Pastor, you must live with a preparation mentality and teach those under your care to do the same. The trials, injustices, and hardships of today do two things for you and me. Every day they remind us that this isn’t our final destination. But there’s another thing… They drive us to the end of ourselves. They drive us and those we pastor beyond our autonomy and self-sufficiency.

Behold, these are the wicked;
always at ease, they increase in riches.
All in vain have I kept my heart clean
and washed my hands in innocence.
For all the day long I have been stricken
and rebuked every morning.
If I had said, “I will speak thus,”
I would have betrayed the generation of your children.
But when I thought how to understand this,
it seemed to me a wearisome task,
until I went into the sanctuary of God;
then I discerned their end (Psalm 73:12-17).

There are two statements I find myself repeating over and over again. These are two things you need to remember about yourself and the people to whom you minister:

1. No one is more influential in your life than you are, because no one talks to you more.

2. Human beings don’t live life based on the facts of their existence, but based on their interpretations of the facts.

Every human being is an interpreter. Everyone you pastor is as much a theologian as you are – most of them just don’t know it. In some way every person is asking and answering deeply spiritual questions. Every human being is a philosopher. Everyone seeks to understand the meaning and purpose of life. Every human being is an analyst searching for understanding of the people, locations, and situations they encounter every day. Every human being is an archaeologist picking through the past, looking to understand where they’ve been, what they’ve experienced, and what they’ve done. No one actually lives thoughtlessly. They may be unaware of their thoughts. They may not be intellectual or academic, but everyone pushes life through the sieve of the personal worldview they’ve built for themselves. This worldview is authoritative and life shaping. It doesn’t determine what we see so much as it determines how we see it. Your calling as a pastor is to interrupt peoples’ private conversation with the clarity-providing, life-giving perspective of the gospel. This is hard to do if you aren’t actively looking at life through the lens of the gospel in the private places where you live.

This interpretive function is called hermeneutics. You and everyone you pastor carry around a personal life hermeneutic – that is, a particular way of making sense out of life. Let me take this one step further. Our functional hermeneutic is what gives sense to our behavior. Everything we do and say has underlying meaning and purpose when understood from the vantage point of our worldview. For example, if I was raised believing that a certain race of people was dangerous, it would make sense for me to be afraid of them and to do everything I could do to avoid them. If I was convinced that coffee led to cancer, then it would make sense that I would restrict my intake of coffee. Our thoughts tend to precede and determine our behavior.

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