Come, Pursue God With Me

This month’s book in A Year of Books on Preaching is Encountering God through Expository Preaching. I’ll post more about it next week.

One thing I really like about this book is how they define expository preaching. “Preaching occurs when a holy man of God opens the Word of God and says to the people of God, ‘Come and experience God with me in this text.’”

So good. The best preaching I’ve heard isn’t necessarily the most eloquent. It’s when a holy person stands and speaks, rooted in the text, and invites me to join them in pursuing God. This cuts through all the complexity and gets right at the heart of good preaching.

It’s also a good way to look at the rest of pastoral ministry. I want to riff off their definition of preaching and say this: Pastoral ministry involves becoming a holy person who pursues God and invites others to join in that pursuit too. Pastoring is about a holy person who says, “Come, pursue God with me.”

A Holy Person

Pastoral ministry begins with a certain kind of person. That’s why the pastoral epistles focus on character qualifications rather than skills in the pastoral epistles. Pastors are people who treasure God in their lives and who are growing in holiness.

I know we’re not perfect people, but we must be growing in holiness. We must meet the qualifications of elders. We must be dealing with our sin and growing in our love of Christ. It’s the foundation of ministry. Without this, nothing else matters.

We often focus more on skill and personality rather than character. Pastoral search committees often want to know more about what we will do rather than who we are. We have nothing to offer others, though, if our lives aren’t being transformed by what we preach. Character matters.

Pastors: let’s deal seriously with our sins. They will kill you and your ministry. Let’s make sure we have no secrets. Instead, let’s drag them into the light. Do it wisely and carefully, but we must do it. Our lives and ministries depend on it.

Pursuing God

We can pursue many things as pastors: church growth, church health, greater effectiveness, and more. None of these are wrong in themselves, but they all pale compared to our primary pursuit: pursuing God.

I think often of what Jared Wilson writes in The Imperfect Disciple:

One day there were about four of us in Ray’s study, and Ray suddenly said, “Let me tell you about my friend Jesus.” And he started telling us about Jesus, and it became very clear that Ray actually knows Jesus. Like, he actually hangs out with him.

And as Ray started describing his friend Jesus to us, the room changed. It got smaller and bigger at the same time. The air seemed to get sweeter, more breathable. I can’t rightly say what happened, but my friend David, who was also there, confirmed he’d had the same experience. All I could figure was that we were somehow encountering a deeper sense of the presence of Jesus Christ, all because our Jesusy friend Ray was introducing us to him.

I want to be Jesusy like that. In my heart of hearts, I don’t care about being seen as a big deal, about having a lot of recognition or a lot of stuff or even a lot of “spiritual experiences.” What I want is to truly know Jesus, to be actual friends with Jesus.

Could there be any better description of our role as pastors? Our primary responsibility is to pursue God with all of our hearts, to grow in our love for him, and to be such good friends with Jesus that others can tell the difference. Pastoral ministry begins with our own pursuit of God.

Inviting Others

I grew up watching Saturday morning cartoons. I still remember the episode in which Bugs Bunny took over as the pacesetting bunny in a dog race. I never thought of it at the time, but that’s a good picture of pastoral ministry. We get to set the pace in our pursuit of God, and invite others to join us.

We’re pacesetters. Pursue God and invite others to join you in that pursuit. Our primary role is to pursue God and to ask others to follow us as we do so. We’re nothing more than pacesetting bunnies who set the pace for others in the only pursuit that ultimately matters.

Pastoring is about a holy person who says, “Come, pursue God with me.”