Episode 110: A Plea for Faithful Pastors

Rural Church Podcast 2.0

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Welcome to the Ruled Church Podcast. This is my beloved son, with whom

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I am well pleased. He is honored, and I get the glory. And by the way, it's even better, because you see that building in Perryville, Arkansas?

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You see that one in Pechote, Mexico? Do you see that one in Tuxla, Guterres, down there in Chiapas? That building has my son's name on it.

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The church is not a democracy. It's a monarchy. Christ is king. You can't be

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Christian without a local church. You can't do anything better than to bend your knee and bow your heart, turn from your sin and repentance, believe on the

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Lord Jesus Christ, and join up with a good Bible -believing church, and spend your life serving

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Jesus in a local, visible congregation. Welcome to the Ruled Church Podcast. I am your host,

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Allen Nelson. I'm one of the pastors at Providence Baptist Church in Perryville, Arkansas.

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I've shared this before, but it depends on which way you're coming into town to tell you exactly the population of Perryville, because one side says,

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I think, like 1 ,300, and the other side says like 1 ,400, so I guess somebody miscounted somewhere, but here we are, and today we have

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Jacob Tanner, who almost needs no introduction, because I said before the show that you were actually on twice, but actually,

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I've introduced you a third time. I don't know if you remember this or not, but on Christmas Day, we featured one of your sermons.

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That's right, so this would be the fourth time. Yeah, the fourth time your voice is heard on the Ruled Church. I mean, did you ever think that you were just gonna be, man, just a frequent guest on the

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Ruled Church Podcast? Wow, you're just, I bet that never crossed your mind 10 years ago.

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Dreams really do come true. Well, let me just say again, you follow up anything you need, but you're the pastor of Christ Keystone Church.

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Did I say that right? And now the town, is it Middleburg, or what is it? Middleburg, yeah.

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Middleburg, Pennsylvania. Anything else? And hopefully we'll have you out soon. Yeah, yeah, well, brother,

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I'm willing, you know, so. Yeah, we're trying to plan that, so. Yeah, sure, great. Was it

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June we were looking at, I think? Yep, yeah, we were looking at June, yeah. Yeah, so hopefully we make that happen. Amen, yeah, we would definitely love to do that.

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I've been to Pennsylvania, but it was just flying into the airport, so I'd love to get over to Gettysburg.

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So you said you're close to that, aren't you? Yeah, we're not too far, an hour and a half or so, which Pennsylvania is nothing, that's super close for us.

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Well, I was just going to say it's a lot closer than I am in Toadstuck, Arkansas, so.

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This is true. Well, I want to mention this, so I don't forget before we get started, because I want our listeners to know.

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Make sure I get this title right, but it's Obey God, Defy Tyrants, right? No, it changed.

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Oh. After you endorsed it, it changed. Oh, what? Right when we went to publication. It's now

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Resist Tyrants, Obey God. Okay, sorry, Resist Tyrants, Obey God.

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So I did, I did get an advanced copy from Founders. I was happy to read it, happy to endorse it.

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It's, I told you before the show, I love what Founders is doing. And I love what you're doing, brother.

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So how many publishers, how many different publishers have you been a part of now? So I did

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Wrath and Grace Publishing. Okay. That was the Union with Christ book. Then we did G3. That was

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Why Sally Can't Preach. Christian Focus was the Bunyan biography. Reformation Heritage Books was

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Wait and Hope. And then now, so five, Founders would be the first one. Well, I'll say this too about Wait and Hope.

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Our ladies actually are going through, they like to go through books.

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And so they're going through Wait and Hope and they are loving it. They're being encouraged, challenged. So thank you for that.

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So that's another great recommendation. But yeah, the best place to probably check out Resist Tyrants, Obey God, right?

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Did I say it right that time? The best place to check out Resist Tyrants, Obey God would be what, Founders? I think

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Amazon just put up a listing for it. Okay. So they can go there. But if you want a physical copy sooner rather than later,

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I think Founders is still the best option for it at this point. I think they also have it on sale still because we're in the pre -release phase, at least while we're recording this.

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I can say this just from publishing books and also working with publishing. I think authors and publishing companies are happy to have you order from Amazon.

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But I do think it's best. Yeah. Even if you have to pay a couple extra more bucks,

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I think it's best if you would order directly from somewhere like Founders and help support them.

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So yeah. And they've got great works there too. So yeah. Yeah. It's definitely worth checking the website out.

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Well, why don't you give like a two -minute spiel here for your book, your newest book on John Knox?

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Because I think that we can transition from that to talk about what we want to talk about today. Yeah. So John Knox is a personal hero of the faith for me and has been for a number of years now.

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And there's a couple of different reasons for that. One of them is just his pastoral clarity,

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I think is a good way of looking at it. He was very clear when speaking to people about what the gospel is, what the

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Bible teaches. And yet he did so in a pastoral way. He loved his people.

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And typically when you talk about Knox, that's not what people expect to hear because he was also very bold.

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And that's another reason why I love John Knox. Early on in my ministry, as I was first learning how to preach,

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I was very concerned about preaching in such a way that I would make myself the highlight of the sermon.

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And so I adopted, because of Jonathan Edwards, actually, I had read that he preached in a monotone way and he would read his sermon.

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I would do the same thing. And I convinced myself that I was doing it because I wanted to make sure

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Christ was being highlighted. But the reality is I was afraid. I had a really big fear of man.

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I was afraid to look up when I talked. I was afraid of what the reactions would be to what I was preaching. So it was safer to me if I would just, you know, get my manuscript out and I would look down and I would just read it.

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I wouldn't even look up at the audience. I wouldn't look up at the congregation. And Knox was an encouragement to me to have boldness when you preach.

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And it was an encouragement to me also that it's okay to have emotion when you preach. In fact, it was said of Knox, even as he was nearing death, one person went to go hear him preach.

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And they said that he was like thundering forth from the pulpit, so much so that they thought the pulpit itself was going to splinter and crack.

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And so the goal with this book was to really bring out those two aspects of John Knox and to show readers that here is a man that we can learn from today as pastors, but also as laypeople, as just common, ordinary, everyday

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Christians. We can learn from John Knox. We can be encouraged by his life, the way that God used him.

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And then we can learn from his life also how we ought to live as Christians. And as the title of the book says,

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Resist Tyrants, Obey God, particularly how we can make sure that we're living every moment of our lives under the glory of God and that we're not actually living in fear of man, that we're not living in such a way that we're dishonoring

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God simply because we're fearful of those who are in authority over us. And so this book was born, really the idea had been germinating for a while, as they often do.

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The idea really came to a head in 2020 with the COVID lockdowns and everything else going on, where I started to think, who's somebody that we can learn from?

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And I just kept going back to the writings of John Knox. And I determined in 2020 then that I wanted to read everything

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Knox had written. And so it took a couple of years, took until 2024 to finish that process and finish writing the book.

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But I think that the challenge there for us today still very much exists, which is how do we live surrounded by corruption and sinfulness, surrounded by enemies?

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How do we live in a way that is bold, courageous, while at the same time loving?

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And how do we wrap that all up in the pretty little bow of how do we glorify God while doing these things?

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Amen. Well, like I said, my endorsement, brother, I appreciate you.

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I think that you've put out a lot of good stuff in a short time.

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And the Lord's using you, and I'm encouraged. And yeah, Lord willing, we'll be able to connect this summer, which

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I already know we will in August, right? So we'll be at the Grace and Truth Conference.

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So that's great. And Lord willing, the other as well. But I think a good transition into our topic today, and really,

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I don't even know what I'm going to title this yet, but just maybe an encouragement to faithful pastors or even what is a faithful pastor.

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We live in a world that we see before our eyes a lot of unfaithfulness, particularly in the role of, or at least people who profess to be pastors, probably actually disqualified.

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But you see it on social media or you see it on, of course, you have some of the big names like Joel Osteen or whatever.

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But you also have the guys that I would say are very close to our camp, that you would say, look, this is not what a faithful pastor is.

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And so I think the life of Knox is a helpful transition into that.

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And just the encouragement to be bold. So in our last episode, which you don't know this, actually was recorded today,

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I talked with our friend Nick White. Oh, okay. And we were talking about boldness in the pulpit.

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And basically, we were just talking about, look, at the end of the day, you're going to stand not before your people, you're going to stand before God.

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Amen. Not before your social media followers, not before the people sitting in the pews.

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At the end of the day, you'll stand before God. And I think Knox exemplifies that, wouldn't you say?

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Amen. He absolutely does. You know, it goes back to one of those real famous quotes from him, right?

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A man with God is always in the majority. He understood that his mission as a pastor and as a preacher was to preach the word and exposit the word in such a way that the people of God would receive it gladly.

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They would receive it joyfully. They would be challenged through it. Sinners would be evangelized. But ultimately, their response was not his concern.

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His concern was that he was being faithful to what the Lord had entrusted to him.

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And because of that, because he understood that he is serving God, he is speaking what thus saith the

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Lord, he was able to have both that courage. And at the same time, he was able to know, because God is on my side,

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I don't need to fear man. I don't need to fear what they're going to do to me. And ultimately, I'm going to stand before him.

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And so if I'm surrounded by enemies on every single side, so what? A man with God is always in the majority.

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Amen. So there's an exhortation there to faithfulness in pastoral ministry is to fear

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God. Fear God above all. And so another thing we could talk about,

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I told you before the show, I'd let you in on this. But this last week, we had gone to Mexico.

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And this was my sixth trip to Mexico since 2022. And I'm part of a small organization called

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FIRM, Fellowship of International Reform Missions. And we're kind of small and unknown by design.

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But our idea is investing in healthy churches. Like our idea for missions is, if you want to go down and build a wall, or I should say that, build a home, whatever, build a wall.

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If you want to go down and build a home or a well or whatever the case may be in that, go for it.

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But that's just not what we see missions as. We see it as investing in pastors and investing in churches.

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And so this last weekend, and this was a several year process, but this last weekend, we were able to sit in on the ordination council of a pastor and ordain him to pastoral ministry.

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And brother, it was one of the best Sundays I've ever had to see all that.

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And one of the things that Pastor Randall Easterhead exhorted this brother in the charge that, you know, well, we had,

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I don't know where you're at on ordination, but like typically in ordination, there's like a charge to the elder, a charge to the church.

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And then I preach a sermon that was kind of both a charge to elder and church. But the one that preached to charge the elder, one of the things he said is your duty is to, from 1

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Timothy 2, your duty is to constantly be reminding your people of the truth of God and the gospel and what

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God has for the church. And I don't know if you want to speak to that, Annie, but just the idea, and he belabored the point in a helpful way is just like from week to week to week to week, you've got to keep bringing

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Christ before your people and reminding them of the gospel. And so I would consider that a crucial aspect of faithful pastoring.

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You want to speak to that? Yeah, absolutely. So one of the things, going back to John Knox again, the things that he does at the end of his life that I'm fascinated by is his final like recorded prayer is,

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Lord, give more, basically more faithful pastors to your

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Kirk, which is Scottish for church. So his final prayer is that the Lord would raise up more faithful pastors.

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And that's something that you'll see often, whether it be the reformers or the Puritans, that's their big, their big desire to see faithful pastors trained up.

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And I believe it goes all the way back to Paul's charge to Timothy, which is to entrust to faithful men the good deposit that was already given to you.

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So in other words, you be faithful to declare the gospel. And as Luther would say, you got to do it every single week because we're so prone to forgetting it, right?

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So be faithful to declare the gospel, be faithful to exposit the word of God, rightly dividing the word of truth so that you're a workman who does not need to be ashamed.

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And as you're faithful in this, you're depositing the word of God into other people.

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And what the goal is, is that they're then going to be able to take that deposit.

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And it's not that they exhaust it. That's kind of the beauty of this, right? When you have the Holy Spirit, when you're filled with the grace of God, you're saved by the

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Lord Jesus Christ, and you have the word of God. It's not like this limited resource that you run out of.

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It's not like I entrusted to others, and now I've lost some of the deposit that was given to me. This is a resource that keeps multiplying.

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The more you deposit into others, you're not running out. Now they have the resource. Now they can then go and give it to others too.

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So the word of God is not some secret thing that we keep close to our chest, and we never share it with others.

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No, we take the word of God, the Old and New Testament, the 66 books of the Bible, and we as pastors preach and declare what thus saith the

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Lord, and we are making a deposit into those who are around us, just so that you can do exactly what you did this past weekend.

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You go, and the hope is, the prayer is, right? That we raise up more elders, that we raise up more faithful men who are able to engage in this mission of faithfully proclaiming the truth.

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And again, a big part of this is you can't be afraid of people when you're doing it. Because if you're afraid of people, you're not going to be faithful to the message.

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Because there's one thing the word of God does very, very faithfully, and that is it cuts through hearts, as the writer of Hebrews says, right?

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Cuts through hearts and joints and marrow. It's sharper than any double -edged sword, which means you preach the word faithfully, and God's going to do his work, right?

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He's going to do the saving of sinners. That's not up to us. He really is even going to do the sanctifying of those who have been saved.

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That's really not up to us either. But we need to be faithful to the message, because when you do violence to the message, when you do violence to the word of God, not only are you being unfaithful, but you're going to train up a generation of those who are also unfaithful to the word, because they've never been taught it.

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And I think that this is something I deal with really daily, right, in my area.

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Because there have been so many unfaithful pastors.

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I'm using quotation marks there, because I don't think they were really pastors. I don't think they were really qualified.

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They weren't able to teach, but they taught unfaithfulness to their people.

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They did violence to the word of God, and that has produced a generation of apathetic, lazy, theologically untrained, not just pastors, but Christians as well.

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So I would go so far as to say, if we're considering it from the point of view of nominal

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Christianity, there are a lot out there who aren't saved because they've never heard the gospel.

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But there's this sort of cultural Christianity. So they'll call themselves Christians, but they don't know the first thing about Christ.

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And that can all be traced back to unfaithfulness in a pulpit somewhere along the way.

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And so I don't think I'm going too far by saying that I believe, and I'm not just saying this either because I'm a pastor and you're a pastor,

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I believe wholeheartedly that the highest calling that any man can receive is the calling to pastor a church, whether that church is composed of 10 people or 10 ,000 people.

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And really, I don't think it should be 10 ,000 people anyway. That's a story for a different time. Regardless, it is an incredibly high calling.

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And to be called to this role, to know that you're going to give an account one day, man, why would you not want to be faithful to what the

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Lord has given to us? That's good, brother. And that's what was communicated in Mexico.

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One of the brothers that went with us, he had some people from his church that went, and he walked back in the back of the room after one of the sermons.

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And they were kind of like wide -eyed. And one of them was like, I don't want any part of that, meaning understanding the weightiness of the call to pastoral ministry.

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But that's just it, right? A lot of people don't understand that. And not to name names or anything, but I've been disheartened recently because I've seen young men, and I say young men, but some of them are actually a little bit older than me.

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Regardless, young men that desire to preach, they don't necessarily desire to pastor, which

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I think is interesting, but they desire to preach, right? They want to have a place where they can proclaim something.

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And they will post their sermons, right? You know, I was invited to this or that church. I was able to preach.

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Listen to the sermon below. They'll post it, Facebook, X, Instagram, all these different places. But then you look at the content of what they're posting, for example, on social media, and you look at it and you go, well, this is ungodly.

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This is unholy what they're saying. Their pictures don't seem godly.

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Their videos don't seem godly. Their likes and their shares don't seem godly. So how are they getting into a pulpit and being faithful to the word of God when they're clearly being unfaithful throughout the rest of the week?

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And I think we often get so caught up in the faithfulness in the pulpit, which is essential, 100%, that we forget this is a life lived out throughout the week.

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This is a high calling that doesn't go away when you step away from the pulpit. We're called to the highest of all possible callings, and God will take into an account,

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Scripture says, even the idle words that are spoken. How much more so for the pastor or the preacher?

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Yeah, that's exactly what was in my mind. And I know this isn't an episode about Knox, but it was in my mind because you have guys like Knox and Calvin, and people want to take maybe the edgier side of these brothers.

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And of course, they did have a bold, sharp side, which we need. It's good. Our Lord Jesus had that.

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I mean, what does he say when he drives the temple changers out, the money changers out of the temple?

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What does he say? What does he say to Peter? Get behind me, Satan, right?

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So we need that bold, strong. But what I was going to say is

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I see a lot of men, younger men, typically tend to be under 50, probably more under 40, maybe even under 30.

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But they want to have that bite. They want to have that sharp side. But another aspect of being a faithful pastor is actually what you just said, pastoring.

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So it's not just preaching, but you also care about the church.

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You care about her health. You care about the members of the church. And you see that in the life of Knox, Calvin, all of them.

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Luther, all these guys. Yeah, go ahead. No, these are guys that loved the church, right?

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So they loved the body that God had entrusted to them. And in fact, I hope you don't mind if I share this, but this was a few months back.

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I was sharing with you a challenge that I was going through. So I won't go into detail there. Kind of related to pastoral ministry,

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I guess. Related to ministry in general. Let's just put it that way. And one of the comments you made to me was, remember that basically your first charge is to your church.

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Your local church is the first calling that you have. And I knew that, of course, but you saying that was such an encouragement to me to remember.

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Yeah, that's the primary thing. And what I see happening, and you're probably seeing this too, the guys who want to have the bite, they want to be known for having a sharp wit.

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They're the guys that are perpetually on social media, right? They're just constantly posting, posting, posting.

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They know every single thing that's going on in the church world, in the Reformed world, in our circles.

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They know everything that's going on, and they will boast of their internet following.

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They will boast of the amount of people that like their posts and the amount of people that are listening to their podcasts or watching their videos or downloading who knows what.

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But when it comes to, say, their faithfulness to the study, they will at the same time boast that they put no effort into their service.

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They're not spending any time in the study. They're not spending any time studying God's word, because God has given them, they say, this calling to social media.

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But last I checked, that's not what scripture says. Yes, you can have a public ministry of sorts, but our primary calling, like you pointed out to me, is to our local church, if indeed we're pastors.

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But I think that what we're seeing is a lot of these guys, they don't want a pastor. They want the popularity, right?

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They want the internet platform. They want to be culturally relevant, and they want to be some sort of influencer.

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And in a way, this isn't really peculiar to our time. The names have changed, but we've always had people like this.

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The people that don't really want to commit to a local church, or if they do, it's a stepping stone to something greater.

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Really what they want is they want public approval. They're looking for some sort of public office where they will receive the praise and admiration of man.

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That's why a lot of these guys that I have in mind right now, they will appeal to the lowest common denominator, but they will not appeal to scripture when they're doing so.

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Because again, they're not really interested, and I know we can't know hearts and all of that, but it would appear to me they're not really interested in the church.

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Yeah, and of course, there's a couple things to say to that, and I'm in a full agreement with you, brother. We are on the same page with that.

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One thing I'd say is obviously we're saying this on a podcast. So it's not that we're against those things we're saying.

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I love what we're doing. I love the interaction. I get texts and stuff. We have a small following, but it's encouraging to hear the feedback, and I think it's helpful.

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We have people in our church that listen. But the thing is, I think you've got to have priority and also an open hand.

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So if someone comes tomorrow and says, hey, look, all the online stuff, it's over.

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Okay. Okay. It's the church. If there's ever a conflict between the online stuff and the church, it's not even a question.

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And so I think I need to be reminded of this. We all need to be reminded of this.

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People listening need to be reminded of this. But if there ever is that conflict of, well, I got to make sure the people on the internet are fed or whatever, and your church being fed, it's not a contest.

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Stop. Unplug. And I think probably all of us need seasons, more seasons, whatever you want to call it, sabbatical, fasting, whatever you want to call it, from social media.

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So, hey, let me unplug and just make sure that this isn't having a grip over me that would keep me from being faithful to my people.

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Yeah. And I think the other thing that goes along with that, which is a real temptation for all of this, pastor or not, is that desire to just be liked.

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Yeah. And social media, I mean, people have done so many studies on this, right? The endorphin rush that happens when you start getting likes on a post and it's getting shared.

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And it was really dumb, but I experienced this recently. I had a post that I made that was just like, you know, threw it out there, walked away, came back the next day, and it had like a hundred shares on it.

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And there was a part of me where immediately I was like, wow, I barely even thought that through and people love it.

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You know, like I was like, oh, this is great. But then I thought about it again and I was like, but how does it benefit my church?

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Like, it's good that I said truth. And it's good if God gives you a public ministry, if God gives you the ability to be able to speak to a lot of people through social media, fantastic.

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But there is this tendency, this desire within us. Again, it goes back to fear of man.

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We wanna be liked, we wanna be applauded. And sometimes what I've found is biblical truth will not be applauded on social media.

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And I, you know, people saying with Facebook that the algorithm's changing and people aren't being shadow banned anymore.

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Praise the Lord if that's true. But by far and large, I've noticed that even some of your more popular

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Christians who post Bible verses, those Bible verses will get like 10 engagements.

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Whereas the political post will get thousands of engagements. Yeah, I was gonna say that earlier actually, brother.

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And that is like, if you have some sort of online presence, I wanna hear

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Christ. Amen. I'm like, how can I listen to so many of your podcasts or tweets, or I don't know if you still call them tweets, whatever, your

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YouTube shorts, whatever the case may be, how can I listen to so many of them and never hear

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Christ? Other than maybe Christ is going to bludgeon his enemies or whatever, which by the way, we affirm, we believe

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Christ is coming. He's gonna put his foot on the neck of his enemy. He's gonna pop them like grapes.

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That's what Revelation says. So, amen. But I gotta hear law and gospel.

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I need to hear Christ. I need to hear about what Jesus has done. I need to hear the gospel.

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So, that's alarming. That goes back to though, appealing to the lowest common denominator, right?

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Because there is something attractive. Our basis, most carnal instincts even, is that we want to see an avenging take place against our enemies.

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So, we want to see those who have wronged us or just simply those we don't like, we want to see them receive what we think theirs really is, which is judgment of some sort.

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So, that's why it's so easy for a lot of these influencers, can I use that term?

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Sure, yeah. It's easy for a lot of them to make an appeal to Christ as king, which praise the

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Lord, yes, he is king. Nobody's gonna say Christ is king harder than me, right? Right. Or you, for that matter.

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Yeah, yeah. But that's not all there is to it. That's not the full gospel. Yes, Christ is king, but Christ gives grace.

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He died to make his enemies his friends. He died to take those who were opposed to the kingdom of God to make us into his bride.

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And that is a beautiful image, but you're not gonna hear that so much because that's not gonna appeal to that base carnal instinct that even non -Christians have, right?

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And so instead, Christ is king. He's going to tread the winepress of God's fury, and yes, he will, praise the

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Lord. I'm glad that he will. I am looking forward to when that happens and sin is no more and evil and wickedness and death are all thrown into the lake of fire.

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I'm looking forward to all of that, but that's not it, right? That doesn't give the sinner hope. That tells the sinner they're condemned.

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What we need to do is do both. We need to tell them they're condemned, but there's a way of escape through the

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Lord Jesus Christ. And that's what a faithful pastor will do. Yeah, amen. And the truth, the reality,

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I am gonna challenge you on who will say Christ is king harder between, you know, but no, but the fact of saying

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Christ is king, that actually manifests itself in a beautiful way in the hearts of his people.

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Since Christ is king, they actually live as though Christ is king.

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Right, and it's not just a motto. It's not just a phrase. That's right. That actually changes and produces transformation within the heart of the

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Christian. And just staying on topic, but the faithful pastor, his work is to bring all of that to bear, you know, and I hear people saying things like, bringing all of Christ for all of life, you know, type, and that's true.

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That may be, I'm stealing that from somewhere, I know. But anyway, the point is, that's good.

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That's a good line, all of Christ for all of life. But that is actually what the pastor is trying to do, bring

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Christ to bear. And another thing I would mention too is, which I see kind of taking a back seat, not only are pastors bold, not only are they faithful, not only should they exemplify

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Christ, but they also have a very high love for the church and for local churches.

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Amen. We've kind of touched on that already, I guess, but I just think it needs to be, have its own little heading, if you will.

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For churches, for pastors who care about something other than the local church

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God has put them over, something as, not that we don't care about other things, but they care about these other things on par with her or above her, they've missed their calling.

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Well, I think you and I have talked about this before maybe, but when it comes to my writing ministry, and I believe yours as well, one of the first things that I'm asking is, how does this benefit my people?

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And what I mean by my people is my church. How does this benefit the body of Christ that is located in Middleburg, Pennsylvania?

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And if I, I've had to stop myself from writing certain things because I think that it might be well -received.

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I think that it might be helpful, but then I look at it again and I think, but how is this going to help my church? Yeah. And then

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I've had to stop myself because I realize it's actually not going to be beneficial overall. If it doesn't help my church first, then

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I don't see how it's going to help anybody else. Well, yeah, I'll go even further than that, brother.

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You've stopped yourself. I've gone ahead. I've had the past, and in the past I have published things, written things, been involved in things, but I realized, you know what?

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This is pulling me away from the church. It's not benefiting the church. For me, a few years ago, and some other brothers know about this, but I was heavily involved in SBC and trying to take the ship.

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And you may not know this about me. The New York Times actually came down or they interviewed me over the phone, but they came down and took a picture.

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I was actually in the New York Times, you know? I didn't know this. Yeah, it's kind of crazy. I got to go like this stuff now.

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Yeah, yeah. It's like, whoa, but what I had to realize after a couple of years and we went through some things as church was like, you know what?

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I'm not saying, you know, the brothers in the SBC go for it, keep fighting, I applaud you. I'm just saying for me, it was pulling me away from pouring into and leading the local church

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God has entrusted me with. Yeah, I think that happens not even necessarily with stuff like that.

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We can have so many different things pull us away from our first love, which is

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Jesus. But then I would say the second love should be the church. And there are so many things that are grappling for our attention constantly.

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You know, in my case, I'm recording right now in my office at the school that I work at.

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So I'm bivocational. And sometimes I'm like, man, not by choice. If I could be full time, that would be wonderful.

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But at the same time, there is this people have referred to it as the tyranny of the urgent, right?

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So between work, between family, between extended family, between friends, between different ministries that the

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Lord has blessed me with, there are so many different things that can take my attention off of Christ and off of his bride so that I basically grow almost lukewarm.

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And the Lord has to then begin to stir me up again so that I am on fire for the things that actually count, for the things that actually matter.

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And there's so many different things. I'm just thinking it's not just work, but going back to social media, you know, the sort of popularity contest that seems to take place on there often.

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So many different things that can take our attention and our focus away from where it truly needs to be.

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Yeah, even good things. I notice this about brothers who sometimes get into this or that ministry.

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And it's good. There's nothing wrong with it. It's good. It's actually the church needs to be encouraged in that and challenged in that.

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But then it kind of evolves over the course of time where it's like, now anybody else that doesn't think about this ministry the way that you do is terrible.

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And, you know, it's like, there's so many examples of that. And so I'm just trying to say, it's not all sin that distracts you from the church.

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There's many good things which turn into sin, but they start out as noble endeavors.

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But we're just saying faithful pastors love Christ. They love his church. Yeah. And I think we can add on to there.

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They love their families too. Oh, of course. Amen. I think, you know, going back to the situation with Lawson from a few months ago, what's one of the things that protects us against any sort of sin that would cause us to be disqualified?

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So whether it be sexual sin or whether it be prideful sin or whatever the case may be, what's going to protect us?

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What's going to ground us? And I believe a lot of the time, ultimately, it's a love for our families. And I think when we're talking about good ministries that people are engaged in, this is one of the reasons why

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I love Joel Beeky. If you follow him on Facebook, he's taking his wife everywhere, you know, married everywhere with him constantly.

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And they're posting together about the different events that he's going to preach at. He's never by himself.

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Now he's older. And so, you know, he doesn't have children at home, as far as I know. What he has is his wife,

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Mary. So he takes her around. But I think that's very valuable for a lot of us to learn from.

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Because if you look at Steve Lawson, what I've heard coming out of that is that he would travel a lot on his own.

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And my question then would be, not necessarily for him. And I know there's a whole lot going on behind the scenes that I'm sure we're not aware of.

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So I don't want to just cast or slander. Of course. But I think there's a lesson there, which is that sometimes as pastors, we have to say no to different things that could take us away from our families, that are good.

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But we actually need to be there with our families. And that can be difficult.

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Because I think a lot of the time as pastors, we want to say yes to everything. And they're not always bad things that sometimes we just have to say, no, and we have to prioritize what comes first.

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Well, Christ, what comes first? Well, my family, what comes first? Well, my church. These are the things that the

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Lord has, in a sense, gifted to us, right? Our church and our family, they're gifted to us to lead.

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It is a gift. It is a privilege that God has entrusted to us to be leaders within the church and within our homes.

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And we must strive to keep those first things first. And the

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Lord loves his church very much. So we better consider how we treat her when the privilege has been given to us to watch over her, to oversee her.

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You know, in my own mind, I don't have anything written down, but I've been trying to think through this with family. And that is when

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I'm invited to go somewhere, do something, I'm going to want to work it out where I'm at least traveling with a member, either a child or my wife.

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Just the accountability, that's part of it. But also just the time with them. I'm learning more and more.

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I've got a son turns 18 this year. I'm like, where's the time gone? So, but speaking of the time, it's time for you to start teaching your class soon.

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So I know anything else, I'll give you the floor here, whatever you need, but anything else you want to wrap up?

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No, I think though that what we should prioritize really finds its focus in Jesus.

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So when you go to Hebrews 12, this is something I've been going back to, honestly, for the past several years now.

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But the writer of Hebrews tells us to fix our eyes upon Jesus. When we do that,

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I think everything else begins to fall into place. And another way of putting it would be like this. We need to treasure

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Jesus above all else. Now, if you're treasuring Christ above all else, then you begin to learn how to be faithful in the preaching of God's word.

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You learn how to be faithful in your life so that you're not just preaching it faithfully, but you're living it out faithfully.

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You learn how to love your family. You learn how to love the local church.

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You learn how to be bold and courageous. You learn how not to fear man, but to fear only God instead.

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When Christ becomes your delight and Christ becomes your treasure, it really does reorient these things into their proper perspectives.

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And so if there's one bit of encouragement I could give, you know, looking at any of the reformers, looking at any of the

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Epirodans, these guys, these men, these faithful men did this.

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They prioritized everything based on treasuring Christ above all else.

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And that's what we need to do as well. Amen. We're not hearing that message so much in certain places, even of the quote unquote reform world.

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So thank you, brother. I needed that. And I think everyone listening, you needed that. So I appreciate you being on today and Resist Tyrants, Obey God, your newest book and check that out at Founders.

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Brother, privilege having you on and this Lord willing will not be the last time. So I hope to connect again soon.

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God bless you. Thank you guys for listening. Thank you. Thanks for listening to the Rural Church Podcast. If you really believe the church is the building, the church is the house, the church is what

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God's doing. This is His work. If we really believe what Ephesians says, we are the poemos, the masterpiece of God.