One of the primary responsibilities and emphases of a good pastor is to ensure that his soul is being fed and nourished. There are stretches and seasons of ministry where this is particularly challenging because of the kinds or quantity of demands placed on him. Recent weeks have felt like this for me, and I reached a point where I needed encouragement and refreshment. On somewhat of a whim I grabbed this little book. You might not think it screams “encouragement” with a title like that, but the foreword by Sinclair Ferguson states, “While there is much practical wisdom to be found in these pages, The Work of the Pastor is not a book to turn to primarily to learn the nuts and bolts of ‘how to be a minister. Other fine books perform that service admirably. Rather this is an inspirational, not an instructional book. It throbs with a passion to keep the central things central. It takes us to the heartbeat rather than the hand actions of pastoral life. It belongs to that smaller category of books on the work of the ministry that stir the affections, challenge the motivations, and produce a change in the affections.” I found this to be entirely and wonderfully accurate, and I am very thankful for this book and for the timing in which I found it. Here are 25 of the best quotes from The Work of the Pastor by William Still.
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The pastor by definition is a shepherd, the under-shepherd of the flock of God. His primary task is to feed the flock by leading them to green pastures. – p. 17
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This end of all pastoral work must never be forgotten – that its ultimate aim is to lead God’s people to offer themselves up to Him in total devotion of worship and service. – p. 17
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If you think that you are called to keep a largely worldly organisation, miscalled a church, going, with infinitesimal doses of innocuous sub-Christian drugs or stimulants, then the only help I can give you is to advise you to give up the hope of the ministry and go and be a street scavenger; a far healthier and more godly job, keeping the streets tidy, than cluttering the church with a lot of worldly claptrap in the delusion that you are doing a job for God. The pastor is called to feed the sheep, even if the sheep do not want to be fed. He is certainly not to become an entertainer of goats. Let goats entertain goats, and let them do it out in goatland. You will certainly not turn goats into sheep by pandering to their goatishness. – p. 23
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. . . the Word of God, the law of God, ‘the royal law according to the scriptures, the perfect law of liberty, is a sort of rational, verbal, imprint, transcript expression, or descriptive mould of the character of God, which character became incarnate and human in Jesus Christ. – p. 24
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To be true pastors, your whole life must be spent in knowing the truth of this Word, not only verbally, propositionally, theologically, but religiously, that is, devotionally, morally, in worshipping Him whom it reveals, and in personal obedience to Him whose commands it contains, in all the promised grace and threat of those commands. To be pastors you must be fed men, not only in knowledge, but in wisdom, grace, humility, courage, fear of God, and fearlessness of men. – p.25
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Eat it, eat it whole. All or nothing. For it is only ‘all or nothing’ devourers of the Word of God who will ever be or do anything for God. – p. 25
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Unless the Word of God works for you, and solves the problems of your own life (I do not mean perfectly, but in the sense that you know where you are in relation to them, how can you expect that you will be able to make it work for others? – p. 27
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But, remember, it is not syntheses of the Word of God, not doctrinal presentations of the Word, but the very Word of God itself, read, commented upon, expounded, and its parts vitally and intelligently related, that does the work in men’s hearts. – p. 30
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. . . the greatest failures are those who, having tried to run Christ’s church as a moneymaking racket, a clockwork train, or a social free-for-all, depart and leave a spiritual wilderness behind them, in which the one thing that is not known at all is the Word of God. – p. 36
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My greatest heartbreaks have been with people who, failing to see that it is the Word that brings out the true flavour of personality, wanted to absorb the preacher’s personality but not the Word – wanted the fruit but not the root, like people want the ethic without the Cross. – p. 41
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The hardest thing ministers, who are great talkers, find to do is to listen. Don’t be making up your next speech while the other is talking. Listen! – p. 47
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Christ is a world of being, not a set of rules. You live your life in Him, you are naughty in him, alas, as well as good in Him. You have fun there as well as seriousness. You must learn that Christ is no mere censor, but a Saviour who saves us by gaining our trust and confidence more and more, and letting us live our total life in Him. He is much more concerned about where we are going, than about how far on we have got. – p.49
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Next to the ministry of the Word, the most fruitful pastoral duty is to help all sorts of odd sheep to live together, and show them how to live in the world amongst goats without becoming goats. – p. 51
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Prayer, example and precept, in that order, are the means of bringing up children and young folk in the faith. Nor will high-pressure tactics and brainwashing techniques avail when young folk have gone off on their own. . . Nothing takes the place of the realism of holy living and secret wrestling before God in prayer for our youngsters. We must commit them to God so utterly that we dare not interfere or tamper with their precious souls. – p.57
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In evangelical circles the danger that the Gospel may be equated with the mere rudiments of the Word of God has become almost a disaster, for these rudiments are only the beginning of the Good News. There are profounder things by far in the Bible than what is called ‘the simple Gospel, although they issue from it. Indeed, in a sense, those who proclaim almost exclusively forgiveness of sins and justification, only make known the preliminaries to the best Good News, which is not that our sins are put away and that we are justified in God’s sight, wonderful though that is, but that God wants us for Himself and to that end brings us to the birth in Christ. After all, the death of Jesus, for all its wonder, is a means to an end, which is not merely that we may be right and clean but that we may be His, which involves personal relationship in love. – p. 62
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A great many of us are far busier propping up our particular brand of democracy and social service than building. the church of Jesus Christ against which even the gates of hell shall not prevail, whether our democracy collapses or not. The church is not called to subsidise the state any more than she is called to work against it; she has to be as neutral to it as loyal citizens can be. She is called to gather and build the church of Jesus Christ under any system whatsoever. – p. 67
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Froth and rigidity; taking things out of the Bible and making of them little verbal godlets to worship, when all the time there is the deep-sounding truth of the whole Word of God waiting for someone to unlock its mighty treasures by the Spirit-truth offering the mighty experience of death and resurrection with Jesus Christ, to change not only men’s superficial ways, but their whole lives. – p. 77
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Some of the hardest nuts to crack in the Christian world are those who have been so busy evangelising that they have never allowed the Word to be turned upon them, and who therefore regard the Bible as a mere book of Gospel texts to hurl at others, or at least to bait them with. – p. 82
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The devil always does a deadlier work through hardened Christians than through the unconverted, and gets far more diabolical pleasure from it, too. – p. 85
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The minister’s job is to produce people to do all these other things. We must not do them, but produce others to do them. We must not leave the Word of God to serve tables. There are deacons, that is, other servants of God, to do these, with as great a need of the fullness of the Holy Spirit (certainly of subtle, discerning grace) as ministers of the Word. – p. 91
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When the superficially evangelistic community exhausts the solid biblical capital it has inherited from its forefathers, what is there to fall back upon? There is more likelihood that it will become increasingly worldly in ostensible attempts to maintain communication with the lost world than that it will be willing to be led back to a solid biblical diet by ministers called of God to give it what it needs and not what it wants. – p. 99
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People who are too easily intimidated by the wickedness of any one generation and who panic over things which go wrong, are living so near their own day that they have lost the message of the ages which is full of such seeming disasters. – p. 111
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There is an application of the Word of God for even the most urgent contemporary situations, but if we get all hot and bothered about it, and myopically concentrate all our ministry on that, forever moaning from our pulpits about the evils of the day, what are the hungry sheep going to feed upon the while? The devil is a master of sidetrack. – p. 112
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Preachers will never be sidetracked by evil. They will never let the devil out of their sight; yet they will not take their mind off what the Spirit is saying and doing through them. It is because they are bent upon doing the Spirit’s behest that they must keep shooing the devil away. – p. 115
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There are two dangers, and we are attacked from two points of view. One, that of being so preoccupied with soundness in the truth, with doctrines, formulations, propositions and principles, that we go all academic and dead . . . The other danger is that we go all activist, constantly running round in fruitless circles, constantly stirring the pot of emotionalism to boiling point, equating the presence and the working of the Spirit with noise, clatter, chatter, laughter and tears, clapping of hands and wringing of hands, etc. – p. 118