“If an experienced pastor had 10 minutes to exhort 200 of the next generation of ministers what would you say to them? That was the charge for R. Albert Mohler Jr., Mark Dever, Ligon Duncan and C.J. Mahaney”

(Editor’s Note: This is the second of four response to this question that The Aquila Report will publish separately over the next week or so.)

Ligon Duncan, senior pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Jackson, Miss., emphasized six things, all of which arise from the Pastoral Epistles, he said: (1) preach the Word, (2) love your people, (3) pray down heaven, (4) promote family religion, (5) equip your elders and (6) live a godly life.

1. Preach the Word
While many pastors think they preach expositionally, in reality they do not, Duncan said. A man must submit his own ideas to Scripture and shape his message according to the message of the text, he said.

“Preach expositionally so that you are explaining and applying the main point of the text from which you are preaching,” he said. “Be theological and be applicational, but do not use the text, the Word of God, as an excuse to talk about what you want to talk about.

“J.I. Packer says that for those of us who are conservative, evangelical Protestants, when we are faithfully preaching the Word of God, the Word is delivering God’s message through us to His people. It is not that we are delivering the Word of God to His people, it is that His Word is delivering through us His Word to His people.”

2. Love your people
Young pastors may be zealous to reform churches, but Duncan said if they do so without love the churches they lead will not be served and no one will follow them

“You cannot reform what you do not love,” he said. “This generation has seen every horrific fad affect the church that is imaginable. And my generation is the one who (led in this). I apologize. It would be very easy for you to be incredibly cynical about the church.

“Your people will receive even your rebuke when they know that you love them. But if they catch a whiff of your distance, detachment or cynicism they will not bear the wounds of a friend that you must deliver if you are going to be a faithful pastor. You must love your people passionately.”

3. Pray down heaven
Duncan said pastors must commit themselves to prayer, in private but particularly though public, corporate prayers. He recounted the story of a young woman coming up to him after a church service at First Presbyterian awestruck by the pastoral prayer in the middle of the service.

“A young woman met me at the door of the church at the end of Sunday morning worship services with tears in her eyes and she said, ‘Dr. Duncan, what was it that he did (pastor Derek Thomas) in the middle of the service?’ I started going back over the order of service and it occurred to me that he prayed a lengthy, biblical pastoral prayer,” Duncan said. “I said ‘do you mean the prayer?’

‘Yes, that thing’ she said. ‘What was that?’ I said ‘are you from a Christian background?’ ‘O, yes,’ she said. ‘Have you grown up going to church?’ I asked.

‘O, yes: my father is a pastor,’ she said. She grew up in church. But she had never heard a pastor assail the gates of heaven in prayer for his people.”

4. Promote family religion
In a day of unprecedented breakdown of the family in American culture, Duncan highlighted the importance of leading one’s people to promote and live out Christianity in their homes.

“Did you know that Calvin and many of the Reformers wanted daily preaching?” Duncan asked. “After 50 or 60 years or so it became apparent that there was not going to be daily preaching regularly attended in Protestant churches so Matthew Henry and others recognized that they had to make every home a local church.

If we do not family religion it will contradict what happens every Lord’s Day as you preach the Word.”

5. Equip your elders
Pastors must also pour themselves into other leaders in the church, so that these people can in turn help equip the congregation, Duncan said.

“Whoever the shepherds are in your local congregation, you must pour your lives into them,” he said. “Every follower of Jesus Christ in the local church is to be one who not only follows Jesus Christ herself or himself, but calls others to follow the Lord Jesus Christ. You must have a group of godly, qualified male elders, or shepherds, nurturing and admonishing that congregation, discipling alongside of the public ministry of the Word on the Lord’s Day.”

6. Live a godly life
Finally, pastors must live a godly life themselves if they expect to lead their congregation to do the same, Duncan said.

“Robert Murray McCheyne said, ‘my people’s greatest need is my own holiness,’” he said. “We will contradict what we say from the pulpit if our lives do not bear it out. The Gospel cannot be preached wordlessly, but it can be contradicted wordlessly. Our lives can contradict what we speak.”

This article first appeared on the Southern Seminary’s official news portal and is used with permission. Source: http://news.sbts.edu/