Calling and Gifting
All that we are and have as Christians are gifts of God because of his grace and purpose planned for our lives. It is a gift of God’s grace that I am a Christian who is also called to be a pastor. But these gifts of grace are not the same as what the New Testament calls spiritual gifts.
Pastors and teachers are a part of a group of servant leaders given to the church to equip God’s people for Kingdom service in and through the body of Christ. This is what Paul teaches in Ephesians 4:11-13. He writes, So Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers, to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.
Biblical scholars differ on whether the “pastors and teachers” in this passage represents the same office or differing offices within the whole. I would see it like this: There are some in the church who are called as teachers, but they are neither called nor gifted to serve as pastors. Some of the most able Bible teachers I have known never felt a call to preach. Pastors on the other hand, are both called and gifted as pastors and teachers. Their primary calling is to preach and teach the Word of God. I would make this distinction also: Not all true teaching is preaching, but all true preaching involves teaching of the Scriptures at some level.
The point I am attempting to make is that everyone God calls into his service as a pastor, he also, by the Holy Spirit, endows with certain spiritual gifts, primary of which are preaching the Word and teaching the truths of Scripture. In his famous Lectures to My Students, C. H. Spurgeon told the young men enrolled in his ministerial college, “The first sign of the heavenly call is an intense, all-absorbing desire for the work.” He goes on to caution against “whims” and “fascination.” He said, “The fascination of the preacher’s office is very great to weak minds, and hence I earnestly caution all young men not to mistake whim for inspiration, and a childish preference for a call of the Holy Spirit.” Spurgeon then offered a second sign of calling to the pastorate. He said, “In the second place, combined with the earnest desire to become a pastor, there must be aptness to teach and some measure of the other qualities needful for the office of a public instructor…If a man be called to preach, he will be endowed with a degree of speaking ability, which he will cultivate and increase.” In other words, Spurgeon was saying that like all spiritual gifts, the gifts of preaching and teaching must be developed.
In another set of more recent lectures, also captured in a book, was Martin Lloyd-Jones’ series of lectures on preaching at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia in 1969. The book, Preaching and Preachers, is still in print and celebrated as one of the finest expositions on the practice and primacy of preaching and teaching in the church. About calling and gifting he said, “What is a preacher? The first thing, obviously, is that he is a speaker.” He goes on to explain that if a person “has not the gift of speech, whatever else he may have, he is not going to make a preacher…by basic definition, if a man has not the gift of speech, he cannot be a preacher.”
Other things go into the life and work of a pastor, of course, but this is without question the essential thing: The Lord who said, “I will build my church,” chooses and calls and enables by his grace and the empowering of the Holy Spirit to carry out the “ministry of the word” (Acts 6:4).
The Apostle Paul in his own lectures to his student, exhorted Timothy to: Devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, to preaching and to teaching (I Timothy 4:13); Preach the word; be prepared in season and out of season; correct, rebuke and encourage—with great patience and careful instruction (II Timothy 4:2).
I believe that at the core of every true pastor, one called and gifted by God, is a heart filled with the love of Christ, the Good Shepherd, who loved and still loves his sheep as well as those not yet in his sheepfold (John 17), and Shepherd-love involves caring, concern, and compassion that are expressed most profoundly in the powerful preaching, teaching, and ministry of the Word.