Prayer, as Calvin puts it, is our chief expression of faith. Prayer is how faith is manifested and expressed. If you don’t believe there is a God or that you need God, then you don’t pray. But if you do believe there is a God who hears, if you believe that you need Him, then the way you express that belief is through prayer.

So far in this series on pastoral character, we’ve considered the role of the pastor’s piety and the pastor’s holiness upon his ministry. Those articles have largely been cautionary, warning pastors against the particular temptations that come in ministry. But what should a pastor cultivate positively in order to grow in pastoral character? Spurgeon’s first answer would likely be the importance of cultivating communion with Christ, expressed in the pastor’s private prayer.
The Problem: Ministerialism
One of the greatest dangers that the minister faces is the danger of what Spurgeon calls formalism or officialism or ministerialism. Listen to his description:
The worst [snare a minister can face] is the temptation to ministerialism — the tendency to read our Bibles as ministers, to pray as ministers, to get into doing the whole of our religion as not ourselves personally, but only relatively concerned in it. To lose the personality of repentance and faith is a loss indeed…
I hate ministerialism, yet I often find it creeping upon me. One gets inside a pulpit, and begins to feel that he is not as other men are; but I like, if I can, to preach as a sinner to sinners; as one saved by grace to tell the love which Christ had towards me, the chief of sinners, and “less than the least of all saints.” I do not doubt that, as soon as you get out your little book to take with you, you feel like a missionary, and not simply like a sinner saved by grace. But, I pray you, do not feel like a missionary; feel like a sinner who has been washed in the precious blood of Jesus. You will never do good if you go to your work simply because of your office, [rather than] because of your soul being in it, because your heart yearns toward sinners, because you must have them saved. Strive not against any habits that are good; but against that evil tendency which, somehow or other, Satan, who is exceedingly crafty, manages to cast over our very best habits.
In other words, even as we pursue holiness and fight sin, we have to keep the gospel central. We have to cultivate a deep awareness and sorrow over our personal sin and the temptations of our hearts. We have to live in dependence on God’s grace in Christ. And then we speak as sinners saved by grace. This is how our holiness becomes warm and attractive.
Apart from our own personal grasp of the gospel, all our efforts at piety and holiness will become a stumbling block to our own sanctification and ministry. The strange thing is that people don’t always notice ministerialism in their pastor. The unspiritual people in the congregation won’t mind that their pastor doesn’t demonstrate any spiritual life before them. Even while the minister is just keeping up appearances, a church can have a growing budget and the congregation can be entertained. But in the end, as far as the pastor is concerned, it’s all external rituals and no spiritual life.
Spurgeon describes one such situation:
I read the other day, that no phase of evil presented so marvelous a power for destruction, as the unconverted minister of a parish, with a £1200 organ, a choir of ungodly singers, and an aristocratic congregation. It was the opinion of the writer, that there could be no greater instrument for damnation out of hell than that. People go to their place of worship and sit down comfortably, and think they must be Christians, when all the time all that their religion consists in, is listening to an orator, having their ears tickled with music, and perhaps their eyes amused with graceful action and fashionable manners; the whole being no better than what they hear and see at the opera — not so good, perhaps, in point of aesthetic beauty, and not an atom more spiritual. Thousands are congratulating themselves, and even blessing God that they are devout worshippers, when at the same time they are living in an unregenerate Christless state, having the form of godliness, but denying the power thereof. He who presides over a system which aims at nothing higher than formalism, is far more a servant of the devil than a minister of God.
May such words never be said of our ministries.
The Answer: Private Prayer
So what’s the solution? How do we fight against formalism? We fight by cultivating our private prayer lives, our communion with God. And Spurgeon particularly emphasizes prayer… Not just Bible reading, but prayer, i.e. communion with Christ.
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When I was around 10 years old, I was a little philosopher piecing together life’s meaning in a world without God. I once confidently told my mom the purpose of life was to pursue happiness. I was sure that in a world devoid of any transcendent standards to which I might be held accountable, this was the only sensible answer to life’s meaning. But my mom quickly rebuked her little hedonist and told me life was about more than enjoying yourself. Life is about helping others and making the world a better place, and while happiness is a good thing, it can’t be the ultimate thing. Her words rang true though I couldn’t assemble a solid foundation on which to place these ideas.

My mom is the single greatest influence on my life, and the Lord used her in a vital way to bring me to a saving knowledge of Christ. She laid a framework that made the Christian worldview intelligible and, eventually, compelling to me. I’m certain my story is like countless others where God worked through the discipline and instruction of parents to reach their children.
But one thing makes my situation unique: my mom isn’t a Christian.
For most of my childhood, she’s been an atheist. During my growing up years, she talked about church as punishment. She’d even threaten to take me and my siblings to church when we were misbehaving. Yet in many ways, the manner in which Mom raised us betrayed dependence on a Christian outlook on reality.
We were brought up with an unshakable sense that we lived in a morally charged world—meaning was derived from the world around us, not something we imposed on the world. We heard we weren’t the only significant people but rather part of a larger network of people who are just as important as us. My mom knew the most loving way to raise us was to teach us we weren’t the center of the universe.
Home Didn’t Revolve Around Us Kids
This was perhaps most clearly evident in the decisions my mom made for me growing up. While she cared about what I wanted, she was most concerned with what was best for me. If the two were in conflict, no amount of protesting on my part would change her mind. Our household didn’t revolve around my desires but around the fixed reality of the world I lived in.
I was taught to eat my vegetables, do my homework as soon as I got home from school, and get eight or nine hours of sleep each night. I might not have always appreciated the wisdom of these rules, but even as a kid, I understood at least theoretically that they existed for my good.
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The Bible teaches us to set apart the Lord’s Day in some way for the Lord, meaning time with him. The whole concept of sabbath—a day for rest, reflection, renewal and recalibration was designed by God to be a great blessing to us. Some Christians have turned it into a legalistic rule about whether you can eat out at a restaurant or watch football games on Sunday afternoons. (Believe me, I know. I was one of them!) But the fourth commandment, as all God’s commandments are, IS GIVEN TO US BY GOD AS A GREAT BLESSING, which is why Jesus said, the Sabbath was made for man not man for the Sabbath (Mark 2:27). In fact, I believe that giving God the firstfruits of our time is very much like giving God the firstfruits of our earning power. 

One of the words used to describe the worldview of the culture in which we all swim is secularism, or sometimes called naturalism, which describes a lifestyle of preoccupation with the visible, material world to the neglect of the world of the spiritual. The result of swimming in this polluted water has been, in my view, a largescale disregard of the fourth commandment by Christians and consequent loss of its benefits. The lost benefits are understanding the eternal value of work and understanding the need to regularly shut out the secular world to be renewed and reconnected to the Spiritual Being who created us. This episode seeks to recover what is often lost by the neglect of the fourth commandment.
One of the complexities of faithfulness to Jesus through obedience to his moral law is understanding how to apply the fourth commandment in today’s world. As I mentioned in the first episode of this series, there are three categories of law. There is ceremonial law, religious rituals practiced in the OT, which are no longer binding, having been fulfilled in Christ. There is civil law. It provides universal principles of just treatment in our horizontal relationships in society. But those laws were for the theocracy of Israel, which no longer exists. The third category is moral law, which does continue into the NT. As Jesus explicitly taught,
Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished. Therefore whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven (Mt 5:17-19).
In fact, in this same sermon, Jesus taught that the scribes and Pharisee’s understanding of the Law was not strict enough. The prohibition against murder covered not just the physical act but hostility towards another that injured his soul by treating him with anger, attacking his character, or making him feel stupid. The prohibition against adultery covered not just the outward act by the inner heart lust for another man’s wife. The OT moral law was not delegitimized by Jesus; to the contrary, Jesus sets a moral standard that goes way beyond the external way if was often interpreted. Moreover, these commandments are the path to LIFE, the path to loving God and others, which we were created to do and be most fulfilled by following. So, the fourth commandment cannot be thrown away as given only to Israel. It is part of the moral law.
Yet, its application is complex because it has a ceremonial component—setting aside one day a week for worship, and a civil component—requiring the whole country to stop conducting business on the Sabbath. Adding to the complexity is the fact that the early Christians changed the day of worship from the Saturday Sabbath of Judaism to Sunday, the Lord’s Day, because Jesus was raised from the dead on the first day of the week. Paul went to the synagogue to preach on Saturday and met with the Christians to worship and celebrate communion on Sunday. The early Christians did not stay home from work to worship on the first day of the workweek, Sunday. This was not the cultural practice in any area of the world. It was like our Monday, the first day of the workweek. For the most part the early Christians who were spread across the Roman Empire were slaves and those with low status. They had no power to get their culture to give them off on the first day of the week to worship Jesus. So they met for worship after work, which explains why Paul was preaching until midnight in Acts 20. Sunday, the first day of the week has been celebrated by Christians as the DAY OF WORSHIP since Christ’s resurrection. But Sunday was not a DAY OF REST FROM WORK until three hundred years later, when Constantine made Sunday a day of rest for the Roman Empire. Refraining from work on Sunday cannot be a moral absolute. If it were, we would have seen widespread rebellion by Christian slaves in the Roman world by refusing to work on Sundays.
I believe the core principle in the fourth commandment is to “set apart” one day per week to commune with God our lover, to restore our soul, and recover God’s perspective on creation. I also believe that the fourth commandment gives us a creation ordinance concerning work—that there is a built-in pattern that God designed into creation that follows his pattern—six days of work and one day of rest. We’ll look at these components in a moment. But let’s not overlook the way this commandment begins—with the significance God places on our work.
Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy (Exodus 20:8-11).
The Biblical Worldview of Work
Six days you shall labor
A.  In the beginning there was work. The Bible begins to talk about work as soon as it begins to talk about anything. The Bible refers to God’s actions to create the universe as work. In fact, he depicts the magnificent project of cosmos invention with language that refers to the regular workweek. Genesis repeatedly shows God “at work” using the Hebrew word, mlkh, the word for ordinary human work. Tim Keller observes, In the beginning, then, God worked. Work was not a necessary evil that came into the picture later, or something human beings were created to do but that was beneath the great God himself. No, God worked for the sheer joy of it. Work could not have a more exalted inauguration (Every Good Endeavor).
B. Our calling to work, is fundamental to bearing God’s image. The opening chapters of Genesis leave us with a striking truth—work was part of paradise. It is part of God’s perfect design for human life, because we are made in God’s image and part of HIS glory and happiness is that HE WORKS. “My Father is always at his work to this very day,” said Jesus, and I too am working.” (John 5:17). The fact that God put work in paradise reminds us that it was not a result of the fall, as is often thought. Work was part of the blessedness of the garden BEFORE the fall. Work is as much a basic human need as food, beauty, rest, friendship, prayer, and sex… Without meaningful work we sense significant inner loss and emptiness. People who are cut off from work because of physical or other reasons quickly discover how much they need work to thrive emotionally, physically, and spiritually (Ibid).
C. The job description of our work is to fill the earth and subdue it and exercise dominion over it. The word, “subdue” indicates that, though all God made was good, it was still to a great degree undeveloped. Al Wolters writes:
The earth had been completely unformed and empty; then in the six-day process of development God had formed it and filled it—but not completely. People must now carry on the work of development: by being fruitful they fill it even more; by subduing it they must form it even more…as God’s representatives, (we) carry on where God left off. But this is now to be a human development of the earth. The human race will FILL the earth WITH its own kind, and it will FORM the earth FOR its own kind. (Creation Regained).
D. The material world matters. Developing the potential of creation is our primary calling because God’s creation matters greatly to him. In fact, the story of salvation is the story of CREATION. Dutch theologian, Herman Bavinck, argues, “The essence of the Christian religion consists in the reality that the CREATION of the Father, ruined by sin, is restored in the death of the Son of God and RECREATED by the grace of the Holy Spirit into a kingdom of God.” For Christians, all work has dignity, no matter how menial, because it reflects God’s image in us, but also because the material universe we are called to care for matters to God. The biblical doctrine of creation harmonizes with the doctrine of the incarnation in which God takes on himself a physical body. It harmonizes with the Biblical view of marriage, which commands the joining of bodies in sex to accompany the joining of hearts in marriage. It harmonizes with the calling of the Messiah in Isaiah 61 to both proclaim the Word and restore physical flourishing. It harmonizes with resurrection doctrine, in which God redeems not just the soul but the body. It harmonizes with Romans 8:21 where we are told that creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption. God’s purpose for the earth is that it should become his dwelling place; it is not simply made to house his creatures…
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