Servant Leadership

In this fourth session, Pastor Martin addresses the spiritual gifts and graces necessary for pastoral ministry. He identifies four irreducible spiritual requirements: (1) a deep experimental knowledge of and devotion to the person of Christ, (2) an experimental knowledge of the workings of sin and grace in one's own soul, (3) a deep, genuine, demonstrable love for people expressed in sacrificial service, and (4) a measure of the authority of unction -- that peculiar something which gives weight and power to the preached word through the Holy Spirit's operation. He draws extensively from John Owen, Spurgeon, and the example of Christ and the apostle Paul to illustrate each point.

In this fifth and final session, Pastor Martin addresses the mechanical and leadership gifts necessary for pastoral ministry. Under the heading of proven ability to speak, he identifies three requirements: ability to be heard without torture to men's ears, ability to be understood without torture to men's minds (including orderly arrangement, perspicuity, and simplicity), and ability to be received as a messenger of God without torture to the discernment of God's people (the sense of divine authority). He then treats the proven ability to rule and lead, encompassing a servant's heart, a natural leadership quality that makes it easy for people to follow, and the ability to be honored and respected in office. He closes with a summary drawing from Bridges, Owen, and Spurgeon.

Pastor Martin completes the fourfold pattern of sanctification by setting forth the Lord Jesus Christ as the supreme pattern for the believer. He establishes from both the self-consciousness of Christ (Matthew 10, Matthew 20, John 13) and the explicit teaching of the apostles (1 Peter 2, 1 John 2, Philippians 2) that Christ is the example believers must imitate, then explains why: in Christ the image of God is perfectly revealed in the concreteness of our human situation. He gives extended examples of Christ's holiness, love, and obedience to the Father, warns against the idolatry of inventing a Christ in our own image, and pleads that no one can be like Christ until they are first in Christ by repentance and faith.