Morning and Evening: Daily Readings
by C. H. Spurgeon
Morning, November 13
The branch cannot bear fruit of itself.
John 15:4
How did you begin to bear fruit? It was when you came to Jesus and cast yourselves on his great atonement, and rested on his finished righteousness. Ah! what fruit you had then! Do you remember those early days? Then indeed the vine flourished, the tender grape appeared, the pomegranates budded forth, and the beds of spices gave forth their smell. Have you declined since then? If you have, we charge you to remember that time of love, and repent, and do thy first works. Be most in those engagements which you have experimentally proved to draw you nearest to Christ, because it is from him that all your fruits proceed. Any holy exercise which will bring you to him will help you to bear fruit. The sun is, no doubt, a great worker in fruit-creating among the trees of the orchard: and Jesus is still more so among the trees of his garden of grace. When have you been the most fruitless? Has not it been when you have lived farthest from the Lord Jesus Christ, when you have slackened in prayer, when you have departed from the simplicity of your faith, when your graces have engrossed your attention instead of your Lord, when you have said, My mountain standeth firm, I shall never be moved; and have forgotten where your strength dwells--has not it been then that your fruit has ceased? Some of us have been taught that we have nothing out of Christ, by terrible abasements of heart before the Lord; and when we have seen the utter barrenness and death of all creature power, we have cried in anguish, From him all my fruit must be found, for no fruit can ever come from me. We are taught, by past experience, that the more simply we depend upon the grace of God in Christ, and wait upon the Holy Spirit, the more we shall bring forth fruit unto God. Oh! to trust Jesus for fruit as well as for life.
Evening, November 13
Men ought always to pray.
Luke 18:1
If men ought always to pray and not to faint, much more Christian men. Jesus has sent his church into the world on the same errand upon which he himself came, and this mission includes intercession. What if I say that the church is the world's priest? Creation is dumb, but the church is to find a mouth for it. It is the church's high privilege to pray with acceptance. The door of grace is always open for her petitions, and they never return empty-handed. The veil was rent for her, the blood was sprinkled upon the altar for her, God constantly invites her to ask what she wills. Will she refuse the privilege which angels might envy her? Is she not the bride of Christ? May she not go in unto her King at every hour? Shall she allow the precious privilege to be unused? The church always has need for prayer. There are always some in her midst who are declining, or falling into open sin. There are lambs to be prayed for, that they may be carried in Christ's bosom? the strong, lest they grow presumptuous; and the weak, lest they become despairing. If we kept up prayer-meetings four-and-twenty hours in the day, all the days in the year, we might never be without a special subject for supplication. Are we ever without the sick and the poor, the afflicted and the wavering? Are we ever without those who seek the conversion of relatives, the reclaiming of back-sliders, or the salvation of the depraved? Nay, with congregations constantly gathering, with ministers always preaching, with millions of sinners lying dead in trespasses and sins; in a country over which the darkness of Romanism is certainly descending; in a world full of idols, cruelties, devilries, if the church doth not pray, how shall she excuse her base neglect of the commission of her loving Lord? Let the church be constant in supplication, let every private believer cast his mite of prayer into the treasury.
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http://www.sovereigngraceministries.org/blogs/cj-mahaney/post/2010/10/15/02-A-Model-for-Pastoral-Ministry.aspx
02: A Model for Pastoral Ministry
This post is from C.J.'s chapter in the new book For the Fame of God's Name: Essays in Honor of John Piper. C.J.'s chapter is titled "The Pastor and the Trinity," and we've posted it in 11 parts.
In this chapter I want to draw your attention to this Trinitarian benediction of 2 Corinthians in order to remind you of what has always been true: the character and work of the triune God define and inform the heart of pastoral ministry. In 2 Corinthians 13:14, hidden in plain sight, is a wonderfully succinct model for pastoral ministry. Paul's pastoral ministry was theologically informed. Moreover, it was thoroughly Trinitarian—he references each member of the Godhead in his benediction. And it was shaped by a clear understanding of the Trinity's disposition toward the church: in the gospel, the triune God extends to us his amazing grace, his immeasurable love, and his gracious fellowship.
Are you looking for a model upon which to build your ministry? If you have been a pastor for more than a few weeks, no doubt you have heard the calls for a new kind of ministry to meet the challenges of a modern world. Hardly a week goes by without a new article, another survey, a large conference, or a new book on church growth, all proclaiming that time-tested ways of doing ministry no longer work. Something entirely new is needed, they tell us. Stephen Wellum captures the current mood: "Around us on every side are calls to 'revision' Christian theology, to 're-imagine' evangelism, to 're-think' how we do church, and even to 'rearticulate' the very nature of the gospel for our postmodern times."[1]
But as John Piper has proclaimed for decades, a biblically faithful ministry model needs no revising. What we are after is not novelty but faithfulness, not new paths but old ones, not the power of cool but the power of the gospel. Scripture is not silent on what leadership in the church should look like. And in a volume dedicated to Dr. Piper—who for thirty years has provided for all of us a compelling model of faithful pastoring—it is fitting for us to reexamine a biblical definition of ministry.
Pastor, if you are looking for a model for ministry, you'll find it here: 2 Corinthians 13:14. Through our prayers, our preaching, our counseling, and all facets of our leadership, we must position those we serve to experience the grace of the Son, the love of the Father, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit.
This blog post is part of an 11-part series, The Pastor and the Trinity, a reprint of C.J. Mahaney's chapter "The Pastor and the Trinity" in For the Fame of God's Name: Essays in Honor of John Piper, edited by Sam Storms and Justin Taylor, ©2010. Used by permission of Crossway. For other posts in this series, see the index here.
[1] Stephen J. Wellum, "Learning from John Today," Southern Baptist Journal of Theology 10, no. 3 (Fall 2006): 2.
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