Students contribute to the family of God as gifted brothers and sisters. Within the local body, seminary students may participate in a scaffolding of opportunities for leading, teaching, and serving in all sorts of capacities…local church participation coheres seminary coursework with the Great Commission.

For many pastors, time spent in formal seminary training is one of the most joyful seasons of life. Most seminary students are in their twenties or early thirties, learning God’s Word and how to walk by faith in all spheres of life. Toward that end I offer here six steps for maximizing the seminary experience.
Be ready to repent. Seminary brings fleshly thinking and habits to the surface. If it is the case that the Word exposes sin, the more time we are around the Word, the more we are exposed. And this is good news! Can you imagine how fleshly our churches would be if we did not have seminaries as spheres of learning where we might discover and deal with fleshly thought patterns? Since the Word is central to all courses at MBTS, a school like ours is a place where students and faculty are confronted about all sorts of fleshly living. It may be that seminary uniquely exposes areas of prideful comparison and competition. When students receive graded papers, they are tempted to ask how fellow students scored; when grading a Hebrew grammar quiz in class, students are tempted to score themselves as highly as possible; when sharing about the number of evangelistic encounters they have had, seminarians want to be sure that their efforts do not go unnoticed. Faculty are tempted to use their platform for self-glory or academic posturing when they get noticed for this or that speaking event or publication. So, the Spirit confronts these fleshly thought patterns and empowers the seminary community to repent and walk in the humble power of the gospel.
Prepare for financial struggles—and miraculous provision. The records of heaven are filled with accounts of God’s faithfulness to young men and women, sometimes with children tagging along, who step out in faith to attend seminary. Most seminary students begin the journey with little cash to spare, initially seeking God to provide a job. And He does. I meet student after student who notes how God provides flexible work through which they can both make it to class and make ends meet. During seminary, most students run into a financial bind—or two. This is part of God’s curriculum for pastors: in leading a church post-seminary, men of God will need to personally know of God’s faithfulness if they will lead the flock to walk by faith. Upon graduation, seminary students, often with tears, detail how God provided through extra work, an anonymous gift, the kindness of their local church, or a generous family member. God has yet to be unfaithful to meet the church’s or her leaders’ needs in training.
Read More
Related Posts:

As we stay alert and maintain allegiance to Jesus, we are protected from Satan’s traps and the spiritual deflation that they bring. Jesus’s promise of blessing those who embrace the role of staying alert rests on God’s justice to reward the faithful. Will not God be alert to those who are alert to him?

Many of us can’t focus for 5 minutes. The technological resources available to us opportune new pursuits without end. We can go in 1,000 directions and nowhere at the same time. This is a spiritual danger. The Bright Shiny Object fabricates a tale of fulfillment but lures us from reality. It promises what it cannot deliver, and we are susceptible if we are not paying attention to our spiritual lives. Challenging life situations, relational strife, and boredom—these and so many other circumstances can be a greenhouse of distraction from God.
John’s audience in Revelation was tempted by the Bright Sinny Object of safety and security, getting by and fitting in to get along and stay alive. Tempted to live for the here and now, to live as earth-dwellers instead of citizens of the soon-to-be-revealed heavenly city, John’s audience, too, was vulnerable to Satan’s lies.
Blessed are the Alert
What is required of God’s people in this atmosphere of spiritual warfare? In Rev 3:3, Jesus urges the church in Sardis to keep alert since his coming is like a thief. In the sixth bowl judgment (Rev 16:12–16), John records the only speech report attributed to Jesus in any of the seal, trumpet, or bowl judgments. Jesus said, “Look, I am coming like a thief. Blessed is the one who is alert and remains clothed, so that he may not go around naked and people see his shame” (Rev 16:15, CSB). John ties together the role of keeping alert with the role of keeping one’s clothes. It is as if, in John’s mind, the level of the believer’s alertness is visible to the believer and the watching world.
We should understand the broader context of Jesus’s statement during the sixth bowl judgment recorded in Rev 16:12–16.
Read More
Related Posts:

Jesus does not call us to look for ways to suffer but to know that we will suffer for him. Disciples have an endurance mindset because of the value of knowing and being known of Jesus. John’s esteem for those who have been slaughtered and those who have been martyred reminds us that our faith is valuable.

Some of the roles John sets forth in Revelation lack appeal for modern readers, just as they would have for John’s live audience. As creatures, humans tend to avoid pain, not embrace roles that might lead to suffering. Let alone death. John exhibits pastoral concern in Revelation, compelling him to esteem those taking up the role of being slaughtered for Christ. The general hue of Revelation places believers in the cross-hairs of spiritual war, and in Rev 6:9, 18:24, and 20:4 John lauds those who have embraced the role of suffering for their faith even to the point of death. 
The Slaughtered Ones Heard in Heaven
Revelation can be seen as a protracted answer to the saints’s question John hears when the sixth seal is broken, “Lord, the one who is holy and true, how long until you judge those who live on the earth and avenge our blood?” (Rev 6:10, CSB). John notes that the ones crying out to God for justice are those who had been slaughtered because of God’s word and their testimony of Christ (Rev 6:9). The role of being slaughtered or martyred in Rev 6:9 and in Rev 18:24 expresses the highest degree of faithfulness to Christ. Beale states it clearly: “Since the symbol of identity for all Christians is the slain Lamb, they all also can be referred to by the same metaphor.” 
Two ideas in Rev 6:9 underscore the saints’ devotion to God as they cry out for justice. First, John’s grammatical choice of “those who had been slaughtered” portrays the violent means of the martyrs’ deaths as yet vivid and in full color. Even if their deaths were decades before, the effects and violent frame of those deaths cast a shadow extending to the very moment when they cry out for God to avenge their blood. The slaughter they endured was thus an antecedent action that placed the saints in the resulting state implied by the slaughtering event. To be slaughtered is to die violently with scars and visible effects that forever mark a person as having been slaughtered.
Further, the nearness and proximity of the violent death of the martyrs anticipates John’s description of why the saints were slaughtered. At the conclusion of Rev 6:9, John notes that the saints had been martyred because of their continuous, consistent testimony of Christ.
Read More
Related Posts: