Lately, I’ve been struggling to finish a couple of books. Tim Challies’ The Guide to Spiritual Discernment, Richard Sibbes’ The Bruised Reed and John Owen’s Mortification of Sin. A series of circumstances led me to put down those three books for a while and take up a new one, Richard Baxter’s The Reformed Pastor.
I was determined that before I get serious, and to make sure if God is really calling me for the great responsibility of being a Minister, I should at the very least read this book. Whether I would be led towards that burden or away from it, coupled with the reading of God’s Word and prayer, I am convinced, Lord willing, my calling would be clear upon reading the last page of this great work.
I started reading it late last night after going through a rough day. I read the Introduction of J.I. Packer. And since then I was hooked.
The book has reality. It is honest and straight. It is often said, quite fairly, that any Christian who seriously thinks that without Christ men are lost, and who seriously loves his neighbour, will not be able to rest for the thought that all around him people are going to hell, but will lay himself out unstintingly to convert others as his prime task in life; and any Christian who fails so to live undermines the credibility of his faith, for if he cannot himself take it seriously as a guide for living, why should anyone else?
Nowhere is this inconsistency more forcefully exposed than in The Reformed Pastor: for here we meet a passionate love and a terribly honest, earnest, straightforward Christian, thinking and talking about the lost with perfect realism, insisting that we must be content to accept any degree of discomfort, poverty, overwork, and loss of material good, if only souls might be saved, and setting us a marvelously vivid example in his own person of what this may involve.
When one knows one is going to be hanged, said Dr Johnson, it concerntrates the mind wonderfully; and when, like Baxter from the time of his majority, one lives with one foot in the grave, it imparts an overwhelming clarity both to one’s sense of proportion (what matters, and what does not), and also to one’s perception of what is and is not consistent with what one professes to believe. ‘O sirs,’ cries the vicar of Kidderminsteri to his ministerial brethren, ‘surely if you had all conversed with neighbour Death as oft as I have done, and as often received the sentence in yourselves, you would have an unquiet conscience, if not a reformed life, as to your ministerial diligence and fidelity: and you would have something within you that would frequently ask you such questions as these: “Is this all thy compassion for lost sinners? Wilt thou do no more to seek and to save them? . . . Shall they die and be in hell before thou wilt speak to them one serious word to prevent it? Shall they there curse thee for ever that thou didst no more in time to save them?”
Such cries of conscience are daily ringing in my ears, though, the Lord knows, I have too little obeyed them. . . . How can you choose, when you are laying a corpse in the grave, but think with yourselves, “Here lieth the body; but where is the soul? And what have I done for it, before it departed? It was part of my charge; what account can I give of it?” O sirs, is it a small matter to you to answer such questions as these? It may seem so now, but the hour is coming when it will not seem so. . . .’ Nobody can say that Baxter was not real; and who will question our need of such reality today, and in the ministry most of all?
—James I. Packer, Introduction to Richard Baxter’s The Reformed Pastor (Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth, 1656/1974), 16-17.
Read the rest of this magnificent work, full of zeal, passion and evangelistic fervor, here. I am convinced that every Christian believer that has a desire and calling to go into the ministry should and must read this book at least once.
Footnotes
- Richard Baxter [↩]
