The Sovereign Grace Leadership Interview Series podcasts give you an opportunity an opportunity to pull up a chair and listen as Joshua Harris, Jeff Purswell, and C.J. chat over topics dear to pastors. Even non-pastors have found benefit in listening to these recordings.
Today we release the fourth podcast: “The Pastor and His Time.” The discussion begins with the panelists busting on a certain pastor for his susceptibility to time-saving devices (you know who you are). Then it moves into more serious matters as Jeff provides a theology of time and explains how to “redeem time.” From here the podcast covers several subtopics, including the importance of maintaining a disciplined use of time, determining pastoral priorities, how to manage the inevitable schedule interruptions, and what to do with the endless flow of email.
Listen to, or download, the audio here.
Whether you’re the pastor of a large church like Covenant Life or the only pastor of a new church plant, determining priorities is crucial to shaping a schedule that is faithful to God’s expectations for you. In this second excerpt from the forthcoming Leadership Interview podcast, “The Pastor and His Time,” Josh, Jeff, and C.J. discuss these biblically defined priorities; the common, albeit well-meant, interruptions; and the importance of educating your church on your priorities. All this in order, C.J. says, “to most effectively, uniquely, specifically, and broadly serve those who have been entrusted to your care.”
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Joshua Harris: Are there any priorities (or, really, not priorities) that you see creep into a pastor’s life? What are some of the temptations that you would think are out there for a pastor to get involved in that really isn’t [a priority]?…
C.J. Mahaney: There are legitimate distractions on a daily basis. There are distractions that I think are created by the active presence of indwelling sin. Certainly there are distractions in the context of ministry. There are distractions provided for us in the context of our culture. These distractions are absolutely endless in their variety and in their consistency, which is why it is so important for pastors to be clear on their calling, role, and priorities. And to recognize that if you don’t prepare for a given week by identifying those roles and creating appropriate goals in fulfillment of those roles, your week will attack you, and you will end up devoting more time that week to the urgent than you do to the important.
Jeff Purswell: And I think that is particularly a temptation for pastors, because a lot of those distractions you mentioned, C.J., will emerge from legitimate needs. And that’s precisely what happened in Acts 6:1–7, the first time you have the crystallization of specialized responsibilities for pastors. There were real, pressing, legitimate needs [related to feeding widows] that needed tending to. But the apostles recognized that it wasn’t their need to attend. They needed to raise up gifted leaders to tend to those things while they specialized in what they were called to do: attention to the Word of God and to prayer (v. 4).
And so I am sure a lot of pastors listening are aware of many legitimate needs. We call them distractions, but they are real, pressing needs. But that doesn’t mean they are the solution to those needs directly, or that those needs become immediate parts of their to-do list for the week.
CJM: Each pastor enters into each week aware that the requests made of him in a given week will exceed his capacity to respond and fulfill those requests. Therefore, if I haven’t in some way determined what is most important and uniquely important for me to do in a given week, I will find myself responding to these urgent, and often legitimate, requests and end up busy throughout the week, but not productive and not ultimately fruitful at the end of the week.
I think it is of critical importance for pastors in particular to enter their week aware of what is most important, what is uniquely important for them to do in order to most effectively, uniquely, specifically, and broadly serve those who have been entrusted to their care. This will inevitably involve some form of specialization, and must be informed by some awareness on the part of the pastor of his limitations.
So a lot depends on whether one is pastoring alone, or whether one has a pastoral team. But regardless of the size of the pastoral team or the size of one’s church, what we are saying applies to a pastor.
JH: That’s good. I just was thinking as Jeff was referencing the care for the widows, the distribution of food, that it is so important. As pastors we are really receiving our priority list from God. I think it is so easy to allow that priority list to be written by other people, you know, the people in your church.…
CJM: You must have a pastoral team supporting you and specializing in particular ways, so you can inform the church specifically of the role of each pastor and how each pastor exists to specialize and to serve the church. In that way that individual that you just described—who you want to care for and not disappoint—you can inform that individual that you are not simply declining to serve that individual through, say, pastoral counseling because you are pursuing some unrelated purpose. No, you are seeking to serve them and the entirety of the church by specializing in particular ways, and other pastors have been trained and provided to care for their souls in this regard. And you cannot devote yourself to all the possible tasks and opportunities and needs, or else you will not serve the church.
JH: We are in a larger context at Covenant Life, but I think the principle still holds even for a guy who is pastoring by himself. He needs to involve other members of the church, small-group leaders, people who can come alongside of him. And ultimately, the good news here is that that is so much healthier for the whole church, for people not just to be looking to that one guy, but to be realizing the grace that flows through so many different means.
CJM: He does, indeed. And he needs to inform or have someone, like a fellow elder, inform the church of what his unique role is, so that the expectations of church members are clear in their hearts and minds. That pastor who is pastoring alone—prior to the formation of a plurality—needs to make clear to the church that he is devoting himself primarily to this task of study and teaching in order to serve the entire church. Other provisions can be made for the important need of biblical counseling through other individuals, who might not even be staff members or part of the pastoral team at that time.
That kind of information, in my experience, is just often not communicated to the church, and therefore individual church members are vulnerable when they make a particular request. They call the office with an expectation that the pastor will respond to their request. But when the pastor declines, if sufficient explanation isn’t given, then the individual is not just disappointed, but offended, and all this can be avoided if there is a clear definition communicated to the church about the role of that particular pastor. And that, again, applies as the pastoral team grows into a plurality.
October 24, 2008 by Tony Reinke
Categories: Pastoral ministry | Schedule
How does a pastor best use his time? What priorities should be reflected in his schedule? How do pastors handle inevitable emergencies and other unexpected adjustments to the schedule? And what to do with all the email?
These and other questions were on the table during the latest Sovereign Grace Leadership Interview podcast recording, “The Pastor and His Time.” The recording will be posted here before long.
Though intended for pastors, this series of podcasts has been well received by our other listeners as well. If you have a general interest in reading, determining the well-being of your soul, growing in joy, or redeeming the time, you may find the practical nature of these podcasts useful. You can find a list of them
here.
This first transcribed excerpt is from the beginning of the latest podcast. The roundtable among Joshua Harris, Jeff Purswell, and C.J. begins with a scriptural definition of “time.”
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C.J. Mahaney: Jeff, I think the most prudent place to begin would be with a biblical perspective of time. What does Paul mean when he writes, “Redeem the time” or “Make the best use of the time” (Ephesians 5:16, Colossians 4:5)?
Jeff Purswell: I so appreciate that we are able to start there, because I think we are particularly vulnerable in our efficient, time-driven culture to falling into a view of time that is not biblical. You see this even in the way that time management techniques are offered. We can view time as though it has its own metaphysical existence. I know I can view it like time is marching on, time is something I have to conquer, and I am losing time—typically time is defeating me.
This idea of time as a quantity, that there is certain amount of time and no more, can lead to the illusion that the answer then is
managing our time better. If I just manage my time better, if I use my time better, then this will answer my problems. To extrapolate on this, by using all my time better, I will have time for all kinds of things. The possibilities will be limitless.
Joshua Harris: And the condemnation is limitless as well.
JP: Exactly.
And this gives rise to time management techniques offered to pastors and church leaders as well that, you know, teach us how to use time more efficiently. And so we use time more efficiently, and then that means we can schedule more, and that means we can do more. The elusive “better use of time” is always out there.
Now, obviously we can use our time more wisely. We can be more efficient. I am sure we would all say there are times where we waste time. So it’s not to eliminate those as helpful aids.
But I think the Bible would call us to view time as any other thing: Time is God’s. He created it. He gives it to us as a gift. He placed us in time, and relates to us in time. And so I think the Bible would push us to place God at the center of our time. He rules it. He gives it. He gives us the responsibilities that we have. Any pastor looking at his to-do list, trusting they are from God, those assignments are to take place in the time that God has given.
And so we talk about “redeeming the time” (Ephesians 5:16, Colossians 4:5). When the Bible speaks of time, it is typically speaking not so much of chronological time—moments ticking away—but often referring to time as opportunities. So the issue is not “use your time better” (although, of course, we can all use our time better and should seek to do so), but there are opportunities God has given us, therefore we steward our lives to make sure we are seizing those opportunities.
If I am not mistaken, the same verb in both of these verses is literally “to buy back the time.” And I think a lot of translations render that well, “making the best use of your time” or “making the most of every opportunity.”
Interesting, when you look at the context of Colossians 4, it is teaching us about relating to non-believers. The days are evil, therefore be ready to share the gospel, be wise towards outsiders, making sure your words are seasoned with grace. And so “using your time” is to use the opportunities God provides to be a witness for the gospel.
In Ephesians 5 it talks about the days are evil, therefore don’t be foolish but understand what the will of the Lord is. And so there the use of time is tied to the will of the Lord.
So all of that to say I think the Bible would not want us laboring under this fear that we are going to lose a moment, but rather being alert to the opportunities God gives us in time, and that he has given us time as a gift.
He is sovereign over time and sovereign over our opportunities. So we can approach time, not with a dread of fear, but with faith that there are things God has given us to do and we want to be alert to them.
October 22, 2008 by C.J. Mahaney
Categories: Interviews | Suffering | Trials
What constitutes suffering for the name of Christ? Often we recall the most severe examples of suffering—Stephen crying out to the Lord as enraged Jewish leaders hurled rocks at his body; Paul and Silas with feet shackled to a Philippian prison, still feeling the pain of their earlier beating; Jim Elliot and his four missionary friends rushed by armed Huaorani Indians. These are all graphic examples of Christians enduring great sacrifices for the advance of the gospel.
Scripture teaches (even promises) that all Christians will suffer, but these graphic examples are not the norm for faithful Christians in the West today. So what does suffering for the name of Christ look like in twenty-first century America?
During one panel discussion at the Together for the Gospel conference, Ligon Duncan and I interviewed our friend John Piper on this issue.
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Ligon Duncan: John, you have done a pretty extended exposition on kinds of suffering, available on the Desiring God website. You have done it in different forms. You are addressing this very question that, that suffering just means taking a bullet or getting your head hacked off. You make a great point in that message about how any kind of suffering can become suffering for Christ if you will embrace it that way.
John Piper: If you pick a text on suffering and you try to apply it to cancer, when it is dealing with persecution, a lot of people will say, “I don’t think that applies to me, because that is really applying to getting suffering from somebody hurting you or saying something evil.” So I have developed an argument: All suffering that a Christian endures in the path of obedience is suffering with Christ and for Christ (though not in the same way).
And there are a couple of reasons for that.
One is that in suffering, the temptation is the same whether it is coming from cancer or slander. And the temptation is to say, “God is not good and it is not worth serving him, and escaping from this suffering in some sinful way is to be preferred.” Those are the same. And so the real battle is the same, whether it is coming from a physical thing or another.
Secondly, I don’t think historically you can draw a line between suffering from persecution and physical suffering. Just try to imagine a particular kind of Pauline persecution, like being whipped 39 lashes, five times (2 Corinthians 11:24). Well, let’s just take the third time. You can imagine what his back must have looked like—39 times five is a lot—and it healed five times. So the third time his back is turned into jelly again.
Now they don’t know anything about antibiotics. When they are done with him, they throw him on the floor and his back is now covered with dirt. What happens when your back is lacerated and it is covered with dirt? I’ll tell you what happens: infection happens. What happens when you get an infection? Fever happens.
Now which is the physical suffering here and which is the persecution suffering? Where are you going to draw that line between the fever and the lashes? Which is why I say that any fever experienced in the path of obedience—getting my sermon ready, making hard calls, staying up late with the suicide situation, and not enough rest and I have got this awful sore throat—tell me these are not the same suffering as being criticized for your ministry. It is the same essential suffering.
And so I think I can develop textual and thoughtful arguments for why almost all texts on suffering can help our people, whether their pain is coming from a difficult marriage, coming from slander, coming from cancer, or coming from wherever.
The issue is in all suffering, when we trust him and keep trusting him, we will find some evidences of his sovereign mercy toward me. And the source of it is a very minor part when it comes to the real battle down here of “Will I trust him? Will I hold on to him or not?”
C.J. Mahaney: Knowing you, John, and knowing your church, you have devoted much time to addressing the topic of suffering and to preparing your church for suffering. Why and how would you recommend that local pastors here do the same?
JP: Well, the why is because the Bible promises, “Through many tribulations we must enter the kingdom of God” (Acts 14:22, ESV). It is a given that to come to Jesus is to compound your suffering, not minimize your suffering. Certain kinds of sufferings get minimized. The suffering that comes from drunkenness will probably go down. So don’t hear me saying nothing changes or is beneficial. That is not true. There are amazing releases for conscience. A lot of psychological things will improve, but others will get worse.
So, if you are now in a marriage where one of you is a believer and one is not, that is this sort of thing. They will suffer.
And the second is because you see it out there. You see the little Down-syndrome kids, and you see the people in the wheelchair, and you see the painful marriages that are out there. You see it, and you either are going to just ignore it, or you are going to give them something to help.
Third, I don’t think Christ is glorified anywhere more than when suffering people rejoice in him as their treasure. If everything is going rosy for all my people, the possibilities of us making a name for Jesus in the city is smaller than if things are going hard for our folks. Then the possibility of making a name for Jesus is greater. What the world wants to see is not for you to tell them, “Jesus makes things go well for me.” Things are going well for them, too, probably better than for you, and it is money and doctors that are doing it for them. So that argument has teeny-weeny effectiveness.
Rather, when neighbors know that the baby in your womb has a liver outside his body, no spinal column, and you have carried this baby to the end and they watch you, the possibilities of making much of Jesus are staggering.
Not many people see life that way. My job as a preacher is to help that mom, way before the pregnancy, get ready for it so that she has some resources. And one of the most satisfying things in ministry, guys, is to do this long enough so that you get a steady stream of testimonies that come to you at funerals and in hospitals and other places where a mom or a son or a relative just takes you by the hand and says, “So glad we have been at Bethlehem. We would be insane if we didn’t have a big God, if we didn’t have a strong God, if we didn’t have a sovereign God, if we didn’t have a holy God.”
I love those testimonies and I get a lot of mileage of late-night work out of testimonies like that, and they are pretty common stream.
We have got a lot of strong women at our church. They bear a lot of things. They endure pain through marriages and through kids that are disabled…Strong women are magnificent testimonies to Christ because, if they are complementarian, they are combining things the world can’t explain. They are combining a sweet, tender, kind, loving, submissive, feminine beauty with this massive steel in their backs and theology in their brains.
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Listen to the T4G panel discussion here.
October 21, 2008 by Tony Reinke
Categories: Videos
Each year, Sovereign Grace Ministries presents a short documentary highlighting a few of the activities in our family of churches. This year, we produced three shorter films to highlight our Pastors College, our ministry among international churches, and our church-planting activities in the United States.
The third and final video, “Transferring the Gospel Together,” features Joshua Harris interviewing C.J. The video celebrates and encourages the transfer of the gospel to the next generation and presents a vision for accomplishing the task. Watch the interview online here.
At a number of conferences, I have had the privilege and joy of sitting in the front row to hear my friend John Piper speak. And a few times I have been assigned to speak after him. It’s never my preference to speak after John. Preaching after John is always a humbling experience.
As you know, I cannot preach like John Piper. But what I have discovered over time is that great preachers like John, Charles Spurgeon, and Jonathan Edwards do model practices all preachers can emulate and benefit from.
At the Together for the Gospel conference, I had the privilege to participate with Mark, Al, and Lig in interviewing John. During the panel discussion, John provided us with a glimpse into how he prepares his sermons, and how he prepares his heart as he prepares his sermons.
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C.J. Mahaney: Most of these guys are already in the process of preparing a sermon for this Sunday. If they were to meet with you for lunch, how would you counsel them about both the preparation process and the preaching event?
John Piper: The most important thing I want to say in answer to that question is this: There isn’t any technique to preaching. It is not a technique. It is not a profession that you go to a homiletics class to learn how to do.
God is doing sermon preparation when your throat is blazing with yellow pustules and you have a fever and you feel like quitting. He is doing sermon preparation there. Don’t begrudge the seminary of suffering. Don’t begrudge the marriage difficulties. Don’t begrudge the parental stuff that is so hard. He is making you a preacher. He is making you a pastor.
So the main preparation work is walking with him through it all, and going deep with him, and being there and not running away from it into endless food or television. That would be a—very practical thing to do would be to get rid of your television so that you have some time, family time and reading time and reflection time, and basically keep your mind free from pornography.
We were talking about this pornography thing over lunch the other day, and we who are 60 years old were reflecting on how difficult it was to get pornography when we were teenagers. The implication of that is that in my brain I have two pornographic images from my teen years. I found a
Playboy in a Laundromat, and they were passing a really weird book around in the locker room one day. I remember both images like I saw them yesterday. Most of you have a thousand images in your brain. That really makes sermon preparation hard, but not impossible. He died to purify our conscience, although you make your job a lot harder if you keep going to that cesspool.
…Keep your minds from being contaminated, because the preparation moment is a heart/mind thing in which every three minutes you are crying out to the Lord as you are reading your text in Greek or Hebrew or English. You are reading it and you are saying, “God, please. I have got to have a word. I have got to have a word for my people. Let me see what is really here.” That is a prayer for the mind part. My points must be here in the text. I can’t make this up. My people have to see it. I have to see it. I don’t want to pull rank on these folks by quoting Greek—and they say, “I don’t see that,” and I say, “Well, believe me it is there.” I don’t want to do that. I want them to see what is really there, so I need to
see what is really there. So I am pleading with the Lord, “Show me what is there.”
And then I am pleading just as strong, “Help me to
feel what is there. If it is a horrible thing, help me to feel horrible. If it is a beautiful thing, help me to feel thrilled over its beauty. Bring this dead heart into some kind of conformity—moral, affectual conformity to what is really there.”
Those are my two kinds of prayers,
light and
heat. If you try to work it up without the Holy Spirit giving it, people will know. They will know. Your people will know sooner or later. “I don’t think that was a real affection. That was planned.”
So there are a thousand details I could say about the preparation moment as far as poking at the text, but the preaching moment is the same. You plead with the Lord.
I do
APTAT, before I stand up.
A—I
admit, O Lord, that I can do nothing of any lasting value.
P—I
pray for self forgetfulness, for fullness of the Holy Spirit, for love, for humility, for passion, for zeal, for prophetic utterance that may come to my mind while I am preaching so that I can say things that I hadn’t prepared that might penetrate where nothing else would.
T—I
trust a particular promise from the Lord that I have found in my devotions early in the morning. So today I read Deborah’s song in Judges 5 as well as Psalm 84 between 6:30 and 7:00 this morning, and pointed out a verse to Mark as we were sitting there. “Oh my soul, ride on in strength.” That was my word this morning.
The Lord gave a word from his Word this morning: “Ride on in strength.” So I take that. That’s my T: trust. So as I am walking up, I am saying, “This is your work. It has come. Don’t leave me here. You have got to do something here. I am counting on you.”
And he is saying, “I got this under control.” He is God.
A—Then you
act. You have got to do it. It is your hands that are moving. It is your voice that is moving. You have got to do this. Walking by the Spirit, putting to death the deeds of the body by the Spirit, being led by the Spirit, bearing the fruits of the Spirit is a mystery. “I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me” (1 Corinthians 15:10, ESV). That is the mystery. So sermon preparation is: You put out when you are preparing and when you are preaching. You put out, but if you have prayed and done APTAT and God is merciful, you won’t be putting out. He will be putting out.
T—
Thank God. And when you have acted and you go sit down, you thank him. He is going to do, and is doing what he is going to do, and he regularly does more than you think he does.
I don’t think after 28 years of preaching that I can correlate with any degree of confidence my sense of effectiveness in the moment and the true effectiveness of the moment. I don’t know any keys to know how to correlate those two. This keeps me from being too excited or too depressed.
The Lord will be sure to put me in my place if I do the one and lift me up if I do the other, because he said, “I am working out there in ways you can’t make happen at all. You thought that was a good thing to say? That wasn’t it. You missed it. That wasn’t what did it. This thing over here that you didn’t even know I gave you did it, and you will find out in heaven that that happened.”
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Listen to the T4G panel discussion
here.
Each year, Sovereign Grace Ministries presents a short documentary highlighting a few of the activities in our family of churches. This year, we produced three shorter films to highlight our Pastors College, our ministry among international churches, and our church-planting activities in the United States.
Our second documentary in the 2008 Mission Presentation features Covenant Life Church in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, which was planted by two Pastors College students five years ago and is now planting another church in Addis. View the film here.
The new book
Worldliness: Resisting the Seduction of a Fallen World, edited by C.J. and coauthored by Craig Cabaniss, Bob Kauflin, Dave Harvey, and Jeff Purswell, was released last month from Crossway. In his foreword, John Piper suggests one way pastors could use the book:
A word to pastors: this book is a gift to you. It will help you help others—by the modeling that’s done here and by the exegetical reflection and by the biblical and cultural insights. I can see whole churches reading this together as the pastor fleshes out the biblical foundations from the pulpit. What a powerful season that would be in the life of the church. (p. 12)
Worldliness was written with pastors and church leaders in mind. If you want to use the book as Dr. Piper proposes, or in some other church or small-group setting, check out the thoughtful discussion questions in the back (see pages 180–187). These questions are designed not only for personal application, but also to help pastors or small-group leaders guide focused and fruitful discussions about the truths in the book.
In addition to purchasing the book (or if you’re not ready to purchase it yet), you can download extended excerpts from the book for free. Download the foreword by Dr. Piper and the opening chapter by C.J. (“Is This Verse in Your Bible?”) as a PDF
here. And recently we posted a series of excerpts on modesty, from chapter five (titled “God, My Heart, and Clothes”). Read this entire chapter online
here.
C.J.’s message from the 2002 New Attitude Conference, “Do Not Love the World” (1 John 2:15) is another tool for resisting the sin in our fallen world—and in our own hearts. (This conference message eventually grew into the first chapter of
Worldliness.) You can watch, listen to, or download the message at
C.J.’s sermon archive.
October 8, 2008 by C.J. Mahaney
Categories:
At the Together for the Gospel conference, I had the privilege to participate with Mark, Al, and Lig in interviewing John Piper after he presented his message (“How the Supremacy of Christ Creates Radical Christian Sacrifice”). During the panel discussion, John provided us with some serious provocation and wisdom. Over the next few days I want to focus on three specific excerpts from our conversation.
In this first excerpt from the beginning of the panel discussion, John encourages us to make radical sacrifices right where we are.
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C.J. Mahaney: In your message, “How the Supremacy of Christ Creates Radical Christian Sacrifice,” you have called us to a radical, risk-taking life. However, most of the pastors here are laboring faithfully in preaching and caring for those who have been entrusted to them in their local church. They desire to stay there for years, hopefully to die in their church, and follow the example of men like you who have had a ministry in one church over the decades. So for many of them, if not most of them, they are not going anywhere. For them, what does radical sacrifice look like?
John Piper: Well, it will look different for each of them, and one of the reasons it will be different for each is because what is hard for one to do is not hard for another to do that ought to be done.
It is not hard for me to do what I just did. There is so much deep, personal gratification in spending time in the Word and preaching that this is no sacrifice. So I don’t count what I am doing here as “going outside the camp.” It might be for you if you are people person, one of these Myers Briggs “E” people, and you get strength by being with people instead of being with a book. That might mean study more. Go deep. Go against your grain. One reason things look different, circumstances are different.
But the principle is that “the camp” is the place where it is comfortable, it is secure and relatively easy. Outside the camp is Golgotha. And Jesus went outside the camp and then he tells us, “Take your cross and go with me.”
So you all know what is hard for you to do in the cause of love. I am not advocating asceticism in some artificial way like taking a cold shower every morning. I mean you have a neighbor and you are scared to talk to him. You have a colleague and that colleague needs to be confronted about some bad habit. You have a marriage problem and you have been running from it forever and you need to tackle it because it is going to be emotionally exhausting to do it. You read Romans 12 with all the exhortations and you know that some of them are extremely difficult for you to do.
So my prayer is that this message will help me mainly to have more affection for the treasure of Christ so that in the moment—when your will is locked into fear, greed, and self-exaltation—you can see a pathway that is costly but looks biblically right, and have enough motive in the truth that I have seen that the Holy Spirit will take those truths and you will act.
But I really think there are probably in everybody’s circumstances some really risky involvements in some causes that Christ has in the world. I’m thinking mainly evangelism (for myself especially). Pastors run away from evangelism, because we believe it is not our gift and we are to equip the saints to do the work of the ministry. And yet we have ringing in our ears the words from Paul to Timothy, a man who did not have the gift of evangelism—he was timid—“Do the work of an evangelist” (2 Timothy 4:5, ESV).
So whatever it is, whether it is evangelism or the marriage or your children. You know, some of your kids are tying you around their little finger, and you are afraid to deal with them—especially if they are 14 you are afraid to deal with it because they could run. And they are just tying you up because you don’t have the courage to get on their case and tell them, “You won’t talk to her that way…We don’t tolerate that in this house…You go to your room. I will be there in a minute.” You just let them run over you. You command them five times to do the same thing. Why? Because you are sitting on the couch watching television and it is a pain in the rear end [to] get up and go spank him. [Applause]
Or since I got applause on spanking…some of you are so good at spanking you have never touched your child’s heart—never! You haven’t said anything to them that would open them like a flower because your mother wasn’t that way and you got beat up as a kid and you are not about to change. “Deal with it, kid!” Instead of, “How are you feeling? Talk to me about what is going on inside of you.”
So the whole range of parenting and the whole range of marriage and the whole range of pastoring and the whole range of evangelism—all of it has hard stuff. And so this is a message to say, “Find the hard stuff, get satisfied in Jesus, find him sufficiently motivating and enjoy the fellowship of his sufferings.”
Have you ever heard anybody say, “While walking on the primrose path of sunshine I discovered the deepest and most lasting fellowship with Jesus”?
Never.
You come to me after this session if that is you. Always and without exception—and I have never heard anybody gainsay this—human beings say, “I met him most, I went deepest with him, I enjoyed him, I saw more of him on my dark road, on my hard road.” And so why would we not embrace commanded hard roads like evangelism or anything that will stress you?
CJM: I dare anybody to come to you after this session and say to John that your deepest fellowship with Jesus has taken place in the midst of the “primrose path of sunshine.” I want to be there for it. [Laughter] So if you are going to do that, if you would alert me ahead of time I just want to watch what kind of “fellowship” takes place between the two of you.
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Listen to Dr. Piper’s T4G message
here and listen to the T4G panel discussion
here.
Each year, Sovereign Grace Ministries presents a short documentary highlighting a few of the activities in our family of churches. This year, we produced three shorter films to highlight our Pastors College, our ministry among international churches, and our church-planting activities in the United States.
The first video features the Pastors College in Gaithersburg and the Arche Church in Hamburg, Germany, which sent Christian Wegert to be part of the 2007–2008 Pastors College class. You can watch the nine-minute film, plus two bonus interviews, here. Two additional videos will be released later this month.