Episode 74: The Tinker's Progress

To the Ruled Church Podcast.

This is my beloved son, with whom 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?

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.

The church is not a democracy, it's a monarchy.

Christ is king.

You can't be 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 Lord Jesus Christ, and join up with a good Bible -believing

church, and spend your life serving Jesus in a local, visible congregation.

Welcome to the Ruled Church Podcast.

I'm your co -host, Alan Nelson.

I am one of the pastors at Providence Baptist Church in Perryville, Arkansas.

With me on this week of the Ruled Church Podcast 2 .0 is Jacob

Tanner.

Jacob Tanner is a pastor, and he's also the author of a new book put out by

Christian Focus.

This book is called The Tinker's Progress, and it's a biography of John

Bundy.

Really encouraged to sit down with Jacob on Zoom and have this

conversation.

I think you'll be encouraged as well.

We talk about the importance of a man like John Bunyan, some of the things we can learn from him.

I hope that you'll pick up this book and consider reading it yourself, sharing it with your family, church members.

It's a good read, edifying.

And we'll get to the interview now, and I hope that you find it helpful.

Here we go.

All right, I'm here with Jacob Tanner, author of The Tinker's Progress, The Rest of Life and

Times of John Bunyan.

This is put out by Christian Focus.

Publication is 2024, right?

That's right, yes.

This is about one of the newest books that you can read this year.

You've got some great endorsements.

I wanna talk about the book, the cover, all that kind of stuff.

But before we do that, Jacob, would you just give us, our listeners, a quick rundown of who

is Jacob Tanner?

Yeah, well, first of all, thank you for having me today.

I appreciate the opportunity to be on the show.

And I guess just a little bit about me, I am the husband of Kayla and the

father of Josiah and Owen, and I pastor Christ Keystone Church, which is a church in Middleburg,

Pennsylvania.

As of right now, we're actually a newer church, and so we've been renting a building.

We're actually looking into buying a church building.

So the actual town may change, but we'll still be in the same general area.

And then I also am the principal of Juniata Christian School, and I write some stuff.

So between all of those different things, I stay busy.

Oh, and I also do a bit of work with Eschatology Matters.

Actually, we just started a new, I guess you could call it podcast series, or maybe it's just its own show under

Eschatology Matters.

I'm not sure how exactly we figured it out, but that's Doctrine to Dominion, if anybody's ever interested in checking that out as

well.

All right, that's great, brother.

You do a lot of things.

That's pretty amazing.

How can folks get this book?

What's the best way?

I'll put some links in the show notes as well.

I think it probably depends on what country they're listening from.

I think right now the cheapest place that you can get it is a website called Cumberland Valley Christian Books,

I think that's the name of it, and Westminster Bookstore.

Those are the two cheapest places for it right now.

But you can also get it from Amazon, of course, and I think somebody, yeah, you can get it from Walmart as well.

You can order it from their website.

Really, you can get it anywhere.

There's a digital online presence, and there are a few Christian bookstores that will also

sell it in person as well.

So you can get it a lot of different places.

Cheapest, though, Cumberland Valley Bookstore and Westminster Bookstore.

Okay, great.

Well, this is an amazing little book.

We should be reading Christian Biography.

Our co -host, Eddie, and myself have talked about this before, that this should be more of a

regular part of believers' lives to read those who have gone in the past.

And of course, you can't go wrong with John Bunyan.

In my office here, I have a picture, he's kind of looking over my study, him and Adoniram Judson on one side,

Benjamin Keech on another.

So I'm surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses, as they say, but I

wanna say first, I love the cover.

Man, they say, don't judge a book by a cover.

Well, you could judge this one by its cover, because it's great.

Like, what made you guys decide, maybe wasn't your decision, to go with the hardback?

So, no, the hardback wasn't my decision.

They just kind of came at me with that, and I thought that was awesome, because yeah, hardcover book, that's

amazing.

And then I was really, really happy with the picture that they picked of Bunyan and his daughter as well.

So there's a section in the book where I detail the relationship between John and his daughter, Mary, who was blind.

And they just kind of took that and they said, well, would you be happy if we did an

actual painting of Bunyan in prison with his daughter nearby, kind of

ministering to him and listening to him as he's writing?

And I said, that is perfect.

That is exactly, I think, a good portrait of Bunyan, really the whole character of

Bunyan, right?

So you have him as the pastor, you have him as the writer, you have him in prison, and you have his

daughter right there with him, because he loved people, but he loved his family, and he especially loved his daughter.

So yeah, I was very, very pleased with what Krishna Focus came up with there.

And you have no idea about this, but my daughter, there's a book out there,

it's escaping me right now, but it's a fictional book about Mary Bunyan, basically.

And it's about her blindness.

And I think in the book, she's kind of self -righteous, like self -focused about it.

And then she gets converted, like God breaks her heart and she comes to Christ.

I don't remember all the details, but a few years ago, my daughter read that book and she's 12 now.

And so this was a few years ago, and she believes that she was converted from this.

Yeah, and so it's like, and so obviously we've been talking, we actually baptized her this fall.

She was a little young, I think when all that kind of happened, but yeah, it's an amazing thing.

So when I saw the cover, I'm like, yes, because I already had a special place in my heart for

John Bunyan, but also his daughter.

Some great endorsements here, Nate Pikowitz, Scott Anal, Dave Jenkins, Garrett

Kale.

This is, I can't recommend this highly enough, grab this book.

And if you're not convinced at this point, you're going to be after we chat a little bit.

So I'm gonna turn it over to you for a little bit, Jacob.

Talk us through, what is it that led you to

write this book?

And then, yeah, let's start there.

So what is it that led you to tackle a project like this?

So it wasn't like one of those days where you wake up and you know you wanna write something.

It wasn't necessarily that.

I've always loved John Bunyan.

Since I was really a teenager, I had read him previously before that, sort of like,

I don't know if you would have ever seen one of these things.

They used to have like these precious moments Bibles.

And I remember I was gifted one of those when I was real young, and my parents would read that to me every night.

But then I remember they had a version, like a cutesy version of the Pilgrim's Progress that

we had as well.

And it was like an abridged version.

I don't remember much of the story from that point.

But when I was a teen, I read another abridged edition of the Pilgrim's Progress.

And I really liked it.

And then sought out the unabridged edition and then kind of started reading a lot of Bunyan's works, not

all of them, but really what was ever free to download at that point.

So we're talking probably like 16 years ago now.

I just started downloading everything I could find from Bunyan.

I had a little Kindle that I got for a birthday.

And so I would just read a lot of the works of the Puritans.

And Bunyan was one of those guys that I just kept going back to.

I just, I loved him.

And at the time I was 13, 14, it was just something that I could understand.

And it was something that was incredibly helpful to me because I was in a lot of churches that they

weren't reformed churches.

They were very holiness, very Wesleyan bent, very,

every Sunday basically I would hear about how you could lose your salvation.

And so going to Bunyan, what I found was a preacher from the

past that was really speaking to a lot of what I was going through, a lot of my own doubts, a lot of my own

spiritual insecurities, a lot of my own questions.

This was a guy that was answering them.

And I could appeal to the fact that he lived, you know, 400 years ago.

So here's somebody that was knowledgeable.

His works have lasted through the centuries.

And it was just a huge help for me.

And then fast forward, I continued to read Bunyan.

The Pilgrim's Progress has continued to be one of my favorite books.

But a couple of years back, I was pastoring a church and it was one of those things where the church really

didn't read Christian biography.

In fact, they really didn't know anything about the history of the church at all.

And so I was kind of doing a really quick speed run through the past 2000 years

of church history.

But I actually ended up pausing on Bunyan.

And I didn't really preach a sermon on Bunyan, more so I was teaching a Wednesday night lesson.

But I put together something for this lesson and then ended up publishing it as well

through Meet the Puritans, which is part of Reformation 21, the Alliance of Confessing

Evangelicals.

And people really liked it.

And so I kind of started teaching a little bit more on Bunyan.

And that's actually where most of the chapters come from then.

They were, of course, edited.

They went through a series of editing.

But really it came from these lessons that I was teaching to the church.

And as I was doing that, in a sense, I was falling more in love with the writings of Bunyan and coming to

appreciate him.

It seemed like all over again.

And even touching on works that I had never read before, which was a lot of fun.

Yeah, this is one of the things I want to say about the book is it is accessible.

That is, if you're handing this to somebody that's never read a Christian biography,

you can really, that comes across, you know, if you, I can tell now, you know, I love you teaching and

having a shepherd's heart there because if you're somebody who wants to put a book

in a hand that someone's not, you know, a great reader, maybe the Tinker's Progress

would be excellent.

And yet at the same time, I read a lot.

I read a lot of biography.

I've read a lot of biography and I'm still edified.

And I'm still in love here with Bunyan all over again.

And so you've done a really good job of, you know, being able to target a wide

audience.

So I commend that, brother.

Praise the Lord, thank you.

That honestly was the goal, making Christian biography accessible to

those who generally don't read it.

And then also still maintaining that edification for guys like us that probably read

more biographies than most people do.

So really my goal was, and I don't remember if we say this early on or not, this was in one of the original editions.

I don't remember if we edited this out, but one of my goals was to really focus on primary sources

rather than just secondary.

So let Bunyan speak for himself.

And so it's not necessarily a scholar's biography, though I hopefully did

scholarly research.

It's focused for really just your regular Christian that has

not read that much.

And so, yeah, that's been my prayer all along.

And also I really want people to read John Bunyan.

So I'm hoping it does that as well.

Yeah, and you mentioned it in the book and some people may not realize this, but if you think of Bunyan, you think, oh

yeah, Pilgrim's Progress.

But it's like, there is a lot more.

And I have his works, the three volume Banner of Truth, put that out there.

So I've been edified over the years by that.

I was preaching through Genesis.

He has a whole thing on Genesis one through 10, I think.

Anyway, I mean, yeah, his writing was pretty prolific, but let's talk about that

for a second because this is the Rural Church Podcast and we are

advocates of seminary education.

We are advocates of training, pastoral training and all these things.

But I kind of feel like Bunyan is somebody who would fit in with our circles.

I'm talking about maybe those listening and some of the guys I run around with.

And that is, he was not officially trained.

He was not seminary educated and yet God used him in a mighty way.

So talk a little bit about that, Bunyan's lack of education.

So the lack of education actually is one of the main reasons he was persecuted as much as he was.

But to back up, no, you're exactly right.

So I also pastor in a very rural area and that can be hard for people to understand.

Why would you plant a church in a rural area?

Because you're not gonna have a congregation of hundreds.

You're gonna typically have a congregation of tens.

Like if you have a hundred in my area, you're considered a mega church.

Like that's amazing.

So Bunyan is one of those guys that can really resonate, I think, with the rural pastor

and even the city pastor as well, right?

He was gifted by God.

He was equipped by the Holy Spirit in such a way that he was able to genuinely preach to the hearts

of men.

So it's not just preaching to the head, which a lot of guys are good at doing with sort of

this academic background to everything that they're saying.

And it's not that that isn't important, but Bunyan was really good at getting to the heart of the man

and sort of pinpointing what does the individual need to hear from the word of God that is going to cause the

greatest fruit to spring forth within their lives.

So this would be a sort of experiential preaching and that is preaching that is thoroughly

biblical, but also it's to the person, right?

So you're not preaching to the people that you want to be there.

You're preaching to the people who are actually there.

And that ends up being the most effective preaching.

And we can see that with Bunyan's writing because here we are 400 years later still talking about what he wrote and what

he preached.

One of my favorite stories though from the life of Bunyan is John Owen, who was the complete opposite.

Yeah, okay, yeah.

Thoroughly educated, had a doctorate.

I mean, if anybody reads the works of John Owen, there is no denying, no doubting

this man was brilliant.

And I don't think they had IQ levels back then, but he probably would have been off the charts, right?

Just absolutely brilliant, brilliant theologian.

And he also had a pastor's heart.

So he was a wonderful pastor as well.

And I would think a wonderful preacher.

In fact, there are testimonies that he was a great preacher, but John Owen loved the preaching of

John Bunyan so much that he would go out of his way to go and listen to Bunyan preach.

And when he would return back home, people would ask him, they'd say, why are you going out there to listen to the

uneducated tinker?

And he would say, basically, if I could preach just one 10th, this is my paraphrase, by the way, if I

could preach just one 10th of the way that Bunyan preaches, then think of how much good

I could potentially do.

And so there you have a man who is very, very well -educated, very well -learned, and yet he's looking

at Bunyan and he's going, this guy is marked by the Holy Spirit.

This guy has been equipped by God in an amazing way to preach to everybody.

And that is something, again, that comes from the Holy Spirit.

So let me say this as well.

I am all for Christian education.

I believe that every pastor should be educated.

I think that Bunyan is one of those exceptions that actually proves the rule, because most of us are not John Bunyan.

But at the same time, I think what Bunyan really teaches us is that you can have all of the education in the world,

but if God has not called you to the task of pastoring and preaching, you'll never be effective in it.

Yeah.

Amen, brother.

That's good.

It's encouraging to hear.

Let's talk for a minute about his conversion.

I just, I have said this for years, and you may disagree, but one of the things that I

feel like, I'm not sure if maybe Bunyan wasn't converted before he

appreciated or understood his conversion, because it's just such a long wrestling,

you know?

So I don't know if you want to mention anything about his conversion.

Yeah.

So that's actually, I think, the longest chapter in the book, right, is the chapter on his conversion.

And that was intentional, because that's actually my favorite part of his entire life.

It's something I can personally relate to, because I went through a long period of struggling with

whether or not I was saved after I had already been saved.

In fact, I believe I was saved at a very young age.

In fact, I'm not entirely sure what age it would have been.

But like I said earlier, when I was growing up as a teenager, I was in these churches that

regularly were preaching things like, you can lose your salvation, or one of the

things that did probably the most damage to me, I was probably, I think I was 14, because I know I was reading Bunyan at this point.

I can't really, it was either 13 or 14, but there was a man that came in.

So we had these revival services.

I don't know if your listeners will be familiar with that whole concept.

Yeah.

Okay, so we had revival, right?

So pray for revival.

God's gonna send revival.

And we had this preacher come in.

He was a traveling evangelist.

He didn't pastor a church.

He just went around preaching to all of these different churches.

And I remember him coming in and standing up front and saying something along the lines of, I have

not sinned in weeks.

I have not had to repent of a single sin.

I am sanctified, and I am being glorified.

And it was just, I remember sitting there, and I was either 13 or 14, and thinking to myself,

I have sinned multiple times since I've come into this church this night.

Like, I don't even wanna be here right now.

I've been sinning so badly.

And here this guy is, evidently a perfect Christian.

What am I doing wrong?

And so I went into this long period of battling with the idea.

Am I genuinely saved?

And then I was also sort of hammered by people in the church.

I moved from New York to Pennsylvania.

And people would say, well, we didn't see you walk an aisle.

We didn't see you say the sinner's prayer out loud.

We didn't see you go to the front of the church.

We didn't see you baptize.

So maybe you need to do all of those things again.

And they would literally say these things to me.

And I was just, I was going through a really, really difficult period.

And Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, which is Bunyan's own autobiography, where he explains this, was so

incredibly helpful.

Even when I read it today, so incredibly helpful to see how he wrestled with his own doubts.

So I would agree with you.

I think he actually was converted earlier than what he actually thinks he was.

But nonetheless, as you go through it and you sort of see the wrestling that's going on in his mind, am I

saved?

Have I done enough?

Do I need to do anything?

Am I saved by faith or am I saved by works?

Is it faith working with works?

How does this all work?

And what's amazing to me is Bunyan's testimony is very similar to my own in that

he was helped immensely by the writings of Martin Luther.

And it was the same exact experience for me.

And so this actually took a very long time for me.

Even as I was reading the Puritans, I was reading the Reformers, I was probably 20 years old by the time

I finally got a sense of peace about all of this.

I was even preaching at this point and I was still struggling with how do I actually know for certain

that I did what I was supposed to do?

And it was Martin Luther that helped me.

When he, in his Romans commentary, talks about how the just shall live by faith

and how when he came, Luther that is, when he came to a knowledge of justification by

faith alone and he really embraced it, how it brought him peace, I remember I was listening to a biography and

I remember hearing that part.

And at that exact moment, thinking to myself, well, I believe in justification by faith.

I don't need to work for my salvation.

I don't need to work to keep my salvation.

I believe that I'm eternally saved and I just need to rest in the finished work of Jesus Christ and Bunyan

had a very similar experience.

So I feel like I can relate to him there and I think that's why I love that story so much is

he went through this period of struggle.

I went through this period of struggle.

Probably most people go through that period of struggle of am I really a Christian or

have I perhaps deceived myself?

And so I would recommend if anybody's listening to this and they're struggling with that, definitely read Martin Luther

on Romans chapter one, verses 16 and 17, but also read John Bunyan because it is so

comforting to know that we are saved by the work of Jesus Christ, which is completely

finished and it's not through our own efforts.

One additional book has not been long ago that I read it, but Joe Beeky has a book.

What is it?

Is it Knowing and Growing in Assurance?

Yeah.

Yeah, I would commend that along with the things that you said.

That's good, brother.

You know, the providence of God is obviously, it's always amazing, but

particularly things in Bunyan's life.

I had never heard before, and maybe just my own ignorance about the possibility of gypsy

background with Bunyan.

I'll let the listeners, you have to grab the book and see what's up with that.

Then there's the, I had heard this story, you know, the time when he was in the army and the man takes his

place and it's like, he gets shot and it's like, wow, you know?

And he grew up from poor means and his first wife, we don't even know her name, it was like just a lot of

suffering in his life.

But one of the things maybe this did was humble him.

And I wanted to read, because I think we live in such volatile times, even among Christian

brothers and sisters.

And there was something that you wrote, this is later in the book, page 112.

It says, even as he was ridiculed and attacked by those he counted as allies, he was quick

to forgive and continue to love.

And that just stuck out to me.

I'll let you speak to that.

But it stuck out to me because I'm like, we need more of the Bunyan mentality

in Christian circles today.

It's okay, it is okay to disagree.

I was gonna joke earlier about what your eschatology was, because I was like, you know, that's a volatile subject these days, but it's

like, it's okay.

It's important to have these disagreements.

On baptism, on eschatology, on ecclesiology, all these things.

It's not wrong to say, hey, we need to discuss this.

Let's talk.

And it's not wrong to say you're wrong.

But there's a way to have these discussions.

And I think Bunyan exemplifies that.

So can you speak to that kind of humility?

So I would absolutely agree.

That's what we need today, especially in Christian ministry.

There are a lot of men that I think they feel like if you would disagree with their theological position,

that you hate them.

And that's not the case.

We can have disagreements about a ton of different things.

I have friends who are Anglican pastors.

Actually, they call themselves priests.

I disagree with them on Anglican polity quite a bit, but I still believe they're my brothers in Christ.

And so we can have those disagreements.

They're incredibly important to have.

But at the same time, doing it in a loving way is one of those, it's the lost art of

argument, right?

We have forgotten how to love the individual we're arguing because really we're not arguing with them so much as we're

arguing with the idea.

And I think that's something that Bunyan understood.

So one of the big sort of controversies in the life of Bunyan related to the issue of

church membership and whether or not a person needed to be baptized as a believer to be

a member and how they had to be sort of accepted into the Lord's Supper.

So will you practice open communion?

You know, anybody that comes in, or will it be closed communion?

There was just a lot of different controversies relating to that very particular subject.

And a lot of the, and I'm going to use a term here that technically didn't exist then, but the

Reformed Baptists of that age, or the particular Baptist, I should say, they disagreed with

Bunyan on this.

And Bunyan would have mostly considered himself a Baptist, I think.

I think if he was around today, we wouldn't have any problem saying he's a Reformed Baptist.

He just differs on some things.

But even as they would attack him, they would attack his character.

They wouldn't just attack the argument, right?

They would attack his character.

They'd say, this guy's a poor tinker.

And a tinkerer was somebody who went around just basically mending pots.

And so very, very poor job.

It actually, you mentioned the gypsy thing.

It actually relates to that as well, probably, that they were sort of calling his heritage into question, his

bloodline.

And as much as he was attacked, what amazes me is as you read the works of Bunyan, and as you see

him writing in response to these guys, he never attacks their character.

He never attacks them as individuals.

He never attacks their education or anything like that.

In fact, more than anything else, he says, I know I'm just a tinkerer.

I know I don't have an education, but I do know I have God's word.

And I am thoroughly persuaded.

I am convinced by the word of God that this should be my position.

And yet I love you guys.

I love you as much as you're attacking me.

I love you.

And I respect you.

And I appreciate your views on these matters.

I think you're wrong.

And I'm gonna do what I believe the word of God is calling me to do, but here's why.

And he does it in the most loving and gracious way possible.

And that really is the lost art of arguing today, especially as brothers in Christ with

iron sharpening iron.

We've just forgotten how to do that.

That's good, brother.

And it's not about being soft, you know, and given a thousand qualifications, you can say strong

things, but you can do it in love, you know, and receive it in love and be able to return it

in that mentality as well.

That's good.

You know, I love Bunyan.

I was just, I was grabbing my recent book on a change of heart, understanding

regeneration, why it matters.

I don't know what you call it.

I'm sure there's a word for this, but like the quote of the book, you know, it starts out the, or the

very, the very, it's got its own page, but it's from Bunyan.

To be saved by grace, suppose it that God had taken the salvation of our souls into his

own hand and to be sure it is safer in God's hand than ours.

And so what I'm wanting to say here is I love Bunyan's theology.

I love his preaching.

I think there's so much that we could learn and you deal with that in the last chapter about some points.

Here's what we can take away from his life.

So much that we can learn from his life.

But one thing I wanted to get into kind of our last segment here really is

I wanted to get into Bunyan as a pastor because he was a

phenomenal preacher.

He was a phenomenal writer, but I think also there's some things about his life

that we can take away that he was a phenomenal shepherd.

You want to talk about being busy.

You and I are busy.

I agree.

I'm not saying we're not busy, but we're not spending our time in jail busy, you know?

So, you know, I think today, let me just say this.

I'm not trying to, you know, pull you into this, Jacob, but I do want to say clearly it is my position

that we do have too many people today that want to get up in front of people and

preach and make a name for themselves or maybe even advertise, you know, what a great preacher they

are.

But Bunyan was not just merely a phenomenal preacher.

It's important to be a good, it's important to study.

It's important to hone the craft, if you will, and to pray and to sharpen the

skills that God has given you but Bunyan loved the people of God.

He loved the church.

And so let's take some time to talk about that.

Yeah, we were talking a little bit before we started recording, but I'm thoroughly convinced that one of the

biggest problems of the church today is that we have a lot of guys who I said want the

pulpit ministry without the shepherding ministry.

So they want the stage.

They want the pulpit.

They want to be in front of the people.

And a lot of the time, they really just want to show how smart they are, how capable they are, how great they are

at orating, at public speaking, but they've got absolutely no heart for the people

that they're preaching to.

And so they're not just preaching over the heads of the people.

They don't really even care that the people are there.

They do because it's numbers, but they don't care about the individual.

They don't care.

How is this going to actually help them in their Christian walk with Christ to

live a holy life before their God?

How is this going to help them to glorify God?

That's not really on their mind.

What's on their mind is, how is this gonna make me look after I'm done saying it, right?

How are people going to applaud me for this sermon?

And how am I going to grow my church?

So it's a very me -centered mentality.

It's really not a Christ -centered mentality at all.

What we need are, as you said, pastors like Bunyan, men who are, yes,

very, very capable preachers, very capable of handling the text of Scripture faithfully and

truly.

If you can't do that, then no, you also should not be a pastor.

But a pastor is also one who loves the sheep.

And so he's not just saying, how can I make myself look the best by preaching this?

He's asking the question, what in this text is going to most help the people

that I am preaching to at this precise moment?

So yes, expository preaching, all the way.

Verse -by -verse preaching, absolutely, praise the Lord.

But we gotta get that experiential part right.

We gotta get the application down.

So it's not just giving the historical background of a text.

It's not just making really good points from the text.

It's actually applying that text faithfully.

So you're not just coming up with these crazy ideas and saying, now, this is what the text means.

No, you're handling it faithfully.

But then as a good shepherd, you are applying it to the sheep in such a way that it becomes the balm of

Gilead, that it's actually producing healing.

It becomes this invigorating force that actually is pushing them forward in the Christian life.

And it's also calling sinners to repentance.

It's calling sinners to come and welcome to Jesus Christ, as Bunyan would have said.

And so I think that's where Bunyan really excels.

And I think that's actually what John Owen was seeing as well.

I have no way to prove that.

He doesn't say that exactly.

But I think that's why Owen loved him.

You can tell, and I think most of your listeners are able to see what I'm saying here.

You can tell when you have a preacher who is really, really knowledgeable, but doesn't care about the

people.

And you can tell when you have a preacher who is mostly knowledgeable, but absolutely loves the people.

And nine times out of 10, most people are gonna say, I want the guy who loves his people.

More than I want just the guy who has had knowledge.

Amen, yeah, that's good, brother.

We need men who love the church, not just love preaching.

And we're not minimizing preaching.

But we, at all, because if you just love the church, but you don't care about preaching, that's a big

problem too.

Clearly a person that does that is not called to pastoring either.

It's not either or, both and.

That's right.

It's just in our circles, in the kind of conservative reform circles, I'm seeing

a drift toward the preaching, the pulpit ministry, neglecting the

shepherding ministry.

But it all goes in together.

So you shepherd from the pulpit, of course, but you care about the people.

And that's good, that's good, brother.

Well, anything, I do have one more thing I need to mention, but is there anything else that you wanna just mention in closing

about the book to our listeners?

I hope anybody that picks it up is going to be edified.

My main prayer, really, with everything that I write, is that God will be glorified, the sheep

will be edified, so we who are followers of Christ, that we will be edified, and that sinners

who pick up this book who don't know Christ will be called to repentance and salvation in Jesus.

So I appreciate anybody that picks up the book, but I appreciate even more those who would pray for those things.

Not just for this book, but for my ministry in general with whatever writing opportunities, preaching

opportunities, even as we pastor here in Central Pennsylvania at a relatively small Reformed

Baptist church, just really appreciate prayers for those things, that God would be glorified, the saints would

be edified, and sinners would be called to salvation in Christ.

And so if you pick up the book, I really appreciate it, but please be praying for those same things, that God would use it for those

purposes.

Yeah, that's the Tinker's Progress, The Life and Times of John Bunyan by Jacob Tanner.

I was edified by it.

The thing I wanted to say is providentially, so I don't wanna get in trouble, Mark Goodson would get in trouble if I maybe didn't mention it.

By the way, we got connected, is this sort of new ministry, if you will, The Art of

Worship.

That's right.

It's a ministry of Grace and Truth Press, and it's theartofworship, dispelled out all

together there, .net, theartofworship .net, and Jacob and myself are both right for that.

We appreciate Mark Goodson, and really, I don't know when that guy sleeps, because I know he does a

lot of work in getting all this together, so that's another place that you can kinda check out some writing of Jacob

Tanner, and also some things that I've put out there, but I know there's a conference coming up in August,

so definitely wanna give a shout out to The Art of Worship.

That's theartofworship .net.

Well, brother -.

You'll be preaching at the conference too, right?

Yes, sir, yeah.

Okay, so I was added to it recently, so we'll see each other in person there.

Yeah, no, that's great.

Well, I look forward to that.

That's in August.

This episode's coming out in April, so what is that, May, June, July, August, four months from this episode in Longview,

Texas.

That's right.

The great Republic of Texas, right?

So if you don't love Texas, just speak to someone who's from Texas,

and they'll tell you why you should love Texas.

There you go.

Well, brother, it's really been a joy.

Thanks for taking part of your time, your day today to come on this, and I am so grateful that you,

I know what the effort it takes to write a book, and so praise God that you did this.

The Lord sustained you.

Thank you for your labors in this, and we hope that the impact of this stretches out

for generations to come.

Amen.

Yeah, thank you for having me on the show.

I really appreciate what you're doing.

Your work as well is excellent, so praise the Lord for everything that you're doing.

Thank you, brother.

Most of the time we're used to our co -host signing us off, but I'm gonna have to do it this time, so

we'll catch you guys next week.

If you really believe the church is the building, the church is the house, the church is what God's

doing, this is his work.

If we really believe what Ephesians says, we are the poemas, the masterpiece of

God.

How are you gonna respond?