2 Timothy 4:1-5
Pastoring
Central Texas Mission Council Meeting
May 19, 2007
Introduction
Read 2 Timothy 4:1-5,
What a charge! The words the aged Apostle Paul penned to Pastor Timothy have been inspiring men for hundreds of years. The force and power with which he gave that charge hasn’t been diminished in any way, and I say with complete confidence that short of our call to walk with the Lord Jesus Christ in a personal trust relationship there is no greater calling in the world than to preach the Word of God or pastor one of the Lord’s churches.
The call to pastor is a high calling. It is the call to speak truth where there are lies; the call to shine light in dark places; the call to stand in the trenches and fight when it seems all the forces of hell stand in our way. There are many good times: the professions of faith, the baptisms, the changed lives, the restored marriages and wounded hearts. And there are certainly plenty of bad times: tough times.
Many men of God rejoice in their calling and love their ministries. Unfortunately there are many who find it a daily struggle to stay in the ministry. The call of God compels them, but the battles of life have bruised them. For some, pastoring does not come naturally. Preaching is difficult at best. Many men have ministries that are less than desirable: working with unmovable people because of their little faith and little prayers and little thinking.
Pastoring is no light thing. The words of J.R. Alexander to our Defense of the Faith class hang over my desk.
“When God called you to preach and put a Bible in your hand you might have thought, “Boy this is going to be a romantic life. I’ll be honored as a preacher. I’ll get a good office, a staff working under me and I’ll make myself a good reputation. People will want me to preach their revivals and I’ll have a good time of it.” There’s a lot more to the call to the ministry than that. If that’s what you’ve got on your mind then you’d better get into something else.”
Why answer the call to preach? The call to pastor? Why bother with the work of God with all its pitfalls and heartaches? Because for all the difficulties it poses there is no greater work on earth. This morning I’d like to challenge you to consider two kinds of pastors and what a man needs in order to preach the Word…to make full proof of his ministry.
The Idealistic Pastor vs. The Realistic Pastor
You all know the idealistic pastor. Everything is perfect. Nothing goes wrong. Church is always great. Everyone gets what he wished for and everybody lives happily ever after! But the realistic pastor on the other hand deals with problems all his ministry. His ministry is marked by broken dreams, where folk never do get saved and some lives never do get changed.
The idealistic pastor has the perfect church of a larger size than ours with perfect music and dynamic worship. The deacons are all on the same page all the time, every committee runs like clockwork and his nickname is Pastor E.F. Hutton, because when he speaks everybody listens. But in the real world pastors deal with bad church members, mean men and hateful women. In the real world a pastor can preach his heart out and knock on every door in town and labor till the sun goes down, but his church doesn’t become the next Saddleback, or whatever you think a church ought to be.
The idealistic pastor has competent teachers for every class. They all come to training meetings. They can all quote the Romans Road and are versed in the Bible. But the realistic pastor is constantly dealing with babes in Christ, men and women who take positions because no one else will, and when they take them can’t do the job they ought to do because they’re too lazy to study and too unmotivated to care.
The idealistic pastor has a stained glass office in his suburban Baptist Cathedral with gardens and fountains and arches. The custodial staff keeps things spotless. The nursery staff keeps the kids happy and laughing and people flock from miles around to experience the latest, greatest thing going on. But the realistic pastor has a study in a hole in the back of the church he pastors in a run down part of town. His butt is sore from sitting in a $20 chair under a cold metal desk that somebody gave him from Aunt Maurine’s garage sale. He runs his own bulletins, vacuums his own carpet, might mow the grass himself and wishes somebody would volunteer to work with the babies this week so he won’t have to compete with the screams.
The idealistic pastor has a sweet petite wife that entertaining but not too forward, plays the piano, cooks up fried chicken and waits on her husband hand and foot. He has 2.5 kids that are obedient, respectful and will all graduate high school and serve the Lord all their lives in some form of ministry. The realistic pastor on the other hand may be married to a woman who hates his ministry. She’s a nag, or maybe just unsupportive. He wonders how his kids will turn out, whether they will love the Lord or not, whether they will go to church or not, whether they’ll end up in jail or not, whether he’ll visit their graves or not.
The idealistic pastor is the one we read about in all the magazines. He’s in all the quotes and writes all the books and speaks at all the great conferences. The ones we know are wearing ten year old suits and have holes in their socks. Their cars are dented, their shoes are scuffed, their Bibles are tattered and worn and they lock up the church themselves.
Idealistic pastors pastor somewhere else in some far away land. Though most would never say it or admit it, that’s what we want and work for: something a little easier, something more sanitized, something more respectable. Maybe you’re the exception to that. Maybe you’re just lying. Most of us live in the real world where life gets messy and maybe yours is too.
Pastor
The apostle Paul knew something about pastoring and preaching the Word of God. He knew something about the call of God and the compelling nature of that call: something we can learn from if we but have the ears to hear.
I asked some folks at our church how their lives might be different if we learned to worship God Monday through Saturday rather than making worship a Sunday morning event we attend. They responded by saying that if we were to make worship a daily habit that our lives would be better and easier. I said, “You mean like the Apostle Paul’s life was easy?”
Paul’s life was by no means easy, nor was his ministry. He also knew that Timothy’s ministry would not be an easy one. Perhaps some men have easy ministries, or they do what it takes to make them easy, but for those men who pastor in the real world Paul had at least four things to say.
Make Sure of Your Calling
Either God has called you or He hasn’t, and He’s not the least bit confused about it. You may be and your friends and family may be confused about whether God has called you, but He isn’t. Paul was absolutely sure of his Damascus Road experience and call, and while we’ll never experience anything remotely that dramatic we need to be sure God has called us to the ministry.
Maybe God has called you to something else. Maybe your mom and dad called you or your pastor called you or you just saw a need you could fill. In an ideal world where pastoring is all about Six Flags and Pizza Hut that might get you by, but in the real world where we’ll answer to God for how we’ve handled His Word and the work to which we’ve been called you absolutely better make sure of your calling.
Preach the Word
The face of ministry has changed a lot through the years, and I don’t just mean the last 50 or so. I’m convinced we’ve made church and ministry into something the apostles would hardly recognize today with our scheduled services, padded pews and brick and mortar. But one thing has never changed for real men called to reach a real world bent on hell, and that’s our duty to preach the Word…all the Word of God: reproving, rebuking, exhorting all who will hear.
Preach the Word with conviction, with heart, like you mean it, like Jesus is coming back today. Preach it with passion, like you know it is the only thing that will really change a life, like a man who knows he will answer for how he handled it.
Guard Your Heart
We make a fuss about all the church members who want Christianity Lite. It tastes great, but it’s less filling. But how many pastors, men of God, settle into the same thing? Brethren, if we’re not careful we’ll forget what ministry really is. We’ll forget its about transformed lives, about making disciples. Ministry isn’t about teaching Sunday School or BTC or even about a Sunday morning event. Ministry is about ministering to sick and hurting people in need of a transformational relationship with Jesus Christ.
Ministry isn’t an entitlement program. It’s a way to a cross. The call of God is a call to wash dirty feet, to hurt, to weep, to suffer, to lose, to be put through the fire, to endure affliction. Guard your hearts brethren, on the one hand so we do not become so soft we cannot bear a cross, and on the other hand so we do not become so hardened we will not bear it.
Brethren, guard your hearts against immorality. Guard them against bitterness and anger and malice. Guard your hearts against sexual temptations. Guard them against Christianity Lite, and even against the dangers of pursuing every new fad that comes along as well as the danger of the hole up and hold out faithful mentality that is killing so many churches.
What A Man Needs
You may have heard the story about the stranger who walked into church during the middle of the pastor’s sermon. After a while he began to fidget around. Leaning over to a white-haired man at his side, he whispered, “How long has he been preaching?” “Thirty or forty years, I think,” the old man answered. “I’ll stay then,” decided the stranger, “He must be nearly done.”
I am nearly done brethren, but before I finish, I think it is important to add that if we as pastors are to heed the counsel of Paul there are certain things we need. Before we can know that we are called of God, before we will be faithful to preach the Word and guard our hearts, we need some things from God and we need some things from our peers.
A Close Walk – you will never do anyone any good if you aren’t first in communion with God. We need to be in the Word. We need to be men of prayer. Before we can make disciples we must first be disciples.
Courage – we need courage to act on what God tells us to do. We need courage to preach hard messages, to rebuke, reprove and exhort. We need courage to stand when others fall. Some days we need courage to simply get out of bed and do it all over again. That doesn’t mean we won’t be afraid some days, but that we trust the One who has called us in spite of our fears.
Anointing – we need to quit running away from this word like it belongs to the charismatics and recognize that without the anointing of God, the presence and power of God driving our lives and ministries we’re dead in the water. And the only way to have it is to stay in His presence.
There are other things we need from God. We need His love, His grace, His mercy. We need His patience, His compassion, His vision, and much more – it begins with a daily close walk with Him. But there are some things we need from one another.
We’re not ever all going to believe the same things about everything. Paul and Timothy surely didn’t. Paul and Barnabas didn’t. Paul and Mark didn’t. But they spurred one another on to greater ministries in the Lord. I don’t know what you believe about the bride, when the rapture will be, whether a divorced man can pastor, what youth program you use or if you want to swallow goldfish to grow your church.
I might do a survey about those things sometime, but so long as we’re preaching the virgin birth, the sinless life of Christ, the substitutionary death of Jesus Christ on the cross of Calvary, the burial and resurrection three days later for the salvation of humanity then we ought to be able to spur one another on too. Yes there are some other essential doctrines – but our criticisms usually lie much shallower than those.
Brethren, we need less fault-finding and more fellowship, less criticism and more encouragement, less knocking and more kneeling – lifting one another up in prayer, in words, and in our attitudes toward one another. If we all did that for one another how much more effective would we all be? The question is whether that’s idealistic thinking or something that could become a reality in our ministries.
Finally, I want to end with this quote from Bob Moorehead as a challenge to each of us.
God give us men...ribbed with the steel of Your Holy Spirit...men who will not flinch when the battle’s fiercest...men who won’t acquiesce, or compromise, or fade when the enemy rages. God give us men who can’t be bought, bartered, or badgered by the enemy, men who will pay the price, make the sacrifice, stand the ground, and hold the torch high. God give us men obsessed with the principles true to your word, men stripped of self-seeking and a yearn for security...men who will pay any price for freedom and go any lengths for truth. God give us men delivered from mediocrity, men with vision high, pride low, faith wide, love deep, and patience long...men who will dare to march to the drumbeat of a distant drummer, men who will not surrender principles of truth in order to accommodate their peers. God give us men more interested in scars than medals. More committed to conviction than convenience, men who will give their life for the eternal, instead of indulging their lives for a moment in time. Give us men who are fearless in the face of danger, calm in the midst of pressure, bold in the midst of opposition. God give us men who will pray earnestly, work long, preach clearly, and wait patiently. Give us men whose walk is by faith, behavior is by principle, whose dreams are in heaven, and whose book is the Bible. God give us men who are equal to the task. Those are the men the church needs today.
