The Lord desires us to live for His glory, and this is good news for us because we find our ultimate joy in doing so. Your best response to your Shepherd is satisfaction in His provision, gratitude for His restoration, and trust as you walk carefully and diligently in His steps no matter the path He chooses for you. Our response is to bring Him glory, whether wealthy or poor, well-known or obscure. He has promised to provide all that we need. 

He restores my soul. He leads me in paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.
Psalm 23:3

As a new school year is upon us, I am reminded of a strange experience I had a few times when I was young. You no doubt experienced it as a child as well. That moment when you walked into the grocery store and saw your teacher pushing a cart full of food. Or perhaps you visited a restaurant and saw your principal with a spouse. Seeing school personnel entirely out of context is stunning for a child! The young mind tries to grasp that teachers and principals have a life outside the school building. As a child, it is quite mind-blowing.
For many of us in church leadership, we can contextualize ourselves in the same way. We are the leaders. We are the ones offering encouragement, rest, and loving guidance. It can be a hard mental shift to take ourselves out of the role of giver and put ourselves into the role of receiver. But my friends, we need the same things we so often offer others. Our Heavenly Father abundantly provides everything we need for life and ministry but with a singular purpose in mind.
The third verse of Psalm 23 tells us that every care we have falls under the provision of the Lord so that He might glorify Himself in our lives. Did you get that? True, we do kingdom work here on Earth, yet sometimes it can become unclear whose kingdom we are actually building. But Scripture is clear that each act of lovingkindness granted on our behalf is accomplished for the glory of our Leader and for His name’s sake. We belong to His flock, and He is our Shepherd even as we shepherd others. Our priority must never be to love our church body for our own sake but to bring glory to His Name. Let’s reintroduce the words of this very familiar verse with these thoughts in mind.
He restores my soul.
Our Lord, the Shepherd, restores us. The word restore can have a dual meaning, referring to the return of one who has strayed in sin and also the reality of renewal and sustenance. When those in our congregation stray, we follow the example of our faithful Shepherd who sought after us and rescued us just as the shepherd in the parable of the lost sheep left the ninety-nine to search for the one (Matthew 18:12). The Lord seeks His people for His glory, each one precious in His sight. As church leaders and brothers and sisters in Christ, we should pursue and bring back others into the safety of the fold. Galatians 6:1 admonishes us, “Brothers, if anyone is caught in any transgression, you who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness.”
However, it is not always an issue of one who has strayed, but perhaps of a life that is strained. Ministry can be stressful, and in those seasons, we need renewal. Psalm 19:7 says, “The law of the Lord is perfect, restoring the soul; the testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple.” The Lord speaks to us and restores us by the work of His Word. What good is a green pasture of provision when our anxious minds have blinded us to it? We must continually keep our eyes alert to the corrective balm of Scripture as it drives us to personal repentance, removing the calluses of this world. This produces soft hearts, sensitive to the leadership of the Lord, so that we can in turn, be effective leaders for others. He offers the restoration we need to persevere in our spiritual journey.
The truth is that sometimes, even as spiritual leaders of whatever flocks the Lord has given us, we lose our footing and may become discouraged. The temptation to focus on the strains of ministry gets the best of us. The cruelty of this world crushes us. At times, we simply feel knocked over by the storms in the valley. We need to be restored by our Shepherd.
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Faithful pastors submit to God’s word and herald it boldly. And they don’t pit the Jesus-breathed red letters against the God-breathed whole (2 Timothy 3:16). They don’t pervert biblical justice or condone immorality. Brothers, labor to teach God’s word to God’s people for the good of God’s church. And as you labor to work out your own salvation with fear and trembling (Philippians 2:12), serve as an example to the flock. 

He lies motionless in the living room, his body gaunt and his breathing labored. His wife of over three decades stands close by. These are sober and holy moments.
I visited him at the care facility a week earlier. A month before that, we talked at the hospital. There he gushed over his wife and how she loved him. When I walked in, he was sharing the gospel with the interfaith chaplain. But now this dear saint is unconscious, days before his death. The psalm I read may be the last words he hears before he is face to face with the incarnate Word. The hymn we sing may be the soundtrack that ushers him into heaven. I cherish this moment.
I’m reminded of a quote from Richard Baxter: “I preached, as never sure to preach again, and as a dying man to dying men!” (The Poetical Fragments of Richard Baxter, 35). Our lives, and the lives of those we minister to, will come to an end. We serve and labor to prepare our people to meet Jesus. This is our primary task. All pastoral ministry labors in light of the end.
Imminent End
We all will die. We all will stand before Jesus. The apostle John describes the great white throne of judgment, where all the books are opened (Revelation 20:11–15). All will be judged for what they have done. No one will escape accountability. The apostle Peter charges the church, “The end of all things is at hand; therefore be self-controlled and sober-minded for the sake of your prayers” (1 Peter 4:7). In other words, live wisely in light of the end. Moses, likewise, prays for insight as he draws near to imminent death: “Teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom” (Psalm 90:12).
We are dying, and so are our people. God has numbered our days. We are not guaranteed sixty, seventy, or eighty years of life. Eternity informs our labors in the present. We serve as men aware of judgment day, ready to stand before Jesus. We are dying ministers who minister to dying people.
The inescapable end keeps us sober — or it should. God will pronounce our labors as straw or gold (1 Corinthians 3:12). Will earthly ministry result in shame or commendation? Leaders watch over souls as those who will have to give an account to God (Hebrews 13:17). These are hard words with profound implications. Who is sufficient for such a task? The stakes could not be greater, nor the difficulty of the task more pronounced.
Within this sobering reality are embedded two beautiful and complementary truths: Jesus will judge, and God gives grace.
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Written by R. Scott Clark |
Thursday, July 7, 2022
Recovering the distinction between sacred and secular will not solve all our problems but, like its analogue, the nature/grace distinction (not dualism), the sacred/secular distinction is an important tool as we continue to learn how to navigate a post-Christian culture.

A significant part of the process of recovering and applying classical Reformed theology to our contemporary situation (sometimes called ressourcement, a French word which refers to getting back to original sources) is recovering the distinctions that we lost in the 19th and 20th centuries. There are a number of these, e.g., the archetypal/ectypal distinction, which, in Recovering the Reformed Confession, I called the categorical distinction; the distinction between law and gospel, which, in the classical period of Reformed theology (i.e., the 16th and 17th), was received as basic. Another lost distinction is that between the sacred and the secular. This is a distinction that our classical writers employed regularly but one that is regarded with suspicion today. In this discussion, sacred refers to that which is devoted to God. Think of the way Leviticus speaks of that which is dedicated to God or holy. Secular, in this context, refers to that which is common to Christians and pagans alike, which is not dedicated to God or holy in that sense. It does not mean “unclean” or defiled but simply not specially set apart. Think of the difference between the loaf of bread in your kitchen and the bread that has been consecrated for use in the Lord’s Supper. We often say during the administration of the Supper, “this sacred meal.” That there are secular meals is necessarily implied. Your family dinner is such a meal but it is not dirty or corrupt.
Recovering the Distinction Between Sacred and Secular
The traditional Christian (and Reformed) distinction is regarded with suspicion by some because it is unfamiliar. It is also, as a recent correspondent wrote to me, regarded by some as a Roman Catholic distinction. Some have been taught that the sacred belongs to God and the secular belongs to the Devil. That would be Manichaeism (i.e., the theology behind the Star Wars films). Others have been taught (directly or indirectly) by the followers of Abraham Kuyper that any distinction between the sacred and the secular somehow removes the sovereignty of God.
Neither of these was true in the classical period of Reformed theology and they are not true now. The Protestants saw the secular and the sacred as two distinct spheres over which and through which God exercises his sovereign providence.
Calvin used “secular” as a category without prejudice regularly. E.g. in Institutes 1.8.2, he contrasted the different styles between the human authors of sacred Scripture and “secular” writers. We see the same usage in 1.8.6. Calvin regularly wrote of secular judges, secular philosophers, secular work. E.g. in 4.7.22 he contrasted the properly sacred work of ministry with Gregory I’s complaint that he was forced to be too occupied with “secular affairs.” This way of thinking, speaking, and writing was universal among the magisterial Protestant Reformers and the Protestant orthodox.
We should not confuse the category secular with the use of “secular humanism” and “secularism” as pejoratives. Just as there is a difference between science and scientism so there is a proper distinction between things that are secular and a philosophy of secularism.
One way to think about the distinction between the sacred and the secular is to consider the restriction that the Apostle Paul placed on us in 1 Corinthians 10:14–21. The problem facing the Corinthian church was what to do about sharing meals with pagans.
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