Truth Unites - The Best Pastoral Theology Ever Written?

Episode Date: October 16, 2023

In this video I explore several themes in Gregory the Great's Book of Pastoral Rule. See the ESV Chronological Bible here: https://www.amazon.com/Chronological-Bible-Hardcover-Bibles-Crossway/dp/1433589508/ See Gregory's Book of Pastoral Rule here: https://www.amazon.com/Book-Pastoral-Rule-Gregory-Patristics/dp/0881413186/ Truth Unites exists to promote gospel assurance through theological depth. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) serves as senior pastor of First Baptist Church of Ojai. SUPPORT: Become a patron: https://www.patreon.com/truthunites One time donation: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/truthunites FOLLOW: Twitter: https://twitter.com/gavinortlund Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/ Website: https://gavinortlund.com/  

Hey, everybody, this video is going to be about Gregory the Great's Book of Pastoral Rule. I love this book. It's helped me so much as a pastor, but also just as a Christian. And I just want to encourage people to read it and learn from it and so forth. It's also a fascinating text. We'll do three things. First, I want to introduce Gregory. Not everybody knows about him. This is Pope Gregory I, also known as Gregory the Great, and just defend him a little bit from one of the criticisms of him, and that is that he's not a good theologian. Second, we'll work through this book a little bit, and I'll work through three themes in particular.

And then third, I'll just draw out three lessons we can learn. All Christians can learn from this book today. What I hope you'll get is a little bit of an introduction to some church history that we sometimes neglect, that late patristic, early medieval period, especially, but also just some lessons about spiritual leadership, some practical wisdom about the pastoral office. And that's relevant, as we'll see, to every single one of us, whether we're in a form. of formal spiritual leadership, like being a pastor or some kind of, I don't know, whatever role you might be in. But even if we're not, that's still so relevant. Before I dive in, I want to do a

book recommendation. I got this awesome new Bible put up by Crossway recently. It's called the Chronological Bible. It's amazing. Basically, what it does is it takes all of the books of scripture and kind of makes them according to historical chronology. So it's got eight different eras that you work through. It's also organized into 365 readings so you can read it through in a year really easily. So, you know, basically you're starting off and then it's going through the historical books, but then sprinkled in our Psalms, passages from the prophets in the New Testament. You're like reading through the book of Acts, but then first Thessalonians will be sprinkled in and other books like this chronologically ordered. So you basically, you're reading

through all of Scripture in these readings one per day for a year, but it helps you read it through in historical timeline as to how it all happened, which is a wonderful way. You know, it always helps to keep your scripture intake fresh. This is a great way to keep your scripture intake fresh. So I'll put a link in the video description, check it out. What an awesome resource. Okay, first, let me just dive in by introducing Gregory a little bit. We call him since the 9th century, at least.

He's been called Gregory the Great. But a lot of people don't know about him or they confuse him with some of the other Gregories that are back there. Gregory is one of the most important early popes or bishops of Rome. In the late patristic era, we're talking about like the turn of the seventh century. So I think he was pope from 590 to 604. Absolutely fascinating time. And Gregory is a very, he's significant in a number of ways.

One is that he's an incredible leader. He's an incredible administrator. You'll see that as we talk about this book, his practical wisdom about how to motivate people, how to counsel people, how to correct people, you know. We'll talk about that. That'll be a theme of this video. But in connection with that, he's one of the most influential people in all of church history. He's one of those figures who has a massive influence upon the medieval church, but then that influence starts to wane later on. So a lot of people today, especially like Protestant evangelicals, don't know much about Gregory at all, even though he had such an impact upon church history.

he shaped the church's liturgy and spirituality so profoundly. Chris Armstrong says it this strong. If Augustine of Hippo was the father of medieval theology, Gregory was the father of medieval spirituality. He's the first monk turned pope, okay? First monk who had been a, or first pope who had been a monk. And he brings that monastic background to his pastoral office and specifically this love for contemplation and the life of prayer. And that's a, as we'll see, it's a huge theme in this book. He also just had a huge impact.

I mean, in terms of the church's monastic organization, he had a huge role of reform. He also commissioned missionaries to go to Britain and convert the, at that time, you know, it's amazing to think about this, but at that time, the Anglo-Saxons up there were like the remote part of the world where they're so pagan. And it was like, wow, could they possibly become Christians? Well, Gregory had a huge influence in the expansion of the church in that way. And another thing about Gregory, he's very much a bridge builder between the east and the west. And a lot of times people don't know this, but before he became the Pope, he was a papal representative to the Byzantine emperor.

So he lived in Constantinople for like seven years. And so his theology was shaped by his extensive interaction with the Eastern Church. In fact, after the Emperor, Emperor Maurice, the Byzantine Emperor read the Book of Pastoral Rule, he ordered that it be translated into Greek and disseminated to every bishop in the empire. So Gregory the Great is the first Latin father whose works were translated into Greek within his own lifetime. Gregory was greatly respected by the reformers, especially Calvin, also Melanchthon. If you read through the institutes, he's always referencing Gregory and his God, and his integrity, and he makes that a point of contrast between some of the abuses he sees

later on in the papal office, because basically Calvin is saying, he's talking about how Gregory emphasized his leadership role as one of service and love, and he's showing how different that is from how things develop, and there's all kinds of fascinating discussions there about how does Gregory understand that, because he has this dispute with some of the Eastern patriarchs, specifically with John the Fourth, who's in the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, and he's basically opposing the language of being a universal bishop. And so there's all kinds of discussions about what does that mean. So that's something you can be aware of. I'm not really going to get into that in this video, though. But here's the thing I want to talk about is he shaped the church's

theology as well. So in addition to all of his leadership and his accomplishments, Gregory had a huge impact upon the church's theology and especially the theology of the pastoral office. Mark Null says that the book of pastoral rule for nearly a thousand years was the Western Church's principal guide to pastoral counseling. And Gregory was a great theologian. Now, before we get into the text, I'll just defend Gregory a little bit. One of the things that you see in the literature about Gregory a lot is that he's seen as just a transmitter of Augustine. You know, he's an effective leader, and he transmits Augustine's thought, but he's not really a profound theologian in his own right. One of the older biographies of Gregory Coast,

and this is all the more interesting because the biographer, this is an older one. one but very influential biography of him. The biographer does respect Gregory, but he is really insulting about his theology. He describes him as destitute of originality, a man who has neither freshness of thought nor depth of insight, a thinker who is extremely uncritical and in his exegesis often puerile and absurd. He goes on with other insults as well. It's kind of interesting, and that's a common way, usually not stated that strongly, but this is a common way to understand Gregory. Here's how G.R. Evans puts it. He's not a thinker of Augustine's sort. His mind was practical. In my book, Theological Retrieval for Evangelicals, I have a chapter on Gregory. I talk a lot about this way of thinking that he's kind of derivative. He's a significant figure, but he's not a great thinker, that way of thinking about him. And I really don't think that's helpful or correct. There's just a lot of errors in understanding Gregory. A lot of people think he didn't know Greek theology, but he did. And this basic criticism of him is kind of simple in his theology.

I think it has as its weakness, I think, just misunderstanding his aims. You don't have to be super creative and innovative to be a good theologian. If you read through Gregory's commentary on Job, you're this massive commentary on Job. It's filled with wisdom and insight and subtlety. As we'll see, the Book of Pestoral Rule is filled with wisdom and practical advice that I would have to say, even more so than works of pastoral theology in the Protestant tradition. Like you think of Spurgeon's lectures to his students or Richard Baxter's, the Reformed Pastor, works like this.

There is such practical wisdom in this book that I really don't see anywhere else in terms of just how it's helped me as a pastor. And I think it's also helpful to people as Christians. There's a great scholar. So the person who translated this edition in the Popular Patristic series, it's also written pretty extensively on Gregory George Democopoulos. I think he gives a fairer summer of Gregory's theology when he says, Gregory was a unique and nuanced theologian whose subtlety is often missed by scholars who wrongly assume that theological originality must be of a dogmatic nature or who fail to see the ways in which his particular theological commitments to asceticism and pastoral ministry informed his approach to administrative and diplomatic tasks. The upshot of it all is what I would say is engaging Gregory is fascinating because it pulls you into this unique, uh, time.

period, kind of at the turn from the early church to the medieval church. Gregory's a huge transmitter in that process. And also, Gregory is someone who, as I say, has greater level of contact with the East than most others in the West. So he kind of opens up both worlds a little bit. So let me go through and basically identify three themes in this book that I hope could be helpful to pastors especially, but I think to everybody, what I would say, the great theme of this book, I love this book. I've spent a lot of time in it. What I would say, the great theme is, pastoral skill involves balancing opposites. And in that way, it's such a difficult office and such kind of a noble and challenging task. So when you get to the end of this book, you have this

sense of just the height of this office and this sense of trembling before it. Specifically, what Gregory argues so much, and it comes up kind of everywhere, is that to be effective at pastoral oversight, you have to be both active and contemplative. And those are key kind of buzzwords. But basically, there needs to be a kind of holiness and detachment from the world at the same time as a kind of practical shrewdness and activity and involvement in the world. And you have to negotiate those two competing impulses wisely to be effective at pastoral oversight.

And we'll develop that. but if you start to get a flavor of that already, you might see how relevant that is. I think this is a perennial struggle for pastors and others in spiritual leadership, because most of us tend to be either task-oriented or idea-oriented. Some pastors love being in the office studying theology. Other pastors love being out with people doing things, and whatever you're—and so this tension often comes up, you have to be good at both. Being a pastor is one of the most challenging jobs because there's so many different

skill sets that are involved. You have to be good with people and ideas. You have to be involved in what he'll use the terms contemplative and active, or inner and outer, the inner man and the outer responsibilities. And we'll develop this a little bit, but hopefully that gives you a little bit of a flavor. Gregory's got a lot of wisdom about that. So just to work through this a little bit, by the way, there's four sections to this book, and it kind of goes through the first one is about qualifications for the pastoral office. The last one is about responsibilities you have once you've carried out your duties as a pastor. And then the middle two are about what are those responsibilities themselves, your life and then your teaching.

And the third part about teachings, we're all spent a little bit of time because it's so helpful and interesting. And just to be clear, Gregory is talking about spiritual leadership generally. He's not just talking about the office of bishop. And you can, you You can see Democopoulos talk about that in the introduction to this book a little bit. So these are relevant, actually, because being an effective pastor isn't totally different from being an effective Christian. If you want to know what makes a great pastor, a lot of that is the same stuff that makes a great Christian. So this is relevant to every Christian. But here's three balances that Gregory is negotiating when he's kind of painting this high picture of the pastoral office

and what a noble and challenging task it is. The first is he says you have to balance an aspiration to and a sense of unworthiness for the pastoral office or pastoral leadership generally. So in other words, it's good to desire it and it's good to feel completely unworthy of it at the same time. In the introductory letter to John, who is one of Gregory's fellow bishops, Gregory makes the purpose of the book very clear. I write the present book to express my opinion of the severity of the burdens of pastoral care

so that he who is free of these burdens might not recklessly pursue them, and he who has already attained them might tremble for having done so. So think this is so different from many modern books of pastoral theology that might be more about a how-to approach, where you haven't agreed upon target and it's just about basically how can you grow your church. We use the term pastoral theology just for the theology of the pastorate and a pastoral leadership, using that word pastor in a general, non-technical sense. And even just that alone is, it's kind of humbling just how many weaknesses there are in the

contemporary church where we don't even have much pastoral theology. If you get a lot of books about what it's like to be a pastor, a lot of them are just, they assume theology and go straight to kind of practical questions of how to do things, how to grow your church, so forth. And of course, you have to think theologically about what it means to be a pastor. and so a book like this really challenges us, but even more than just that, note that the purpose of the book is to make you tremble before the office. He doesn't start off saying, you know, I write this book to make people desire to be a pastor. It's the opposite. He's basically saying to make you

not at least recklessly pursue it, or if you already are a pastor, to make you tremble. It's just kind of amazing. It's like, I'm writing this book so that people won't too quickly want to be a pastor, and so that if you are a pastor, you're afraid of what you've gotten yourself into. But that's wonderful because what he's trying to give you is the sense of the nobility and the height of this responsibility and how wonderful it is. And it's convicting to read through this book. At the end of the book, he even describes himself as kind of, he has such a high view of pastoral leadership in the church that he says, I can't even fully describe it.

And at the very end, he says, I'm like a poor painter who tries to paint the ideal man. So early on throughout the early chapters of the book, there's lots of warnings that an ungodly person would too quickly aspire to the pastoral office. But then there's this balance. And he's saying basically a godly person must be careful not to be unwilling to serve the church to feed the sheep of Christ. And he really actually rebukes that even more strongly, which surprised me. The first time I read through this, I didn't expect that. And so what it sort of leaves you with is what I felt a lot of times when I'm trying to encourage people about serving as an elder in the church or raising of people in the church, this sense that on the one hand, we don't want to be glib about it.

On the other hand, there's this sense of, this is good, and this is honoring to the Lord. And the scripture says, he who desires to be an overseer desires a noble thing. So there's a sense of balance there. But no one can read through this book in those early chapters without being humbled before the crushing weight of responsibility that a pastor bears. Okay, the second balance is between what we've already kind of hinted at with these words, contemplation and action. This is all throughout part two of the book.

Basically, to put it like this, I'll quote him in the central chapter of this section of the book. The spiritual director should not reduce his attention to the internal life because of external occupations, nor should he relinquish his care for external matters because of his anxiety for the internal life. And this tension between these two competing impulses and needs that need to balance each other out, in the life of every pastor, the active and the contemplative, basically being out there doing the ministry, on the one hand, and on the other hand, retreating into secret intimacy with God and prayer and so forth. Both are absolutely essential. Both serve one another. If you have only one, then that one thing will be diminished. You need both of them to strengthen each other. I think

that tension between those two things is the deep theme of Gregory's thought. Certainly in this book, and you might even say throughout his whole life, And I say that because I appreciate Gregory because I really think he's sincere. When his pontificate begins in 590, he seems to be sincerely not desiring it. On the one hand, there is this theme you can find in like John Chrysostom's on the priesthood or Gregory of Nazanza's orations where to protest against being in an office is kind of, you know, that's what you should do. You know, you should feel unworthy and so forth.

So you might say that when Gregory is protesting, he doesn't want to be. the pope. He's being insincere. Someone could be cynical like that, but I really think he sincerely did not want to be the pope. I mean, he just, honestly, if you read through his letters at that time, or if you read through his, he wrote another work called just Dialogues, and at the beginning, he talks about this. Basically, he seems to be depressed. In his letters, he talks about how he's lost the high joys of quiet. He talks, in another letter he talks about he's tumbling down in the darkness. he honestly seems depressed after he becomes the pope because he's just overwhelmed by the practical responsibilities thrust upon him, even though he's actually really good at them. He's a very

capable administrator. But that tension between the practical weight of responsibilities and his desire for a quiet spiritual life is, I don't think that's just a circumstantial thing. I think that's a theological theme that he's having to work through. And so it, and it plays out in his vision of what it means to be a pastor and how you need to balance those two things. So, for example, he talks a lot about how you have to be both humble and bold, or you have to be both kind and firm. And the kind of tensions there are drawn out of these two sort of directions you're looking in, the active and the contemplative. By the way, that whole construct of active versus contemplative is not unique to Gregory.

That actually goes back to like Seneca and Cicero and people like that in the classical world. But then it becomes a huge way of thinking in the medieval church, also in the early church from Augustine and others. But basically, people associate this with in Luke 10, whereas if you remember the story of Mary and Martha, Martha's doing a lot, many things. Mary is just sitting at the feet of Jesus. These two figures become types for these two different kinds. of life, the active life, the contemplative life. So Martha, you know, her earthly labors, this is the type of one life. And then Mary sitting at the feet of Jesus is a type of the contemplative life. So that's this whole broader way of thought. But Grater retakes that broader construct,

and he puts it to work in this text to talk about this tension that you go through as a pastor. And it's a great theme in the book. I'll just give maybe an example here. When he's talking about charity, how a pastor must love people. He's warning people basically that the if you focus too much on prayers, you can start despising the infirmities of your people. But then if you get too bound up with serving people, it can lead you to abandon the high ideals of your prayer life. And so you have to kind of negotiate back and forth between these things. He says, the pastor must be as a mother with respect to kindness and as a father with respect to discipline. And then he quotes from his own commentary on Job, either discipline or kindness is

lacking if one is ever exercised independently of the other. This is that sense of balance that makes the pastoral calling so challenging. To be effective as a pastor, you have to combine so many different skills and dispositions and tendencies. Here's the third one, and this is the one that I find most helpful for me personally. You have to balance encouragement and exhortation in your preaching. So book three, or I should say part three in the book of pastoral rule, is longer than all the others combined. It's the main one. It's about your preaching and your teaching

and how you have to preach differently to different kinds of people. I have learned so much from this section. It's so filled with practical wisdom. You know, it's so true. I have my own preaching checklist now where I basically try to think through different, you know, the non-Christian and the Christian.

So I'll have an aside in the sermon that says, you know, if you're here today and you're not a follower of Jesus, here's what this text might mean for you. You have to kind of acknowledge different demographics. children and adults. Here's probably the most important one and the one that Gregory talks a lot about, the hard-hearted and the soft-hearted.

You have to preach with a sensitivity to both. There are hard-hearted and there are soft-hearted. And so he talks a lot about, here's an example of how basically you preach with a sensitivity to the fact that there are both proud and humble people out there. Here's what he says. Let the humble hear how the things they strive for are eternal and the things that they despise are transitory. Let the proud hear that the things they pursue are transitory

and the things that they abandon are eternal. Let the humble hear the authoritative voice of the truth. Everyone who humbles himself will be exalted. Let the proud hear, everyone who exalts himself will be humbled. Let the humble here, humility precedes glory. And let the proud hear, the spirit is exalted before a fall. Let the humble here, whom shall I respect, if not the humble, the quiet, and those who tremble at my words.

Let the proud hear, why, are... earth and ashes proud. And he goes on, he's quoting scriptures, by the way. You can see that's like Isaiah 662 and other passages. And he's basically trying to say, in your sermons, that both of those strands need to be expressed. You need to have enough in your sermons that will shatter the pride of the hard-hearted, and at the same time, food and gentleness and comfort for the soft-hearted. And I find that so helpful because so many of us who are pastors tend toward one or the other. we often tend to be either stronger at encouraging the weak or challenging the proud. And so the council here is for balance to put those together.

And I'll just say that the wisdom in this, the practical wisdom, the shrewdness, you know, the insight into the human heart. Gregory was a great psychologist. You know, he understood the human heart so well. You know, for example, oftentimes when he's, he'll talk about a virtue and a vice, but then he'll warn about the virtue more than the vice. And you're thinking, why would he do that? And it's because he's very aware of self-righteousness

and how in the pursuit of virtues, how easy it is to fall into sin. So he's often more stern in that way. There's brilliant pastoral wisdom. So just kind of stepping back, so hopefully that was clear. I know I'm doing this video fast on a Sunday afternoon again. I may have missed some things here. I'm not really in my notes too much right now.

But so we're saying there's three kind of points of balance between two opposing tendencies that's reflected in Gregory's vision of the pastoral office. Just to real briefly conclude with what we can learn from that, I'll just speak personally at three takeaways that I think, especially those of us who are evangelicals, but probably all Christians today can especially benefit from Gregory. First, I think Gregory helps us think about specific virtues and vices. A lot of times, especially evangelicals, we tend to think about sanctification or our growth in Christ in these very general terms of just. is growing to love God more and know God more.

We don't think about specific virtues and vices as much. Like, what is the nature of charity? How is envy related to other vices? How does sin work differently upon the will than the mind? Things like this. Those are questions that the medieval thought a lot about, a great deal about. C.S. Lewis is another example of someone who thought a lot about this.

If you get to the largest section of mere Christianity, it's all about virtues and vices. And because he was so informed, Macias Lewis was so informed by medieval categories. So, you know, Gregory is so helpful on this. If you've heard of the seven deadly sins, Gregory is, of course, the one who kind of revises the seven deadly sins and kind of standardizes them to include envy,

because he talks a lot about envy. You know, what he has to say about envy and how, he talks about envy as the essence of sin and the essence of unhappiness. And he talks a lot about the relation of envy to pride and things like this, all kinds of things that are incredibly edifying to think about. Second thing I think we can learn from Gregory is just the psychological insight that I think is of a practical nature that really supplements the pastoral theology you're going to get

from other pastoral theology texts like Richard Baxter and others I've mentioned in the Protestant tradition. Like Gregory, those ones really emphasize the need for godliness in the minister, but Gregory goes so far down the road in giving practical advice that's so helpful. and it's so acquainted with the human heart. You know, to be an effective pastor, you have to have some skills at dealing with people. You have to have good social skills.

And Gregory was a very good student of the human heart. There's one of the text, secondary literature texts on Gregory says, he writes with the awareness that the human heart is itself, no less amaze than the scriptural mysteries he was so fond of allegorizing and that it requires all the discretion of the spiritual director,

trained in contemplation and perfected in the care of souls to navigate its secrets. Let me give my favorite example of this, and that's Gregory's concern for skillful persuasion and how to be winsome. For example, in how you correct the proud. So Gregory talks about how basically, I mean, on the one hand, Gregory is so harsh against pride, and he's constantly warning against pride. At the same time, he's very shrewd in talking about how a pastor should relate to the proud people in their congregation. And he says at one point, I love this piece of advice. It is generally more useful to correct the proud if we combine a measure of praise with our correction. See, for all his like stringent focus upon godliness, he's actually very practically wise about how to go about things, how not to offend people unnecessarily.

And he talks about this with metaphors. He talks about, you know, just as when you're trying to train a horse, an unbroken horse, you have to touch the horse gently and reassure it first before you use a whip on the horse and this kind of thing. and he's using these as metaphors for pastoral wisdom. And he even goes so far as to talk about showing a kind of deference to the proud people, to try to win them over. It will generally be easier to persuade the proud that amendment is beneficial if we speak to them about their improvement as though it would help us rather than them. We should seek to convince them that their amendment is a favor to us.

See, you know, again, for all of his warnings against pride, he's actually willing to go very far in trying to help people and win people over. It's like, you know, suppose you're leading a small group and there's someone who is, who is talking too much. And everyone else is kind of just waiting for them to finish talking. Now, you're the leader of the small. This is the kind of practical question that comes up in ministry. You're the leader of the small group. What do you do? Well, it's not effective leadership to do nothing because it's affecting the whole group pretty profoundly. But if this person has pride and you're going to offend them, if you just stay to them, you know, you're talking too much. People are getting

tired of what you're, you know, that's, you could just alienate them. So how do you do that? Well, maybe you go to them and you say, hey, I really need your help. As the leader of this group, I really want to try to draw out some of the others. Would you be willing to, I need your help. Would you join forces with me in trying to help draw out some of the others? And let's you and I just focus only on questions this week. Now, do you see how that's effective? Because what you've done there is you've influenced the behavior, but in their mind, now they're thinking, oh, wow, yeah, they need my help. You know, it's a way of doing it with giving the correction, leading to the desired outcome without giving undue offense. And there's all kinds of practical

wisdom like that in this book. Final thing is I think at the end of the day, what this book ultimately leaves you with is a sense of reverence for the pastoral office. I think in our culture right now, pastors, I mean, when was the last time you saw a movie in which a pastor or priest was portrayed positively. Right now, there's a tendency towards cynicism, and that concerns me. We talk about the great resignation. I've said things on Twitter about that, just my concern about how many pastors are resigning, and I have a deep concern to try to help pastors flourish and help pastors have hobbies and friends and Sabbath rest and the things we need to flourish over the long haul. A lot of pastors don't take care of themselves over the long haul. Well, with that, I think to have a high

respect for the pastoral office is a wonderful thing, and Gregory leaves you with this. I mean, at the end of the day, this emphasis on balancing these inner and outer qualities, active and contemplative qualities, leaves you with this sense of, it's so humbling. You know, for me as a pastor, it's so humbling to see, because what you have to do is you have to embrace your areas of weakness, because you have to say, well, if to be an effective pastor, I have to balance discipline and kindness. Okay, which one am I more naturally good at? Now I need to grow in my area of weakness, you know? And so to appropriate Gregory's vision of pastoral balance requires you to humble yourself before the things you're not already good at. I do think one of the reasons being a pastor is

difficult, even beyond just circumstantial questions of what, from one church to another, is that it has to combine lots of different skills. You really do. There are a lot of diverse pressures put upon you. You do have to be good at both prayer and administration. You do have to have both practical and theological skills. At one point, Gregory calls the pastoral office the art of arts. And the sense you get as you leave this book is the sense of trembling before this office without saying that that means you should never seek to be a pastor. Again, he rebukes that tendency as well, and he's trying to say, no, it's a good thing to seek this if God is calling you to do that. But at the same time, there's this sense of just fear and trembling before this. You know,

do your due diligence in assessing whether you're called to the ministry. Some of you who watch my videos, young men, maybe you're wondering if you're called. You should look at your internal call, your external call, your own desires and aptitudes and gifting, the feedback of others, opportunities God gives. There's all things you need to think about. But we should never lose a sense of reverence for this responsibility. We are called to be the under shepherds of the church, serving under Christ, feeding his sheep. That is such a significant responsibility, and we should have a sense of fear and trembling before this responsibility, and that above all else is what I think this wonderful book gives you. So what that means is pray for your pastor and your other leaders in your church, and if you are a

pastor, be humble, have fear and trembling before the role that God is entrusted to you, even while you have joy as well. So I hope this video will help, will encourage people. I'll put to check out this book and to think about its themes. I'll put a link to that book in the video description as well. Let me know what you think in the comments. If you've read this book, let me know what you appreciate about it. All right, thanks for watching, everybody.