Pastors, Lead Like There’s No Tomorrow

Today as I was rummaging through my hard drive, I stumbled upon an old group photo of the small congregation I helped pastor from 2005-2009. 

There were about 50 of us at church that day, and we all sat on one side of the auditorium for the photo. It looks like the photo was taken early on in that ministry—sometime in 2005.

I smiled as I studied it closely. My children looked so small compared to how they look today. Some of the adults I see regularly today looked so young, including myself.

But as I kept looking at the photo, it went from humorous to haunting as I started to count how many people in the photo are no longer alive. These were not the oldest ones, either.

For one, our daughter, who is sitting in the very front in her wheelchair with a huge smile, would die in her sleep at age 8 in 2008.

Dave, our preaching Pastor, would die of cancer in 2011, just a few months after being diagnosed in his mid 50s.

Joyce, one of our dear older saints, would go to heaven in 2009 after a decades-long battle with infections she contracted after a terrible motorcycle accident in the 60s.

Many of the people in the photo now live in different parts of the country. Pimple-faced kids in the picture are now in college and doing great things.

The photo tells a compelling story about the brevity and transience of our time on earth. But more than that, it is a chilling reminder of the urgency and the weight of what it means to be a Pastor.

How would Pastors preach, teach, counsel and love with more passion if they viewed themselves—and their people—as being on the very brink of eternity?

Far too many of today’s Pastors are out to impress people with their intellect, amuse people with their wit, and shame people with their man-made hobby horses. They have little sense of the urgency or the weightiness of life, death and eternity.

The world needs more Pastors who are dominated by a sense of God’s holiness, their helplessness and Christ’s power alone to awaken the dead. Broken, tearful pastors who have tasted the grace of Christ, and are humbly extending it to those in their care. Pastors who completely give themselves to the Word they teach, and who are themselves being transformed by it week after week. Pastors who passionately study and know the Bible, and who believe in the Holy Spirit's power to change hearts far beyond any great anecdote or illustration can.

I was in the room with some 3,000 other Pastors on April 13, 2006, when Dr. John Piper preached the best sermon I have ever heard about this matter of the urgency and the weight of preaching. I keep this sermon on my iPod, and have listened to it countless times since that night. Tears stream down my face every time I listen to it. I will carry those 52 minutes with me for the rest of my life. I'm telling you, there was something going on in that room that night.

Stories abound of men in that room with me, whose lives were changed permanently when they heard that sermon. Some moved to distant mission fields where Christianity is a crime, and have suffered great loss as a result. It is a sermon that has reverberated with gospel-spreading power in the hearts of countless Pastors.

In lieu of quoting the entire sermon here, I will leave you with this quote:

“God planned for his Son to be crucified, and for hell to be terrible, so that we would have the clearest witnesses possible to what is at stake when we preach. What gives preaching its seriousness is that the mantle of the preacher is soaked with the blood of Jesus and singed with the fire of hell. That’s the mantle that turns mere talkers into preachers.”

Pastors, preach, teach and love your people like there’s no tomorrow. They may not be with you after today.

The Deep, Settled Confidence of Christian Hope

1 Peter 1:3-5 – Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who by God's power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.


The other night, I was watching some bonus features on our Lord of the Rings DVD. This particular chapter contained interviews with life-long scholars of J.R.R. Tolkien, who talked about the many hardships and traumatic experiences early on that shaped Tolkien’s writing later on.


Tolkien experienced many dark seasons in his life. Both of his parents died well before he reached adulthood. He experienced the horrors of war first hand when he fought in World War 1. He watched the belching smoke of the industrial revolution choke out the pastoral pasturelands that had once surrounded his neighborhood. The stinging pain of real life and sense of innocence lost pressed hard on Tolkien.


Over the years, many have tried to allegorize Tolkien’s stories based on his life experiences. For example, they try to say that The One Ring has a direct correlation to the atomic bomb, and so on. Yet Tolkien hotly denied these connections. He spoke ill of allegory, and insisted that allegory was a waste of time.


Tolkien preferred the term applicability over allegory. He wrote about universal themes of human existence that every generation experiences in its own way—things like having hope when everything around us seems hopeless.


Knowing from what I have read that Tolkien was a born-again believer, I have a degree of confidence that I can keenly relate to his hermeneutic of hope. Which is why I was bothered by what seemed like one Tolkien scholar’s misrepresentation of the theme of hope in Tolkien’s writing. Patrick Curry said:


“Despair is for people who know, beyond any doubt, what the future is going to bring. Nobody is in that position. So despair is not only a kind of sin, theologically, but also a simple mistake, because nobody actually knows. In that sense there is always hope.”


In other words, you can have hope when things seem hopeless because the future is unknowable, and hope just might be lurking somewhere in those folds of uncertainty.


This is the polar opposite message from 1 Peter, which teaches that my (and Tolkien's) hope is grounded in a sure and certain future that was established in Christ before I was ever born. I must not despair because the future is knowable.


1 Peter 1:3-5 shatters the notion of holding out hope because nobody knows the future. Peter gives me a deep, settled confidence in what the future is going to bring. It's a capital "H" kind of hope based on objective reality.


No matter what trials I encounter in this life, I have a heavenly inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for me. God’s very power is guarding it for me—a power that is beyond all comprehension.


Can life seem hopeless? Yes. Does the ground beneath me shake and shift? Yes. But, praise God, I don’t have to rejoice in the fact that “the great unknown” holds some remote possibility of hope. THIS would drive me to despair like nothing else.


In the movie The Return of the King, Pippin the Hobbit and Gandalf the Wizard are cowering behind a large stone door that is being rammed by the enemy, and are awaiting probable death. Here’s their conversation:


Pippen: I didn't think it would end this way.  
Gandalf: [smiling] End? No, the journey doesn't end here Death is just another path, one that we all must take. The grey rain curtain of this world rolls back. And all turns to silver glass. And then you see it.  
Pippen: What, Gandalf? See what?  
Gandalf: White shores. And beyond, a far green country under a swift sunrise.
Pippen: Well, that isn't so bad.  
Gandalf: No. No, it isn't.





I think that’s the kind of hope Tolkien is bringing to bear in his books. A hope that can weather uncertain times because of a certain future. A hope that can endure temporary affliction in the forward-looking joy of a permanent inheritance.


This is no fool’s hope. It was Tolkien’s hope. It’s the Christian’s hope. And nothing can take it away.


In THAT sense, there is always hope.

Image credit.

Grace to Disobey

Romans 6:12-14 — Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, to make you obey its passions. Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness. For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace.

The book of Romans teaches us that being a Christian does not mark the end of the battle against indwelling sin. Rather, it marks the beginning. 

In fact, one of the ways we can be confident we are Christ’s is the strong inner sense that we are engaged in a very real and difficult struggle against indwelling sin—a struggle that didn’t exist before we were saved.

As a new creature in Christ, I still have my sin nature while I’m in this body. This sin nature is like an ousted king that has not been completely banished. It is running haplessly about the courtyard, doing everything it can to convince my members to obey it rather than Christ, who is the new King.

Even though it’s no longer on the throne, sin can still succeed at grassroots efforts to persuade me to obey its passions. Knowing it can no longer work from the top down, it finds ways to work from the bottom up. Still learning and growing in wisdom, I frequently fall for its sordid ponzi schemes.

Romans 6 teaches me about sin’s new mode of operation in my body. It is making every effort to take back its former reign, with the classic lure of short-term satisfaction. It tries to twist good and healthy desires into turncoat desires that betray their rightful and intended use. It makes empty promises about quick and dirty delights that never satisfy, when King Jesus promises fullness of joy in His presence, and pleasures forevermore at His right hand (Psalm 16:11).

Like a caring father, Paul is telling me to hang up on sin. Slam the door in its face. Force Quit the application. Walk another way. Look away. Stiff-arm it. It’s a scam, a very persuasive scam that wants to take me down.

In a word, Scott, disobey. And if it persists past the first attempt (which it most likely will), grab it by the scruff of the neck and drag it out into the light. Sin’s best-kept secret is that it thrives on darkness and secrecy. Ephesians 5:11 says, “Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them.” The power of a secret sin is severely hamstrung when others are aware of it, and can help fuel my resolve to disobey it.

Sin’s power is real, and it is unrelenting. It may win a battle here and there, but it will not win the war. With Christ on the throne of my new heart, I have far deeper delights to behold. I have divine grace to help me withstand sin's whispers. And I have other believers to encourage me in the battle.

Thank you, Lord, for the manifold grace you give. Grace to disobey.