The Power of the Pulpit (with H. B. Charles Jr.)

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0:00:00 – (Matt Smethurst): If you’re ready to go deeper in theology, Southern Seminary’s PhD programs were built for you. With flexible formats from fully online to modular to in person. Southern makes serious doctoral level theological training accessible to the pastor. Called to bring the depth of God’s word to God’s people. Study with faculty committed to strengthening the church and bring that depth back to the people you lead.

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0:00:34 – (H. B. Charles): There are those who think that expository preaching is just heavy in interpretation and devoid of real life application. I think that is a caricature of expository preaching and it is a mark of expository preaching done wrong. In its essence, expository preaching is both explanation and exhortation.

0:01:04 – (Matt Smethurst): Welcome friends, to another episode of the Everyday Pastor, a podcast from the Gospel Coalition on the nuts and bolts of ministry. My name is Matt Smethurst and I’m Luke Duncan and we’re joined today by our good friend HB Charles. HB is the pastor of Shiloh Church in Jacksonville, Florida. He’s a council member with the Gospel Coalition. He’s the author of several helpful books including On Preaching, On Pastoring and On Worship.

0:01:33 – (Matt Smethurst): And today we wanted to talk with HB in particular about that first topic on preaching. Some of you listeners may be aware of his preaching ministry. Maybe you’ve heard him preach in person. It’s a real treat for those of us who have. He preached at our church at River City Baptist here in Richmond not too long ago and our congregation was deeply blessed. HB thanks for joining us for this conversation.

0:02:00 – (H. B. Charles): Hey Matt, Hey L. It’s a joy to be with you both. Thanks for having me.

0:02:03 – (Matt Smethurst): Now, HB you’ve been doing this preaching thing for a long time. You became a pastor at 17, is that right?

0:02:12 – (H. B. Charles): Yeah, I trusted Christ as a boy and started preaching as a boy and was preaching pretty regularly by my early teens and succeeded my father who passed away in 1989. And the next year, in 1990, I was called to serve the church while still a teenager, still a senior at Los Angeles High School.

0:02:35 – (Matt Smethurst): HB what did that season as a young preacher do to you spiritually and emotionally that people still may not fully understand? How did that form the man you are today?

0:02:49 – (H. B. Charles): Well, you ask how you know. I’m often asked, how does a 17 year old pastor a church? And there are a lot of answers to that question, but maybe the most blunt answer is he does it. The men were determined to lead the church and just let me preach. So that was my singular responsibility. I led the pulpit ministry And I led the prayer meetings. And really those early formative years were teaching me Acts 6:4, that the pastoral ministry is to devote itself to prayer and the ministry of the word. That was critical to my spiritual formation and the development of my philosophy of ministry.

0:03:40 – (Ligon Duncan): HB you grew up under your father’s preaching, and he was a faithful man, but not an expository preacher in the way that you are. So talk to me. How did you form your convictions about the way you ought to preach while admiring your father, whom you loved?

0:03:59 – (H. B. Charles): Yeah, my dad is my first and foremost preaching hero. He was a textual preacher. So from week to week, he preached typically one verse every week. That verse had nothing to do with last week’s verse and kind of his homiletical hero, historical hero, is mine, Charles Spurgeon. And he was an evangelist at heart. He looked for the gospel implications of the text. He was also pretty eloquent in the pulpit.

0:04:35 – (H. B. Charles): He was an orator is the word I would use to describe him. And I just immediately felt like as a boy, I would not be able to. I wouldn’t be able to do that. So very early on in my ministry, in my teens, I’m reading books. So I’m preaching. I’m reading Al Faisal’s stuff, who is a prophet of Southwestern. I’m reading Jerry Vine’s work. So I’m preaching. I’m reading even Walter Kaiser’s Toward an Exegetical Theology.

0:05:03 – (H. B. Charles): So I’m slowly being convinced of expositional preaching. And then I heard it done by the late Dr. E.K. bailey, who is the founding pastor of Concord Church. And that sealed the deal for me that expository preaching was the right way, the most faithful way to handle scripture and preaching.

0:05:24 – (Ligon Duncan): How did you equip yourself for that? HB Obviously good preaching is caught, and I’m all about that. I had same privilege as you to sit under great preaching and to listen to great preaching. But there’s certain things a person has to do for himself as well. So what are the things that you did for yourself in order to exercise an expository ministry?

0:05:50 – (H. B. Charles): So my dad would always say that he didn’t want me to be a jack leg preacher. I had no idea what that meant. I just knew it wasn’t a good thing. And to be honest with you, this year, this year is like the first time I ever looked up that word jack leg. And it’s like an amateur or phony. So I did not want to be that. And I knew as a young guy, people would not. I wouldn’t have credibility. I would have to be taken seriously.

0:06:29 – (H. B. Charles): And I knew that I didn’t have age or experience, so that had to be a result of my work. So I worked hard. I read everything I could get my hands on. I was listening to as much preaching as I could. Just we had a weekly newspaper that would have church events in Los Angeles and I’m Sunday marking what events? Who’s coming to town for me to hear. I still have in one of my rooms shelves of tapes from those early years where I’m buying as many tapes and I’m just listening to preaching.

0:07:13 – (H. B. Charles): And I didn’t have much of a social life. You know, there’s old story about the pianist that’s playing the concert and he walks off stage and a young protege says to him, I’d give my life to be able to play like that. And the maestro says, young man, I did. I did not have a plan B. I gave my life to preaching and I got as many reps as I could. The other thing I’ll mention finally related to that is I started pastoring at 17.

0:07:50 – (H. B. Charles): So the church kind of. I was thrown in and did not have time to go to seminary. I was pastoring a pretty well established church that was pulling me in a lot of different directions. But that church gave me an unlimited book allowance. And just one, they gave me a generous book allowance. They did not. They did whatever they could to help me to have time to pray, read and think. And they expected me to come to the pulpit prepared. There’s a lot of things they made excuses. He’s a young man. He won’t be able to do A, B and C.

0:08:26 – (H. B. Charles): There was no excuse for me coming to the pulpit unprepared. And the fact that I had that honor and privilege, I took that very, very seriously.

0:08:34 – (Ligon Duncan): That’s glorious.

0:08:35 – (Matt Smethurst): Let’s talk about that process of preparation. HB I love how you’ve said before, a passion to preach without a burden to study is a desire to perform.

0:08:48 – (H. B. Charles): Yep.

0:08:48 – (Matt Smethurst): So talk about that burden to study. Maybe before you talk about studying the text, how do you prepare yourself? What’s the role of prayer and your own intimacy with Christ as it relates to sermon prep?

0:09:07 – (H. B. Charles): Sure. So how does a 17 year old pastor a church? Another answer to that question is I was blessed to pastor a church that was committed to believing prayer. During my pastorate, there met a 6am prayer meeting every morning at that church where members gathered in person to pray for me. That prayer meeting continued after I was gone and they were still remembering me every day in Prayer that didn’t end until Covid forced them in Los Angeles to stop that prayer meeting.

0:09:48 – (H. B. Charles): So I was in an atmosphere that prioritized prayer and that was critical to my spiritual formation, but also very critical to my development as a, as a preacher. The way I say it, I published a book under this title, It Happens After Prayer. And there’s a lot of things we could do to help the situation after we pray, but there’s nothing we could do to help the situation until we pray. When we work, we work. When we pray, God works. And I think that applies to private study and public ministry in every sphere of both of those realities.

0:10:27 – (H. B. Charles): So I do have a process of personal devotion that includes Bible intake and prayer and scripture memorization that is divorced from my sermon preparation. And I want a firewall there so that my time with God is non utilitarian. But primarily I’m starting my day with that time of personal devotion with the Lord. In terms of the more general study for preaching, when I was young, the advice I kept getting was that you should spend your mornings with God, your afternoons with your people, and your evenings with your family.

0:11:10 – (H. B. Charles): So that has been the general pattern of my schedule as best as I could guard that. So I have been blessed in two churches I’ve pastored, who they’re going to pull at me. The church I serve is going to pull at me in a lot of different directions, but they don’t bother me in the morning. They are going to let me spend those mornings in prayer and preparation. Then it becomes my responsibility to make sure I am using that time wisely and strategically.

0:11:43 – (H. B. Charles): But most mornings I am in sermon preparation and then stealing whatever time I can in the afternoon and evenings.

0:11:51 – (Matt Smethurst): We’re recording this in the morning. Listeners should know, which means that HB in hanging out with Lig, he’s hanging. He’s spending time with the voice of God.

0:12:05 – (H. B. Charles): Absolutely.

0:12:09 – (Ligon Duncan): HB you’ve been involved in promoting expository preaching for a long time, and you preach at expositional preaching conferences. You have your own conference Cutting It Straight, where you have promoted this. Undoubtedly you have heard misconceptions about expositional preaching and you’ve heard objections to expositional preaching. Can you talk about some of the misconceptions that you run into out there? Because I do as well.

0:12:41 – (Ligon Duncan): And some of the objections that you run into and how you might answer those things?

0:12:46 – (H. B. Charles): Sure. So one of the things that I hear often is that expositional preaching is not how Jesus preached. It’s not how Paul preached, it’s not how Peter Preached, just read their sermons and their writings in the New Testament. It’s not how they preached, to which I just respond. They were inspired and we are not. But I think there are those who think that expository preaching is just heavy in interpretation and devoid of.

0:13:23 – (H. B. Charles): Of real life application. I think that is a caricature of expository preaching and it is a mark of expository preaching done wrong. In its essence, expository preaching is both explanation and exhortation. There are some that think it’s just a running commentary of the text that you read you an extended passage and things that jump out at you along the way that you think it might be significant to note without that sermon being bound together with a main idea, a point.

0:13:57 – (H. B. Charles): I think there are those who think that expository preaching is pulpit exegesis, where I call it when they use the pulpit as a cooking show and bring languages and all of this exegetical detail and are showing people in the pulpit how to make a sermon when they should be serving fresh bread on Sunday morning. And then I think the other thing is that I think in our circles you can also treat expository preaching as if it’s a theological lecture where it is something more appropriate for a classroom.

0:14:39 – (H. B. Charles): Probably your professor would give you an A on it, but it doesn’t, you know, feed the elderly saint sitting in the front or the young person sitting in the back. It is not true for life, if I may say it that way. And just letting the text speak for itself.

0:14:57 – (Matt Smethurst): Yeah. So along those lines, HB what are some of the common. So those are misconceptions. What are some of the common mistakes you see among young preachers who maybe have a right understanding of what expository preaching is, but in the pulpit they’re doing something else.

0:15:20 – (H. B. Charles): Sure. Yep. I think one of the mistakes is, and I struggle with this, I mean, I just think it’s the challenge of application. We are to be doers of the word and not hearers only. And I think it is incumbent upon faithful preaching to exhort the hearer to live out the life of the teachings of our faith. I could tell you when I started learning expository preaching, I also think that I was very serious about it, but I think I viewed the role of the sermon is to just get out as much as I can about what I’ve learned about the text that week.

0:16:03 – (H. B. Charles): So my sermons were just data dumps, you know,

0:16:09 – (Matt Smethurst): you brought all the pots and pans to the dinner table. Yes.

0:16:13 – (H. B. Charles): And I’m telling you, I mean, I had a preaching mentor, Maurice Watson, who was like, hb, I appreciate what you are striving to do, but if you’re going to deal with the text in a serious way, you’re trying. You can’t do that and have a 40 minute introduction, you know, where everything that I couldn’t find a place for in the outline, you know, I just stuck it in.

0:16:35 – (Matt Smethurst): The front porch becomes so big, you’re out of breath by the time you get to the house.

0:16:40 – (H. B. Charles): Absolutely. I mean, I was putting the big screen and the couch and the dinner table all on the front porch and then wondering why nobody wanted to come in the house with me.

0:16:51 – (Matt Smethurst): It was good. Hey, it was a good intro, let’s be honest. Yeah, yeah.

0:16:55 – (H. B. Charles): Yes, yes.

0:16:57 – (Matt Smethurst): And so as you’re training up young preachers to grow, for example, in application, what are some specific concrete tips you give for how a preacher can grow an application?

0:17:14 – (H. B. Charles): I recommend people make use of the application grid that our friend Mark Dever uses. There is a section which can be found online, which can be found online. There is a section in the book Come and See that is by Jonathan Pennington, that is a popularly written work on Bible interpretation. But his little section on application, duties, character, goals and perspective. I just think those are four good principles to be thinking through.

0:17:56 – (H. B. Charles): What is the duty here? How does this develop my character? How does this shape my perspective? How I should see the world around me and goals? What should I be striving for? I could keep going on and on, but one of the things I think matters is you just gotta have a pastor’s heart and you gotta love the people to, you know, dear Martin, Lloyd Jones is right. It is one thing to love to preach, it is quite another thing to love those to whom you preach.

0:18:25 – (H. B. Charles): And I think if you have a shepherd’s heart and you love those to whom you preach. My congregation is not with me in my study, but they are with me in my study. And I know the questions that they ask me. I know some who are godly people that are going through sickness, their children have gone astray, they are in a season of grief, they are unemployed or underemployed. And I those burdens that my members have, I feel the weight of them as I am preparing.

0:19:01 – (H. B. Charles): And I want to point them to Christ and his total sufficiency for every need, including the deep needs of the soul. So it may not be, you know, all of the technical tips about application, but I think I get the job done, of course, with the help of the Holy Spirit, by just Carrying a burden of spiritual concern for those to whom I preach to week in and week out.

0:19:32 – (Matt Smethurst): The pastor who goes deeper in theology doesn’t just become a better thinker, he becomes a better Shepherd. Southern Seminary’s PhD programs are forming pastor theologians, men who have wrestled seriously with the great tradition of Christian thought and who bring that depth back to the people they love and lead. What you gain in your study, your congregation receives in. Southern Seminary’s faculty are here to support you in your work to strengthen the church.

0:20:01 – (Matt Smethurst): Southern’s PhD program is built to fit alongside your ministry, offering flexible formats from fully online to modular to in person, so you can pursue the kind of rigorous theological training that will change how you pastor without stepping away from your church. If you’re ready to go deeper, Southern Seminary’s PhD program is where that begins. Visit sbts.edu PhD to learn more.

0:20:33 – (Ligon Duncan): Yeah, so good. You know, I might. I might throw in. And by the way, fellow preachers, I’ve not done this myself, so I’m about to give you some advice that I’ve not done yet myself, but I’ve done it at least in my head. And that is, I love that application grid, by the way, hb, that you just recommended. And I love other tools like you just mentioned, the Pennington tool. There are other tools we could mention as well that make you think about different ways that you can bring the text to bear on people’s hearts. But it’s also good, in light of what you just said, to have sort of an application grid of your congregation, because not all the people sitting under you are the same and they’re not all struggling with the same thing.

0:21:19 – (Ligon Duncan): Sometimes we preach as if everybody in the congregation is in the same place and they’re not. And the Puritans were so aware that the people sitting under their noses were not all facing the same thing in the same way. And hence Puritan application often went on and on because they were trying to apply the text to 23 different things. And you have to watch out for that as well. That can be a problem too. But works like Thomas Brooks Precious Remedies Against Satan’s Devices reminded me, wow, there are actually a lot of different things that my people are struggling with.

0:22:00 – (Ligon Duncan): And so I think it’s probably good early in your ministry to go to a resource like that and build a little application grid in the sense of what are my people dealing with? And then to build that for your own congregation. What are the unique temptations of my people? What are they particularly struggling with in this particular geographical Location, demographical location, social location. What are the unique things that I need to help them in? That’s one way that we can love our people well and preach to our people well and not have them walking away saying, well, that didn’t have anything to do with my life.

0:22:39 – (Ligon Duncan): We would rather say, how did the pastor know that I was struggling with that? How did he know that that was exactly what I needed to hear today? Well, because the pastor’s been praying over you.

0:22:50 – (Matt Smethurst): You were in his study this week, even though you were in his study this week.

0:22:53 – (H. B. Charles): That’s right.

0:22:54 – (Ligon Duncan): You were in his heart, in his mind. He’s trying to think about how to bring the bear the word of God on your heart. So I wish I had done more of that earlier on. I think my application probably more came out of how God was, you know, addressing my own soul as I studied the passage and thinking, okay, well, if God’s helping my soul in this way, maybe he’ll help the people of God. And that’s important.

0:23:18 – (Ligon Duncan): But I do think your point about loving your people enough to know them, that’s an application unlocker for pastors.

0:23:29 – (H. B. Charles): If I can add a couple of things quickly, I would also say I read. One of the reasons I read Spurgeon is because I do think he is a model of very clean preaching, clear preaching. That did it. Well, you just, you know, oh, there for that mother who care. You know, he’s preaching the thousands and his mind is on the mother, you know, making dinner. I also listened to over the years, John Piper and Ralph Douglas West, a white pastor and a black pastor who I thought in their preaching, does corporate application from a pastoral perspective excellently well. I think that is helpful.

0:24:17 – (H. B. Charles): And I do think that it’s important for you to, as a pastor, to be knowing your church’s own idolatries. So it’s not my job. I’m not the Bishop of America. It’s not my job to address everything that’s going on in the larger church world and in the culture around us. There are specifics, specific high places in my own congregation that I need to be pulling down ways my congregation thinks about things and responds to things that I need to be aware of and pushing them in those areas to greater faithfulness to Christ.

0:24:52 – (Ligon Duncan): That’s really good. Matt, you’ve talked before about not trying to pastor Twitter, but pastor your own congregation. And that’s a good word. HB we all need to inhabit the world of the people that the Lord has granted us the responsibility of being the under shepherds to their souls and not focus on some sort of generic out there place. We’ll serve them better if we’re thinking about them.

0:25:20 – (H. B. Charles): Indeed.

0:25:21 – (Matt Smethurst): Well, I love what you’re saying, HB because for someone who preaches at conferences as much as you do, part of what you’re saying is that the bread and butter of your preaching ministry are not conference messages. You’re not preaching generic application at Shiloh Church. You’re preaching to a particular flock in a particular sheep pen for whom you will give account to God. Your first Father’s Day after your dad died, you preached a sermon titled the Lord knows what he is doing.

0:25:58 – (Matt Smethurst): How did grief, both then and since, how has grief shaped the way you preach to suffering people?

0:26:06 – (H. B. Charles): Yeah. So the week my father passed away, I was preaching a youth meeting at the Chapel Hill Baptist Church in Detroit, Michigan. So as I’m flying from Detroit to Los Angeles, the Lord calls my father from labor to reward. And I come home to the news that my. My dad had passed away. I’m sitting in the back seat with my suitcase and the men of the church are there waiting for me. I’m 16 years old. It is the day before Father’s Day.

0:26:41 – (H. B. Charles): They have come out to. To the car to tell me my dad passed. And I will tell you something about the man. When I got in the house, my family told me I needed to come in because the man wanted me to preach the next day. And my family, we needed to call a locksmith because people were going in. My daddy’s members were showing up, going in my dad’s studies to take a book. They just wanted something that belonged to him. They just loved the man.

0:27:15 – (H. B. Charles): But I think I was more shocked and stunned so much not to say no to telling me to preach the next day. And I had just preached that youth message on the last lunch in John chapter 6, and looked at that text again and saw that line that he asked these things to test Philip because he knew what he would do. And I restructured that to lean into that, that the Lord knew what he was doing. I will tell you, though, the week of my dad’s funeral, my dad’s pastor friends told me as I wept at his funeral, don’t cry.

0:27:59 – (H. B. Charles): Your dad would not be proud to see you sitting here crying. You know where your dad is. There is nothing for you to cry about. Stop. Stop that crying. And I so appreciated their care and concern. And they were absolutely wrong. They were just absolutely wrong. And it took me some time to come to grips with that, that being saved doesn’t mean, you are bionic, and you are. Yes. The Bible says that we should not sorrow as those who have no hope, but it doesn’t mean we should not sorrow.

0:28:43 – (H. B. Charles): So it took me a while to go through the grief process, and I feel like not only the loss of a loved one at an early age and then me really having the grief process delayed makes me really, really sensitive as I am ministering to suffering people here at Shiloh Church. When I preach a funeral sermon, and there are families and guests there that don’t know who I am, who has shown up for a funeral. One of the things I say to introduce myself is not my title there or tenure at the church, but that I’ve sat where you sit.

0:29:23 – (H. B. Charles): And I know what it is for death to snatch away a loved one. So I do. And after all these decades, I still miss my dad and grieve my dad’s passing and carry on the hope of heaven in my heart for comfort. But I do feel like it has shaped me to be sensitive to those in our congregation who are going through various sorrows and griefs and afflictions. I don’t remember who said it, but they have said it was well said that you should preach to broken hearts, and you’ll never lack for a congregation because there’s one in every pew.

0:30:05 – (Ligon Duncan): Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. HB I lost my dad at 32, and I can’t imagine what it would have been like to lose my dad at 16 or 17 years old. I just. I. I can’t even imagine that. And I probably miss him more now than I missed him at 32. So I. I resonate with that. And I do think that’s the Lord. The Lord prepared your heart, the heart of a shepherd, to love people that are brokenhearted that way. And. And what a. What a wonderful testimony.

0:30:34 – (Ligon Duncan): You know, people love you, but they can still sometimes give you bad advice. That’s really important for pastors to hear. People that love you can give you really bad advice. HB I know that leaving Los Angeles to go to Shiloh and Jacksonville. You’ve talked about the Lord dragging you there kicking and screaming. And like any church, you’ve had challenges that you’ve had to face. How. How has your preaching helped you lead that congregation and see that congregation grow in their knowledge of the Lord, their love for the Lord Jesus Christ. Tell us a little bit about your preaching at Shiloh these last seven.

0:31:18 – (Ligon Duncan): How many years now is it?

0:31:20 – (H. B. Charles): I am in my 18th year, closing in on 20. Yeah, I’m in my 18th year. And this has been a great joy to pastor this church. But I know what John Newton meant. Through many dangerous toils and snares, I have already come. So I have had some very difficult seasons over these 18 years pastoring this church. I have been aided by my study of God’s Word and preaching from the overflow. God has used that in times of division, sometimes of betrayal, sometimes of just difficult transition. Here, my own time, I’m still shocked that I get paid to study the Bible.

0:32:21 – (H. B. Charles): I can’t believe that. And my study of God’s Word, Word to fill up my heart and then get to the pulpit to preach from the overflow of that has been a great blessing. Secondly, I do believe in the power of the pulpit. And I just believe there is nothing that the Word of God cannot fix. So I do not think the solutions to the challenges I’ve had in my. I’ve never thought that the solutions are in the boardroom.

0:32:48 – (H. B. Charles): The solutions are in the power of God’s Word. And I am his spokesman here. And I want to make sure that I rightly divide the word of truth. I also think one of the great compliments I’ve received on the other side of some difficult periods is that I would have never known you were going through that behind the scenes from the way you went to the pulpit on Sundays. God’s grace is sufficient for us and his strength is perfected in our weakness.

0:33:29 – (H. B. Charles): And I don’t think that the pulpit is a place to vent. And I think that has made me. I know that I have been at times burdened and hurt and troubled. And it has made me be more intentional in the crafting of my sermon. Not just the study of the text, but the crafting of my sermon. There was a period where I just went to the pulpit with the full. I’m not a manuscript preacher. I write it but didn’t take it to the pulpit. But I went through a stretch where I took it to the pulpit every week.

0:34:02 – (H. B. Charles): And I did not want to succumb to the temptation to say something off the cuff. There might be a reaction to. To a last deacon meeting rather than the leadership of the Holy Spirit. So if push come to shove, I just want to read what I have prayerfully thought of here. So I have tried to be very precise and careful in the pulpit. And I am blessed. Not everyone can say this with all of the challenges.

0:34:34 – (H. B. Charles): I am blessed to serve a church where preaching is in season and the people. Last week I got a chance to preach at a great conference, national conference I came here Sunday. I came home Sunday. They didn’t know or care that I was at that conference. They just wanted to know if they’re a word from the Lord. And that is an inspiring reality that spurs me on to keep preaching.

0:35:05 – (Matt Smethurst): HB you mentioned that the power is in the pulpit, specifically in the word of God. And so many of the pastors listening to this podcast believe that in their heads. But the week in, week out grind of ministry with satanic distraction and discouragement, as well as just our own struggles as weak, fallen creatures, it can lead us to lose sight of those theological truths we affirm to not feel them. So what would you say to the pastor who is struggling to believe that the word works? I mean, after all, his people show up every Sunday looking pretty much the same they did the Sunday before.

0:35:51 – (Matt Smethurst): Same struggles, same questions. So how do you fight to really believe that God’s word will not return void? What would you encourage? What word would you have for a discouraged pastor in that regard?

0:36:06 – (H. B. Charles): Sure. So the entirety of my ministry, I have been consumed with the opening of a series of commands in 2nd Timothy, chapter 4, verse 2, preach the Word. Now, at this season of my life, I am consumed with the last of that series. Commands of commands in verse five, fulfill your ministry. And we don’t get any credit for how well we start. Anyone can start fast. The question is, can you finish strong?

0:36:44 – (H. B. Charles): And the word works, but it doesn’t work according to our timetable and schedule. You can’t preach and expect God to, you know, he is the fool who expects to sow and reap on the same day.

0:37:06 – (Ligon Duncan): Yeah.

0:37:08 – (H. B. Charles): And you have to have a great confidence in God. There are weeks where I do feel that I have poured out everything I’ve gotten and I don’t see a difference. But I’m grateful that whether or not I can thank God for things I can see growing over above the soil, God is always at work underneath the soil in ways that we cannot see and we do not know. And our confidence must be in him, in the lordship of Christ and in the power of his Word and in the ministry of the Holy Spirit to get the job done in the life of his people.

0:37:49 – (H. B. Charles): I pray a prayer of illumination every Sunday before I start the sermon. And I typically end that prayer by saying that as we plant, as the seed of your word is planted and watered, Lord, we know that only you can make it grow. So we reserve for you as always, the highest praise and full credit for the fruit that shall come from this time. Our job to just plant in Water. We got to trust God to give the increase.

0:38:20 – (H. B. Charles): Hang in there.

0:38:22 – (Matt Smethurst): Amen. I’ve forgotten 99% of the meals I’ve eaten in my life, but you know what? They’ve kept me alive.

0:38:30 – (H. B. Charles): Amen.

0:38:32 – (Matt Smethurst): God uses faithful, forgettable sermons to beautify his bride.

0:38:37 – (H. B. Charles): Amen. Praise God.

0:38:39 – (Ligon Duncan): And just think how often the Bible tells us to wait. To wait on the Lord. And the prophets had to set the people of God up for a 600 year wait between the exile and the coming of Christ. And I’m sure that there could have been a lot of people who said within that time, oh well, God’s word hasn’t come to pass, but they had to wait. They just had to wait. So that’s important for preachers too, to remember God does not work on our time schedule.

0:39:24 – (Ligon Duncan): His ways are not our ways. And our faithfulness is not measured in speed, the speed of the immediate results, even at a smaller level. Very often a pastor won’t see the effect of his ministry until the ministry of the next man in his congregation. Now, you’ll see some results, but all of us, we’re always trying to measure in this area, but a lot of times you won’t see the effect until the next ministry. And so pastors have to live realizing we won’t get our final report card until glory.

0:40:07 – (Ligon Duncan): And if the report card is well done, good and faithful servant, everything’s going to be all right.

0:40:12 – (H. B. Charles): Amen.

0:40:13 – (Matt Smethurst): HB Would you have a final word for preachers who are listening?

0:40:19 – (H. B. Charles): Yes. I am glad you gave me that opportunity because as Lig was talking, it was on my heart to simply quote 1st Corinthians 15, verse 58. Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.

0:40:44 – (Matt Smethurst): HP Would you pray for pastors listening?

0:40:47 – (H. B. Charles): It’d be a pleasure. Gracious and heavenly Father, we do give you praise for the privilege of prayer that is ours in Christ, our great High Priest, whose blood and righteousness opens a way, a new and living way for us to draw near to the throne of grace. Thank you. That we need not be anxious about anything. That we can bring all of our cares and cast them upon you because you care for us. I pray for the pastors listening and watching that you would, Lord, prove in their experience that your grace is sufficient and that your strength is perfected in our weakness.

0:41:25 – (H. B. Charles): Fulfill every holy desire they have and bring to pass the deeds prompted by their faith. May every sphere of our lives be brought under the authority of the Lordship of Christ. And may we not be weary in well doing, knowing that in due season we will reap the harvest if we do not give up. We pray these things in Jesus name. Amen.

0:41:45 – (Ligon Duncan): Amen.

0:41:47 – (Matt Smethurst): Amen. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Everyday Pastor. We hope it has put some fresh wind in your sails. We’d encourage you to share it with another friend in ministry so that we can continue helping pastors find fresh joy in the work of ministry. HB thanks for being with us.

0:42:04 – (H. B. Charles): Thank you brothers. It was a joy to be with you.

0:42:06 – (Ligon Duncan): Thanks, H.B. thanks, Matt.