Sublime

If your image of God is that he is a stern, harsh rule maker, then you will live like you’re always being graded, constantly being watched and evaluated. You’ll believe the truest thing about you is the final mark you receive as the sum total of your days.

If we are truly one body in Christ, then the sufferings of our brothers and sisters are also ours.

Eugene Peterson writes of the period in his ministry when he discovered that “in the cultural flatland of suburbia the people to whom I was pastor had no interest in books or the life of the mind.”

My job is simply to be there, teaching, preaching Scripture as well as I can, and being honest with them, not doing anything to interfere with what the Spirit is shaping in them. Could God be doing something that I never even thought of? Am I willing to be quiet for a day, a week, a year?

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,

C. The Nature of God

communities,

That church needs a fresh rediscovery of his gospel in all its beauty. It needs to prayerfully reconsider everything it believes and practices. Nothing is gained by merely repackaging the church in forms more attractive to outsiders.

Perhaps this is what pastoral ministry is supposed to look like? Maybe applying the gospel to those in the holes they keep falling into is the mission. Or part of it, anyway. Jesus says, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me” (Luke 9:23), so we should expect that every day feels like death