Dear Pastor . . . Your Leadership Is Needed in the Pulpit

Commenting on expositional leadership, Scott Pace and Jim Shaddix note, “While preaching is not the only thing you do as a pastor, it must be the first thing. Speaking of the work of preaching, Paul exhorted Timothy to “not neglect the gift you have, which was given you by prophecy when the council of elders laid their hands on you” (1 Tim. 4:14). Preaching God’s word is the primary task for which you’ve been set apart. And the fact that pastoral preaching should be characterized by good exposition is no secret.” 

“Back in my day . . .” vs. “. . . for such a time as this.”

This post notes that when we romanticize the past “. . . we pine for what we consider to be the relatively cut and dry, clear-thinking days in which we grew up, or for certain holiness-minded epochs of church history we read about, we might be revealing that our evaluation of the present is less Scripturally studied than we think, and that our understanding of the past suffers the same lack of Scriptural perspective.”

Scripture Is Always Available. But Is It in Your Heart?

Pastor Andy Davis, an avid practitioner of Scripture memorization, recognizes “It may be that having easy access to the Bible has enabled people to put off learning what it says. . . . We’ve got apps, websites that provide the text in multiple translations, and instantaneous access to commentaries and articles to explain the hard passages. There’s no shortage of access to the information Scripture provides. What we need, though, is heart transformation that only comes by traveling deeply into the text.”