Whether the dust has settled from my recent series or not, who can say. In my experience, these things tend to bounce around for a bit, and sometimes, they don’t gain a head of steam until further downstream. Maybe the next time I gather with friends, I will feel that awkward silence that says, “Somethin’ ain’t rat.” Who knows?

But I have the urge to unpack a few thoughts in conclusion. Consider this my apology for not apologizing.

I was pretty young when Berean Baptist Church called me to become her pastor. I was woefully unprepared. Pastoral ministry always seemed to have a romantic quality in my imagination – a fiction that evaporated quickly once the church voted me into office. I quickly discovered the nature of the battle we are in for the hearts and souls of men. 

Early on, I felt the weight of responsibility that God had placed on me. God made me see the importance of rightly dividing the Word of truth so believers would be built and not destroyed. I fear that I hurt more than I helped in those early years. God pressed on me a sense that eternal souls hung in the balance and that if I did not carefully handle God’s Word, those souls would be destroyed.

This impacted me profoundly. In my earliest years as a pastor, I followed the examples of men before me. I offered heavy doses of opinion sprinkled lightly with Biblical references. It didn’t take long for me to recognize that, not only were my opinions like a bruised reed and smoking flax, but that the people didn’t travel all the way to church three times a week so they could learn more about my mind.

That launched me into a long practice of expository preaching. I wouldn’t give much for those early series (my first series was through the book of Romans), but I will say that the challenge of digging into the text so I could give the meaning and application (instead of my impressions based loosely on the text) transformed me and shaped my ministry. 

In those early years, I came to recognize a strange kind of pressure to conform to the opinions of others. I felt in my bones that if I followed certain texts to their plain meaning, I would be ostracized and rejected. My sense of foreboding was confirmed one unfortunate day when I publicly expressed an opinion outside the vein of conventional wisdom. The attacks against me were furious and personal, and to my shock and horror, I discovered that several pastors were gunning for my church, attempting to persuade the men of my church to expel me as pastor. 

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