I guess most of my life in ministry I've operated with a kind of subliminal order of priorities, as you probably do yourself, in terms of what you're prepared to do outside of the congregation that you serve. And at least subliminally, invitations to speak to ministers have, for me, been fairly the totem pole of priority, because there are few more multiplying ministries than ministering to those whose ministry is multiplied in others. When one is retired, one reflects just a little more on the rectitude of that priority. One is always a little nervous about speaking to ministers about ministry when one is not in the trenches, as it were, exactly with those ministers. And so part of the reason I've been willing to come today is to be the warm-up man for Steve Lawson. And also because the theme in the afternoon, I think, has been set as a focus on the preaching of the Word. And in the evening, I think we're going to reflect together on, essentially, the Gospel of the Reformation. At the end of the day, you're either pre-Noxian, a-Noxian or post-Noxian. And at least I can say this about this group, all of you, I don't know, that we are all post-Noxian. And in that sense, the work to which we are committed in our own places, either by the fact that we do it ourselves, or because we have some particular role in supporting and encouraging those who do preach the word, I'm going to speak this afternoon just a little about the minister's equipment, which I think is the title of this address, with a special focus on the preaching of the word. And I want to do that by turning your attention to a passage that all of us as gospel ministers need to have at the very least a working knowledge of, 2 Timothy chapter 3 into the beginning of chapter 4. I'll read the first few verses in chapter 3, last few verses of that chapter and the first verses of chapter 4. But understand this, says Paul, I'm using the English Standard Version, that in the last days there will come times of difficulty, or times of stress, unmanageable, uncontrollable times. For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power. And he issues warning about such people. And then he contrasts Timothy, particularly at the beginning of verse 10. You, however, in contrast, you who have followed my teaching, etc. As for you, verse 14, continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it, and how from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may in due season be competent, equipped for every good work. I charge you, in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing and his kingdom, preach the word. Be ready in season and out of season. Reprove, rebuke, and exhort with complete patience and teaching. For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, But having itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths. As for you, always be sober-minded, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, fulfil your ministry. I said that I think all of us need a real working knowledge of this particular section of what is presumably the Apostle Paul's final letter, at least the final letter that is extant to us. That in itself would be a good reason for having a working knowledge of it. The fact that he is writing to the person who probably knew him best, and the person in whom he himself had invested most also underlines that principle. And what underlines that principle yet more fully is that clearly in this letter, which is written to Timothy but not intended exclusively for Timothy, a distinction that's true of all of the New Testament letters, They were not written to you, but they were written for you. And because this letter is written to Timothy as the individual in whom we see most clearly the transition from the apostolic ministry to the post-apostolic ministry. It's written into the pastoral letters, it's written dominantly into the letters to Timothy, it's written supremely into 2 Timothy. But what Paul is clearly doing here as he writes to Timothy is not just writing for Timothy, but he's writing to Timothy in order that what he longs to see in Timothy will be repeated until the end of the age and the return of Jesus Christ. So in a sense, 2 Timothy supremely in the New Testament is the vision for future ministry. That's why one of the keynotes of these letters that you can't really avoid is the emphasis of the Apostle Paul on the significance of the paradoxes of the tradition You don't get that in the same way in his other letters. Why? Because in his other letters you always have the opportunity, as it were, to phone an apostle. Like the Corinthians do. What's the divine mind on this? What's the divine mind on that? But now, although there are still apostles in the church, All of those apostles, I think from a New Testament point of view, are in the church in heaven. And we do not have direct access to them. We cannot engage in a kind of Corinthian correspondence with them to find the heavenly mind on divine situations. So while we live in the same age, and Paul underlines this at the beginning of chapter 3, we are in the last days, and I'm sure here I don't need to underline that in the New Testament the last days begin at Pentecost and come to a consummation with the return of Christ. So we live in precisely the same time period as the apostles. but we don't live in the church in which the apostles are present. And so we see very clearly the movement in these letters from the presence of the vehicles of new revelation turning now to the traditions, that is to say, the places in which those revelations have been embodied. Remember how Paul warns people against false teaching and false doctrine and false apostles which come either purporting to be by word of mouth or by letter. It's one of those verses that, underneath it and woven into it, has the notion that the apostolic message is the Word of God. Whether that be the apostolic message preached, for example, in 1 Thessalonians 2.13, they received it not as the Word of men, although it was the words of men, but as the Word of God. And that Word of God comes in the proclamation of the Gospel through the apostles, or in what the apostles embody in what they write. And now it is not to the living apostle, but to the paradosis, the tradition that is now embodied, of course, for us and was being embodied for Timothy in the pages of New Testament Scripture. So we have been brought into the same pre-eschatological age as the apostles, but we live as gospel ministers without the resident presence of apostles. And this is the new phenomenon for Timothy, and therefore into Timothy Paul is investing this teaching here that he may be held up before us as a kind of working model of what Gospel ministers are to do and are to be in every future generation. And the nearer, at least in the reflection I have on the history of my own times, the nearer I come to the present day, the more exciting it is to read 2 Timothy chapter 3. If you read 2 Timothy chapter 3 when I was a little boy in primary school, you would read it with different emotions from reading it in early 21st century Scotland. Because these opening words, in the last days, between Pentecost and Christ's return, There will come what the ESV calls times of difficulty. That's tame. This is the language used in the Gospels of the Gadarene demoniac. Nobody could control him. Actually, to use the language of the tabloids, this is the language that's also used by Josephus of Cleopatra. She was absolutely irresistible. alluring. And when you read these verses here that describe seasons of a special stress in the context of the much larger period of gospel ministry, you can't help feeling that you're actually reading the daily newspaper's headlines. You read this and it sounds so now. And in some ways, at the tail end of ministry, I read passages like this and think, instead of responding to this with doom and gloom, no matter what your eschatology is, responding with doom and gloom, that times are so bad, there's so little we can do, isn't it awful? Actually, it's rather exciting to be living in times that are so parallel to the times of the New Testament. We are often surrounded in our subculture by evangelical people who are complaining about the times, and of course the times are out of joint. What a thrilling thing it is to feel the tension and the excitement of having to preach the gospel in a world where the pseudo-Christian masks are off. And precisely what Paul describes here is all around us every day of the week. Headlines in the newspapers, the reality that causes our governments behind closed doors to panic in desperation because they do not know what to do or how to do it in response. And it's interesting, isn't it, in this context that what Paul is doing here at the end of his own personal ministry to Timothy is laying out the reality of the fast decaying society in which he lives, the poison of false teaching that will arise, the suffering that will go hand in hand with him being a minister of Jesus Christ. Because, like ourselves, Timothy is now entering into a season when Christianity will no longer be a religio liquita under the umbrella of Judaism, will no longer be seen as a sect of Judaism which was an acceptable religion with its little tribal god, Yahweh, But now it's going to be fully exposed in a culture where it is legitimate to believe in Jesus, but it's not legitimate to act as though you believed in Jesus. And we see that in our own times. This is a time of stress, a time of difficulty. This is what our people face, isn't it? they may believe in Jesus as Lord. What is intolerable is if they claim his exclusivity and what is actually becoming increasingly intolerable is if they have the audacity to practice that exclusivity. If they have the audacity in the public square to behave and act and react in terms of what they believe the scriptures teach. We will be allowed to believe it. No one here will suffer persecution for what they believe as long as they do not act on the basis of what they believe. So, the times are out of joint, the times are difficult, the times are stressful, the times... It's actually, as I say, behind closed doors. Men and women in government in our country and throughout the Western world realise how uncontrollable things are. Which is why some of the foolish measures they take are actually symptoms of their desperation. They don't know how to control their society. And so they try and find ways of controlling society, usually with laws. Not realizing laws do not change hearts and are not designed to change hearts. And so we are living in a society, astonishingly like this society, in which Timothy is living. And Paul points him in the direction of two great encouragements. The first, that we ought not to minimize, although I don't want to focus on it, the first is the people of God around him. you know from whom you learned this. His grandmother, his mother, as Calvin says in his commentary on 2 Timothy chapter 1, Timothy drank in godliness with his mother's milk, and Paul You've seen it in me, my aim, my conduct, my faith, my patience, my love, my steadfastness, my persecutions, my sufferings, my endurance, the Lord's rescue and the principle. This isn't just because I'm an apostle. all who live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted. It's normal. This is how it is when you follow a crucified Christ. I actually think that is probably the most difficult thing for Christians in the comfortable West to grasp. I think all my ministry that the most difficult thing for us to grasp is actually what lies at the heart of the Christian gospel, that the one we follow was beaten and crucified. And that's the pattern. So don't be surprised by the fiery trial as though something unexpected were happening to you. You are following in the footsteps of Christ. And our first encouragement is just to look around. To look at old Mrs Smith or old Mr Brown or young Miss Smith or young Master Brown out there in the trenches being faithful to Jesus Christ and to reflect on the enormous privilege it is. to serve them as they serve Christ. There can be few greater abominations at a conference of ministers than ministers bad-mouthing their congregations, don't you think? And complaining about what a difficult lot they have. But the big encouragement to him is of course found in addition to the people of God who model the Word of God. in the Word of God itself. And it's in this context, you know, we are all wise enough in theory not to pick up 2 Timothy 3, 16 and 17 as though it fell straight out of Louis Berkhoff or John Calvin or Wayne Grudem or whoever happens to be your favourite systematic theologian. It really comes embedded in this context. And for that reason should never ultimately be removed from this context as though this were not the context in which it were given to us. But actually this teaching on the God-breathed character of Scripture and the usefulness of Scripture is to point up the resources that God has given to us as ministers of the Gospel. in the word that he has inscripturated. And for our purposes, what I want to camp down on just for a few minutes is this. If you take a whiteout, if you still get any whiteout, you should whiteout that number 4 in your Bible. and any heading that lies between the end of chapter 3 and the beginning of chapter 4. And if you don't do that mentally, you will actually miss Paul's point. Paul's point is this. The scriptures are God-breathed and useful, ophelimos, profitable, for teaching, reproof, correction, training and righteousness. So, chapter 4 verse 2, preach the word, be ready in season and out of season, reprove, rebuke and exhort with complete patience and teaching. Now you see, the point he's making is this. If that's what scripture is for, make sure that's the way you use scripture. Because if you don't, then otherwise you're not using scripture the way it was intended to be used. It's actually a very simple logic. here are the things that scripture is useful, profitable for, so do that with it. Do that with it. Or to put this in kind of contemporary terms, what Paul says to Timothy in verse 16 of chapter 3, is actually Paul's preaching grid. Most of you in the room are younger than I am. You probably have gone through some wretched individual's preaching class who has handed out the preaching grid and you're supposed to grade each other on, you know, was he well-dressed? Did he stumble? Was there a great introduction? Did he have a conclusion? Did he get the point of the text? And these preaching grids are placed upon us. And I confess in my earlier life, when I knew everything, I used to think, who are these horrible ignorant people who draw up preaching grids? Who do they think they are? And then of course you read the parable of the sower and the soils and you realise, Jesus had a preaching grid. preaching grid of the congregation. Note to self, always remember there are four kinds of soil sitting before me in the congregation. And Paul is a preaching grid. This is what Scripture is, God breathed word, this is what Scripture is for, for these four things. So for a few minutes I want to invite you to reflect on the text, reflect on what you hear, if you are largely a hearer, reflect on how you study scripture, reflect on how you preach scripture, and be invited into the apostolic preaching group as a kind of little check-up on your preaching ministry. There are four things here. The first is this. All scripture, he says, is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching or for doctrine. I think he actually means the term there in both of those senses. That is to say, enshrined in preaching, there should be teaching. There should be the kind of thing that Paul did throughout his ministry, especially when he went into the synagogues, of reasoning out of the Scriptures, the unfolding of the Scriptures. There needs to be teaching. Why does there need to be teaching? Because people are appallingly ignorant. And one might be bold enough to say, probably, if you are in the average congregation, your average member is also appallingly ignorant of the Scriptures. Maybe knows the Scriptures as a few isolated texts, life verses, but not well learned in the Scriptures. I don't mean not well educated. I mean, they're not like John Bunyan, that if you prick them anywhere, their blood, as Sturgeon famously said, will flow bubbly. Some of them will be, thank God. Some of us have people in our congregations who, if you take them to any situation, will instinctively think of three verses from one of the Psalms. But interestingly also for them the real challenge is that can you think of three verses outside of the Metrical Psalter? Do you really think biblically? You know, I think it's true in the last 50 years or so, many parts of the English speaking world and beyond, especially younger men have really got this notion, we have gone back to the Reformation in our ministry. You know, we've got this Reformed theology. We are either young or old, we're either restless or resting, but we are definitely Reformed. And sometimes I've found myself in situations where people have kind of exuded a sense of pride about this. We have got things right. I kind of developed a kind of, I know how to upset you response. You are only Reformed. when you are preaching every single day of the week to your people, when the whole of Wednesday is given over to prayer, and when the discipline of the word is exercised in your congregation. That's what it meant for Calvin to be reformed. But alas, most of the reformed churches I've watched think you can do all of that in 30 minutes on a Sunday morning and a Sunday school. The result, we've actually no idea how little of the scriptures we really know. And we're like, you remember the Corinthians? When we compare ourselves with ourselves, hey, we're doing pretty well. But not when we meet someone from whose very pores the scriptures come. And one of the things that we need to do in our own churches and congregations is to encourage our people to see how much more of the ministry of the Word they actually need. But there's also this sense, this flavour here, that this teaching has a kind of shape. Remember how Paul says in Romans 6, that although you once were a slave of sin, and he's drawing an antithesis, you know Romans 6, 17, thanks be to God that you who once were slaves of sin have become, what? Well, you would think freed from sin. But no, he speaks about being pressed into the mould or form of doctrine to which we've been delivered. And so in the context of the general exposition of the word, Paul I think is urging Timothy here, as he has done several times already in this letter, within that context to focus attention on how the gospel works. on the sound doctrine. It seems to me this is a great need for us, for all sometimes biblical scholars, and there are one or two biblical scholars in the room, are almost neurotic now about story rather than doctrine. I think it's fairly clear that when you get down to the nitty gritty, for example, of Jesus' teaching and Paul's letters, there is a shape to the Gospel. I sometimes put it like this. If you go to the doctor tomorrow and you've got some presenting symptom and he says to you, you know, I've just got 51% in anatomy. It's not really all that important. I haven't looked at it since I managed to pass the exam. You know, if you've got the opportunity, you want to say, is there another partner here, you know, who maybe got 80%? Because if you don't know how the body works, you're not going to be able to provide for me the pharmaceutical that is going to get this body that is working improperly to work properly. And that's where theology or doctrine or systematics or whatever title you want to give it functions in the ministry of the word. It's like the knowledge of anatomy and physiology and pharmacy. I did actually once go to a doctor and it was pretty clear what was wrong. And then I was horrified when he reached back and he got out that big book that they have And he started leaping through it to find an aspirin or something like that. Now shame on us if people come to us with all kinds of spiritual diseases and we don't understand how the gospel works and what the connections are between the truth of the gospel, the logic of the gospel and the symptoms they are presenting. so that we can bring together the pharmacy of the gospel with the sickness of the soul. And you see Paul doing this again and again, doesn't he? Don't you know? Don't you understand these things? I mean, what is his great remedy? Actually, his usual great remedy is union with Christ. Something one almost never hears about. Until relatively recently there's been a kind of splurging union with Christ. People are getting union with Christ just like 20 years ago. People got adoption. 20 years before that they got the Holy Spirit, got something else. But you see in his case, it's because he understands how the Gospel works in Christ that he's able to drag every sickness back to the remedy that is in Jesus Christ. Now, underline just how absent that has been from our evangelical subculture. Name me five really good books from the past hundred years on the death of Christ. Isn't that the centre of the Gospel? Death and Resurrection of Christ. Name me five really good books. Well, you can't. Can you? What about Denny? Well, Denny's a hundred years ago. And I'm sorry to tell you, if you didn't know, but Denny needed to be doctored in order to pass the intervarsity doctrinal standards and be published. Oh, but there's John Stott. Well, now you've got one book in a hundred on what evangelicals say lies at the very heart of the gospel. Is it any wonder Tell me if I'm speaking at a place that you know very few preachers, your favourite preachers, how many of them would you say, now the dominant motif here is a ministry of expounding, I am determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. It's kind of staggering really. Or is it, you know, tell me if that's just my little myopic perception on the subculture in which we live. So the Word of God is profitable for doctrine, for teaching. And again and again in Scripture, wherever you see there is spiritual malady, spiritual sickness, it's in there the doctrine comes. It's all over the sand. In the sands, it's largely the doctrine of God. In the upper room, fascinatingly, it's the doctrine of the Trinity. While I'm on a run, what was the last great book you read on the doctrine of the Trinity? People have been getting the doctrine of the Trinity recently, but in the last hundred years, what's been the great evangelical book on the doctrine of the Trinity? So what evangelicals have been known for? No, the Trinity is to us the most speculative and the least practical of all doctrines. And it's so embarrassing that on the night of his crucifixion, in John 14, 15, 16 especially, Jesus spent so much time teaching his very diminished congregation about the mutual interrelationships of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. So it can't be the most speculative, it must be the most fundamental. And it can't be the least practical, because he's aiming to get them through the greatest crisis in their lives. So this is hugely important. Then he adds, and this is interesting, the scriptures are given to us not only for doctrine, but they're given to us for reproving That is to say, and he goes on to emphasise this in verse 2 of chapter 4, so preach the word, reprove and rebuke. And he's speaking here about this simple principle that the word of God is given so that its preaching will bring about the conviction of sin. And interestingly, in the Upper Room Discourse, to me it's fascinating how Jesus brings these two things together, doesn't he? He makes it very clear that the reason the apostles are going to be given the gift of the Holy Spirit is so that they can give the New Testament to the Church. When the Spirit comes, not before, but when the Spirit comes, He will lead you into all the truth. He will remind you of everything I've said. He will show you the things that are to come. That's actually the simplest summary of the New Testament anywhere to be found in the New Testament. Jesus is preparing the apostles to give the New Testament to the church. That's what he's doing. And it's precisely in that context he says, that's what's going to happen to you when the Spirit comes. And when the Spirit comes, He will reprove or convict the world of sin and righteousness and judgment, all in relationship to Christ himself. So they will be the instruments of the Spirit to give the Christ-centered New Covenant document And the Spirit himself will come, as it were, in tandem with that new covenant document bearing witness in our hearts alongside the witness of that new covenant document to produce the conviction of sin. Why? Because without the conviction of sin there can never be the conviction of need for salvation. And again and again we need to bring our people back into this tumble dryer of Christian experience. That it's those who are most deeply convinced of their sin who grasp for the depths of grace, and those who are least convinced of their sinfulness. believe that that sinfulness can be lightly healed with a dab of grace here and there. And so this should always be a characteristic in our preaching. Now, notice I'm not saying this needs to be a characteristic of my personality. Okay? So we don't want to confuse this. It's not moi, as Miss Piggy would say, who does the convicting. It's the Spirit who does the convicting through the Word. So we can't run away into a corner and say, I'm not really a kind of convicting person. That's not really my ministry. Timothy wasn't a convicting kind of person. When there was an opening in the church at Corinth for ministry, do you remember how Paul sent a letter of recommendation? In that opening, do you remember what he said about Timothy? I've always wanted a church to write to me about a Timothy-like person who needed to rub wine on his tummy because it was upset, or even drink the wine because his tummy was upset. He needed to be encouraged not to be supplement. I'd love a church, a big church, the bigger the better, the most prestigious the better, so that I could write and say, When John comes to you, make sure you put him at his ease, because he's doing the work of the Lord, as I'm trying to do the work of the Lord, and I can write the response. Dear Dr Ferguson, we are so grateful to you for taking the time to respond, but we are not looking for a minister, we need to put at his ease. Now that's Timothy. He's not the bull in the china shop personality. But when the Spirit and the Word work together, if we're really following the teaching, then the conviction of sin is absolutely inevitable and equally necessary because The Gospel makes sense only within the context of the conviction of sin. You know, in all the yards that have been written in the history of theology, there are some kind of one-liners that stand out. And to me, one of the great one-liners in all the story of Christian theology is Anselm's response to his monk friend Bozo. When slightly exasperated, I think, he says to Bozer, who's struggling with the cross, I mean, this has meant so much to me. I know this in Latin. But lest I be puffed up by revelations. He says, Bozer, your problem is, you have not yet considered the greatness of the weight of sin. That's at the root. of just about every pastoral problem you will ever meet. That's why people don't like the doctrine of election at the end of the day, because they don't see that the weight of sin is so great. There's no way for me out of this unless God begins it. That's why people hate the cross, because the only reality that makes sense of this is that he was bearing the greatness of the weight of sin. But then Paul adds another feature. What I like about Paul is he always gets you. There's no wiggle room. I've often said to the congregations I've served, some of you think it would be great if we had Paul as our minister. No, it wouldn't be great. He's always wanting more. But you see what he adds? It's profitable for teaching, for reproving. And almost none of the translations get it right, he said loftily. In the English Standard Version, for correction. And that's the translation tradition, for reproving and correction. Now, if you're my age, reproving and correcting mean exactly the same. You know, having your work corrected by the teacher meant the teacher would reprove you and tell you it was wrong. And that's almost the diameter removed from what Paul is actually saying here. The one person that gets it kind of right, that catches the flavour, was the late Canon J.B. Phillips. He translates epanorthosis as resetting. And the reason he does that is because he's captured the secular use of the word. In secular Greek it was used in the context of medicine. Galen uses it. Somebody comes to you and they've broken their arm. What do you do? You reset the broken bone. So it has a heavily transformative restorative connotation to it. And this is very beautiful because these two notions, that the preaching of the word brings the conviction of sin, but the preaching of the word also brings restoration to what we are intended to be. The restoration of life as the image of God. The restoration of fellowship. The beginnings of the new creation. the life of a church into which people come and say, I didn't know a church was like this. In fact, I didn't know life could be like this. That's the connotation. And to me, I think the challenging thing is, either you're a convicting kind of preacher or you're a healing kind of preacher. But the word is given so that you will be both kinds of That means not only that the Word eats into the soul, that your preaching has this element that I guess one would call imagination in the sense that you are able to get inside with the Word, that you get inside not only to convict but also to bring restoration, transformation. And that pattern, that rhythm runs throughout all of Paul's teaching, doesn't it? The strong teaching on the mortification of sin in Colossians 3.5 following, balanced with the equally strong teaching on the restoration of the image of God in Jesus Christ. And actually that's what good teaching always does. Good teaching is more than good lecturing. Good lecturing tells you what is true and what you ought to do. Good teaching actually releases into the person who hears it the mode of transition from the old to the new. And actually, you know, if this so happens, my golf, I know this is of no interest to most of you, but my golf has been in a state of huge disrepair recently. And so, for the first time in my life, I turn up at the pro shop and I say, Bill, I need lessons. So we go out. I know something's wrong. And the ball's not going that direction one hole, and that direction another hole. Unless something's badly wrong, you say to the congregation, some of the elders I played golf with, I say, brothers, if my mind worked the same way when I was preaching as it does when I'm driving my ball off the tee, people in the gallery wouldn't know which side should be ducking at any point in the sermon. So what does Bill do? Does he say, Sinclair, that's all wrong. I'm doing it wrong. I am convicted I'm doing it wrong. No, you're not just doing it wrong, you're doing it really wrong. You're playing golf the way people played golf in the 1950s. And here I am, convicted, I'm convicted, but what I need Bill to do is to come to me and say, here's how the transition takes place. One of my boys was a very, very good golfer and he had a very good coach whom I had known in an earlier day and I went with him one day And I'll never forget the inspiration to me as somebody who handles the scriptures of seeing this friend transition my son in such a way that a really good golfer, I could actually hear the difference in the ball striking. And that's why it's dangerous to major on the negatives. of the Gospel if we don't also major on the positives. There's no point in majoring on mortification, the Pharisees did that, unless you're able to use the Word in such a way that it feeds the people of God and majors also on the transformation. And that requires a sense of what it is they are destined to be, and how through the ministry of the Word can I help them to move from where they are to where they are to be. And that leads, doesn't it, to the fourth thing, for training in righteousness. Again, there's a flavour in the term here, isn't there, of child training. It's interesting. Although the pastoral letters are not expositions of the doctrine of the church, Paul's key vision of the church comes out dominantly in the pastoral letters. His metaphors are family metaphors. And that's the heart of the church. It's a family. How do I know that? Because the heart of the gospel is, in distinction from the opaque revelation of the Old Testament where nobody was bold to say it, everybody is now bold to say, Our Father in Heaven. You'll get Old Testament believers saying that. It's not that they're not believers, it's just that they are not in the season when the high privilege of the Gospel is theirs. And so what are we doing in this context? Well, we're child training. Church yesterday morning, David was asking the children what they wanted to be when they grow up. Usually in front of where we sit on Sunday, there's a young couple, both dentists. What's their daughter want to be? She wants to have a nice cream shop. My second son's a paediatric surgeon. His wee boy said to him the other day, Dad, why don't you do something really interesting like I love dads. My daughter is a psychiatrist. Her daughter says, why don't you open a cafe mum? It would be so much more interesting. Now it's lovely, but it's very immature isn't it? And yet the tragedy is that we think we've been born again and maturity comes immediately. But what we're actually dealing with in the raw life of congregation is people who want to open ice cream shops and people who think there would be something more interesting than saving babies' lives and other things than the fundamentals. And so what I find in this, now this is just scratching the surface of this, but what you find when you scratch the surface of this is a perspective on what am I doing when I'm preaching the word? I'm treating the congregation the same way I would treat the children of my own flesh and blood. Because they are the children of my flesh and blood in Jesus Christ. And the supreme thing that means is that I do all this in a spirit of brotherly, or dare one say, because the New Testament uses this language as well, of fatherly love. Remember what John Newton writes in those marvellous letters of his? He writes to a young man attending the ministry and says, you know, the goal of our Calling is love. And I believe, says Newton, I believe that now, after these years, I believe my people know so clearly that I love them, that I could say anything to them. Our problem often is that we say anything to them without having established the bond of love with them. But what Paul is doing here, and interestingly this is Ephesus, this is the one place Paul visited where we know over an extended season how he himself actually did this. And his letters are full of this kind of language, the language of love for the flock. And perhaps in with all the teaching, in with all the reproving, in with all the transformation, the resetting, maybe that's where we should end and where we should also re-begin. Can I put my hand on my heart? and say to my congregation, I love you all to death. Because if I can't, that's the point at which the Scriptures need to begin to work in me, isn't it? To inform me, clarify my thinking about my ministry, to rebuke me, that perhaps There's more self-love than people love to heal me so that I can love them. Our Heavenly Father, thank you for your grace to us in your Word and for its instructive power to us. We pray as we minister in a variety of circumstances, some on our own, some in tough situations, others in situations of present relative joy and fruitfulness that is evident. We pray that you would give us a single eye for the glory of our Saviour, a love for the Word of God and a deep devoted commitment and affection for the people to whom you have sent us. We pray it may be true of us that even those, maybe especially those, who give us most hassle, who create intractable problems for our ministry, that it may become evident to them how deeply we love them, because our Saviour does. And so we pray for help to encourage one another this day to do this for the glory of our Saviour.