Three connected tasks demand the time of a pastor-teacher: preaching/teaching; people-work; and leading/admin. A wise pastor, it was recommended, gives a third of his time to each of these tasks, each task relating to and serving the others. To preach effectively involves knowing the people to whom we are preaching. Knowing the people fuels our love for them and shapes our prayers and our preaching to them.

What does it mean to be a good teacher?
I read recently that a good teacher is not just someone who knows and communicates their subject but who genuinely cares about their students, knows their students, and seeks to make what they teach accessible and helpful to the individuals they teach.
So it is with a wise pastor. A wise pastor-teacher doesn’t see their role as simply teaching the Bible. Rather, they teach God’s living Word to the flock entrusted to their care; those with whom they share their lives and take time to get to know.
Wisdom from Proverbs
There is wisdom for shepherd-leaders in Proverbs 27:23: “Be sure you know the condition of your flocks, give careful attention to your herds.”
The given reason for this instruction is future-focussed; a well-cared-for flock will provide resources needed in the future.
For pastor-teachers, the reason for knowing the condition of the flock is also future-focussed; to best prepare them for their eternal future. In eternity they will be our joy.
Writing to those with whom he had shared both God’s Word and his life, Paul wrote, “For what will be our hope, our joy, or the crown in which we will glory in the presence of our Lord Jesus when He comes? Is it not you? Indeed you are our glory and joy.” (1 Thessalonians 2:19-20)
Literally, Proverbs 27:23 says “Know well the face of your flock; set your heart on the herds.”
In the Bible, to know someone’s face is to really know them, their characters, their temperament, conditions, quirks and so on. This takes time. It will be costly. It involves prioritising spending time with them. It means getting up from our desks and deliberately engaging with them.
Pastors in a former generation tended to spend their mornings in the study and the afternoons/evenings with people. Spending time with people in their homes seems to be less common now. There may be understandable reasons why that is so, but a wise pastor finds ways to “know well the face of their flock.”
Loving the flock
Spending time getting to know those entrusted to our care is an act of love.
It fuels our prayers as we prepare to preach. It shapes how we teach as we adapt and apply our teaching to their needs.
Read More
Related Posts:

Our lack of the original autographs in no way impacts the Christian faith. If anything, it is the amazing unity and agreement between the ancient copies and manuscripts that we possess today that affirm God’s divine and sovereign hand over the transmission of His Word throughout the ages. It would be impossible for the multitude of handwritten manuscript copies, from the hands of a plethora of scribes across the centuries, to agree with such an incredibly small margin of error if it were not for the providential and sovereign hand of God leading the transmission of these documents.

Article X: “WE AFFIRM that inspiration, strictly speaking, applies only to the autographic text of Scripture, which in the providence of God can be ascertained from available manuscripts with great accuracy. We further affirm that copies and translations of Scripture are the Word of God to the extent that they faithfully represent the original. WE DENY that any essential element of the Christian faith is affected by the absence of the autographs. We further deny that this absence renders the assertion of Biblical inerrancy invalid or irrelevant.”
We do not possess the original manuscripts of Scripture. We do not have an autographed copy of Isaiah or Jeremiah from the prophets themselves, the original Gospel according to Matthew is gone, and none of Paul’s original epistles remain. What we have are copies, translations, and more copies. Does this mean that we can’t trust the copies and translations that we do possess? According to The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, not only can we trust that the ancient copies are trustworthy, but so too are our modern copies and translations.
Affirming the Inspiration of the Original Autographs and the Accuracy of the Copies
William Shakespeare lived from 1562-1616. During his lifetime as a writer, he wrote 38 plays, 154 sonnets, and at least two narrative poems. He is, without a doubt, the most famous playwright of the English-speaking language, even to this very day. And absolutely none of his original manuscripts survive.
It is not at all unusual for original manuscripts of published works to be lost. The older the work, the more likely it is that the original manuscript (the autograph copy) has been lost or has perished with age. Most of the time, however, no one calls into question the validity of various copies. For example, if one were to go into a bookstore and purchase a copy of Shakespeare’s Plays, even though the original manuscripts no longer exist, hardly anyone is going to dispute the authorship of the plays, the validity of their wording, or their genuineness. There are, however, some that will do all three of those things—some argue Shakespeare didn’t even exist, that significant discrepancies must exist between the autographs and the republications, and that the plays may not even be rightly attributed to the phantom known as Shakespeare.
What does this have to do with the inspiration of Scripture and the original autographic texts? Everything.
Read More
Related Posts:

Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Wednesday, January 26, 2022
Contemporary Christians need to remember that our hands are not so clean. Anyone who uses a computer or smartphone to decry racism or call for reparations for American slavery can only do so because of contemporary slave labor in China. Does the fact that others own the slaves who make the goods we buy make us less guilty than Luther or Edwards? Are the past sins of long ago, committed by others, more heinous than the contemporary sins of far away to which we are all now connected?

Cancel culture shows no signs of abatement. The Spectator in Britain ended the year speculating on whether comedy itself will now be a thing of the past. Cancel culture is incompatible with comedy and humor. Meanwhile, the venomous reactions to those who dare to affirm the importance of biological sex, such as J.K. Rowling, continue unabated. Even the word “mother” is under attack from the highest levels of government. It is hard to imagine that a society can survive long term that denies reality and reinforces its lunacy with an adamant refusal to laugh at itself.
Yet there is a form of cancel culture emerging within the ranks of Christians. It operates with selective pieties drawn from the wider woke culture and reflects, whether by accident or design, the same self-righteousness that marks the secular world. Two obvious examples are current attitudes toward Martin Luther and Jonathan Edwards.
Edwards owned slaves and was thus a part of America’s original sin, the consequences of which we still live with today. Luther is worse. He is notorious for the violently anti-Jewish nature of some of his later works. In a post-Holocaust world, that is highly problematic. Some years ago, while working on a book on historical fallacies, I did considerable research on the Jewish question in Luther and was distressed to find that his anti-Jewish works had been reprinted by the Nazis as part of their own propaganda and were also available today on viciously anti-Semitic websites.
The question—and it is a very legitimate question—is whether we should continue to take seriously such men who failed so signally to conform to moral positions that we now regard as self-evident and, indeed, a consistent application of the Christianity into which they both had such signal insights. Should we cancel them?
Read More