“Keep a close watch on yourself and on the teaching,” Paul exhorts the young pastor Timothy (1 Tim. 4:16). For many of us, it’s dangerously easy to guard our doctrine but not our lives. How can a busy pastor tend to his soul?
In this episode of The Everyday Pastor, Matt Smethurst and Ligon Duncan discuss practices for maintaining intimacy with Christ amid the demands of ministry.
Recommended resources:
- Josiah Bull (ed.), Letters of John Newton
- Jonathan Aitken, John Newton: From Disgrace to Amazing Grace
- Tony Reinke, Newton on the Christian Life: To Live Is Christ
- Sinclair Ferguson, The Whole Christ: Legalism, Antinomianism, and Gospel Assurance—Why the Marrow Controversy Still Matters
- David Gibson, The Lord of Psalm 23: Jesus Our Shepherd, Companion, and Host
Transcript
The following is an uncorrected transcript generated by a transcription service. Before quoting in print, please check the corresponding audio for accuracy.
Ligon Duncan
I think you don’t want to dwell on your disappointments, but I do think you have to watch them, because that is often the way that Satan is going to come at you, just like he did with with Eve. If
Matt Smethurst
I spend unhurried time with the Lord in the morning, my day can only go so bad. Tragedy can befall me. Criticism can come but if I’ve made my soul happy in the Lord, my day can only go so bad.
Matt Smethurst
Welcome back to the everyday pastor a podcast on the nuts and bolts of ministry from the gospel coalition. I’m Matt Smithers, I’m the younger one,
Ligon Duncan
and I’m LIG Duncan, the old guy, and we’re gonna be
Matt Smethurst
talking for a few minutes about the topic of the soul of the pastor. It’s hard to envision a more important topic. Of course, my mind goes to Paul’s charge, to Timothy and First Timothy 416 keep a close watch on yourself and on the teaching, and we have to hold both of those things together our life and our doctrine. So let me just start with this, given all of your experience in vocational ministry, especially as a senior pastor for nearly 20 years, how did you before I ask how you watched over your interior life and sought to grow your own soul in the Lord, how do you see ministry as an overflow of one’s interior life? And what’s the danger of separating those two things, doctrine from life?
Ligon Duncan
Well, if, if our goal in ministry is for the sheep to hear the great shepherd’s voice and to follow Him, and that’s not a reality for us, what are women doing? Then we’ve got a disconnect between our interior life and our external vocation, and that’s going to blow us apart one direction or another. So if we’re not pursuing what we are purportedly pursuing for our people, game over. So it’s just a matter, sooner or later, the wheels come off. And so yes, all of us go through dry seasons, and there are variety of reasons for that. All of us have our own sin, battles that we are fighting. For some of us, it may be pride. For some of us, it may be envy. For some of us, it may be anger. It can be a variety of things, but if the reality of hearing his voice and following Him is not reflected in our interior life, then we’re just we’re going to be a shipwreck in our public vocation. You know, to go back to your reminder to us that we’re sheet two. You know that half, half of what we do is being able to say to our people, I I’m a sheep. And here’s how the Shepherd has dealt with me, you know, here’s here’s how the Shepherd has corrected me and gotten back on the right path. Here’s how the shepherd, you know, makes me to lie down in green pastures and leads me to decides to still waters. This is how he’ll do it for you. If those things aren’t reality, then the awareness of hypocrisy ought to be overwhelming us at every step of the way. So it’s really important for us to pay attention to these things
Matt Smethurst
when it’s often been observed that in the qualifications for a pastor, elder in first, Timothy three and Titus one. The most extraordinary thing about that list is how ordinary it is, that’s right. In other words, these are things that are commanded and commended to all Christians, with the exception of being able to teach, but really, these are just basic Christian virtues that pastors are called to be, not perfect, of course, but exemplary in and one of the ways we are called to be exemplary is to be lead repenters, yeah, to show people what it means to you know Proverbs, 2416, For though a righteous man falls seven times, he rises again. Yeah.
Ligon Duncan
And just to say that when you notice those list of qualifications they they zero in on character and behavior, and especially character and behavior in the places where it is almost impossible to fake them in in family relations. You know your family knows whether you love Jesus or not, your family knows whether you are growing in grace or not, in your relations, in the congregation, and even with those nearest who are outsiders, it’s it’s really hard to fake following Jesus. There people can. See it. And so Paul, Paul identifies those things. People can see those things. And he, he cares about character and behavior and and then, yeah, you get the one and able to teach in there. There’s the competency, but most of it is character and behavior.
Matt Smethurst
Yeah, there’s no such thing as being a good pastor, but a lousy husband or dad. I mean, in other words, Paul is saying, for example, with the household qualifications, that being what we would call a good family man, faithful in the home in private, that’s not a bonus. That’s a prerequisite, right? And another thing that strikes me like in this passage, first, Timothy, three, one to seven, the qualifications for a pastor is who shows up two times in this very brief paragraph, Satan verses six and seven. He must not be a recent convert, or he may be puffed up with conceit and fall into the condemnation of the devil. Moreover, he must be thought well of by outsiders, so that he may not fall into disgrace, into a snare of the devil. Why is Satan making cameo appearances in the qualifications for an elder? Because he loves to stalk and destroy shepherds. And what that reminds me of is a quote from Spurgeon where he said, consider how precious a soul must be if both God and the devil are after it. When I think about that, not only in relation to my people, my congregation, but in relation to me, and how much of an incentive the demonic forces have to undercut the ministry of the gospel and the reputation of Jesus Christ in the world by slithering in and causing me to be a hypocrite. That that’s something that that gives me pause, and it ought to make us feel afresh the weightiness of our calling. You just think about Jesus’s famous statement in Mark 836, what good is it to a man to gain the whole world yet lose his soul, yeah. What’s the logic of that statement that a soul is worth more than a world? Yeah? So like when you reflect on your ministry and how you, especially as a senior pastor, sought to preserve the value and the integrity of your soul by prioritizing it. What did that look like? Practically,
Ligon Duncan
the rhythms of of the Pastoral Week were, were a real help to me. There I was. I was exhausted. By the time the Lord’s day evening came, it was, it was my favorite time of the week that I was exhausted. And so pastors choose different rhythms. But for me, Monday was a day that I needed to dial down, and I could not be jam packed with things to do. Now, I didn’t always keep a strict day off, but Monday was always a slow day for me where I could kind of recover physically.
Matt Smethurst
And would you take off your uniform would take
Ligon Duncan
off. My I love being in my sweats and tennis shoes, and now I can’t go out anywhere because invariably, I bump into a church member and always feel like I’m letting them down when I’m out of uniform. So you know, I had to be careful, like going to the
Matt Smethurst
grocery that the way you vacation in the summers is in a semi vegetative state on the beach, a whole lot of nothing. Absolutely, we’re Mondays.
Ligon Duncan
Absolutely, I tried to do that and and I would listen to things. I would I would read things, not necessarily, you know, biography, history. I’m a history nerd, so history is an escape. And I would read historical books or biography. Biographies were spiritually nourishing sometimes, but, you know, it might have been secular biography that I was reading. I just try to feed my mind and hopefully a little bit of my soul and recuperate from from the weekend, and especially from the work of the Lord’s day, which was precious. And as I’ve told you, I looked forward to it, and it was, it was personally edifying to be in the services. And I did try to worship with the congregation every step of the way, but you’re exhausted at the end of that day, and so Monday was a day to recuperate. And then the other thing is, I do believe that there is value in distinctly studying the scriptures for ourselves, apart from what we are doing in terms of preparing messages. But I did find the preparation of messages personally edifying to me, and so though I was doing a Bible reading plan separate from my message preparation, my message preparation was always personally very edifying, and I always thought that I did the best job when I was teaching or preaching, when I. Had been personally affected in the process of preparation. I mean, there were many times in preparation that I’d be moved to tears realizing the glory of Jesus or the love of Christ for me, despite my sin, or something that the Lord had done to reveal himself in the scriptures. I got excited in that process. I was learning things in that process, I was affected by that. That was an edifying thing for me. I wasn’t just thinking professionally, well, what am I going to say here next? Or what are the three things I need to say? I was being moved and taught and edified in the preparation. I imagine,
Matt Smethurst
though, that we have pastors listening in and they long for that, but sermon preparation has long and we’ve already done an episode of sermon prep, but you know, there’s worth revisiting. It’s long since become a duty, a slog. They don’t find themselves moved by the truths that they’re going to proclaim on Sunday. What wisdom would you come in to a brother who that’s what you’re articulating, actually, is not his experience? Well,
Ligon Duncan
you have quoted several times already John Newton. And John Newton and Charles Simeon have sort of been my pastors, people from the past that I have wanted to pastor my soul and so very often I will go when I’m working through texts, I will go to things that they have said or preached on those texts to you know, if my heart is in a really Low place or a dead place and let them speak to my soul. So I, you know, theologically, you know, I’m a Calvin turret and Van Maastricht Warfield, you know, Murray kind of guy, but boy, when it comes to pastoring, Newton and Simeon have just, they have a way of getting at
Matt Smethurst
my heart. And are you looking for their first sermons they’ve preached? Well,
Ligon Duncan
Simeon, of course, preaches, you know, sermons on almost all of the Bible. So no matter what passage I’m in, I’m always going to look and see if Simeon preached on the passage. Okay? And if he did, I’m I’m wanting him to just sort of stoke the flames of my own heart with Newton. You know, you can, you can look up the Scripture references in his works and see where he has spoken to certain things I’m I make my students read Newton’s letters. Newton’s biography is something that has had a profound effect on me in especially a recent biography of Newton by Jonathan akin call from disgrace to Amazing Grace, which is, is, it’s my favorite Newton biography.
Matt Smethurst
And also, Tony Reinke has a book called John Newton on the Christian
Ligon Duncan
life, yes, and that series that crossway is, and he distills
Matt Smethurst
and synthesizes a lot of the best of Newton. And I just experientially
Ligon Duncan
Newton gets me and gets to me. And so when I’m when I’m feeling like I’m having to go through the grind, I must say that for most of my life, sermon preparation for me was not a grind. But if I am low, Newton and Simeon speak to me, and I think all of us need to have somebody like that that we can turn to. It may be living preachers. You know, there, there are people that we can go to, that we listen to regularly, that help our souls, and particularly are able to get to us and open us our eyes to spiritual realities that we might be dead to as we’re working through particular text. But so I, for me, the that that process was an edifying process. Matt, yeah,
Matt Smethurst
and before we move on from commending Newton, you can so you pastors, you can purchase vault an abridged volume of John Newton’s letters. Banner of Truth has published it. There’s
Ligon Duncan
a paperback version that’s really small. Now, there’s a larger volume too, but there’s a
Matt Smethurst
right but he was a quintessential doctor of souls. Tim Keller has said John Newton is the greatest pastor he’s ever read and the ability to apply gospel balm to weary hearts, exactly. And so that would be a wonderful thing to read through devotionally, one letter a day alongside your Bible reading. Would you typically spend time with the Lord in you know, your devotional time? Would that be the first thing you did when you woke up? Yeah,
Ligon Duncan
I need to do that, and I’ll tell you more so now at the seminary than at the church, oftentimes I would, I have, I have the thing set on my phone where I’m not getting message notifications all night long, or I would get message notifications all night long. And so. When I wake up and the alarm goes off and the sleep thing goes off, all the messages that have been sent during the night, because we’ve got people in different time zones in the RTS system and and people doing things around the world, it all comes flooding through. Yeah, I start my day with that, Matt, Matt, I’m done. I’m fried already, before I can even get so I’ve got to find ways to get to my prayer outline and to and to get to my prayer cards and to get to the Bible before that. Or I’m, I’m just, I’m
Matt Smethurst
Hudson. Hudson Taylor once said, don’t have your concert first, and then tune your instruments afterward, begin your begin your day with God. And I actually think your generation of Christians is far better at this, and that younger generations have something to learn from from older ones, because the folks in my own church who are older than me seem to have come of age at a time when having a daily quiet time was just a non negotiable. And I don’t know if it’s a allergy to or over overreaction to legalism, surely quiet times have you know, I can imagine a church environment or a campus ministry environment in which they become a means of meriting favor with God. But none of the older saints I know think of it that way, and I just want to commend that. I mean spiritual disciplines are not a way of making you more precious to God. They’re a way of making God more precious to you, and you’re not above that, especially if you’re a leader of God’s people. And
Ligon Duncan
I, you know, if I can just sort of confess a little bit one of the one of the besetting sins that I struggle with, and that I’ve probably struggled with more since I have been the Chancellor of RTS than even in in my in my previous Christian life is worry, and you say, you know, you say you’re a Calvinist. How can you how can you worry? Well, I believe that God makes all things work together for our good, but experientially, especially when it comes to things like the financial resources that are necessary to pay my people, take care of my people, get my students through seminary. I struggle with worry over those things, like, I keep you up at night, right? They wake me up in the middle of the night and and that’s a sin, and I’m not, I’m not making light of that, but I’ve, I’ve got to get up in the morning and start battling that right away. Or I’m, I’m done for that day. And so that’s where being praying to the Lord, reading the scriptures first thing, helps me fight that kind of worry. And everybody has their thing. You know, it may not be. I mean, I for years at the church, I had elders that handled all that, and I rarely worried about that, because my elders were handling all that. Now that’s part of my responsibility. And I think the Lord has a sense of humor. It’s like, okay, look, we’re gonna see whether you trust me or not, and so I have to fight to trust him in that area, even though he has been faithful every year of the existence of the seminary. But I’m still fighting worry about that, so the scriptures and prayer helped me fight that Matt and I just need to get to that as quick as I can.
Matt Smethurst
Yeah, to quote Hudson Taylor’s contemporary and friend George Mueller, who famously said, the first great and primary business to which I ought to attend each day is to have my soul happy in the Lord right now. I’m sure there are pastors who wake up just ebullient, effusively happy doing just fine. That’s not me. I can often wake up just feeling cold, kind of dead inside. And if I don’t, I mean, it’s like a car engine, you know that that’s cold in the winter and it takes a while to turn on, like if I don’t seek to warm my soul by the fire of God’s Word. You know, I almost would go so far as to say, LIG, that if I spend unhurried time with the Lord in the morning, my day can only go so bad. Tragedy can befall me. Criticism can come but if I’ve made my soul happy in the Lord first thing, if I’ve tuned my instruments before the concert, my day can only go so bad. But the reverse is also true. If I haven’t done that right, or if I’ve just kind of done it haphazardly, my day can only be so good, no matter how many things go well, there’s just something humming beneath the surface of my life, right during the day, that is robbing me of the joy that could have been mine, right?
Ligon Duncan
Absolutely and I think especially in a day and age when you do have an invasive technology like a cell phone or an iPad or some other thing that allows lots of voices to immediately speak into your life, in your world, you’re minding your own business, and that stuff is coming into your world, it’s really important to make sure that God is the first one speaking into your world, and that world is being seen in light of the reality of God, rather than that world coloring your reality, and God sort of being sprinkled in here and there. And I need that because I, you know, because of what I do, I have to pay attention to what’s going on out there, and it can be very discouraging. And I need to be anchored in things that are going to last forever, not things that are temporal and aren’t going to matter. And sometimes it’s hard to know what’s what’s what. And I need the orientation of God’s word in that.
Matt Smethurst
And I need help. So you know, if I’m honest, there have been far too many times in my Christian life, even in my tenure as a pastor so far, my brief tenure, when honestly Mueller’s quote would be, he would say, Matt, your your first great and primary business each morning is making yourself informed, making yourself entertained or distracted, not making yourself happy in the Lord, will never drift into happiness in Christ, joy in Christ. That’s something we have to fight for, just like contentment. Paul says, I learned the secret of being content. That means he had to go to school. He had to learn it. It didn’t come naturally. And so when I say I need help, I don’t just mean obviously, from the Holy Spirit. I also need to bring others along. I mean the times in my ministry when I’ve been most consistent in vibrant devotional times, because, because it’s one thing to just check the box. But but vibrant devotional times where I’m spending unhurried, quality time with the Lord have been when there have been other brothers doing it with me, maybe not in person, but checking in saying, Hey, did you go on your the prayer walk this morning? Right? That, that kind of thing, that’s good. You have seen, and sadly, you know, we have seen various pastors flame out, and perhaps listeners think of famous examples, but for every famous example, there are dozens of ones we’ve never heard of, and so often, Surely that is downstream From a slow dulling of the affections. The reality we mentioned satanic attack earlier. The reality is that you’re as a pastor, you’re not likely going to lose your soul overnight. Satan is not going to destroy your soul in a day. He’s going to dull your affections over a decade, sure. How have you seen that occupational hazard of ministry and any kind of final wisdom you’d want to come in to pastors to really watch not only their doctrine, but also their life? Well,
Ligon Duncan
in the end, if if there is something greater than than God in this world to us, if there’s something more precious than Christ to us in this world, there’s, there’s our, there’s your, you know, Red Alert right there, and the way we usually get there is is through some pathway of disappointment in our life that we’re not responding to with trust in God and treasuring Christ. And so I think it’s really important. I I don’t think we need to preoccupy ourselves all day long with our disappointments, but we do need to be aware of what is it that has disappointed me, and how am I responding to that? And in is that driving me back toward Jesus? Is that? Is that making me to want to make more of God and get more of God, or is that leading me on a search in some other direction? And it can be, it could be like for an older guy like me. It could be your kids. I was, I was with Tim Keller on a panel many years ago at TGC, and somebody asked him a question about parenting and and he said, he said something like, you know, when you get older, you’re only as happy as your least happy child. And I had my kids at that time were younger, right? And it had not hit me. He had a. Adult kids at that time. And I started, I started thinking about that man that is so true, because as a parent, you love those children, and when you see a child who’s not in a good place, you think about it all the time. Well, that can be a pathway for disappointment that either drives you back into Jesus or makes you start a search for something else other than Jesus. And so I think pastors have to keep an eye on that, and it could be a disappointment at the church, or I am serving you faithfully, and I am not seeing the fruit that I want to see. And then there’s that guy down the street who doesn’t value the word like I value the word, and they are bursting at the seams
Matt Smethurst
what their prayer life may put ours to shame. Yeah,
Ligon Duncan
I think you don’t want to dwell on your disappointments, but I do think you have to watch them, because that is often the way that Satan is going to come at you, just like he did with with Eve. You know, you mean to tell me that he told you that you could not eat any of the trees in the garden, please. He’s that sting, yeah. What kind of a god is that? And so I just think we have to watch that as pastors, because we’ve got a million things that we can be disappointed. Yeah,
Matt Smethurst
another book recommendation now that you mentioned Sinclair Ferguson’s book, the whole Christ, yes, for me, was a paradigm shift, to use an overused phrase, but I mean, it was revolutionary in thinking about the, what he calls the Edenic poison that courses through all sin and lies from the evil one about the fact that God is God is not generous. He’s he wants to withhold good, yeah, and how actually, that shows up in both legalism and antinomianism, which of which, of course, he is drawing from historical examples, but just Yeah, and really says
Ligon Duncan
that both legalism and antinomianism make the mistake of not understanding that God is our good Heavenly Father.
Matt Smethurst
They’re non identical twins from the same Right, right?
Ligon Duncan
I tell people that book is the solution to everything. I’m not a silver bullet guy, like if you do this everything, but that, I agree with you, Matt, I’m glad you brought that up. I wouldn’t have thought to bring it up in this context, it’s true that’s a cross way. Did that book that? That book the whole Christ by Sinclair Ferguson. He, he did some lectures on the marrow controversy, obscure Presbyterian controversy in the 18th century in Scotland. And people listened to bootleg copies of that for years. A friend of mine, Brian habig, who’s a pastor in Greenville, South Carolina. Listen to those until I think he could probably give the lectures himself. And a bunch of us had been saying, Sinclair, you’ve got to write this down in a book. And you know, Sinclair does everything excellently. So he wasn’t just going to do sort of a transcription of the lectures. He really worked it over. And it is great soul diagnosis. So you’re exactly right. The whole Christ by Sinclair Ferguson would be a wonderful thing for just for pastors, for themselves, much less, you know, helping, helping your people fight these battles.
Matt Smethurst
Yeah. And speaking of good books from from crossway, I think in terms of, if you’re listening to this, and you’re you’re just feeling depleted and discouraged and just kind of numb to the things of God, of course, a book you’ve heard of, and it is beloved for a reason, is Dan orlands gentle and lowly, right? But another one, more recently that’s real balm for the soul is David Gibson’s the lord of Psalm 23 Yes, and I’ll confess to you, LIG, you know, I received that book in the mail and didn’t really care to read it. It didn’t pop out at me, because I just kind of thought, you know, I’ve I’ve not studied Psalm 23 I’ve memorized it. I’ve even taught it as brilliant as David Gibson is. What else is there? I ended up reading. Was just blown away by the devotional riches of it. And so yeah, we hope this episode has been useful to you. We could obviously continue talking about how to watch our lives and prioritize our souls, but I think a parting word for those of you tuning in would be, if you feel like you’re a walking hypocrite, or you feel like that you’re just on complete autopilot spiritually, reach out to a fellow pastor, a fellow elder. Don’t just try to hack it yourself. You have to reach out for help. The reputation of Jesus, Christ is at stake. Will you end this episode just by praying for pastors,
Ligon Duncan
Heavenly Father, we need you more than we need food. We need you more than we need air to breathe. Do. Don’t let us forget that. And as we seek to be faithful shepherds to your people and do them good and do them no harm, and as we seek to lead them to the Great Shepherd of the sheep and to have them nourished in the grace that He provides, nourish us with that same grace and protect us from the wiles of Satan and from the disappointments of our hearts that would cause us to to leave the God we love. We know that we’re Prone to wander, and so we ask that you, the Great Shepherd of the sheep, would keep us as we seek to be faithful under shepherds to your sheep, keep us, find us, seek us, bring us home. And Lord, thank You for pastors who have a heart for helping other pastors in precisely this situation. I’m have pictures in my mind right now, Lord of servants of yours who have been so good to struggling servants and leading them back to the to the to the still waters and to the green pastures of the Lord. So we commit ourselves to you, Lord. We ask that you would keep us, because if you don’t keep us, we will not be kept. Bring us home. We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen. Amen.
Matt Smethurst
Thank you for tuning in to the everyday pastor from the gospel Coalition. We hope this conversation has been encouraging to you. If you don’t mind, please take a moment to share this with a friend, especially a pastor friend, so that you together can find fresh joy in the work of ministry.
Ligon Duncan (PhD, University of Edinburgh) is chancellor and CEO of Reformed Theological Seminary, president of RTS Jackson, and the John E. Richards professor of systematic and historical theology. He is a Board and Council member of The Gospel Coalition. His new RTS course on the theology of the Westminster Standards is now available via RTS Global, the online program of RTS. He and his wife, Anne, have two adult children.
Matt Smethurst serves as lead pastor of River City Baptist Church in Richmond, Virginia. He also cohosts and edits The Everyday Pastor podcast from The Gospel Coalition. Matt is the author of Tim Keller on the Christian Life: The Transforming Power of the Gospel (Crossway, 2025), Before You Share Your Faith: Five Ways to Be Evangelism Ready (10Publishing, 2022), Deacons: How They Serve and Strengthen the Church (Crossway, 2021), Before You Open Your Bible: Nine Heart Postures for Approaching God’s Word (10Publishing, 2019), and 1–2 Thessalonians: A 12-Week Study (Crossway, 2017). He and his wife, Maghan, have five children. You can follow him on Twitter/X and Instagram.