Pastoral Failure

How much faith do we have in God?

Tony Reinke A.W. Tozer, Faith in Pulpit, God, Great Quotes, Humility, Hypocritical pastor, Pastoral Failure, Pastoral faith, Pride, Self-promotion, Self-strength, Sinfulness, Sovereign Grace Ministries

Thank you Mark Alderton (Sovereign Grace Fellowship, Minneapolis) for the following quote!

Pseudo faith always arranges a way out to serve in case God fails. Real faith knows only one way and gladly allows itself to be stripped of any second way or makeshift substitutes. For true faith, it is either God or total collapse. And not since Adam first stood up on earth has God failed a single man or woman who trusted Him.

The man of pseudo faith will fight for his verbal creed but refuse flatly to allow himself to get into a predicament where his future must depend upon that creed being true. He always provides himself with secondary ways of escape so he will have a way out if the roof caves in.

The faith of Paul or Luther was a revolutionizing thing. It upset the whole life of the individual and made him into another person altogether. It laid hold on the life and brought it under obedience to Christ. It took up its cross and followed along after Jesus with no intention of going back. It said goodbye to its old friends as certainly as Elijah when he stepped into the fiery chariot and went away in the whirlwind. It had a finality about it … It realigned all life’s actions and brought them into accord with the will of God.

What we need very badly these days is a company of Christians who are prepared to trust God as completely now, as they must do at the last day. For each of us the time is surely coming when we shall have nothing but God! Health and wealth and friends and hiding places will all be swept away and we shall have only God. To the man of pseudo faith that is a terrifying thought, but to real faith it is one of the most comforting thoughts the heart can entertain.

It would be a tragedy indeed to come to the place where we have no other but God and find that we had not really been trusting God during the days or our earthly sojourn. It would be better to invite God now to remove every false trust, to disengage our hearts from all secret hiding places and to bring us out into the open where we can discover for ourselves whether we actually trust Him. This is a harsh cure for our troubles, it is a sure one! Gentler cures may be too weak to do the work. And time is running out on us.

– A.W. Tozer (source unknown)

Earnest preaching and earnest conversation

Tony Reinke Banner of Truth, Earnestness, Great Quotes, Hypocritical pastor, M'Cheyne, Pastoral Failure, Pastoral Ministry, Preaching, Pupit Seriousness

When I think of being earnest in the pulpit many quotes from preachers come to mind (see the quotes here by John Angell James). But what about earnestness during a one-on-one lunch or breakfast meeting? This is where I must learn more about earnestness and feel the same weight as when I climb behind the pulpit. If what people see inside and outside the pulpit are inconsistent, our preaching loses authority. If we are to be earnest in the pulpit we must be earnest outside the pulpit as well. This is the great warning from the life of M’Cheyne:

“Whatever be said in the pulpit men will not much regard, though they may feel it at the time, if the minister does not say the same in private, with equal earnestness, in speaking with his people face to face; and it must be in our moments of most familiar intercourse with them, that we are thus to put the seal to all we say in public. Familiar moments are the times when the things that are most closely twined round the heart are brought out to view; and shall we forbear … We must not only speak faithfully to our people in our sermons, but live faithfully for them too. Perhaps it may be found that the reason why many who preach the gospel fully and in all earnestness are not owned of God in the conversion of souls, is to be found in their defective exhibition of grace in these easy moments of life … It was noticed long ago that men will give you leave [permission] to preach against their sins as much as you will, if you will but be easy with them when you have done, and talk as they do, and live as they live. How much otherwise was it with Mr. M’Cheyne, all who knew him are witnesses.”

Andrew Bonar, Memoir & Remains of Robert Murray M’Cheyne (Banner of Truth: 1844/2004), p. 74

Church discipline

Tony Reinke Banner of Truth, Biblically Faithful, Church discipline, Great Quotes, Hard decisions, M'Cheyne, Obedience to Scripture, Pastoral Failure, Pastoral Ministry, Pupit Seriousness, Shepherding, Sin

“When I first entered upon the work of the ministry among you, I was exceedingly ignorant of the vast importance of church discipline. I thought that my great and almost only work was to pray and preach. I saw your souls to be so precious, and the time so short, that I devoted all my time, and care, and strength, to labor in word and doctrine. When cases of discipline were brought before me and the elders, I regarded them with something like abhorrence. It was a duty I shrank from; and I may truly say it nearly drove me from the work of the ministry among you altogether. But it pleased God, who teaches His servants in another way than man teaches, to bless some of the cases of discipline to the manifest and undeniable conversion of the souls of those under our care; and from that hour a new light broke in upon my mind, and I saw that if preaching be an ordinance of Christ, so is church discipline. I now feel very deeply persuaded that both are of God – that two keys are committed to us by Christ: the one the key of doctrine, by means of which we unlock the treasures of the Bible; the other the key of discipline, by which we open or shut the way to the sealing ordinances of the faith. Both are Christ’s gift, and neither is to be resigned without sin.”

– Robert Murray M’Cheyne in Andrew Bonar, Memoir & Remains of Robert Murray M’Cheyne (Banner of Truth: 1844/2004), p. 73.

See Matthew 18:15-20 (clearly defined steps of church discipline), 1 Cor. 5:4-5 with 5:9-13; 2 Cor. 7:8-12 (the fruit of godly confrontation); 1 Tim. 1:18-20; Tit. 3:9-11 (notice the difference between church discipline and dealing with the divisive man); Rev. 2:1-7 (notice how a disciplining and discerning church can still lack in passionate love for Christ).

Preaching with freshness

Tony Reinke Biblically Faithful, Boldness, C.H. Spurgeon, Communion with God, Earnestness, Fresh preaching, Great Quotes, Imagination, Pastoral Failure, Preaching, Preaching Legacy

“My soul – never be satisfied within a shadowy Christ. … I cannot know Christ through another person’s brains. I cannot love him with another man’s heart, and I cannot see him with another man’s eyes. … I am so afraid of living in a second-hand religion. God forbid that I should get a biographical experience. Lord save us from having borrowed communion. No, I must know him myself. O God, let me not be deceived in this. I must know him without fancy or proxy; I must know him on my own account.”

This quote from Charles Spurgeon is a reminder that we must know and press close to Christ ourselves. Some of the darkest periods of church history, where the shroud of monotony covered the pulpit came at a time when preachers lived off a second-hand, borrowed communion.

Anyways, during the Middle Ages, the deadness of the churches can certainly be tied to a failed pulpit. Most noticeable was a failure of preachers to stand for God’s Word with conviction and freshness enforced with genuine godliness of character. We are reminded of the impotence of the church when God’s preachers do not preach from the freshness of personal communion with Himself but rather simply copy and regurgitate what was given by others. The result is borrowed communion and dead preaching:

“We have already had occasion to speak of the low character of the clergy during this epoch [the medieval period leading up to the Reformation]. Much ignorance, immorality, luxury and ambition [or a desire for rank], laziness, avarice, and other evil things have to be charged to their account. And this of course was at once both the cause and evidence of decay in the pulpit. For in all times the character of the preacher either enforces or enfeebles his preaching. And where the average of character is bad, no matter how noble the exceptions may be, the average of preaching will necessarily be low. Where there is a lack of true piety and conviction in the preacher the pulpit work tends to become empty, formal, frigid and without moving effect. And this is the character of much of the preaching of that age.”

“Always one of the signs of degenerate preaching – as of any literary production – is a slavish dependence upon others, past or present, a want of independence, originality, freshness. Copyists and imitators are found in every age, it is true, but when the masters belong chiefly to a former generation and the small followers mostly abound, the fall is great.”

– Edwin Charles Dargan, A History of Preaching (Solid Ground: 1905/2003), 1:308.

Seeing the Ugliness of Spiritual Pride

Tony Reinke Charles Bridges, Great Quotes, Humility, Pastoral Failure, Pastoral Sin, Pride

“Apprehensions of pride – the sin of young ministers – working in my heart, filled me with inexpressible bitterness and confusion before the Lord. I found, that, when I met with enlargement [success] in prayer or preaching, or answered a question readily and suitably, I was apt to applaud myself in my own mind. I affected pre-eminence above what belonged to my age or worth. I therefore endeavored to take a view of my pride – as the very image of the Devil, contrary to the grace and image of Christ – as an offense against God, and grieving of his Spirit – as the most unreasonable folly and madness for one, who had nothing singularly excellent, and who had a nature so corrupt – as infinitely dangerous, and ready to provoke God to deprive me of my capacities and opportunities. I therefore resolved to carry my distempered heart to be cured by Jesus Christ, that all-sufficient Physician – to watch against my pride – to study much the nature and aggravations of it, and the excellence of the contrary grace.”

Cotton Mather quoted by Charles Bridges in The Christian Ministry (Banner of Truth: 1830/2001), p. 152.