The Pastor's Justification

And I have learned in ministry and out over the last twenty years the secret of pastoral confidence, pastoral competence, and pastoral power: his name is Jesus Christ. I continue to relearn this secret every day.

Do we love God and others enough to drop the pretense and just be ourselves? Only the gospel simultaneously provides the humility and the confidence the pastor needs to be his real self. The pastorate is no place for image-managing, for worrying about our own PR. In any event, if everybody likes you, something’s wrong, and if everybody hates you, s

Should we switch things up? Try another tack? Measurable nonresults is one of the reasons so many churches tuck the gospel behind fog and lasers or adjust their teaching to the “7 Steps” busywork of moralistic therapeutic deism.

Christ is sinless and was perfectly obedient to the Father. Summarily speaking, then, the pursuit of holiness is the pursuit of Christlikeness. Holiness is Christlikeness.

Watch Out for Division Gossip sows division. So does every other sin. Many times when a church’s authorities speak out against sin in the church, they are charged with being divisive. But it is not discipline that starts division. It’s sin that’s divisive. We do not say to a surgeon that he is harming a body by cutting a tumor out of it.

Pastors, personal holiness begins in the quietude of your study or office or bedside. Holiness begins in your meditation on the written word and supplication to the risen Word. But it is made an example outside the office door.

But, “If you do obey, you will go to heaven” is just as legalistic, even if you’ve lowered the bar of heaven to a successful family, workplace, sex life, or whatever else. “Do these things and thereby reap these rewards” is in essence legalistic. But, again, many of us didn’t realize that, because we thought of legalists as frowning fundamentalists

The right response to the survey of this wearying battlefield is not timidity or a pity party, but clinging more desperately to the gospel of Jesus Christ. The justification for the sin-prone pastor—by which I mean simply the pastor—is the same as it is for every sinner. There is no Justification 2.0 for ministers of the gospel.

The content of our message can absolutely include what the message is not but if the shape of our message is what it is not (or what we hate or who we’re against, etc.), we triumphantly and enthusiastically shoot ourselves in the foot over and over again. It will be a frustrating—and ultimately failing—endeavor, attempting to maintain forward missi

There’s room to breathe in this reality. And room to obey with heads held high, straightened backs, soft hearts, and thick skins. It is for freedom we’ve been set free. When Paul gives the pastoral admonition to Timothy to “flee” sins and “pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, steadfastness, gentleness” (1 Tim. 6:11), he is picturing a cont