I invite you to take your Bibles and turn with me to 1 Timothy 4. As you’re turning there, may I say how delighted I am to have the privilege of being here. It is a great privilege to come to this. I’ve known of this conference and never had the opportunity of coming. I’m somewhat embarrassed only to come having been invited to speak, but nevertheless, I felt, yesterday evening, by the time I went to my bed, that I had had a great time. I had a safe journey here, a lovely drive from the airport, a very good meal, and wonderful singing. It was worth being here just for the singing of, “Jesus, I am resting, resting in the joy of what thou art.” It was worth coming from Cleveland to join the choir, and then, of course, to have David’s talk last night. And I got to meet John Piper, so it was a great deal. I was done by about half past nine last night and ready to go home. Unfortunately, there was just the pressing issue of this morning to deal with, and so I had to return to it.

A Pastor Among Brothers

Before I read these verses from 1 Timothy 4, I want to acknowledge that I come to you as a peer this morning. I come to you as a working pastor, someone who has been called to that and who, by conviction, remains in that. And I come to you out of the events of the last weekend in the same way that many of you have come, and I come to you this morning conscious of the fact that we are the learners from the One who knows the answers.

There may be some things that I say this morning that confirm my alienation, my sense of being a resident alien here in America. If you feel that there’s anything pointed against the United States of America, I want you to know that there isn’t. Any disease that I happen to identify in the States, I want to freely admit, is present in the United Kingdom, as well. The symptoms may appear a little different, but I’d hate to think that you thought that I came as the prophet, as it were, roaming around and pointing fingers. That’s not it.

I’m here by dint of the invitation of you kind folks to come to America, and I love America. In fact, I married an American. You’re kind of stuck here. I’m here by choice, as it were, so I chose it. You just ended up in it. The last thing I wanted to say is that my talk this morning is a bit of a dog’s breakfast. I don’t know if you have a dog. We don’t now, but I did for many years, and the dog’s breakfast starts off with a kind of wholesale contribution of something that is the standard fair, and to that, depending on your family, is added all kinds of bits and pieces, so that when you finally look at the thing, you say, “Man, I can’t believe any dog would even be prepared to eat that.” And yet, nevertheless, there are dogs, and they do eat it.

Since I’m amongst friends and peers, I want you to know that I was stuck between a number of messages. When I gave the title to the conference, I said 2 Timothy 4:5. The closer I got to it, the more I was concerned that that may come out as merely hortatory and that it wouldn’t be grounded enough. And so I decided that I would go to 1 Timothy 4, and then I said, “Yeah, but I like 2 Timothy 4,” and then I had some other thoughts and everything else. So I just hAVE a whole ton of material up here, and I’m personally quite excited to see how it comes out. It’s going to go like this. It’s sort of a brief exposition followed by words of exhortation and, if time allows, some of my favorite Irish jokes. The last part was a joke, guys, because word will get back.

A Clear Instruction for Pastors

Now, 1 Timothy 4:6–16 says:

If you put these things before the brothers, you will be a good servant of Christ Jesus, being trained in the words of the faith and of the good doctrine that you have followed. Have nothing to do with irreverent, silly myths. Rather train yourself for godliness; for while bodily training is of some value, godliness is of value in every way, as it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come. The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance. For to this end we toil and strive, because we have our hope set on the living God, who is the Savior of all people, especially of those who believe. Command and teach these things. Let no one despise you for your youth, but set the believers an example in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith, in purity. Until I come, devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, to exhortation, to teaching. Do not neglect the gift you have, which was given you by prophecy when the council of elders laid their hands on you. Practice these things, immerse yourself in them, so that all may see your progress. Keep a close watch on yourself and on the teaching. Persist in this, for by so doing you will save both yourself and your hearers.

Now, we need to be in absolutely no doubt about the nature of the information which is being conveyed here by the apostle Paul to Timothy. He says, “I’m giving you instruction, Timothy, in relation to these things, and if you point them out, you will be a good minister of Christ Jesus.” Which of us in serving Christ does not wish to be good at it? And if there are places to which we might turn to enable us in our task, then we want to turn there. It is this kind of straightforward instruction, which is then contained in these verses, that proceed throughout this fourth chapter. I’d like to try and draw them to us and draw our thoughts around them by suggesting that Paul is issuing here a threefold call to Timothy, as a younger man.

It is a call to discipline, a call to devotion, and a call to diligence. The discipline to which he calls him, he addresses in the sixth verse through verse eight or so, and we should make it clear to our minds that he is giving this instruction in the immediate context of false teaching. It’s not my purpose this morning to deal with the first five verses. I assume a measure of familiarity on each of your parts, and we do recognize that there were those ascetics, who were teaching an externalized form of religion, which was just devastating to the people. Paul is concerned that Timothy will be both alert to this and clear in his own instruction.

The confusion in confronting Timothy was largely on two fronts. It was moral insofar as men and women did not know how they ought to behave, and it was doctrinal in so much as they were unsure about what it was they believed. And despite the passage of time, it was clear from the talk that was given last evening that the confusion abounds at this point in which we are exercising our ministry and clearly still within those two realms. There is moral and doctrinal confusion. What, then, is the pastor to do in that context? Well, he is to be disciplined and he is to be disciplined insofar as he himself is being disciplined by the very truth that he teaches.

A Call to Discipline

That’s the significance of what he says here about being brought up in the truths of the faith and of the good teaching that you have followed. In other words, “Timothy, it is because you follow that you can lead. And if you do not follow, you do not deserve to lead. And what you follow is that which you must then convey. So if you follow Christ, then you will lead others to follow him. If you follow the Scriptures sincerely, then you will be a catalyst for that in the lives of those under your care. But Timothy, if you should wander, if you should be distracted, if you should be unduly discouraged, if you should be deterred from your task, then those under your care will suffer dreadfully as a result.”

If you doubt that, you should only look again at the final sentence of the chapter. “Persevere in these things,” he says, “because if you do, you will save both yourself and your hearers.” In other words, this isn’t a matter of marginal interest. This is not something that is on the fringes of life. This is at the very heart of it all. Timothy, it is imperative that you are disciplined in these things, that you are brought up in these truths. The verb there is a continual expression of a process of being nourished in the words of the faith. Timothy is to be the one who is both diligently studying and perseveringly practicing the things that he is conveying to other people.

He and we are not to become like the jaded school teacher or the college professor, who is simply plowing his way through material that is ages old and seldom reviewed. We have all had those teachers. Their notebooks are falling apart because they’ve used them so much, which is commendable, on one hand, and yet there hasn’t been a new thought inserted in them in the last 25 years. People have drifted away from their lectures, not because the substance was really not so good. It was good, but it was once fresh. It was once dynamic. It was once stirring. It was once moving, but now it has become like an old pot of porridge, kept somewhere in a cupboard and, every so often, pulled out and tried to be reheated in a microwave and served up to people. And those of you who don’t like porridge to begin with will find that the most distasteful of thoughts.

And yet, there is a danger that in pastoral ministry, especially once we have gone for a period of time, that we cease to be being brought up in the truths of the faith. And we have become so consumed with the thought of being leaders that we have lost sight of the fact that if we don’t follow, we can’t lead. It was to be Timothy’s careful investigation of these deep truths of the faith, of the great truths that had founded his path and established his going. His careful investigation was to be the basis for his public proclamation. If our preaching is thin, it is because our study is vacuous.

Some Value in Physical Training

Now, Paul says, “I want you to be disciplined, not in the way that these folks that I’ve been referring to in the first five verses are disciplined in terms of their asceticism, but I want you to be disciplined in relation to spiritual fitness or to godliness. For physical training has a certain value, but godliness has value both for this life and for the life to come.” In other words, “Timothy, you should have nothing to do with the unholy myths which resemble the tall stories told by credulous old women.” Don’t be sitting around consuming your mind and being diverted because there is so much nonsense going around.

If he’d been writing today, he would’ve said, “You should probably only read ‘Christianity Today’ and read it very quickly, and then throw it away, because if you allow yourself to be consumed with that stuff, the chances are you’ll become horribly distracted and dreadfully discouraged.” Don’t fill your mind with old wive’s tales and unholy myths. Instead, concentrate. Train yourself for godliness. In godliness, not in the self-centered ascetic struggle for moral and religious perfection but the training necessary for the unhindered pursuit of God’s purpose.

Everybody understands that physical training has a certain value. Sometimes, in Christian circles, that has been devalued. Oftentimes, in pastoral ministry, it is devalued. I know it isn’t true here, but it certainly is true at home, that many pastors have what I call the tea-time tummy. And some of you are already sucking it in, but that’s okay. These are gentlemen that I have observed over the years who’ve done a tremendous amount of pastoral visitation and have found it totally impossible to resist the opportunities of fodder being provided at every stop on the journey and they’ve developed a special little platform.

You notice this without really noticing it when you realize that you’re standing talking to a gentleman and, somehow or another, his cup and saucer have not fallen on the floor, but he’s not apparently holding it with his hands, and that is because he has developed a ledge, the tea-time ledge, on which he can set his little cup, and he likes to give talks on self-discipline.

Surpassing Value of Spiritual Fitness

Physical training has value, but spiritual fitness is absolutely essential. Now, when I arrived here yesterday, I was taken to the room where I’m staying, and I recognized that I had 55 minutes. So I said, “Okay, I can lie on the bed, read the paper, read my notes, pray, phone my wife, or go running on the treadmill.” So I went running on the treadmill, and I ran on the treadmill for as long as I could, until it was time to leave. Then, I reread my notes and felt horribly convicted because I gave myself the opportunity to pursue physical fitness, but I didn’t spend half an hour in prayer or in meditation or in the reading of the word, but that’s actually not unusual.

I don’t know how you do it, but I can run on the treadmill three times a week, definitely, and four in a good week for about 40 minutes a shot. That’s about 20 minutes off three hours of sweating. I’m not sure about four sessions or 40 minutes on my knees before God in pursuing godliness. And yet, all of the instruction here is a clear reminder that my growth in grace calls for an obedience to God’s will that demands strenuous self-discipline. The very verbs that are used call attention to that. The verb in verse seven is, “Train yourself,” in verse 10 it’s, “We labor and we strive.” When you get into chapter six, he’s talking about fleeing and fighting. All of this demands action. Surely, we are nurtured in the grace of God. Yes, we understand that, but nevertheless, we are called to this disciplined activity.

When I was 12, I got a tracksuit for the first time, and I thought I was an athlete just because I had a tracksuit. I was so stupid that I thought that if you had a tracksuit, it made you fast or something. And I put the tracksuit on and I found I was still as horrible at running as I was before. In fact, I was worse with the tracksuit on than I was with the tracksuit off, but I thought if I just clothed myself in the right stuff it would work. It’d be easy enough to dress up like John the Baptist, wouldn’t it, but not have a prophetic ministry. We could grow his beard, eat his diet, preach his sermons, and amount to nothing for God. Train yourself, Timothy. Have nothing to do with this stuff. Physical fitness is vital, but you need to ensure that you are training yourself to be godly.

A Trustworthy Statement

Now, in 1 Timothy 4:8–10, we could get into a little theological discourse about whether the trustworthy saying is verse eight or whether the trustworthy saying is verse 10. In fact, just as an exercise, let me see. How many of you in teaching 1 Timothy 4 have taught that the trustworthy saying is verse 10? Okay, let’s do something else. How many of you have ever taught 1 Timothy? Okay, the exercise is futile. That’s all right.

I think 1 Timothy 4:8 is the trustworthy saying. I think this is the way it should read. What we have here in verse 8 is a trustworthy saying and it is to this end that we labor and strive. I think that that should be “because” halfway through verse 10, after the parenthesis. It should say, “And for this we labor and strive because we have put our hope in the living God who is the savior of all men and especially of those who believe.” That little phrase is in the Bible deliberately to close down in home Bible study groups and to cause chaos — when your group leaders try to deal with this question. I’m not planning on pausing on it at the moment, simply to acknowledge that it conveys what the New Testament teaches clearly that the divine offer of the gospel is universal in its scope and it is particular in its application.

Be An Example

Now, from this matter of discipline, there are then follows a string of 10 imperatives and these commands are aptly summarized in 1 Timothy 4:16 in the phrase, “Watch your life in doctrine closely.” Paul wants to dissuade Timothy from any sense of diffidence that he might feel in relationship to the responsibility that he has and so he commands him to teach these things even though he may only be in his mid-thirties, he’s not to allow that to prevent him from being effective in his leadership. Indeed, he says instead of people looking down on him because he is young, people are to look up to him.

One of the staggering things about Timothy — and it is an encouragement to me — is that he had so many disqualifications for ministry. He was obviously young and he was physically frail. That’s why he had to keep having wine for his tummy’s sake. And he was naturally timid. When Timothy comes, Paul says to the Corinthians, “Put him at his ease.” Why? Because he’s not the kind of person who just naturally walks in and takes over. He’s a young-looking character. He often has trouble with his tummy and he is diffident amongst people and yet he is the one upon whose life God has set his hand. Paul is saying, “He is my lieutenant in the faith and he is the one to whom I am entrusting the responsibility.” I derive great encouragement from that.

If you read Dallimore’s first volume on Whitfield, you know that when Whitfield appeared in places in New England, he looked like such a boy that the people used to shout and laugh at him as he came into town. They said, “Here comes the boy, here comes the boy preacher.” And the same people who laughed him into town were often brought to their faces in the fields under the profound moving of the Spirit of God through the lips of this boy preacher.

A Call to Devotion

Paul says, “Timothy, you need to be disciplined in these things and I want to encourage you in your devotion.” In 1 Timothy 4:13 — I deliberately went for this because it was another D — it says, “Until I come devote yourself to the public reading of scripture.” Now the three pursuits to which Timothy is to devote himself come after a call to be an example in five areas of life and ministry. The first two — speech and life — are largely public and the remaining three are largely private, namely love, faith, and purity, but they do clearly have a public manifestation.

Now, Paul is saying this, the authority with which Timothy is called to speak, the basis of his command and of his teaching is not ultimately age and experience but character. It is what he is under God that provides the basis for what he does. In other words, there is none of the contemporary predilection for saying, “Well, the man is a disaster in his private life, but he is wonderful on the basketball court and therefore all is fine.” A man may be a brilliant chemical engineer and a moral disaster and still continue to function well in his day-to-day discipline.

That kind of gap between public and private morality is so pervasive in our culture that if we are not careful we might imbibe just a little of it ourselves. That somehow or another we can call people to a standard that is higher than the one towards which we are actually living. Remember C.S. Lewis in The Four Loves makes that very point. He says, “Those like myself whose imagination far exceeds their obedience are subject to a just penalty.” We easily imagine conditions far higher than we have actually reached. If we describe what we have imagined, we may make others and make ourselves believe that we have really been there and so fool both them and ourselves. I don’t know if you identify with that, but it reverberates a little too loudly in my head and heart.

Godliness in Speech

So let’s just look at these five areas. I don’t want to camp on any one of them, but let’s just notice first of all, in your speech. Who’s the perfect man? A man who’s never wrong on what he says. What is our trade? Words. Instead of our speech being an occasion for lies or for anger or for bitterness or slander or malice or abuse or filthy talk, our speech public and casual and inadvertent is to be marked by edification and by admonition and by tenderness and forgiveness and by thanksgiving.

I find this to be such a challenge. Isn’t it interesting that when Isaiah encounters God in all of his grandeur and holiness in Isaiah 6, the first thing he says is, “I am a man of unclean lips” (Isaiah 6:5). The very vehicle for God’s purpose in his life is the occasion for his greatest problem, but is that not so often the case that that which has the capacity for the greatest good holds within it the potential for the greatest declension? So that tenderheartedness becomes weakness and inability to lead? That strength in leadership becomes brashness and autocracy? That a facility with the language which may be used for the edifying of the people of God becomes the occasion of the parading of our own abilities and drawing attention to ourselves?

Solomon says:

Whoever keeps his mouth and his tongue keeps himself out of trouble (Proverbs 21:23).

Godliness in Conduct

That is our speech, and also it must be our life, in other words, our conduct or our behavior. Again, I think it’s in the most unconscious ways that this is revealed staggeringly so. It’s what people see of us out of the corner of their eye, as it were. It’s when they find us in the unusual place that this is probably made most obviously so. In other words, there is a closing of the gap between our professed statements and our actual behavior.

The way to test this is with our children, or with our wives, or with our next door neighbors, or with our colleagues with whom we have built over the years a certain sense of camaraderie and closeness and have established for one another the lowest common denominator in both morality and in various forms of practice.

Godliness in Love

My life, and also it must be my love. The word is the agape love of Christ. It’s the self-giving dimension of love. Would our people say of us that we genuinely love them? That we are loving? Not in some soft and sentimental squishy kind of way. It’s not that we have a PhD in hugging. I’m pretty choosy about who I hug, as it turns out. It’s partly personality, partly Scotland. But I’m not talking about necessarily a style. I’m just talking about what the word is talking about.

I tell my people regularly, “You’ll know that I love you if I always show up with the food the way I promised I would and the way you asked me to. If you want to determine my love for you on the basis of whether I came over to your house for dinner or some other standard that you have created, you may actually assume that I don’t love you at all. It wouldn’t be true, but you may assume that. You may assume from my absence that it is an absence of love. It’s not an absence of love. It is an absence in order that when I am present I might do what you’ve asked me to do.” Some of us are terrorized not because we’re concerned to love à la 1 Timothy 4, but perhaps because we have been seduced with the idea that everyone has to like us. Do you want to lead your people or do you want them just to like you?

Godliness in Faith

What about faith? I could expand on these all I think so could you, but we’re just mentioning them in passing that he used to be a man of the faith and the man of faith. In 2 Timothy 2:15, Paul says:

Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth.

And in the dividing of the word of truth, there is the instilling of faith. There is growth in personal faith.

Godliness in Purity

And also he speaks in this matter about purity. He’s going to come to this again in 1 Timothy 5:2. He makes the point very clearly, “Treat younger men as brothers, older women as mothers and younger women as sisters with absolute purity.” It’s a purity that is at the core of things, a purity of mind, a purity of action. There will be no improper involvement. There will be no wrongful lingering. There will be no engaging with others of the opposite sex, especially younger women, in such a way as to create the impression that we are anything other than one-women men.

I’ve been here now for 14 and a half years and sadly in the space of 14 and a half years I have watched a number of my personal heroes collapse in pastoral ministry. I know that there is a definite interface between theology and practice. But perceptively, the collapse came not because they wandered first theologically, but because they capitulated morally and then they started to bring their theology into line with their immorality rather than correct their immorality on the strength of true theology.

The statistics say that two thirds of the men in America cheat on their wives and the statistics that come out of churches are getting staggeringly close to the same. So when the Scriptures call us to a lifestyle that is so radically different, then we must be honest with ourselves. Luther says:

I’m more afraid of my own heart than of the pope of Rome. For in my heart there dwells that great pope self.

And I go through this list: speech, life, love, faith, purity, and I say to myself, “This would be a good day to leave the ministry. This would be a good point just to quit. Who can live up to these things? Who is sufficient for this?” And the danger is that when we establish for ourselves the challenge of this standard is that we get lost in some kind of crippling despondent. The devil loves it.

The work of the Spirit of God in our lives is not to bring us down and to dispirit us, but it is to convict us and convert us and to train us and to stimulate us and to use us. Now, the reason that it is so important that these areas are in line is because unless this dimension of lifestyle and behavior is in place, then a commitment to 1 Timothy 4:13 can be nothing other than a show.

Facing Our Own Ugliness

You see, you can devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, you can read the Bible and you can show up and preach and teach and so can I, and you can fail to be (and I can fail to be) an example for the believers in my speech, my life, my love, my faith, and my purity. In other words, I’m a walking contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction, taking every wrong direction on my lonely way back home. That’s a country western song. In other words, we’re on two escalators, one is going up one way, one is going up the other way. We’re being torn apart. We know it. God knows it. And I do want to say in passing that one of the great benefits of staying anywhere for a period of time in pastoral ministry is that just when you think you’re about to be torn in two by the escalator, the temptation is, “Just jump on one side and head for another place.”

Now, God is sovereign in all these things, but there is great benefit in being able to be honest and seek counsel amongst our peers and amongst our elders and recognize that there are seasons in the soul, there are transitions in the journey, there are points along the pilgrimage that we need to deal with. We need to face the ugliness of ourselves at various points and ask for others to pray with us and help us and be open and prepared to take their counsel. We need to have our elders say, “You know, you have a fat mouth, Alistair, and what you said to that guy in that conversation discouraged him horribly. Now, what you said was right but the way you said it was rotten, and if you continue to function in that way, you will never be able to build relationships as necessary.” You get in your car and you are a mixture of defiance and penitence and defeat, and the tears smart in your eyes and you don’t know if they’re tears of repentance or tears of anger or what they are, but they’re key points along the journey. Every time you find yourself saying, “There’s nobody going to talk to me like that,” ask yourself, “Why not?” We probably need to be talked to like that.

Devoted to Public Reading, PReaching, and Teaching

Now, with that as the backdrop, he then says, “I want you to be devoted and I want your devotion to devote yourself, your whole psyche, your life, your personality, your Romans 12 bit, to the public, reading of the Scriptures to preaching and to teaching.” Now, what we have here is largely the pattern of the synagogue. We can find it, for example, in Acts 13. You have the situation there in Psidia in Antioch. It says:

And on the Sabbath day they went into the synagogue and sat down. After the reading from the Law and the Prophets, the rulers of the synagogue sent a message to them, saying, “Brothers, if you have any word of encouragement for the people, say it.” So Paul stood up, and motioning with his hand said: “Men of Israel and you who fear God, listen (Acts 13:14–16).

So in other words, they read the Scriptures and then they asked if there were those who were able to make exhortation on the strength of the Scriptures, and then they ensured that the exhortation was clarified by the teaching, which ran not only through the exhortation, but through the totality of the unfolding plan of God’s truth. And rather than get tied up on breaking all of this up, let’s just say that it is a devotion to the preeminence of the proclamation of the word of God. It is a devotion to the Bible being at the very center of all that we are and all that we believe and all that we do — that we are worshiping Christ, that we are serving him in the power of the Spirit, and that we are seeking to set forward the truth of God’s word as best we understand it and to that we will give our lives.

We will be totally devoted so that if our kids or our parents or our aunts or our uncles were to say about us, “What is he about?” They would say, “Well, he is absolutely devoted to reading the Bible, preaching the Bible, and teaching the Bible. He’s essentially got one string to his bull. There are other people who do different things around him. There are others who have gifts and graces that are very necessary, but this chap is absolutely devoted. His focus is there. He is reading the Scriptures to the gathered congregation, exhorting them to respond appropriately, and then teaching its principles.”

A Word on Preaching

Now, will you allow me a brief discourses on preaching at this point? Okay, one person said he would and I’ll point him out to you afterwards. I want to say just a word or two about preaching, and if there’s any of this that is original, it will be the parts that don’t make sense. Why is there such a disinterest in preaching? It’s partly because there is so much boring preaching. There is so much that passes for preaching which actually is not preaching. Preaching is not less than teaching. Preaching is more than teaching. Preaching is both didactic in its content and it is hortatory in its application. Should be clear in its structure, it should be biblical in its framework, and it should be all of these things.

But the preacher is not somebody who gets up on a Sunday morning and sort of quotes from “Newsweek” and “Time Magazine” and plays a few thrills on the trumpet and then suggests that everybody go downstairs to where the well-trained theologians are going to teach the congregation the Bible. I understand that that’s a pattern in many churches, so that what you have in the pulpit is a sort of cheerleader, a nice man, a cozy figure, an encouraging chap who will gather the crowds and then he will disperse them so that somebody else who has spent their time studying the Bible will be able to teach it. That is not what I’m talking about, about a model of preaching.

There needs to be in our preaching integrity, fidelity, intelligibility, and definite humility. But one of the things that I find in talking with younger men who seek me out — and I’m going to be 46 in a couple of months, so I think I now qualify to say that there are younger men — is that they are on the receiving end of various snippets of information which are not new, but come with profound impact at various seasons. So many of them are wondering whether it is accurate when people tell them preaching doesn’t do any good.

So they’re told. Preaching doesn’t do any good. Insofar as mono-directional communication can reinforce attitudes and beliefs that are already held but can only very, very rarely really affect change in people’s opinions. Now, that is a facet of modern psychotherapy. When you buy that, the inference is, “If you want to change people, you must give up on monologue because monologue only reinforces held convictions, and you must at least try dialogue and beyond dialogue, you should maybe add a little travel log and maybe a chocolate log or two as well.” In other words, you are in deep difficulty.

The Biblical Precedent of Preaching

Now, first of all, we take this and we hold it up to the mirror of God’s word and we are forced to conclude that if that is accurate, then Jesus was involved in a complete faux pas, and so were all the apostles with him, because they were very clear that their role was to be a herald, to be a communicator, to be the deliverers of information from the living God to those who are his creation. And he was engaged not in dialogue, but in proclamation.

So what’s the deal? Well, the flaw isn’t in the psychology, the flaw is in the theology. I don’t know enough about psychotherapy to know how true that statement is, but I’m not concerned whether it’s true or not because that’s not what happens when you preach — not when you really preach. See, people who argue in that way have assumed that preaching is analogous to a marketing exercise. And what you have in the preaching event, we are told, is a product (namely, the gospel), consumers (namely, the congregation), salesman (the preacher), and the job of the preacher is to overcome consumer resistance and persuade people to buy his product.

Many, many, many younger men apparently have begun to labor in pastoral ministry with that as a model. It is a recipe for the worst kind of disappointment eventually, because what do we discover when we turn to the Bible? We discover that according to Paul, there is one overwhelming reason why the analogy is no good, and that is because the preacher doesn’t overcome consumer resistance. The preacher cannot overcome consumer resistance. Second Corinthians 4 says that the gospel is veiled to those who do not believe. When Jesus told the parable of the sower, there was one sower and four soils. If it was told today in marketing terms it would be completely in reverse, wouldn’t it?

You would have one soil and four sowers. Sower number one goes up and does quite a good job, but not a very good job and nothing happens. Sower number two, he goes up and he’s a little more skillful in the way he does it and he has a bit of a better response. Sower number three goes up and he’s been doing some church growth reading and some marketing analysis and his thing is really beginning to take off. But number four, he has all of the technology and all of the marketing strategy down, and he knows how to overcome consumer resistance, and presto, look at his field. Do we really believe that Christian conversion is the result of human persuasion? Absolutely not. God said, “Let light shine out of darkness.”

The Trouble with Contemporary Preaching

See, much of the trouble with our contemporary preaching is that it is built on the fallacious assumption that anybody can and will respond to the gospel if it’s only presented to them in a proper fashion. I don’t know when’s the last time I presented it in a proper enough fashion. And how would I ever know if I had? What would you use as the quantifier? Preaching will be effective not because by all accounts it is the best means of communication — apparently by all accounts it’s not the best means of communication — but it will be effective because it is God’s chosen method by which he opens people’s eyes and brings them to an awareness of his grace. And that is why it will demand from us 110-percent committed devotion. I’m not going to get into anything further, but the same young men are coming and people are telling them people won’t listen to preaching these days.

My answer to that is, “No, I’ve heard you preach and I’m not surprised they don’t listen to you.” They haven’t even given it a try under the Spirit of God. If they’d used five percent of the imagination involved in creating this roadshow that they’ve got going in their church to seriously understand the Bible and convey it, they would be amazed at what God would do by his Spirit. So we’ve got to hold the standard high. We’ve got to hold it first for ourselves. They say, “People won’t listen to preaching, so what we need to do is look at advertising, look at the way they package it, look at the world of entertainment, and look and see how they do it.”

But the question when our worship services are over is not how much did the pagan enjoy that? The question is how much did they learn from that? Not how electric was the atmosphere but how clear was the gospel? It’s simply not true to say that people won’t listen to preaching. If people are being awakened spiritually to their need of God, they will listen. And if they’re not, then no amount of gospel entertainment or evangelistic gimmickry will make them listen. So if God’s not going to do it God’s way, it’s not going to be done.

A Word on Expository Preaching

Now, while I’m on this discourse, I want to say just a word about expository preaching as well because I get asked this question everywhere I go. I think that expository preaching means that systematically we are asking of every book, every chapter, and every verse of the Bible, two things: first, what is God’s intention in this portion of the Bible, and secondly what is its relevance to our contemporary culture? Every time we come to any portion of Scripture, we’re asking, what is God’s intention here? Why was this written to Corinth at this point in time? What is the historical context? What is the environment in which this truth was being conveyed? What does this mean in Ephesus for Timothy as a young man in pastoral ministry? And then, what is the relevance to our contemporary culture?

Now, those two questions don’t necessarily or even ideally establish the structure of the way in which we preach. These two questions actually precede all other questions of style. But what these two questions ensure is simply that the agenda for our sermon is determined by the text itself, that it is established by the Bible. It starts there, and we then try to do as John Stott has said so helpfully, “fuse the two horizons of the biblical text and the contemporary world.”

Now, a sermon that is preoccupied with its relevance to contemporary culture and has only a kind of tangential reference to Scripture may count as preaching insofar as it is seeking to communicate orthodox Christian truth, but it is not expository in the true sense of the word because the Bible isn’t sufficiently central to it. It’s not actually unfolding the Scripture in the understanding of God’s purpose in the giving of that Scripture for that moment in time-space history.

It’s the kind of preaching that says, “Now let me tell you what this means to me.” Or it reads a passage of scripture and says, “Let me give you seven principles on this.” They may all be wonderful seven principles. And there are congregations that are instructed on principle here and principle that and principle this, and they think that they are listening to expository preaching. They’re not at all. You can preach the same stuff out of the “US Airways” magazine.

On the other hand, a sermon that concentrates wholly on what is God’s intention in this portion of the Bible and has little or no insightful application to the contemporary scene would be better termed an exegetical treatise than an expository sermon, because expository preaching must have a prophetic dimension to it. It must have a “thus says the Lord” in the existential moment

For God’s word is timeless in its appeal. But first we ground it in an understanding of why God said what he said as best as our minds can be brought under its truth, and then and from that point we go forward instead of a kind of schizophrenic compartmentalism between the Bible and the world, our preaching needs to exemplify and encourage the bringing together of those two horizons. Why is it that a number of people in our churches are so schizo in relationship to where they are in the world and what the Bible has to say to them? I think it’s partly because of our preaching, because we are not successfully devoting ourselves to the task of under God fusing those two horizons. So you go to some churches and the preaching is unbelievably solid, but you walk out and you say, “Well, I understand five things about the doctrine of providence, but my daughter is at university and not going on with the Lord. My mother-in-law has cancer. I wish he could just have explained how providence invades my shoes, that kind of thing.”

Then you go somewhere else and you get a series of exhortations that are about, “Now try and be happy and be joyful and be spirited and be thankful and see the good in everything.” And you say, “Okay,” and you go out and you say, “How and why?” And the answer is on the basis of the doctrine of providence. But because it has gone all off here, without any substance here, all we’re left with is the third and the fourth floor but with no basement and no ground floor. Over here we’ve got guys building basements ad-nauseum. This is the same in terms of evangelism. You’ve got guys that are so tied up in Reformed theology that they’re waiting for God to evangelize India. And you’ve got other guys who are so concerned that they’ve got the problem of saving the world that they have now created a gospel that is man-made in its orientation. And they are two sorry groups of people.

A Call to Diligence

Let me come to the last word, which is the word diligence. I’ve said more than enough on that. It would appear that Paul in his great wisdom anticipates Timothy shaking in his shoes a wee bit there at the end 1 Timothy 4:13. I know I’m shaking in my shoes. I don’t know about you — speech, life, love, faith, purity, devotion to the public, reading of the Bible, the preaching and the teaching. Okay, I’ll have a go at that. Yes, I’ll be getting right to that Lord, yes. I’m planning on starting really seriously on that this afternoon. That is, if I don’t quit before this afternoon.

The Spirit of God moves Paul and he says, “Hey, listen, don’t neglect your gift that was given you through a prophetic message when the body of elders laid their hands on you. You’re not out here on your own Timothy, you’re not on a fool’s errand. You didn’t sign up for gospel ministry. You didn’t wake up one morning and say, ‘I think I’d be a fine preacher.’ Timothy, you’re obviously young, you’re naturally timid, you’re physically frail. You know when you put your head on the pillow at night that you don’t have much going for you, Timothy. But I want to remind you of this. I want to remind you of the prophetic gift that was given you when the elders laid their hands on you. In other words, this is God’s doing, Timothy, all of the substance of your ministry and all of the strength of your ministry and all of the scope of your ministry is under the overarching hand of Almighty God. So just in case you were thinking about making a run for it, I wanted to remind you of that.”

Oh, how apropos is an encouraging reminder. We all can use a wee reminder, can’t we, from time to time? And then he says, “I want you to be diligent in these things.” We understand the word. Having reminded him of the gift that has qualified him for the task, he now says, “I want you to be diligent in the exercise of your ministry.” You get the same thing again. He says, “Give yourself wholly to them.” Now, which part of that don’t you understand? Give yourself wholly to them. In other words, study, practice, and lose yourself in them. Be absorbed in these pursuits in the same way that your body is absorbed in the very air that it breathes. Be totally consumed by this, Timothy.

An Account of Diligence

In the second half of September, I had occasion to be somewhere in Florida and the environment in which I found myself contained four of the members of your Ryder Cup team. And they were practicing on a daily basis and they practiced very hard. Unfortunately, they didn’t practice quite hard enough, but they practiced very hard. I enjoyed many a morning simply standing behind them, watching them hit golf balls, and they would hit the same shot again and again and again, ad-infinitum. One of them, perhaps the best known and the most prominent, stood out there and sweat through his shirt completely to the point of saturation. He then went with another of the golfers and they played 18 holes of golf. He walked off the 18th tee and went to the practice putting green and on the practice putting green, he walked on as I went running. I ran for 45 minutes and when I came back, he was in the same spot and still putting.

I went in, I took a shower, I got changed, and I left. About an hour and 20 minutes later as I went out, he was still on the practice green in the same spot and still putting. What was he doing? He was giving himself wholly to the pursuit of an overarching objective. Was it Hendrick that said most churches think they’re doing fine because they don’t know what they’re doing.

Personal Piety and Public Ministry

Now as the leader goes, so goes the church. We may think we’re doing fine because we don’t know what we’re doing. You read 1 Corinthians 9 and Paul says, “This is what I’m doing. I want to win as many as possible. This is why I become this way to this guy and this way to this guy, because I have an overarching objective. I want to see unbelieving people become committed followers of Jesus Christ.”

He speaks to Timothy about the kind of progress that is necessary. The word that is used here incidentally for “progress” is a word that the stoics like to use in relationship to the development of the inroads of their philosophy, and it may well be in relationship to the first five verses that Paul is just picking up on. And then he says, “There’s a lot of talk about progress. Let’s make sure everyone can see your progress and let me tell you where they need to see your progress: Keep a close eye on your life and keep an eye out on your doctrine.” Holy living and sound teaching must be held together. Personal piety and public ministry must be the focus of our perseverance. And as I said earlier, this is not a matter of marginal concern. It’s an issue of salvation. Calvin says:

Nor should it seem strange that Paul ascribes to Timothy the work of saving the church , for all that are won for God are saved. And it is by the preaching of the gospel that we are gathered to Christ and just as the faithfulness or negligence of a pastor is fatal to the church, so it is right for its salvation to be ascribed to his faithfulness and diligence. It is indeed true that it is God alone who saves and not even the smallest part of his glory can be rightly transferred to man. But God’s glory is in no way diminished by his using the labor of man in bestowing salvation.

What Then Shall We Do?

So my concluding exhortation is actually 2 Timothy 4:5. What should we then do? What should we do?

Keep Your Head

There are four things. First, keep your head. In Glasgow they say, “Keep the heid.” In other words, don’t let anyone spin your head off your shoulders for you. Don’t get a fat head from people telling you you’re fantastic, because frankly you’re not. And don’t get a pinhead by people telling you that you stink because you really don’t. Just think of yourself in a realistic way, the way you ought to think. We should put our heads on the pillow at night and say, “Well, that’s another day for this old clay pot.” Then put the clay pot back in the box for the night and if God wakes us up to a new day and chooses to shine through us again, we’ll thank him for it. We’ll keep our heads. We’re not going to chase down this labyrinth, down that passageway, try to fix that, try to cure this, try to cure the next thing. The degree to which the evil one has managed to take the church and reorientate its agenda in the last quarter of a century in this country is unbelievably staggering, isn’t it? People think they’re in the battle. They’re fighting the wrong battle. They’re fighting the wrong battle using the wrong weapons.

The church can’t say we don’t fight as the world fights, we fight the exact same way the world fights. We don’t wage war as the world does? Yes, we do. They shout, we shout. They march, we march. They exclaim, we exclaim. They politic, we politic. They get 1-800 numbers, we get 1-800 numbers. The devil is thrilled. Thrilled. I mean, he didn’t tell me personally, but I assume so. So what are you going to do on a Monday? Keep your head. Because, as Chadwick said, he left the ministry every Sunday night. I was thrilled when I found out because I thought I was the only person that did that. Samuel Chadwick said, “I left the ministry every Sunday night.” Every Monday morning he awoke. The first thing he did was he read Isaiah 40. After he finished reading Isaiah 40 and praying, he said, “Okay, God, we’ll try it for another week.” That’s pretty well where I am. Keep your head.

Endure Hardship

Secondly, endure hardship, endure hardship. A country western song says, “I beg your pardon, I never promised you’re a rose garden. Along with the sunshine there’s got to be a little rain sometimes.” Don’t be whining. In fact, there are three real dangers in pastoral ministry that I identified for myself the other day and I’m good at all of them — shining, reclining, and shining. In other words, shining like, “Hey, hey, I’m here. Thank you and good afternoon.” Whining is, “This is the worst place I’ve ever seen.” Get yourself a tangerine and go in a corner. And reclining, the absolute antithesis of burnout is rust out. There is no greater potential for laziness than in pastoral ministry. You can run and you can hide. But if we’re going to endure hardship, if we’re going to persevere and do the will of God, then that’s something different.

Do the Work of an Evangelist

Do the work of an evangelist. Do the work of an evangelist. “When the challenges come,” says Dick Lucas, “don’t board up and retreat, buckle up and evangelize.” What a great quote. You really need his accent for it to come across properly. You’ve been thinking of boarding up and retreating? Buckle up and evangelize. Go to McDonald’s. Have you been to McDonald’s lately? When’s the last time you engaged anybody in personal, private conversation about faith in Jesus Christ, and not somebody who came and sought you out? Okay, don’t answer that. That’s fine. Do the work of an evangelist.

Preach the Cross

If I had time, we’d talk about preaching the cross because how can you do the work of an evangelist without preaching the cross? When’s the last time you preached on the cross? Do you think there may be a direct correlation between usefulness in ministry and making much of the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ? Do you think maybe that’s why when we read Whitfield and when we read Lloyd Jones, we read about dimensions of ministry and response that are staggering to us, and then we analyze what’s going on. We read Spurgeon and we say, “What was it about Spurgeon?” Then we go to his tombstone in London and we look at it and it says on his tombstone, “E’er since by faith I saw the stream thy flowing wounds supply, redeeming love has been my theme and shall be till I die.”

How could we do the work of evangelism without preaching the cross? Keep your head, endure hardship, do the work of an evangelist and discharge all the duties of your ministry. And what are they? Well, they’re multi-various, aren’t they? But I wouldn’t trade them for anything and I don’t think you would either. What is pastoral ministry? It’s a succession of days. There are delightful days and there are disastrous days, but there are no dull days, there are no dull days. Dull is you and dull is me. Dull is not the days. So whether it is delightful or is disastrous at the moment, it’s the place God has put us. And there is no ideal place to serve God except the place he sets us down. So we will take all of our days and all of our opportunities as from his hand and seek to serve him.

Questions and Answers

You made reference to a lot of marketing strategies, the different techniques. It seems to be that there are churches being handed off with something like that. You say that there are a lot of people who aren’t really being converted, that a lot of this is just big groups of people being enticed for worldly gains, but many are added numerically. Do you think the Lord is using that movement? How do you see that?

I think I would start with Paul in jail, when he writes to the Philippines, he says that he rejoices when Christ is preached. And where there is the honest and straightforward preaching of the gospel, then I rejoice in that, albeit I may have a difference in relationship to strategy.

I think where the concern that I have comes in is that in relation to what was delivered last evening, that if we begin simply with man and his need rather than God and his glory, if we begin simply with the felt needs of individuals and seek to bring to bear passages of Scripture that address that, there will be problems. For example, we have a minister in our area who every Sunday has a thing about, “Would you like to be stress-free? Would you like to be debt-free? Would you like to train your dog?” I don’t know what it is. And if the answer is yes to any of the above, then if you roll up he can show you principles from the Bible that will help you to that end. But this is far removed from the preaching of the gospel.

Now I haven’t been to all these places. I wasn’t poking fun at any particular thing. I’m trying simply to distinguish between the notion that in preaching it is not a strategy whereby we endeavor by means of human manipulation and skill to overcome consumer resistance. I don’t know the motives of individuals, I can’t impugn them in that way. Are there a lot of people in our churches who are unconverted? Without question. Would that be true in environments like that? It would be surprising if it were not true.

Can you tell us what your discipline of sermon preparation would be?

Why do you have to ask that? When I was at London Bible College, a man by the name of Leith Samuel came to speak on that very subject. And he told us something that day that I wrote down and I’ve tried to use as the framework for my approach. So that when I come to the question of let’s say 1 Timothy 4, I start with my Bible and with prayer. And then I would seek to think myself empty. Now sometimes that doesn’t take very long and it’s a salutary experience, but what I do is I write down on a legal pad anything that comes to mind, which again is not always worthy of consideration. But nevertheless I do it. And I write down thoughts and quotes and cross references and anything at all.

I think if there’s something that is obvious in the text, it may be that there is an immediate structure that suggests itself to me in terms of an outline. It may be that I notice something doctrinally that I need to do, so I do that. So I think myself empty. And then I read myself full, insofar as I want to read helpful material that will help me to exegete the passage. I don’t mean simply by that just the reading of commentaries, but as time allows, especially where we’re in a series of study, being able to read as diversely as possible so that we’re able to bring to bear on our study of the Word, especially this notion of fusing the contemporary horizon with it.

It’s important to be reading beyond the discipline of simply what some guy said. What Leon Morris said about John is really helpful exegetically, but he isn’t living in Cleveland right now as far as I know. So I want to be reading myself full. And then I write myself clear. It’s embarrassing to even say after this morning, but I try to write myself clear.

For me this part is the missing link in most young guys’ lives. They don’t understand how disengaged they are about to be between what’s going on up here in their head and what’s coming out of their mouth. And the only way I know to deal with that is to write. I think that’s why you’ll find that people who do write, their ability verbally I think is directly enhanced by the discipline of having to form and frame sentences with articulation. And that is a necessary discipline in preaching.

I’ve allowed myself a greater freedom here today perhaps than I should have. As I mentioned to you as a disclaimer at the beginning, I feel like the context is such that I might do that. On a given Sunday in my own place, I would want to be more orderly than I’ve been. And the key to orderliness then is writing myself clear. So I think myself empty, read myself full, write myself clear, pray myself ready, and preach myself into depression.

In 1 Timothy 1:13–14 it talks about prophetic utterance and earlier in chapter 1 he talks about personal prophecy towards Timothy. How do you understand that personal prophecy given to Timothy?

I think it’s probably directly related to his being set apart to ministry, perhaps to the issue of his ordination. On the occasion of his ordination there were prophetic words that were given in relationship to Timothy, in which God spoke through his servants words of encouragement to which now Timothy could look. For example, it may well have been that Paul’s statement, “God did not give us a spirit of timidity, but a spirit of power and of love and of a sound mind,” may have been a constituent part of the kind of prophetic word that was given to Timothy. So that for him to remind him of that was simply to remind him of the fact that God was the originator of his ministry, that God had underscored his call and that it was to God that he must always look. I don’t think the prophetic message itself is so much the issue as it is that it is a reminder to Timothy that God is the instigator of the ministry that he now exercises and that his beginnings were accompanied by overt signs of God’s presence.

Now if you’re asking beyond that about its relationship to the contemporary environment, which I suggest you may well be, do I believe that God gives prophetic words in relationship to men being set apart to ministry today? I think my answer to that would be, no, I don’t. The reason I would say that is because every time someone has told me that they have given me a prophetic word — I’m on the receiving end of prophetic words with frequency. One guy came to me Sunday night after the service and told me he had one for me. Bless his heart. Anytime that it’s legitimate, it’s in the Bible. And anytime it isn’t in the Bible, it’s illegitimate. So in other words, if it is an extra-Biblical statement that takes me beyond Scripture, then I wouldn’t pay any attention to it at all. And if it is simply a contemporary restatement of a Biblical reference, if somebody wants to call that a prophetic word, then we can talk about the nature of that. But if what they’re doing is quoting Psalm 37:4, namely “Delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart,” then it’s not necessary for them to close their eyes and tell me it’s a prophetic word. They should just open their Bibles and tell me it’s Psalm 37:4.

I think from your message you said we ought be consumed with the Scripture and claiming the Scripture. How do you balance that with the leadership, pastoral, shepherding responsibilities of your ministry?

First of all, I think we have to be committed to the fact that we are pastors and teachers, that we have no right to jump down on one side or the other, as it were. If we’re going to have that as a hyphenated singular designation, then we can’t be, as John Stott says, “invisible during the week and incomprehensible on a Sunday.” So the way I balance that is by taking my fair share along with my colleagues of all the things that come my way pastorally. It’s the only thing for which I’ve been trained. It’s the natural response of my heart when one of the sheep is in need, to go help them. I’ve tried hard to not fall into the trap of removing myself from those very necessary situations.

We have in the course of the last 15 months, for example, had three teenage youngsters in our church die. One died with his grandparents as a result of asphyxiation because they left the car running in the garage. His grandfather had the onset of Alzheimer’s. Another young boy died showing his girlfriend his family’s amusement park down in one of the states. And another young boy died just in the last three months falling out of a ski lift in one of the resorts in Ohio. That not only brings as you know a tremendous something into the heart of the congregation, but it demands all of our attention. And so I would be at the heart of those things.

In trying to balance it, what I do is I’ll say to people, “If this is something that others can help with, I’d sure be glad on this occasion if they might, because I have to show up on Sunday morning and Mike doesn’t. But that’s fine as well because I can study late into the night and I want to help you.” I think it’s a commitment of heart. I think it’s a heart attitude. If we’ve got the attitude, then we work it out. And I’m constantly driving in the car saying, “Lord, you know I didn’t waste time this week. I don’t know where the time went so please help me make up the time.” I don’t know if that’s a legitimate prayer.

You spoke about the occasional necessity of our leadership to come to us and be direct about some of our shortcomings and of our failures. How can we encourage our people to come to us with those things without inviting the prophetic utterances that you got Sunday night?

I think I’d like to defer that question to John or someone else. But I think it starts with the leader. It starts with the pastor being prepared to open oneself. And I don’t mean in some sentimental way. I don’t mean that stuff at all, but it’s about being prepared to be brutally honest enough with our peers to say to them, “I want you to watch for this in me, because I recognize that I can so easily do this. And would you therefore seize the opportunity?”

So for example, about seven years into the ministry at Parkside, I began to meet on a Saturday morning with three of my elders and myself and to say, “Okay, we’ve been here for seven years. Let’s kind of strip the engine down and lay it all out. Let’s start with me. I don’t mean that in a self-serving way. Why don’t you guys just be honest and talk to me about whether you think there’s a future for me in ministry here.” It was so that we don’t have that very thing. So that all of a sudden I don’t go away and come back and say, “Oh, I’m going to Connecticut.” And the people go, “Well, where did that come from?” Or that you wake up one morning and they tell you you’re going to Connecticut.

So over a period of a few months we dealt with that. And it became something of a pattern then in going forward. But I think it demands our initiative. I’m very fortunate in the environment, how gracious my people are to me, how kind they are, how decent they are, and the quality of men that I have in leadership and eldership around me. I recognize not everybody has that set up at the moment. And it’s “faithful are the wounds of a friend.” There are certain people I don’t want to go to and invite them to poke into my life because they just can’t wait to poke into my life.

When you don’t meet your people’s expectations for you to be all these things — to be able to press all their buttons and ring all their bells — how do you deal with that?

Well, for myself, the key in that whole thing is that I believe in the sense of what John Murray calls “the parity and plurality of leadership.” When we then work to that end within the structure of our congregations, then it’s one for all and all for one.

So we make it very difficult for anybody to divide us and conquer us. So that in the developing of our doctrine, in the framing of our priorities, in the establishing of ministry, if I’m not a one-man band, but I’m actually operating and we are praying these things through together in the development of ministry, then when for example we decide that we’re not going to use the organ for the next six months, and although “Yeah, we are,” come to me with words of direction, it’s been really important to me that there were another 19 guys in the room who said, “No, we’re not going to use the organ for the next six months.”

So in other words, I say, “When you can talk to me, you can talk to the other 19 guys. And if you talk to the other 19, they’ll all say the same thing.” There’s tremendous protection in that. It’s called solidarity, you know. And what you need are some of those big guys. I don’t know how American football works, but you need those big guys. What do you call those, linemen? I’ve met a few of them. Huge people. They have enormous paws, but they are really gentle. I have never met a gruff one yet. So gentle. I thought when I put my hand in there, it was over. It was such a gentle hand. But when he sets down to that task, he’ll tear your face off. Hopefully I’m not pushing the analogy too far.