As one who has served as pastor and interim pastor, I grieve as I evaluate my own heart in light of Paul David Tripp’s words:
Perhaps one of the silent scandals of the modern evangelical church is that there are many, many pastors in this place. They are leaders of gospel ministries, but they have little felt need for the gospel in their daily lives. They are not concerned for the healing, nurture, and growth of their own hearts. They are not constantly thankful for rescuing, transforming, and enabling grace. They are functionally more in love with ministry than they are in love with Christ. They are more excited about the ideas of redemption than they are about the Redeemer. Whether they know it or not, they have come to be more impressed with themselves than they are with the One who gives them both physical and spiritual breath. They don’t live with the daily grief of knowing that everything they teach is much easier to teach than to live. They aren’t sad that they often fail to be good ambassadors of the King. They fail to recognize the artifacts of the old way in their hearts—impatience, anger, bitterness, lust, envy, greed, self-righteousness, etc.—and they don’t long for the gracious, character-shaping hands of the Redeemer to be on them. They neglect consistent habits of personal worship not because they are undisciplined or lazy; it’s because they need to prepare for some upcoming ministry responsibility. They’re not motivated to spend time in personal worship and meditation because arrival has crushed the godly fear and the humble gratitude that make it happen.*
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Paul David Tripp, Dangerous Calling: Confronting the Unique Challenges of Pastoral Ministry (p. 187). Crossway. Kindle Edition.
