Pastor - Shepherd Your People With Your Heart
Pastor, use your heart.
Many men & women in ministry are skilled in creating, leading, and ministering with their minds. But people didn’t fall in love with Jesus because of His mind alone, but His heart. Was it the mind that caused the social outcast to feel safe with Jesus? Was it the mind that moved Jesus to show levels of compassion that would comfort His people for ages to come when He weeped at the loss of His friend, Lazarus?
If we are to follow Jesus in His ministry, we must learn to use our hearts. We must learn to feel again. I don’t mean to put the mind and the heart at odds with each other, for I do not think they are. I just think our books and our seminaries and our conferences are focused on building the mind. But where are the resources to build the heart? What class ever told you to go sit under a tree and marvel at creation? To feel!
People need pastors with informed minds and hearts that have been tendered by life. A sermon full of heart allows the mind to more easily absorb truth. Because the listener doesn’t think the preacher is talking about truths that are easy in the study, but difficult in life when his heart is on display in his words. Your people need mindful sermons, for anything less is unfaithful. But a heartless sermon is unfaithful as well. Your people are hurting, pastor. They have sorrows and burdens. Their kids are ridden with anxiety and that puts a weight on the parents. Their spouses are difficult to love (and so are they). They are addicted to pornography and desire help. For sins are not idols of the mind, but of the heart! If you want to really help your people with their heart problems, you must engage yours!
One of the ways we engage the heart in our ministry is by allowing the heart to be engaged in the Scriptures. When you read, do you engage with your heart, or just your mind? Do you allow the scriptures to move your emotions? Do you enter into the sadness when you read about sadness? Do you allow your heart to be embraced by the mercy of Jesus in Romans? Or do you only praise the logic of justification in Romans? Those are two different things. Because praising logic is for the mind, but being moved to gratefulness for who God is involves the heart. And involving the heart is difficult work, even scary at times. Because it means we must deal with our insecurities. The way we really believe.
I had a greek professor in seminary, and his heart bleed into everything he said. He spoke on thoughts of the mind, but his heart infused it all. There wasn’t an exposition on sin, without a tear-felt exhortation to love Jesus Christ for His beautiful mercy. And you felt it! Not because the greek had unlocked the secret (although that helped), but because the speaker had been moved in his heart by the truth.
Pastor, your people need both your mind and your heart. Let them know you have felt things because of what Jesus has done for you. Let them know you are aware of their struggles with depression, anxiety, and hardships because you have your own. If you allow your heart to be moved in your hospital visits, quiet times with Jesus, and mundane moments of life- you will be a better pastor. Because your people will see that you not only know truth, but have been moved by it. Because you not only know about Jesus, but have tasted and seen the glory of who He is.
Learning with you,
Josh.
