John Brown on the trials of the ministry

Note:  Below is one of the points of application from my sermon on Galatians 4:12-20.

"Am I therefore become your enemy, because I tell you the truth?" (Galatians 4:16) 

 

Application: This passage reminds ministers, and all those engaged in personal ministry as well, that the exercise of the ministry is very often painful and discouraging.
 

John Brown in his 1853 commentary on Galatians zeroes in on this application:

The Christian ministry, if entered on with appropriate sentiments, and prosecuted with conscientious fidelity, will be found replete with difficulties.  Its toils are arduous and unceasing—its trials numerous and severe.

The minister must submit,

to labors often ill-appreciated, sometimes unkindly requited, and with meeting trials and afflictions which are the more severe as coming  from a quarter from which nothing but support and encouragement has been expected.

Brown continues:

It is not an impossible, nor even an uncommon, thing for persons who seemed to be—who were—most tenderly attached to their ministers, and attached to him in consequence of having received from him spiritual advantage, to have their affections entirely alienated from him whom they so greatly esteemed and loved; and what is worse still, it is not impossible, nor very uncommon, to find this alienation of affection to their minister arising out of , or at any rate connected with, indifference about, or rejection of, those grand peculiarities of Christian truths….

He adds:

This is one of the severest trials which a Christian minister can meet with; and perhaps there are few situations in which he is so strongly tempted to indulge something like a resentful, almost a malignant feeling, as when thus situated, in reference to those designing men, whose selfish intrigues have been the means of injuring the best interests of his people, and robbing him of the dearest jewel of his heart.  It is comparatively an easy thing for a minister to be reproached, and ridiculed, and persecuted by an ungodly world; but he only knows who has felt it how bitter it is to see those whose conversion and spiritual improvement he flattered himself he had been the instrument, to guide whom to heaven he felt to be his most delightful work on earth, and to meet with whom in heaven who was not of the least delightful anticipations of eternity—to see them regard him with “hard unkindness, altered eye,” especially if, when they are turning their backs on him, they also seem in extreme hazard of making shipwreck of faith and of a good conscience.

In the end, Brown suggests that Paul in his interaction with the Galatians is a model of how the minister is to deal with such circumstances with discretion, patience, and affection.  Can we learn to do the same?

John Brown on Galatians 2:20: "He is the soul of my soul, the life of my life."

I used this quote from John Brown on Galatians 2:20 ("I am crucified with Christ:  nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me....") in last Sunday's sermon:

 

Christ died, and in him I died; Christ revived and in him I revived.  I am a dead man with regard to the law, but I am a living man in regard to Christ.  The law has killed me, and by doing so, it has set me free from itself.  I have no more to do with the law.  The life I have now is not the life of a man under the law, but the life of a man delivered from the law; having died and risen again with Christ Jesus, Christ’s righteousness justifies me, Christ’s spirit animates me.  My relations to God are his relations.  The influences under which I live are the influences under which he lives.  Christ’s views are my views; Christ’s feelings are my feelings.  He is the soul of my soul, the life of my life.  My state, my sentiments, my feelings, my conduct are all Christian (p. 97).

JTR

Luther's call to follow the "stubbornness" of the apostle Paul

Here is a quote from Luther on the model of  inspired tenacity given by the apostle Paul which I used in last Sunday's sermon on Galatians 2:1-10:

Let us learn this kind of stubbornness from the apostle. We will suffer our goods to be taken away, our name, our life, and all that we have, but the gospel, our faith, Jesus Christ, we will never suffer to be wrested from us:  and cursed be that humility that here abaseth and submitteth itself; nay, rather let every Christian be proud and spare not, except he will deny Christ.  Wherefore, God assisting me, my forehead shall be harder than all men’s foreheads. Here I take my motto, “Credo nulli.”  I will give place to none.  I am, and ever will be, stout and stern, and will not give one inch to any creature.  Charity giveth place, “for it suffereth all things, believeth all things, endureth all things:” but faith giveth no place (as cited in John Brown, Galatians, p. 76).

The Vision (9/6/12): And they glorified God in me (Galatians 1:24).

Thus far in our Sunday morning Galatians sermon series we have been expositing the opening chapters in which Paul provides the autobiographical account of how the Lord turned him from a would-be-destroyer of the gospel to a preacher of the gospel.  In Galatians 1:24 Paul notes the response of his fellow believers to his conversion:  “And they glorified God in me.”  Below is part of the Scottish minister John Brown’s 1853 commentary on that verse (with quotes from Barnes and Perkins):

Well they might; and so may—so ought—we.  Divine grace never had a more glorious trophy, Christianity never made, in one individual, so important an acquisition.  “We may still glorify and praise God for the grace manifested in the conversion of Saul of Tarsus.  What does not the world owe to him!  What do we not owe him!  No man did so much in establishing the Christian religion as he did; no one among the apostles was the means of converting and saving so many souls; no one has left so many and so valuable writings for the edification of the church.  To him we owe the invaluable epistles—so full of truth, and eloquence, and promises, and consolations—on one of which we are commenting; and to him the church owes, some of its most elevated and ennobling views of the nature of the Christian doctrine and duty.  After the lapse, therefore of eighteen hundred years, we should not cease to glorify God for the conversion of this wonderful man, and should feel that we have cause of thankfulness that He changed the infuriated persecutor to a holy and devoted apostle.”  “Here we see what is the right way of honouring the saints, and that is to glorify God in them and for them.  As for religious worship of adoration and invocation, it is proper to God, and the saints desire it not” (p. 68).

Indeed, we still marvel over and give glory to God for Paul’s conversion and for the conversion of countless other lesser known former enemies who have become God’s friends through Christ.

Grace and peace, Pastor Jeff Riddle

John Brown on the hazards of tampering with the gospel

I preached Sunday morning on Another Gospel from Galatians 1:6-10.  Here are John Brown’s comments on Paul’s attack against false teachers in the churches of Galatia who took his “system of pure grace” and converted it “into a variety of the law of works”:

It is a most hazardous thing to tamper with the gospel of Christ.  It must neither be abridged nor enlarged.  It cannot admit of either without injury.  An apparently very simple addition may completely “pervert” it.  It seems to many no great harm to substitute, in the room of the plain scriptural statement of the gospel, a system which makes our faith and repentance, in connection with Christ’s sacrifice, the ground of pardon; but we find the apostle pronouncing a similar system a perversion of the gospel of Christ—a turning of things upside down—a making of Christ of none effect.  No greater curse can befall a Christian church than to have teachers who , by their confused and erroneous statements, trouble the minds of believers, and attempt to pervert the gospel of Christ (p. 44).

JTR