Transcript
May we unite in the word of prayer. O God, our Father, we come to Thee in the morning with the wonder of a day stretching out before us, and pray for Thy grace and health that we may fill it with things that matter to Thee, and will help us in our growth and Thy service, for we come in the name of Jesus. Amen. I've already concluded that one of the very great virtues of the pastorate is
over against teaching is that you rarely preach at eight o'clock in the morning. I wanted to talk to you this morning about a theology of the ministry and its implications. This is by way of being a footnote to what Dr. Homrighausen said on Wednesday. And it's partially an effort, I think, on my part during this first year when I have with you to see just where we have been and where we're going. And I would
like to begin by asking the question, where are we to find a norm for determining the nature of the ministry? Some people will say that you will find it by going to the teachings of Jesus. See what he teaches about the ministry. The difficulty is that while Jesus has much to say about the privileges and responsibilities of all God's children, and while he assumes the necessity of leadership and even trains a handful of leaders, there's little
in his teaching which specifically outlines the particular functions of the ministry in any period. Now, our Roman Catholic brethren have another answer. They say look to Peter and his successors if you want to know the shape of the ministry. They maintain, as we all know, that Christ appointed Peter head of the church with authority to speak and act for the Lord in working out the details of church life. Acting on this authority, Peter established a church
order in accordance with the divine intention, and he passed this authority on to the first bishop of Rome and his successors, each of whom may expect the guidance of the Holy Spirit as he shapes the church and its ministry to meet the needs of each age. This is simple, and it leads to very clear-cut definitions of function. Many of us find it untenable, however. We believe that the exegesis of the passage in Matthew is faulty.
The passage actually represents Jesus as declaring that he will build his church on the first The Lord had declared Peter an infallible teacher. If you read the whole passage, you will see that the story goes on and almost in the same breath to show that Peter could be terribly wrong, even to the extent of being a sincere advocate of the devil's way of life. Further, we find no evidence that Peter conceived of himself in the way
suggested. No evidence of Peter's continued primacy in the primitive church. No evidence that anyone in the early church was familiar with this theory as they would have been if Christ had been responsible for it. There is positive evidence that large sections of the early church and of the church since have flourished under other forms of ministry, and that the part of the church developed under this norm, while fruitful in many ways, has been guilty of gross
abuses which have arisen out of the very character of the theory of the church and its ministry. Now, our Protestant forefathers had another answer to this question of where you get a norm for the ministry. They sought a norm in scripture. They reasoned that Christ gave his authority to the Old Testament by his assumptions and by his explicit statements and by the manner in which he used ancient scripture. They argued that he authorized his disciples to
speak for him and that they wrote the New Testament. It seemed logical then to seek instructions for church order in the Bible. They studied the New Testament carefully on the assumption that it would yield clear instructions about the shape of the ministry. Now, leaving critical questions aside as to whether the apostles did write the New Testament, we do see that while these reformers, our forefathers, developed a picture of the ministry which had many things in common,
their view differed enough to suggest that even men with finest preparation and the most sincere intention could not find a clear pattern of the ministry in scripture. Our own form of government comes very close to recognizing this in its willingness to allow various groups of people to take different views on this subject. And our General Assembly certainly has recognized it repeatedly in making overtures toward churches which have a different order and leaving the door open for
changes in the shape of the church and its ministry. Serious contemporary study of the New Testament makes it quite clear that the primitive ministry of the church took a number of forms. There were, of course, apostles. There were prophets and teachers, most of whom seem to have been devoted to an itinerant ministry. There were committees or boards of elders, in the Jewish Christian churches at least, whose duties at first seemed to have corresponded to the political
tasks of the elders in the synagogue. There were bishops. The word means shepherd and was secularly used for president or chairman, as you know. And our word pastor is a reasonable synonym for this word. There were deacons. The word means waiter and was secularly used both for servant and for steward or officer of a group. Our word minister is often used to translate this word or its synonyms. It appears that the bishops and deacons were first
used in the Gentile churches and that gradually the two systems flowed together. The bishops and deacons were regarded as elders and the bishop was elected by the other elders, that's why he became a bishop, to preside over the local congregation. And for, as you know from the reading you've done in this course, for a good while there was a bishop in each church. The rootless preaching of the prophets and teachers became less and less relevant to
the needs of the churches. And their functions were taken over by the permanent officers. If this thumbnail sketch of the early church is reasonably close to the best picture which our limited sources yield, it becomes abundantly clear that those closest to our Lord in time had no impression that he had set down any detailed plan of ministry. And if they who wrote the New Testament had not learned the clear pattern of the church order from Jesus,
it is plain that we cannot expect to get it from them. Where then shall we look? In the first place, you and I always look to the great central revelation of God in Christ when we seek an answer to the basic questions in our lives. This great event includes the life and death and resurrection of Christ and his continued activity through those who love him, for he is alive and active in the world today by the
power of his spirit. It involves all the events and the unfolding of ideas which surround Christ in God's revelation. And therefore it leads us to the unfolding of ideas and events in the Old Testament and the events and interpretations which follow in the New Testament. This whole complex has its burning center in those six hours that Jesus spent on the cross. There was never before or since a situation in which God acted as clearly and as
certainly to make us aware of our sin and of his divine love at the same time, the love which saves us from our sin, the love without which we cannot face our sin, we cannot find any hope. And this is the love which draws men together at the feet of Christ. I think we are all aware because we have all met God in this event that here as nowhere else we really meet God. For here before
the cross, God has said to us everything that can be said to us about what we need to know for our salvation. We cannot face our sin without at the same time knowing the love of God and God who knew this gave us Christ and his cross. Now if this is true, the revelatory act and its results in the new family of God that drawn together by this love which shines forth at the cross, this redeeming
love, this revelatory act itself and the new family which emerges in response to it gives us a norm for the nature of the family itself. It consists of the people called together out of the world to live in love with him and with each other. That he himself thought of this new fellowship as the family of God is abundantly clear. This is clear from Jesus' use, repeated use of the term father for God and his assuring
his disciples that God was their father. It is clear from his reference to the nature of his family. It is clear from his declarations that it is my new commandment that you love one another as I have loved you and from his assurance that by this shall all men know that you are my disciples if you have love one for another. Other New Testament analogies or images reinforce this conception of the church. The body of Christ,
the new Israel, the fellowship, the household of God. The very words for this company underline this conception of a people gathered at his feet in love, in love with him and with each other. The words, the ecclesia, the church, the lords, the kuryakos, or church. It is plain that the New Testament Christian community led by Christ's spirit and sharply aware of his intentions had a clear picture of the church as it should be in the light
of the mighty things that God had done. We can see that ideal worked out in the New Testament and we can test our impressions of it against the great revelation of God in Christ, which brought it into being. We can perceive the functions of this church as described by those who knew Jesus well and we can test these functions against the central revelation at the cross with its obvious implications. Now under these circumstances we can see
that the church is a fellowship entered by repentance and faith. It exists because of all that God has done in Christ. It has a threefold task, this fellowship, of worship and nurture and witness. When we examine the all too human forms, which the ideal church has taken in history, we should get the hint that God never intended to reveal an order for the church for all time, that he does this insofar as by his spirit he
enables the church in each generation to grapple with its problems and organize in the way that seems most effective for the performance of the glad tasks of the church, worship and nurture and witness. Wherever the great revelation involved in the incarnation and the atonement and the resurrection and the living work of Christ in the world, wherever this great revelation is known and responded to under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, there will be a company in
the world, in the world but not of it, called into a fellowship with Christ and with each other and they will engage in worship, in mutual nurture and in witness. The organizational form that this may require in any period must be found by the people of that period under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. It may be an old familiar form, it may be something quite new. The important thing is that it is to be fitted
to carry forward the tasks of worship, nurture and witness and is to be true to the nature of the church as that appears in the great revelatory event and all that has followed as Christ has carried forward his work. One thing then will be apparent. The fellowship cannot pass from idea to reality, a reality embodied in flesh and blood without some form of organization because we human beings can only work under these circumstances and this involves
some form of leadership. Attempts to carry the fellowship forward without some person set aside for leadership have invariably resulted in the dissolution of that part of the fellowship or the gradual assumption of leadership by somebody. God was ready to do great things for his people in Egypt but he needed Moses to lead them. Centuries later Samuel was struggling to maintain the illusion that no organized leadership was essential. Let the people merely hear the word of God
from the prophet and all would be well and Samuel has many sons. It is obvious to any reader of the New Testament that the hungry and fractious sheep of the first generation required of the apostles more than with us. This was important but the people had to be led. The same fact stares at you from the pages of Christian history. Whether you're reading of Ignatius in the first century, Irenaeus in the second, Cyprian in the third,
Ambrose in the fourth, Augustine or Patrick in the fifth, whether you're thinking of Boniface or Bernard or Francis or Luther or Calvin or Wesley or Kerry, in every generation the people of God need leaders and some men are called to this service or minister. This does not lessen the responsibility of the rest but it makes it possible for the whole company to carry out its functions under God. Now let's look at this for a moment. Worship.
If a group of people are going to worship there must be some order. There must be some arrangements made and someone must make the arrangements. There must be someone to give order and shape to the expression of a people's love for God. The love will be there if they've confronted Christ in his life and death and resurrection, if they've had the touch of his spirit in their hearts. The love will be there but the love must
take shape and find expression and they will need someone's help to do this and people always recognize this. Even if they decide that they themselves wish to do all of the acts involved they will have to have someone to help them to order and shape what is to be done and the church has discovered all through the ages that someone must be set aside who doesn't have other tasks who will have time to do this effectively
and even our brethren the friends who thought that this wouldn't be necessary are increasingly, wherever you find them, developing some folk who either by nature of success in business and the ability to put aside a great deal of time or by reason of the community's willingness to support them can help to order and guide the worship and life of the church. Now this is equally true in the area of nurture. There must be someone with time
and training to marshal the abilities of the group as they seek to help each other grow. There's a great deal of talk of lay participation in our time but it is very obvious that this is not possible without some kind of skilled leadership. It's necessary for one thing for someone to become so thoroughly acquainted with the great revelatory actions of God that they can help the people around them to understand these things and after 2 ,000
years this is not an easy task. You're all beginning to learn that. It takes a great deal of study in order to relate that event to this time. Dr. DT Niles when he was here preaching at the University Chapel for the seminary in a series last year was telling us about the great difficulty that they have in translating the Bible into Tamil and he pointed out that Tamil has no words for many of the ideas
of the gospel and so they have to create words in order to get the sense of the gospel to the people. Now this is an extreme instance of what always happens when the gospel comes to a new group of people. The gospel created words when it came into English. We have a great many words that mean very different things from the meaning they had when the gospel came to English. This is true of other languages but
it is not only the language itself but the thought that we have that has to be put under the pressure of the thing that God has done and someone must know enough about what has happened and all of the various ways in which it may be possibly interpreted in order that those who hear or look to the event may understand it and there is just simply no way around this. It is absolutely essential that someone have
taken the time to do this task and any idea that it can be done in spare time by one or two people is obvious foolishness. The event must be related. This is not only true because of the nature of our language and our lives but it's true because of what has given them shape. It's not merely our blindness and ignorance that has us in trouble but it is the fact that we are incorrigibly set over against
these ideas and invariably twist them when they come into our language and into our lives. The task is perpetual because take the one instance of grace. Again and again the church has seen the central meaning of the grace of God as they confront it in the great revelatory events in Christ and they have grasped it and then immediately begun to work away from it to pride and you can see this done over and over again. We
think of it as graphically illustrated in what happened to the church in the period before the reformation but it has happened to the church again and again in the period since the revelation. I remember vividly the little not a folk who came to prayer meeting in the first church I served devout fine people deeply devoted to Christ but very busily swinging around from grace to works very busy proving to God that he ought to hold them
in special favor because they were doing something extra special for him. They came on Wednesday night and in every church you serve you will find some people finding some way to twist the grace of God around and put something in its place and the something is usually their human pride and achievement. This is a simply one illustration of what goes on when someone tries to bring the revelatory acts of God and their interpretation to bear upon
human life and someone must be spending time in finding new ways to make this clear to people to translate it. This is necessary if the nurture of the people is to be continued and this can only be done it would appear since the whole act of God is a personal thing through persons and someone is needed to do this. Phillips Brooks referred to preaching as truth in personality and he was looking deep into the nature of
the relationship between the leader who had been set aside and the people. Someone had somehow to become a channel of what God had to say and this is necessary also if within the life of the church this nurture is to go on and people are to do the unique things that each of them can do for Christ somebody must give them leadership. Let me illustrate what I mean. Several years ago there came to us in Rochester
a young man who was to be an associate minister of the church. He had not yet developed very great gifts as a preacher. He had many limitations but one thing he saw with a burning intensity was the need for the love of God to move out into life and in many of the neglected areas of life and one thing he saw the very first year that he was with us was that nothing was being done about
the migrants in the area around Rochester and he asked me if it would be all right if he tried to do something and I said it would be wonderful. So he called together some of the people in the church and he talked to them about this. Now they hadn't seen this implication of the gospel at all. They were in a church that was at the center of the city and these people were way on the outside.
They hadn't felt any need for this but as he talked and they talked with him they began to see this and so he then said he came again and he said now where will I get information about this and I said if I were you I'd call the Council of Churches. So he called the Council of Churches and asked how we could help and they said you'll have to call the State Council of Churches. So he
called the State Council of Churches in Syracuse and they said all the migrant work in the Rochester area is being handled by the Rochester Council of Churches and so he called them back and they said well there's some misunderstanding here and indeed there was. The misunderstanding was that nobody had thought about it and so he gathered a group of people and in response to his intense desire to do something about this and the word of God
which flowed from him into the lives of these people, 80 people volunteered, doctors, nurses, man worked for the singer sewing machine, got some sewing machines, another fellow that worked for a car dealer got the loan of a car for the summer, a station wagon, a great number of people volunteered and day and night literally throughout that entire summer 80 laymen completely carried on this program, clinics for babies, all sorts of things. The next year it was
taken up by other churches, it's now a regular function of the Council of Churches in that area and there's an employed person who gives the leadership and he's needed. But the point of this is that unless there is someone to draw this together and give some leadership, someone who has time to think about it, it won't happen. It's entirely possible that the situation will arise in another way. A woman came to a pastor some years ago
and said there are a great many older people in this area, they need something to give them a chance to express their faith and to renew it in fellowship, they can't get out to worship on Sunday, they are not able to go and come. Isn't there something that could be worked out? One of the people in that church who had been set aside as a leader or minister who could give more time to this than anyone
else, it took some time to sit down with her and work out this program. Then the woman gathered a whole committee that carried this through and no full time person has to have anything to do with it anymore, it goes on week in and week out completely led over ten years by a group of women. But they did need help in seeing how this should be articulated, what could be done. They needed help occasionally to set
their sights and see what they could do for these people that would enable them to be involved in the whole process of worship and nurture and witness. I saw a letter just the day before yesterday about one of the women that has been in that She heard about, through materials supplied by one of the full time leaders to the group, but through these laywomen she learned of the need of little children in the mountains of the
south for mittens and then of need for mittens abroad and that little old lady who can't get out of a wheelchair has in ten years knitted 900 mittens, 900 pairs and sent them all over the world and people bring her things. Now this is lay activity for Christ, but someone must mediate the word of God and his intention to this individual and give some leadership if something is to happen. And this could be documented on and
on. There must also be someone available when other people are busy and somebody in the fellowship or someone outside is troubled or in need. It may be a physical need, it may be a need of another sort and someone must be available. Now in a number of churches it's been possible to train a group of laymen to help with this, but there must be someone who is able to spend some time working this out and the
church has found this necessary in every period. What I've been saying is that the worship of the church and the nurture of the church do require leadership and this is equally true of witness. Every Christian is expected, and this is very obvious throughout, through the great divine event itself, through its interpretation in scripture and through all that Christ has done in the world in the last 2000 years, every Christian is expected to be a witness to
what Christ has done. This is obvious. He's expected to do this not necessarily in the same way as someone else, but he's expected to do it in his home, at the place where he works, even when he's playing. There ought to be something distinctive about it. And he must go out into the midst of a confused and terrible world, which is sunk in sin, and he must somehow live in that world, a sinful man himself, but
under the grace of God, trying to in some way witness to what has happened, what God has done. Now this will not happen unless this man can, from time to time, get some help from a brother. It may be one of his brethren in the church, but ultimately they will all need some kind of leadership. And any pastor who has lived very long at the heart of a city or in a town or in a village
or out in the country at a crossroads and knows the life of the community knows that these people do need some kind of leadership if they are to do these things, that they ought to do in the community and at their jobs and in their home. And so it is very sensible that the church has, again and again, chosen leaders well fitted for each particular generation to guide this witness. It isn't that this man who is
set aside is any more able to witness than the others, but someone that must be set aside to guide it and give some kind of leadership. I suppose that theoretically this could be a rotating office, but in practice it's more effective if somebody gives his life to the task. And this I think is very obvious. Now I think that if we see how the shape of the ministry emerges based on the norm of the church, which
gets its norm from the great act of God in Christ, then we will see that God calls men to this leadership in every generation. And he calls them first of all by the great revelatory event itself, the great thing he has done for us in Christ. Because if we did not believe he had done this for us, you and I would have no reason for doing what we are trying to do. In the second place, he
does it by the work of the Holy Spirit, his spirit in our hearts and lives, bringing us to repentance and faith. Or if we were not aware of our sinfulness and need and of his love, and if we were not ready to respond to that, we certainly would not be very helpful as leaders and we would not even think of doing something about this. In the third place, he brings us to this task by the tug
of need which the Spirit makes us feel and a growing desire to be used. Most of us who are in this task put up a pretty good fight before we yielded to the leading of God's Spirit in this matter. And I suspect that more than one of you did as I did and avoided any at least open acknowledgement that I was being pushed in this direction for several years before you got to the point where you
were willing to admit that this is what you had to do. But God does put this pressure upon us. For some it's a very wonderful mystical experience, for others it's a very practical pressure of human need. But in whatever way you define it, God does call us to this task by some kind of pressure, by the tug of need or pressure from his love. It becomes a great pressure to do this. Now many of us will
often stop and ask whether we are quite sure that this is what he wants us to do. And I think that this is normal for all of us and I suspect that every minister many times in his ministry may stop and ask, is it possible that I'm the wrong one to do this? And perhaps he ought to ask this task because if at any point he decides that he is not the effective leader that God called
him to be, he may decide that he should be doing something else. But we are called by the act of God in Christ, we are called by his spirit giving us the grace of repentance and faith, we are called by the tug of need, the growing desire to be used, and then we are called by the call of God's people to lead them. And unless they ask us to lead them, it's quite obvious that we weren't
called to do it. There is no possibility of being a leader unless people want you to lead. And there is no possibility of serving somebody unless they're willing to have you serve them. So the shape of the task, the nature of the ministry then arises out of the nature of the church and the conditions in the world at the time. This will tell the minister much of what he has to do. He is a servant of
servants to enable them to exalt their Lord who loves them and died for them. If he tries to exalt himself, he fails. Not only fails to exalt himself, but he fails to carry out his Lord's command. He is a leader in worship, a guide in the nurture of the people, and a coordinator of the witness. And in all these things, he is also a worshiping person, a person who is participating in the mutual nurture and a
witness. If he forgets a part of the task, the church may become deformed under his leadership. And we see this in Rome. We even see it in many Protestant churches where a minister is particularly enamored of one part of his task and neglects the others in order to perform this. If he fancies himself a very remarkable preacher and doesn't give any time to anything else, his sermons have a way of becoming precious and empty. If he
fancies himself a great leader in worship and neglects his preaching and neglects the function of the church and neglects the social implications of the gospel, the church becomes deformed. If he becomes very, very active in his carrying out of the implications of the gospel in the social structure and neglects his preaching and the worship and the teaching of the church, the church becomes deformed. And much of the frustration among ministers, and there are frustrated ministers as
there are frustrated businessmen and frustrated doctors and frustrated coalmen, much of the frustration comes from the man's feeling that some particular thing is the essence of leadership in the church and his feeling that he must do this and that everything else is a distraction from it. This is very much as if one would say that lovemaking was all there was to marriage. It may be a very fine thing, but it isn't all there is. And this
is true of any one of the minister's functions. And the moment that he feels frustrated because he can't devote all his time to one of them, he's on the way to trouble. I hope that in the course of the three years you're here, you will read many biographies of ministers in every one of the ages. One thing you can do after you get into your church after a year or two is to lead the people in
some connection through a study of the great Christian figures in each one of the Christian centuries. This is a very rewarding experience. But you will also gain a great deal from some of the really outstanding biographies. And I think the one that meant the most to me in the early years of my ministry and still is a book to which I return is The Three-Volume Life of Phillips Brooks by Allen. Phillips Brooks was a great
preacher. I told one of my associates this a couple of years ago, and he said, well, I'd like my medicine in smaller doses. And so he bought the new book by my very good friend Dr. Albright of the Divinity School in Cambridge, something about infinity, the new biography of Brooks. And he read it and came into me with a downcast face and he said, I don't know what you caught from Brooks. Well, he knew that I
had the three-volume thing and a whole shelf of Brooks sermons and that they meant a great deal to me. And I said, I'm just going to tell you what I told you before. If you want to meet Brooks, read The Three-Volume Edition. I've read Dr. Albright's book. I was excited about it because he told me about the research he was doing as he was preparing it. And with every kindness to a friend, I can
only say that the Allen book is still a great deal more helpful. Now, if you will read a book like this of the man that I think was the greatest minister that America has ever had, and this is a private opinion, here was a man who would yield to no man on study. He found time every day for his study. He was a great preacher. But if you will read his life carefully, you will find that
this was very well balanced with a pastoral ministry that was truly wonderful. He was in the humblest homes in his parishes. And even after he became a bishop, he gave much time to dealing with individuals. And he also saw the necessity, and I must say he saw it reluctantly at first, for the administrative task that he had to perform first as a pastor and then as a bishop. And he saw that this would take time and
he learned not to resent it. And it was necessary to balance. And I think that it is very important for every one of us to recognize this, that the task we have if we undertake leadership in the church must be a balanced task. And I suspect that much of the frustration that Dr. Blizzard reports could be eliminated if this were done. Now, however, when we once have a norm for the ministry, and this norm arises from
the church as the church grows out of the great revelatory acts of God in Christ. How do we bring ourselves to live by this norm? What are its implications? It seems to me that here, once we have the norm, the problem is how to bring ourselves in any degree of conformity to it. And I've talked to a number of you, I've talked to a number of other men here on the campus, and for the last 12
years in Rochester particularly, although also in Albany and to some extent in Philadelphia, I've been listening to the woes of ministers as the chairman of ministerial relations and just as a friend. I think that it's fair to say that in the last 12 years, it's very rarely that a week has gone by except in the summer that some minister hasn't come in to talk over his problem. And I know something about the things that frustrate a
man, from them and from my own experience. And I suspect that the problem arises principally from the fact that we forget that while we have a norm for the ministry then in the church, a norm which must be adjusted in terms of the needs of each generation, which has certain constants, the fellowship with its worship and nurture and witness, and which has many variables and can take very different forms. While we have this norm and must
constantly be working toward it in terms of our time, changing the order and arrangements as need be, we need most of all discipline under God. And this arises surely from the devotional life. And one of the appalling things is that there are a great many of us who find it extremely hard to get our directions day by day. Because we simply don't give God a chance to give them. Christ is alive. He's not someone who lived
merely long ago in Palestine, he's alive and he can guide us now. But very few of us give him an adequate opportunity. And this is a major reason for discontent and confusion and frustration. If each of you would, if you are not doing it, start each week with a time set aside, first for your own devotional life, for the reading of the scripture and for prayer, and then when you have finished the devotions, move into a
period in which you ask Christ to help you plan your week. A number of things would happen. And I do not mean to say that you're going to ask him to suggest one or two things you're going to do this week, but that you're going to ask him to help you wrestle with the problem of how you're going to use those precious seven days to his glory and for your own growth. And you're going to take
the time to sit down with him and look at Monday, the morning, the afternoon, the evening, and Tuesday, and the tasks you have to perform and begin to fit them together. You'll probably need a pencil and a piece of paper because Christ has a way of being very tangible if you will let him. You have your norm and now you need help in adjusting to it. And you sit down with him to see how will this
week fall out. And much of the rush will go if you do this. It hasn't been too long since one of the fellows was saying to me that he was just going to have to get away from the seminary for a year and why. He said, I'm on a rat race. I'm racing around and I've got to sit down and look at myself. And his solution was exactly the solution that less than six months ago a
minister proposed in my study. He said, I've got to get away from the church. Can you tell me anywhere where I can go where they would give me some kind of a fellowship and support my family for a year? I've just got to get away in order to get bearings. Now, God had made a very careful arrangement for all of us to help us get our bearings. He suggested that on the first day of the week
we'd climb up somewhere and look and let him show us what we ought to do. And if you will do this, you won't have this passionate need all the time to get out of the rat race because Christ will not involve you in a rat race. He will show you the way. Then if each morning you will ask him to help you adjust this thing so that if something has had to be taken out and if
you're a human being and if you're a Christian, there will be times when you must change the order of events. And certainly when you get into the pastorate, there'll be many interruptions which you will welcome if you want to be the servant of the people. And when this occurs, you will have to take the next period to readjust your schedule. Now, in the pastorate, the people of God are very considerate. And any minister who does not
find them so had better talk it over with his Lord. The people of God are remarkably considerate. And if you tell them you want until 11 o 'clock in the morning to study, they'll usually let you have that time if you make it quite clear. But occasionally they must break in. The same thing is true of other things in your ministry. But you must be constantly readjusting this schedule. And you need Christ's help in this. And
he speaks. And then I would suggest to you that if you're going to live a disciplined life in the ministry, you must have the help of your brethren in the Lord. And many a minister to his peril neglects the presbytery and the organized life of the failing to see that this is the company of people working out an order for today. And he lives his little separate life apart and suddenly discovers that he and what he's
doing has become irrelevant or what he's doing that's relevant is no longer possible because the church has moved either into the right way or into the wrong way without his participating in learning the will of God for that church. Will you measure your success in all of this? If you're foolish enough to try, you will again find yourself in extreme frustration. Dr. Johnson in the beginning of the little book on the study of the ministry tells
us that a sociologist studied a community and found that none of the ministers were among the top ten men of influence in the community. And I'd like to know what could matter less. Your reputation isn't important, but it is important to do the will of God and leave the results with him. And I submit that there's a way to discover the will of God through that wonderful thing that God has done for you and me in
Christ and through its results in the church and through the order which has emerged in the church as the church has faced each generation and particularly at the burning heart of your own relationship to Christ as you face him and answer for what you're doing and ask his help for the days ahead.