The Unique Joys of Ministry

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Ligon Duncan
The ordinary demands of ministry mean that we have to see hard things. You know, you have people come into your office who have been married for years and they are on the verge of breaking a marriage, suicides. I lost count of the number of funerals that I preached.

Matt Smethurst
It’s a really easy time right now for pastors to feel distracted, discouraged, beleaguered, in an age of suspicion, in an age of distraction, in an age of polarization, I just would love to explore for a few minutes some of the joys of ministry, because I think it’s easy Amid the hardships, to lose sight of the joys.

Matt Smethurst
Matt, welcome to the very first episode of the everyday pastor, a podcast on the nuts and bolts of ministry from the gospel coalition. My name is Matt Smethurst. I’m a pastor in Richmond, Virginia, and I’m here with ligand Duncan, my friend, who is the Chancellor of Reformed Theological Seminary, I was asking him exactly what Chancellor means in this context, and he’s essentially the president of all the RTS presidents. And of course, he was the longtime senior minister at First Presbyterian Church in Jackson, Mississippi. What league are we trying to accomplish with this podcast?

Ligon Duncan
Well, we do want to talk about the nuts and bolts of ministry, but we’ve got several folks in mind. Obviously, pastors. We want to be an encouragement to pastors that are thinking through the joys and the trials, the hard things in ministry, and then just the basic things that all of us have to do in ministry. But we we also we’re thinking of elders in local churches that sometimes might, they might need some insight in what their pastor is going through. We’re thinking about young men that are considering the pastoral ministry. We’re thinking about folks that are on church staffs. I can, I can think of folks in women’s ministry, in children’s ministry, in young adult ministry, in mission work that serve on church path. It’s good for them to know what’s going on in the pastoral world. I’m even thinking of church members, because sometimes church members don’t know what their pastor is doing day to day. Don’t understand the joys and the sorrows, the wonderful opportunities and the discouragements of pastoral ministry. So I’ve got kind of all those those audiences in mind. Yeah, how about you? Well, that’s

Matt Smethurst
right. I think pastors are kind of the bullseye of who we’re addressing, but we are happy for others to not only kind of overhear what we’re talking about, but we actually think, and we hope, we pray that they will be edified. And despite the fact, I’m just realizing this that I have more gray hair than you, the listeners you know, have more hair than I if it’s not clear, actually, he’s he’s older, I’m younger. So part of what we’re also trying to do is is model how different generations can talk with rather than past one another, and you bring a lot more pastoral ministry experience to the table than I do. I’ve only been a lead pastor for two and a half years, and so it’ll be helpful for us to think about different stages of life and ministry and what we’re learning and how what wisdom we might have to commend to others. So before we kind of dive into the topic of this first episode, first Logan, just how did you come to faith and how did the Lord lead you into ministry?

Ligon Duncan
I grew up in a wonderful Christian home. Both my mom and my dad were strong believers. My dad was an elder in the local church. My mom served in in music ministry in the church, and volunteered in a variety of ways. And so I had, I had wonderful, godly Christian parents that were always talking to me about the Bible and about Christ and about the gospel. I also had wonderful pastors. So my my coming to faith in Christ was was beautiful in the sense that a lot of people in my family and in my local church were part of bearing testimony to me to Christ. I made a public profession of faith when I was about 10 years old. But there my pastor was involved in that. My mom was a conversation partner with me probably for over a course of four years about that. And let me just

Matt Smethurst
say, on Mother’s Day 2024 Mother’s Day. TGC published a tribute that you wrote about your mother, which was just incredibly edifying. I would encourage folks to look that she’s amazing

Ligon Duncan
for her nature. And then my grandparents were really wonderful, godly Southern Baptist members of First Baptist Mims Florida and the pastor at First Baptist. Mims really cared about my soul. I would spend a month down there every summer, and we would talk about Christ in the Gospel. And so I had testimony from so many wonderful Christians into my life, as well as sitting under good preaching and and just having studied the gospel of Mark and the Gospel of John with my pastor, felt that okay. I understand the gospel. I know that I’m a sinner. I know that I need Jesus. I want to trust in Christ, and so that I have a very churchly and family oriented profession of faith. Yeah. How about you? Well, to know Christ,

Matt Smethurst
I could give the pious answer, the honest answer is, I wanted to be an NBA player, and then when I realized that was never gonna happen, I wanted to be a SportsCenter anchor. So growing up, ministry was not on my mind. Now, you played

Ligon Duncan
ball in high school. In high school, yes, did you play in college at all? I

Matt Smethurst
was a practice player on the women’s basketball team. Yeah,

Ligon Duncan
my is doing that. He’s doing that university? Yeah, he’s a big, tall guy on his high school team, and he he’s a practice team for the women’s basketball team.

Matt Smethurst
Yeah. I mean, they get, they get high school players to simulate opposing defenses and such in practice. But hey, you know, I got a bunch of gear. Got to play there in the stadium at James Madison University. But it was there at JMU in college that the Lord I was already a believer. I was raised in a Christian home, godly parents, but it was in college where the Lord really captivated my heart with a love for His word and with and for theology, he actually used a really difficult roommate situation my freshman year to drive me to the word out of desperation for the first time in my life, and and it was while leading a Bible study of some underclassmen there in college that I quickly started to realize, hey, studying this book and preparing and actually teaching this book is the highlight of my week. I want to do this in some capacity for the rest of my life. I didn’t know if that would be missions or pastoral ministry. I ended up going to serve in China for a couple years, but I sensed, well, even while over there, that the Lord might be leading me toward pastoral ministry here in the States, and many years later, that that’s exactly what he has what he’s brought about, right?

Ligon Duncan
And my own sense of call to the ministry formed soon after my profession of faith as well, and especially under the the mentoring and discipleship of my of my youth minister in high school. And he had a huge impact on me, and we went to a youth conference in Florida, in Tampa, Florida when I was probably 13 years old, and I heard a pastor preaching on Ephesians one and I, I, I’m ashamed to admit this, but even as a Presbyterian that had memorized the shorter catechism, I was functionally an Arminian. To go back. I was in Tampa, Florida, heard a guy preaching on Ephesians one, and realized that before I had ever reached out to God in faith, he had reached out in grace to me. And it clicked. I mean, I probably could have given you a catechism question that would have said that. But experientially, it clicked with hearing that sermon. And really, from that time on, I was headed to ministry because I had been so greatly helped by the Ministry of my youth minister, the Ministry of my pastors. I wanted to help people that way. So really, probably by the time I’m 13, I’m 14, I’m I’m thinking about going into ministry. So

Matt Smethurst
I mentioned earlier the pastoral experience that you bring to the table. So tell us a little bit about especially your tenure there at first Prez and Jackson. What was the nature of that ministry? Well,

Ligon Duncan
I started teaching at reformed Theological Seminary in 1990 and I taught there six years full time, and then I was asked by First Presbyterian Church Jackson, to come and and be the senior minister there. And I was 35 years old. I had, I had never been a solo or a senior pastor before. Was one of the largest churches in our denomination, and I was, I was scared about whether I should take the call. That was an important call in the denominational Life and History. And so I really relied on my boyhood pastor and on the senior member of my theology department, Doug Kelly. I basically said to them, you’re going to tell me whether I do this or not. And Mr. Reid and Doug Kelly both said, you need to do this. And so I went to first pres in 1996 17 of the happiest years of my life. I mean, I, I, I loved pastoring. First pres doesn’t mean that there weren’t hard days. Doesn’t mean that there were days where I didn’t think, what have I gotten myself into? But. 17, really wonderful years. Oftentimes, when I talk with friends that have had hard ministries, I just feel guilty because God was so good to me in that setting. He gave me a lot. There were a lot of older, wiser ministers on the staff when I got there that they kept me from stepping into problems all the time. So I I served there at first pres for 17 years, 1996 2013 and loved every minute of it. And could have stayed there for the rest of my life. But again, the seminary asked me to come back. The man who had been the chancellor became medically incapacitated, and so I thought he would be there for the next 20 years, because he’s not much older than me. And so that they reached out and asked if I would come back to the seminary. And again, I relied on the Council of people that I respected. So Mark Dever, who likes the local church a little bit. You know, I thought mark would tell me not to do it because of the importance of the ministry in the local church. And Mark said, No, I think you, I think you ought to go back to to RTS and lead in that way. And Sinclair Ferguson, who’s never given me advice in my life, I’ve known him since I was a seminary student in the in the 1980s and Sinclair said, If not, you who, if not now when, I mean, he’s never given me advice in my life, and so that kind of advice, okay, I need to do this. And so I went back to the to the seminary. So that’s I was at seminary, full time, working in churches, part time. Then at first Prez, okay, full time in the church, teaching part time at the seminary and then back at the seminary. Yeah,

Matt Smethurst
and Mark Devers, counsel to you. Doesn’t entirely surprise me, because what you’re doing is you’re training pastor now, of course, missionaries, counselors, others, but again, the bullseye of what you’re doing every day. So you know the This podcast is called the everyday pastor, if anyone dogs and says, Well, he’s not a pastor, no, what you were for almost two decades, and that’s what you’re doing every single day now, is training the next generation of ministers of God’s word.

Ligon Duncan
Yeah, by God’s grace, that’s certainly what I intend to do. How about you? Matt, so you’re at JMU. You since called a ministry. Just walked through what you did.

Matt Smethurst
Yeah, I mentioned that after graduation, I went to serve in China for a couple years doing campus ministry, and then since the Lord calling me back to the to the States to pursue theological education and went to Southern Seminary was was went To

Ligon Duncan
RTS before you went to Southern.

Matt Smethurst
Okay, so you let the record show you were a Baptist before, and let the record show that my first 15 seminary credits were through RTS Orlando, including all of my ecclesiology teaching that transferred to southern. Great experience with RTS. But yeah, it was actually through serving as a lay elder, a non staff pastor at a church in Louisville, Kentucky, that I sensed the Lord leading me to be a senior pastor and in consultation with my other elders, it just became clear that the Lord was opening a door For us to return to Virginia, my home state, with a view to starting a brand new gospel witness in a place that needed it. There are wonderful gospel preaching churches in Richmond, but the rate of new healthy churches just wasn’t keeping up with the population growth. And I wasn’t just learning that through reading data online. I was talking to friends and even pastors in Richmond, and when you hear from another pastor who says, Come we need more gospel witnesses that that that goes a long way. And so, by God’s grace, we were able to move with 11 other adults from our church in Louisville, Kentucky. I tell people that humanly speaking, they were the real kind of heroes of the story, because they weren’t moving back to their home state like I was. They weren’t moving for a leadership position like I was. They just caught a vision for living a faithful Christian life in a different place that that needed it, that needed a new a new church. And so we’ve, we’ve existed as River City Baptist Church for two and a half years, and it’s, it’s I still, in many ways, feel green, feel like I’m getting my feet wet, but we’re out of the honeymoon phase also, and I think that I’ve been able to experience both the joys but also some of the the rigors and difficulties of pastoral ministry, much of which we’ll be exploring in in this podcast, and speaking of that, it’s a really easy time right now for pastors to feel distracted, discouraged, beleaguered, in an age of of suspicion, in an age of distraction, in an age of polarization, it can be difficult for past. Doctors to chart a way forward that is courageous and truthful, but that also builds bridges rather than walls, Particularly within their congregation. And I think I just would love to explore for a few minutes some of the joys of ministry, because I think it’s easy amid the hardships to lose sight of the joys. So what are some of the things you loved about pastoral ministry? Well,

Ligon Duncan
first and foremost, I caught myself all the time, especially when I was in the process of preparing to preach, thinking, These people are paying me to study the Word of God and teach and preach it to me, I cannot believe that I get paid to do this. And I often said to people, that’s not what you pay me for. You pay me to do the other stuff this I would do for free, but to have my primary vocation the study of the Word of God, in order to edify the people of God, and in order to call those who are not the people of God to become the people of God. Nothing like it. There is nothing like it in the world, and it’s good. It was so good for me spiritually to be in that routine. You know, every week you’re in another portion of the Word of God. And I’m learning with the congregation as I go along. I’ve read the Bible over and over. I’ve studied the Bible professionally, but when you’re preaching through the Bible, you are learning things with your people as you preach through the Bible. And so it is incredibly edifying. It doesn’t take me a lot of effort to think about how this would apply to others, because as I’m studying it, I’m seeing how it applies to me, and that gives me a roadmap for applying it to others. And so that that part of the ministry was just absolutely wonderful. How about

Matt Smethurst
for you? Just to underscore what you said, a friend recently pointed something out to me, which is a very basic observation, but it was helpful to be reminded of and he just said that, given the nature of Revelation, so God, in His kindness, has not left us to speculation. He’s given us the gift of Revelation, of which we are actually doubly undeserving. We are undeserving to hear from our Creator. How much more are we undeserving to hear from the one against whom we’ve rebelled? Right? He didn’t have to speak. He could have given us the eternal silent treatment, right? But he pierced through our rebellion, through our sin, and has spoken to us, ultimately in his son, but also in His Word. And if you think about it, if we only had the chance in our life, one chance to see and read a copy of God’s word, just one chance to hear his voice to us, that would be an unfathomable privilege. Yeah, but the reality is, we have dozens of copies of it on our shelves with different kinds of study notes and all the rest, and we are paid to get to study it every week and unfold it to the people of God. And when I think about the joys of pastoral ministry, one of them is seeing light bulbs go on as as it’s true for people as you help them learn to put their Bible together. So, you know the kind of fancy word for that is biblical theology, seeing that the this is not this book is not just a collection of Bible stories. There is also a story of the Bible. And when people come to see that when they see how the Old Testament anticipates the new you know, it’s been said that the Old Testament, Jesus Christ, is concealed. The New Testament, he’s revealed. I think it was the theologian BB Warfield who said the Old Testament is like a room full of treasures, but the room is dimly lit. And as we get to show people the beauty and the glory of Jesus Christ and the pages of his word. And when they are awakened themselves to that, so that they can go and then read the Bible for themselves, and not just be second handers, but derive help and hope from God’s word. That that is so gratifying, one of, one of my favorite things, and we can talk about this in a future episode, is, is when I feel like I’ve preached a sermon that have helped people know how to better read their own Bibles in their own time. So what we don’t want to do is just a weekly exegetical parlor trick where people leave wowed, right? But think I would have never seen that, right? What he just pulled out of the text. Now I want people to leave thinking, If only I had paid closer attention to the passage, I would

Ligon Duncan
have Yeah, that’s exactly right. Yeah, that’s a pastor friend of mine told me many years ago, one of our jobs is to help people. Read their Bibles better, so that when they come away from hearing the preached word, they do think, if I had studied that passage, I would have gotten out of it exactly what the pastor got out of it. It wasn’t a magic, you know, thing that we had done that only the, you know, the sort of the super shaman could have come up with. Now this, this clearly I saw his points come right out of the text of Scripture. I realized that he was just telling me what the Bible says, following the flow of argument, telling me the main point, pointing me to the application. Yeah, that was in the text. I could see where that’s coming from.

Matt Smethurst
John Piper once said that when you rake, you just get leaves, but it’s when you dig that you find diamonds, and that’s what we have the privilege of showing people how to do week in and week out. What are some other joys? Well, I

Ligon Duncan
mean, obviously you’ve hinted at one. One is seeing the light bulbs come on. But another thing is just seeing significant growth in the Christian life. Not Not long ago, a man in my congregation who’s not an elder, but who has a real love for businessmen and wants to feed into their lives and bear witness to the Gospel, in some cases, edify people, help them grow. Brought a young man to me for a breakfast that had strayed from the faith and had gone through some really, really hard things, substance abuse, a variety of really hard things in his life, and God had dramatically converted him, and I had nothing to do with it. I knew him as a boy. I didn’t know him when he strayed from the faith. I was the pastor of the church when he was a boy. I wasn’t a pastor when he left town and went to another city and basically did the story of the prodigal son in his life, but the story of how he came back, it’s he was literally seeing a shaman in a in a western US town. And the western US town, the shaman in the western US town told him, after listening to him, one day, I think you need to go back and listen to Jesus again. And this is it ends up being part of his testimony. And long story short, is he comes to me he wanted to confess his sin to me. He wanted to see if I could help him get right with some other people that he had wronged. I had nothing to do whatsoever with that transformation, but as a pastor, I got to talk with a guy about it. I got to hear the story, and that can keep you going for a long time. You know, when you’re going through hard stuff in ministry, a few things like that can just encourage you in incredible ways. And so seeing people come to faith in Christ, seeing the Lord work in ordinary ways and extraordinary ways, that’s a real encouragement. And I you know, I will say having been around guys like Mark dever having been around guys like David Sinclair, I could, I could list a lot of guys that have been real encouragements to me in my life, that they’re very good at evangelism, at personal evangelism. I’ve not had the kind of fruit that they have had in their lives. It still encourages me to hear their fruit. I’m not jealous of my other brothers that are really extraordinarily used to the Lord in that area, and it does encourage me, and I do think it’s important to have ministerial friends that you can live a little bit vicariously through and enjoy the fruit that God is giving them. That encourages you in ministry too. It encourages you every time I hear somebody come to faith in Christ. It encourages me every time I see somebody grow and so like you, I’ve probably seen more light bulbs come on than I have directly led someone to faith in Christ, in a, you know, in my office at the church, sort of way. But all of that is, it’s a joy. And you think, I get to watch this, I get a front row seat as to what the Holy Spirit is doing in people’s lives. And that’s a joy. Matt, what’s one of the ways that you find joy in the work of ministry?

Matt Smethurst
Yeah, well, you just mentioned people growing in their faith. And I think that’s important to remember that it’s not just the grace of God that we see in conversion, but also in sanctification we sing in the hymn, you know, he breaks the power of canceled sin. So it’s not just canceled sin that will be praising Him for all eternity for us, but also the fact that in our lives, day after day, as we put sin to death and rely on His Spirit to grow in grace, he’s breaking that power of canceled sin and seeing that in church members, seeing. Their moral taste buds change to where they start to have a taste for things that they used to be repelled by and vice versa. We have a line, a promise in our church covenant that says we will pursue transparency with each other, resisting the temptation to hide our struggles and sins so that we might experience the grace of God in the care of his saints, so that we might experience something vertical in this horizontal gift. And I have had at least two conversations with with guys in my church who have sat across from me and said, if it were not for that promise in our church covenant, I wouldn’t be telling you what I’m about to say, that that’s not a natural thing for a fallen sinner to do, to say, but to see God’s supernatural intervening kindness to sanctify his people has been immensely gratifying. And I think also, you know, this may sound morbid, but it ought not just the joy of preparing people for death, because at the end of the day, we are getting people ready for heaven. We’re we’re getting them ready to meet their maker and hopefully their Redeemer, and that’s so gratifying, and it puts into perspective those other distractions, even sometimes trivialities. John Newton, the great 18th century Anglican minister, once said, The day is coming when we will be astonished at what mere trifles once were capable of discouraging us so keeping our our eyes on that that ultimate, eternal day puts the difficulties of the president into perspective. Now, having said all that ligand, surely there are pastors listening who might be encouraged to be reminded of some of the joys of ministry. But if they’re honest, they’re not experiencing much of what we’re talking about. They are discouraged, they are beleaguered, maybe even they’re tempted to kind of throw in the towel. So what would you say to the pastor listening to this who is struggling to find any joy in ministry right now?

Ligon Duncan
There are a lot of causes for that. Sometimes it’s just the the demand of ministry itself, the ordinary demands of ministry mean that we have to see hard things. You know, you have people come into your office who have been married for years, and they are on the verge of of breaking a marriage up, and you are pouring your heart out to them and into them. And it doesn’t work in the mirror, you know. And you may,

Matt Smethurst
you may like them both, like you’re making the problem worse. Sometimes

Ligon Duncan
you like them both, you see them just destroying their lives. That’s really discouraging. I think that’s been one of the most discouraging things that I’ve experienced in ministry, is just seeing families break apart when you’re doing everything you can to try and hold it together and and families break apart, and you realize the generational disaster that is going to ensue. That’s a hard thing, suicides, I lost count of the number of funerals that I preached in the in the in the instance of suicide early on in my ministry, and that’s a gut punch. And so sometimes a pastor is just doing things that are really, really hard, and it can discourage you in ministry. On, on the other hand, you can be preaching your heart out, and things can be going well, and some controversy that you have nothing to do with, nothing to do with, can blow up and suddenly it’s on you. And that’s incredibly discouraging in the ministry. It might be something that somebody in the church has done, and then some somehow that comes back on you, and you’ve got people that are polarized about that. There are all sorts of ways that ministers can be discouraged and all sorts of reasons, but the things that give you joy are never going to go away. What happens, though, is you lose sight of them because of the other things that are happening. And I think you have to. You have to wake up every morning and realize, okay, Jesus prayed to the Father that his joy would be made complete in us. And so, Lord, I don’t feel a lot of joy today, I’m going to need you by the Holy Spirit to fulfill Jesus Prayer, and help me keep my eyes on things eternal, going back to the to the John Newton quote, you know, trifles discourage you, but the great things, the central things, encourage you. Jesus is at work in his church, and help me keep my eyes on those things. Things while these other really, we don’t have to go into denial and pretend like discouraging things aren’t happening, but to keep your eye on the things that the Lord is doing in the church, and I think just like in sanctification, we tend to focus on the things that discourage us rather than on the things that encourage us. Same thing in ministry, you’ve got to keep your eyes on the things that are eternal and and not lose sight for the things that are discouraging.

Matt Smethurst
Yeah, and that is another thing we’ll address in future episodes. But, but that’s a reason why pastors need other pastor friends, other guys in the trenches. You need that camaraderie, people to learn from people to be encouraged by otherwise, you will at times feel like you’re on an island, like you’re hopeless, because it’s these other guys that the Lord will put in your life to help remind you of those big eternal truths that have been obscured by the clouds of whatever the present circumstances are. And of course, the evil one, Satan has the gift of discouragement. Of course, he will do anything he can to slither in to your heart, to your conscience, and convince you that you’re not up to the task to which we say, you’re right, we’re not, but the Lord Jesus, you know, he who is in us is greater than he who is in the world. In 2016 at the together for the gospel conference, Mark, dever spoke about the joy of the elder chair, by which he meant the unique vantage point that you have as a pastor of a church to see beautiful things bubbling up in a congregation of that kind of front row seat. And I’m just gonna, I’m just gonna read his list, because I, after all these years, I revisited it and just thought that is, that is the kind of perspective, reorienting thing that we need to keep coming back to this helps us take the 10,000 Year view on things going on. The joys of the elder chair that he says it’s the joy of resting and the sufficiency of Scripture, the joy of seeing people converted, the joy of knowing your congregation well enough to see God’s work in their lives, the joy of watching the assembly sing God’s praises and relish and live off the hope they’re given. The joy of knowing that the state of your members is more important than their number. The joy of hearing others preach better sermons than you. The joy of being more excited by God’s work than by our own. The joy of knowing the weight of the world is on God’s shoulders, not mine, the joy of longing for heaven together, the joy of waiting together on the promises of God. And I think that to the degree we forget those kinds of things, we are going to be discouraged and despondent, but to the degree we can remember them, by God’s grace, will be strengthened for the work ahead. And the very last thing I want to read, and I’m going to have you close in prayer, is friend of ours, Bobby Jamison. He He closes his helpful little book, the path to being a pastor, which is all about how to how to get ready for ministry, the qualifications, the training. But he ends by talking about the importance of, above all, cherishing Christ. And here’s what he writes, as good as pastoral ministry is Jesus is infinitely better. Christ is the beginning and the end of pastoral ministry. He is the beginning and end of your relationship with God. He is the beginning and end of your life. He is the beginning and end of the universe. Cherish him more than you cherish serving Him. Cherish him more than you cherish telling others about Him. Cherish him more than you cherish leading his people. And then he closes with this anecdote that Ray ortlen, who was a co host of you’re not crazy, a predecessor podcast to this one, Ray ortlund shares this story about his dad, his pastor, dad on his deathbed. Ray and his wife were actually overseas when his dad was dying. But he tells the story of hearing that his dad had pronounced a kind of blessing, individual blessing, over each member of his family, each of his children, with a kind of charge, an exhortation. And he says this, the family gathered at dad’s bedside. They read scripture, they sang hymns. Dad spoke a word of blessing and admonition to each one, a message suited to encourage and guide, and then he quietly fell asleep. Later, I asked my sister about dad’s message to me, it was this, tell bud ministry isn’t ever. Everything Jesus is I love that Will you close us with a word of prayer. Pray for pastors, especially who are struggling to find joy.

Ligon Duncan
Heavenly Father, for every discouraged pastor, we pray that you would answer the prayer that your son prayed to you in John 17 that his joy might be made full in them, and the only way that prayer will be answered Lord is if Jesus is greater than anything else in their life. So I pray that pastors would not lose sight of the Savior that they proclaim in the ministry that he has called them to, that they will love the work, that they will love the people, that they will love the church, but that they will recognize that Even when discouragement comes, Christ loves them still, Christ will bless them, yet, Christ will bring them home, and they will have souls for their higher and he will get the glory. So encourage your pastors with Jesus above all things, and make their joyful. We ask this in Jesus name, amen.

Matt Smethurst
Amen. Listeners, we hope this inaugural episode of the everyday pastor from TGC has helped you to find fresh joy in the work of ministry. Thanks for joining us, and if you found this conversation helpful, please just take a moment to like and subscribe. I know you’re probably tired of hearing this kind of thing, but it’s actually really important to help us get some digital traction and help us help other pastors who are doing the good work of ministry. Thanks for joining us. You.