Still Not Professionals
Ten Pleas for Today’s Pastors

Still Not Professionals: Ten Pleas for Today’s Pastors is a celebration and extension of John Piper’s Brothers, We Are Not Professionals. With two brief exhortations from Piper and eight others from veteran pastors, this short ebook aims to strengthen and challenge Christians in general, and pastors in particular, for the labor of everyday life and ministry. The contributors were asked to express their “heart of hearts” for fellow leaders. You’ll find these chapters tap into profound human themes, in both the pastor and his flock, and will be of use, we hope, beyond the North American context of the contributors.

by John Piper Modal , Daniel L. Akin Modal , Thabiti Anyabwile Modal , Mike Bullmore Modal , Sam Crabtree Modal , Ray Ortlund Modal , Jeff Vanderstelt Modal , and Douglas Wilson
Read here by J.N.Wheels

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Full Text:
BROTHERS, WE ARE NOT PROFESSORS
R. C. Sproul, Jr.
It has been said by one great Reformed theologian that we are living in the most anti-intellectual age in the church’s history. We are the TV generation, making way for the Internet gen- eration. Images tickle our eyes, and sound-bites massage our brains. We are, compared to our Puritan fathers, ignorant shep- herds leading sensate sheep in a dry and dusty land. Surely what we need then is more thought, more scholarship, more earnest hours spent pouring over the ancients in our studies. Right?
We are worldly when we, like the world around us, give our- selves to an entertainment mentality, when we amuse ourselves to death. We are still worldly, however, when we rightly reject the eye candy and froth of pop culture and then conclude that our problems are intellectual, and our solutions more learning. It was the Enlightenment, not the Light of the World, that gave us education as its high and holy sacrament. What Jesus calls us to is to repent and believe the gospel. It is more important to us
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Still Not Professionals Ten Pleas for Today’s Pastors
and our sheep that we would learn to believe more, than that we would find more to believe.
The Call of the Shepherd
That means first that when we prepare to serve in the minis- try, we have to prepare to serve in the ministry. Our seminaries, if we must have them, should more reflect a training hospital than a university. Divinity is not a body of knowledge to be mastered like geology. The Bible is not a book to be dissected like Moby Dick. We go there, if we must go there, not to study the Word, but to begin to learn to have the Word study us. We go to pursue not advanced degrees but the fruit of the Spirit. We go to lose our reputations, not to gain them. We go not to be thought wise, but to learn what fools we are.
That means next that when we are called to the ministry, that we minister. Our pulpits, sadly, are filled with men who started as seminarians eager to shepherd a flock. There they were introduced to a dynamic, likely godly professor, and sud- denly the student determines he will pursue still more degrees, that he might follow in the footsteps of his hero. As seminary comes to a close, growing debts, a growing family, and a grow- ing urge to go and teach derail the plan to become a professor. Instead the young pastor determines to take a church that his flock can become his student body, and His Body, a tiny little seminary. He will lecture then during Sunday School, and regale them through each sermon.
The Shepherd, however, calls us to feed His Sheep. We are not to give our wisdom, our insights, the fruits of our scholar- ship. Rather, like Paul before us, we serve up our weakness, our
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frailty, our need. That’s how the Word breaks through, where the power comes from.
Fools for Jesus
Brothers, your flock may need some more information. What they need more, however, is someone to lead them, to show them the Way. They need to see you repenting. They need to see you wrestling with your sins. They need to see you preaching the gospel to yourself, not because you like the sound of your voice, but because you hate the sin that yet remains, and you need grace. They need to see you rejoicing in the fullness of his prom- ises, and mourning both sin and its fruit, the last enemy, death.
No man needs advanced degrees, and arcane letters after his name in order to follow Jesus. Which means that no man needs these things to lead others in following Jesus. If you follow him, they will follow you. If, however, you merely tickle their brains, they will soon go off in pursuit of someone who seems smarter than you. If they are taught to hear your voice, they won’t dis- cern the voice of the Master.
When our days of ministry come to an end, our labors will either be dust, or they will be dust. No matter how many downloads our wisdom garners, no matter how many journals publish our insights, these will all one day decay. Our scholars’ hoods and robes, pulpits and libraries will become mere chaff.
If, however, we spend our days as shepherds, pasturing the flock, our labors will last forever. For we minister to dust, to men into whom the Spirit breathed twice. We minister to dust that is, through faithful, pastoral preaching, being burnished into the image of the Pearl of Great Price. Brothers, we are not
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doctors, but the sick—not scholars, but fools. Let us then be fools for Christ. Preach.