Discerning the Call to Ministry

Paul’s first requirement for any man considering pastoral ministry is that he has an eager longing and passion for the work. There is a healthy, zealous ambition that should exist in the soul of every man contemplating pastoral ministry. Prospective pastors should want to be pastors. They should be driven. They should be passionate. But this passion and ambition, although real and undeniable, is just the entrance fee, as it were, into the process. It is not to be equated with a bona fide call to ministry.

What I mean is this: while the internal, heart passion referenced in 1 Timothy 3:1 is an essential requirement for ministry, that passion only means something if the other qualifications in vv. 2-7 are increasingly being shaped in your life over time and if a team of qualified elders can affirm your character, doctrine, and giftedness.

Your heart may scream “yes!” to the ministry, but your life, maturity, and doctrine will likely need years to catch up with this zeal. Most times, the call is less bright lights and tingly feelings than it is years of discipleship, training, and examination by the local church. These years will speak more to your call than a tingly gut feeling.

The call to ministry necessitates an investment not just from the elders, but from the local body as a whole. Learning to lean on the local church in the long process of aspiring to ministry is an honest way to ensure that it is God who is preparing this path, not your own whimsical desires. And giving yourself to the local church should be the thing you are most anxious to do if you are called to the ministry.

The very first thing you must do with your calling is to guard it. Because a life disqualified is a calling discarded, the gravity of the task requires a certain sobriety of life. The call to preach the gospel is among the most precious privileges granted by God to men. Faithfulness to your calling must be who you are today. 

We all understand that it is wise to lock up your valuables. We put fences around our property and deadbolts on our precious possessions in order to protect them. The call to ministry is a precious possession worth guarding. It is for this reason that Paul instructs Timothy in I Tim. 4:16, “Keep a close watch on yourself and on the teaching.”

Don’t worry about how to use your calling until you have first ensured that you are adequately protecting that calling by living a life that is above reproach.

And then you must depend upon your calling. If you are convinced that God has called you into His service, then you must be faithful to the task he has placed before you. Imagine the horror of Isaiah hearing the call of God to proclaim the truth and then choosing to walk away into the Judean desert the first time he ran into difficulty. Imagine the tragedy it would have been if Timothy had pulled “a Demas,” and instead of exercising “the spiritual gift within” him (I Tim. 4:14), he chose instead to “love this present world” (2 Tim. 4:10). If God has appointed you to the work, who are you to turn away when He brings trials into your life for the perfection of your faith?

A third action you can take while you wait is to exercise your calling right where you are. You don’t need a prestigious position or a fancy title in order to be faithful with the gift that has been given to you. Be faithful with what God has put before you today. When God providentially places a task in front of you, be faithful to it as unto Him, no matter how menial that duty may seem. In order to become a man of God, you must first be a man of God. Seminary is not a salvific experience where you are changed and made into something that you once were not. Either you are a pastor or you’re not. Additional training is not suddenly going to make you into a faithful servant. Faithfulness to your calling must be who you are today.

Finally, you must also be faithful to prepare for your calling. As you actively make plans for a lifetime of faithfulness, the work of preparation will either cause your desire to decrease (demonstrating that you’re not called to it) or it will be further enflamed (demonstrating that you must obey the direction of the Lord in your life). If the Lord is setting you apart for the work of preaching His gospel, then you must be prepared to effectively undertake that work. This requires that the man of God be educated in theology, pastoral ministry, and acquire the necessary exegetical skills in order to faithfully handle the word of God. For the vast majority of men, this means the pursuit of formal training through seminary education. This is simply the clearest and most expedited path for the acquisition of the necessary skills and material.

A biblical justification for seminary education might be made from a number of passages, from Matthew 28:19 (and its emphasis on teaching disciples) to 2 Timothy 2:2 (and its emphasis on leadership training) to Titus 1:9 (and its emphasis on elders being equipped to articulate and defend the faith).

But there is a short passage in Acts that provides a biblical precedent for seminary education in a particularly insightful way. These verses, which at first glance may not seem overly significant, show the apostle Paul starting a theological training school in the city of Ephesus. As one commentator explains: “In Ephesus, Paul opened a school of theology to train future leaders for the developing church in the province of Asia” (Simon J. Kistemaker, Acts, NTC, 684).

It’s unlikely that Paul called it Ephesus Theological Seminary, but in essence, that is exactly what it was.

When the Scottish Reformer John Knox learned that he was going to be ordained, he went to his room and wept, because he was so immediately aware of the weighty responsibility with which he was being entrusted.

Pastoral ministry is a serious calling. It is both a great privilege and a great responsibility. And those who aspire to it ought to desire the best training they can possibly receive—because they long to be approved workmen, as Paul says in 2 Timothy 2:15, workmen who are not ashamed because they know how to rightly divide the Word of truth.

When a student comes to seminary, then, he is coming to be trained for the most weighty task anyone could ever undertake. So how one chooses a seminary ought to be primarily dependent on which seminary can best equip him for his God-given task.

With that in mind, I believe there are three questions that must be asked when considering how to choose a seminary. (1) What does it mean to be successful in ministry? (2) In which areas are pastors called to be faithful? And (3) what seminary can I choose where I will be discipled in the area of character and trained to understand and teach sound doctrine?

Dear First-Year Seminary Students,

The point of seminary is to make better servants. It is not simply to educate you in your Bible knowledge or increase your ability to communicate the Word of God, but ultimately to increase your love for Christ and His people.

I don’t want you to fail. So I compiled a list of ways others before you have wandered into failure. The following are ten ways to fail as a seminary student. I hope you will avoid these temptations.

1. Pursue a title rather than an education.

If your goal is letters behind your name, you will do just enough to get by. You will find yourself asking: how little do I need to do to pass? Make your goal to be a better student, more skilled preacher, and a greater blessing to the church—not simply to graduate. Don’t take shortcuts. Digging is hard, but you might find diamonds.

2. Substitute your classroom reading for your devotional life.

Your life is now a balance of work, sermon preparation, assignments, and devotional time. You often will be tempted to neglect the latter. There is a difference between opening the Word to finish an assignment and opening the Word for sustenance. At the end of each week, no amount of time spent writing a paper or reading will replace whether or not that week you communed with Jesus. Remember what John Owen wrote: “We read our Bible to know and savor Christ.”

Purity

A deep knowledge of the biblical languages helps preserve doctrinal purity—both for the pastor and for the church. In fact, Luther himself credited the entire Reformation to the rediscovery of the biblical languages!

He writes:

If we neglect the [the languages] we shall eventually lose the Gospel…No sooner did men cease to cultivate the languages, then Christendom declined, even until it fell under the undisputed dominion of the pope. But no sooner was this torch relighted, then this papal owl fled with a shriek into congenial gloom.

He continues:

If the languages had not made me positive as to the true meaning of the Word, I might have still remained a chained monk, engaged in quietly preaching Romish errors in the obscurity of a cloister; the pope, the sophists, and their anti-Christian empire would have remained unshaken.

This is astonishing—Luther attributes the breakthrough of the Reformation to the use of the original Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. Learning these languages is not some cushy, ivory tower pursuit for those with too much time or too few friendships; this is about the purity of the gospel.

Precision

The English Bibles we have been given are both phenomenal and trustworthy. We can read from our English translations and confidently say, This is the Word of the living God. But if the central aspect of a pastor’s duty is to wrestle the meaning from a book and carefully apply it to his own life and that of his congregation, then we should want every tool at his disposal to engage and accurately handle that text (cf. 2 Timothy 2:15).

Total dependence upon English translations can often hinder the careful exegesis required in sermon preparation. Without intimate knowledge of the languages, the preacher often has to content himself with the general flavor of the text, and the result can be that his exposition will lack the precision and clarity that would have been his had he known the original languages.

When it comes to the languages, the issue is not superiority over those who don’t know them, but specificity on their behalf. This is not to be a pride issue, but one of precision.

John Piper writes: “Where the languages are not prized and pursued, care in biblical observation and biblical thinking and concern for truth decreases. It has to, because the tools to think otherwise are not present.”

Power

And by this, I mean power in preaching. Where pastors lack the tools and confidence to determine the precise meaning of the text, the power of biblical preaching diminishes. It is difficult to preach with depth and power, week after week, verse after verse, if you are plagued with uncertainty when deciding between two competing interpretations as presented by commentators.

Again, Luther raises his voice: “When the preacher is versed in the languages, his discourse has freshness and force, the whole of Scripture is treated, and faith finds itself constantly renewed by a continual variety of words.”

Our aim in preaching is not to impress our people, but to inflame them; our purpose is not to win fans, but to win souls! And the languages are a means to preach with a kind of power, clarity, and authority not likely to be ours apart from them.

Pleasure

And by pleasure, I mean devotional delight in the soul. In other words, why learn the languages only well enough that they are painful to use? Why not strive to learn them so well that they become pleasurable to the soul? Why not know them so intimately as to do our devotions in them? Shouldn’t our exposition on a Sunday morning be an overflow of our own glad-hearted affections for God?

What I’m arguing is this—knowing the languages affords us opportunities to behold breathtaking vistas of God in the text that can often otherwise be missed.

George Muller, famous for his life of prayer and orphanage ministry in London, said this as a 24-year old man:

I now studied much, about 12 hours a day, chiefly Hebrew…[and] committed portions of the Hebrew Old Testament to memory; and this I did with prayer, often falling on my knees…I looked up to the Lord even whilst turning over the leaves of my Hebrew dictionary.[2]

Oh for the day more men would have these kinds of encounters with the living God – on their knees, Hebrew text in hand, looking to the Lord, tasting the unfiltered honey of the Word (cf. Psalm 19:10)! Oh to see men who yearn to know what the Word means so desperately that they are searching through Hebrew lexicons on their knees—these needy men will have a markedly dependent posture and tone to their ministry and preaching.

Our preaching should be tough as iron, precise as a laser, profound as a poet, and warm like the sun – and the languages of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek are one of the many ways to make this a reality. More than anything, learning the languages is a tangible way of expressing our neediness to hear from the very mouth of God—it is leaning in just a bit closer to hear the words of a loved one.

As a recent seminary graduate, I have been reflecting on some of the decisions I made during my time in school. My hope is that some new or prospective seminarian might learn from what I wish I had known before starting seminary.

1. I wish I had taken my time.

2. I wish I had invested more in relationships.

3. I wish I had gotten to know my professors better.

4. I wish I had been more strategic with my electives.

5. I wish I had started sooner.

In Hebrews chapter 13 the writer enjoins church members to obey their leaders, willingly submitting to them.

Obey your leaders, and submit to them; for they keep watch over your souls, as those who will give an account. Let them do this with joy and not with grief, for this would be unprofitable for you (Hebrews 13:17).

In other words, every church member should take care to submit to the leaders in the church because those pastors and elders will be held responsible before the Lord Jesus Christ for how they kept watch over the souls in their care. A tall order indeed.

While this passage is directed at church members, it would be difficult for any sober-minded pastor to read those words without a shot of ice water running through his veins. This is a terrifying responsibility.

Only the humble realization of the weight of the task will drive us to the dependency necessary for fulfilling it. For He who calls also supplies, “who also made us adequate as servants of a new covenant, not of the letter, but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life” (2 Corinthians 3:6). When you read Hebrews 13:17 and your blood runs cold, let it drive you back to the warmth of the Son. Cling to Him who supplies and equips His undershepherds for the noble task to which He has called them.

And that same humility which drives us to dependence on God-supplied sufficiency for ministry ought also to drive us to seek out whatever equipping is available to us. Seminary is not a requirement for ministry, but if you are able, and knowing the seriousness of the call to gospel ministry, why would you not avail yourself of every opportunity for preparation?