Home on the Range
Friday, April 16, 2010 at 2:46PM | Email Article Home, home on the range. Where my dear, and my son Corban plays...
I am back from the T4G conference! I am refreshed, encourage, and invigorated to preach the Gospel. Several delightful things occurred throughout the week by the grace of God. But I expect the most enduring for me will be C.J. Mahaney's closing message to pastors.
He took his theme from Don Carson's book Memoirs of an Ordinary Pastor (a biography of sorts on Carson's dad). Mahaney exhorted us to be faithful in the work of the ministry and content with being "ordinary pastors". I left with two simultaneous desires: the desire to be deeply faithful to and used by the Lord, and the desire to be content as a nobody in the service of my great God.
But wonderfully, I had just purchased the Carson book that Mahaney was citing in his sermon. I have just begun to read and I am already encouraged. I want to share two anecdotes right off the bat (with the expectation that there are more to follow).
Tom Carson (the author's dad) was an ordinary, not very popular, not very influential pastor in Canada for most of the 20th century. In the preface of the book, the author is thanking the church that served Tom during the final years of his life after his wife passed away. This is what he says:
I know full well that these men and many others feel indebted to Dad. All I can say is that they and the church they served discharged the debt full well in the love and support they provided him during Mom's eight-year descent through Alzheimer's and in his final three years of living on his own. For you see, he was never on his own. God displayed his great love for him in the church's faithful care, making sure the chores around the house got done, even encouraging him in his return to preaching, visiting, and counseling again, at the age of seventy-eight.
O how I love the Church of Jesus Christ, especially when she acts like the Church of Jesus Christ!
One more quote. The author of the book, Don Carson, had his assistant transcribe much of his father's journals. Carson says that when his assistant emailed him the final typed transcripts, he also said this in the email:
I used to aspire to be the next Henry Martyn [heroic British Bible translator and missionary to the Muslim peoples of India and Persia]. However, after reading your dad's diaries, the Lord has given my heart a far loftier goal: simply to be faithful. I know we as men are but dust, but what dust the man I read about in these diaries was!"
I love that. That's what the Lord did in my heart at this conference. Perhaps going I wanted to be the next John Piper. I have no idea what the Lord will do in and through me (but let's be honest, that's not looking too likely). But the goal of my heart post-T4G is this: simply to be faithful. An ordinary pastor. I don't care. Just be faithful!
2 Timothy 4:8
"Henceforth there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the Righteous Judge, will award to me on that Day, and not only to me but also to all who loved his appearing." [Even to ordinary pastors like me...]
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