Hanging On When You Feel Like Giving Up

the following message by aleister begg is made available by truth for life for more information visit us online at truthforlife.org first peter chapter 5 and verse 1. so i exhort exhort the elders among you as a fellow elder and a witness of the sufferings of christ as well as a partaker in the glory that is going to be revealed shepherd the flock of god that is among you exercising oversight not under compulsion but willingly as god would have you not for shameful gain but eagerly not domineering over those in your charge by being examples to the flock and when the chief shepherd appears you will receive the unfading crown of glory likewise you who are younger be subject to the elders clothe yourselves all of you with humility toward one another for god opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble humble yourselves therefore unto the mighty hand of god so that at the proper time he may exalt you casting all your anxieties on him because he cares for you be sober minded be watchful your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion seeking someone to devour resist him firm in your faith knowing that the same kinds of suffering are being experienced by your brotherhood throughout the world and after you have suffered a little while the god of all grace who has called you to his eternal glory in christ will himself restore confirm strengthen and establish you to him be the dominion forever and ever amen martin luther was uh no friend of uh the pope after his thesis had been made manifestly plain but on one occasion in writing he said i am more afraid of my own heart than of the pope of rome for in my own heart there dwells that great pope self and i don't know about you but i think without any sense of rhetoric or trying to be clever there is no doubt in my mind that in the space of time that i have been involved in pastoral ministry no one has given me greater trouble than me that i am my own biggest problem that the issues that come our way in ministry uh do not come to us in a vacuum they come to us in the framework of our personalities of our family life of whatever it might be and personality plays a large part in the way in which we respond to trials to difficulties to what paul what peter refers to here as sufferings and it is very very easy for us to try and pretend we know about things that we don't know about at all we're keenly aware that some of the people who are with us here these few days when it comes to trials and sufferings our brothers know this at a very material a very physical a very immediate level in a way that some of us only know in a in a theoretical way and even when it comes to the thing that we're going to give ourselves some thought to just now the idea of hanging on when you feel like giving up the reason that i decided to do this was because i couldn't think of anything else to do and someone said well you've got to do something for a breakout and i said okay well then i'll try it if you want to slip out right now some of these other things are still on the go but i um the only time i remember doing anything like this was years and years ago when i was very very young and i was invited to do a seminar at the moody bible institute and i'd never done a seminar i wasn't really sure what a seminar was and apparently it was a sort of loki something where you went in a classroom and so i i had to give them titles but i didn't know what to give them a title of and so i out of the blue i said uh i'm going to deal with uh ministerial depression i thought it sounded fairly good and not that i knew hardly anything about it at all in fact i knew nothing about it and so i assumed it's a safe one they don't know anybody called bag and they probably won't show up so it won't be much of a problem well i found my way to this classroom it was jam-packed there were people hanging off the rafters almost and it clearly was not because of any name recognition because nobody knew me at all and then i suddenly realized this is actually an issue this is an issue now why do we start here in peter because i want to make sure that whatever we do we're counseled by the scriptures and that any observations that i'm able to make are poured if you like safely through the filtration system of the word of god itself um peter introduces himself here in chapter five not in a very authoritative fashion as he does at the beginning of his letter at the beginning of his letter in chapter one he identifies himself as an apostle as someone who has authority under god now here in chapter five you will notice that he exhorts the elders as quotes a fellow elder i he says i'm with you in this venture together we are entrusted with the responsibility of feeding and tending the flock of god he is able to speak now to the fact that although at one point in his life if you think about it when he was there with jesus he essentially ran away from the sufferings of christ when everything began to come down on jesus he was one of the first to make a run for the border as it were and yet now he has been restored remember the breakfast meeting and he identifies himself not only as a fellow elder but as a witness of the sufferings of christ as well as a partaker in the glory that is going to be revealed so jumping on the back of what tony has been saying to us he is living in his now in light of the then that the experience that he understands in terms of suffering and in persecution and in the pushback of things he identifies the fact that there is a that there is a not yet dimension to this which needs to not simply loom in the future but give him that which enables him to to deal uh with the present circumstances and this is not something that he introduces here in chapter five it's all the way through his letter for example verse six of chapter one he says in this you rejoice though now for a little while if necessary you have been grieved by various trials and he immediately points out that behind the trials that we experience there still is the hand of god there still is the hand of god that his providence is actually overruling these things and it is in order that uh the faith that you profess may be tested and may prove to be uh all that god purposes for it to be uh he does the same thing again in chapter four and where are we verse 12 beloved do not be surprised at the fiery trial when it comes upon you to test you as though something strange were happening to you but rejoice in so far as you share christ's sufferings that you may also rejoice and be glad notice again when his glory is revealed suffering now and glory then he comes back to it again in 1904 therefore let those who suffer according to god's will entrust their souls to a faithful creator while doing good and again finally uh just uh reiterating this in verse 10 of five and after you have suffered a little while the god of all grace who has called you to his eternal glory i will complete his purposes in you and through you now all of that just to observe what is no surprise to any of us namely that this issue of being challenged of being pressed upon of suffering of being less than in a circumstance that makes us very very happy about life it's not placed in the small print in the bible it's not hidden it's not like when you upgrade your uh your apple watch and it and it tells you have you read these things you know before you take the box and i don't even know what's in any of those things i've never read one of them in my life and probably uh i should have but i just ticked the box um i hope they didn't ask me if i've read it i hope he asked if i'm happy about it how could i be happy about it since i never read it but anyway i takes the box but when you come to this issue of uh being pressed upon and pressed down and burdened the passage that again tony was proclaiming you know we're pressed down but we're not pressed out we're we're buffeted but we're not broken and so on none of it is in the small print and all of this is taking place you will notice and he's addressing specifically here at the beginning of the chapter those who are involved in pastoral ministry and he is exhorting these elders these presbyterians and these presbyters are to be the shepherds point a point the episcopalis which he mentions when he deals with the ephesian um folks in in acts chapter 20 you've got all those words which gave us presbyter they gave us episcopalis they give us episcopal they give us a shepherd or pastor by didn't of the verb that he uses here i want you to shepherd the flock of god that is among you and he wants to make sure that they understand that if they are shepherds it is inevitable they're going to be with sheep the problem is that the sheep stink i say that on some authority my grandfather was a shepherd in the highlands of scotland and you don't really want to have sheep and not in close proximity they do things and it's not particularly nice now they look very nice and from a distance it can be quite wonderful but when you get up close they butt their heads against one another and they do all manner of naughty things and so that's a wonderful picture of your average congregation is it not he said well he he said in the breakout session that his congregation stinks no i did not say that i said that sheep stink but you will notice that it is the congregation that is among you that is among you among you in other words they're not over there they're in here they're in your face they're in your phone they're in your email and we live among them if we don't we're not shepherds we might be talking heads but we can't be shepherds and so what he's about to say is directly related to the fact that the responsibilities that fall to the shepherd exactly impinge upon all these other elements of it and so he says i want you to shepherd the flock of god that is among you and i don't want you to be ashamed of yourselves by prostituting your ministry barnes in his commentary says it should not be that any of us are engaged in this to gain popularity to live a life of ease to rule over people or to make the preaching of the gospel simply an occasion of advancing ourselves in the world i find that very very challenging why are you doing what you're doing what is it that you're doing we say to ourselves well we're we're shepherding the flock and why are you shepherding the flock and what does it really mean to do that we're not ceos we're not generals in an army we're given a high and a holy responsibility to care for those entrusted to our care and it is within the context of that opportunity that our responsibility is then pressed upon by the fact that we are as i've said our own problem at least maybe you're not maybe you've got another problem but i i think i can be very honest about this so uh i was in a uh on a panel recently where with at least one other person and the question was posed not to me but to somebody else um can you ever think of a time in your in your life when you were tempted to quit the ministry that was the question and i don't remember the answer that the fellow gave but it certainly wasn't my answer because i wanted to grab the microphone and say yes yes every sunday night every sunday evening i do the people of course would not believe that but there's a sense in which it is absolutely factual it is absolutely true because we bring to our responsibilities ourselves we carry into those situations the burdens that we bear the concerns for our families and all kinds of issues in fact i went looking for somewhere that i had perhaps said this and and i found it because everything you say now is taken down to be used in evidence against you and i was i was asked a question about crippling despondency and i re replied in in a similar way you know i i can't make a comment about clinical depression i haven't experienced it but i do know it's real i cannot comment on facing manic bouts i've not experienced it i do know that it's real but i went on to say i'm just talking about the blues i'm talking about being totally cheesed off i'm talking about being absolutely fed up i'm talking about ending a sunday and wanting to run as far as i possibly can from every responsibility and pastoral ministry that i have ever known to run from enduring the smiles and the handshakes or worse the grimaces and the complaints wishing somehow that i could actually merge with the pavement that i'm standing on and be done with it forever i'm talking about waking up at two in the morning and trying to think of one other reasonable thing that i could do with my life if i could only get a job and fearing that the only reason i'm still in pastoral ministry is because i am unemployable that i couldn't get a job and recognizing how easily and how quickly especially on the back of any sense of success the elijah syndrome gets you in a stranglehold and then you start to say to yourself you know there's nobody who really understands this the way i do there's nobody who really gets what this is like and off we go metaphorically to find our own little broom tree and sit down under it and commiserate with ourselves and somehow or another he sends an angel you may not think of your wife as an angel but you probably should and she comes to you and she doesn't quote the bible to you she says i i brought you a bottle of water and a bran muffin give yourself a shake would you that kind of angelic visitation which really hurt but in actual fight that's what happened to elijah wasn't it they they didn't sing him out of it he said to him hey i'm not sure you're looking at things correctly in other words it was a reminder to him of the fact that he had experienced that that that was real that that was not enjoyable that he genuinely felt what he felt and yet he was wrong it's surely fascinating that some of the most profoundly helpful hymns and or hymns that have become a large part of our uh hymnady in our circles have more than a tinge of difficulty at the very heart of them you know when peace like a river attendeth my way when soros like c billow's role is written out of the heartache of the loss of spafford's four daughters god moves in a mysterious way his wonders to perform he plants his footsteps in the sea and rides upon the storm is written by calper who spent three spells in a mental institution so the idea that somehow or another the journey of ministerial privilege is a journey that takes us always up and beyond the cloudy terrain the turbulent stuff that you can always go higher than it is neither true to the bible nor is it true to our own human experience and so we have then to make sure that we are able to do what we've been asked to do and to do it in a way that is in keeping with what we're told so not for shameful gain we're to do it not in a grudging way because we have to not in a greedy way because we're looking for gain out of it not in a pompous or in the domineering way because that is not the pattern of the lord jesus and to do it in awareness of the fact that the ship the chief shepherd is going to appear and we will receive an unfading crown of glory you see part of the problem i think is that we look for glory now but no if you look for glory in what you're doing there's not a lot of glory in what you're doing even if you're doing it really well i mean just be honest it's certainly not in the eye sight of the world not in the people you went to school with not even in the minds of many of your congregation so if i'm looking for acceptance for fulfillment for security for all of that in some kind of glorified position in the now i'm going to be sorely disappointed because there is nothing that can provide that now no it is the prospect of glory then which gives us the wherewithal to experience this now so in straightforward terms we're to engage in it with a spirit of willingness eagerness and gentleness isn't it interesting too how our worst characteristics come out when we're pressed in this way that one of the things that has come out of the circles in which many of us move is a high-handed domineering bullying type of perspective that has marked out local church leadership it runs absolutely counter to what he's saying here not domineering over those in your charge but being examples to the flock and the pattern is of course a pattern of servanthood now all of this to move to what i suggest in the balance of the text are is a framework that if we get it on the wrong side of this we only contribute to our own problems and he mentions each of these things in turn clothe yourselves with humility toward one another because god opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble well you see when i think that i deserve more than i am getting or when i live thinking that i'm not getting what i really deserve then at the root of that the problem is i think of myself more highly than i ought you think about what this caused peter to write it's quite interesting isn't it he says i i'm i'm writing this final little section here reminding myself and reminding you that i share with you in this as a fellow elder god resists the proud well of course he was the one that got it right you're the christ the son of the living god and then he began to remonstrate with jesus and then he began to distinguish himself from his from his colleagues even if they all leave you jesus i'm your man you can count on me entirely well he was proud he grew proud to his own destruction they must have pained him to write this down because this was a lesson that he himself had had to learn most painfully you know augustine augustine says something along the lines that go like this there is something about humility that appeals to my ego and the idea that somehow or another if we can only explain to everybody just how wonderfully humble you know we are you end up being such a such a pain in the neck david wells and i left two books behind that i was going to quote from must have been supposed to be in the providence of god but uh there were great quotes actually and um it doesn't matter but but wells in in one of his books he says you know humility is not telling people that you can't do things you know i always have these people is anybody here can play the piano oh no i can't play the piano i'm a tarot piano player they're actually a good piano player well why wouldn't they just say yeah i can play the piano well it was humble no it wasn't humble it was a blooming nuisance we needed a piano we needed a piano player no humility is is recognizing that i am not the center of the universe that i'm not even the center of my own universe we're helped actually when when we go for example to the book of job and and in the context of that you have these amazing correctives stop and consider god's wonders do you know how god controls the clouds and makes his lightning flash well no i'd say i don't where were you says god when i laid the earth's foundation the almighty is beyond our reach and exalted in power and the creator of the universe has stepped down into time has humbled himself and therefore we should do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit see what i'm trying to suggest is that we bring a lot of stuff on ourselves and one of the problems is when we get a fat head if you think about it in relationship again to to paul and in second corinthians paul was a mega brain saul of tarsus had a size 14 brain for sure if that's you know if that's a big one i don't know but he had it he he had it he was phenomenally effective in leadership and yet he writes to keep me from becoming conceited there was given me a thorn in the flesh a messenger from satan so that i wouldn't get a fat head he says the insinuations of the evil one on the back of whatever that thorn was were such as to seek to bring him down but it wasn't satan that gave him this satan took this and did no with it but god gave it to him have you ever thought about the fact that some of the things that dispirit us confront us in our weakness make us feel perhaps that we're not good enough to finish that if only i was brighter if only i was taller if only i was in another place whatever else it is and god says well i'm going to help you with that painful but absolutely necessary when john the baptist was asked who are you and what do you have to say about yourself he answered in a way that a few of us would have chosen to do he answered in a way that would make it very difficult for people who were trying to put you know a little thing in the in the brochure a little little picture of john the baptist and then john we talked to john last week and we asked him who are you are you a a prophet uh no no are you elijah no well who in the world are you well i'm uh i'm a finger i'm a finger pointing i'm a light shining i'm a voice crying really yeah if you look over there you see the lamb of god he takes away the sin of the world that's probably the one you're looking for there's nothing worse than going to a wedding where the best man is a royal pain in the neck whether he didn't have a good wedding or whatever happened to him i don't know what happened to him at all but it's like every chance he has to get on his feet hey we're back we're the best man again i want to shout out sit down please immediately sit down we're interested in the bride we're interested in her mother we're marginally we're marginally interested in the groom but we're not remotely interested in you right now as it happens so thank you you say well you've obviously never been a best man you wouldn't say such disparaging things about such a person well i will not boast in anything that's what we sing isn't it i will not boast in anything no gifts no power no wisdom but i will boast in jesus christ his death and resurrection while humility and all of the implications that go with it are part of the constraints i think that are used to help us in these circumstances and along with that you will notice anxiety anxiety be sober minded and be watchful verse seven cast all your anxieties on him because he cares for you i don't know if i'm an anxious person i think perhaps i don't know if you're anxious i don't know if you're sort of consistently anxious or a wee bit anxious or only anxious about certain things do you worry isn't it interesting how much the bible has to say even about that about worrying it's not there because it's theoretical it's there because it's real it's realistic remember jesus says which of you by who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life he said to him why why do you why do you worry about stuff it's amazing isn't it paul writes to the philippians do not be anxious about anything oh goodness gracious why couldn't it be don't be anxious about things most things no don't be anxious about anything jesus paul peter they're all saying the same things are you anxious about your present effectiveness right you think you're doing it are you are you anxious about your ongoing effectiveness just general usefulness in ministry when the messenger of satan comes and either tries to inflate your ego and destroy you in the realm of pride or to puncture your increasingly fat head and to reduce you to somebody who says i don't think i'm any good at all there's nothing i can do and isn't it fascinating how these anxious thoughts will appear from nowhere i mean it's not like you go to your bed and say now probably around three o'clock three o'clock i'm gonna get and get on my anxious program no i'm going to bed going i don't want the three o'clock thing and yet three o'clock comes and here they are again from nowhere threatening to undo us it's real that's why songs whole poems and stuff are are helpful to us i think again calpers him where we're tempted to be unsettled by these things and he says in his poem he says judge not the lord by feeble sense but trust him for his grace behind a frowning providence he hides a smiling face he said it doesn't look like that and he plants his footsteps in the sea you can't see footsteps in the sea well i need to see but you can see but it looks all so wrong but in actual fact behind it is the care of our loving father people i think are bemused with how many times i come up with crazy stupid little songs from my childhood but they're important to me i sing them to myself all the time oh your anxiety all your care bring to the mercy seat leave it there never a burden he cannot bear never a friend like jesus you've got to talk to yourself sing to yourself said the robin to the sparrow i should really like to know why these anxious human beings rush around and worry so said the sparrow to the robber oh i think that it must be that they have no heavenly father such is cares for you and me then adversity adversity and adversity comes on all fronts doesn't it the reason we're doing this is because we're saying to ourselves there is good reason why we would find ourselves perhaps saying i think i'll make a run for the border and peter is giving a very realistic picture of what's involved in fulfilling the task of shepherding the flock of god it doesn't happen in a vacuum for us it doesn't happen in a vacuum for any one of us we look at other people and we admire the gifts that other that god has given other people that we don't have in ourselves we have to learn then to thank god for the gifts he's given to others rather than becoming jealous of those gifts and commiserating with ourselves because we don't have them that's why we're all better together than any of us is on our own and the evil one wants to come and insinuate these things and you notice that's what he says your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion seeking someone to devour in other words if we're going to be successful in this there's no place for us kind of dreamy carelessness where we're just sort of drifting through life no we've got to be on the alert peter has said that earlier on in chapter 1 where he is saying to them prepare your minds for action and being sober minded thinking properly set your hope fully on the grace that will be brought to you at the revelation of jesus christ in other words he doesn't say come on now everything's good it's your best life now it's a great friday come on no he doesn't say that in fact the bible never says that no the then the now is set within the context of the then and the westminster confession of the faith helps us in this doesn't it says it says that we are the christian is involved in a continual and irreconcilable war continually and irreconcilable war i hope you watch the the six nations rugby on tv now that you don't have to put now you don't have to pay pay-per-view for it and then you can see what these these big guys are doing without helmets and pads and everything else it's thoroughly scary these gigantic creatures running at one another in that way well i played rugby i played rugby i cut it out i played at the back with 14 people in front of me it was very very important they say i go after the game i say oh look at that look i got my knees brown and my shorts are all scuffed oh that's no good i don't like that it says look do you want to play rugby or what do you want to do this is what's involved you get broken noses you get filthy you get big giants they jam you into the ground welcome to rugby well welcome to the christian life welcome to pastoral ministry i have not had an encounter with anybody carrying a pitchfork with horns sticking out of their heads but i've had a number of encounters and that's all i'm going to say what the devil are you think you're doing we might say well d.e host followed hudson taylor is the the leader of the china inland mission and this is what he said on one occasion he said i would not appoint a man to the mission field until he had learned to wrestle with the devil because otherwise he will wrestle with his fellow missionaries there's two preoccupations isn't there when we come to the evil one one is that we dismiss him uh dismiss the notion almost entirely or the other is that we become preoccupied with it and the direction here is very clear resistant firm in your faith recognizing that the same kinds of suffering are being experienced by others and let me remind you of the fact that there is yet a dimension that awaits you and it's that which he then finishes with you will see in verse 10 after you've suffered a little while who's called you to his glory he will himself restore confirm strengthen establish you who does this the god of all grace he's the one who called you called you ultimately to his eternal glory in christ yeah he called us to leadership in the church but ultimately the call is a much higher call to eternal glory one day in jesus and in the meantime he says if you're feeling that you need to draw the strength from yourself or run away and hide you need to know that he will himself restore you the word that is used there is for the mending of nets or the work of an orthopedic surgeon who's putting things back in place and in order he will strengthen you in other words again the word that is used there is the support that would be given for example in those big things that make that noise when they're when they're building buildings i remember one time speaking in a church in hong kong and they were building something next door and it went like this and you'll see in verse boom i said you'll see in verse boom five and it went on for the whole sermon eventually i got into a kind of rhythm as a soul the sort of boom but what what they were trying to do what they were doing there was they were laying a foundation so the thing would not topple over that's the promise that is here he will strengthen you he will support you that you want so that you won't topple and you will notice that he will establish you establish you make you steadfast so that you're not blown away like the wind blows the chaff away and isn't it fantastic that he comes as the god of all grace he will himself he will himself do this well he uses people he uses circumstances but it's he's personally our father he's personally interested in it i had an album years ago when you had albums although i believe it's coming back it was called a man in black by johnny cash and this is when i lived in britain and he had a song in there it was called i talk to jesus every day and i talk to jesus every day and he's interested in every word i say and no secretary ever tells me he's been called away and i talk to jesus every day the love of the father ministered to us through christ by the holy spirit so as to say to us hey i'm the one who put you in the position i'm the one who keeps you in the position and the one who will provide for you there is no ideal place to serve god except the place he sets you down you may come here from another church another building and look at this and say oh that would be lovely i get that i could do that but you better understand something that when i drive in my car and i drive by some of those lovely little white churches that can hold about 120 flat out i say to myself now i would like a goal i would like to go with that and the lord says would you just do what i asked you to do and i repent of your fat head and acknowledge that you are far too anxious that you fight with yourself you fight with your wife and you fight with other people when you should be engaged in the great fight against the evil one and don't doubt don't doubt for a moment that i will fail to complete what i've begun in you and through you and the strange thing for me at this stage in my life is that uh just on a personal note um you know i used to hear fellas who are the age that i am now and i used to as a young man look and say oh it's going to be great you know when i when i get to that thing where you you sort of know everything you understand everything you can do everything and here i am and you can and you don't and you didn't the longer i go the harder it gets maybe you feel the same way hey let's let's go bowling let's let's leave the ministry together why don't we do that let's say say uh they've been people coming down for the second session so we lost about we lost about 700 oh yeah they were they were at bag sting they all quit the ministry they're done he convinced them it was a great idea okay do we want any queue in there we'll just go get coffee anybody want a question yeah there's a question there noah right behind you get a microphone going brother oh you don't even have the microphone there we go microphones are appearing from everywhere we're going for dinner right dinner's at 5 45 but we're supposed to stop at 5 30. just say your name where you're from please russell rice from fort worth texas i know you go uh the question is how do you compare and contrast the concepts of happiness versus joy is there some relation to pride and humility tied to that somehow yeah maybe you know i it's a truism isn't it but i think you know somebody said happiness is dependent upon what happens whereas joy is something deeper and grows from another place and i think i'm not sure that's the the complete answer to that question but i do i i do think that that is right first of all that uh joy is part of the fruit of the spirit in our lives in a way that happiness is is not i think of happiness as more um well let's say let's go let's go to him again uh my god i thank thee who has made the earth so bright so full of all these wonderful things and so on and it goes through and i thank you for this and i thank you for that and this makes me happy and that makes me happy and i'm really quite happy and then it goes the hymn writer goes i thank thee to that all my joys are touched with pain that shadows fall on brightest hours and thorns remain so that earth's bliss may be my guide and not my chain and i think that him riders onto something there the idea of joy unspeakable and full of glory as you weep at the open grave of your loved one there is nothing remotely happy about that situation funerals are supposed to be sad they are not 21st birthday parties saved for later on for showing photographs of everybody's ski trips to veil and everything else it's do what you want to do but i'm just telling you it gives me the crawls because here i got a dead body lying here right he's not in the next room you know like they tell you when you go to the funeral home to give you a little card do not worry for me i am in the next room no he's not i was in the next room he wasn't in the next room and he and he but here but up here we've got whoa fantastic oh this is good i don't know what to do with myself i'm like a schizophrenic i'm sweat this is i thought we were having a funeral for crying out loud not a 21st birthday party sorry brother that was a question about happiness that's okay it's okay it's all right we're done but not this is not going out over any media oh it's going is it going live yeah it's perfect yeah um i'm sam waddington from bristol tennessee it's my first conference and i actually came um to thank you over the last um two years it was the word of god spoken through you at some really critical points that kept me from running from the hills so thank you well thank you and um the thing i'm processing now because i respect what you have to say is i want to know some of the greatest wounds that i've experienced as a minister in the last two years have come from fellow ministers other ministers and just i'm struggling with forgiveness and that's could you help me with that well i don't know if i can help you with that but i i do know that as hard as those things are love always takes the initiative when i'm when i'm in that mode i'm tempted to say well you know they're going to have to be the ones that you know come to me and say they're sorry and everything else and sometimes the hardest thing that we can do is the best thing we can do and the right thing we can do the other side of that though of course is that we do cast our cares upon the lord i mean we we have to say to him lord you know that i'm i'm harmed by this i'm saddened by this and i and i and i really feel quite resentful about it as well i confessed my resentment to you i couldn't hide it from you are you married or single you're married this is another area where we got it we got a challenge of either bringing our wives into the realm because we want their support or keeping them out of the realm because we don't want to poison their feelings about other people i don't i right now i can't think of a decent thing to say to you brother quite honestly except that forgiveness is right in the heart of the lord's prayer you know forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against it i think part of the thing that i find difficult is is is saying it and then letting my feelings catch up with what i'm saying and that's why i think it's that's where you know sometimes god uses others in our lives to to help us in that way but it's right for us to forgive uh and to try try and uh catch catch our hearts up to our mouths if you like yep okay derek howard from south carolina is there ever a point that you would encourage a pastor to quit yeah i think probably i think i mean we're going to create a hypothetical situation but i would say this that our our um ability to lead is directly related to the scriptures right so that so that it is the bible that acts as the tiller that guides that guides the boat through the water where where a congregation is no longer uh willing to submit to the authority of the bible and where then we now we have lost we've lost our ability to lead what will happen then is either by the end of our personality we'll try to drive things or whatever it might be but we are servants of the word as well as servants of the people and the way we serve the people is by the serving up of the word and when our children um are are no longer being nourished by the food that we've been given to provide then that would be one place in which i would say there's probably another place that i could serve and and operate that's the first thing that comes to mind there may be other situations too but that would be one or maybe just one more question up charles from riverside county california was the great russian writer uh dostoyevsky who seemed to make a point that it would be easier to die as a martyr than it would be to give our lives over to the service of god because a martyr serves once and then they're gone this costs us all of our most virile entrepreneurial years that we otherwise might have had and i'm just wondering agree or disagree how could i possibly disagree with dostoevsky i mean he's the guy who said if uh if god is dead then all things are permissible right um well i don't um it's an interesting thought i'm gonna have to think about it um i don't like the idea of dying at all i'm not partial to death um so the idea of dying as a martyr um would be would be easier i don't know what do you think you don't know either that's great none of us know it's perfect there's somebody when you go to dinner brother it's going to know the answers to that question are you got one last one my question kind of disappeared uh calvin van der may grand island new york i just want to say thank you on behalf of my daughter reason i've never been to a bible conference for 18 years i just haven't but very thankful to be here and the reason i'm here is because my daughter 20 year old daughter listens every day to your podcasts and your messages from over the years and uh it it kind of struck me when the brother over here was making a comment how do you handle disagreements and attacks and complaints and so on so forth my daughter i have been through difficult times like that also but every day she writes me scripture verses and most of them are coming from your podcast she'll write it on not not one of your stories but i'm sorry the scripture you use and i have little post-it notes i have stacks of them uh she'll write out the scripture verse and from that writing to me every single card she started at a card ministry she writes the verses out she doesn't just put the reference so the person they'll never look it up she writes it out for them and so i thank you and that has encouraged my preaching to be more expounding less stories stories are fun but making sure people walk away with the scripture verse and reading that verse so thank you well thank you and tell your daughter thanks thanks for listening and thanks for passing it passing it on um mike you're going to come and wrap this up or do i wrap it up you come all right hey fellas thank you i'm going to try this again tomorrow if you think this was rotten i'll try it again tomorrow afternoon and and you know the things that i left up the stairs were the really good parts and but there was nothing i could do because i looked down i said oh goodness gracious it's all up the stairs but anyway celebi it's all part of the south part of the selager all right there we go this message was brought to you from truth for life where the learning is for living to learn more about truth for life with aleister begg visit us online at truthforlife.org you

Channel: Alistair Begg

Views: 215,834

Keywords: Church Leadership, Ministry, Pastoral Ministry, Pastors

Id: E6_7-7NwNxw

Length: 56min 20sec (3380 seconds)

Published: Thu May 19 2022