In 'The Persevering Shepherd (Pt. 2),' Dr. Joel Beeke underscores the critical role of family in sustaining a fruitful ministry. Drawing from Ephesians 5, he urges husbands to love their wives as Christ loves the church, emphasizing absolute, purposeful, realistic, and sacrificial love. Beeke advocates prioritizing the spiritual well-being of one's family, citing John Gill's argument that pastors must diligently care for their flock, starting at home. He highlights the importance of 'holy habits,' such as regular prayer and scripture reading with one's spouse, as vehicles for fostering spiritual vitality. Beeke also stresses the necessity of adapting parenting styles to each child's unique needs, avoiding rigid molds that could stifle their individuality. He advises pastors to handle criticism with grace, using it as a tool for personal growth, and to lead with humility and patience. The sermon also calls for sermons to be Christ-centered and application-driven, engaging all members of the congregation, including children. Beeke encourages pastors to continually grow, embrace challenges, and maintain healthy relationships to avoid stagnation and sustain long-term ministry vitality.

All right, I want to just read a few verses from Ephesians 5, Ephesians 5, 25 through 28. Husbands, love your wives even as Christ also loved the church and gave himself for it, that he might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water by the word, that he might present it to himself a glorious church, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that she should be holy and without blemish. So it meant to love their wives as their own bodies. He that loveth his wife loveth himself. Dear Lord, bless this address now to every area of our lives and help us to bring it with applicability to every man gathered here in these moments, and that each one of us, myself included, would be able to take some nuggets from it that we would implement and make holy resolutions about, as Scott Brown just said, in the area of our own personal sanctification.

Come and bless us now. We need thee, Lord. Draw nearer. In Jesus' name, amen. Help number six.

Love your family. Love your family. You want to run a vital ministry? Begin with your home. Vitality with your family will help you produce vitality in your ministry.

There's an old saying, Ain't mommy happy, ain't nobody happy. And I would add to it, ain't children happy, ain't nobody happy. And when you have divisions within your own home and you neglect your home and you spend all your energy in the ministry and forget that the most important family you have to minister to in the church is your own family, you make a huge mistake. If you want to experience the joys of a long-term ministry, be even more careful to shepherd the heart of your wife and the hearts of your children than anyone else. Your choicest little flock within your flock is your own family.

John Gill said, if it's the duty of shepherds in common to be diligent looking after their sheep and doing everything the duty of their office requires, then it must become the indispensable duty of pastors of churches to take heed to the flock of God committed to them and to be always looking at their state and their condition and provide for them and feed them with knowledge and understanding. Well, how much truer that is in a very intimate way with your own family. So you need to take spiritual inventory not just of yourself but of your wife and your children. Are my wife and children spiritually dead or spiritually alive, first of all? Are they healthy or infirm, strong or weak, well-nourished or starving?

Are they walking steadily or stumbling? Are they secure or in peril? What are their vulnerabilities? What is influencing them? Are these influences commendable?

What are their spiritual strengths and weaknesses? Am I doing all that I can in my power by the grace of God to see Christ formed and shaped within them? Am I faithfully, this is a big one, leading them daily in family worship, extracting the major points of each chapter as we read them day by day, and applying them to them through Q&A? Do I explain and apply the scriptures to each member of my family? Personally, intimately, affectionately, Directly?

Do I intercede for them regularly in private as well as in their presence, One by one, praying that they treasure Christ, abhor sin, cheerfully embrace their duties. How can I better prepare my children, better equip them so they don't fall prey to the attacks of the enemy? So, back up and consider seriously that You are a husband before you are a minister. That's a common saying today, that's true. But I would go even deeper and say, you are also your wife's minister.

And you've got to treat her as number one. She's your most important church member. You should be praying often with her, daily with her, and daily for her, and make sure she is spending time and that you allow her by not being too demanding to spend time with the Lord in the Word and in prayer every day, also on her own. And try to establish, if you want to maintain vitality in ministry, try to establish a daily routine to pray with her, read scripture with her, fellowship with her. These kinds of spiritual exercises with your wife should be distinct from your personal devotions and your family worship.

I was at a conference once of 1, 800 ministers and the question was asked, raise your hand if you spend time every day praying with your wife alone. It was astonishing. I don't think more than 10% of the hands went up. This is embarrassing. I mean, you're praying with what, five, 10, 15 people a day on the phone, in person, And you're not praying alone with your wife?

If you don't maintain spiritual vitality with your wife, it's gonna damage spiritual vitality with your congregation. So how do you do it? Well, you form what the Puritans said, holy habits. I can tell you what we do. We follow the Dutch custom where you pray before every meal and you read the Bible after every meal and then you pray after every meal.

So that's what we do in the morning. Now we're empty desks, so we're just doing that with the two of us. That's what we do at noon. And then at supper time, we do the same, but then after supper, we do our regular family worship. And we walk through the family worship Bible guide just like we did when our kids were home, but now it's just the two of us.

But also we love this holy habit. When we go to bed at night, we get down on our knees beside the bed, and I won't give this up for anything in the world, hold hands, and then she prays one night and I pray the next night. And that's probably our longest prayer of the day, because we want to come in the whole day to God. We want to ask for forgiveness of any shortcoming. We want to thank God for all his mercies that day.

We want to remember different people in the church, but we also pray specifically with gratitude for our marriage and pray for each one of the children. It's precious. And Men, we need to hear the feminine side of prayer. There's something tender about it, something beautiful. And it can impact us.

I can't tell you how many times I always have my wife pray on Sunday night because I'm exhausted. So I'm actually praying four nights of the week. She's praying three nights. Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday are her nights. But I love the Sunday night prayer because she prays her way back through the two sermons.

And I love to hear what she gleaned from my sermon and my colleague's sermon. And not only that, but she has a way of doing it that lifts up my soul. She's ministering to me, fantastic. And when you have that kind of spiritual fellowship with your wife in a habitual routine every day, the really cool thing about that is you're so used to talking about the Lord together that you could be in the middle of the day, you could be going for a walk in the middle of the day and you just naturally find yourself talking about the Lord because it's a spillover of what you're doing every day. There's a Dutch saying that says, When the form is gone, soon all will be gone.

And what it means is when you don't have set times, it's in your personal devotions too, the form of serving God every day, pretty soon the spontaneous times will also be gone. And that's how you can become in your marriage like two ships passing in the night. You don't want to do that. You want to linger joyfully in Christ's presence every day with your wife. Now, there's all kinds of other things you can do.

Sometimes you can just sit together and read your own books and interrupt each other as you have to share a good thought back and forth about Christ or something you're reading in this very spiritual book. Or better yet, read a godly, informative, heart-forming book together out loud, maybe 10 minutes a day. I mean, that's great. But what's really at the heart of it, and that's most important, is that you are thanking God in your wife's presence every day for her and praying for her. And she hears that.

She feels your love. You see, it's difficult to hold a grudge against your wife for anything, and for her to hold it against you, if you're both filling your minds with the gospel every day and you're talking about it, and you're thanking God for each other. So when Paul says, husbands love your wives, and then goes on in the next four verses he's saying to us we need to love our wives in four ways. We need to love them absolutely. Like in verse 25, Christ gave himself for her.

Not 50%, 100%. In fact, he died and bled for her. And you'll never go that far, So you're never going to live up to this completely. But you need to be in your heart convinced that if it had to be so, you would be willing to die for her. Love your wife absolutely.

Then love your wife purposefully, verse 26, that you would wash and cleanse her by the washing of the water of the Word. So you want, don't you, on the day of judgment you want your wife to be able to say to Christ, This man, because I was married to him, he was a busy minister, but he never forgot me. He never forgot my soul. He washed me every day with the water of the word. And Lord, because I was married to this man, I was washed and cleansed in sanctification to a degree I would not have been had it not been for His daily leading me into the green pastures of scripture." That's what I want my wife to be able to say on the day of judgment about me, you too?

And then you're to love your wife realistically. Notice in verse 27 that he might present her to himself, a glorious church, not having spot or wrinkle. What does that mean? Or any such thing? Well, it means that you can't marry a woman that is absolutely sin-free.

No one is perfect in this life. I know a certain minister who will go unnamed and this guy, he irritates me so much because when he comes to us, He lives with us sometimes with his wife. And he's telling his wife what to do all the time. He's like head of household exponentially. He tells her what to do in the kitchen.

Where to put things in the kitchen. I mean, this is crazy. I tried to tell him one time, you know, you know, I said to my wife about the kitchen. I said, honey, the whole domain is yours. Enjoy it.

I'm not going to interfere. I'm not gonna tell you where to put anything or how to do it. He was telling her even how to load the dishwasher. Can you imagine that? When I load the dishwasher, my wife turns it all around and I don't say a word because I know she knows how to do it better than I do.

So the point is this, when your wife has faults and flaws and weaknesses, if they're not sin issues and they're not major issues, Don't even bother trying to change her. What you see is what you get anyway with people. You don't fundamentally change a person in marriage. Don't be a nitpicker. And if you do have to talk to her about something, make sure you couch it in what I call the Pauline sandwich principle, where in chapter one, Paul says really wonderful things.

And then in chapter two, thank 1 Corinthians, he begins to say, but I hear said among you, and he begins to put in, well, 1 Corinthians, seven levels of meat of criticism, but then he tops it off in chapter 16 with another chapter of just wonderful things. She don't come out and criticize her. She'll think you're totally rejecting her. But put it in the context and say, this particular thing, I'd love to see it changed, honey, because it's negative in one way or another, on our marriage or whatever. But you put it in the context of who she is in all her global qualities and blessed is the man The ministerial man who loves his wife so much that even those little small faults, you actually learn to even love those in her because she wouldn't be who she is without him.

I just love you, my dear, just the way you are. Affirm her, husbands, love your wives, as Christ loves the church. And Christ isn't nitpicking us every day, is he? And all kinds of little idiosyncrasies. But he receives us graciously, and then love her sacrificially, as you love your own body.

Verses 28 and 29. If you get something in your eye, you go get it out right away. If your wife is troubled about something, you sit down right away, as soon as you can. You work it out with patience and with love. So don't be a commander in your home, treating your wife like an overlord, but lead her graciously by informing her mind, by wooing her affections, by serving her in love so that she can follow you willingly and joyfully and express that love every day.

Compliment her every day, multiple times. Treat her like she's the best friend on earth you could ever have because she is. And your marriage will give you vitality for ministry because the happiness of the home will spill over into the happiness of the pastorate. Similarly with children, you need to avoid cookie cutter approaches, spawned from fear that your children will somehow turn out well. This is one of my problems when our kids grew up.

I knew of many ministers' families where there were all kinds of problems, and I worried about the teenagers. Now, post-teen years, if you ask me, what would I have done different when our kids were younger? I guess my answer would be, I'd trust God more, His covenant mercies more, and I'd worry less. And enjoy these things, Enjoy the teen years. As long as your children are not rebellious, they're wonderful years.

So You need to maintain vitality in ministry by maintaining vitality and pastoring your children. And in ministry, you never treat everyone exactly alike, do you? Everyone has their own personality. Guess what? You've got no two kids alike.

Do you know why? Because God wants us dependent on him for how to raise every single child. We had two families in our church at one point of 10 kids each. One family was a mess. The other family was just a model family.

I mean, really a model family. So the father of the family that was a mess came to the father of the family where the kids were really walking with the Lord and it was just a sweet family. He said, how do you do it? I mean, I treat every one of my kids exactly alike. And the father was a very humble man of the wise family, he goes, well brother, that just may be your problem.

You see, what discipline works with one child may not work with another. Oh, We had that. With one child, we followed the Ted Tripp principles. Man, it worked perfectly. It was great.

So next child, I thought I'd do the same thing. Oh, didn't work at all. But that child, if you put that child in her room for a little while and say, don't come out until you're repentant, that did far more than the spanking did. So you have to learn to not force your children into molds of success story parenting books, but you have to learn a parenting style that won't crush their character, break their spirit, or provoke them to wrath, but will lovingly administer discipline in accord with the end goal of discipline, the repentance of the heart. And through it all, you need to be constantly filling your own mind and the minds of each of your children with Christ and the gospel and forgiveness and peace and adoption and all kinds of wonderful biblical themes.

Now at the same time, When your children are converted, don't set unrealistic standards that trickle down from armchair critics in the church of what they expect the minister's kids to be. Don't be frightened by what the church expects. Only fear God and what he expects. Many children, ministers' children, have apostatized from the faith because they've been scarred by what the church has done to their father and can't forgive them, or scarred by the expectations of certain members of the church that the minister's children somehow got to be a lot more holy than other children. No, no, no.

Tell your children, we've all got to be holy. But you and I together want to walk that path of holiness. So secure and guard blocked off uninterrupted, I call it airplane mode time with your family and establish non-negotiable times. When you unplug as it were to focus exclusively on your own family, of course, barring genuine emergencies. But in family worship, for example, if the phone rings, obviously don't answer it.

You're in the presence of Almighty God. And do fun things with your children. Spend some time, at least, probably not as much as you wish you could, but some time with each child just doing fun things. And while you do fun things, it's amazing how opportunities arise to talk to them on very meaningful and rich things. So maintain vitality in your relationship with your wife and with your kids.

That's a big one if you want to maintain vitality in the ministry. And then number seven, the obvious one, I won't spend too much time here, because it's so obvious, but you've preached the word. You can only maintain vitality in the ministry when the highest calling is done conscientiously with vitality, with prayer, with integrity, with authority, laboring, laboring, laboring week in, week out to bring the word of God to your people, particularly on the Lord's day, laboring to bring sinners to Christ, laboring to grow the saved in Christ, and laboring to preach the sermon to yourself before you preach it to your people. And that means your sermons need to be full of the word. You need to preach every part of divine revelation.

You need to love every doctrine of the Bible. You need to preach law and gospel, warning and encouragement, judgment and consolation, wrath and grace. You need to preach from every genre, law, history, poetry, prophecy, gospels, epistles. You need to preach consecutively through entire books of scripture. But in my opinion, it's also good once in a while to just take, as Spurgeon said, one of the big short texts of the Bible, full of gospel, a text like, for me to live is Christ and to die is gain, and just preach that with all your heart and all your love to your people.

If you wanna maintain vitality in the ministry, don't ever come to the point where you think you're a great preacher. As soon as you think you're a great preacher, you'll plateau. That's what concerns me. I was just talking to these brothers about some of our students sometimes. They go out preaching and they come back and you say, how'd it go?

Oh wonderful, the Lord really helped me. Oh that's wonderful. Next time, how'd it go? Oh wonderful, Lord. Wait a minute, do you ever have a sermon that you're not too happy with?

If you don't, you'll plateau. And so don't be as hard on yourself as Thomas Shepherd was. He said he could count on one hand the sermons he preached, really preached in his whole lifetime. I mean, that's going overboard. I think you fall into spiritual depression.

But think that your average sermon is sterling and you're an unusually good preacher. That'll ruin you. But be a student. And when you preach sermons, just don't look at commentaries. Look at our forefathers.

What did they get out of that text? How did they preach that sermon? You don't copy them, of course, but you get ideas and thoughts and it gradually forms and molds you and deepens your spirituality. And remember, as you prepare the Word, you should never, never be able to prepare a sermon without getting down on your knees, if not physically, at least in your chair, and crying out to God. Help me, Lord.

Let this text master me more. I feel like I haven't gotten to the depths of it. I'm just scratching the surface. Lead me, show me, guide me, and compare scripture with scripture. Study with your heart as well as with your mind.

And that will help you, that will help you tremendously. And use illustrations that will catch the children, and when they catch the children, they'll catch the adults as well. Interesting ones that show the sermon is alive and practical, but then also aim for the heart. Speak to the heart. Make your sermons not just doctrinal, but doctrinal with the practical, experiential emphases.

Actually, all true doctrine at bottom is experiential and practical. And so we need to ask ourselves, before we go on the pulpit, as we get done with our sermon preparation, Always ask this question, so what? Is it clear from this sermon what I'm telling my people they need to do because of this text, or telling myself as well, Do they know what to do with the sermon when they go home? This is important. You gotta make it clear.

The old Scottish story, You've probably heard of it. A guy named Donald came home from church a little early. His wife was sick. He opened the back door. She was surprised.

She called out from another room, Donald, is that you already? He said, yes, my dear. Is the Sermon done already, Donald? No, my dear, it's been said, it has yet to be done. That's how we should think of every sermon.

You need to ask yourself, When people leave the sanctuary, have I made it clear enough what they need to do with this sermon? How they need to change or reassess themselves? Sermons need to be word-based, Christ-centered, spirit-dependent, prayer-soaked, well-studied, exegetically faithful, well-organized, application-saturated, and delightfully simple. Based, Christ-centered, spirit dependent, prayer soaked, well studied, exegetically faithful, well organized, application saturated, and delightfully simple. So that a child can I was swimming in a swimming pool in Florida with one of our, well, with all of our grandchildren?

A few weeks ago, and I was talking to one of our older grandchildren, our oldest is ten, this one was nine, and she was taking notes, I noticed, of every sermon, and really listening very well, so I just, I was curious, I said, how much of grandpa's sermon can you understand? And I said, 60%, maybe 40%. She looked at me really shocked and she said, oh grandpa, at least 90%. I go, oh yeah, that's great. I don't know if it's true, but it made me feel good.

The point is, you see, you want to stop in your sermons at different places, and you want to say, to maintain vitality. Am I bringing in the children here? And in our tradition, almost all of our ministers, three, four, five times a sermon, we'll say, boys and girls, and then we get their attention again. And meanwhile, we get the whole congregation's attention again if we're losing people. And you apply it at their level, and everybody understands it.

This is valuable. You want everyone to leave church with takeaways and God forbid you send, I'm sorry, but God forbid you send your children out to some little teacher who's gonna teach them a class, and they miss the sermon. What? And you keep them out till they're 10 years old or some crazy number like that, and then you bring them in and you expect them to join the church in a couple years. They hardly know what it is to worship with God's people.

No, no, no, no. You keep them in the sermon. Now if they cry and stuff like that, you gotta take them out temporarily. But you keep them in the sermon, and you talk to them on the way home from church and at home and you weave throughout the week the sermon at their level and the family worship. The sermon comes alive for them all week long.

You do like the Puritans. The sermons on Sunday were the market day of the soul, where you get your spiritual food and you dispense it all week long to your children and family worship. All right, So, I'll stop there and preach. Let me move on to number eight. Lead wisely, lead wisely.

What do I mean by that? Well, a lot of things. I'll just give you mainly the bullet points here because already the time is flying. First, know where you're going, but don't go too fast. Don't get so far ahead of your people that you share all your visions, your deepest visions.

While you do that, you'll probably be so far ahead of them, they'll just focus on you and be worried, and you start dividing your elders. No, no, you stay just a little bit in front of them, and you bring them along with you. Number two, develop trust and credibility through good communication and by building relationships. Building relationships. Thoughtfully.

That means often having to say I'm sorry. But it also often means complimenting people when they're working effectively in the church. Third, concentrate on your own and each member's gifts and strengths. Always be asking yourself, what can this 12-year-old, serious, godly-minded young boy, What can he do in the church? How can I put him to work?

Or how can I use the gifts of that elderly man who's now retired, but he's not an elder, he's not a deacon, how can he serve the church? Be thinking, Be creative. A wise leader aims to get the right people in the right place at the right time according to their own skill sets and commitments. Fourth, Make effective decisions after considerable thought, consultation, and prayer. Don't make rushed decisions.

Often consult with your wisest office bearer or office bearers before making major decisions. And marinate every major decision in plenty of earnest prayer. John Bunyan said, you can do more than pray after you prayed, but you can't do more than pray until you prayed. Five, delegate as much as you can to well-qualified people. It took me a long time to learn this.

I was very bad at this. I thought I had to do everything when I first became a minister, And it didn't work. So now maybe I'm the other extreme, I delegate everything I possibly can. But I have this principle. I look at the bulletin and I say, I'm a writer.

You know what? I could do that bulletin maybe better, but how long would it take me? How valuable is it to have it be absolutely perfect? We actually have a good bulletin. But in my first church especially, I wrestled with this because the bulletin was not exactly top notch.

But I decided this, and now I feel it even more strongly and the numbers have gone up. If someone can do something that's not absolutely essential, 50% as well as I can, and it takes them twice as long, it's yours. Because I have so many things that are on my shoulders, I have to offload as much as possible. I can't be a perfectionist on other people's work. So, Communicate well to people you delegate things, what you're looking for, the nuts and the bolts of the task.

You tell them the how, the what, the when, the who, the where, the how much, and the why. And maybe you have to continue to train them one or two times. But once they're in the groove of it and doing it well, just compliment it and give it over completely. Sixth, manage your time well. Manage your time well.

If you want to maintain vitality, you've got to be a good time manager And I in a nutshell here's here's my approach you divide everything up into three piles Every morning the must-do the should-do and the I would like to do. Now, I very seldom get to the I would like to do, but what I found in my life is if you're disciplined and if you love the ministry, you can actually turn the must do pile and the should do pile into I'd like to do piles as well. So at this point in my life, I love the ministry so much that all three piles are I like to do piles. With one exception, no long meetings, okay? That's that I can never get that into the like to do pile.

But everything else, I love to visit a mourning family. I love to do a wedding. I love to counsel people in marital trouble. I love to write a book for my own soul as well as for other people. I love to preach, I love to prepare for preaching.

So the more you love to do in the ministry, and you can bring that not like to do pile down to next to nothing, You will maintain wonderful vitality. And look at the variety you have every day. It's beautiful. And the importance of it every day, that you get to serve the Lord. You never have to wake up, brother, with a midlife crisis and say, is my job worthwhile?

No, you have a vocatio, you have a calling, you're serving the God of the universe, you're serving the bride of Christ. Manage your time well and enjoy the ministry. It's a heavy work but it's a joyful work. Seventh, exercise patient leadership with a flock. Never respond in kind to angry people, never.

I've had a fair number of people yell at me in their lifetime. Dutch people in their background are not exactly the calmest folk in the world. And some of them, they're straight shooters and they'll give it to you. But only twice in my life, but twice, and I regret both of them, did I give it back in kind? And I've grieved over both situations.

I've asked for forgiveness in both. They've given it to me, but it still bothers me. Today, I actually yelled at two people back. Ugh. Ridiculous, awful, it was self-defensive.

I'm ashamed of it. Never responding kind. Your calling is to lead people, not to force them. Anger or force will always backfire on you. Number eight, be grateful to your people.

I just love them. They're your extended family. Thank them often, appreciate them often, affirm them often, show kindness to them often. Always, I should say. Remember that loveless leadership will seldom preserve vitality.

Loveless leadership will seldom persevere. A ninth, exercise humility and its kindred virtues. Live out the virtues of Ephesians 4, The fruit in Galatians 5, the Spirit will help you. But stay humble. Stay humble.

Remember, God doesn't need you. It's just a privilege to serve Him. And number 10, Use biblical models to assist your growing leadership skills. I had the privilege of teaching leadership in our seminary three times. Once I just preached the whole course on the leadership of Christ.

That's beautiful. Examples are popping up in every chapter. Another time I did leadership course from examples in scripture. I did Joseph teaching you long range planning, Jethro for artful delegation, David for human relations, Solomon for building programs, Daniel for persevering consistency, John for developing experience wisdom, Paul for reaching contemporary culture, and Jude for fighting apostasy. And another time I just did a mixture of practical leadership truths.

But there's so much involved in leadership. And build models in your own mind to assist you to grow in these skills. Help number nine, learn how to cope with criticism. This is a big one. I'm running out of time, so I'm gonna just give you the bullet points here too.

But I have a book on it called The pastor's critic, coping with criticism in the ministry by PNR. You can get it from rhb.org. And I say in the preface of the book that of all the books I've written in my entire lifetime, this is the only one I ever felt qualified to write because I have so much experience in the field. I've had a lot of criticism in my life, especially when I was young and in a different denomination. But here's what I learned in a nutshell.

Number one, consider the inevitability of criticism. You're a leader. People will criticize. Number two, consider the source. Who is it?

Is it an elder who really means your best welfare? Is it a fringe member who just came into the church, is trying to change the church? You handle those things differently. Number three, consider timing. Take a deep breath when you get criticized.

I try never to answer criticism within 24 hours. If it's substantial, if it's minor, I'm fine. But that's the way I'm wired. I need time to think about it, pray about it, consult one or two people about it, and then I can go back. And meanwhile, the critic has calmed down after 24 hours a bit.

I've calmed down, and we can talk one-on-one. Always, always try to resolve it one on one, 99% of the time when you come humbly back and change where you need to change, maybe don't do everything the critic says but do something, 99% of the time you can resolve it between the two of you. Four, consider prayer. Prayer is crucial. Prayer puts criticism in its proper context.

Number five, consider yourself. Embrace criticism as an opportunity to grow in sanctification. Number six, consider the content. Here's the point, when you get criticized, You consider it. If you need to change, A, B, C, you change A, B, C, and you move on.

You don't let it fester. If you don't need to change anything, you go back to your critic and say, I've considered it, I prayed about it, I've thought about it, and I've decided, I appreciate your thoughts, but I'm not going to change. But you let them know. But then you move on. But either way, you see, you don't let things fester.

Either way you move on. The best way to lose vitality in the ministry is to hang on to unresolved inward bitterness. That will destroy you. And I know whereof I speak. Number seven, consider scripture.

Take those promises that have been very special in your life, post them on your computer or a place where you're gonna see them regularly and read them again and again, especially when you're in time of criticism in your ministry. My favorites are Romans 8.28, Ephesians 6.10, such like texts. Number eight, consider Christ. This is the best way of coping with criticism of all, at least for me. Here's what I mean.

If Jesus Christ was absolutely perfect, and I am always imperfect, and he was silent when he was criticized, spat upon, mocked, rejected, crucified, what can an unworthy and sinful under-shepherd like me expect? I haven't been criticized a shadow of the degree that Christ has been criticized. And so I consider him and I've got it good. Number nine, consider love. Love your critic, Pray for your critic.

That will help you a great deal. And number 10, consider eternity. On the Great Judgment Day, you stand before God. You have to give an account of how you coped with criticism and you need to be able to say to God Despite my shortcomings. I love my enemies Despite my shortcomings.

I prayed for my critics That will give you a great inward peace. All right, help number 10. Live on the growing edge. Never stop growing. Avoid stagnation.

Work on three levels. I say this often to my students, work on an intermediate level, which is your regular normal preaching, which is probably somewhat below the level where you're at intellectually because you're making the truth simple, but it's an intermediate level. Then work at a very simple level where you never need any notes, like going to do a school chapel. Oh, I love doing that. No notes.

Just speak from the heart to the kids. That keeps you being able to think on your feet. And then you work at a higher level. You get a request to do an academic article for a journal and you say, I can't do that. Oh yes you can.

Grow if it's an area you want to grow in. Accept the invitation. Embrace the challenge. That will help you maintain vitality in ministry as well. Take short sabbaticals.

For me, everyone's different. For me, I work best with a half a day break. I don't take a whole day sabbatical. It drives me crazy. But you may be different.

It's okay, but understand what works. For me, an hour here, couple hours there, works a lot better than taking a whole day. But vacations, Of course, once in a while, yeah, good, good for you. Fifth, steward your physical health. You've got to exercise.

You've got to do the SLED thing, S-L-E-D acronym, Sleep, leisure, exercise, and diet. You need to maintain those four things, or else you'll get run down. You get to be my age, you got to do 150 minutes a week of exercise, not to degenerate. So you do it. You care for your body with a nutritious, balanced, wholesome diet.

You eat in moderation. It's like spiritual exercises. Physical exercise requires discipline, perseverance, endurance through pain. Sixth, continue to use your gifts well. Be conscious of the area where you do have more gifts, and if you do have extra time, after you've done your absolute requirements, excel in those gifts.

Or if you feel a personal burden for a particular thing like I do for family worship, I've preached on family worship 400 times all around the world in 50 some countries because I feel so strongly that's my mission, It's a calling I have from God. And that is very rewarding as you see people change. Tens of thousands of people doing family worship. That's a very rewarding part of my life and my ministry. And then seventh, maintain vitality by cultivating healthy friendships.

We've already had a talk on that, but that's very, very important. Friendships with other ministers, friendships with close people in the church, and so on. But don't flaunt those friendships in the church so that people say, oh, he's catering to so and so. No, no, after church, you don't go to your best friends and chat and people see that. Oh, he always goes to the same people, no.

But you need your friends. And just on a low key level, you might see a few people, you're really close to more than other people, but you don't flaunt it. In fact, I tend to go to people that I don't see outside of church, when I see them after church. I go to the young people, talk to them about the sermon. And people that are surprised I come to them.

That's what I want to do. All right, conclusion. Ultimately, we persevere the way William Perkins said at the end of his homiletics workbook that was used all throughout England for years, Preach one Christ by Christ to the praise of Christ. There is nothing that will energize you as much as preaching Christ. St.

Clair Ferguson used to say to us at Westminster, brothers spend the best energy of your life preparing for preaching Christ and for preaching Christ. That's it. Be like Samuel Rutherford who said, my two greatest joys in life are Christ and preaching Christ. Then you will maintain vitality because He is altogether lovely. So don't resign, but re-sign with the Lord.

Let's pray. Gracious God, Please take these ten helps in these two addresses and use them now for good. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.