If the Apostle Paul was a modern day church consultant, what kind of coaching would he provide for today's church pastors? Today on Truth for Life, Alistair Begg presents the final message in a series called The Pastors Study. This message was originally presented to a gathering of pastors and church leaders and Alistair taught from Paul's letter to the Colossians chapter 1 about the priority for pastors of presenting everyone mature in Christ. The best way for us to motivate our flock to grow is simply by reminding them of all the things that are theirs in Christ. That's why in verse 27, which we've largely ignored, he is pointing out what a wonder it is that the Gentiles—which is this great mystery hidden from before to which he refers in Ephesians 2—that the Gentiles, that out of these two God has made one new man, and the Gentiles have become beneficiaries of the riches of glory, which, he says, is Christ in you.
Christ in you. And so, what does it mean, then, to motivate them in this way? Well, it's ultimately, now, the work of the Spirit of God through the Word of God through the servant of God, and as the Word of God is proclaimed, verse 25 again, I became a minister according to the stewardship from God.
He gave it to me to do what? To present my own opinions. No, to let people know how funny I am, how bright I am. No, to make the Word of God fully known. And as the Word of God is made fully known, then the Spirit of God is at work. Is at work like a sculptor on our lives, chipping away at us so as to conform us to the image of the Lord Jesus Christ? Says Paul in 2 Corinthians 3, We are being transformed into his image, says John in 1 John 3, and when we see him, we will be like him. So he not only sculpts us, but he also molds us, applying the truth of God's Word to the varied circumstances of our lives. And of course, we know that no matter how well we know our congregation, we could never know the details of their lives. How could we ever make application? People ask all the time, Well, how are you going to apply this? Well, we seek to apply it as best we can. But isn't the mystery when people come to us and say, you know, I heard this or I heard that, and you find yourself saying, I don't think I ever said that.
How did they hear that? Well, the great mystery of the work of the Spirit bringing home the Word of God. Well, notice, too, that the Lord Jesus presents us in the presence of the Father in verse 21. For we were alienated, we were hostile, and so on. He has reconciled us in order to present us.
That's what he does. Now, here in verse 28, we are engaged in this proclamation in order that we may present everyone on that day, present all those for whom we have had responsibility. I think it's such a challenge and such a wonderful thing too, isn't it? You think of Paul in this regard when he writes to the Thessalonians, thinking about the parousia, thinking about the day when everything is finally wrapped up. And he says, For what is our hope, our joy, our crown, in which we will glory in the presence of the Lord Jesus when he comes?
Is it not you? Indeed, you are our glory and our joy. Do you remember that hymn, The Sands of Time Are Sinking, The Dawn of Heaven Breaks, a poem written by Margaret Cousins, who was a friend of Samuel Rutherford?
Her husband and Rutherford were friends. And it runs to about thirty-three verses, I think. It was collapsed into a hymn. And there is a verse in it, and it's a little Victorian, it's a little, you know, cloying.
But don't let that put you off when I read you this. She took the letters and the journals of Rutherford to write this poem. You remember that Rutherford ministered, in relative obscurity, actually, in a tiny little place on the River Solway, in Anwith.
And so she created the verse in Rutherford's words, O Anwith, by the Solway, To me thou still art dear, In from the edge of heaven I shed for thee a tear. But if one soul from Anwith Meets me at God's right hand, My heaven will be two heavens In Emmanuel's land. You are our joy.
You are our hope. You are our crown. Wise shepherds—may we be wise shepherds? Wise shepherds look for their rewards then and not now.
Not now. Well, what are we doing proclaiming Christ, proclaiming the Scriptures? Why are we doing it? Well, in this context, in order that we may present everyone mature, and how are we doing it, if you like? What is the experience of doing this?
Well, notice there in verse 29. For this I toil. I toil. Struggling.
Agonizumai. With all his energy that he powerfully works within me. There's a lot of struggling when you read Paul. In 1 Timothy 4, to this end, we toil and strive. First Corinthians 15, Epaphras is struggling. We say, Oh, goodness gracious, I thought it was supposed to be, you know, just fine.
No turbulence, and up we get to a cruising altitude, and we can just look out the window. Well, no, not at all. At least, if that's your experience, come and see me afterwards, because I want to learn how to do it.
No! Verse 1 of chapter 2, For I want you to know how great a struggle I have for you. This is not a walk in the park.
This is not take your laptop down to Starbucks and sit around with a latte, pretending you're involved in ministry. I'm just talking to myself now. Now Christopher Ash gave us a really helpful book, right? Zeal Without Burnout. He asked me if I'd write a piece about that. I might have written a foreword to it, actually. Goodness gracious, if all the forewords I wrote were put into a book, it'd be terrific!
But I found it really hard to write a foreword, because I don't know anything about that. Zeal without burnout? That I could burn out? I could rust out quicker than I could burn out. No!
It's a useful book, and it's a real and present danger for some of us. But no, I said to myself, no, I should be writing a foreword for a book called Lessons for the Lazy, or Secrets Sluggers Never Learn. As a door turns upon its hinges, so turns a lazy man upon his bed. Alan Redpath, when I was a boy, he used to say, And let me ask you, son, do you have blanket victory? I said, blanket victory?
You mean, like, comprehensive total victory? No! Blanket victory! You're gonna have to help me with this. Can you get out of your bed in the morning?
Can you beat the blankets? Toiling! The word for struggling—these words are not used just haphazardly by Paul. What we know of Paul guarantees this, doesn't it? His own testimony, his experience of life.
None of us have ever come close to approximating all that he went through. But nevertheless, the word that is used here is the word that would be used for a contest, a fight, usually involving weaponry. And of course, you remember, in Ephesians, Paul is making it clear that we are involved, as the Westminster Confession reminds us, in a continual and irreconcilable war.
And part of that war involves the burden that we bear for those who are under our care. For let us not forget that we will give an answer. So we are those who keep watch over their souls as those who will give an answer.
How could this be easy? You think you can go back in the, quote, green room and say to the person who's about to preach, Go on, get him! Get him! I hate it when people say that to me. I want to get him who said it to me. What do you mean, get him?
What could I possibly do? Nothing! It's a struggle! And our weapons are prayer and the ministry of the Word.
We will give ourselves. Says Lucas again, there is no shortcut here for lazy pastors or undisciplined believers. The word here in verse 28, the work that is described in it, is harder than anyone who has not attempted it can ever imagine. And it will sap the strength of the youngest and the fittest people who endeavor to proceed minus the strength which God supplies. Do you remember in the second volume of Lloyd-Jones, Ian Murray quotes William Taylor, who says, A young minister is prone to try to attain by one jump the height which others have reached by a long series of single steps in the labor of a quarter of a century. If that is the temptation on the front end, what about the temptation on the back end? Those of us who are further along the path, those of us who have less in front of us than we have behind us, we face the danger of thinking that we may just coast.
Put it in… whatever you do that… you put that thing in the car drives itself. You know, we can just roll along now. Yeah, cruise! There we go. Cruise!
Brother, it'd be better we died than we cruised. The devil's not remotely concerned about dead pastors. He's really concerned about half-dead pastors, where somehow or another along the way the joy has gone, or the toil has gone, or we've decided that we're in a position now where we don't have to be bothered with any of that stuff.
Well, listen, the constant study and teaching of the Bible will be enough to teach us what it means. You remember in Shakespeare's Hamlet, when they come on the gravediggers, and one of the gravediggers is joking around, and he's singing, and somebody says, Has this fellow no feeling of his business? And Horatio replies, Custom hath made it in him a property of easiness.
Now, I've been doing it so long now that I don't really get concerned about it one way or another. Better that we died. Perkins in the sixteenth century says to his people, You are a minister of the word. Mind your business. And to mind our business is to realize that this is a toil. Now, there is something of a mystery, isn't there? The same mystery that you have in Philippians 1, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who is at work in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure. You've got a similar statement here in verse 29, For this I toil, struggling with all his energy, that he powerfully works within me. Working hard, and the supply of the energy of God are somehow another interwoven. The thing I think it is important to see is that we discover God's power at work within us in the context of work.
There's no sense in which Paul appropriates divine energy, as it were, in a vacuum. What he's saying is, When I put my shoulder to the plow, I was amazed that even though I came to the task in weakness and in fear and in much trembling, I discovered God powerfully at work within me. Preparation is toil, isn't it?
Well, it really is. You sit with your Bible, you sit with a pad or whatever you use, and you say, Dear Lord, this is the passage, as you know, of course, and I can't think of a single thing about this passage. And then you say, Well, I think I'll go to the bathroom.
So you go through there for a little while, get a drink of water, come back. And it's still there, the blooming thing. I mean, it's… And the sheet with nothing written on it. It's okay. It's just Wednesday. Now you fast forward, and it's Friday. Loved ones, it's toil.
I used to think… Now, I'm not gonna play fast and loose with you. Over time, one's facility and ability with the text ought to get better. We ought to be able to get to things without a lot of the rigmarole that was part and parcel of our early startings. But with that said, it remains a real toil. The preparation is toil, the preaching is toil, and the aftermath is an absolute struggle.
The aftermath is a struggle. I don't know about you, but I don't come down from the pulpit going, There we go. No, I come down, I want to go through that door and try and beat the people who leave from there so that I can get up the stairs before they even see my face.
It's a struggle, because then you go up the stairs, and somehow or another he's always up there. The evil one. Yeah. Either to inflate you with notions of usefulness—hey!—or to deplete you, to undermine you with any notion of effectiveness. It's a great danger, isn't it? The evil one comes and says, You know, everybody is really interested to hear what you have to say. You say, Well, really? Mm-mm. Or he comes to you and says, You know what?
Nobody cares a thing about what you have to say. Both ways, you're a dead man. It's a struggle. The longer I tell this story, the more I start to think it might even be fictitious itself, but I know that it isn't. And it has to do with Lloyd-Jones. And it has to do with Eric Alexander as a young man who preached for us here some time ago, not when he was a young man. But Eric Alexander was leading a meeting at which Lloyd-Jones preached.
And Lloyd-Jones preached, and preached powerfully and with great effectiveness. If you ever saw Lloyd-Jones preach, he's a fascinating fellow, and he didn't like it if it was cold, and he wouldn't have liked any of this music at all. He would have left the conference after the first song on Monday, and he was wrong on that, but that's by the way—we'll talk about it in heaven—but he didn't like being cold, and he would sit on the platform wearing his coat.
And if he still felt cold, he would start off with his coat on. And he preached, and preached his heart out, and he sat down. And Eric Alexander was a young minister, and he was so excited that he got to lead in for Lloyd-Jones. And he sat down beside him, and he said, Dr. Lloyd-Jones, how do you feel? And Lloyd-Jones said, tired. That wasn't good enough for Eric. So he says, Yeah, but… I mean, anything else. And he said, Young man, I think that this—pointing to the pulpit—is the closest that a man will ever come to the experience of childbirth. Now, I suggest to you that even when you allow for the eccentricities of the Welsh, which he was, which always need to be moderated by the phlegmatic approach of the English, which then can be corrected by the Scots and turned into an argument by the Irish. Even when you allow for that, it is a challenge in this respect, isn't it?
Because, you take that and set it against the gravedigger scene. Oh, God, do not let this ever become a custom of easiness, whereby the sense of… There's just nothing there. Well, we should end, shouldn't we? Who's equal to this? Who is equal to this? That's what Paul asks in 2 Corinthians. And the answer is not one of us in ourselves, but those who are called by God are equipped by him. He uses the strangest of people.
Some of us have good voices, some of us have squeaky voices. He uses us despite ourselves. But there is a definite underlying strain that is present with usefulness in the service of God.
And that is why I quoted from Guinness. Because the thing that kills us all is our pride. This is the one to whom I look, says the Lord. Isaiah 66, 2b, he is humble, contrite in spirit, and trembles at his word.
So what shall we do? Let's make it our goal, first of all, to present ourselves as workmen who do not need to be ashamed—workmen, rightly dividing the word of truth. Because only then will we ever be able to present everyone mature in Christ Jesus. And so, in many ways, the verse with which I end is the verse which gave rise to this conference twenty years ago and from which we've never deviated. Paul to Timothy in 2 Timothy 4. As for you, Timothy, keep your head, endure hardship, do the work of an evangelist, and discharge all the duties of your ministry. And we say together, God being our helper, we will endeavor to do so. Wrapping up this newest volume in the Pastors' Study series, you're listening to Alistair Begg. This is Truth for Life.
We'll pause for a brief word of prayer in just a minute, so please stay with us. Each year, it's our tradition to observe Pastor Appreciation Month in October. That's the reason we're presenting this collection of messages on church leadership called the Pastors' Study. Here on this final day of the series, keep in mind you're always welcome to download the audio files from any of the messages you hear on Truth for Life, including the entire eight-volume set from the Pastors' Study. Or you can listen directly on the Truth for Life mobile app. Or if you'd prefer, you can purchase the Pastors' Study series on CD or on a USB drive.
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If you'd prefer to stream the video, there are instructions available on how to do that inside the DVD kit. Now Alistair concludes today's program with prayer. Father, thank you that you have chosen to put your treasure in old clay pots so that the transcendent power might be seen to belong to God and not to us. Thank you for the immense privilege. Come and fill us afresh with the Holy Spirit, with joy in service, with diligence in application. To the glory of your name.
Amen. If you have read Mark's Gospel, you know it emphasizes the certainty that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God. Be sure to join us tomorrow as Alistair begins an in-depth study in Mark, beginning with chapter 12. I'm Bob Lapine. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.
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