception and grant them repentance? Am I inclined to anger against them? Are tears for them even a possibility?

One last practical word here before we close. Let me mention Bob Yarbrough’s commentary on yet another place where Paul exhorts pastors to stay out of stupid tussles. First Timothy 4:7 says, “Have nothing to do with irreverent, silly myths.” Yarbrough writes,

Some ideas or proposals are so far beyond the pale of plausible that a pastor has no time or business giving them the dignity of extensive attention. This does not mean writing people off crudely. But overall, Paul’s view (and example) is to focus on and promulgate the truths of Christ and the faith, not to be distracted with undue attention to aberrant beliefs. There are contemporary analogies, for example, in conspiracy theories, so-called urban legends, and endless issue-oriented (and often polemical) blogs and websites from which most pastors find it wise to recuse themselves. (Pastoral Epistles, 238)

To be clear, this is not a reductionistic call for all pastors to stay off social media (though many find that wise). Rather, more holistically — in our preaching and teaching, our conversations and emails, our text messages and online comments — do we “focus on and promulgate the truths of Christ and the faith”?

Who Sets the Agenda?

Practically, then, one question to ask ourselves as pastors — about our preaching schedule, about our meeting agendas, about our conversations — is, Who sets the agenda? Is it the world? Is it what’s trending on Twitter? Is it the never-ending flow of daily news that keeps us from giving our limited attention to what’s most important and enduringly relevant? Is it the latest error you’ve been made aware of in a famous church or Christian spokesman far, far away? Or is it even the loudest, most immature voices in our own church?

When Yarbrough mentions Paul’s “example” in the quote above, he adds this footnote:

It is an ongoing source of scholarly frustration that Paul is not more specific about the names and views of his opponents. He tends to focus on what he holds to be true and redemptive rather than allow gospel detractors to set the agenda for his remarks or exhaust his energies in venting so as to profile them.

Paul focuses on what he holds to be true and redemptive — and he does not “allow gospel detractors to set the agenda.” That is a good word for pastors in the Information Age. To be clear, it’s not that gospel detractors don’t inform Paul’s ministry. Indeed they do. We have thirteen letters from Paul that give evidence to his being seriously informed by, and aware of, quite a number of grave errors in his day. However, being aware of error, and responding to error through a “focus on what [we hold] to be true and redemptive,” is a far cry from letting error set the agenda.

God means for his ministers, together, by his Spirit, to strike the balance, dynamic as it can be. We can learn to avoid foolish controversies and move wisely toward genuine conflicts. We can be unafraid of disagreements while not creating divisions. In a world of haters, trolls, and brawlers, we are to be men, set apart by Christ to lead his church, who fight well, in love, for peace.

Brothers, we have a countercultural calling in this age, not only as pastors but as Christians. Don’t give in. Don’t coast. Don’t let the world take your lunch. Save both yourself and your hearers. “Pay careful attention to yourselves and to all the flock” (Acts 20:28). “And when the chief Shepherd appears, you will receive the unfading crown of glory” (1 Peter 5:4).

Bethlehem would prove to be the perfect town.

Ancient Israel had no better spot for this quiet yet promising birth — for a royal heir who would grow up in the boonies but come to die in the capital.

On its own, the little town was not great. It was far more like the rural village of Nazareth than celestial Jerusalem. But Bethlehem was iconic for its potential — the city of David — the place where Israel’s greatest king was born and raised, before ascending to the throne and founding the city of kings.

Unlike the splendor of Jerusalem, and unlike unimpressive Nazareth, Bethlehem had a veiled majesty. So did the day of Jesus’s birth. From all appearances, this newborn was ordinary, even earthy — wrapped in swaddling clothes, and laid, of all places, in the spot where barn animals fed. So too his first visitors were plain and unsophisticated: shepherds keeping watch on the night shift.

Yet the majestic host of heaven had come to announce this birth. Something splendid was in the offing — but humbly, slowly, patiently. Big city Jerusalem would wait in the distance for more than three decades.

Bethlehem: From Majesty to None

Christmas marks the eternal divine Son “leaving” the majesty of heaven, so to speak. In truth, he came to earth without leaving heaven. Not ceasing to be God, he took to himself our humanity. He “did not count equality with God” and his divine majesty “a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant,” and there, in the city of David, “being born in the likeness of men” (Philippians 2:6–7). He “emptied himself” not by losing divinity but by taking our humanity. And not only did he descend, in birth, to the veiled majesty of Bethlehem but even lower in his backwater childhood in Nazareth.

There, as Isaiah had foretold seven centuries before,

he grew up before him like a young plant,and like a root out of dry ground;he had no form or majesty that we should look at him,and no beauty that we should desire him. (Isaiah 53:2)

“No majesty” need not mean that he was especially ugly — that too might draw the wrong attention — but that he was pretty normal — “no form or majesty that we should look at him.” He was no Adonis, no sight of masculine beauty to behold. Not so handsome as to stand out and draw attention.

Veiling his divine majesty with humanity, he lived among us, as one of us, for more than three decades in the very “no majesty” of normal humanity that most of us know so well.

Galilee: Majesty Through Man

After decades in obscurity, Jesus “went public” in his thirties as a teacher of the masses, and a discipler of men. Those who followed him did so not because of his looks or wealth or political power, but they were won by his extraordinary words, and accompanying miracles, which he performed to give glory to God. So Luke 9:42–43 reports,

Jesus rebuked the unclean spirit and healed the boy, and gave him back to his father. And all were astonished at the majesty of God.

How striking, in such circumstances, that he had been so clear with his words, and so humble in his demeanor, that it was God’s majesty, not his own, that astonished the crowds. This is what majesty does: it astounds, it amazes, it overwhelms. It inspires awe and makes human hearts marvel. It portrays a kind of magnificence that is deserving of worship (Acts 19:27). Yet Jesus himself was so plain, so normal, so human. No one spoke like this man (John 7:46), and did what he could do (John 9:32), yet he relentlessly looked and pointed to heaven. When the crowds stood in awe of him, and saw his unnerving normalcy, they found themselves astounded at the majesty of God.

On the Mount: Majesty in Man

Still, the divine majesty the crowds saw through him soon became a divine majesty his disciples would see in him. His inner circle of Peter, James, and John would get the first glimpse, ahead of time, of his unveiled majesty to come.

At his “transfiguration” on the mountain, the Father showed them the coming majesty that was veiled during Jesus’s state of humiliation in the days of his flesh. Later Peter would tell about the sight they beheld. Speaking especially for James and John, he writes,

we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty. For when he received honor and glory from God the Father, and the voice was borne to him by the Majestic Glory, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased,” we ourselves heard this very voice borne from heaven, for we were with him on the holy mountain. (2 Peter 1:16–18)

Peter had the privilege of being one of the three who, ahead of time, witnessed his majesty — that is, Jesus’s own divine-human majesty that would be secured and revealed on the other side of the cross. In his resurrected, glorified state, the God-man — divine from all eternity, and now fully human forever as well — would come into his unsurpassed human majesty. The one who from all eternity shared in divine majesty (in heaven) and took on human no-majesty in his state of humiliation (Bethlehem and Nazareth), and pointed to divine majesty (Galilee), would soon shine in Jerusalem with divine majesty, and be the man of divine majesty forever (New Jerusalem).

Jerusalem: Majesty on the Cross

At that transfiguration, what still lay before him was the cross, inglorious and glorious, horrible and wonderful. Here, in Jerusalem, his last and culminating act of humiliation would also, in time, prove to be the first great act of exaltation and cosmic majesty. As he says in John 12:31–32, having arrived in the holy city, in his near approach to the cross,

Now is the judgment of this world; now will the ruler of this world be cast out. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.

John then adds that Jesus “said this to show by what kind of death he was going to die” (John 12:33). His lifting up to the cross would be both his last great act of self-humbling and, simultaneously, his first lifting up to glory.

Zion: Majesty on the Throne

Three days later the veil was lifted. His Father raised him to fully human, glorified, new life. Then, for forty days, his divine-human majesty could shine out in fuller strength, before he would be lifted up yet again, now to heaven itself, there to sit, in ultimate honor, “at the right hand of the Majesty on high” (Hebrews 1:3; also 8:1).

His mission finished, purification for sins complete, his majesty comes full circle: from heaven, to earth, to Nazareth and Galilee, finally to Jerusalem, and back to heaven, now to await one final move: the New Jerusalem coming down out of heaven to earth, where Jesus will reign with divine-human majesty beyond our imagining. Then will he fulfill, in finality, the great Bethlehem prophecy of Micah 5:

You, O Bethlehem Ephrathah,who are too little to be among the clans of Judah,from you shall come forth for meone who is to be ruler in Israel,whose coming forth is from of old,from ancient days. . . .And he shall stand and shepherd his flock in the strength of the Lord,in the majesty of the name of the Lord his God.And they shall dwell secure, for now he shall be greatto the ends of the earth.And he shall be their peace. (Micah 5:2, 4–5)

Human and divine. He is son of David, yet one whose coming forth is from of old. A ruler in Israel, and over all the nations, he shepherds in the very strength of God almighty, and as God almighty, and in the majesty of God’s own name. At long last, the king has come, with God-bestowed splendor and majesty (Psalm 21:5), Messiah who in his majesty rides “out victoriously for the cause of truth and meekness and righteousness” (Psalm 45:4).

Bethlehem was perfect for such a birth. Quietly and unexpectedly as he came, Christmas Day too would change everything, in time, and remake both heaven and earth.

Now, by faith, we see him exalted. Soon, by sight, we will behold his full majesty.

Forty-four years ago, on October 14, 1979, John Piper felt himself irretrievably called to pastoral ministry. He was on sabbatical after teaching six years at Bethel College. He was studying Romans 9. Reflecting on that season, he would say later, in 2002,

As I studied Romans 9 day after day, I began to see a God so majestic and so free and so absolutely sovereign that my analysis merged into worship, and the Lord said, in effect, “I will not simply be analyzed — I will be adored. I will not simply be pondered — I will be proclaimed. My sovereignty is not simply to be scrutinized — it is to be heralded. It is not grist for the mill of controversy — it is gospel for sinners who know that their only hope is the sovereign triumph of God’s grace over their rebellious will.”

In 2019, on the fortieth anniversary of John’s call to the pastorate, Justin Taylor published an article at Desiring God called “This Word Must Be Preached,” which quotes extensively from John’s 1800-word journal he wrote longhand that night he first felt called — and very much relates to our second session here today.

First, Justin comments, “It is remarkable how realistic [John] was that night. He knew himself well.” Then a quote from John’s journal:

I know, really know, I would despair as a pastor. I would despair that my people are not where I want them to be, I would despair at ruptured study and writing goals, I would despair at barren administrative details. [But he asked himself:] “Who shall shepherd the flock of God? People who love barrenness? People who feel no flame to study God and write it out? People who weep not over the tares and the choking wheat? Is the criterion for judging one’s fitness for the ministry that one feels no pain in the mechanics of ‘running a church’? Is the calling so managerial in our day that the Word burning to be spoken and lived and applied is no qualification?”

Second, another quote from John’s journal, contrasting himself with his father, who was a traveling evangelist: “My heart is not in one-time shots or one-week shots. I am not a gifted evangelist. My heart leans hard to regularity of feeding [that’s the work of pastor-elders]. I believe little in the injection method to health. I believe in the long, steady diet of rich food in surroundings of love.”

Third, Justin comments about John that “he had a hunger to be the direct instrument of the Word.” For John, that meant being a local-church pastor, not a seminary professor. He wanted to be “a vessel of [God’s] Word” in the church. So he left the academy for the pastorate. He became a preacher, but he emphatically did not cease to be a teacher. Because pastors are teachers.

In our second session, we turn to the two qualifications for eldership that correspond most directly with the two main tasks of the elders. The two tasks are feeding and leading. Pastors feed the flock and lead the flock. The two qualifications, then, are “able to teach” and “sober-minded.” And we’ll end with how all of us, young and old (and perhaps especially young, and those aspiring to the work), might grow in these two central qualifications.

1. Feeding the Flock (Able to Teach)

Perhaps you can imagine a scenario in which a man is being considered for eldership, and the question “Is he ‘able to teach’?” comes up. Let’s say the man is not a known teacher, but the one who is advocating for his candidacy responds, “Teaching is not his strength. He’s rarely willing to do public speaking. But if you put a gun to his head . . .”

Stop. Such a minimalistic understanding is not what Paul means by “able to teach.” Rather, what he’s after, and what we should be after, is the more maximalist assertion: “He’s the kind of man who will hardly stop teaching — even if you put a gun to his head.”

Pastors and elders, paid and unpaid, full-time and lay, are to be teachers. “Able to teach” (one word in the Greek, didaktikos) is the most central of the elder qualifications in 1 Timothy 3 (listed eighth of the fifteen) and also the most distinctive. The single qualification that most plainly sets the pastor-elders apart from the deacons is “able to teach” — or perhaps even better, “apt or prone to teach.”

Such teaching bent and ability in pastors is not to be minimal, but maximal. We want the kind of man who will hardly stop teaching, even if you put a gun to his head. As he learns, he wants to teach. As he studies, he thinks about teaching. He breathes teaching. We might say he’s a teacher at heart. He loves to teach, with all the planning and discipline and patience and energy and exposure to criticism that good teaching requires.

A pastor who is didaktikos, “able to teach,” is not just “able to teach if necessary,” but rather “eager to teach when possible.” He’s bent to teach — not only able in terms of skill but also eager in terms of proclivity.

In English, we have the word “didactic,” built on the Greek didachē for “teaching.” But we don’t have an easy equivalent for the Greek adjective didaktikos. Maybe we need something like “didactive” or “teachative.” If “talkative” refers to someone who is “fond of or given to talking,” “teachative” would mean someone “fond of or given to teaching.”

The point is that New Testament local leaders — the pastor-elders — are teachers. Christianity is a teaching movement. Jesus was the consummate teacher. He chose and discipled his men to be teachers who discipled others also (Matthew 28:19; 2 Timothy 2:2). After his ascension, the apostles spoke on Christ’s behalf and led the early church through teaching — and when their living voices died, their writings became the church’s ongoing polestar, along with Old Testament Scripture (but surpassing it), for teaching the churches.

And so, fitting with the very nature of the Christian faith, Christ appoints men who are “teachative,” didaktikos, which entails at least three important realities we would be wise to keep in mind today: we look for men who are equipped to teach, effective at teaching, and eager to teach.

Equipped to Teach

First of all, a man may be off-the-charts teachative, and be little more than a liability if he has not been sufficiently equipped in sound doctrine. The miracle of new birth does not include instantaneous miracles of equipping for leadership. Now, we might grant a kind of miracle status to any sinner coming, in time, to have genuinely sound theology, but this would be a long-range miracle worked out through diligent training over time, not the endowment of a mere moment.

As Walter Henrichsen wrote fifty years ago (in 1974), disciples are made, not born. And so teachers. Jesus spoke about a righteous scribe being “trained for the kingdom of heaven.” He “brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old” (Matthew 13:52). “A disciple is not above his teacher,” he says, “but everyone when he is fully trained will be like his teacher” (Luke 6:40).

To become a Christian requires no training, just faith: “To the one who does not work but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness” (Romans 4:5). But one does not become a teacher (nor practically holy) by faith alone. Rather, grace trains us, in life, over time, “to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions” (Titus 2:12). And those whom Christ gives to his church as pastor-teachers, he sees to their “being trained in the words of the faith” (1 Timothy 4:6).

Training is necessary for maturity (Hebrews 5:14), and training requires the discipline of persisting in momentary discomfort, even pain, for the reward set before us (Hebrews 12:11). So when we emphasize in pastors the necessity of a proclivity and ability to teach, we do not overlook a critical component of Christian teachers: training. Pastors must be equipped in sound doctrine to teach sound doctrine. It doesn’t happen without work.

Effective at Teaching

Second, the pastor-elders of the church must also be effective teachers. That is, they must be skillful — able in the sense of good. It’s not enough if they want to teach, and have been trained in sound doctrine, but they’re not any good at teaching. Then the church becomes a sitting duck, or unprotected flock. If the pastors aren’t effective teachers, it’s only a matter of time until wolves carry the day and feast on the lambs.

And so Paul says, as his culminating qualification in the Titus 1 list, the pastor-elder “must hold firm to the trustworthy word as taught, so that he may be able to give instruction in sound doctrine and also to rebuke those who contradict it” (Titus 1:9). That is, he must know “the trustworthy word,” and be trained in it, and genuinely “hold firm” to it.

But then begins the work of teaching in its twofold sense: feeding the flock (“give instruction in sound doctrine”) and defending the flock (“rebuke those who contradict it”). And if the pastors and elders are poor or ineffective teachers, the sheep go hungry — or get eaten.

So pastors and elders, as a team, must be effective teachers — that is, effective in the context of the particular local church where they are called. They need not compete with the world’s best orators on popular podcasts or television. But they must be effective teachers of their people, in their context. When push comes to shove, the pastors-teachers must get the job done, or the wolves take the sheep.

Eager to Teach

Third, we come back to where we started and the heart of the teaching qualification — that is, the heart of a teacher. We need men who are eager to teach — not just willing to have their arm bent once in a while to fill a slot, not with a gun to their heads. But men who are teachers, the pastor-teachers.

“Remember your leaders,” says Hebrews 13:7, “those who spoke to you the word of God.” Hebrews could assume that their leaders were those who spoke God’s word to them, because their leaders were teachers.

Christianity is a word-critical, teaching-critical faith. The leaders teach. And good teachers, in time and with sufficient maturation, come to lead. The pastor-elders, then, are called not only to lead or govern, but first and foremost to labor in word and teaching. And since the work, at its heart, is the work of teaching, we want men who want to teach. They are eager to do it. (And brothers, this too can be cultivated.)

Such didactive men think like teachers, not judges. Their orientation toward the church is not mainly as those rendering verdicts but envisioning possibilities, providing fresh perspective and information, faithfully teaching the Scriptures, making persuasive arguments, patiently reviewing and restating and illustrating, and praying for God’s miraculous work in life change.

Is it not amazing that when Paul speaks into how Timothy should carry himself in the midst of the conflict with false teachers in the Ephesian church, he says, “The Lord’s servant must not be quarrelsome but kind to everyone, able to teach, patiently enduring evil, correcting his opponents with gentleness” (2 Timothy 2:24–25)? Look at what company “able to teach” keeps: not quarrelsome but kind, patient, gentle — not apart from correction, but gentle in “correcting his opponents.”

“Able to teach” is not minimal competence but a kind of virtue — a magnanimity — arising from the heart and proper training.

2. Leading the Sheep (Able to Govern)

Now, pastors are not only teachers. As overseers, they “watch over” the flock. As elders, they counsel and guide the people. As shepherds, they muster the collective forethought to envision where to go next for green pastures and still waters, lead the sheep in that direction, and wield the “comfort” of their rod to crack the skulls of wolves to protect the sheep.

So, not only does Christ gift his church with leaders who have such a proclivity, being teachative, but he also — strange as it may seem to us — puts these teachers in charge as the church’s lead officers. The elders feed and lead. Teaching and oversight are paired in 1 Thessalonians 5:12 and 1 Timothy 5:17, and 1 Timothy 2:12 provides that particularly memorable coupling of the elders’ teaching with their exercising authority in the local church, particularly in the gathered assembly: “I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man.” (Then, three verses later, come the qualifications for those who exercise authority through teaching: the elders.)

Amazingly, the risen Christ, in building his church on his terms, not the world’s, is so audacious as to appoint teachers to lead, which is both surprising (because teachers, as a group, can be so idealistic and inefficient) and fitting (because Christianity is a teaching movement). That Christ made teachers to be pastors (and pastors, teachers) confirms what a few sharp souls might have suspected all along: that Jesus really is more interested in the church’s effectiveness than its efficiency.

So, pastors teach. They are, at heart, teachers. The plurality of elders is, in an important sense, a team of teachers who also govern. The call to pastoral ministry is not for specialized administrators of large departments. Nor is it a call for brawlers and pugilists, more apt to quarrel than to teach (as we’ll see in the final session). Pastors teach, and are the kind of men who will graciously hardly cease — even if you put a gun to their heads.

Now, what are we to say about their governing? If “able to teach” (didaktikos), as we’ve said, is the most central and most distinctive of the elder qualifications, “sober-minded” might be the most underrated or underappreciated.

I remember on several occasions, sitting as an elder among elders, brainstorming names for future additions to the council. By God’s grace, the voicing of some names elicited words of praise. Sometimes there was largely enthusiasm, with some minor misgivings. On occasion, it seemed as if many of us intuited that “something’s not right” or “doesn’t resonate” when thinking of this man as an elder. Over time, I came to learn that often the language we were groping for was right here in the eldership qualifications: sober-minded.

It is a remarkable turn of events that Jesus appoints a team of teachers, in essence, to lead his local churches. However — this is where we come especially to “sober-minded” — Jesus does not call these pastor-teachers to teaching alone. He calls the pastor-elders, under the gathered assembly of saints, to lead the people — leadership that requires they be, both individually and collectively, sober-minded.

Levelheaded, Not Imbalanced

As I said, of the fifteen pastor-elder qualifications in 1 Timothy 3, sober-mindedness might be the most underrated. Not only is teaching (with preaching) central to the pastors’ work, but also vital is “exercising oversight” (1 Peter 5:2). Pastor-elders not only “labor among you” as teachers but “are over you in the Lord” (1 Thessalonians 5:12). They both feed and lead. The elder “must manage his own household well” because, as a team, the elders are charged with caring for God’s household, the church (1 Timothy 3:4–5, 15).

Not only are pastors who preach and teach well worthy of honor — and “double honor” (remuneration) when laboring at the work as a breadwinning vocation — but also as governors, that is, “the elders who rule well” (1 Timothy 5:17). The pastor-elders teach and rule — that is, lead or govern — and to do so requires a kind of spiritual acuity the New Testament calls “sober-mindedness.”

Men who are sober-minded are levelheaded and balanced. They are responsive without being reactive. They are not given to extremes, not suckers for myths and speculation and conspiracy theories, and not dragged into silly controversies. They are able to discern what emphases and preoccupations would compromise the stewardship at the heart of their work (1 Timothy 1:4), and they stay grounded in what’s most important and enduring. Keeping the gospel “of first importance” (1 Corinthians 15:3), as their center, they are able (like increasingly few modern adults) to “keep [their] head in all situations” (2 Timothy 4:5 NIV).

Together, the team of sober-minded elders is able to navigate complicated challenges, like church-size dynamics and generational dynamics and digital-versus-analog dynamics and, perhaps above all, issues of timing in the life of the local church. Many, young and old, are able to see various problems and feel various tensions in church life, but the pastor-elders are those with the sober-mindedness, and the accompanying “superpower of patience” (as Dan Miller calls it), to know how and when to address the challenges.

Sober-minded pastor-elders, together as a group, keep the church on mission (Matthew 28:19), keep the gospel central, and demonstrate that the essence of leadership is not personal privilege and preference but self-giving, self-humbling, and self-sacrifice for the church’s good.

Such sober-mindedness, without doubt, is also critical for teaching — for determining what to teach and when and how — but such spiritual acuity especially maps on to the call to govern or lead, and the untiring vigilance it requires. “Pay careful attention to yourselves and to all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers” (Acts 20:28). The pastor-elders are those who “are keeping watch over your souls, as those who will have to give an account” (Hebrews 13:17). So they must be sober-minded (1 Timothy 3:2) — in fact, “always . . . sober-minded” (2 Timothy 4:5).

How to Get a Sober Mind

In Acts 6, we are not yet dealing with pastors and deacons, per se, but apostles and “the seven.” But we can see a kind of analog here for what was to come in local congregations. As “the seven” were appointed to “serve tables” that the apostles might not “give up preaching the word of God” (Acts 6:2), so local-church pastor-elders have a particular calling to lead and spiritually feed the flock — that is, to “devote ourselves to prayer and to the ministry of the word” (Acts 6:4). Word and prayer.

We teach and preach the word to feed the church. And sober-minded men pray to God, and take counsel with each other, to lead the church in the ups and downs on the raging seas of real life. It will not be enough to have balanced thinkers who do not pray. (Besides, prayerlessness would betray their imbalance.) Nor would it be enough to have prayerful men without sober minds. We need both prayer and prudence, even as we need both teaching and leading. And Christ appoints that his local-church leaders be such prayerful, sober-minded teachers.

All well and good, you might say, but what about the gaffs in my own sober-mindedness that I’m aware of — not to mention the many of which I do not even know? Whether already a pastor-elder, or aspiring to the office, or not, How might I become more sober-minded?

The good news is that sobering our minds is part of the work the Holy Spirit is doing on all those who are in Christ. And in particular, this is work he does over time, through the word of God. However naturally balanced and levelheaded you might be, the word of God is critical in giving us real balance in a destabilizing world and sobering us up to what really matters in God’s economy. Sober-mindedness is not a miracle God does in just a moment, but the effect of thousands of quiet early-morning miracles over his word day after day, for years.

In the days to come, as in the last two thousand years, the church needs men who keep their heads under pressure, in conflict and controversy. And in just the normal, steady-state life of the church, we need levelheaded, wise, spiritually and emotionally intelligent leaders rather than those who are impulsive, imbalanced, rash, and reactive, because pastor-elders are not just God-appointed teachers but God-appointed governors.

Such men the Spirit loves to produce through years of quiet Scripture meditation and real-life accountability in the local church. And such men, years in the making, the risen Christ then loves to give to his church to feed it through faithful, effective teaching and guide it through patient, composed, reasonable team leadership.

Which leads to our concluding focus on how a young or aspiring pastor-elder might go about pursuing growth and development in his teaching.

How to Grow as a Pastor-Teacher

With this short list, I’m assuming eagerness. Without some initial aspiration or eagerness, there would not be interest in growth. So assuming some measure of eagerness, here are six avenues to consider in seeking to develop yourself as a teacher.

1. Know the Word himself, that is, Jesus.

How? In the word itself, the gospel. How? Through the word itself, Scripture. So, know the Word (Jesus) in the word (gospel) through the word (Scripture).

Read, study, and meditate on the Bible — and all the Bible. Those who lead and aspire to lead the church would be wise to have all the biblical text pass before their eyes every calendar year. Obviously, there will be (many) passages you not only read but study and meditate on and teach on, perhaps multiple times in a year, but reading through the Bible with some plan each year at least lets each biblical text pass before you each year. As you do, you’re increasingly understanding Scripture as a whole — and most of all, knowing and enjoying Jesus in it.

2. Self-educate in the information age.

This is a step in equipping. Leverage the amazing availability of books, messages, and essays (meaty articles). Perhaps some limited social media exposure would help you to be aware of new books, essays, and articles, but I would highly caution you against any more than a pretty modest, controlled portion of social media. (Make the web serve your interests, rather than letting the algorithms harvest you for their interests.)

Beware the radicalizing effects of social media. Algorithms are no friend to the pursuit of sober-mindedness.

3. Pursue some formal program of training.

This is a distinct step in equipping that goes beyond self-educating. I’m talking about some curriculum and course of study, designed by someone other than yourself, to develop in knowledge and skill, and fill in areas you’ve never gravitated toward studying on your own.

4. Take what at bats you can and make them count.

Now we’re moving to effectiveness, which grows, over time, with the Spirit’s help and hard work. You need hundreds of at bats, not dozens. Teaching, like singing (not like athletics), is a life skill. Work to peak in your sixties (or seventies!), not twenties.

5. Always keep learning and be ready.

After Paul says to “preach the word” in 2 Timothy 4:2, the very next charge is this: “Be ready in season and out of season.” Then again in verse 5: “Always be sober-minded.”

And this is for those who continue to learn and grow. In 1 Timothy 4, after just telling Timothy to “devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, to exhortation, to teaching,” Paul says, “Practice these things, immerse yourself in them, so that all may see your progress” (1 Timothy 4:13–15). Our people ought to see our progress, our growth — in all areas, but particularly in our teaching. Which means — this should be encouraging — you grow in teaching. It is not fundamentally a gift you have or do not.

6. Rejoice more in being saved than in being a fruitful teacher.

I love the words of Jesus in Luke 10:20, and I often go back there to steady my soul in ministry: “Do not rejoice in this, that the spirits are subject to you [as your teaching ability and effectiveness improves and matures], but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.” The language is stark, but I think Jesus means to provoke, not speak absolutely, as if there is not any holy joy to be had in faithful, fruitful teaching. But we dare not let the joy of teaching the faith eclipse the joy of the faith itself.

Brothers, rejoice most that your names are written in heaven. Being a Christian is ten thousand times more important, and sweeter, than being a pastor-teacher.

I was watching the Super Bowl this past February, expecting to see the newest commercials from Doritos and Budweiser and Coca-Cola, when this unusual music began to play. On the screen were still shots of kids doing adorable things — helping each other, hugging each other, wrapping arms around the family dog. At the end, the words came up,

Jesus didn’t want us to act like adults. . . . He gets us.

It was a heartwarming riff on Jesus’s teaching about being childlike. I liked it. This is the Super Bowl, with hundreds of millions of people watching, and a 30-second spot comes up commending Jesus. I love Jesus. I worship Jesus. Yeah, let’s commend Jesus.

Then another spot came up in the second half. Harsher music. Pictures of adults demonstrating manifest outrage and hatred, in each other’s faces. Sometimes it’s a physical altercation. All of it from the last three years. Then the message:

Jesus loved the people we hate. . . . He gets us.

And my response was, Ouch and yes.

The ads are from a non-profit looking to “put Jesus in the middle of culture.” They paid $20 million for the Super Bowl ads and plan to spend $3 billion in the coming years.

So, I’ve seen more of these “He gets us” ads in recent months. Sometimes, I like them. Other times, I cringe a little, concerned it will give a skewed impression of Jesus.

Jesus was judged wrongly.Jesus had strained relationships.Jesus welcomes the weird.Jesus was fed up with politics.Jesus invited everyone to sit at his table.Jesus chose forgiveness.

Then last week I took my twin sons to their first Minnesota Wild hockey game at the X, and now there’s a hockey “He gets us” on the thin digital screens around the side of the arena: “Jesus had great lettuce, too.” “Lettuce” means hockey hair. (I had to ask my boys for help on that.) I don’t want to be too picky, but I wonder if “great lettuce” might represent some mission drift for the “He gets us” campaign. Admittedly, it doesn’t speak to me personally like it would if it said, “Jesus was losing his hair, too.”

Hebrews 2 is a “he gets us” passage. But it’s also clear that he not only gets us, but he helps us. He rescues us. Saves us. Getting us is good; as we’ll see, that can lead to real, genuine help for us in our need. But getting us, on its own, doesn’t do a whole lot for us. Yes, he gets us. He really does. And this is a slice of what we celebrate in Advent. But there’s no real joy in Advent if he only gets us and doesn’t also help us, save us, change us, lift us up. In Advent, we celebrate that he became man, fully human like us, not just to be one of us, but to save us.

Our Pioneer and Champion

Hebrews 2:10 has a name for Jesus that I’ve come to love, and it’s hard to find an equivalent word for it in English. The ESV has founder: God “make[s] the founder of [our] salvation perfect through suffering.” Founder is a good translation, but I want to fill out the meaning for us a little bit.

The Greek word is archegos, and it’s built on the word archē, which means “beginning.” So archegos, we might say, is “the originator” or “the beginner.” The problem is we mean something else by “beginner” in English: “a person just starting to learn a skill or take part in an activity.” Jesus is not a “beginner” in that sense. Rather, he’s a “beginner” in the sense that he’s the leader who goes first and others follow him. Like a pioneer. This archegos, however, doesn’t just go first into uncharted territory, but into battle. So “champion” or “hero” could be a good translation of archegos as well.

Again, we don’t just stand back and watch this champion fight from afar. We’re connected to him and come with him. He doesn’t just fight for us; he leads the charge, and we follow in his wake. So, Jesus as our archegos, is both our hero and example. He is “the beginner” in that he births the people, and he leads us into the battle, and he rescues us through faith in him, and then he also inspires us as our model to follow. We benefit from what he does for us (and couldn’t do for ourselves), and yet in his work for us, he opens up a path that we might follow in his steps.

And Advent is where our “beginner” begins, so to speak. That is, Advent is the beginning of his humanity, and his getting us, saving us, and helping us. But Advent is not the beginning of his person. So, let’s walk with Hebrews chapter 2 through the Advent drama of our “beginner,” our “champion,” from the very beginning until now. There are four distinct stages here in the drama of Hebrews 2 — four movements in the story of Advent.

1. Jesus Did Not Start Like Us

Our champion, our “beginner,” did not begin like we did. His person was not created like ours. He is a divine person, the second person of the eternal Threeness. His humanity was created, conceived in Mary’s womb and born in Bethlehem, but not his person.

The book of Hebrews begins with glimpses of his godhood. Before any world existed, he existed and was “appointed the heir of all things” (Hebrews 1:2). Then through him God (the Father) made the world. “He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature” — he is distinct from the Father in his person and same as his Father in divine nature. “And,” verse 3 adds, “he upholds the universe by the word of his power” — as only God can do.

So, the story of Advent begins before time, before creation, before “the beginning.” Jesus himself is God, and if you have eyes to see his divinity, it’s all over the New Testament.

Greg Lanier, in his recent book Is Jesus Truly God?, shows how the deity of Christ shines on just about every page in the New Testament:

He is preexistent before Advent, and before creation.
He is the unique “Son” of the heavenly Father, eternally begotten.
He is called “Lord,” which refers to God’s Old Testament covenant name (Yahweh).
He receives worship.
He relates to the Father and Spirit in ways that reveal his person as one of the divine Threeness.

So, let’s get this clear before we talk about his humanity and how he gets us. In Jesus, a man did not become God. Rather, God became man. We say that Jesus is fully God and fully man in one person, but we do not mean that he became God and man at the same time. There is a profound asymmetry in the story of the God-man: he has been God for all eternity, and he became man at the first Christmas.

2. Jesus Was Made Like Us

Now we come to his first Advent and the first Christmas, when God made God in the image of God. Without ceasing to be God, God the Son took on humanity. He added humanity to his divine person.

Humanity, as a created nature, is “compatible” with the uncreated divine nature. Deity and humanity are not a zero-sum game. The divine Son did not have to jettison any eternal deity (as if that’s even possible) to take on humanity. Uncreated deity and created humanity operate at different levels of reality, so to speak. Without ceasing, in any way, to be fully God, the Son took on our full created nature and became fully human. As Hebrews 2:17 says, he was “made like his brothers in every respect.” Look at verses 11–14:

“For he who sanctifies” (Jesus) “and those who are sanctified” (us) “all have one source” (that is, one nature). “That is why he is not ashamed to call them brothers, saying, ‘I will tell of your name to my brothers; in the midst of the congregation I will sing your praise.’ And again, ‘I will put my trust in him.’ And again, ‘Behold, I and the children God has given me.’ Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things . . .

We’ll come back to finish verse 14, but let me just say about these Old Testament quotations in verses 13–14 that Pastor Jonathan explained them so well in a previous sermon as pointing to Jesus’s solidarity with us in our suffering.

“Flesh and blood” in verse 14 refers to our humanity. We are flesh and blood, and so Jesus became one of us — to which Hebrews 4:15 adds, “without sin.” Sin is not an essential part of what it means to be human. Jesus was fully human, made like us in every respect, and “without sin.” So, then, what’s included in this “every respect” of our humanity? What does it mean for Jesus to be fully human, like us?

One of the biggest moments in the collective formation of early Christians in saying what the Scriptures teach about the humanity of Christ is a church council called Chalcedon in 451 AD. The Chalcedonian Creed says Jesus is “perfect in Godhead and also perfect in manhood; truly God and truly man, of a rational soul and body.”

Jesus has a fully human body. He “became flesh,” which means at least a human body. He was born and grew and grew tired. He became thirsty and hungry. He suffered, and he died. And his human body was raised and glorified, and he sits right now, on heaven’s throne, in a risen, glorified human body.

But becoming fully human also involved taking “a rational soul,” or “the inner man,” including human emotions. He marveled. He expressed sorrow. “He was deeply moved in his spirit and greatly troubled” and he wept (John 11:33–35). And he rejoiced and was happy. John Calvin memorably summed it up, “Christ has put on our feelings along with our flesh.”

A “rational soul” also includes a human mind (in addition to his divine mind). So, Jesus “increased in wisdom” as well as in stature (Luke 2:52), and most strikingly, he says about the timing of his second coming, “Concerning that day or that hour, no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father” (Mark 13:32). With respect to his humanity, and his human mind, there are things he does not know. His human knowledge is limited, like all human minds. Yet, at the same time, for this unique two-natured person of Christ, he also knows all things with respect to his divine mind. As one-natured humans, this is beyond our experience and ability to understand, but divine and human minds are compatible. And this is no contradiction for the unique person of Christ, but one of his unique glories.

So too with his human will, in addition to the divine will. Jesus says, “I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will but the will of him who sent me” (John 6:38). Jesus, speaking with respect to his human will, says that he came “not of [his] own will” but his Father’s. And that divine will, while not proper to his humanity, is proper to his person as God. When he prays in Gethsemane, “Not as I will, but as you will” (Matthew 26:39), he aligns his human will with the divine will, which also is his as God.

So, Jesus has a fully human body and emotions and mind and will. And verse 11 says, “That is why he is not ashamed to call them brothers.” He is not ashamed to call you brother (or sister). Jesus could have been a brother in our nature, and yet ashamed to call us his brothers. But mark this, he is not that kind of brother. He’s not ashamed of his siblings. He’s not worried that our weaknesses and immaturities, or even our follies, will mar his reputation. He’s not stuck with us and embarrassed by them.

That’s not how Jesus is with me, and with us. I want to be like Jesus is with me. I want to be like this as a dad, and be like this as a friend, and be like this as a pastor: not mainly concerned about how others’ behavior reflects on me, but mainly concerned about my brother or sister in Christ, so that I can be loving, rather than self-focused — especially in the moments when love is needed most.

3. Jesus Suffered Like Us

Being fully human, he suffered both with us and for us.

Suffering is an important aspect of his being fully human, and saving us in his full humanity. If he was only God, he could not suffer. God is “impassible,” unable to be afflicted or be moved from outside. But not humanity. So, Jesus becoming fully human involved not only a human body and reasoning human soul, emotions, mind, and will, but he also entered as man into our fallen world, which is under the curse of sin. And even though he himself was not a sinner, he was, as a creature, susceptible to the afflictions, assaults, sufferings, and pains of our world. He entered into our suffering, and did so in two senses.

One, he suffered with us. He knows what it’s like to suffer in created flesh and blood. And verse 10 says that he was made “perfect through suffering.” This language of “perfect” or “complete” is important in Hebrews. Verse 10 doesn’t mean that Jesus was imperfect, or sinful, but that he was made ready, or made complete, for his calling, as our champion and High Priest, through his suffering. Having become man, he was not yet complete, not yet ready, but needed to be made ready, complete, “perfect” through suffering. Hebrews 5:8–9 says,

Although he was a son, he learned obedience through what he suffered. And being made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey him.

Which leads, then, to a second sense in which he suffered: for us. Not only does he, as man, suffer with us, but he, as the God-man, suffers for us — in our place, in our stead. This leads us to the connection between suffering and death. Verse 9 introduces “the suffering of death” (of Jesus suffering and dying for us): “by the grace of God he [tasted] death for everyone.” Jesus not only experienced suffering with us but for us. He not only gets us, but saves us, and that “through death.”

Now look at the rest of verse 14 and verse 15, and two achievements of Jesus for us through this human suffering of death at the cross. Pick it up in the middle of verse 14: Jesus shared in our humanity “that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery.” The first achievement through his human death is that he defeated Satan. His suffering unto death conquers the one who had the power of death.

We should not forget this as a Christmas theme: “The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil” (1 John 3:8). How? “He appeared in order to take away sins” (1 John 3:5). They go together. Jesus destroys the devil by taking away sins. The weapon Satan had against us was unforgiven sin, “the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands.” But through the suffering of death, Jesus “set [this] aside, nailing it to the cross” and in so doing, God “disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in [Jesus]” (Colossians 2:14–15).

So, the first achievement is destroying Satan, and second in Hebrews 2:15 is delivering us. How? We might expect what follows in verse 17, but not expect the next verse. Verse 17 gives us one reason that he had to be made like us in every respect:

so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people.

We had sinned and needed covering before the holy God. We had a “record of debt that stood against us” because we were humans with sin. So, to rescue us, God needed not only to become fully man, and suffer with us, but suffer for us, unto death, that his death might be for us, his brothers, the death we deserved for our sins. That’s what it means when the high priest “[makes] propitiation for the sins of the people.” The people’s sin against the holy and infinitely worthy God deserves his righteous, omnipotent wrath. And in becoming human, and suffering with us, and unto death, for us, Jesus absorbs the just penalty due us that we might be delivered from hell and the justice due our sin.

And verse 18 gives us one more reason, embedded in the first, for why Jesus was made like us, in every respect, including suffering and then dying in our place.

4. Jesus Helps Us Right Now

Verse 17 is amazing in that he deals with our sin, and gets us right with God, and verse 18 is amazing in that he’s ready and eager to help us right now. He both makes atonement for us in his death, and he rises again, and sends his Spirit, that he might help us in our struggles right now. Look at verse 18:

For because he himself has suffered when tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted.

Because Jesus suffered, he can help us in our suffering. That is, because he suffered unto death to atone for our sins, he is able to indwell us by his Spirit, draw near to us in our time of need, and help us in whatever tests and challenges and trials and temptations we face in the ongoing struggle of the Christian life. Jesus not only saves us out of sin’s curse, but also through sin’s temptations. He atones for our sins, and stands ready to come to our aid in temptation and in our own suffering. Having saved us from sin’s guilt, he is poised to save us from sin’s power.

So, as Hebrews 12:2 says, Jesus is not only the founder, the archegos, the beginner, the champion of our faith, but also the finisher. He’s not only the beginner but finisher. Our champion not only leads the way and goes ahead of us to face the foe, but he also doubles back to check on us, to help us, to keep us.

What Child Is This?

Let’s close, then, with this question: What help do you need this Advent? How are you suffering? What’s your present trial (or trials)? What’s testing your faith most right now? What’s tempting you to sin or give up? What’s your biggest need this Advent?

In Advent, we don’t just remember what he did in the past; we remember who he is in the present. Christmas is not only a was; it’s an is. Get his help. He not only gets us; he helps us. So, as we come to the Table, let’s ask for his help afresh. What need do you bring to the Table this morning? How do you need his help to persevere?

The one who meets us here is fully divine, the second person of the eternal Godhead, who in his happy, expansive, overflowing, gracious nature, took our full humanity to come rescue us. And he suffered with us — and for us unto death. He destroyed Satan, and he delivers us from our sins. And he rose from the dead, and ascended, and is now enthroned in heaven, where he stands ready, by his Spirit, to help us in the fight of faith.

In this first session, I would like for us to linger together in my favorite eldership passage: 1 Peter 5:1–5. But before I read those verses and pray for our time together, let’s mark the word “So” at the beginning of verse 1. “So” links this passage to chapter 4 and therefore to the hard times Peter and these elders knew.

First Peter 4:12 mentions “fiery trials.” Verse 13, “sufferings.” Verse 14, “insults.” Verses 15, 16, 19: “suffer,” “suffers,” “suffer.” This is a passage for pastor-elders who know hard times, like the last three years may have been for some.

Bright and inspiring as the words of 1 Peter 5:1–5 can be, they are set against a dark backdrop. Don’t miss this context. The joys of pastoral ministry are not joys in a vacuum. They are amazing joys, accentuated and deepened against the backdrop of struggle and hardship and suffering. In the endless challenges of pastoral ministry, its joys shine out all the clearer.

And note how Peter gets to elders in chapter 5. A context of suffering makes the teaching and leadership of the elders all the more essential. Pastor-elders, and their teaching and leading, are always vital to congregational health, but especially in suffering.

Gift of the Great Shepherd

So, 1 Peter 5:1–5:

So I exhort the elders among you, as a fellow elder and a witness of the sufferings of Christ, as well as a partaker in the glory that is going to be revealed: 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; not domineering over those in your charge, but being examples to the flock. And when the chief Shepherd appears, you will receive the unfading crown of glory. Likewise, you who are younger, be subject to the elders. Clothe yourselves, all of you, with humility toward one another, for “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.”

One of the most precious promises in all the Bible for pastors is Jesus’s words in Matthew 16:18: “I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” Jesus is the chief Shepherd; he is “the Shepherd and Overseer of [our] souls” (1 Peter 2:25; 5:4). He is “the great shepherd of the sheep” (Hebrews 13:20). He builds his church. And his work will not fail. He will prevail — over hell, and sin, and death, and disease, and division.

And one of the ways Christ builds and governs his church, and blesses her, is by giving her the gift of local leaders under him: “He gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ” (Ephesians 4:11–12).

Faithful pastors and elders are a gift from Christ to guide and keep his church. As pastors, this is a truth that may not be healthy to regularly emphasize in public (as it will seem self-serving), but it can be good to have someone else say it to you from time to time. So that’s what I’d like to do here at the outset of our time together today: brother pastors and elders, you are a gift from the risen Christ to your flock.

No matter what that recent email said. No matter how flat the last sermon fell. No matter what you hear whispered about leaders in society (not to mention the cynical thoughts that aren’t whispered). No matter what that person posted online about your church or your elder team, or you in particular — and you didn’t see it, but your wife saw it and said, “Did you see this?”

No matter what has been said explicitly or implied to the contrary, you, dear brother, as you lean on Christ and remain faithful to his word — you are a gift from him to your church.

Of course, we pastors and elders are flawed and sinful. Some who carry the name “pastor” have made terrible mistakes, sinned grievously, fleeced their flocks, and harmed the very ones they were commissioned to protect. But such failures were not owing to the biblical vision of what true leadership is. Rather, such failures fell short of God’s vision, or departed from it altogether. In fact, such failures show — by way of contrast — what real leadership in the church should be.

That’s our focus today: what Christ calls leaders in his church to be — especially the “lead office” or “teaching office” in the church, that of “pastor” or “elder” or “overseer,” three terms in the New Testament for the same lead office.

Preliminary Observations

Now, in this session, I want us to give most of our focus to the three not-but pairs in verses 2–3, but first let me make three preliminary observations on the passage, which are vital to the vision of eldership and pastoral ministry that we’ll be rehearsing today.

1. Elders are plural.

Elders is plural in 1 Peter 5:1. One of the most important truths to rehearse about Christian ministry is that Christ means for it to be teamwork. As in 1 Peter 5, so in every context in which local-church pastor-elders are mentioned in the New Testament, the title is plural.

Christ alone reigns as Lord of the church. He is head (Ephesians 1:22; 5:23; Colossians 1:18), and he alone. The glory of singular leadership in the church is his alone. And he means for his undershepherds to labor, and thrive, not alone but as a team.

The kind of pastors we long for in this age are good men with good friends — friends who love them enough to challenge their instincts, tell them when they’re mistaken, hold them to the fire of accountability, and make life both harder and better, both more uncomfortable and more fruitful.

Now, if pastoral ministry for you is not teamwork, if you find yourself in a lone pastor-elder situation, for whatever reason, I don’t think that means you’re in error or sin. But I do think it’s an error to prefer it, and not dream toward more, and pray for more, and take some modest steps toward looking for and raising up the kind of men who could minister alongside you.

So, number one, elders here (as elsewhere in the New Testament) are plural.

2. Elders are pastors.

Second, observe the main verb in 1 Peter 5:1–5, which is Peter’s charge to the elders: “shepherd the flock of God.” Shepherd, as a verb, is a rich image. Consider all that shepherds do: they feed, water, tend, herd, protect, guide, lead to pasture, govern, care for, nurture. To shepherd is a picture of what we might call “benign rule” (the opposite of “domineering,” as we’ll see). In shepherding, the good of the shepherd is bound up with the good of the sheep.

The concept of shepherding also has a rich Old Testament background, not just in the patriarchs and the nation of Israel in Egypt and in the wilderness, but also in King David, the shepherd boy who became the nation’s great king, God’s anointed one, who came to anticipate the greater Anointed One to come.

So, with David, and in the prophets, shepherding takes on messianic overtones. David, of course, had his own grave failures in shepherding the nation, but after David, the trend of the nation’s kings became worse and worse, with only a couple exceptions.

Shepherds Feed

Five centuries later, the prophet Ezekiel condemned the nation’s leaders for “feeding themselves” rather than feeding the sheep:

Ah, shepherds of Israel who have been feeding yourselves! Should not shepherds feed the sheep? You eat the fat, you clothe yourselves with the wool, you slaughter the fat ones, but you do not feed the sheep. The weak you have not strengthened, the sick you have not healed, the injured you have not bound up, the strayed you have not brought back, the lost you have not sought, and with force and harshness you have ruled them. (Ezekiel 34:2–4)

The appointed leaders of God’s people should have fed them, not fed on them. They should have strengthened their people, and sought them out, and healed them, bound up their wounds, brought them back to God, but instead they governed them “with force and harshness” — not benign rule but malignant rule.

So, the people long for a shepherd, a king, who will rule them with strength and gentleness, with clarity and kindness, with decisiveness and persuasion and patience and grace, even as he protects them from their enemies. And in response, again and again, God not only says, “I will rescue my flock,” but also, “I will set up over them one shepherd, my servant David, and he shall feed them: he shall feed them and be their shepherd” (Ezekiel 34:22–23). Note the prominence of feeding in shepherding.

The Good Shepherd’s Charge

The prophet Micah foretells that from Bethlehem, the city of David, will “come a ruler who will shepherd my people Israel” (Micah 5:2; Matthew 2:6). During his life, Jesus himself says he is the good shepherd (John 10:11), who, rather than taking from his sheep, comes to give, and to give them life, and even to give his own life for them. He is the long-promised Shepherd.

Then amazingly, at the end of the Gospel of John, when Jesus asks Peter three times if he loves him (this same Peter who wrote 1 Peter), Peter says yes, and then Jesus says three times to him, “Feed my lambs,” “Tend my sheep,” and “Feed my sheep” (John 21:15–17).

Here “feeding” and “shepherding” (or “pastoring”) are synonymous. Jesus, the good shepherd, has finally come, and given himself as the Lamb for his sheep, but now he is leaving, and now he will pastor his sheep through Peter and other undershepherds — not just apostles, but local-church elders, overseers, pastors.

So Paul says in Acts 20:28 to the elders in Ephesus, “Pay careful attention to yourselves and to all the flock [!], in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to care for [that is, pastor] the church of God, which he obtained with his own blood.” The elders are also overseers, and they are to “care for” — or literally, pastor — “the church of God” (elders = overseers = pastors).

Finally, in the book of Revelation, we find two images of Jesus as shepherd. The Lamb, as shepherd, “will guide them to springs of living water” (Revelation 7:17), and in three texts, he will rule “with a rod of iron” (Revelation 2:27; 12:5; 19:15). Which doesn’t mean he is forceful or harsh with his people, but that he protects them from their enemies (with his rod). The shepherd’s rod and staff are for protecting and guiding his flock: “Your rod and your staff, they comfort me” (Psalm 23:4).

Elders shepherd. That’s just a quick taste of the richness in this shepherding image: centrally, feeding and watering (“green pastures” and “still waters,” Psalm 23:2), but also protecting. Shepherding means caring for the sheep, and leading with gentleness and kindness, with persuasion and patience, and wielding the rod of protection with strength and decisiveness toward various threats to the flock.

So, elders is plural, and elders are pastors.

3. Elders exercise oversight.

A third and final preliminary observation, more briefly: the verb that augments “shepherd” is “exercising oversight” (episkopountes). It’s a form of the noun overseer used in Acts 20:28, as well as in four other New Testament texts (Philippians 1:1; 1 Timothy 3:2; Titus 1:7; 1 Peter 2:25). “Oversee” in this context doesn’t mean only to watch and observe, but also to “see to it” that important observations about the flock, and any threats to it, also become tangible initiatives and actions in the church.

Which brings us to the heart of this passage, where Peter gives us three “not-buts” — not this but that. Verses 2–3: “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;
not domineering over those in your charge, but being examples to the flock.”

Let’s take them in reverse order.

1. Not Domineering, but Exemplifying

We saw God’s condemnation for the leaders of Israel who ruled “with force and harshness.” Peter says, “not domineering” — which is the same language elsewhere translated “not lording it over.” It’s built on a strong verb (katakurieuo) that can refer in other contexts to

Jesus’s lordship (Romans 14:9; 1 Timothy 6:15);
the kind of lordship sin once had, and should no longer have, over us (Romans 6:9, 14; 7:1);
or the kind of lordship Christian leaders do not have over those in their charge (Luke 22:25).

The intensified form of the verb here in 1 Peter 5 is the same one Jesus uses in Mark 10:42–43:

Those who are considered [dokeō, seeming, purporting, thinking (hoi dokountes archein)] rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. But it shall not be so among you.

Okay, then, what will be so among us? Verses 43–45:

But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all. For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.

So, the opposite of “not lording it over” others is serving them, assisting their good, attending to their joy. Like Christ himself, not coming to be served but to serve; not to be assisted, but to assist; not to be attended to, but to attend to.

With the same language, Paul says to the Corinthians about his labors as an apostle, “Not that we lord it over your faith, but we work with you for your joy” (2 Corinthians 1:24). As in Mark 10, “lord it over” implies the exercise of privilege, the seeking and obtaining of personal or private benefit — benefit from them (versus through or with them).

Paul’s vision of the opposite in leadership is “[working] with you for your joy.” The “we” here is Paul with his assistants Timothy and Silas (2 Corinthians 1:19). He says, “we work”: we give effort, expend energy; it is not just overflow but work, labor (as Jesus says in Matthew 9:37–38: “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest”). It might begin almost effortlessly, as overflow, but then it takes effort (sometimes great effort) to complete. Spiritual leadership, pastoral ministry is work, requiring a work ethic. And Paul, of all people, was not one to suffer laziness, and especially among pastor-elders.

But this work isn’t alone. Not only is there a “we” in the company of the leaders, but it’s also “with you” — with the people. Pastors equip the saints to engage, expend effort, and invest energy — to work with us (which is vital to keep in mind in our discipling and counseling; we work with them, not instead of them). We don’t do it all for them; we go the extra mile, putting in more work, to win them to leaning in, working with us, taking responsibility, not just being consumers.

And that work, Paul says, is “for your joy.” Not thin, fleeting sugar highs. He’s talking real, deep, lasting, long-term, durable joy in Christ. Joy that tastes of the next age even in this painful, evil one. In Christian joy, our promised, blissful future in Christ is brought into the painful present — which means the frictions and sufferings of our present times do not preclude real joy even now but make us all the more desperate for real joy.

So, Christian leaders, as workers for the joy of their people, are not to be controlling and domineering, lording over them. Rather, they are to serve (in the words of Jesus), as workers for their people’s joy (in the words of Paul) and as examples to the flock (in the words of Peter): “not domineering over those in your charge, but being examples to the flock.”

2. Not for Shameful Gain, but Eagerly

“Shameful gain” would be some benefit not befitting of the work — or some gain for the leader that is not a gain, but a loss, for the flock, and the glory of Christ — whether it’s money as the driving motivation, or power, or respect, or comfort, or the chance to perform and be on the platform. In terms of “eagerness,” the epistle to the Hebrews gives this important glimpse into the dynamic of Christian leadership as workers for the joy of the flock:

Obey your leaders and submit to them, for they are keeping watch over your souls, as those who will have to give an account. Let them do this with joy and not with groaning, for that would be of no advantage to you. (Hebrews 13:17)

Hebrews 13:17 is the reason John Piper says that “there is a joy without which pastors cannot profit their people.” This is a beautiful, marriage-like vision of the complementary relationship between the church and its leaders.

The leaders, for their part, labor, they work hard, for the advantage — the profit, the gain — of the church. And the church, for its part, wants its leaders to work not only hard but happily, without groaning, because the pastors’ joy in leading will lead to the church’s own benefit. The people want their leaders to labor with joy because they know their leaders are working for theirs.

Christ gives leaders to his people for their joy. Pastors are glad workers for the gladness of their people in God. And if the people see evidence of this, and become convinced of this, how eager might they be to submit to such leaders? The prospect of submitting to leadership drastically changes when you are persuaded that they aren’t pursuing their own private advantage but are genuinely seeking yours: what is best for you, what will give you the deepest and most enduring joy — when they find their joy in yours, rather than apart from or instead of yours.

The word submission has negative connotations today in many circles. But how might the charge to “submit” in Hebrews 13:17 and “be subject” in 1 Peter 5:5 change when we see it in the context of this vision of shepherding and oversight and pastoring as working for the joy of our people? There’s no charge to submit in verse 5 until verses 2–4 establish a context of “workers for your joy” who are willing, eager, and exemplary: they feed the flock, not themselves; they attend to the flock’s needs, not their own; they gain as the flock gains, not as the flock loses.

Have you ever considered what actions and initiatives and care are required in the New Testament, from husbands and fathers and governors and pastor-elders, before the charge is given to submit?

Husbands, love and be kind, not harsh (Colossians 3:19); then, wives, submit.
“Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger” (Ephesians 6:4), but to what? Joy! Gratitude! Then, children, submit.
Civil governors, be God’s servants for society’s good, avenging wrongdoing (Romans 13:1, 4; 1 Peter 2:13); then, citizens, submit.
Pastors, feed the flock through public teaching (1 Corinthians 14:34) and paying careful attention to (Acts 20:28) and keeping watch over (1 Timothy 4:16) the flock; then, flock, submit.

Godly pastor-elders give of themselves, their time, their energy, their attention, to work for the joy of the flock. Therefore, church, submit to your leaders. In Hebrews 13:17, negatively, God will hold the pastors accountable, and positively, it will be to your advantage, church, to your benefit, to your joy, if you let them labor with joy, for your joy, and not with groaning.

When we, as leaders in the church, show ourselves to be workers for their joy, we walk in the steps of the great shepherd — the great worker for our joy — the one who bore the greatest cost for others’ good, and not to the exclusion of his own joy. He found his joy in the joy of his Beloved. “For the joy that was set before him [he] endured the cross” (Hebrews 12:2). Or, in the words of Isaiah 53:11, “Out of the anguish of his soul he shall see and be satisfied.”

As workers for the church’s joy, we pastors emphatically pursue gain — not shameful gain but the shameless gain that is our joy in the joy of the church, to the glory of Christ. Joy now, and joy in the coming shameless reward: “When the chief Shepherd appears, you will receive the unfading crown of glory” (1 Peter 5:4).

So, “not domineering over those in your charge, but being examples to the flock,” and “not for shameful gain, but eagerly.” Now, finally . . .

3. Not Under Compulsion, but Willingly

Brothers, our churches want happy pastors. Not dutiful clergy. Not groaning ministers. The kind of pastors our people want are pastors who want to do the work, and labor with joy for their joy. They want pastors who serve “not under compulsion, but willingly, as God would have [them]” (1 Peter 5:2).

Did you hear that? Not just our people, but God himself wants pastors who labor willingly, from the heart, not under compulsion. He wants us to aspire to the work (1 Timothy 3:1), and do it with joy (Hebrews 13:17). Not dutifully, or under obligation, but willingly, eagerly, and happily.

And that phrase “as God would have you” does not mean that God requires something of us that is different from his own character and actions. “As God would have you” means “as God himself is” and does — literally, “according to God” (kata theon). Like God. Like he is and does — that’s how he likes it.

It says something about our God that he would have it this way. He is the infinitely happy “blessed God” (1 Timothy 1:11) who acts from the boundless, immeasurable bliss of the eternal Godhead. He wants pastors to work with joy because he works with joy. He acts from fullness of joy. He is a God most glorified not by heartless duty, but by our eagerness and enjoyment, and he himself cares for his people willingly, eagerly, and happily.

Happy pastors and elders, not groaning pastors and elders, make for happy churches and a glorified Savior. Pastors who enjoy the work, and work with joy, are a benefit and an advantage to their people (Hebrews 13:17).

Two Ways Toward Joy

Let’s close this first session, then, with two practical manifestations of this vision. I have two suggestions, among others, for what it might mean for you, as pastors (or aspiring pastors), to be a worker with your people for their joy in Christ. One private, early morning one. One corporate, late-night one (at least “late-night” for our pastors, as we do our meetings every other Thursday night at 8:30, after our kids’ bedtimes).

There are countless implications of this vision, whether for discipling, or counseling, or your scheduling and calendar, or sermon prep, or husbanding and fathering, or sleep and exercise, and on and on. But let me start with just two. What does it look like for me to pursue my joy in the joy of our people (to the glory of God)?

1. Alone in the Morning

In the words of George Müller, my “first great and primary business to which I ought to attend every day” is “to have my soul happy in the Lord.” My prayer is that this would land on you as not a burden but a blessing, not an obligation but an opportunity — not a have to as much as a get to. To feed on God, to get our souls happy in him, not with the accent on us but on him. He gives, we receive. He speaks, we listen. We come hungry, and he says, “I am the bread of life” (John 6:35). We come thirsty, and he says, “Come, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters” (Isaiah 55:1). Müller says,

The first thing to be concerned about [is] not how much I might serve the Lord [what I might do for others’ joy] . . . but how I might get my soul into a happy state, and how my inner man might be nourished.

How did he pursue this? Müller’s focus, in his words, was “the reading of the word of God and . . . meditation on it” — oh, the joys of unhurried, even leisurely, meditation on the words of God himself — “that thus my heart might be comforted, encouraged, warned, reproved, instructed; and that thus, while meditating, my heart might be brought into experimental communion with the Lord.”

How did he go about approaching God’s word? He would meditate, he said, “searching, as it were, into every verse to get blessing out of it; not for the sake of public ministry of the word; not for the sake of preaching on what I had meditated upon; but for the sake of obtaining food for my soul.”

2. Together as a Team

How often in our call to govern, to lead through prayer and collective wisdom and decision-making for the church, do we find two (or more) options lying before us?

This is a good moment to check ourselves. What is our framework for the decisions of leadership? It can be easy to slip into a selfish mindset: what is easiest, what’s most convenient for those of us sitting around the table. Without saying it, or thinking it explicitly, how might our preferences and comforts shape this church? How might church life be more convenient for us? Rather than asking, Which path, so far as we can tell, will be best for our people’s true joy in Christ?

But beware: when you ask a question like this, and answer in light of it, you find that the answer is often the path that is more costly to the pastors and elders. But this is the work to which we are called, as workers for their joy. If our team of pastors and elders trends toward the personal preferences and conveniences of the pastors and elders, then we are not loving our people well. We are not working with them for their joy. We are using them for ours.

But when we are “workers for their joy” — knowing that Christ is most glorified in his church when his church is most satisfied in him — then, from joy, we set aside our own convenience and personal preferences, and together we labor for the joy of our people in Jesus.

At the end of July, our family visited the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, with our sons’ 12U baseball team. After hearing so often about Cooperstown as a lifelong baseball fan, it was surreal to finally be there onsite, and especially to walk through the famous Plaque Gallery and see the faces of the Hall of Fame inductees.

One thing I didn’t realize about Cooperstown until this year is how far it is off the beaten trail. It’s not in New York City or LA or Orlando or Vegas, where tourists would already be gathered. It’s four hours north of Manhattan. You don’t just happen to go by the Hall of Fame. You go out of the way, to upstate New York, away from the big city and other distractions, to this small town with a population less than my wife’s hometown of Aitkin, Minnesota. So, you get away from normal life, and stand in awe of these larger-than-life figures who did what very few humans can do.

Sometimes we hear Hebrews 11 talked about as the “hall of faith” or “faith hall of fame,” but that might give the wrong impression. Hebrews 11 is actually not like the Baseball Hall of Fame. This is not a remote gallery to visit while you forget normal life and gawk at inimitable greats. Rather, Hebrews 11 takes normal humans, who had faith in the true God, and presses their stories into the service of our real lives and struggles. This is no mere record of Israel’s history, but Israel’s history pressed into the service of helping us persevere in faith.

We live in times where this is particularly needed. We need examples and encouragements to help us endure in faith and keep believing.

Amen Time

Chapter 11 is the rhetorical climax of Hebrews, the best part of the sermon, the big “amen” part, leading up to the highest point in 12:1–3, where Jesus is the climactic man of faith, and author and perfecter of ours.

Along the way, while narrating this “by faith” history of Israel, Hebrews makes four editorial comments (in verses 6, 13–16, 32, and 38). By far, the editorial comment in verses 13–16 is the longest, and most significant. Verses 13–16 are the heart of our passage this morning, and in some ways the heart of the whole chapter. And verses 13–16 deal with three distinct but connected realities: faith, obedience, and being strangers because of it.

This chapter leads us not only to ask what these realities are and what they mean, but what they are like. In other words, what’s the experience of faith like? What’s it like to obey from faith? And what’s it like to live as strangers and exiles in this world, seeking another, rather than being at home in this one?

So, with this risky experiential focus, let’s ask three “what’s it like” questions this morning: (1) What’s it like to have saving faith? (2) What’s it like to obey from faith? (3) What’s it like to live in this world as strangers and exiles, seeking a homeland?

1. What’s It Like to Have Saving Faith?

We start with the first half of verse 13:

These all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar . . .

Last week we looked at verse 1, which may be the closest thing to a definition of faith in the New Testament. However, the chapter keeps going. Instead of just giving a definition and then moving on, Hebrews keeps going and shows us faith from one angle after another.

In fact, if you were to say, “Okay, what does this chapter say about the nature of faith, and what it’s like to have it?” you will find various angles on this many-splendored reality:

Verse 1: Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.
Verse 5: Faith pleases God, and walks with him.
Verse 6: Faith sees God as a rewarder of those who seek him.
Verse 10: Faith looks to God’s city, not man’s.
Verse 11: Faith considers him faithful who promised.
Verse 14: Faith seeks another homeland, and desires a better country.
Verse 19: Faith considers that God is able to raise the dead.

But the first part of verse 13 has a particularly important contribution to make: faith (1) sees God’s promises from afar and (2) greets them.

Last Sunday we saw this emphasis on faith as “seeing” what is not yet visible. Faith hears the promises of God and sees them with the soul, or the eyes of the heart. Faith sees spiritually what cannot yet be fully seen, or seen at all, with the physical eyes. There is a kind of distance, for now, bridged by faith.

And because this “seeing” is a response to hearing God’s promises, faith is tied repeatedly in this chapter to “receiving” (verses 8, 11, 13, 17, and 19). Faith receives. It’s a “peculiarly receiving grace,” as Andrew Fuller said. It is not a “doing grace” or a “performing grace.” It does not merit God’s favor. Rather, faith receives God’s favor and “sees” his promises that are still, for now, invisible and distant.

But faith not only sees from afar. It greets. That is, it welcomes, embraces, even kisses. Faith receives with delight, not with disgust or disinterest. It is not mere assent, but warm embrace. In the language of verse 6, faith looks to the reward. Verse 10: it looks forward to the heavenly city. Verse 16: it desires a better country, the heavenly one. And the whole point of the chapter is that saving faith perseveres. It keeps seeing, keeps greeting, keeps looking forward, keeps desiring and tasting of the fullness of joy to come.

So, then, what’s it like to have saving faith? What might we say about the experience of faith?

On the one hand, to live according to faith is not to have all the promises yet. Once you have all the promises, you no longer live by faith, but by sight. Faith is not yet content with the here and now, as we’ll see.

But faith also has a foretaste of the goodness of God’s promises. Faith hears God’s word and sees him as true with the eyes of the soul and embraces him as desirable. Saving faith is not indifferent to what it sees or apathetic toward who God is and what he has said and done. Rather, there is in faith an eagerness, a desire, a thirst to drink, a hunger to eat, and a foretaste of satisfaction. As Jonathan said last Sunday, faith says to God, “I want you.” And saving faith perseveres. It keeps wanting. (Which might lead us to ask, practically, How am I conditioning my soul — for indifference to God or delight in him?)

So, faith, in verse 13, sees God’s promises from afar and greets them, and continues to want them. Which leads to our second “what’s it like” question.

2. What’s It Like to Obey from Faith?

We ask this because verses 8–12 and 17–22 tell us about external, observable actions undertaken in faith: Abraham obeyed and went out and lived in a foreign land. Sarah received power to conceive and gave birth. Abraham reached for the knife to sacrifice his beloved son of promise. Isaac and Jacob and Joseph invoked blessings on their heirs and gave them future directions.

So, having some working sense of the experience of faith, what’s it like to obey, to act, to live by faith?

Faith Looks Forward

First, verses 8–9, Abraham’s obedience:

By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place that he was to receive as an inheritance. And he went out, not knowing where he was going. By faith he went to live in the land of promise, as in a foreign land, living in tents with Isaac and Jacob, heirs with him of the same promise.

So, God said to him in Genesis 12:1, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.” And Abraham obeyed. But (this is very important) God didn’t only command obedience; he made promises:

I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed. (Genesis 12:2–3)

This wasn’t just “command and obey,” but “command and promise,” leading to “trust and obey.” So, verse 10 tells us how faith led to obedience. What was it like?

Abraham obeyed because (“for,” verse 10) “he was looking forward [that’s faith] to the city that has foundations, whose designer and builder is God.” In other words, God didn’t just command it, and Abraham obeyed it. God made commands and gave promises, and Abraham looked forward to — that is, believed — God’s promises as the better future, which led him to obey. Still today, when we talk about looking forward to something, we mean something we want, desire, anticipate enjoying.

Faith Considers

Then, Sarah. The first part of verse 11 tells us she obeyed, and the second part describes how it happened:

By faith Sarah herself received power to conceive, even when she was past the age, since she considered him faithful who had promised.

Now, this obedience seems very different from her husband’s. He goes out and moves and stays. Sarah obeys by welcoming God’s work in her womb and preparing at age ninety to finally have a child, to nurture the child in pregnancy and give birth and nurse and raise the child — all sorts of big and little obediences to bring a child into the world, and to do so at age ninety.

And how did her obedience come from faith? See that word considered in verse 11? We’ll see it again in verse 19 (and again next week, talking about Moses, in verse 26). That idea of “considering” is so important to obeying from faith and to how faith gives rise to obedience.

There is a natural course of action — ninety-year-old women don’t prepare to have babies. But faith considers. It does not simply move, like natural humans, with the patterns of the world. God’s promises come, faith receives them and looks forward to them, and it changes how we live. We move to another place and live in a different way, with our eyes opened to something better. We open our arms to receive a child, or later we open our hands to release our grasp on that child (that’s next).

So, Sarah heard promises from God, like Abraham, and she too considered God faithful. She believed God would do what he said, and she desired that he do it, that it would be better, and so she acted differently. Faith changed how she lived. Her faith led her to obey.

Faith Acts (Differently)

Now, back to Abraham. Verses 17–18 tell us about Abraham’s further obedience by faith, and verse 19, how it happened:

By faith Abraham, when he was tested, offered up Isaac, and he who had received the promises was in the act of offering up his only son, of whom it was said, “Through Isaac shall your offspring be named.” He considered that God was able even to raise him from the dead, from which, figuratively speaking, he did receive him back.

Like Sarah, he considered. Naturally speaking, it made no sense to offer up Isaac. How could offspring come through Isaac if he was dead? Answer: God could raise him. God had promised offspring, and God had said, “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and . . . offer him . . . as a burnt offering” (Genesis 22:2). So, Abraham tells the two young men he brought with them, “Stay here with the donkey; I and the boy will go over there and worship and come again to you” (Genesis 22:5). Abraham would obey God, and he believed that God would provide a rescue, or resurrection, for Isaac.

Again, faith leads to obedience. Faith takes God at his word. Faith considers the truthfulness and faithfulness of God, and his goodness, and that his plan is better, and faith leads us to act differently than we would without it.

So, what’s it like today to obey from faith? In short, we see something better than the world sees, and we act accordingly. Hearing God’s promises, we consider differently than unbelievers. Our minds and hearts do different calculus. We don’t float through life, with its givens, like unbelievers do. We don’t just see and do. We see, we stop, we see with the eyes of faith, and we then act. For Christians, the line “everyone else is doing it” is not a good reason to do it or (don’t miss this) not do it, but for us to pause and ask, Given my true home and my new desires, what is obedience here?

So, faith gives us a foretaste of God’s promises, our souls consider the world and life differently, and we obey from the heart.

3. What’s It Like to Live as Strangers?

Now we finish with the rest of verses 13–16. We already saw in verses 9–10 that Abraham “went to live . . . in a foreign land. . . . For he was looking forward to the city that has foundations, whose designer and builder is God.” Now we learn more:

These all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth. For people who speak thus make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. If they had been thinking of that land from which they had gone out, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city.

So, men and women of faith not only see God’s promises from afar and welcome them, but they acknowledge, or confess, themselves to be strangers and exiles on earth. Make no mistake: faith makes them strangers. To hear God’s promises and embrace them is to be a stranger. You are no longer “of the world.” Now you are different, strange. But Hebrews says these examples of faith also acknowledged it. They confessed it. They recognized it and said it.

And verse 14 says that people like that, call them Christians, “make it clear that they are seeking a homeland.” They are not “at home” in this world, and don’t expect to be, and don’t pretend to be. This age, its patterns, its assumptions are no longer theirs. They are Christians, and by definition, they seek a homeland other than where they were born on earth or where they live for now.

Strangers Refuse to Move Back

In verse 15, Hebrews looks his first audience right in the eye (if you can do that in a letter). He puts his finger on the connection between Abraham’s story and theirs. Because of social pressure, they are tempted to “go back” to Judaism apart from Jesus. So, Hebrews says about these examples of faith, “If they had been thinking of that land from which they had gone out, they would have had opportunity to return.”

But they didn’t. They didn’t reminisce about the past. They didn’t dwell on the comforts of their former life before God spoke and they believed. They didn’t constantly consider the old or pine for the other. For them, the “return” would have been Judaism. For us, what might it be? Normal modern American life?

And to them, and to us, Hebrews says, “Don’t go back. Don’t settle for an earthly homeland when God has prepared a better city. In Christ, the best is ahead, not behind. Don’t let nostalgia play tricks on you. God has prepared a better place for you — a New Jerusalem, the better city and country that is come, the heavenly one, ‘that has foundations, whose designer and builder is God’” (verse 10).

We seek a homeland that is not immaterial, but is not of this age and not of this earth (but “of heaven”). We seek the better city, built and inhabited by God himself, that soon will come “down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband” (Revelation 21:2).

Strangers Live Differently Than Locals

So, what’s it like to live today as strangers and exiles? Simply, our hearts are not at home in this world. God has lit the flame of faith in our souls, and now we no longer want all our world wants and do all it does. We’re not at home with its movies, its shows, what it affirms and denies, its values and priorities and proportions, its distractions and investments of attention, its ways of talking, its dreams, its topics, its ways of using technology. We do not think and feel and live like everyone else. Or do we?

Being strangers and exiles doesn’t only mean that we give Christian takes on all the world’s topics and trends while we just swallow its feeds and add our spin. We find different feeds. We order our lives around God’s word and his people, rather than the world’s authorities and algorithms. We set the patterns and pace of our souls through meditating on Scripture and rhythms of prayer and meeting together in the habits of church life. Or do we?

Now, all the answers and subtle ethical challenges are not easy. We overlap as humans: we eat, we sleep, we love, we nurture, we exercise, we work, we rest. But now it’s all different, even while some of it’s still very similar.

If you ask, “How do I live as a stranger and exile in this luxurious, twenty-first-century American life?” wisdom requires walking in tensions, not reaching for easy fixes or simplistic compromise or separation. The answers are often not in the absolutes but in the proportions, and in the rhythms of our lives, and in how we condition our souls.

But what Hebrews 11 makes unmistakable is that the Christian faith is not a layer you add to the old life of unbelief, but it is new life, from the inside out — joy enough to obey and own that we are strangers.

Not Ashamed to Be Our God

Let’s end with the amazing statement in verse 16. So those who are of saving, persevering faith are not those who return to where they came from, but desire a better country, the heavenly one. Verse 16:

Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city.

I can’t think of anywhere else in Scripture that talks about God being ashamed or not ashamed. What could Hebrews even mean that God would be ashamed? God never does anything shameful. God could never be put to shame. So, what is Hebrews communicating by saying that God is not ashamed to be called our God, if we have such faith?

What is the opposite of shame? Honor. So, put it like this: for those who desire the heavenly city, God is honored to be their God. Don’t you want that? None of us wants to bring shame to one we call our God. And in the end we won’t, because if we abandon faith, we show that he was not our God. God will not be shamed.

But he will be honored. He will be honored by those who take him at his word, welcome his promises, embrace his Son, and confess themselves to be strangers on the earth — and desire a better country, a better land, a better city than human hands and constitutions can build. Not only is that desire an aspect of faith, but that desire honors God. He is not honored by indifference or apathy to him and his promises. He is honored by souls that seek him, embrace him, welcome him, desire him. He says, in effect,

I am honored to be their God because they desire me, not their world and its empty promises. They seek a fatherland, a home, with me, not on earth. They see me and my city from afar, and they are not uninterested or unimpressed, but they greet it, welcome it, embrace it, kiss it. They want me, and that honors me. They enjoy me, and that glorifies me. No, I am not ashamed to be their God; I am honored by such hearts of faith. And they will not be disappointed — because I have prepared for them that better city that they desire.

And a better Table.

To the Table

We come here with such faith. We do not come with indifference or apathy or disinterest. We come here seeking satisfaction. We come desiring God and his city. We come embracing his Son, and cherishing his Isaac-like and Isaac-surpassing sacrifice.

In faith, we see the crucified and risen Jesus from afar and greet him. We receive his good news as true, and we receive it as good. We come to eat and drink according to faith and to satisfy our souls in him.

I want to begin by giving you a peek at where we’re headed this morning. At the end, I hope to talk practically and concretely about what kind of habits we might cultivate in our lives to know and enjoy God, and feed our souls on his word. I have in mind a matrix of four categories: direct and indirect, and alone and together, as you’ll see.

I often summarize God’s appointed means of grace for our Christian lives as (1) hear his voice (in his word), (2) have his hear (in prayer), and (3) belong to his body (in the covenant fellowship of the local church). Our focus in this message is the first — hearing God’s voice in his word, which is God’s primary, or first and foremost, means of grace (his “chief” means, as Jonathan Edwards called it, or the “soul” of the means).

Both prayer and fellowship (which we’ll focus on in later sessions) are secondary, in a sense, to God’s word. First comes his word. First he speaks. Then our prayers come in response to his word. And his word creates the body of fellow believers called the church. The church does not create itself, and the church does not create Scripture, but the church is a “creature of the word.”

To focus in this message on God’s word as his chief means of grace, we turn to the book of Hebrews, where I’d like to linger over two central truths about God’s word, and then finish with some ideas on the kinds of habits we might cultivate in our lives to position ourselves to go on receiving, and enjoying, God’s word, and through his word to know and enjoy Jesus. So then, let’s turn to the first truth about God’s word from the book of Hebrews, from its first two verses.

1. God has spoken.

Do you realize how massive, how significant, this seemingly simple, basic truth is for the very nature of reality and our world and our lives? God did not have to speak to humanity. He could have just created the world — embedded his truth and justice, as it were, in the world through the principles and laws of nature. He might have chosen to reveal himself only through creation, rather than human words.

But wonder upon wonder, God has spoken. Our Father, in all his majesty, has stooped to speak to us in human words. The God who made everything, including you, has spoken — and that changes everything.

Look at the first four verses of Hebrews, and we’ll focus for now on just the first two:

Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world. He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power. After making purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, having become as much superior to angels as the name he has inherited is more excellent than theirs.

So, in the past, God spoke (verse 1). And in these last days, God has spoken (verse 2). This is the kind of God he is. He is a speaking God, a communicative God. We might say God is talkative. In verses 1–2, God’s speaking is cast into two eras: “long ago” and “in these last days” — a past era, an old era, and then a later era, a new era.

Related to these two eras, then, two sets of recipients are mentioned. In the past there were “our fathers” — for Jews, their biological ancestors, and for Christians, our spiritual ancestors. Then, in the new era, there’s “us.” That’s an amazing phrase in verse 2: “to us.” Hebrews doesn’t say God spoke “to them,” meaning the apostles, or the first generation of Christians, but he says “to us,” to his readers in the first century, which includes us in this same church age, in these same last days, some twenty centuries later.

Hebrews also mentions two agents of God’s speaking: In the past they had the prophets. In these last days we have his Son. (And with the mention of the Son, then follows a cascade of sevenfold glory, which we’ll come back to.)

In Many Ways

Focus with me on the past era, when God spoke “at many times and in many ways” (literally, “in many parts and many manners”). The speaking God not only spoke once, or a few times, but many times, in many parts, in many ways, and through multiple (plural) prophets. The God who is is a talker.

First, he spoke to create the world. Again and again in Genesis 1, some twelve times, we hear, “And God said . . . and God called” (verses 3, 5–6, 8–11, 14, 20, 24, 26, 28; interestingly, God speaks to create on all six days, but he calls or names only on days 1–3 and leaves the naming of the plants, stars, and animals to man).

And our speaking God not only spoke to create, but he continues to speak in creation. Psalm 19:1–4 tells us,

The heavens declare the glory of God,     and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.Day to day pours out speech,     and night to night reveals knowledge.There is no speech, nor are there words,     whose voice is not heard.Their voice goes out through all the earth,     and their words to the end of the world.

So, God spoke to create, and he keeps speaking through creation. Then, as we’ve seen, God spoke in human words through his prophets. Psalm 19:7–8 (and all of Psalm 119!) says,

The law of the Lord is perfect,     reviving the soul;the testimony of the Lord is sure,     making wise the simple;the precepts of the Lord are right,     rejoicing the heart;the commandment of the Lord is pure,     enlightening the eyes.

So, not only has he spoken, say, on an occasion or two, but he is a speaking God; he’s prone to speak; he likes to speak. He’s a talker, in the highest and most holy of senses, as he speaks many times, in many parts and manners, through many prophets.

In the Word

Coming back to Hebrews 1, what’s the implied pairing with “many” for the new era? In the old era, to the fathers, through the prophets, he spoke in many parts and ways. Now, in the new era, to us, in his Son — how does he speak? One part, one way, one manner. God has spoken so fully and so richly and so decisively in one particular person — not just through him but in him — that we call him “the Word,” with a capital W.

And so, the Gospel of John begins,

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. (John 1:1–3)

And then John 1:14–18 says,

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. . . . For from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known.

God has most fully made himself known in his Word.

Manifold Speech

Consider then the nature of God’s word, from the idea of God speaking to its various expressions:

First is God’s word as concept. God speaks. He reveals himself. He’s communicative and talkative, speaking to create, through creation, and particularly through his prophets.
Second, then, his word, spoken through prophets, is written down to preserve it, called Scripture.
Third is his Word incarnate, his Word personal, in the person of his Son. Jesus is the Word of God. If God had one word, one message, so to speak, to reveal, to say to us, it’s Jesus. It’s “my Son” — hear him, see him, consider him, and believe in him.
Finally, we might also talk about the word preached, or spoken — the gospel word about Jesus. This is the most common referent of the word word in the New Testament — the message about Jesus through which Jesus himself comes to us, through faith and by his Spirit.

So, God has spoken. He’s spoken through his prophets. He’s spoken climactically in his Son, the Word. He’s spoken through the gospel, the word about his Son. And God has seen to it that his words have been written down — that is, Scripture.

God Gave Us a Book

How often do you pause to ponder how stunning it is that we have this Book? A record of God’s words through the prophets before the coming of his Son. And the inspired record of the life and sacrifice and triumph of his Son in the four Gospels. And the inspired story of the early church and God-breathed letters from his apostles to the church.

Brothers and sisters, we actually have the words of God. This is almost too good to be true. And yet how often are we so accustomed to this reality — one of the greatest wonders in all the universe — that it barely moves us to handle the Bible with care (and awe), or at least to access his words with the frequency and wonder they deserve?

One of the greatest facts in all of history is that God gave us a Book. He gave us his words! He has spoken. Think of the lengths God went to, and with what patience, to make himself known to us here in the twenty-first century.

For centuries, God’s word was copied by hand and preserved with the utmost diligence and care. Then, for the last five hundred years of the printing press, God’s word has gone far and wide like never before. Some men gave their lives, upsetting the apple carts of man-made religion, to translate the words of God into the heart-language of their people. And now, in the digital age, access to God’s own words has exploded exponentially again, and yet — and yet — in such abundance, do we marvel at what we have? And do we, as individuals and as churches, make the most of what infinite riches we have in such access to the Scriptures?

It’s wonder enough that God has spoken. But as we continue reading Hebrews, it gets even better. Not only did our speaking God speak in the past through the prophets, and not only did he speak to us in the Son, but he continues to speak.

2. God is speaking.

God’s speech is a central emphasis in the book of Hebrews. In Hebrews, God speaks, says, testifies, proclaims, calls, promises, vows, warns, reproves, and declares. Again and again, Hebrews refers to God’s word, his promise, his oath, his spoken word, and his voice.

Something that’s amazing to track in Hebrews is who speaks to whom. First, Father speaks to Son in chapter 1, and Son speaks to Father in chapter 2 (and 10). But then, the Son also speaks to us. And the Spirit speaks to us. And the Father speaks to us.

The Spirit speaks to us through Psalm 95 in chapters 3–4.
God speaks Proverbs 3:11–12 to us, as his children, in chapter 12.
God speaks to us, corporately and individually, in the words of Joshua 1:5 in chapter 13.

Hebrews’s burden is to show that Scripture is not just a collection of ancient texts from the past, but Scripture is the voice of the living God, speaking right now. It’s implicit throughout, but Hebrews makes it explicit, as we’ve seen already in chapter 1, and now will see elsewhere, across its chapters.

Living Words

First, consider Hebrews 3:7–8:

As the Holy Spirit says [quoting Psalm 95], “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion.”

Psalm 95 is not only what the Spirit said in the past, but what the Spirit continues to speak when we read or hear the words of Psalm 95. Then added to this is the emphasis on “today” in the quote from Psalm 95. That “today” was first for hearers in David’s day. Now, that “today” is for hearers in Hebrews’s day, because the Spirit not only said Scripture, but says Scripture. This is what it means for Scripture to be “living and active.” That’s the famous passage in Hebrews 4:12–13:

The word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And no creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account.

Psalm 95, as the Spirit’s ongoing speech to believers, in the past as well as the present, is the immediate referent of Hebrews 4:12. When Hebrews says “the word of God is living and active,” he’s talking first about Psalm 95, but it’s not as though Psalm 95 is unique in this respect. This is applicable to all of Scripture as God’s speaking. When God speaks in Scripture, he does not speak only in the moment and move on, but he continues to speak to his people through his word by his Spirit.

Which might then lead us to reflect on the closeness of God and his word. Think about this with me: there is no separation between God himself and the word he breathes out. Humans may err in their speech; they may misspeak and later try to “distance themselves” from what they said. God never misspeaks, and he never miscalculates the reception of his words. And God never changes. He never says, “Well, I said that a long time ago, but I don’t say it anymore.” There is no disconnect between God and his words. To encounter the words of the living God is to encounter God himself — his sight and his eyes, as Hebrews 4:13 says.

Active Warnings

Let’s go to Hebrews 12:25, the final warning of Hebrews:

See that you do not refuse him who is speaking. For if they did not escape when they refused him who warned them on earth, much less will we escape if we reject him who warns from heaven.

So, through his letter, Hebrews has spoken the written words of Scripture to the church as living words from God by the Spirit. And now, in this final warning, he speaks of God as “him who warns from heaven” and as “him who is speaking.” Our God not only has warned, but he warns. He not only has spoken, but he is speaking. And how does he do that? By the Spirit and the word. Word and Spirit. The Holy Spirit works by and with the word to speak in the present to the people of God.

And lest we think this is unique to Hebrews — that all of Scripture should be applied to, spoken to, new-covenant Christians as the very present-moment speaking of God — the apostle Paul speaks similarly at least three times:

“Whatever was written in former days [in the past, to the fathers] was written for our instruction, that through endurance and through the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope” (Romans 15:4).
“All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness” (2 Timothy 3:16). Not “was breathed out,” but “is.” Not “was . . . profitable,” but “is.” Is, not was.
“Now these things took place as examples for us, that we might not desire evil as they did. . . . Now these things happened to them as an example, but they were written down for our instruction, on whom the end of the ages has come” (1 Corinthians 10:6, 11).

Not only has God spoken in this Book we call “the Bible,” but he is speaking.

And so, to conclude, we ask one question.

3. Will you listen — and how?

Unavoidably, a very personal and practical question confronts us in this moment, having rehearsed how much God has spoken, and that he still speaks, and that we have no excuse not to hear him. Do you listen to him? How? In what ways? And how often?

Let me end with some encouragements about “habits of grace” as they relate to saturating our lives in the word of God.

First, note I say habits plural, not habit. We need multiple habits in our lives for accessing God’s ongoing speaking in the Bible. Think of this like an hourglass, going back to Hebrews 1 and then forward into our habits of life: in Jesus, the many (prophets) become one (Son); in our lives, the one (Son) becomes many (habits).

Then, in thinking of habits plural, we might think in the matrix of four categories I mentioned at the beginning: direct and indirect, and alone and together. Direct engagement alone would be our own reading, listening, studying, and meditating on Scripture. God’s word, as the chief and soul of the means of grace, is worth your direct engagement. Here are some recommendations for your consideration.

For direct engagement, alone:

Read daily, in some form or manner.
Read first thing in the morning if possible.
Slow down; perhaps even read a paper Bible.
Don’t try to do too much, but instead “gather a day’s portion.”
Consider various gears or modes: read, study, and meditate.
“Begin with Bible, move to meditation, and polish with prayer,” as I like to say.

One way we might sum it up would be this: Treat God’s word differently from all others — when you access it, the priority you give it, the way you hear it. Make his word the standard by which you judge all other words. And don’t only read; consider hearing his word. Use a smartphone app to sit attentively under the reading of the Bible.

For indirect engagement, alone:

Read Christian books, devotionals, and substantive articles.
Listen to audiobooks, sermons and other monologues, and faithful podcasts.

For direct engagement, together:

Gather under preaching in corporate worship, which is the re-revealing of God’s word in the gathering of God’s people.
Engage in family devotions.
Participate in Bible studies.

For indirect engagement, together:

Seek Christian conversation and interaction; heed Christian counsel.
Speak truth into each other’s lives.

Consider Christ

Finally, contemplate and enjoy the person of Jesus through Scripture. He is God’s Word embodied, the Word personalized, the Word made flesh — and divine words lead to an encounter with God himself in Christ.

So, let’s close with Christ’s sevenfold greatness in Hebrews 1:1–4. Jesus is the end of the means — of prayer, of fellowship, of Scripture. He is Grace incarnate (Titus 2:11), his person, his work, his exaltation:

Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world. He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power. After making purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, having become as much superior to angels as the name he has inherited is more excellent than theirs.

The God of all grace has spoken, and he is speaking. And what one word, if it were only one word, is he saying? Jesus.

Oh, find your many times, your life-giving habits, for knowing and enjoying and getting this one Word into your soul.

We have over two hundred pastors in this room, and if Barna’s recent report is accurate, then about 85 of you considered quitting in the last twelve months.

This past March, Barna’s survey on pastoral confidence and vocational satisfaction reported that 41 percent of the pastors they queried thought about walking away in the last year. That was down 1 percent from 2022, which was up 13 percent from 2021.

But most of us don’t need survey numbers to know that these last few years have been hard times to be a pastor and to endure in the challenges of pastoral ministry. And in such times, Philippians is a great choice for a pastors’ conference.

In particular, I love the pairing of “the epistle of joy” with this theme of endurance. Paul wrote while enduring incarceration, and he wrote to a church enduring opposition. And yet Philippians is known for radiating with joy. No other epistle, and maybe no other biblical book, shines so brightly with so many explicit mentions of joy and rejoicing and gladness in such short space. So we are set up very wisely and wonderfully for illuminating both this theme and this letter, and for learning to count the joys of ministry, not just the costs.

Unity, Humility, and Joy

Chapter 2 continues the focus on unity begun in Philippians 1:27, with exhortations to unity within the church (verses 1–2, 14–16), and humility in the soul (verses 3–4), and with four personal examples.

Verses 1–2 extend the charge to unity, and verses 3–4 commend humility as the channel to such unity. And the Philippians are not on their own to obey, but God himself is at work in them (verses 12–13) to humble themselves, and so, in the face of external opposition, to strive side by side for the gospel, not against each other.

For the Philippian church, opposition was not new. Acts 16 tells us how quickly persecution followed on the heels of the gospel first coming to Philippi. Paul cast the spirit out of a slave girl, and he and Silas were soon beaten with rods and imprisoned. What’s new, and newly threatening, is that Paul has heard of some emerging divisions inside this local church. So Paul, imprisoned again, now in Rome, writes with the burden that the Philippians freshly seek unity and humility, and follow four tangible examples of humble, joyful endurance.

Chapter 2 is wonderfully concrete with these four personal examples: Timothy and Epaphroditus in verses 19–30, and Christ himself in verses 5–11 — which is the heart of the chapter and the Christian faith. And it’s where we’ll focus in this session, and see not only that Jesus endured but ask how. And there’s a sneaky fourth personal example, Paul himself, in verse 17.

If we try to capture Paul’s essential structure in this chapter of exhortations and examples to a church newly encountering tensions within, perhaps it would go like this: pursue (1) unity in the gospel, (2) through humility in your minds, (3) learning foremost from Jesus’s enduring to the cross. So: unity in the gospel, through humility of mind, like Christ at the cross.

And since this is a pastors’ conference, let’s work through that sequence with our work as pastors in view. I don’t think Paul would begrudge this approach because he addressed this letter “to all the saints in Christ Jesus who are at Philippi, with the overseers and deacons” (Philippians 1:1). Overseers, plural. In the New Testament, “overseers” and “pastors” and “elders” are three titles for one office, the lead or teaching office — the office that is our common denominator in this conference.

So, let’s ask of chapter 2, How would the pastors in Philippi have received Paul’s letter to the church? And what might be our calling, as pastors today, related to congregational unity and personal humility and the work and example of Christ in helping our local churches obey Paul’s letter?

From that perspective, then, consider the call to pastoral endurance here in Philippians 2 with its key and its incentives.

1. The Call: Lead our people into unity in the gospel.

The specific unity in view is local-church unity. The focus here is not elder teams, or large denominations, or evangelicalism at large, but the particular congregation in Philippi, and your particular congregation.

And that qualifier — “in the gospel” — is critical. We have stated terms on which to maintain and seek unity. Verses 1–2:

If there is any encouragement in Christ, any comfort from love, any participation in the Spirit, any affection and sympathy, complete my joy by being of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind.

And remember what Paul has just written in Philippians 1:27: “standing firm in one spirit, with one mind striving side by side for the faith of the gospel.” This is not simple unity, or general unity, or undefined unity, no matter the cause. This is unity in the gospel — the unity of striving side by side for the faith of the gospel. This unity is not just getting along without conflict, but unity in the gospel, on gospel terms.

So, given the qualification, it’s good for us doctrinal, theological types to pause and appreciate that unity in the local church matters. Paul values it, and means for us to value it. When the whole church maintains and enjoys Christian unity, with the pastors leading the way, it serves both the endurance and health of believers and the evangelism and conversion of unbelievers. Gospel advance is the context in which Paul calls for gospel unity.

The reason to say maintain is that unity in the gospel isn’t first something we produce. First, God gives it. That’s why Paul talks in Ephesians 4 about maintaining unity: he says, “With all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, [be] eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” (Ephesians 4:2–3). God gives us, as his church, unity in knowing his Son, believing his gospel, and having his Spirit.

Then we, eager to maintain it, beware incursions into it — however big or small; doctrinal or ethical; what we believe about God, his world, and his gospel; how we’re influenced and shaped by unbelieving society (especially through our devices); and how we treat each other in everyday life.

Pastor — and Peacemaker

And we, as pastors, have a requirement for our office that helps us in the work of leading the charge for gospel unity in the local church. Pastor-elder-overseers, says 1 Timothy 3:3, are to be “peaceable” or “not quarrelsome” (ESV), or “not a brawler” (KJV; Greek amachon). In pastoral ministry, unity, not conflict, is our long game. We’re not angling for conflict. We angle for real peace and unity in the gospel. Our calling is not to spoil the peace, but to pursue true peace, even when it requires tension and conflict to get there.

At heart, pastors are peacemakers, not troublemakers. And we sometimes (if not often) discover trouble that regretfully requires more trouble, in order to pursue true unity and, in the end, have less trouble. But we don’t delight in trouble. Nor do we seek to add unnecessary trouble to the sad amount of necessary trouble we already have in this age. Rather, we delight to be unified in the gospel — and unity in the gospel is precious enough that we’re willing to endure intermediate tensions and conflicts along the path to peace and unity.

Which presents us as pastors with countless needs and challenges for wisdom. We need to know when to handle challenges to gospel unity with one-time private conversations, and when to give trouble more extended private attention, and when to address trouble with public attention in some form, as in a sermon or sermon series, or in a letter, or at church meetings.

In other words, how much attention do we give to error and for how long? These are some of the most difficult challenges in pastoral ministry. And this is why plurality in leadership is so important and precious. Alone, none of us makes such decisions perfectly, and perhaps not even very well. We need a team of brothers to help discern what challenges in our own congregation to unity in the gospel are worthy of our attention, and not, and how much attention, and for how long.

And is this unity uniformity? Twice verse 2 says to be “of the same mind” and “of one mind.” We might call it like-mindedness, a shared perspective or cast of mind. It doesn’t mean sameness, that everybody believes all the same things about all the same things, but that at the heart, and in the end, there is a like-mindedness in what matters most — in getting the gospel right and longing for it to advance.

So, we are not afraid of relational tensions in ministry, and we check ourselves to make sure that our part in those tensions is owing to the long game of unity, not division, and especially those divisions that stem from selfish ambition and conceit.

Which leads us to verses 3–4 and humility, which is set in contrast to conceit.

2. The Key: Lead our people in humility of mind.

In other words, we aim to serve the church’s needs, not the pastors’ preferences. Paul’s call to unity from Philippians 1:27–2:2 leads to the focus on humility in 2:3 and following.

Humility is far more conducive to real unity than pride and arrogance. Pride may lead to semblances of unity for a while, but in time, pride will produce division. And humility will at times lead to awkward moments and seasons of necessary conflict, but in the end, humility tends toward, and is essential for, true and lasting unity. Much division in churches stems from pride — selfish ambition and empty conceit. And often the first practical step toward addressing division in local churches is individual Christians coming to humble themselves. So, verses 3–4:

Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others.

Verses 3–4 are the key exhortations in the chapter, leading into verse 5 and the example of Christ. And as pastors, these are charges not just to teach to our congregations, but first to apply to ourselves and model.

“Brothers, let’s not wait till we’re on the brink of quitting to count the joys.”

The idea of humility as looking to the interests of others holds this chapter together from Jesus, to Paul, to Timothy and Epaphroditus. Though he was sick and almost died, Epaphroditus, says verse 26, “has been longing for you all and has been distressed because you heard that he was ill.” And Paul says of Timothy in verse 20 that he “will be genuinely concerned for your welfare.” Then verse 21, most strikingly: Timothy will not seek his own interests, but those of Jesus Christ.

Verse 4 calls it “the interests of others,” and verse 21 calls it “those of Jesus Christ.” There’s a good caution for us here in how to understand the terms of verses 3–4. Counting others more significant than ourselves does not mean catering to their whims. Looking to the interests of others does not mean letting their desires, however sinful, set the terms for how they will be loved by us or not. Rather, the terms are clarified, and sanctified, in verse 21: the interests of Jesus Christ. The interests of others to which we look, in humility, are those that correspond to, and are not in contradiction to, the interests of Jesus, as revealed in Scripture.

Why ‘the Mind’?

But why the emphasis on “the mind”? I said this key was to lead our people in humility of mind. The reason for emphasizing the mind is that Paul talks about unity “of mind” in verses 2 and 5, and then twice talks about “counting” or “reckoning” or “considering”:

Verse 3: “In humility count others more significant than yourselves.”
Verse 6: Jesus “did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped.”

It’s the same verb in verses 3 and 6. Paul is telling the Philippians, and us, to do what Jesus did. He counted. He reckoned. He regarded. He considered. This involves thought, making calculations and valuations. It requires the use of the mind that serves the forming and shaping of the heart, which then issues in choices and behaviors.

And how we think about ourselves, and others (in our own minds and hearts), really matters. It is critical to actually being humble and not just putting on an external pretense of humility. Humility grows first in the quiet, unseen place of our own thinking and feeling. It is the product of habitual thoughts about ourselves and others that are humble or conceited, loving or selfish.

And this is first and foremost for us as pastors. One danger in ministry is that we quietly, subtly, inconspicuously come to count ourselves as more important, gifted, necessary, respected. Leadership comes with privileges. I deserve them, so we might begin to think. How good a preacher I’ve become. Or what great leadership instincts I have. How many years I’ve put in for these people.

Slowly, over time, pastors can begin to count ourselves more significant than our congregants. We’d never verbalize it that way, but in our own patterns of thought our minds and hearts develop those instincts. And ministry decisions begin to serve our preferences, rather than the true needs of the congregation — which are often at odds with our preferences.

When we come to forks in the road in pastoral leadership, sometimes (if not often) the truly loving, humble course of action for us as pastors is the more personally costly path — more work, more study, more care, more double-checking, more conversations, more patience, more teaching, more time. But the reason we are pastors, and the reason we sit together at the table making week-in and week-out decisions for the church, is not to cater the church’s life to our comforts and ease, but to discern and seek to meet the church’s needs.

In other words, we are workers for the joy of our people. That’s how Paul talks in 2 Corinthians 1:24: “Not that we [leaders] lord it over your faith [that is, to our convenience and private benefit], but we work with you for your joy.” And serving the church’s needs, putting the church’s joy foremost in our counting, is often the harder, more costly avenue for the pastors — but not joyless. In fact, in the end, more joyful. But in the meantime, less convenient.

So, our call is to endure in leading our people into unity in the gospel, and the key is to lead, through our teaching and modeling, in humility.

3. The Incentives: Lead our people to count like Jesus.

And now the focus is especially on how to endure in ministry — that is, to endure in our work as Jesus endured. And how did he endure?

Now, Philippians 2 does not mention explicitly the joy of Jesus. Verses 5–8 put Jesus’s endurance in terms of self-humbling. But what in the world are verses 9–11 doing here? Incentivizing our self-humbling with what incentivized Jesus’s self-humbling.

We have in this famous Christ hymn something like six stanzas, each with three lines. The first three stanzas capture the increasing degrees of Christ’s self-humbling descent:

[1] [Being] in the form of God,[he] did not count equality with Goda thing to be grasped,

[2] but [he] emptied himself,by taking the form of a servant,being born in the likeness of men.

[3] And being found in human form,he humbled himself bybecoming obedient to the point of death . . . (Philippians 2:6–8)

Then, the last three stanzas, which we’ll come to, capture the heights of his incentivizing, rewarding exaltation.

But in the very middle, Paul breaks the three-line pattern and includes one extra line that is conspicuously out of place at the very heart of the hymn: “even death on a cross.” And the stray line is all the more arresting because it ends with an obscenity.

In the first century, the cross was known to be so horrific, so gruesome, so shameful that it was not a topic of polite conversation. The Latin crux, the Greek stauros, pained the ears and imaginations of the dignified.

Think of all the trials Jesus faced, of all his needs for endurance. He endured decades in obscurity, rejection from his hometown, spiritual dullness and unbelief in his own disciples, opposition from religious (Pharisees) and political (Sadducees) leaders, carnal and fickle masses, one of his own betraying him, another denying him, all his men fleeing, being unjustly accused, tried, and condemned, flogged, reviled, mocked, blasphemed — and worst of all, the suffering and shame of crucifixion.

How did Jesus endure this, of all things? How did he keep going? How did he humble himself and obey to the point of death, even death on a cross?

In a similar passage, Hebrews 12:2 says, “For the joy that was set before him [he] endured the cross.” So, joy, yes — but I want to know more. Specifically, what joy could that have been? What reward could have been valuable enough in his reckoning, in his counting, to pull him forward to finish this race, with the very emblem of suffering and shame standing in the way?

What foretaste of joy, or joys, could endure the cross?

The Gospel of John gives us the best glimpse into his mind as he readied himself for the cross and counted not only the costs, but the joys. Two particular sections speak to the substance and shades of his joy as he owned and embraced the cross in the hours leading up to his sacrifice.

John 12

The first section is John 12:27–33, not long after Jesus’s Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem. Previously, Jesus (and John) had said “his hour had not yet come” (John 2:4; 7:30; 8:20). Now he owns that it has:

“Now is my soul troubled. And what shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’? But for this purpose I have come to this hour. Father, glorify your name.” Then a voice came from heaven: “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.” (John 12:27–28)

Here we find a first source of his joy: the glory of his Father. When Jesus owns the arrival of his hour, and need to endure, this is the first motivation he vocalizes. He had lived to his Father’s glory, not his own (John 8:50), and now, as the cross fast approaches, he prays first for this, and receives the affirmation of an immediate answer from heaven: “I have glorified it [in your life], and I will glorify it again [in and through your death, even death on a cross].”

Next comes a second joy: what the cross will achieve over the ancient foe. John 12:31: “Now is the judgment of this world; now will the ruler of this world be cast out.” Satan, whom Paul would call “the god of this world” (2 Corinthians 4:4) and “the prince of the power of the air” (Ephesians 2:2), would be decisively unseated as “ruler of this world,” and Jesus would experience the joy of unseating him, and being his Father’s instrument to disarm “the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them” (Colossians 2:15) at the cross.

Jesus mentions a third joy in John 12:32: the saving of his people. “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” He would be lifted up from the earth — which first meant being lifted up to the cross, as John immediately adds (John 12:33). Make no mistake, in the “joy that was set before him” was the joy of love. He had come to save (John 12:47), and on that Thursday night, he would wash his disciples’ feet to show them the love that, in real measure, sent him to the cross. John 13:1: “Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.”

John 17

The second passage is Jesus’s High Priestly Prayer in John 17. On the very night when he gave himself into custody, he echoes two of the joys already introduced, and adds one further “joy that was set before him” that brings us back to Hebrews 12 and, with it, Philippians 2.

First, Jesus prays explicitly about sharing his own joy, and that (again) as an expression of his love for disciples. John 17:13: “These things I speak in the world, that they may have my joy fulfilled in themselves.” Jesus’s joy — deep enough, thick enough, rich enough to carry him to and through the cross — will not only be his, but he will put it in his people, through both his words and sacrificial work, that they too might endure. John 15:11: “These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.” This is love: it was his joy to share his joy to increase their joy.

Second, Jesus also prays in John 17 in anticipation of his Father’s glory. He recalls that his life has been devoted to his Father’s glory, to making known his name (John 17:4, 6, 26). But now, in the consecration of prayer, and on his final evening before the cross, he prays, third, for his own exaltation:

Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son that the Son may glorify you. . . . Now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had with you before the world existed. (John 17:1, 5; see also verse 24)

Misunderstand the holiness of Christ, and this moment, and we will misunderstand this culminating joy: returning to his Father, and being seated, as the God-man, with his work accomplished, on the throne of the universe. The joy of being enthroned in heaven — glorified — at the right hand of his Father, will not come any other way than through, and because of, the cross. And his exaltation and enthronement will mean not only personal honor but personal nearness (“in your own presence” and “with you” in John 17:5). “At the right hand” is the seat of both honor and proximity to his Father. Jesus wanted not only to have heaven’s throne but again to have his Father.

And this coming exaltation, with its nearness, is the particular joy that Hebrews 12:2 points to, like Philippians 2: “For the joy that was set before him [Jesus] endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.”

Joy Will Have the Last Word

Which brings us back to the epistle of joy. As Paul’s hymn says, Jesus endured the cross, and therefore God “highly exalted him.” Jesus endured by looking to the reward — that is, through joy. He counted the joys — his Father’s glory, his people’s good, his enemy’s defeat, and his own exaltation and nearness to his Father, which the final three stanzas of the Christ hymn celebrate:

[4] Therefore God has highly exalted himand bestowed on him the namethat is above every name,

[5] so that at the name of Jesusevery knee should bow,in heaven and on earth and under the earth,

[6] and every tongue confessthat Jesus Christ is Lord,to the glory of God the Father. (Philippians 2:9–11)

So, weary pastors, “Consider him who endured from sinners such hostility against himself, so that you may not grow weary or fainthearted. In your struggle against sin you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood” (Hebrews 12:3–4).

And let’s learn to count the joys like Jesus. We can hardly rehearse too often that the glory of Christ is our great goal and great joy. What a calling we have in him, as we lead our little churches in the cosmic victory, crushing Satan underneath our feet. And we pastors, as workers for the joy of our people, enrich our joy (not impoverish it) by folding others deeper into the joy we have in Jesus.

The day is coming when the many sacrifices and challenges and costs and self-humblings of pastoral ministry will be done. Brothers, on that day, “when the chief Shepherd appears, you will receive the unfading crown of glory” (1 Peter 5:4).

Then the frustrations and discouragements of ministry in this age will feed our unending joy. At last, we will see how our trials and setbacks have been setups for eternal glory. And the church — of which we are part, and for which we have labored — will be finally perfected, in perfect unity, a bride holy and without blemish, presented to Christ in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing.

Final unity will come. Division and threats will be no more. And every hard step along the path of pastoral endurance will be swallowed up in peace, and glory, and joy beyond our best imagining.

Brothers, let’s not wait till we’re on the brink of quitting to count the joys.