http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/15086535/how-is-christ-head-of-the-church
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How Do We ‘Learn Christ’? Ephesians 4:17–24, Part 5
http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/14835147/how-do-we-learn-christ
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Until You Get to Pastor: Seven Ambitions for Aspiring Men
If you desire to serve as a pastor, you desire a noble task (1 Timothy 3:1) — literally, a good work. When God surveys the mountain range of your desire, he sees wisdom, beauty, and honor. The worldly may pity the pastor. They see anything but nobility. But not you. When you look at the real costs and inconveniences of ministry, you see glory and eternity and gain. Whether anyone ever paid you to pastor or not, you couldn’t be content to devote your short life any other way.
And yet, for some of you, you’re still not a pastor. As much as your desire to pastor may please God, it has not yet pleased him to open a door for you to actually pastor. The waiting can be as disorienting as longing to be married but struggling to find a date, or aching to have children while amassing pregnancy tests. If God loves this work, and if churches need this work, and if you want this work, why would God withhold it from you, sometimes for years?
Because God often does as much through our waiting as he does through our serving. Sometimes God makes us wait for doors to open in ministry because unwanted waiting is some of the best preparation for ministry. That means closed doors really can become spiritual gifts to those who will humbly kneel before them.
But what can we do while we wait? How do we keep ourselves from wasting the years before we enter formal ministry? How do we squeeze as much good as possible from a closed door? Over the last decade, I’ve learned at least seven practical lessons while waiting outside doors of my own.
1. Purify Your Ambition
One reason God withholds ministry from those aspiring to ministry is because the aspiration itself needs refining. That the task is noble does not necessarily mean that our desire has risen to such nobility. People seek out positions of leadership for all kinds of reasons (and sometimes, honorable motives are deeply mixed with dishonorable ones). We may want to glorify Christ and love his people, but deep down, we also want recognition, or influence, or power and authority. Our ambition needs purifying.
Sometimes this selfishness lies across the path to ministry like a fallen tree after a storm. We can’t always see our own selfishness, but God is kind to help us remove it. A season of waiting can be a season for better aspiring. In these times, it’s especially good to pray prayers like Psalm 139:23–24,
Search me, O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts!And see if there be any grievous way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting!
In his classic book, The Christian Ministry, Charles Bridges presses home three qualities of a godly desire to pastor. First, godly desire is a constraining desire, one that persists and intensifies over time. Waiting helps us test the strength and stamina of our desire. Second, godly desire is a considerate desire, meaning we have sufficiently counted the cost. Waiting gives us time to begin serving and to seek out the stories and counsel of those further along in ministry. Lastly, godly desire is an unselfish desire, meaning it’s not focused on self — praise, power, esteem — but on the glory of Christ and the good of his bride. Waiting proves and strengthens our readiness to deny ourselves, pick up our cross, and follow him.
2. Strengthen Your Character
The qualifications for eldership in 1 Timothy 3:1–7 and Titus 1:6–9 touch on various areas of a man’s life — how he speaks, how he drinks, how he spends his money, how he responds to conflict, what kind of husband and father he is — but they’re really all about who he is. The qualifications are searching for outer evidence of inner character — not perfect evidence, but real and persistent evidence.
So, God might be withholding ministry to give your character time and space to mature. Therefore, in your season of waiting, “be all the more diligent to confirm your calling and election” (2 Peter 1:10).
Make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue, and virtue with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with steadfastness, and steadfastness with godliness, and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love. For if these qualities are yours and are increasing, they keep you from being ineffective or unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. (2 Peter 1:5–8)
This stage of pastoral preparation is not unlike premarital counseling. No couple can address every character flaw or potential area of conflict in three or four or five sessions with a counselor. It’s impossible. But that doesn’t mean premarital counseling is futile. Everything you can address (or at least begin to address) in premarital will have some good effect in marriage. The same is true in preparation for pastoral ministry.
So, which areas of your life and character could use more prayerful attention and consistent accountability? You cannot imagine all the future fruit your church might receive from your diligently sowing godliness now.
3. Pastor Your Home Better
When you read through the qualifications for eldership, which one feels the most daunting to you? Someone could certainly make an argument for “able to teach” (“I sweat even thinking about public speaking”), or “hospitable” (“Do you know what my house is like with small kids?”), or “well thought of by outsiders” (“You don’t know my neighbors”). I would argue for a different one though: “He must manage his own household well” (1 Timothy 3:4). In other words, we know how well a man will lead a church by how well he has led his home.
In most cases, this will be the qualification that requires the most forethought, sacrifice, and follow-through. If God has given you a wife and children, they are the first proving grounds for your qualification and preparation for church office. No man who fails here should be entrusted with the people of God. “For if someone does not know how to manage his own household, how will he care for God’s church?” (1 Timothy 3:5).
And yet every man, even the most qualified, can stand to grow here. So, if God gives you a season without formal responsibility in the church, receive it as a golden opportunity to lead even better in the high and holy responsibilities you have at home. Initiate more time in the word of God. Lead your family in singing to him. Spend more time on your knees, with them and alone. Brainstorm how you might be more hospitable together and share the gospel with neighbors. Before you begin formal ministry, use the precious time and energy you have now to fortify the spiritual foundation of your home.
4. Refine Your Abilities
If God has given you gifts that others believe would be useful as a pastor, a season of waiting can be a great time to identify and nurture those gifts. You don’t have to wait until you’re preaching regularly to develop your ability to teach. You don’t have to have formal office hours for counseling to begin helping other believers through conflict and crisis. In fact, you don’t have to have a title to meet most of the needs in your church. How, then, might you use your gifts now to be a blessing to others?
Bobby Jamieson, in his excellent book for those aspiring to ministry, wisely counsels younger men, “Aim to be mistaken for an elder before you are appointed an elder” (The Path to Being a Pastor, 67). You cannot be a pastor until a church calls you to pastor, but you do not need to be a pastor to begin serving, teaching, leading, and loving like one. In fact, as Jamieson says, no man should be called to pastoral ministry who is not already doing some, if not much, of the work of pastors.
The apostle Paul urges his protégé Timothy, “Do not neglect the gift you have, which was given you by prophecy when the council of elders laid their hands on you. Practice these things, immerse yourself in them, so that all may see your progress” (1 Timothy 4:14–15). He returns to the same point in his second letter: “Fan into flame the gift of God, which is in you through the laying on of my hands” (2 Timothy 1:6). So, if others have seen abilities of teaching and counsel in you, what could you do to fan the flame of those abilities? How might you immerse yourself in ministering the word? What opportunities has God given you now, however modest, to teach and meet needs in your church?
5. Count the Cost
Many men who aspire to pastoral ministry really aspire to the more fulfilling facets of ministry — studying God’s word, helping the congregation see what’s there, watching people become liberated from sin and reconciled to one another, winning souls to Christ. Fewer aspire to the costs. Some are almost completely ignorant of the costs. And there are serious, sometimes overwhelming costs to ministry.
Jesus says to the great crowds who seem so eager to follow him,
Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple. For which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it begin to mock him, saying, “This man began to build and was not able to finish.” (Luke 14:27–30)
The warning applies all the more to pastors. Have you given yourself time to look beyond the appealing aspects of ministry to its darker, more discouraging sides? One way to count the cost in a season of waiting would be to spend regular time with a veteran pastor or two. Find a man willing to be vulnerable about how hard pastoring can be. Ask him to paint a wider, fuller picture of the warfare he faces than you can imagine on your own.
6. Discern the Right Door
God may have withheld some opportunities from you simply because he has a particular opportunity in mind for you. There are real spiritual dimensions to any ministry job search. Paul says to the church in Thessalonica, “We endeavored the more eagerly and with great desire to see you face to face, because we wanted to come to you . . . but Satan hindered us” (1 Thessalonians 2:17–18). Paul wanted to minister there, and that desire was a noble desire — and the church wanted him to come — and yet Satan hindered him. Ministry did not happen because evil was allowed to intervene (at least for a time). A door was closed, and God had a good reason for leaving it closed.
Elsewhere, Paul highlights other spiritual dynamics: “When I came to Troas to preach the gospel of Christ, even though a door was opened for me in the Lord, my spirit was not at rest because I did not find my brother Titus there. So I took leave of them and went on to Macedonia” (2 Corinthians 2:12–13). The door was open in Troas, and Paul wanted to be there, but he didn’t feel peace about staying there. He took Titus’s unexpected absence as a reason to leave for now and walk through a door in Macedonia instead. So, for various reasons, even some open doors may not be the right doors.
And some right doors may not immediately seem open. Look closely at how Paul talks about an opportunity he took in a different city: “I will stay in Ephesus until Pentecost, for a wide door for effective work has opened to me, and there are many adversaries” (1 Corinthians 16:8–9). He saw a wide-open door even though the enemies were many. While many might have interpreted intense opposition as a closed door, he saw the opposite. So, just because a particular ministry opportunity looks challenging, even very challenging, it still might be the right door.
All to say, a season of unwanted waiting may be necessary to make sure you land where God wants you. You may knock on closed door after closed door because you haven’t reached the door he has opened wide for you. So, pray with Paul that God may open to you the right “door for the word, to declare the mystery of Christ” (Colossians 4:3) — and that you’d recognize it when he does.
7. Care for Souls
Lastly, and most fundamentally, the call to pastor is a call to shepherd, to live and die for the good of the sheep. When Jesus, the Good Shepherd, restores and commissions Peter after his betrayal, he charges him three times (mercifully, once for each denial) in John 21:15–17,
“Feed my lambs.”
“Tend my sheep.”
“Feed my sheep.”
This is pastoral ministry in five words: “Feed and tend my sheep.” Sheep-work is rarely thrilling, glorious, or fragrant. It’s simple. It’s repetitive. It can be messy. It’s often thankless. But if these sheep belong to Jesus, and one day will be washed clean and made like him, there’s no more important work in the world. If God has called you to ministry, you see that filthy wool and those wandering feet, and your heart strangely rises with love and devotion. You want to give yourself to the word, so that one day you might help present them to Christ.
So, spend time with the sheep. Tend the sheep. Love the sheep. Embrace a season of waiting and serving in the church with a graduate-level degree in shepherding. Do what good pastors do, and begin to make yourself at home in the pasture.
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Forgive Me and Help Me Forgive: The Lord’s Prayer for Daily Sin
If you were teaching the Lord’s Prayer to someone for the first time — a child, a neighbor, a co-worker, or friend — which line would you feel the most need to explain?
Our Father in heaven,hallowed be your name.Your kingdom come,your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.Give us this day our daily bread,and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. (Matthew 6:9–13)
As you rehearse those familiar lines, which one begs for more explanation? Maybe it’s the first, Why do we call the God of the universe “Father”? Or perhaps the second, What does it mean to “hallow” something, much less a name? What about the will of God — what is it and how would we recognize it on earth? Or that haunting last line, What kind of evil is surrounding and threatening us?
However we might answer, we have Jesus’s answer to the question. He chooses to say more about just one line, and it’s not the one many of us might think.
Do You Pray for Your Sin?
When Jesus taught his disciples to pray, he started with the kingdom of God, the will of God, and the glory of God — you can almost hear the replies, Amen! Amen! Amen! And then, as suddenly as he entered the manger, he climbed down into the nitty-gritty of our earthly lives: “Give us this day our daily bread . . .” Give us all we need for today. Who could refuse such provision?
The next line, however, may have been more jarring:
. . . and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.
When you pray, Jesus says, remember how you have offended God. Remember how you’ve failed him again today, how far short you have fallen of his kingdom, his will, his glory — and then ask him for forgiveness.
Whatever else you pray, he teaches, make sure you pray for this. Each day that you wake up, you will need to eat and you will need to be forgiven. Your stomach will rumble and your soul will rebel. So pray and live accordingly.
Hunger Pangs of the Heart
Most Christians pray daily for bread (if not for God to provide it before it comes, then to thank him once it’s on the table). How many of us, however, pray as persistently for our sin as we do for our meals? Why might that be?
Well, for one, because we viscerally sense our need for food. We ache. We may be able to skip meals here and there, but not many and not for long. And when we do, our bodies let us hear about it. We take it for granted, but there’s a magic tying our brains to our intestines, telling us when we need to eat. We don’t have to constantly record what we eat to survive; our bodies push notifications when it’s time for lunch or a snack or a drink of water. We’re less likely to forget food because our hunger eventually shouts over everything else.
For various reasons, though, we often have a harder time hearing the rumblings of our sinful hearts. The heart has its own voice, but it doesn’t physically overwhelm us like hunger can. The pangs of the heart reveal as much or more as hunger, but we learn to live with them. Restlessness. Anxiety. Irritability. Sluggishness. Impatience. Grumbling. If we notice them at all, we learn to excuse them instead of addressing them.
The symptoms of remaining sin are saying what Jesus clearly taught: We need to be forgiven — and far more often than we want to acknowledge. The prayer, “Forgive us our sins,” is an honest, gracious, and daily reminder of a constant need.
Isn’t Forgiveness Finished?
We also might not pray more often for forgiveness, though, because we assume we’ve already been forgiven. If our debt is already paid in full, why would we need to keep asking God to forgive us? When Jesus died on the cross, he announced that his atoning work was complete: “It is finished” (John 19:30). So why would he teach us to pray as if forgiveness was somehow an ongoing need?
Justification — full acceptance with God, through faith alone — is not a new need each day, like our need for daily bread. If you’re justified by grace through faith today, you do not need to be re-justified tomorrow. “Since we have been justified by faith,” Romans 5:1, “we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” Since we have been justified, we have peace with God — and that peace isn’t undone by today’s or tomorrow’s sins. “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1). Eternal condemnation isn’t a weed that creeps back into the garden overnight. For those truly in Christ, it’s dead and gone for good.
“By regularly asking for forgiveness, we draw the finished work of Christ into today’s temptations and failures.”
Still Jesus teaches us to pray (and keep praying), “Forgive us our debts.” Why? Because justified sinners are still sinners, and sin still disrupts our communion with God. Sin cannot damn the truly justified — their debt has been canceled, their curse lifted, their wrath removed. That doesn’t mean sin isn’t offensive or damaging to relationships, including with God. By regularly asking for forgiveness, we draw the finished work of Christ into today’s temptations and failures — and we renew and sweeten the fellowship we enjoy with him because of that finished work.
We see this dynamic when James exhorts us, “Confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed” (James 5:16). These believers have already been justified, but they’re still sinning and still feeling the awful consequences of sin, which leads them to pray, confess, and ask for forgiveness. And as they pray, they push back the painful havoc sin causes. In this case, they’re healed.
How Not to Be Forgiven
We still haven’t heard Jesus explain this line in the prayer, though. After he finishes the prayer, he specifically returns to the petition for forgiveness:
For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses. (Matthew 6:14–15)
He doesn’t dig further into God’s will or shed light on the dangers of evil; no, he impresses on them how spiritually urgent it is that they forgive. He warns them that their prayers — all their prayers for everything else — will fall on deaf ears if they harbor bitterness and withhold forgiveness. The warning’s baked directly into the prayer: “Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.” The prayer for God to forgive presumes we’ve already done forgiving ourselves — so have we?
At least as often as we’ll need to eat, we’ll need to be forgiven. And almost as often as we’ll need to be forgiven, we’ll need to forgive. And we won’t be forgiven if we don’t go and do likewise. So who do you need to forgive? We cannot pray the rest of the Lord’s Prayer in any meaningful way if we refuse to forgive like he does.
Forgiveness Makes Prayer Possible
Jesus’s simple prayer reminds us that our sin problem is a daily problem. Every day, we do what we shouldn’t and don’t do what we should. We say what we shouldn’t and don’t say what we should. We think what we shouldn’t and don’t think what we should. The Lord’s Prayer exposes the rotten leftovers of our mutiny against God. And it reminds us, as often as we pray, that God still forgives — even today, even you, if you’ll humble yourself and ask him to.
“Even before Jesus received the nails, the thorns, the beams, he was teaching his friends how to receive the cross.”
Jesus didn’t say, “Remember your sin and wallow in shame and guilt.” No, he taught them to bring their sin and expect forgiveness in return. And why could they presume to be forgiven? Because, he knew his wounds would soon make this kind of prayer possible. He didn’t just teach them how to pray; he would die to give their prayers life and power before the throne. Even before he received the nails, the thorns, the beams, he was teaching his friends how to receive the cross.
So, when you pray, plead boldly for forgiveness in the name of Jesus. And before you pray, forgive like God so gladly forgives you.