By Rev. Bo Cogbill
A Homily to Ministers of the Gospel at Anselm Presbytery
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
Pray with me.
Father of Heavenly Lights and fount of all Wisdom, guide us we pray, by your Word and Spirit, so that in your light we may see light, in your truth find wisdom, and in your will discover your peace. Add Your blessing to the reading, the hearing, and the preaching of Your Word, and grant us all the grace to trust and obey You, and all God’s people said, “Amen.”
The scripture reading we’ll consider tonight is from Paul’s letter to Timothy.
Hear God’s Word:
1 Timothy 4:7–16 – [7] Have nothing to do with irreverent, silly myths. Rather train yourself for godliness; [8] for while bodily training is of some value, godliness is of value in every way, as it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come. [9] The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance. [10] For to this end we toil and strive, because we have our hope set on the living God, who is the Savior of all people, especially of those who believe.
[11] Command and teach these things. [12] Let no one despise you for your youth, but set the believers an example in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith, in purity. [13] Until I come, devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, to exhortation, to teaching. [14] Do not neglect the gift you have, which was given you by prophecy when the council of elders laid their hands on you. [15] Practice these things, immerse yourself in them, so that all may see your progress. [16] Keep a close watch on yourself and on the teaching. Persist in this, for by so doing you will save both yourself and your hearers. [1] Do not rebuke an older man but encourage him as you would a father, younger men as brothers, [2] older women as mothers, younger women as sisters, in all purity.
This is the word of the Lord; thanks be to God.
We could probably do a whole series of presbytery talks on this passage – talks about what is and isn’t’ a silly myth or irreverent babble, talks about how ministerial scandal might be avoided if we saw the women and girls among us more like mothers and sisters and daughters than mere women, or how some of us need to get a little more value from our bodily training, but PM Stoos asked me to address Anselm w/some of the words I tried to encourage the RES students with during our convocation a little over a month ago.
That talk was supposed to be on an eschatological vision for ministry.
I’m pretty sure the expectation going in was for me to inspire the students who were aspiring to the ministry by giving them a vision for what role their ministry might play in the eschaton, but instead, I tried to do the opposite.
Instead of telling them how great their ministry could be, instead of telling them how much of an impact they could make for Christ, and instead of encouraging them that they were a part of the great postmillennial hope, I tried to show them, that relative to that grand eschatological vision, their ministry would be nothing.
Now, I did that for them, and I’m hoping to do that for us. I’m convinced one of the main reasons men enter the ministry and fall from grace is that they’re always chasing that initial feeling of inspiration—they want to do great things for God, and they think they’re going to feel great while doing it, and they’re probably going to receive a lot of attaboys along the way.
And then, when their eschatological vision for ministry isn’t everything they dreamed it to be, like a disillusioned spouse whose husband or wife fails to keep giving them honeymoon butterflies, pastors likewise search for greener pastures, either by taking another call every 3-5 years or by trying to develop some online relationship with their ideal congregation.
Brothers, it would do us all well to remember this morning, and quite often, that like our marriages, our individual ministries, which are of eternal importance for the people God gives us to care for, are only successful insofar as we’re willing to die daily in all the countless, insignificant, minute by minute ways that no one but our wives and our Lord will ever appreciate.
The Allures of Ministry
Even if some of you end up traveling the country as a coveted conference speaker or becoming a famous author who impacts millions, compared to the countless billions of souls who will be in glory, your ministry will contribute but a few grains of sand to the seashore of eternity.
And then, after you die, even after all that success, in a couple of generations, no one, perhaps not even your own great, great, great-grandchildren, will even know you ever existed.
Brothers, if we do not keep our own relative meaninglessness in mind, we’ll be tempted to think that our ministry, and perhaps even worse, we ourselves are more important to the kingdom than we actually are.
If we forget that we are nobodies, we’ll be tempted to think we’re somebodies, and what we, some nobody in a town that no one from Scotland or Bangladesh or anywhere else in the world even knows exists, have to say is so important that everyone on the internet needs to hear what we’re thinking as we’re thinking it because our next tweet might be the one that ushers in the golden age we’ve all been waiting for.
We’ll be tempted to create podcast after podcast, tempted to monetize the faith, tempted to film promo after promo advertising our eschatological vision for ministry for a bunch of people out there, all while failing to minister to the actual people God has given us, the people who aren’t even on X or Gab or whatever other platform pastors measure our…ministries by.
If you remember, the shepherds in Ezekiel were rebuked for thinking too highly of themselves and for neglecting the people God had placed under their care.
They supposedly wanted God’s glory to fill the temple and then the earth, and perhaps they really did want that, but God evaluates those shepherds as not serving Him and His people His way—they were in it for themselves, for their own vision of the eschaton, not His.
Brothers, you and I will not save the internet. We will not usher in anything; I know you all call yourselves postmillennialists, but you need to remember your Amill roots.
God has sent the Good Shepherd and His glory will fill the earth, but it’s going to be a while.
Again, relatively speaking, you and I are nothing.
Nameless, faceless undershepherds and our ministries will accomplish next to nothing in this blip of a micro-moment we’re on the earth.
And yet, all that being said, while hardly anyone in this world or the world to come will know we ever existed, if we are faithful to maintain the right eschatological vision for our ministry, there are some people who will literally be eternally grateful for our faithful service, not the least of which is Christ Himself.
Keep a Close Watch
Finally, this is where we return to Paul’s words to Timothy, words that must be branded into our souls.
[16] Keep a close watch on yourself and on the teaching. Persist in this, for by so doing you will save both yourself and your hearers. – 1 Timothy 4:16
If you want an eschatological vision for your ministry, there it is: your salvation and the salvation of your people.
Your life and your doctrinal faithfulness, while utterly insignificant in the grand scheme of things, will be used by God to save the people He has put in your church if you keep a close watch on your life and the teaching.
Feel the weight of those words, consider their alternative, and let that weight press down on your shoulders to keep you grounded.
If you guard your life and if you guard the teaching, you, oh man of God, will save not just yourself, but as a minister of the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, your godly life and your faithful teaching will be used by God to save your people unto eternal glory, and hardly anyone except you, them, and God will ever know about it.
The Persevering Ministry
Now, there are several Pauls who have gone through every stage of ministry that I’m about to lay out, but most of us are closer to being Timothys, myself included, so let me paint a little vision for what our ministry has been, is, and could be, should we so seek to fulfill it.
Most of you began serving Christ by taking a call at a church, likely for far less money than you could have made being really good at any other job.
For the first couple of years, very few people listened to anything you say, and depending on how old you were when you started giving advice, that might have been a good thing.
But, you kept a close watch on your life; you came to see the mixture of wisdom and foolishness in their hesitations, and you allowed their resistance to wise counsel, which you recognized in your own heart, to be a means for you to grow in imitating the patience God has shown you to them.
And that refusal to be embittered matured you.
You kept keeping a close watch on your life and the teaching, kept fighting your own sin, which you felt crouching at the door, kept feeling the weight of that collar around your neck, and you continued growing in being an example of what it looks like for Christ to love His Bride and for a Father to love His children, even if only in your own household.
You continued studying, continued preaching, and continued to pour yourself out for your people because even if no one felt it yet, you knew that Christ and your baptism said that God had given you these people to be your family.
Over time, not because you were necessarily the smartest guy at the church, but because a family was in a crisis and they didn’t know who else to ask for help, they came to you.
And because you kept a close watch on your own life and the subtle and various ways sin tried to rise up and master you, when they share what they’re thinking and feeling, you recognize their pain and their struggle and their grief and anxiety.
And because you know who to turn to for comfort and where in the Scriptures to take them, you comfort them with that same comfort with which you’ve been comforted.
As word spread that you were willing, able, and available to love, serve, and lead anyone in need, your plate became so full that you forgot most of your Hebrew and who wrote which Reformed Confession.
You’re busy baptizing little boys and girls, and now you can understand how Paul forgot who he baptized. You’ve got so many little spiritual nieces and nephews that it’s hard to remember all their names, so you come up with nicknames that make more sense to you than the four brothers and four sisters whose names all start with the letter B.
The little boys feel cared about because you mess up their hair, and they want to be like you; they’re preaching sermons from the top of the couch and baptizing their action figures in the bathtub.
The girls know you see them too because you tell them their dress is pretty and the bow in their hair is so cool, so they start drawing you pictures and showing you their new shoes when they see you.
And they all show you their missing teeth.
What no one but you in the whole church knows is that you’re meeting with their parents because they’re on the verge of divorce. Dad has been on the internet again, and someone gave mom some literature on abuse, and things look pretty grim.
But you’re coming alongside them both, with the firm tenderness of Christ, reproving, rebuking, and exhorting both of them with complete patience and teaching (2 Tim 4).
Eventually, they’ll learn to forgive each other, and they and their kids will keep growing in grace.
You’ll keep teasing the boys about their braces and reassuring the girls their teeth look great.
And then one day, because they remember the time you helped their parents, as teenagers, they’ll come to you with questions about how to honor their parents, and they’ll want your advice on how to resolve conflict with their friends at school.
In what feels like the blink of an eye, those little boys and girls will be asking you to write a recommendation letter for Gloria Sancta or so they can get into NSA, and then they’ll want you to do their pre-marital and their wedding – even though it’s two hours away and tomorrow you have to teach SS, preach, and meet with another family after church.
And then, just like you did for their parents, they’ll ask you to baptize their kids and talk at their graduations.
A few years later, you’ll weep yet again with them, like when you buried their second child, as this time you bury their mom, who you sat with for months and learned to play cribbage with as the cancer slowly ate away at that always strong woman.
After that you’ll help usher their dad who you fed communion to even after he didn’t recognize who you were or where he was into glory.
And then, having kept a close watch on your life and doctrine, having not rebuked older men but having encouraged them as fathers, the younger men as your brothers, the older women like your mother, and younger women like little sisters, you will hand off your ministry to another man who has no idea what he’s getting himself into, and then you, like the countless folks you buried before, will die.
And while no one other than Jesus in the entire world will know you did all of that and so much more, those kids will never forget it – they’ll never forget you.
Literally, never.
Because in keeping that vision for ministry, a vision for ministry that reckons yourself as nothing and nobody to anyone except the people God gave you, a vision that keeps a close watch on your life and the teaching, you will have saved unto eternity, not just yourself but your hearers.
The Eternal Ministry
Brothers, this is God’s vision for your ministry – your salvation and the salvation of your hearers.
He didn’t call you to be an internet tough guy or a Bitcoin consultant or a bigfoot hunter.
Our people are already prone to getting distracted and wandering off into strange places, which may end up leaving them scattered in the wilderness. They don’t need their ministers shining a laser pointer all over the place for them to chase until they die.
They will need you, now and all your days, to be godly and faithful to Christ and His Word in thought, word, and deed. And they will need us, Anselm presbytery, not to be a good ol’ boy club who just kind of figures things out as we go along, thinking everything will be fine, but rather they need us to be a band of fathers and brothers who are willing to assist our churches in making sure their ministers are the kinds of men who keep a close watch on their lives and the teaching.
I know none of us likes to be the bad guy, and I also know our church government and BOPs are a bit of a…work in progress, but if we believe God’s Word is true and that the literal salvation of the souls of our people is on the line, we must be less interested in drinking whiskey and smoking cigars than we are in being the kind of men who keep a close watch on our lives and doctrine.
Remember, this exhortation to an individual, Timothy, was an exhortation from one minister to another.
Fathers and brothers, I can’t tell you how thankful I am to serve with you, men.
When I meet with other pastors in our town or when I foolishly wade into the social media waters for longer than 12 seconds and see pastors engaging online, I often think of y’all and how thankful I am for you and your relatively inconspicuous service to Christ and His people.
I thought of you when [PM] Uri [Brito] wrote a few months ago: “Every time you convince yourself you’re the only one fighting against evil, remember that God has left seven thousand men who have NOT bowed the knee to Baal.”
And I want to encourage you all with the words of another one of our number, [Pastor] Bill Smith:
If your ministry is based on being edgy or sensational, you must continuously up the ante lest you become irrelevant when a more edgy or sensational ministry appears. Slow and steady, Christian pastors.
Thank you, Jack Phelps, Dave Hatcher, John Stoos, and Mike Denna, for being slow, steady examples for us younger men. Your ordinary faithfulness over many years in relative obscurity is something we can and should look up to and is worthy of far more emulation than even the most so-called successful internet pastors.
For my brothers who have many years to go, as we follow in the footsteps of these men, let us not lose sight of their and our calling, regular, old-fashioned, every day faithfulness to the flesh and blood people God has put in front of us.
Keep fighting the good fight so that we all might hear, on that great and glorious day, the words I know we all long to hear from our Beloved Savior, “Well done, good and faithful slave. You have been faithful over a little, now enter into the joy of your Master.”
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Let’s pray.
Almighty and everliving God, source of all wisdom and understanding, be present with us as who take counsel over the next couple of days for the renewal and mission of your Church. By your grace, help us, in all things to seek first your honor and glory. By your Spirit, guide us to perceive what is right, and grant us both the courage to pursue it and the grace to accomplish it; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
