The Work of the Pastor

William Still

• Publisher: Christian Focus Publication
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781845506773

ONE

‘FEED MY SHEEP’

The Pastor

Before we look at the work of the pastor we must look at the pastor himself. The pastor by definition is a shepherd, the under-shepherd of the flock of God. His primary task is to feed the flock by leading them to green pastures. He also has to care for them when they are sick or hurt, and seek them when they go astray. The importance of the pastor depends on the value of the sheep.

Pursue the pastoral metaphor a little further: Israel's sheep were reared, fed, tended, retrieved, healed and restored – for sacrifice on the altar of God. This end of all pastoral work must never be forgotten – that its ultimate aim is to lead God's people to offer themselves up to Him in total devotion of worship and service.

Many who are called pastors, having lost the end in view, or never having seen it, become pedlars of various sorts of wares, gulling the people and leading them into their own power. And when they fail to gather a clientele for their own brand of merchandise they uptail and away, for they are not really interested in the flock of God; they were using them only as a means of their own aggrandisement, to boost their ego and indulge their desire for power. ‘The hireling fleeth, because he is an hireling [he is in it for what he can get out of it], and careth not for the sheep’ (John 10:13). Whereas the Good Shepherd careth for the sheep – even unto death; and, therefore, seeks so to care for them that He may at last present them without blemish unto God.

But there are different kinds of flocks, goats as well as sheep. A pastor may find himself in the midst of a generally nominal church membership. How is he going to turn a flock of goats into a flock of sheep? For sheep they must become. To quote James Packer:

The assumption implied and often implicit in Calvin's handling of the theme of the Christian life, is that only Christians are in a position to live it. The Christian life is for Christian men only. The point looks obvious as soon as it is stated, but, nevertheless, we need to dwell on it, not only because it is fundamental to everything that follows, but also because it would be rash to assume without discussion that twentieth century churchmen (and chapel men!) are of Calvin's mind as to what a Christian is. To Calvin the Christian is utterly different from other men.

And if I may add to Dr Packer's quotation, Christian men are different from other men, particularly in believing that there is an alternative destiny for men. So that the pastor called to feed the sheep may find that his first calling is to evangelise the goats!

The Pastor as Evangelist

Evangelists are a separate gift to the church from pastors and teachers (one office in Eph. 4:11), set between apostles and prophets on the one hand, and pastors and teachers on the other. Evangelists are not mentioned at all in the list of ministries in 1 Corinthians 12:1-18. But the pastor must be an evangelist all the time – all are evangelists in the primary sense of showing forth Christ (Matt. 5:16); and as soon as he has a handful of converted members, even one, on his hands, he must at once shepherd, that is, feed them. And you don't feed sheep on mere Gospel addresses. Paul's charge to young Timothy is to,

Preach the word, be instant in season and out of season; convince, rebuke, exhort with all long suffering and teaching. For the time will come when they will not endure sound teaching, but their ears will itch for tales and fables and they will refuse the truth. But watch thou in all things, endure afflictions, do the work of an evangelist, make full proof of thy ministry (2 Tim. 4:2-5).

This is the work of pastor, teacher and evangelist, combined.

In a Bible study on the subject of evangelism and teaching in Paul's ministry, John Duncan (Professor of Mathematics) alleged:

There is no clear distinction in the Acts between what may be called Paul's ‘evangelistic ministry’ and his ‘teaching ministry’. In both, we find him expounding the Scriptures (and writing new Scriptures!). When his hearers were mainly unconverted we might call the ministry evangelistic or kerugmatic (e.g. at Lystra, Athens, and at Cornelius’ home); and when mainly Christian, we might call the ministry teaching or didactic. But there is a wide range between these situations, and some of Paul's evangelism involves major pieces of Old Testament exposition.

Dodd, I think, holds that the distinction between kerygma and didache (preaching and teaching) in the Acts is clear cut. ‘Too clear cut’, says F. F. Bruce. ‘For several purposes,’ he says, ‘it is a convenient distinction, but in the New Testament there is a considerable overlap between the two.’

James Philip of Holyrood Abbey Church, Edinburgh, taking up the question of the relation between kerygma and didache and noting that Locke in the International Critical Commentary renders 2 Timothy 4:5, ‘Do the work of one who has a Gospel to preach’, maintains that the emphasis is upon euangelion (the Gospel) rather than on euangelistes (the evangelist). He goes on:

Whether this be a true interpretation or not, it does serve to underline the fact that it is misleading to identify ‘preaching the Gospel’ with ‘preaching an evangelistic message’. All the evidence of the New Testament goes to show that the apostles’ evangelism was a teaching evangelism. All the characteristic messages in Acts have the kerygma at their heart; but it was doctrinal preaching all the time, based on the Scriptures, expounding and interpreting them. ‘Paul, as his manner was … reasoned (or argued) with them out of the scriptures, opening and alleging …’ (Acts 17:2, 3). Rightly understood, apostolic evangelism is not a matter of exhorting and pressing men to come to Christ until there has been a proclamation of the mighty acts of God in Christ in reconciliation and redemption, and on the basis of this, the free offer of His grace is made to all who will receive it.

It follows, therefore, that the church's evangelism ought to be one in which all the counsel of God is made known to men. We need a recovery of belief in the converting and sanctifying power of the living Word of God in the teaching of the pulpit, and its ability to transform the lives of men and produce in them the lineaments and fruits of mature Christian character.

Teacher and Preacher

All this suggests that if a man declares the whole counsel of the Word of God contained in the Bible, then he must be both teaching and preaching. I suggest to you that such a thorough, radical ministry is so little known today that most people, even in the evangelical church, have not the faintest idea of its effects and fruits. For where this total ministry is energised by the prayers of saints who mean business with God, the effect upon the unconverted person happening into the midst of such a fellowship will be as Paul describes when he says,

He will be convinced [convicted] of all, judged, examined, searched, sifted by all; and thus the secrets of his heart are made manifest; and so falling down on his face he will worship God, and report that God is among you of a truth (1 Cor. 14:24, 25).

Of course, the sense of the presence of God, and the cutting edge of His Word, may make him mad, so that he rushes out, bangs the door, and goes and reports you to the authorities … He may come back! This is equally to be expected where the power of the mighty God is unleashed. You cannot expect to have the one without the other. But too many today pin their faith for fruitful evangelism on harping for ever on a few Gospel facts isolated from the broad and full context of the whole Bible.

We were thinking about this in our fellowship in a discussion of a programme ‘Instant Salvation’, broadcast by the BBC's Radio 3, when our lawyer elder, Francis Lyall, who had spent a year in Canada and the United States, pointed out that Gospel facts are poured over the air for twenty-four hours every Sunday across the water, and few there can really claim to be ignorant of them. ‘But,’ he said, ‘there seemed to me to be little evidence that the dispelling of ignorance on that level had much effect in increasing the vital Christian constituency.’ We have had in our congregation the curious experience of a number of academic evangelicals of different denominations coming to church and complaining that they could not take their unconverted friends to a ministry of continual systematic teaching of the Word. Why not? Some of the most thoroughly converted people I know were converted through a teaching ministry. One of them, converted in our church hall, became President of the Cambridge Inter-Collegiate Christian Union.

Feed the Sheep!

Certainly, we must not make the disastrous error of going on preaching what is called the simple Gospel, isolating a few mere facts, wonderful as they are, until the last manjack is known to have been converted. What are all the hungry sheep going to do until then? Jesus will tell you what to do with them – not in word, but in deed. When the Galileans made it clear that they wanted the fruits of Christ's kingdom in healing to their bodies, but not His teaching about the nature of the kingdom, He turned and ran from them up a mountain, to teach (feed) His disciples. For our Lord came to do three things, in an ascending scale of importance: to show forth the powers of His kingdom in healing the sick; to teach the tiny nucleus who would listen to Him and who were to be the hope of the church after His ascension; and – His greatest reason for coming – to die. Next to that (His death and rising, which gave sanction and power to all the rest) He must teach a nucleus of the laws of His kingdom; so He gave them the Sermon on the Mount. Such teaching is essential food for sheep.

It is to feed sheep on such truth that men are called to churches and congregations, whatever they may think they are called to do. If you think that you are called to keep a largely worldly organisation, miscalled a church, going, with infinitesimal doses of innocuous sub-Christian drugs or stimulants, then the only help I can give you is to advise you to give up the hope of the ministry and go and be a street scavenger; a far healthier and more godly job, keeping the streets tidy, than cluttering the church with a lot of worldly claptrap in the delusion that you are doing a job for God. The pastor is called to feed the sheep, even if the sheep do not want to be fed. He is certainly not to become an entertainer of goats. Let goats entertain goats, and let them do it out in goatland. You will certainly not turn goats into sheep by pandering to their goatishness. Do we really believe that the Word of God, by His Spirit, changes, as well as maddens men? If we do, to be evangelists and pastors, feeders of sheep, we must be men of the Word of God.

The Word of God

Now, consider what this means: the Word of God, the law of God, ‘the royal law according to the scriptures’, ‘the perfect law of liberty’, is a sort of rational, verbal, imprint, transcript expression, or descriptive mould of the character of God, which character became incarnate and human in Jesus Christ. ‘He is,’ says the writer to the Hebrews, ‘the character, the express image [the matrix, stamp, engraving] of the Person or substance of God’ (Heb. 1:3). But this written Word, summed up in the incarnate Word, not only expresses what God is like, but is and becomes by the operation of the Spirit of God, the nourishment by which we become like Him also. To be a pastor of the sheep, a feeder of the Word to others, you must be fed yourself.

No man can make the Bible become the Word of God for today (I know that it is, I am not selling you Barth at his worst!) to feed the flock of God by simply ‘passing on’ what it says. Food has to be assimilated and absorbed by digestion. An atheist could ‘teach’ the Bible, and some try to in our schools! That will not do. The Word became flesh, and it must become flesh again in you. It is godly character which is the real pastor, or is the basis of him. You have heard the saying that a man's words could not be heard because what he was and did spoke so loudly. Well, it takes the whole Word of God, impartially received but rightly divided, to make a rounded, full-orbed character, which every pastor, within his God-given limitations, must be. ‘Brethren,’ says the Apostle, ‘be not adolescents in understanding [in your minds]: howbeit, in malice be infants [harmless as doves; having no part with evil, so that, standing back from it, you may see it as it is, in contrast to its opposite], but in understanding, be full-grown [teleioi, mature, manly]’ (1 Cor. 14:20). To be true pastors, your whole life must be spent in knowing the truth of this Word, not only verbally, propositionally, theologically, but religiously, that is, devotionally, morally, in worshipping Him whom it reveals, and in personal obedience to Him whose commands it contains, in all the promised grace and threat of those commands. To be pastors you must be ‘fed men’, not only in knowledge, but in wisdom, grace, humility, courage, fear of God, and fearlessness of men.

A Poor Diet

Courage is the greatest lack today. If all men in the ministry acted upon what they know we would have a far better ministry. Yet, the ignorance is colossal. Your ignorance of the Word may be colossal. And what can we do to help that in one sermon? I have little hope of anyone learning categorically, decisively, from me unless he or she is prepared to sit consistently, almost exclusively, for years under the ministry of the Word of God: thereafter, he or she will spend their whole life digesting it. This is what I wrote recently about spiritual ‘vagrants’ amongst the students who drop into our church:

I despair of some who come to our church and who read our literature, because what they hear and read is only one item of their spiritual diet. Indeed, they eat very little of anything but like children play with their food. That is why they are so thin. They juggle with it as if it were something to sell, not eat, and are not very sure which item is the best-selling line.

The advice to them was:

Eat it, eat it whole. All or nothing. For it is only ‘all or nothing’ devourers of the Word of God who will ever be or do anything for God.

Extreme? Yes; but there is no other way of knowing for sure that this is the way of ways than by swallowing the message whole. And that is not an experiment; it is a committal. But obedience to the truth demands nothing less. Knowledge without obedience is useless. You must be doers as well as hearers of the Word in your own lives. This alone will make the image of Jesus Christ appear in your life so that you exemplify your teaching in your own person before you begin to teach. Then your hearers will receive both the teacher and his teaching.

Spirit-Inspired

There is, of course, only one Teacher, the Holy Spirit (cf. John 14:16, 17, 26; 16:7-15). And if the Holy Spirit is not in our hearts, in our life and in all our teaching of the Word of God (and He will not be if our characters are not being moulded according to the moral and spiritual pattern of the Word), then we had better not open our mouths. For there is nothing so boring, stale, flat and unprofitable as holy things retailed in the absence of the Spirit. This is one of the devil's most cunning tricks, to cause the Word of God to be dispensed by lazy, sleepy, moribund creatures, who find preaching the most burdensome part of their work and cannot help showing it. I have heard people praying, preaching and teaching, and have been so desolated and my heart has been so opposed to the whole depressing exercise, that I have almost wished the things they said were not true so that I could refute them. The whole soul of man, even ungodly man, cries out against the Word of God as a dead thing. Where the Spirit of God is, there may and will be unpleasant manifestations, but there will not be boredom. Division there will be, some for and some against – that is another story – but there will be life, and the Word of God will cut and melt ice, even if it confirms the unmeltability of some ice, which is even hardened by the Word of God. Change the metaphor to steel, and you will understand what I am trying to say.

Things will happen. The preaching of the Word of God, when it flows through a living vessel dedicated utterly to the Master's use, is not only an event in the lives of those who hear it but becomes, first, a decisive act, and then, necessary food for their souls. My whole concern in my work of trying to make pastors (and I have ‘made’ too few, although I have had many men through my hands) is that they become men of God; then, the pastoral work will look after itself. It will still have to be done. But the man of God is made for that.

The question is: Are you on the way to becoming men of God? I am not really concerned with anything else until men are. I am sure that some of you are. None of us has arrived! Do you, then, know the Spirit of God teaching you the Word, in private, and in the fellowship of the saints? We learn in fellowship. This may have nothing to do with lectures, although it should have everything to do with them if your lecturers are men of God. Unless the Word of God works for you, and solves the problems of your own life (I do not mean perfectly, but in the sense that you know where you are in relation to them), how can you expect that you will be able to make it work for others? One of the great sorrows of my life is that men who have gone through my hands are out in the ministry and, because of what seems to be disobedience to the Word, or it may be because they were never called to it at all, they have not yet begun to solve their own problems. The Word has not had a chance to do its own work in them. What can they do for others? Nothing!

Be Sure of Your Calling

Then, when you are sure that God has laid His hand upon you to be His child and servant as pastor and teacher of the Word of God – I wonder what proportion of you will yet find out that you were never called by God to do this and will therefore be spewed out of the ministry by the Spirit of God in the next few years to become something else, deputation secretaries, etc. (this is not to despise deputation secretaries, for not all deputation secretaries are rejects from the ministry; some had the courage and humility in the first place to know their God-given calling, not being carnally ambitious) – when you are sure of your calling as pastors and teachers, then you must be...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Endorsements
• Foreword
• Author’s Preface
• Introduction
• 1. ‘Feed My Sheep’
• 2. The Pastor Outside the Pulpit
• 3. Complete and Contemporary
• 4. Commissioned by God
• 5. Walking the Tightrope
• Also available from this author
• Towards Spiritual Maturity
• Pastoral Visitation
• Christian Focus Publications