Spiritual Warfare in Ministry

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0:00:00 – (Matt Smethurst): The Christian heart is not a shared space in the sense that when the omnipotent third person of the eternal Trinity moves in and takes up residence within a believer, again, that’s claimed territory. That’s not a shared working environment. The holy and of course we can grieve the Spirit, we can suppress the Spirit, we can refuse to be led by the Spirit. But fundamentally, a child of God is indwelt by the Spirit, not by the evil one.

0:00:26 – (Ligon Duncan): Amen.

0:00:32 – (Matt Smethurst): Welcome, friends, to this episode of the Everyday Pastor, a podcast from the Gospel Coalition on the nuts and bolts of ministry. I’m Matt Homelesshurst.

0:00:39 – (Ligon Duncan): And I’m Lig Duncan.

0:00:41 – (Matt Smethurst): And we’re here to think about the topic of spiritual warfare in ministry. Lig as we think about this perennial topic, I think it’s easy to fall into kind of one or two extremes. CS Lewis talked about this. Others have mentioned it. There can be a kind of unhealthy fixation on the demonic powers and the role they play in our world. But there also can be a kind of lackadaisical ignorance or ignoring of the reality of satanic attack, which is a real thing in ministry. So let’s just start here.

0:01:16 – (Matt Smethurst): How did you teach on this subject as you ministered for so many years? At first Pres.

0:01:24 – (Ligon Duncan): I don’t consider myself an expert on this subject by any stretch, and I definitely experientially felt not a match for it. Now, I had colleagues in ministry that I think had done a better job of escaping the sort of rationalistic framework that I think has dominated even evangelicals in the 20th century. I think one of the reasons, Matt, for the phenomenon you just described of some people overreacting and other people underreacting is because we’ve been cooked and baked in the 20th century, at least in a pretty heavy dose of rat.

0:02:05 – (Ligon Duncan): And of course, that’s what C.S. lewis is pushing back against when he talks about this. And so it makes some people in that vacuum of rationalism jump onto weird, quirky fringe fads, and then it makes others of us perhaps unaware of how much worldly thinking has taken over. And I think that impacted me. And so I’ve benefited by colleagues that were older and more mature and I think had a more healthy biblical and supernatural worldview. But the people that helped me the most on this are the Puritans. So I’ve got open to my page here. I’ve mentioned this before. We’ve talked about this in the past.

0:02:50 – (Ligon Duncan): Thomas Brooks Precious Remedies Against Satan’s Devices has helped me more in the area of spiritual warfare than any other book. Now, some people will put. They’ll point to William Gernall’s the Christian Incomplete Armor. Great book. But it’s Ben Brooks that has helped me most in this area, along with just knowing some godly colleagues who have had a balanced biblical understanding of this and just watching them and listening to them and letting them make me aware of areas that I might have not taken into consideration as a part of the battles that we face in Christian ministry with spiritual forces impacting our hearts.

0:03:37 – (Ligon Duncan): So it’s the Puritans that have helped me the most. And I think they, you know, they’re far enough away from us. They’re not perfect, Matt, but they sure are far enough away from us that they don’t fall for the same mistakes that people in our time fall for. There may be some correctives that we would want to give there, But I’ve found Thomas Brooks super helpful in this area.

0:04:00 – (Matt Smethurst): And you would say that that’s not just one of those. The most helpful books on this subject you’ve read. But I think I’ve heard you say Precious Remedies Against Satan’s Devices is one of the most influential books you’ve ever read.

0:04:11 – (Ligon Duncan): It definitely helped me know how to apply application. I think for me, that’s still something I have to work at. And, boy, does he help you apply because he makes you aware of all the different kinds of things that your congregation is facing. And I think. I think in our time, the number one temptation that I’ve seen in application is for.

0:04:37 – (Matt Smethurst): You’re talking about sermon application.

0:04:38 – (Ligon Duncan): Sermon application. And I’m talking about evangelical Bible believing big God believing ministers. We have a tendency to apply to one kind of person in our congregation. Not realizing that there are multiple kinds of persons in our congregation and there are multiple kinds of temptations and conditions that they are facing.

0:05:00 – (Matt Smethurst): Yeah.

0:05:01 – (Ligon Duncan): And one reason Puritan sermons were so long is that they were busily trying to apply the word to multiple people, multiple conditions. Now, I wouldn’t say plop that kind of application into our current environment and do that every Sunday, but boy, did it help me to recognize that if I’m only applying to one thing, if I’m only applying to one kind of a person, I’m not serving my whole congregation well.

0:05:27 – (Ligon Duncan): And I may be helping them miss the impact of that scripture on them that it is meant to have.

0:05:33 – (Matt Smethurst): Yeah. Well, I’m glad you mentioned the effect of rationalism, because we can’t have this conversation in a vacuum. The secular worldview has stripped away the supernatural, which has left some people hungry for spiritual reality, others just kind of dismissing anything beyond the material world. And so can I just ask, how.

0:05:56 – (Ligon Duncan): Did you see that? The very fact that you’ve chosen this as a topic for us to speak about. I wonder, in your own experience, what tipped you off to this and what’s helped you?

0:06:07 – (Matt Smethurst): Well, Satan has the gift of discouragement, at least in my life. And though I don’t want to be the kind of believer that rushes to blame Satan for everything, of course, at times it’s just my indwelling sin. But in ministry, I do find that it’s so easy to fixate on the things that are not going well. And I think often that’s the evil one trying to convince me that, yeah, the word it’s actually not enough.

0:06:39 – (Matt Smethurst): You know, it’s interesting to think about the fact that Jesus over and over said, it is written. It is written, it is written. But in the garden, Satan essentially says, is it written? And I feel like that’s so much of what ministry comes down to every day. Which voice are you going to believe? And Satan speaks with a forked tongue. And he wants us. He uses the same ancient strategy of, did God really say. Right, Matt? Did God really say that he would be enough for you in ministry?

0:07:13 – (Matt Smethurst): Did he really say that faithfulness is success? Did he really say that he’s going to be with you and in you and for you on your best days? Did he really say your identity is in who you are as his child, not how well ministry, you know, and so on and so forth. So for me, this is coming out of personal experience.

0:07:33 – (Ligon Duncan): Okay, okay. And have there been people that have been helpful to you in sort of correcting whatever you feel is a lack in your own life in that area?

0:07:45 – (Matt Smethurst): Charles Spurgeon has some good stuff in lectures to my students on this. Absolutely true. And he, I think, just takes a very sane approach to it in the sense that while he acknowledges at times there is real spiritual warfare going on, at other times he acknowledges that we need a fresh walk outdoors. Whereas, you know, Don Carson has said, sometimes the godliest thing you can do is get a good night’s sleep, not stay up and pray all night, but actually get a good night’s sleep. And so, yeah, there’s a multiplicity of factors.

0:08:14 – (Matt Smethurst): And as you mentioned, people not only in our congregation that have different conditions, you know, sinners, sufferers and all the rest, but we ourselves are often a complex mix of realities. And, yeah, some of it’s spiritual, some of it’s physical.

0:08:33 – (Ligon Duncan): But.

0:08:34 – (Matt Smethurst): But I want to think, as I’m preaching to my congregation, as I’m counseling throughout the week, I’m wanting to help them think biblically about this reality because, as you said, I do think we either overreact to it or we underreact to it. So let’s think a little bit about what the Bible teaches in terms of spiritual warfare. Can a Christian be possessed by a demon? Can a Christian be what is the nature of spiritual attack in the life of a Christian?

0:09:12 – (Ligon Duncan): Let me back up from that question one step and say that you will find a number of places in the New Testament where Jesus or the apostles are exhorting Christians to be aware of the spiritual battle that we are in. One place that comes to mind is in the Armor of God passage where Paul says our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places. That’s Ephesians 6:12.

0:09:54 – (Ligon Duncan): And right before that, he says, put on the full armor of God that you may be able to stand firm against the schemes of the devil. And that’s the verse that gets Thomas Brooks thinking about the schemes or the devices of Satan in his book Precious Remedies Against Satan’s Devices, as well as.

0:10:20 – (Matt Smethurst): Probably 2 Corinthians 2:11. For we are not unaware of Satan’s schemes exactly.

0:10:26 – (Ligon Duncan): So I think start there. It ought to be a standing part of the Christian life to be aware of those spiritual realities. And again, I love the balance that Brooks gives in the introduction to Precious Remedies Against Satan’s Devices. He says there are four things that you need to concentrate on if you’re going to be happy here and hereafter. Number one, Christ. So your eyes are always on Christ. That’s the most important thing. If your eyes are on demons more than they’re on Christ, they’re in the wrong place.

0:11:04 – (Ligon Duncan): So Christ the Scriptures is the next thing Brook says, keep your nose in your Bible, keep burying your soul into the word of God and plumbing the depths of the scriptures your own selves is the third thing he said. You need to know yourself. You need to know how your desires work, because Satan is gonna go for the weak spots in your desires. And then next thing he says the fourth thing, and Satan’s devices.

0:11:37 – (Ligon Duncan): You need to know how Satan operates. And the Scriptures tell us how Satan operates. You’ve already started this conversation by pointing us to the original temptation in which Satan sought to undermine Adam and Eve’s Confidence in the word of God, in the goodness of God, in the truthfulness of his word, in his concern for their wellbeing. What was he doing? He was leveraging and building a doubt in their souls and leveraging it against God, against their own good, for their self destruction.

0:12:15 – (Ligon Duncan): So you learn something out of that Satan. Satan knows how to twist true things so that they hurt us. He knows how to question true things so that our doubt hurts us. And the whole of the Bible will give us. And that’s really what Brooks is doing in his book. He’s sort of piling up examples in the Bible of how Satan uses our own desires against us. And so I think we start there, Matt, to recognize that there is a personal being who wants to destroy us.

0:12:55 – (Ligon Duncan): And he’s doing that. And we see the effects of that all around us. And we don’t fixate on that. We fix our eyes on Christ. We base our life on the scripture. We know ourselves. But we do need to know there is a being that wants to destroy.

0:13:13 – (Matt Smethurst): Us and he’s more powerful than you. There’s a sense in which it’s hey, God is mightier than Satan, so be assured, but Satan is mightier than you, so do be careful.

0:13:25 – (Ligon Duncan): That’s absolutely true. And so he’s more than we are, but he’s less than Christ is. And so we’ve got to retain that balance. Now that you come back to your question about possession, what I want to say is if we are united with Christ and indwelt by the Holy Spirit, there is no room for Satan to occupy our hearts and control our desires. Absolutely. The Lord Jesus Christ has been sent on a mission by his Father and in his role as our mediator and our Savior, he loves to take those whom the Father has given to him and he says no one will snatch them out of our hand. So I think that’s very important, especially for Christians who feel spiritually oppressed, to know that no one is going to take you out of Jesus hand.

0:14:28 – (Ligon Duncan): Now does that mean that you will not sometimes face despair?

0:14:34 – (Matt Smethurst): Let me just interject. And not just Christ. I’m a church planner. So I office not out of a church building but out of a co working space. Right. A shared workspace. The Christian heart is not a shared space in the sense that when the omnipotent third person of the eternal Trinity moves in and takes up residence within a believer, again that’s claimed territory. That’s not a shared working environment.

0:15:02 – (Matt Smethurst): And of course we can grieve the spirit spirit, we can suppress The Spirit. We can refuse to be led by the Spirit, but fundamentally, a child of God is indwelt by the Spirit, not by the Evil One.

0:15:13 – (Ligon Duncan): Amen. And I think the other thing that we need to remember along with that, especially if we are feeling Satanic oppression, satanic opposition, satanic discouragement, satanic temptation, these.

0:15:28 – (Matt Smethurst): Are all real categories. Not Satanic possession in a believer, but all those other words you used.

0:15:34 – (Ligon Duncan): And you see that so clearly in Job. As far as we know, Job never knows what we know in Job one and two. But there is something going on in the heavenly places that is directly impinging upon Job’s life. And so we shouldn’t be surprised that he’s deeply struggling with despair and discouragement because the Evil One wants him to.

0:16:00 – (Matt Smethurst): Or, Peter, Jesus says Satan demanded. He wants to sift you like wheat.

0:16:04 – (Ligon Duncan): And so that should not surprise us that we feel those things that are so I think that’s one reason why you get believers using language like possession, because it feels so real, so powerful, so pervasive that you can be. And believe me, the Evil One wants you to feel like you’re possessed. He wants you to feel like you’re his. He wants you to feel like you’ve got no chance, no choice. And so I think that leads some believers to make a bad theological deduction.

0:16:40 – (Ligon Duncan): And so alongside of the glorious truths that you just articulated, I think we need to recognize, and that’s what Paul’s talking about here in Ephesians 6, that the occupation of us by the Spirit does not mean a cessation of conflict. It means the inauguration of spiritual conflict for the rest of our lives. And that is due to two things. Number one, outside of us, the Evil One is raging inside of us. However, there is still a remnant of sin, and it’s that which the Evil One is trying to get ahold of.

0:17:19 – (Ligon Duncan): And that means that our possession by the Holy Spirit, our occupation by the Holy Spirit, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, launches a conflict with sin and with temptation that we’re going to have for the rest of our lives. And so we shouldn’t be discouraged as believers when we see that conflict raging. That is not a sign of Satanic dominion. It’s a sign of new life. If we were dead, still dead in our trespasses and sins, we.

0:17:52 – (Ligon Duncan): We would not be raging in a war against our trespasses and sins. That is the effect of the living Holy Spirit in us. In the process of reclaiming everything that Satan has spoiled in this world, including every last corner of our hearts. And that is a project that goes on until we take our last breath. And so really mature believers can experience this in overpowering ways. I was just reading. I was trying to get ready for a sermon for a friend of mine that I couldn’t preach the other day on Psalm 88. And I ran across this amazing quote from Spurgeon in the treasury of David, where he just talks about the spiritual battle of discouragement that wages war in many wonderful Christian souls. And I couldn’t help but think, oh, man, Spurgeon, you are speaking to us out of your own experience here. This is why you’re able to speak so realistic about this as you felt this yourself.

0:18:54 – (Ligon Duncan): And in fact, a friend of mine who’s a counselor wrote to me and said, I have never read a better, more comprehensive description of spiritual depression and discouragement than this one. And it’s a pastor writing out of his own experience.

0:19:10 – (Matt Smethurst): It’s a dispersion sermon on Psalm 88.

0:19:12 – (Ligon Duncan): Yeah, it’s out of treasury of David. So it’s his notes, you know, as he builds his sermon on Psalm 88. I’d never read it before until this weekend, and it is so good, Matt. But it’s speaking to exactly the reality that you were talking about at the beginning of our conversation.

0:19:29 – (Matt Smethurst): At the risk of wanting to improve on Thomas Brooks, I do want to hasten to add. So you mentioned the four areas. Christ, Scripture, our own selves, and Satan’s schemes. I would also add the church. And here’s why. When you struggle to feel the presence of God in yourself and to see his work in you, one of the best things you can do is get out of yourself and to see his work in others, to see ways that the power of the Holy Spirit is overcoming Satanic oppression, Satanic attack in the lives of God’s people.

0:20:12 – (Ligon Duncan): Right.

0:20:12 – (Matt Smethurst): I have a buddy who took the song Blessed Assurance and did a version where it goes from Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine to the next verse, Blessed assurance, Jesus is yours. Blessed assurance, Jesus is ours. And he wrote it as kind of a sermon. That would be a song that would be particularly fitting around the table, taking the Lord’s Supper together. But I think that’s just one more note that we want to sound.

0:20:41 – (Matt Smethurst): You can’t fight the attacks of the evil one with your Bible in the woods, unless that’s where God in His providence has you. But you ultimately are going to fight the attacks of the evil one in the presence of Christ with His people as you see his work in them. Like as we turn to thinking More specifically, about how the evil one attacks ministers. Talk a little bit about your experience as a pastor.

0:21:10 – (Matt Smethurst): Were there times, seasons where you experienced what you felt was spiritual attack? And how have you counseled other pastors and aspiring pastors as they think about this reality?

0:21:22 – (Ligon Duncan): Yes, and I think it usually comes in the area of our desires. So if you have a discouraged pastor, you can bet that Satan is going to go after that discouragement and is gonna try and drive it in a wrong direction. If you have a pastor whose aspirations, whether personal or ministerial, have been frustrated and he starts looking somewhere else for his fulfillment, Satan will grab hold of that and run with the wind. And I’ve certainly.

0:21:57 – (Ligon Duncan): And I continue. I mean, it’s the same reality. I just told my faculty, I was with my faculty recently, talking with them, and I said, I have to remind myself that I believe in a sovereign God every single day when I get up, because I am tempted to not trust him to provide what we need in order for me to make sure that my people can eat, can make sure that my seminary students can get through. And I had the same temptations as a pastor when it came to trusting that the Lord would bring in the budget so that the staff that were serving the congregation could be taken care of, so that we could carry on the ministry of the church. And so I’ve certainly seen for my whole ministerial life, times where I thought that either through discouragement or through desires drifting, that there was a spiritual warfare going on. And of course, I’ve seen colleagues fall in the ministry around me. And I think.

0:22:59 – (Ligon Duncan): I think we become, as pastors, we become really aware of that when we see colleagues fall. And those falls can happen in a lot of different ways. We think of dramatic ways, like moral failures, but there can also be falls that happen because of character issues. And you can see Satan going after those character defects. Unmortified sins that may seem small that become the occasion for the end of a ministry.

0:23:28 – (Ligon Duncan): It can be a man’s anger. I know a really, really wonderful minister who has struggled with an ungodly anger for much of his life. And that deployed in the wrong place at the wrong time, can be the end of a ministry. And so Satan has a lot of ways that he can get you. And I’ve just seen that happen over and over throughout the course of my life. And I’ve also been aware that the only reason I’m still standing is because of the Lord Jesus, because of the work of the Holy Spirit. It’s not because I don’t have the deficiencies or the defects or the sins or the temptations or the disappointments that other brothers have, it’s that the Lord has protected.

0:24:15 – (Ligon Duncan): So, you know, it is something I’ve been very aware of from the very beginning of ministry. And, and that’s why Jeff Thomas, the wonderful longtime pastor of the Alfred Place Baptist Church in Aberystwyth, Wales, said, when I was a young man, I wanted to be like my heroes and I wanted to do some great thing for God. But as an older man, I just want to cross the finish line without dishonoring my Lord.

0:24:44 – (Ligon Duncan): And I think a lot of that was because he saw the spiritual warfare that was going on over the course of his ministry, and he realized, I’ve undervalued crossing the finish line, and I’ve undervalued what it would take in terms of spiritual warfare to do that. And that’s a lofty aspiration to fight the good fight, to finish the race to keep the faith. That’s a lofty aspiration. And I think younger ministers need to set their target on that.

0:25:16 – (Ligon Duncan): As you were saying, faithfulness is success. All the stuff that looks like success when you start out in ministry, the Lord will handle that. It’s the faithfulness that you need to aim at. He’ll take care of the rest and we’ll all get used in different ways and that’ll be fine. But if we can cross the finish line in faithfulness, we will rejoice.

0:25:39 – (Matt Smethurst): Yeah. And one of the ways again we cross the finish line is with the help of each other. To quote Spurgeon, again he said, Satan hates Christian fellowship. It is the devil’s policy to keep Christians apart from. Which means that one of the ways we defy the devil in our lives is by leaning into our church family. And I think of crossing the finish line. I think of that classic scene at the end of Pilgrim’s Progress. You know, the only way Christian is able to get over the deep, turbulent, troubled waters is with the help of his friend, Hopeful.

0:26:10 – (Matt Smethurst): And so I think that’s another area that Satan attacks, not just through discouragement in the life of the minister, but also in attacking church unity. We did a whole episode on deacons, but it’s noteworthy to me that Acts chapter six is the third in a three pronged attack that Satan brings against the church. In Acts 4, he tries to take the church out via persecution and fails. Acts 5, he tries to take the church out via deception and fails. That’s the story of Ananias and Sapphira.

0:26:43 – (Matt Smethurst): Acts 6, he tries a third measure, distraction. And I think that especially in our age of digital distraction, that is one of the ways that Satan is attacking us. It’s not always going to be in dramatic ways. He is far more likely to dull your affections over a decade than to destroy your soul in a day.

0:27:09 – (Ligon Duncan): Correct. And boy, amen. I regularly say to those that are preparing for the ministry, distraction may be our biggest challenge today. And Satan will sail with the wind. That’s a phrase from Brooks that Brooks loves to use. And he won’t do any more than he needs to do. And a little nudge to distraction may be all that he needs to completely preoccupy someone from the duties that they ought to be throwing themselves into, or to the trust that they ought to be manifesting in their lives, or that keeps them from getting relief from the discouragement that they want relief from.

0:27:51 – (Matt Smethurst): As we start to finish this episode, I just want to remind all of our listeners of that invincible promise from the Lord Jesus. Matthew 16:18 I will build my church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it. It’s a reminder to all of us ministers that doing the Lord’s work in your own way and doing the devil’s work are basically the same thing. We have to do the Lord’s work in the Lord’s way.

0:28:23 – (Matt Smethurst): We have to lean on him and encourage our people to do the same, remembering that it’s his church and that ultimately his kingdom is going to advance not because of our creativity, our ingenuity, our strategies, our gifting. It’s going to advance because there has been an invincible promise given from heaven to those of us who bear the Gospel.

0:28:47 – (Ligon Duncan): That’s good. I love your addition of the doctrine of the church to Brooke’s Four things to kind of keep your eye on. And I would say another way that you can experience that is not only for faithful scriptural preaching and being around brothers and sisters that love the Word and live the Christian life, but there have been people uniquely gifted over the course of Christianity, sensitive to these spiritual realities that are a help to us. I’ve already mentioned Thomas Brooks.

0:29:17 – (Ligon Duncan): An interesting one that you might not think of is Abraham Kuyper, in his work on the Holy Spirit, does a wonderful job of saying something to this effect that if you could see the spiritual battle that is being waged around you right now, it is a greater battle than any earthly battle ever fought. And so here’s Kuyper, who’s often depicted as sort of heady and intellectual and building worldviews and things like this.

0:29:49 – (Ligon Duncan): But he’s very, very attuned to spiritual realities that we’re talking about today. Kuyper, his work on the Holy Spirit is a help. Another person who’s been a huge help to me is Douglas F. Kelly. He was my senior colleague at RTS in Jackson, went on to teach at RTS Charlotte for many years. And Dr. I’ve said to many people, I don’t know if there’s a person who has taught me more about the unseen world of spiritual reality that than Dr. Kelly.

0:30:20 – (Ligon Duncan): He has this ability to make the unseen feel so tangible in such a biblical way. And so if you get a chance to read his sermons or listen to his sermons, they’re online or read some of his books, he’s got a commentary on first or Second Corinthians that it has something like Wasteland in it. I can’t remember. It’s not God in the Wasteland like David Wells book, but it’s something like Messages from the Wasteland or something like this. And it does a tremendous job of just cluing you in to the spiritual realities that swirl around us and impinge upon us as we live the Christian life. And Dr. Kelly, it was a wonderful blessing for me. This is kind of in there.

0:31:10 – (Matt Smethurst): I think there’s new life in the wasteland.

0:31:12 – (Ligon Duncan): New life in the wasteland.

0:31:13 – (Matt Smethurst): Second Corinthians on the cost and glory of Christian ministry.

0:31:16 – (Ligon Duncan): That is so good. And for ministers, because he’s thinking about ministers there as we think about spiritual warfare in the ministry. He’s your friend and guide and I got to watch him live this. And that points back to your. You need the church. Right. I couldn’t do this alone, just me and Jesus in my Bible. But to have Doug and his family and the congregation around you, that’s a tremendous, tremendous encouragement.

0:31:44 – (Ligon Duncan): And so I think, looking for whether it’s, you know, missionaries are often, you know, good, godly, solid missionaries are often very attuned to this. If you read the biography of John Patton, the great Scottish missionary, he’s keenly aware of the spiritual realities that impact us. And so there’s a lot of help in reading. There’s a lot of help from the church, there’s a lot of help from ministers to help us figure out how do we forward this particular stream in ministry in the Christian Life.

0:32:20 – (Matt Smethurst): Yeah, well, 2 Corinthians would be a great book to camp out in. It’s the most autobiographical of Paul’s letters. It’s visceral. His heart is bleeding on every page. And another Classic book that listeners should read or reread, I think would be the screwtape letters by C.S. lewis. Just incredibly trenchant insight into the condition, condition of the human heart and the schemes of the evil one. And I’ll just end by saying this, brother listening.

0:32:48 – (Matt Smethurst): James 4, 7 says, resist the devil and he will flee from you. It’s striking to me that that’s a promise. He will flee from you. You can make Satan leave you alone if you resist him. If you lean into the ordinary means of grace, into the communion of the saints, and if you fight sin by the power of the Holy Spirit, and you keep your gaze fixed on Christ, he will finally give up. Satan will finally give up and seek out other prey.

0:33:20 – (Ligon Duncan): Right.

0:33:21 – (Matt Smethurst): But even with that great confidence, Lig, the reality is that many of us, including probably many of our listeners, are feeling discouraged in the depths, way down. And you found the Spurgeon quote on Psalm 88.

0:33:37 – (Ligon Duncan): Yeah. And let me just say you started with that as one of the applications at the very beginning of the conversation, talking about how Satan will try to discourage us. And it’s very interesting that that’s where Brook starts. That’s his first. The first set of temptations that he deals with are the ways that Satan discourages us. And Spurgeon understood that experientially. And you can really hear it.

0:34:02 – (Ligon Duncan): This is from the treasury of David. So that’s something everybody needs to have devotionally as well as expositionally. That’s his exposition and notes on the Psalms. And this comes from Psalm 88, which is one of the darkest of the Psalms. There’s not much light and Hope in Psalm 88. And Spurgeon just starts talking about the spiritual discouragement that a believer can feel. And a minister can feel this. And he says this.

0:34:32 – (Ligon Duncan): The mind can descend far lower than the body, for there are bottomless pits. The flesh can bear only a certain number of wounds and no more. But the soul can bleed in 10,000 ways and die over and over again each hour. It is grievous to the good man to see the Lord whom he loves, laying him in the sepulchre of despondency, piling nightshade upon him, and putting out all his candles, and heaping over him solid masses of sorrow.

0:35:07 – (Ligon Duncan): And then he goes on to say, he who now feebly expounds these words knows within himself more than he would care or dare to tell of the abysses of inward anguish. So Spurgeon is telling you, I know this personally. I felt this myself. I feel this myself. And he says this. Those who know this bitterness by experience will sympathize. But from others it would be idle to expect pity, nor would their pity be worth the having if it could be obtained. So sometimes we have Job’s counselors around us when we’re experiencing this discouragement, he says.

0:35:46 – (Ligon Duncan): But here’s his consolation. It is an unspeakable consolation that our Lord Jesus knows this experience right well having, with the exception of the sin of it, felt it all and more than all in Gethsemane when he was exceeding sorrowful even unto death. And that’s a tremendous hope to hang on as we talk about the things that the Lord has given to us to hold onto in these discouragements.

0:36:16 – (Matt Smethurst): Whether or not you feel like it, Brother Minister, he who is in you is greater than he who is in the world. Why don’t you pray, Lig, for ministers who are feeling discouraged?

0:36:26 – (Ligon Duncan): Heavenly Father, we know that one of the schemes of the Evil One is to discourage faithful ministers. And there are no doubt faithful ministers listening to this conversation who know depths of discouragement that I couldn’t even describe. And yet you know their hearts and you know their needs and you know that Satan would love to keep them in despondency. So I ask in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, their Savior and mediator, the one who bled, the one who experienced this kind of despair in the garden of Gethsemane on their behalf and who poured out the ever living, all powerful Holy Spirit upon them and in them to reclaim them from the death and the sin that Satan has plunged this world into. I pray, oh God, that you would encourage them by the Spirit, that their eyes would look to Jesus, that they would know that in him they have a brother that understands the deepest depths of their despair and yet who was raised again from the dead and who will raise them from their despair and their discouragement and their despondency, grant that they would, by the Holy Spirit, trust in that Savior and be brought out of the pit and placed in a field of green pasture with quiet waters where their shepherd will lead them.

0:38:02 – (Ligon Duncan): And I ask this in Jesus name. Amen.

0:38:06 – (Matt Smethurst): Amen. We hope this episode of the everyday pastor has been encouraging to you. And if you can think of someone in ministry that you think it might also encourage, please send it to them because we want to continue helping pastors find fresh joy in the work of ministry.