There are people who assume that a pastor's job has to be easy.
I mean, it's just one day a week, right? But there's a lot of work, a lot of responsibility in this high calling, far beyond what we see from one Sunday to the next. Today, Alistair Begg takes a look at this important role as we study the book of Ephesians on Truth for Life. I invite you to turn with me to Ephesians and chapter 4. We are studying the book of Ephesians, if you're visiting today, and we have essentially reached the end of verse 11.
And so we'll read from verse 11 through to the end of the chapter—no, to the end of verse 16. Ephesians 4 and verse 11–16. And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes.
Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love. Thanks be to God for his Word. And as we turn to the Bible, we turn to God and pray, Heavenly Father, we bow in your presence. May your Word be our rule, may your Spirit be our teacher, and may your greater glory be our supreme concern. Through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen. Well, when we left off, we had looked just at the foundational elements that Paul gives to us there, describing gifts of the ascended Christ. He gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, and the shepherds and teachers—or, as it is most commonly translated, the pastors and teachers. And as it is most commonly understood, a dual office, both shepherding and teaching.
At least I understand it in that way. What are we to do, though, with this role of the pastor-teacher? It's vitally important that both those who seek to fulfill the role and those who are on the receiving end of the exercise of that gift in a congregation understand it too. Let me give you a quote, which I think in the opening sentence may catch us all a little off guard. The pastor-teacher holds the greatest office of human responsibility in all creation. Now, you imagine, we just went out into the street this morning, and we said, Now, I want to give you a list of possible places that you can fulfill in society. We have, you know, the prime minister, the member of Congress, we have a golf professional, we have a cardiothoracic surgeon, we have a number of things. We have a pastor-teacher. We just like you to put them in one to six or whatever it is. Where do you think they'll lie? I don't think it would be possible… I don't think pastor-teacher would even get in the six. I think the average person would say, What is that? What is that about?
Well, why would that be included? The person who said that went on to say, He is called to preach the Word, to teach the truth to God's people, to lead God's people in worship, to tend the flock as a caring shepherd, and to mobilize the church for Christian witness and service. Not quite a high calling, isn't it? One immediately, in reading that, says, No one is sufficient in himself for such a responsibility. Thus making both the person called to it and all who seek to support the person called to it aware of the absolute dependence on the grace of God for the fulfilling of the assigned task. And our recent conference for pastors, which I think was the eighteenth in a row, is built on the fundamental notion that we believe in pastoral ministry, that we believe that in actual fact the role of the pastor-teacher is the most crucial role. Lloyd-Jones used to say, I would not descend from being a king to assume the role of the pulpit.
I would be ascending to the role of the pulpit. And you remember, of course, that Lloyd-Jones himself was a physician. He was the assistant to Lord Hoarder, who was the physician to the royal family of Great Britain. And he left that in order to begin teaching the Bible in obscurity in Wales, in a small Calvinistic Methodist chapel. And everybody said, The fellow has got to be crazy. Who would leave such a significant position—not just a physician, but a physician of such prominence and significance—to teach the Bible?
What in the world are they thinking about? Well, you see, we need to think it out, don't we? Where does this pastor-teacher role come from? Who came up with it? The answer is, God did. Jesus did. He is put in place as a gift to the church, as a gift of the ascended Christ. He is supposed to equip the church by spiritual feeding. The ministry of the Word of God is then a gift that the people of God neglect to their peril.
Now, there are certain fundamentals that undergird all that we have done here over the years at Parkside, and since we state them seldomly, I thought I might just remind us of not every core conviction in relationship to this, but perhaps just to three. First of all, to notice that the pastor-teacher is an elder among the other elders in the church—that we understand New Testament pattern of leadership to be one both of parity and of plurality. That's why when Paul writes to Timothy in 1 Timothy, he says, Let the elders who rule well be considered worthy of double honor, especially those who labor in preaching and teaching. So, in other words, there's a distinction between some who are giving their leadership to the church, and in doing so, not all are involved in the public pulpit ministry that falls to those in this capacity. Secondly, within that shared leadership, as within all leadership, there has to be a leader among the leaders. And it is most appropriate that the one who has the primary teaching role should be that leader, so that the rudder that moves the congregation at Parkside through the water is the rudder, essentially, of the Scriptures, and therefore the one who has the preponderance of the teaching of the Scriptures, inevitably it falls to him to exercise that leadership role. With that said, our focus is on the purpose for which the gift of Pastor Teacher has been given to the church.
Let's be clear. Who gave it? What is its source? The ascended Christ. What is this gift? What are these gifts that he mentions? They're all gifts of the Word.
They are all Word gifts. The apostles proclaiming the Word, they said, These are the things that we have seen, that we have heard, that we have handled, that we have touched. We did not come to you, they said, with notions of, you know, fairy stories. In fact, as we've said often, we wouldn't have a New Testament apart from the resurrection of Jesus Christ. If Jesus had not risen from the dead, there is no way that we would ever have had any of this stuff written down. No, so the apostles were in the Word, the prophets were in the Word, the evangelists were sending out that Word as widely as possible, and as churches begin to be established, God says, Now I want you to make sure that the role of pastor and teacher is safely in place.
And the reason for this is stated there in the balance of verse 12, to equip the saints for the work of ministry so that the body of Christ may be built up. Now, this is a slight diversion, but I think it makes a point that is important. In the authorized version, the King James Version with which I was brought up, there is in that version another comma. You say, Really? Like, you want to talk about that?
Yes, I do, just for a moment. I want to tell you where the comma comes. Verse 12 in the AV reads, For the perfecting of the saints, … for the work of ministry, … for the building up of the body of Christ. Now, there is no linguistic authority for commas—any commas anywhere. We don't have them in the original texts.
Okay? So it is an endeavor on the part of the translators to make sense of the text. And in their wisdom, they put a comma there. But when you read it with a comma there, it changes the thing entirely. Because what does it do? It places all of this squarely in the hands, responsibility, of the pastor-teacher.
Because look at how it then reads. They were given pastors and teachers to equip the saints for the perfecting of the saints, comma, the work of ministry, comma, the building up of the body of Christ. In other words, all of this, then, becomes the sole prerogative of the poor soul who's entrusted with the job of pastor and teacher.
And that's the way many congregations continue to operate. Hey, we hired him, and this is what he's gonna do. He's gonna perfect, equip the saints. He's gonna do the works of ministry. He's gonna take out the garbage. He's gonna do what we want him to do.
And if he doesn't do it, then we'll get it somebody who will do it. Well, that comma needs to go for the well-being not only of the pastor-teacher but for the well-being of the congregation. Because the entire effective development of a built-up congregation demands that that comma is not there, and then that it reads as it reads, to equip the saints for the works of ministry, NIV, so that the body of Christ may be built up. The ascended Christ gives a gift to the church—the role of the pastor and teacher. Those pastors and teachers, then, are to equip the people of God for the works of ministry, which they do, so that the body itself may then actually come to maturity.
So, you see, when you circumvent that, then you end up with congregations that are just marred by what is essentially a bottleneck kind of operation. Now, there are three words that I'd like us to grasp this morning. They're straightforward.
They emerge from the text. In fact, I wrote down in my notes, MUM's the word. MUM.
Not spelled American, but spelled English. M-U-M. MUM. Ministry, unity, and maturity. Ministry, unity, and maturity.
All right? To equip the saints for the works of ministry. The word there is diaconia. It's the same word that you have as a root for the word deacon or deaconess. People say to us at Parkside, you don't have any deacons.
Well, that's actually inaccurate. We have hundreds of deacons. We have hundreds of people who are serving diaconal responsibilities. This church would actually collapse were it not for that fact. What people usually think, though, is that there is a little room that says the deacon's room, and all these deacons go in there and do what deacons do in the room.
But in actual fact, it is possible to have the diaconal function without the room and without a little sign. It simply means doing the works of service. It's the same word that you find in the record of Martha and Mary. Remember, Martha was distracted with much serving. Much serving.
So the responsibility of the pastor-teacher is to equip the saints by teaching the Bible in such a way that the mechanisms and tools for ministry are placed in their hands so that they can effectively work in that way. In February of 1941, Winston Churchill made one of his memorable speeches in London. He knew that it would be heard in the United States, and he knew exactly what he was doing.
And rhetorically, he says in the midst of the speech, And if you were to ask me what I would say to Mr. Roosevelt, I would say this. Give us the tools, and we will finish the job. Give us the tools, and we will finish the job. And of course, Roosevelt and the United States did exactly that and equipped the Allied forces for the effective vanquishing of the Hitler regime. The tools were absolutely necessary.
And they're absolutely necessary if the people of God are going to do this kind of ministry. The word for equip is actually a medical word. It's a kind of orthopedic word. It would be used for the resetting of a limb. It's also a word that is found in the Gospels, where the disciples are mending their nets, and the word that is used there is this same word. They're equipping themselves for their next voyage. So what happens is simply this—that the ministry of God's Word is brought home to the lives of God's people by the power of God's Spirit so that, if you like to stick with the picture of the fishing nets, so that the tangled, knotted, disjointed features of our lives are then brought into line with God's plans and purposes so that when we set back out on the voyage of life, we have been equipped to do that which we have been enabled to do.
So it radically changes the idea of hearing the Word of God being taught. It moves it immediately from the idea of, Was it good? Was it long? Was it short? Did it stir me? Was I happy? Did I feel good? Suddenly all of that is not irrelevant, but it is subservient to the question, Was I fed?
Was I equipped? Do the practicalities of Christian living begin to work their way out as the Word of God is proclaimed? That's what's being described here. And that is why it is so vitally important, the way in which we listen to the Bible. James says, if you've got a filthy mind, if you have an angry heart, you might as well not even listen to the Bible. You need to make sure that when you receive the Word, he says you receive it with meekness as the implanted Word, which is able to save your souls. So that the place of the Word of God in bringing someone to faith in God is absolutely crucial.
Now, I know that there are people who have questions all the time about these things, and justifiably so, and understandably so. Paul, when he writes to the Thessalonians, he says to them—commending them in 1 Thessalonians 2—he says, And we also thank God constantly for this, that when you received the Word of God, which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men, but as what it really is, the Word of God, which is at work in you believers. People always ask all the time, Well, what's the big deal about the Word of God? I mean, why can't you just get out and do something useful in the community?
Why this emphasis? Well, you see, accepting the authority of God's Word is Christian. It is part of being a Christian. Well, but, says somebody, what about the problems that come along with it? Well, there's problems that come along with everything.
You accept as a Christian that God is love, don't you? That immediately raises problems. It raises the problem of what happened to my young child when he died in infancy. That raises the question of the problems of suffering throughout the world.
What do you do? Well, you do what you do. You don't abandon the love of God because there are problems. You investigate the problems in light of the love of God. What do you do about the Bible when there are problems? You don't abandon the Bible because of the problems. You believe the Bible, and you wrestle with the problems. Jesus said to his disciples, You call me teacher and Lord, and you are right.
For so I am. Since he is who he is, we have no freedom to disagree with what he says, nor do we have any freedom to disobey what he says. You see, it ultimately comes down to this fundamental matter. Is Jesus Christ the person he claimed to be? And then, if he in his ascended glory has given this gift to the church, we are to make sure that we're paying attention to it. Now, what I want us to understand as well is this. You will notice that the direct link is not there between we teach the Bible and the church matures.
No. The Bible is taught, the saints are equipped, they do the works of ministry, and the church is built up. So in other words, there's a missing link, isn't there? If we fail to understand that the way in which we not only receive the Bible when it is taught to us, but the way in which we take it away with us and say, Now, there are implications for this. So that the, if you like, the spiritual and the numerical growth of the church under God is directly related to all who are members of the church doing what they're supposed to do. Like turning off their cell phones.
We'll come to this later on, some of us. You'll notice the phrase at the end of verse 16, when each part is working properly. When each part is working properly. You know, that jolly CAT scan thing that makes that horrible noise, that … Yeah, that better be working properly. Actually, it's not the CAT scans.
It's the MRI that makes that noise. This changes everything, you see. At school in Scotland, we used to sing, There's a work for Jesus ready at your hand. It's a task the Master just for you has planned. He's to do his bidding, yield him, serve us true.
There's a work for Jesus none but you can do. Now, you see, do you actually believe that? That God has given to you a place and a purpose and a function? Don't look around and say, But I'm not that, and I'm not him, and I'm not her.
Forget that. Learn to say with the old Anglican bishop, I am only one, but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something. What I can do, I ought to do. And what I ought to do, with God's help, I will do. That love once is ministry—ministry.
And as a result of that, the church is built up. You're listening to Truth for Life with Alistair Begg. Alistair has more to say about pastors and teachers tomorrow. Here at Truth for Life, we get letters from people all across the country, around the world, people who have come to rely on Alistair's solid Bible teaching.
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It's quick and easy to sign up online at truthforlife.org slash truth partner, or you can call us at 888-588-7884. When you become a Truth Partner, we will say thank you today by offering you the book, Future Proof, How to Live for Jesus in a Culture That Keeps Changing. This is a book that accentuates the vast opportunities we have as believers to bring the hope and joy of the gospel to a world that has drifted from a biblical worldview. This is a really insightful book that will help you stay grounded in the promises of Scripture as you navigate an environment that is increasingly dismissing the church or the kingship of the Lord Jesus. Ask for your copy of the book, Future Proof, when you sign up to become a Truth Partner or when you give a one-time donation at truthforlife.org slash donate. I'm Bob Lapine. It is the job of a pastor to teach God's Word and to shepherd the congregation, but those in the congregation have responsibilities as well. Tomorrow we'll learn what we need to contribute. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.
