The Pastor's Heart with Dominic Steele
Christian leaders join Dominic Steele for a deep end conversation about our hearts and different aspects of Christian ministry each Tuesday afternoon.
We share personally, pastorally and professionally about how we can best fulfill Jesus' mission to save the lost and serve the saints.
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The Pastor's Heart with Dominic Steele
Sinclair Ferguson on Kirk, Macarthur, Sproul and the Queen.
Sinclair Ferguson joins us to share wisdom that he wishes he’d been given when he started in pastoral ministry in Glasgow 54 years ago.
Sinclair has served for decades as a pastor, preacher, theologian and author in Scotland and the United States. He’s the author of 50 books.
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It is the Pastors Hart and Dominic Steele, and Sinclair Ferguson is with us from Scotland and also the United States. He's served for decades as a pastor, teacher, preacher, theologian, and author for many years at St. George's Tron and then First Presbyterian Church in Columbia, South Carolina, and long stints in theological lecturing. He's written more than 50 books. Sinclair was speaking at a sold-out event in Sydney last night and a series of events across Eastern Australia this month with Liganham Ministries. Sinclair, thanks for coming in. And could we start with the pastor's heart? And uh, I mean, you have spoken in the past about those early years at St. George's Tron. And I'm just wondering, uh, what's the wisdom from the heart that 77-year-old Sinclair might want to share with 23-year-old Assistant Minister Sinclair?
SPEAKER_00:Well, I think um I think I would have asked my boss more questions. Um I think I think the chief question I would have asked him, because I was I I grew up kind of paralytically shy. Um and my my boss actually uh spoke at the Keswick Convention more than anyone else has ever done in the whole history of the convention. So he was a pretty major figure in that world. Um, I think he was also slightly shy. So I was with him for three years, and he he never once said to me, Sinclair, let me help you do better what I think you do. We were very different from each other. And I was, I think I was too shy and naive to say to him, Mr. Duncan, how do you do that? So I knew he could go into a home and come out of it 15 minutes later, and stardust would be sprinkled in the home. I could be in the home half an hour still trying to work out how do I turn this conversation to spiritual things. And one thing I would say to myself now would be as this is experiential, old people really like talking about their lives. Um, and nobody, interestingly, nobody had ever said that to me. Um, my theological education was um, I would say predominantly liberal. Um, the pastoral training was non-existent. I don't remember any lectures on preaching. Um I guess in those days, this is this is the late 60s, um, when I was a student, it was assumed that you picked up how to do things by a kind of osmosis. Uh, it was assumed, you know, you would have a church background and so on. And it it really, you know, I just knew nothing about pastoral visitation. And I didn't know that all I needed to do was to set somebody off, and I would learn enough about them that would enable me to visit them during the next three years and have what I sometimes think about as loose threads on people's sweaters that you can pull and connect to the Bible, the Christian faith, the gospel, their difficulties and challenges. And I suspect he might have said to me, Sinclair, there's no way you can go into a house for 15 minutes and sprinkle stardust. You're 23 years old. Um, it will come. But this is this is something that would give you a good start. And I actually now I sometimes say this to younger people in the church, you know, at the end, especially of the evening service, go and sit down beside one of the older people and just say, How did you get here? You will be absolutely amazed at the at the lines of the stories that have brought you here. So I think that would be that would be one thing. Um another thing that I I think I realized even in in pretty early on in those three years I was there, uh, it wasn't that anybody said it to me. Um my m my minister as a student had said to me, Sinclair, you need to watch your relentlessness. And I I th I don't think he meant um that in terms of voice um or personality. I think he meant it in terms of intellect. Um that I had to learn to um trans transpose my intellectual thinking into pastoral feeding of the flock. And I realized somewhere in the middle of those three years, I I feel I'm coming down on people. Um and that was partly the intellectual relentlessness, want to get this into your mind. Instead of get my instead of my preaching getting underneath people and lifting them to Christ, lifting them to the Father, lifting them to the Spirit. Um and that that was actually a big moment in my life, I think. Um, and I hoped began to transform my whole my whole attitude to what preaching was, that it was much more than an intellect seeking to communicate to intellects, but to use Philips Brooks' famous words, um it was it was the preaching of the gospel, the truth of God, in which Christ by the Spirit was preaching to the people, but he was doing that through my preaching, through the words I used. And therefore, my fundamental challenge was to be as Christ-like in my preaching as I wanted to be in my living. So those were those were big moments. And then I spent a few years after that in the most northerly island in the United Kingdom. And one of the first things I did when I got there was sell Bibles. Really? So because they didn't have them. Yeah, they somewhere they might have had a very small print King, King James version. Those were the days when the when the the modern version was the revised standard version, and the Bible Society would do you a good deal on Bibles if you were going to use them. And so you're trying to get people to read the Bible. That's right. Selling them. That's right. So I I I I realized very quickly when I so I was working my way through passages in the Bible, nobody had a Bible open. Um, and so that was really that was that was pretty much bargain basement ministry, um, and very different from where I'd been, uh the assistant minister, and and basically where you know my future pastoral ministries would lie.
SPEAKER_01:Um you talked about your first boss being a regular speaker at Keswick. What was the I've I've just forgotten the journey from Keswick being caught in sinless perfectionism to orthodox evangelical theology.
SPEAKER_00:Tell us the dates and the journey there. Well, I'm too young to remember the actual events. Uh I remember when I was a uh young student, John Stott's book, Men Made New. Romans 5 to 8. It was Romans 5 to 8. Um, he changed his views later on, as it happens. Um, but I think people saw that as a line in the sand. Um I think the stinking before then, but that would have been that was probably in the 1960s, Darmanic. It may have been about 1965. So not that long before you worked for Mr. Duncan. Yeah. And he um there was no there was no sign in his preaching of the higher life movement. So I think it had begun to fade. Um and I would say Mr. Duncan, that generation, by and large, had pretty slim resources to help them. You know, if you go back to the 1950s, the literature that was available to help people theologically was really very slim picking. Compared to the library that you would have now. Now, you know, and so that fact, knowing that, just because of the age I am, has really helped me more to view these men with affection and gratitude for um the way they preached the gospel, the fruitfulness of their ministries, and and their commitment to biblical orthodoxy. Mr. Duncan actually wrote a little pamphlet on Ephesians 5.18 on being filled with the Spirit, before, I think it was before John Stott's little book, Baptism Fullness of the Holy Spirit, which was really excellent. You know, there was there was no tinge of higher life in it. He probably did tend to focus on conversion and consecration, which would still have continued in the Keswick Convention. But the first time I spoke there was 1979. Um, and they were still then using the old formulation of was it the holiness of God, sinfulness? You know, it was structured in the old way, but I didn't hear any of the what I knew to be the old Keswick message.
SPEAKER_01:Talk to us about the legacies of um John MacArthur and R. C. Because I mean you spoke at the funerals of them just yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. So um R. C. I knew, I I I know exactly where I was standing when somebody mentioned his name to me, first of all. There was a fellow who had studied in the United States. We were speaking at a conference, we were actually standing at the podium, and he said to me, Have you heard of R. C. Sproul? And I hadn't heard of him. This would have been, this might have been 1979. And he said, uh, J.I. Packer says he's the best communicator of reformed theology in the United States. And I remember thinking, well, this I must see and hear. Yeah. Um, and I was I felt I was as likely to go to the moon as I was to go to the United States. But in the school year 82-83, I started teaching at Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia. And we happened the next year, I think, to speak at a conference together. And that was how I came to know him. And he he you know, he befriended me, um, brought me into what in those days was in many ways a quite a modest ministry, began in uh it was it was really a a kind of it was a bit like Schaefer's labri in Pennsylvania in a modest way, and over the years mushroomed into really an amazing ministry. The materials in 20 languages they're reaching the world in all kinds of ways. Very able people. So he was a long-standing friend.
SPEAKER_01:One of my favorite stories of him was um, I think they had a sale once a year, and uh he would go and help in the warehouse in the picking of the stuff.
SPEAKER_00:He was he was really terrific. He was very, very able intellectually, but he had he and ordinarily you'd have thought he would he did teach in seminary, but you'd have thought he'll end up in university or a seminary. But he had really committed himself to bringing the whole of biblical theology and the history of the church to the whole church. And I resonated with that because just trying to understand who I was and what gifts I might have, I I I really wanted to be able to communicate Christ and the gospel to every stage and layer. So, and and in a way that you know the books I've written express that, you know, I I I've written for seminary and college, I've written for the ordinary Christian and for children. And that's really an expression of I think an echo uh that he saw in my life of of the things that he wanted to do. Um MacArthur's contribution. And and he well, the interesting thing is um the John MacArthur was very good friends with RCE, but in some areas they were a dispensation apart. It's in beta. And that was really very interesting in the United States, because um in Scotland, I can only ever remember one person asking me what my views of the millennium were. And it was when I was an assistant minister, and Mr. Duncan had just given a Bible midweek Bible study on the millennium. Um, when I went to the States, I felt everybody wants to know what my views on the millennium are. And I really don't talk about it here in Australia. Yeah. Yeah. And I realized this was a this was a kingdom demarcation line. So there were churches where you would never be minister unless you uh signed on the dotted line. So it was a very striking thing in maybe the 19, it was maybe the 1980s, I can't quite remember when, that John kind of reached beyond the borders of that world in which he had been reared and lived. And he he was reaching out to people like Jim Boyce and R. C. And and he reached out to me, kind of out of the blue. Um, and so we became we became friends as well. I didn't know him as well as I knew R. C. I think John's contribution was that in the world in which he lived, which was by and large kind of independent Baptist with a kind of fundamentalistic background to it, he really introduced a more rigorous focus on actually preaching what was in the text. And that influenced a whole generation of younger men, you know, vast numbers of them I bump into, who have all been influenced by him. And people who would not have been influenced by him in the sense that they would ever be thought of as MacArthurites, but realized he was somebody in the generation above them who had modelled faithfulness to the gospel and and was was willing, as he often appeared on Larry King Live, which was the big um evening talk talk show. And I'm sure it was because Larry King, six times married or whatever he was, knew that with this man the he will not dodge the issues. So he was good television from that point of view, but he had a very good mind. Um and he was able to, you know, and he had a whole library of information in his head. So he was able to answer clearly and strongly. And I think I thought a lot of Americans probably hated that, but many Christians admired it. And I found it's interesting because I I I preached at the memorial service of both of them, very different personalities. You know, R. C. was Pittsburgh, you know, he was a Pittsburgh stealer. Um, and and John, John was always beautifully dressed. R RC R. C. dressed well, but R. C. you would never say R. C. was beautifully dressed, kind of thing. But I think the thing that that struck me about both of them was that there was kindness in both of them. And actually, that was what made me kind of look again at the fruit of the spirit and see that kindness is embedded there right in the middle. And I think I've noticed that with with with ministers who have been in the generation above me, um, that whatever personality God has gifted them with, some of them seem to be more like Ezekiel than the Apostle John. And their preaching can be as different. Um, there is always that element of personal kindness in them and a Christ-like gentleness. And um, that's, you know, I I just have loved them for that. It's reminded me of Augustine, you know, when he says in in the confessions about Ambrose, you know, when I came to Milan, I didn't really expect to find any great teaching because I didn't believe there was great teaching in the Catholic Church. But what touched me was that you were kind to me. And I've often thought if I were if I were comp if I were creating the individual who would reach an intellect like Augustine, the only thing I'd be interested in would be intellect. Um and it just it's just been a great lesson to me in both of these men and in Augustine, whom I didn't know, um, that the gospel does not exist in a kind of bubble of the intellect. It's a whole person reality, and and many of us, maybe even most of us, are drawn to Christ because we've seen reflections of him and others.
SPEAKER_01:Still reflecting on the gospel in the United States, um, and uh I have been scratching my head as I've I've looked at um uh what's been going on there the last few weeks, and uh I mean, and even some uh Christian leaders in the states saying things like if your pastor hasn't aligned themselves with Charlie Kirk, find a different church and and and things like that. What do you make of all of that?
SPEAKER_00:In a way, I think Dominic, it's kind of analogous to what one sometimes saw in Northern Ireland in the days of the Troubles with figures like Ian Paisley, um, where there was a closer alignment to how you voted with what you believed. Um and and in a sense, I think underneath all of that is a kind of struggle either for identity, because people feel they need they're lost in this world. I mean, Christians feel this, you know, where am I with whom am I going to align? Because they they're perhaps not well enough taught to know that as long as you align with Christ, the gospel, the Trinity, his word, and the people of God, you are secure. And these big figures, in a, I think in a pretty unusual way in the United States, gather to themselves people who are identified by the kingdom to which they belong. And I think that has happened in this case. And um, I've often reflected on the fact that you know how in the early church, if someone was martyred, martyred, then a kind of sanctity blanket came over the whole family, and the whole family was special and kind of untouchable. Um, and I think that's one of the things that has been happening in the last few days, a kind of untouchability about the profession of faith that Charlie Kirk made. Um, and perhaps not the kind of analysis that would recognize the reality of what has happened, but also would question well, is this um is this enthusiasm going to be turned into faithful Christian living? Or is it all it going to do make people align with power structures? Um and very definitely, you know, there are there are very strong power structures in the United States in a way that I don't think you would find in Australia or in or in the United Kingdom.
SPEAKER_01:Um I mean, I'm just trying to think about and and seeking your advice on as a pastor, what should my posture be towards politics? And so, I mean, I've I have been somebody, our our congregation members wouldn't know which way I I vote. Um, and I want people to come to our church who are highly left-wing and highly right wing, and I stay in my lane of preaching Christ and don't get in the lane of expressing political views.
SPEAKER_00:Well, I am I'm very much with you, I think, Dominic. Uh that's kind of church-state separation in its in its own way. That what I'm wanting to do in ministry is really to give people what I call the lenses through which they can see the world fairly clearly, that will enable them to assess situations in a fallen world. And if it's a vote, then to vote accordingly. I think American friends have found themselves in recent years in pretty considerable difficulty because they found themselves uh faced with candidates, neither of whom actually appeals to them as a person. But at least in my world, you know, they have they have they have at least understood this principle that the person of the individual is not the most important thing. That what will happen as a result of the individual may be very different from the question, do you like him or her or not? Um and so I, you know, I've always done some really, really interesting story. I don't know if we've time for this, but uh year a few years ago, on the 50th anniversary of Martin Lloyd Jones' lectures on preaching and preachers, which were given at Westminster Seminary, I was asked to give the lecture in London, the uh Lloyd Jones Memorial Lecture, on preaching and preachers. And at the end, I'm trying to land the plane, and there is a photograph of him in Ian Murray's biographies of him, in which he's being introduced to the Queen by Dr. Marjorie Blackie, who was a member of his congregation, and this was her retirement due, and the Queen had turned up to it. And so I thought Dr. Lloyd John's face here expresses how I think he thought about preaching. So I thought there is a sense of privilege in meeting the monarch and a sense of modesty, humility in meeting the monarch. And so that was how I landed the plane, I thought, quite well. And I I didn't realize I'd cause some turbulence because uh his daughter, who who died recently, Anne, whom I knew, came up to me. I didn't know her well. She said, that was very fine. She said, I don't like that photograph. So I think it's a very nice photograph. So as the conversation went on, she said, No, we don't like that photograph. And then she told me why, and it blew me out of the water. She said, Because my father was a Republican. And I thought, I should have thought about that. Welshman, lover of the Puritans. It never crossed my mind. And I wondered, did anyone in Westminster Chapel when he was minister there know that he was a Republican and not a royalist? And my guess was probably not. Because he stayed in his lane. He stayed in his lane, you know. Um So I think I think that is a great I think we do our congregation a kind of disservice if we tell them what to think and what to do but are unable to show, like the Westminster Confession is this expression that I think is very helpful, that this conclusion is drawn from Scripture by good and necessary consequence. And I I think sometimes people think, well, this is good consequence, so there is no other way you can do it. But you've got to show also by necessary consequence to be able to bind something on people's consciences. Give me an example of that. Umone might say, in in connection with the with the teaching of the Westminster Confession, just to use it as an example of what is true of Scripture, um, my view is consistent with what the confession says. But there may be other views that are consistent with what the confession says. So if you think of the way Paul comported himself, in one context, comporting himself as a Jew, in another context comporting himself as a Gentile believer, somebody might say you are being inconsistent. Um you have to be one or the other. And I think Paul would say from the gospel you cannot show by good and necessary consequence that that's the case. And I think it's a very it's not a principle that answers all the questions, but I think it is a principle that dissolves some of the unnecessary tensions that there are. So, like for example, what what he does in Romans 14 and 15, it is a really good consequence of the gospel that you eat meat, right? That uh you don't mind having bacon and eggs for your breakfast. But it's not a necessary consequence of the gospel that you eat bacon and eggs for your breakfast. And unless you can show that it's a necessary consequence as well as a good consequence, then you cannot impose that as a dogma on the life of the church. And you know, in Romans 14, 15 he does this really beautiful job of seeking to dissolve the tensions that presumably have arisen in a church where the the Jewish believers have been thrown out because of Claudius's decree and have come back and discovered we're in a gentile church now. What are we going to do? And and we're upsetting our gentile friends and they're upsetting us.
SPEAKER_01:Tell us about, as a minister in Scotland, your interactions with the Queen. How did you know about this?
SPEAKER_00:Well, um, so uh the Queen uh would would vacation in the summer in Scotland, in at Balmoral Castle. And um I think Victoria actually built the church, not individually, um, but built the church that is just outside the gates of Balmoral Castle, which is where the Queen would worship. And there would be invitations given to people to go and preach. And I I got an invitation to go, which I I actually declined, um, and will not go into the reasons for declining it. But then one of the royal chaplains called me and said, You would really be helping us if you came. And I think he was probably evangelically sympathetic, but I also kind of had picked up that there were grumblings and murmurings that the Queen rarely heard evangelical preachers or preachers who weren't known as he is an evangelical. And I thought, well, maybe this is the tactic that when people say that again, oh sure, we had that man Ferguson two years ago. We of course we have evangelicals. So so I then I accepted the invitation. And accepting the invitation meant that you spent the weekend with them and and lived with them. It was in a way In the castle. In the castle. Um for me it was a bit like and had breakfast and yeah, so it was a bit like entering a soap opera you had watched all your life. Like watching the crown. She was the only queen I could remember.
SPEAKER_01:Well, I mean, just when you were talking about Lloyd Jones and The Queen. I mean, you think she was the monarch back then?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Yeah. So it was a it was a really interesting experience. Uh a very interesting experience, illuminating experience. Um and in in in many ways it was um it was a it was a it was a it was an opportunity to serve the Lord. There are I didn't sign the official Secrets Act, but there are there are some things that happened over the weekend I might tell somebody personally, but I wouldn't I wouldn't share on the podcast. It's just us. It's just us. The one thing I would say was the um the queen, the other members of the royal family came down for breakfast. The queen does not come down for breakfast. But uh on the Sunday night when the whole weekend was over, that w it really struck me that she came right across the room to speak to me, uh, to thank me for the message in church. And I I thought afterwards she she didn't need to do that. Um It was uh it was it was really a signal of grace. Um I uh I n I know a funeral director who knows the funeral director, and he told me that that the funeral director uh who had gone to Balmoral, the one thing he he kind of regretted was that he didn't make a note of the passage in the Bible that was open beside her. Now, an open Bible could mean anything, but you know, my impression of her was that she was a genuine woman. A duteous, she was a very dutious woman. Um and you know, to be honest, I always felt she's surrounded by actually intellectually quite able men, but they preach for ten minutes, and that's a world in which you're not really being fed the mana from heaven, and grow growing is is difficult, and so I kind of assumed she read her Bible and prayed.
SPEAKER_01:How do you preach to power?
SPEAKER_00:To power, yeah. Um by ignoring its power, I think. Um there were lots of other people in the in the church, and in in my uh so the the the preacher is invited, his wife is not invited, and one member of the royal family explained to me that this is because Victoria did not invite the wives. So there are obviously still men in grey suits who tell you um this is the way it's always been done. But my memory of the service, it's a while ago now, was it really was a it was a great service. And my wife and daughter actually came to the service, and um somebody said on the way out, uh a visitor who was presumably there, um said to them, assuming that they were members of the church, the local church, said, Is it always like this? Um So there I think there really was a touch of the spirit in the service. And I I I preached the way I would have preached to any congregation.
SPEAKER_01:Um warning against legalism and antinomianism has been one of the themes of your work over the years. Um what are your concerns in the contemporary church at the moment? Probably both.
SPEAKER_00:Um I've I've kind of long held, well, let just go back in my personal life. I was, I think, I was probably about 15 or 16, a very young Christian. My family didn't go to church till after I was converted. And some of the books that were fed to me, one of the first was Watchmen Knees, The Normal Christian Life. And I could, I could just never get it. But it caused me to wrestle with the question, what does it actually mean to be united to Christ? Um, it it took me a year or two actually to actually to kind of pay attention to the fact that Christians are in Christ. I remember maybe I was 15 reading 2 Corinthians 12, Paul says, I knew a man in Christ, and thinking, who was this man in Christ? He knew. And it just didn't dawn on me he was talking about himself. And rather than saying, I am a Christian, actually, that was how he would have described himself as a man in Christ. Um, but then by the time I was 17, I was a first-year university student, and I was really, I was just still struggling to understand passages like Romans 6, Colossians 3, other passages, Galatians 2.20, which was like a big verse that you had to memorize, but nobody ever actually explained what it meant to be crucified with Christ. And um I heard a message in my very first term at university that really helped me. And so I suppose union with Christ was a theme embedded in scripture that had become a special help to me. And it wasn't, it didn't take long to realize that whether Paul was dealing with legalism in the church or antinomianism in the church, he was always bringing both of these diversions back to the principle we're united to Christ. And if we're united to Christ, these implications follow. Um and and so that that's just been something that I guess that's lingered in my mind and probably come out in in my writings over the years.
SPEAKER_01:Now we've had a number of uh questions submitted on Facebook for us. Uh I'm just gonna bowl them up and then get you to hit them quickly. This is the lightning round. Yeah, this is the lightning raping with short answers, you know, Dominic. How could Jodie Jessup asks, how can we disciple believers in such a way that Christ becomes not just central to their doctrine, but central to their affections?
SPEAKER_00:Well, I think being conscious of that, that individuals are not just brains. Um, and I think that then affects the way we quotes disciple them. Um I'm I've become kind of uber sensitive to different forms of discipleship in which the relationship is more one of um teacher and student, and less one of older friend and younger friend. So in my years at seminary, no, it not every seminary student bonds to the same faculty member, which is good, but different students bond to different faculty members or are attracted to their style or whatever. And so over the over the years I taught in seminary, students would come and say, Would you mentor me? And I always said, No, I won't, but I will be your friend if you want. Because I think I sensed um that that was what Jesus mentored his disciples into friendship. Um, you're my friends.
SPEAKER_01:I mean, that's very interesting. We're having a thing here of increasing pressure to be involved in professional supervision. And and yet I think actually, if we had better, deeper friendships, that would be better.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah. I mean, the man who was my minister when I was a student, William Still, who's a legendary figure, um, great and eccentric man who had no formal education between about 14 and 26. And so he didn't preach in straight lines with easy to follow divisions. He was more like a deep sea diver, I sometimes say, who where are you, Mr. Still? And then he would come up with a peril in his hand. And um he he invested himself in me without me ever feeling there is a kind of authority structure here. And I think that that's that's actually what I fear. Um I actually fear it sometimes in counseling as well, that the counselor is the expert and and the Christian becomes a client. Whereas in the life of the church, which the life of the church in the ministry of the word, which is where we centrally get our counseling, the relationship is pastor to people, friend to friend, brother to brother, brother to sister. Um, and I would rather see those kinds of relationships develop. And so sometimes, you know, I've said to younger men, you know, the best thing you can do is to get near enough someone who is already a minister, near enough to smell his breath. And I I I think that's that's how it works.
SPEAKER_01:Uh, last question, Mark Allison. In what ways do even faithful and learned evangelicals in the Anglo Sphere sometimes fail to grasp the whole Christ?
SPEAKER_00:Well, he is so whole, we're all struggling to grasp him. Um I I often go back to what I think is the wisdom of the early fathers and their emphasis on the reality of the two natures united in the one person. Um, because I I have this feeling that many evangelicals think, for example, that Christ did what he did by infusing a percent or two of deity into his life. The the kind of the the the proof text, as it were, that uh I often use is so uh Luke 2 tells us that Jesus uh went back home, was obedient to his parents, um, and he grew in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and man. And you can grasp that he grew in stature, you know, obviously. You can maybe grasp he grew in wisdom, although that might be a little more challenging for you, because like in your mind you kind of assume he was God and so he knew everything. Um you you understand that at least with many men he grew in favor. But do you have a Jesus who could have grown in favor with God? And if I if I quote that text, I kind of usually pause and actually, you know, look into the faces of people in the congregation, and I'm I'm always struck by this kind of um because maybe it's because we have sp we have inevitably had to defend his deity, that we we can easily lose touch with his humanity. And then if like if I fast forward from that to Hebrews 13 and the author of Hebrews saying that he is the same yesterday, today, and forever, which have a kind of theory many Christians think is a rather long way of saying he's eternal, when what it is actually saying is what he was yesterday, what he was in the authors yesterday, that is to say, what he was, at least in the days, what he calls the days of his flesh. That is who he is and what he is for you today. Which interestingly for me has kind of come to mean that the letter in the New Testament that brings the incarnate Christ closest to us is actually the epistle to the Hebrews, which I think some of us find one of the more difficult parts of Scripture to preach. So I think having uh having a good theological paradigm which the Father sought to give us helps us to take in, gives us, as I sometimes say, velcro strips, to take in what is actually there in the text, but left to ourselves without the communion of the saints, we we might never notice.
SPEAKER_01:I have a stack more questions, but we're out of time. So thank you for coming.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you for having me, Tom.
SPEAKER_01:My guest on The Pastor's Heart, Sinclair Ferguson, and uh Sinclair in Australia at the moment, uh, speaking in Melbourne, Brisbane, and Sydney on a whirlwind trip. And uh he's out here with Ligner Ministries. My name's Dominic Steele. This has been The Pastor's Heart. We'll look forward to your company next Tuesday afternoon.
