Notes on *Gospel-Driven Ministry*

Gospel-Driven Ministry: An Introduction to the Calling and Work of a Pastor, Jared C. Wilson (Zondervan, 2021)

Main Idea/Takeaway

• The practical matters of pastoral ministry must be undertaken with the conviction that pastoral ministry is mainly intentional, careful stewardship of the gospel.

• "Christian ministry is not built on religious know-how or leadership strategies. Christian ministry is the overflow of the mystery of God in Christ coming to bear on your soul and, through yours, on the souls of others. pastoral ministry is the intentional and careful stewardship of the mystery of the gospel." (227)

Interaction 

• "Between elders and deacons" (13)

• "He preacheth not mightily to his people who prays not fervently for them." Baxter (69)

Table of Contents

Introduction: On This Mysterious Stewardship

I. The Pastor

II. The Power

III. Worshiping

IV. Preaching: Part 1

V. Preaching: Part 2

VI. Caring

VII. Leading

VIII. Fighting (and Making Peace)

IX. Living

X. Dying

Conclusion: On the Readiness to Pastor

Favorite Quotes by Chapter

Introduction: On This Mysterious Stewardship

• "That God would entrust this power to ordinary mortals like you and me is utterly astounding. As if only to further demonstrate the supernatural power of the foolish message of the cross, he gives it freely to fools to proclaim. We ponder a great mystery: ordinary sinners like you and like me are entrusted with the tending of Christ's little lambs." (6)

• "Of course, all Christians are called to know, enjoy, and center on the gospel. But the bar of maturity is set higher for pastors (1 Tim 3; Titus 1; 1 Peter 5). The accountability for pastors is also heightened (James 3:1; 1 Peter 5:3). And pastors share a unique responsibility for "keeping watch" over the Christians entrusted to them (Heb.13:17). Thus, the call upon the lives of pastors to know and preach the gospel is more pronounced." (7)

I. The Pastor

• "In order to be fueled by the gospel rather than the world, we must look to Scripture to define what a pastor is, outline the pastoral job description, and determine which candidates are eligible for the job." (10)

• "the division of labor is between authoritative leadership and assisting servanthood. To put it another way, elders serve by leading and deacons lead by serving. And the primary way pastors serve by leading is by proclaiming the Word of God and by selling an example in godly living." (13)

• "What Paul affirms is male headship/authority in the church, and the teaching that is in accordance with that. And Paul roots his declaration in the creation order, making it a foundational guideline not a cultural one?" (16)

• "A man may be creative, entrepreneurial, theologically excellent, a real "people person," a born orator, and a visionary leader; but if he is not qualified according to the apostolic record, he shouldn't be a pastor." (17)

• "What the call is primarily aimed at is not a title, nor even an office in the church, but a qualification of the heart! In other words, you don't have to be qualified (yet) for ministry to be called to it; but, in such cases, the call to ministry should be taken as a call to pursue qualification for that ministry." (20)

• "There is an ecclesial commissioning, a "stamp of approval" that serves as a sign from the congregation of its conviction that a person is qualified. By commissioning, I mean a confirmation of pastoral qualifications by a congregation or a congregational representation." (23)

• "The pastoral office is undeniably connected to a local congregation. It is certainly appropriate to sometimes speak of "pastoring" as a kind of ministry that can be conducted outside a church context military and hospital chaplains do pastoral work, campus ministers do pastoral work, etc.), but the role of pastor is inextricably connected to a particular people for whom and to whom the pastor is covenantally responsible." (23)

• "The bottom line is this: someone who wants to serve over a church should be a product of a church."(24)

II. The Power

• "To be a pastor often means to subject one's self to the weaponized disappointments of others." (27)

• "And there is only one place the pastor can find supernatural power- the Spirit of God working through the message of the gospel, the finished work of the Son of God." (28)

• "Your basic ministerial task in every context is to say to people both near and far from the Lord, "Behold your God!" (31)

• "Pastor, everything your people need is bound up in the person and work of Jesus Christ alone." (31)

• " A regular preaching of practical application, moral inspiration, and religious do-goodism-detached from the central and empowering reality of the finished work of Christ-_-is a subtle and seductive means of leading people into condemnation." (34)

• "The point of the whole Bible is Jesus. So it is possible to preach the Bible in an unchristian way, even if we ourselves are Christians preaching to Christians in a Christian church. If we do not preach Christ from the text, we are not preaching a Christian sermon." (37)

• "I cannot simply berate people into centering on grace; I need to hold it up for them to see. I can't simply tell people to be awed by Christ, I need to hold up Christ's glory so that they can be. If we want people to be more changed toward the image of Christ, we will center on the only power for this change- the gospel of Christ." (39)

• When outside is all conflict or chaos, and inside is all confusion and concern, Christ is upholding the pastor with his powerful word.(42)

III. Worshiping

• "We are ambivalent about God's Word because we don't hallow him. We succumb to the prosperity gospel because we don't know him. We surrender to political idolatry because we don't trust him. Our desire for truth, provision, and power is directed elsewhere. Disordered worship is the major disease threatening every local church. It may not manifest itself in any of the ailments listed above, but the churches we pastor will, regardless, be infected with it. And so will we." (46)

• "Devoted pastors are not those who have come to place their trust in vague spiritual platitudes; they are those who have come to place their trust by the real Spirit in the real Savior, Jesus, as proclaimed in the specific words of the powerful gospel." (50)

• "Adorational study of God's Word deepens not just our knowledge of God, but also our love for him. The more we read, study, meditate on, and prayerfully apply the Word of God, the more we will find ourselves in awe of him." (51)

• "The power you need to pastor is not derived from within. It is a gift from the alien righteousness of Christ. It comes from God's Spirit. Thus our attention to God's Word must be drenched in prayerful surrender." (52)

• "Prayer is essentially acknowledged helplessness, the act by which we recognize that everything we need must be graciously given by God." (52)

• "Faith is an empty hand and prayer is a confession of need." (52)

• "The worshiping pastor is a praying pastor. He is a prayer-full pastor." (53)

• "The aim of the sermon is no different from the aim of the rest of the service: leading sinners to worship God." (54)

• "Study yourself hot. Pray yourself full. Preach Christ passionately and gratuitously." (54)

IV. Preaching: Part 1

• "Christian preaching, especially preaching in the Lord's Day worship gathering, isn't synonymous with teaching a lesson. Getting information across is important and necessary, but it's not the main point." (58)

• "The Christian church needs constant reevangelization, and thus the Christian church needs preaching." (59)

• "Preaching is proclamation that exults in Christ, through the Word, over his grace. The sermon is an act of worship and has worship as its aim- that hearers would come to enjoy Christ more or for the first time." (59)

• "Christian preaching, then, doesn't simply provide a running commentary on a Bible passage; preaching provides, through the text, a hearing of the gospel in the hopes of a seeing of the glory of God in Christ." (60)

• "The primary task of the pastor is to preach and teach the Bible. Preaching is in fact a vital work of pastoral care." (61)

• "Authentic Christian preaching comes with conviction about who God is, what God has done, and what this means for you and me." (62)

• "Whether he says it or not, every preacher should begin his sermon as if he has a message from the very throne room of God to deliver. It is urgent. It is important. It is authoritative. It is a matter of life and death. This doesn't mean the preacher must always be somber. Remember to exult! But it does mean the preacher feels the gravity of the glory of God and the souls at stake in the hearing about it. Don't entertain us; bring us a word." (62)

• "Many preachers engage in a kind of passionate preaching. Rarer is compassionate preaching. This is the kind of passion that erupts from love for souls. For souls, generally, but also for the specific souls in our congregations. This question for our sermon evaluation is simply asking, Are you preaching out of love?" (64)

• "To preach with compassion, then, is to preach with a pervasive concern for the expansion of the glory of Christ, a deep affection for the church, and a sincere and thorough desire for lost souls to be rescued from their sin." (65)

• "It is the gospel that chiefly distinguishes Christian preaching from unchristian preaching." (65)

• "The ministry of preaching cannot be divorced from the ministry of soul care; in fact, preaching is actually an extension of soul care. Pastoring isn't preaching, but preaching is pastoring." (67)

• "Preacher, don't take to your text without carrying the real burdens of your people in your heart." (69)

• "A pastor who commits to showing Christ week after week through book after book rewires the short attention spans of modern congregants to the Spiritual fruit of patience, the Christian virtue of endurance, and the church's mandate to be "people of the book." (75)

V. Preaching: Part 2

• "The gospel-driven pastor isn't simply seeking to explicate grace in his content. We want to employ grace in our work, our organization, our construction."(80)

• "It's important to say that gospel-centrality does not mean imperative-denial. We want to keep the commands of Scripture (law) in the context of the announcements of Scripture (gospel), but we don't need to avoid, spin, or dismiss them." (88)

• "The points of your sermon are best thought of not as permanent reminders but as temporary handholds through the sermon. They help explicate the meaning of the text, yes. They are vitally important truths about the ultimate truth of God's Word, yes. But they mainly serve to help people in the moment understand the Word and "track" through your message." (93)

• "Remember that the hearts of people are not won to Christ by our well-spun stories or images, but by the Spirit working through the very Word of God. Our illustrations are meant to adorn the gospel, not help it. The gospel doesn't need any help." (97)

VI. Caring

• "Jesus did not say simply to go out into the world and make converts of all peoples; he said to make disciples. And this means the pastoral enterprise cannot begin and end with public proclamation and private planning- it must be applied in personal care." (113)

• "The work of pastoring is sheep work- tending, feeding, nurturing. Preaching may be the most important thing a pastor does, but if he does not do the relational work of pastoral care, he will find fewer and fewer listening in the end." (114)

• "Pastor, do not look at your church primarily as a recruiting station, an event center, or a spiritual production but as a pasture where the sheep are nourished." (116)

• "Godly pastoral care means taking the uncomfortable risk of self-giving." (116)

• "Godly pastoral care is the overflow of nurturing, self-giving love." (117)

• "The heart of ministry is a heart that doesn't see people as the interruption to your ministry, but sees the interruptions as the ministry. The posture of pastoral care is inclined toward the church." (121)

VII. Leading

• "Leadership is intentional influence. Gospel-driven leadership is intentionally influencing others from a heart of grace toward the heart of Christ." (142)

• "A 'next level" pastor is one who is engaged in the trenches and foxholes, yes, but who is also able to keep an eye on the big picture. He measures ramifications of actions. He is not pushed into passivity or impotence by setbacks or negativity; he expects them, assesses them, and factors them into his planning." (145)

• "Good leaders don't wait for someone else to do their job or make it easier for them to do. They get up, suit up, and do the next right thing (to borrow a phrase from an old pastor of mine). Passivity isn't good for any Christian, but it can be debilitating and toxic for a leader in pastoral ministry." (147)

• "The bottom line is that if you do not love people, you ought not be a pastor." (148)

• "If we are regularly communing with Christ, reading the Scriptures devotionally in a daily and disciplined way, and praying without ceasing (1 Thess 5:17), the instincts of grace will be natural -which is to say supernatural." (150)

• "Perhaps the reason so many pastors who engage in all the right gospel stuff still struggle to lead in gospel patterns is because they are not in regular communion with the Christ who is the center of the gospel." (150)

• "When you know who you are in Christ and adequately meditate on your union with him (and thus your security in him), you will be bold to take appropriate leadership steps." (154)

• "If we are happy to receive credit when things go right but are always passing the buck when things go wrong, we have implicitly prioritized our glory over God's." (154)

• "One of the most important components of Christian leadership is the passing of the baton to others, the developing and empowering of others to replicate and increase the work of ministry." (155)

• "Aspiring leaders go where they know they will be discipled and trained." (157)

VIII. Fighting (and Making Peace)

• "Pastor, do not immediately equate a difficult ministry with a lack of calling. It is quite likely that God, in his wisdom, has chosen exactly you for exactly this moment. He has stewarded this church, with all of its problems, to you." (167)

• "When you're a pastor, you discover that you disappoint some people just by being." (173)

• "My two biggest critics in my ministry started out as two of my biggest fans. The hostility became clarifying about where their true interests were, what they were really about. Hostility is clarifying." (174)

• "Discipline doesn't begin when someone must be excommunicated from a church. It begins long before and is seeking to avoid that end. It begins with the regular preaching of the gospel. This is a training of the church to cherish Christ and his work and to believe all the doctrine that emerges from it."(180)

• "Different situations may call for different approaches, but the direct approach is almost always best. Proverbs 4:24 tells us to avoid "crooked speech" (ESV), by which we may interpret it to mean avoiding dishonesty but also talk about others that is circuitous around them."(188)

IX. Living

• "The first habit that we must adopt to ensure that we are well fed is to pray as if our lives depended upon it. I know this is the umpteenth time I've urged prayer in this book, but there is a reason for that. When the book is finished, I still will not have emphasized it enough. We need an honest and open dialogue with God. He speaks to us in his Word. You speak to him in prayer. How on earth do you expect to see a relationship sustained where there is no communication?" (194)

• "Too many pastors are gospel-centered in idea or paradigm but not in person. They have a relationship with the ideaof Christ. They deny themselves the profound joy and extraordinary power in the simple privilege of knowing Christ and being his friend." (198)

• "You have, by the gospel, not just a relationship with Christianity but a relationship with Christ, a communion with the living God." (199)

• "Do you have a third place where you can be a regular? The coffee shop, the cafe, the corner store, the gym, etc.? Be active be present, and be friendly." (207)

• "No matter the ministerial trials or congregational strife you have to endure, joy can be a dominant experience in your ministry." (209)

• "Biblical joy is not about "putting on a happy face." But the fruit of our mystical connection with Christ through faith becoming our foundation is not the fruit of misery but of settled, persevering, all-flavoring joy." (209)

• "Yes, you serve him, but not to earn his pleasure. He already delights in you. He already rejoices over you. His smile is already upon you. Christ has measured up on your behalf. Christ has made the sacrifice required for you to be square with God, so there's no need to keep paying down a debt with your ministry. the debt has been paid." (213)

• "There is so much joy to be had in the simple privilege of knowing Jesus and being his friend." (213)

X. Dying

• "I used to think that pastoral ministry was about helping people live, Then I learned it was actually about helping people die." (217)

Conclusion: On the Readiness to Pastor

• "When you have tasted and seen that the Lord is good and it has ruined you for everything else, you are ready. When you have been hijacked by grace, you are ready. By his grace, then, brothers, you are ready to pastor when weakness and fear and trembling actually make sense to you." (226-227)

Notable Content

• "The idea at work among these disqualified men is that a sense of calling trumps everything. This is unbiblical and dangerous." (20)

• "Proclamation that exults in the exposing of God's glory in Christ." (59)

• "We now turn to consider the components we should look for in the finished product as a way of determining not just if our sermon is "good" but if it is fundamentally Christian." (60)

• Eight Reasons for Expositional Preaching: (72-75)

  1. Enduring Exposition is Thoroughly Biblical

  2. Enduring Exposition Helps People Learn Their Bible

  3. Enduring Exposition Spiritually Stretches the Preacher and Deepens His Understanding of God

  4. Enduring Exposition Puts Controversial or "Hot Topic" Issues in Their Proper Place

  5. Enduring Exposition Helps Christians See the Full Story Line of Redemption

  6. Enduring Exposition More Greatly Magnifies the Glory of Jesus Christ

  7. Enduring Exposition Fosters Congregational Endurance

  8. Enduring Exposition Creates a Longer Pastoral and Congregational Legacy

• Four Components of Gospel-Driven Leadership: (153-155)

  1. Decisiveness

  2. Responsibility

  3. Humility

  4. Delegation

• Four Pastoral Rhythms for Healthy Ministry: (195-199)

  1. Meditate on Your Qualifications

  2. Fast from Being Needed

  3. Commune with Jesus as an Actual Person

  4. Return to the Gospel for Your Validation

• Three Ways to Avoid Burnout: (201-202)

  1. Rest

  2. Boundaries

  3. Margin

• Being a Good Citizen: (207-208)

  1. Be Involved In Your Community

  2. Evangelize

  3. Be Charitable

  4. Be Circumspect Online

• There are at least three kinds of joy to be found in the work of pastoral ministry: (210-212)

  1. Resting in God's Sovereignty over Your Ministry

  2. Knowing that Normal Ministry will Produce Fruit

  3. Knowing Christ and Being His Friend