#293 | Embracing Limitations: Insights from ‘The Imperfect Pastor’ with Zack Eswine

Today's episode is brought to you by the Alalede family.

May God's grace and favor be upon you and your children's children.

Productivity, culturally speaking, is a results oriented point of view.

But productivity as a pastor is people growing in likeness to Jesus.

And that's a slow business.

What if one of the greatest dangers in ministry today is trying to be more than human?

What if the pressure to grow faster, preach better, lead stronger, and matter more is actually quietly crushing the souls of pastors everywhere?

Today on Ministry Deep Dive, we're introducing a book that has become a lifeline for weary pastors, church planners and ministry leaders across the country, including myself.

This is a book that's had a huge influence on my life, and that is Zach S. Wine's the Imperfect Pastor.

And it's not just another leadership strategy book.

It's not about scaling influence or building platforms or becoming the next ministry success story.

It's about something far more difficult.

It's learning how to embrace, get ready for this, your limitations, learning to stay faithful in the ordinary places of life, and learning how to walk with Jesus without trying to be Jesus.

It's an honor to have him on the show today.

So let's dive in.

Zach S. Wine, welcome to Ministry Deep Dive.

Thank you so much.

It's really good to be here to talk with you.

Are you ready for the fast five?

I am ready for the fast five.

All right, here we go.

In the Imperfect Pastor, you talk a lot about embracing our limitations.

But as you've thought about adulthood when you were a kid and you didn't realize all these limitations that you had, I mean, what is something that didn't prepare you when you were a kid for adulthood or you thought should, but absolutely didn't?

Well, you know what, when I was a kid, we didn't have energy drinks.

The energy drink we had was Mountain Dew.

Yeah.

Which is terrible for you.

It was so good when we were kids.

That's right.

Yeah.

So I wasn't prepared to find the energy drink that I need to get through a day.

You know, I heard a comedian said, I don't understand why kids need energy drinks.

They should have them at old folks homes.

That's right.

That's right.

How about this with being in pastoral ministry.

What is your ideal day off?

My ideal day off is Friday.

But I mean, like, what do you do on your day off?

Oh, oh, well.

Well, that's fine.

Well, we have a seven year old, our youngest of four, in the home.

Our other kids are out of the house and we have grandkids all under the age of three.

So that season of life, you know, it ebbs and flows, what your ideal day would be.

But for me, an ideal day would be a backpack with notebooks, some poem, book of poetry, book of a novel and a journal and a book of theology.

And I'm spending the day either up at Crevecor Lake, which is a half hour from here, or over at the botanical gardens at a sweet spot that I like over there.

And yeah, so I'm the.

I'm a reflective sort.

If I get the opportunity, I am too.

But carrying around a backpack with all the books, that.

That would take some time.

I just want to lay.

That's right.

With a light.

Just give me the light so I can read.

That's right.

All right, how about number three?

What's one thing you're irrationally competitive about?

Huh?

That is something I don't know.

I'm not generally a competitive person.

My wife Jessica, she does tell me she'll say that I'm a pretty laid back person unless I'm in an airport.

And so I become irrationally competitive about getting early in line, getting a good spot.

I'd rather be there two hours in advance and just know we're there and I'm up front.

So if we're in a.

We're in a situation where you choose your seat kind of thing, and then I want.

I want to be early in that line because I want a good seat.

And when the air.

When the airplane's finished, I want everybody to take their turn.

So if someone's trying to pass me to get out of the airplane, they were sitting three rows back and they're trying to pass me rather than letting me come out.

Like everyone came out in order.

Yeah, I get irrationally bothered by that.

I don't know why.

I don't know why.

I gotta.

I gotta talk to somebody about that.

You need to talk to a pastor.

I do.

Number four.

What's a sign that you're officially getting older?

A sign that I'm officially getting older.

Hearing my grandson say, papa.

Papa, that's.

That's a beautiful sign.

And then the other sign would be a pain in my heel that just comes and goes.

And when I told the doctor about that, he said, oh, yep.

And he named what.

That was what I need to do.

Here's a.

Here's even a better sign.

Okay.

My.

I was trying to switch appointments with my youngest, with one of my sons, and me with the doctor, and the administrator said they can't do that.

Because.

And I said why?

And I said because my son, his annual appointment, they have 20 minutes scheduled for him for me, for my, for my annual appointment, they've got 50 minutes scheduled for me.

Right.

Number five.

If you could order anything you wanted on Amazon, anything right now, what would it be?

And why?

Anything on Amazon right now and why?

Well, it's going to be some kind of book probably, and that's probably something with Walt Wangren.

Walt Wangren was a Lutheran pastor who was a, A novelist and poet.

And I've been reading a good bit of him lately and maybe if I could get a Walt Wangren mug or something like that.

No, but something, I'm sure something about that.

If I, if I thought about it, what there's.

I'm just still getting to know his books and things like that.

Yeah.

Well, I wanted to talk, I mean, we're talking about pastors, ministry leaders and talking about books as we do on this show often.

Your book, the Imperfect Pastor, what made you want to write this book about embracing our limitations?

I think it came out of, as sometimes these things do, it came out of a really dark period of my life where I was sort of an up and coming person in which people saw my gifts as a young man and, and said things like, if I could only, I can't wait to see you in 10 years, you know, and had visions for what my future ministry and difference making would be and, and then hitting.

Contrasting that with my wife at the time of 15 years walking away from Jesus and trying to find a different life to make sense of the world walking away from me.

And which meant that I became a single dad with the primary care of the kids and of three kids.

And that that juxtaposition and the outworking of all that I had to rethink and revisit my way of being, my way of life.

How was I, how I was approaching everything with the Lord.

And so that's part of it, a personal story.

A second aspect is by now sitting with lots of pastors in lots of different places and seeing the toll that, that a consumer upwardly mobile cultural story has upon ministry leaders when we're operating as a character in that story and we don't realize it.

And so seeing that and then, then the third thing is just as a pastor with people, just ordinary folks going about their daily vocations and feeling like they can't rest.

You know, I sort of make a joke about the energy drink and then the comedian made a good joke about it.

But there's A serious question to ask, too, which is when we were growing up, when I was growing up, being young was enough to have enough energy to get through a day.

And as you mentioned, the energy drinks today are targeted to young people.

And the significant question is, when did it happen that being young doesn't provide enough energy to get through a day?

And so there's something going on in our cultural way of being that pushes us past our human creatureliness and doesn't prize it or value it, but sees our limits as a weakness that we have to overcome and get past.

And so from all three of those angles, seeing the toll on my life and other people's lives, this book comes from there.

Is it so hard, though, for pastors specifically to not want to be, as you mentioned, to act omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent?

I mean, how do those temptations actually shape modern ministry culture?

I think part of that is, as an American thing.

The late Eugene Peterson said somewhere that it's difficult to be a pastor in America.

I think he said it's hard to be a Christian as a pastor in America.

And I think part of what he's getting at is we are in a culture in which some churches can grow fast and large, and it's not generally going to be that way in other parts of the West.

And so we can assume that's a normality and.

And then measure ourselves against it and then feel like we have to keep up.

It's.

It's the old Keeping up with the Joneses, but it's just translated into pastoral ministry.

But even if, as a ministry leader, we.

We kind of get a handle on that, we learn about it.

The folks that we're serving have expectations, particularly if they're coming from a consumer mindset, which most, almost all of us are.

We don't.

I don't even mean that as a curmudgeon.

I just mean it factually.

Like we're just accustomed to ordering what we would like, and so we don't even know that's in us.

And so we come to a church and the church down the road is doing such and such, and the guy on the podcast we're listening to is able to do such and such.

Why can't our church do such and such?

And so just that combination of meeting immediate needs, I should say, meeting immediate preferences as a way of.

And people will leave or stay on the basis of whether we can meet immediate preferences.

That's just a challenge.

It's a real challenge.

There are other There are other things, too, but that's a real challenge for us.

One of the things that you mention in the book is about how we need to learn how to go unnoticed.

Why is obscurity so hard for ministry leaders today?

Obscurity.

You know, we.

We say that about Jesus when we are in seminary or Bible class.

We, we talk about Jesus's years of obscurity and years of popularity, and we tend to focus on the years of popularity, his public ministry.

But that was for three years, you know, and the 30 years was the unknown aspects of the Lord faithful living as a carpenter or construction worker, you know, a person who worked with his hands.

And so we can get untethered from that.

If we're a pastor somewhere in other parts of the world, obscurity is normative for us.

If we're a small town pastor in, you know, somewhere, somewhere Indiana or Ohio or Iowa or somewhere California or upper state New York, you know, we're not known.

But the reason it's tough is because we do have pastors who are able to be known in a larger way.

And then we're in that digital world that amplifies that.

So at the best, what a wonderful tool, you know.

You know, someone I appreciated, the late Tim Keller, thankful for access to his messages, his sermons and his thought.

It's a real help to me.

And.

And yet that kind of ability to be known also brings with it all kinds of temptations and expectations and.

And so just an ordinary pastor, I just.

It's easy to think, well, why.

Why am I not known like that?

My best sermons are heard by 70 people or 40 people or 130 people.

Why is, why is that person not.

Not speaking about Tim Keller now, but anybody who's just more known, why are their sermons heard by however many, you know, people?

And that.

That kind of thing can trip us up.

When, especially if we're a small town pastor or a small church pastor and someone says, well, I was listening to Tim Keller or I was listening to whoever, and when they handled this passage, they handled it that way.

Why didn't you talk about it like that?

You know, well, meaning people, you know, but we, we can feel small.

It's the hardest part, I think, is to feel like we don't matter.

Where our contribution doesn't really do much because we see the, the people, we hear their responses.

Like, I think if we heard Jesus say, well done, I think we would be okay, but I think we've lost that.

We look at those bigger churches and more amplified platforms and wonder why.

Why can't I do that?

Why can't I be that way?

And it.

And.

And I think it really diminishes what we're doing there and takes our eye off of what God is accomplishing with us.

Since you've written the book, what has been some of the responses that you have received from pastors and ministry leaders?

What do they say to you?

Well, it's very humbling and meaningful what pastors have shared about the Lord meeting them at just the right time through the book to.

As a lifesaver.

For some, it's.

I didn't know.

I didn't know I could be a pastor like this.

And it's invigorating for them.

Others, it's.

This is why I came into ministry.

But I don't know how to get there from the.

The church culture that we have.

And.

But I want to get there.

Others.

Other side can be a little more critical, would be too strong, but just hesitant, you know, are these things scalable, you know, that I'm talking about?

And I think I would just say to the degree that they're biblical, then they're.

They're what we need.

And they will.

They will meet scalability or they will challenge our notion of scalability.

I think one of the things is, you know, something like this, we want to make a difference, and we want to be salt and light, and we want to see the kingdom grow and people come to know Jesus and be discipled in him.

And.

And so what happens is in the midst of that, there's like clergy mail.

You know, the clergy mail tells me that I need to mobilize people and I need to.

So I need to tell my congregation, in essence, that I need them to be someone other than who they are going someplace other than where they are to do something other than what they're doing for the kingdom.

That's mobilizing from mission.

But that means that their ordinary work life isn't part of mission.

It means that their marriages or their singleness, their.

Their wrestling match with celibacy, their.

Their enjoyment of a tree, you know, and making food, it gives the impression that that's not enough.

And I always think of it this way.

If I'm thinking of a very dear person and her husband of 40 years, you know, died, how do I mobilize her for mission?

From that vantage point, she's trying to learn how to do death as a Christian.

She's like.

She's trying to learn how to have the loss of her best friend.

She's trying to learn how to do each day with a bed more empty than she wants it to be, and her husband no longer there, and that's enough for her, you know, And.

And so Jesus the Lord has sent pastors to walk with unknown people like that through the ordinary and real seasons of life until he comes.

Because He.

He longs for ordinary, unknown people like that to have a living expression of his presence.

And of course, he gives us His Holy Spirit, and then he brings his people and ministers into their life.

And so if I remember that, then I remember my purpose as a minister is to shepherd, to come alongside a people and to walk with them like a shepherd that goes to the same old hillside day after day with the same old sheep, you know, and walk with them.

Because there's something about the steadfast love and faithfulness of God that people are meant to experience.

And this is his kindness and giving pastors as part of.

As a vocation.

And I can lose sight of that when I need to somehow leverage a congregation rather than love them, or loving them means a numerical value rather than sitting with someone.

Because the sitting with someone can feel like a waste of time.

And once that feels like a waste of time, something's happened, you know, a different story has taken over my pastoral imagination.

An idolatrous story has taken over my pastoral imagination.

What time is meant for, what neighbor love means, what a shepherd's meant to do.

You know, things like that.

Wanting to be faithfully present with our people.

Nevertheless, there's still this in many of us, gnawing ambition to want to be known, to be validated.

How do we juxtapose healthy ambition and an unhealthy striving administrator?

That's such a good question.

It's helpful to remember the striving after wind that Ecclesiastes talks about and how that can apply to us in pastoral ministry.

Striving after wind.

Maybe one way to say it is this.

We, let's be ambitious for a great thing.

We just need to make sure we're defining great the way Jesus does.

What is he ambitious for?

What?

What would he say is great?

And of course, we have hints because He.

He taught his disciples quite clearly when they wanted to sit on his right hand and his left.

And mom thought it was a good idea too.

Jesus brought them together.

And then he said, the Gentiles, lord it over those they serve.

It shall not be so among you.

And then he talked about serving the least and being the least among them.

And so what is being ambitious for what Our cultural compulsions are ambitious for and our ambitions to have in comparison in contrast to what the Lord thinks is great.

And so it's like when Jesus said the Gentiles lord it over them.

It's like James and John had to realize that they were actually operating out of a non Christian worldview and attaching Jesus's name to it.

They were actually talking no differently than any non Christian Gentile would talk.

They were just using Jesus language to do it.

And he so gently, Jesus so gently, you know, uncovered that and taught them maybe a third thought.

A final way for now to think about this was would it be enough have to be Bartholomew or do you have to be Peter?

You know, it's interesting you mentioned this.

Our ministry of course is named after apollos.

And in First Corinthians 3 he appears in that kind of pod of well known figures.

Some say, no, I follow Apollos, I follow Cephas, I follow Paul, I follow Jesus.

That's a big list Apollos gets to.

But he virtually disappears from, I mean he, he does in fact disappear from second Corinthians.

However, I think when Paul mentions the disciple who is famous among the churches for preaching the gospel, I think that was Apollos because probably he was such a great rhetorician and he was so steeped in Judaism.

I mean, he amazed Aquila and Priscilla with his preaching, even though he didn't know that much and being educated out of Alexandria.

And then he gets mentioned, of course, helping Titus and Crete.

And my theory is, is that it really wasn't about him and he recognized it and he was frustrated at the division that was going on in Corinth and that in some respect he should be the template for, for ministry today because he was not about his own platform and leveraging it.

As a matter of fact, he steps out.

And my theory is he's the only one who's really more educated than Paul because even when Paul says, you know, I told Apollos to come, but he'll come when he.

Basically when he's good and ready to come.

But I think, and I know this is taking us slightly off the path, but I think that's why the only book in the entire New Testament is Hebrews.

And I think that it was Apollos that wrote it, that he's, that he's, that this Apollo's path, because for him it really wasn't about him, it was about Jesus.

And again, this is conjecture and theory and yeah, but I don't think it's out of line.

I think that Apollo's Path is what we need more of those guys who are following the kind of the Zinzendorf ideal of preach Christ and die and be forgotten, and rather than leaving behind podcasts and books and.

And that.

But just being content that we fulfilled the purpose that God had for us.

Yeah.

Why is that so hard today, though, for so many pastors and ministry leaders that we get so caught up in this More, more, more and bigger.

Bigger, bigger.

What?

Why?

I think it's.

It's part of our culture.

It's just our cultural assumption, like our artifacts.

Our cultural artifacts and stories, our strength come out of our strengths.

We're entrepreneurial in the United States.

We're optimists as a.

As a cultural ethos in comparison, in contrast to other parts of the world.

And so we are efficient, inventive, innovative.

We.

We can, you know, create technology or a sock factory, and we can sell socks, the most quantity of socks, for the least amount of money, the most efficiently to produce and make.

So it's just in the air.

These are our strengths.

And then you sit at a leadership table in a church, elders or leaders of some kind, or deacons, depending on where you're at.

And those lay leaders are, to the degree that they're in business or they work in these kinds of places, that's just the kind of board meetings they're accustomed to, that kind of mindset, that kind of planning, that kind of going.

And so then when you're trying to think about Agnes, Agnes who loves Jesus, but her husband doesn't, and Agnes is trying to think about that.

And two of their grown sons don't follow Jesus.

So to walk with Agnes is just going to take a long time.

And joining her in prayer, joining her in council, thinking about her kids and her husband, and.

And that doesn't seem efficient, and it's not fast.

And it's hard to quantify what that produces because it takes a period of time and a lot of small moments.

And so we can.

Because of the cultural error, if we spend time with Agnes, we can feel like we're behind, like we're missing out on something we were meant to do.

And that's the case for whatever size church or ministry we're in.

You know, I wouldn't want to be in any way against or opposed to our faithful brothers and sisters in large ministries.

They face temptations and challenges that are unique to that scenario, and they need our prayer and our support.

And then within that, they.

They might have even more pressure to feel like Agnes is taking time from whatever the Big thing they're supposed to be doing.

And in a small church or middling ministry, we've.

We have our own version of that.

And so on the one hand, it comes from inside of us.

We really are.

The issue of Eden, the original issue of Eden, is still with us.

The garden wasn't enough for Adam and Eve.

It wasn't enough in the cool of the day.

The garden, There had to be more, you know, and we sort of, you and I are still tempted to that.

So that's inside of us.

But we're also in a cultural environment to give ourselves a little grace here.

There are very few incentives in the strengths and weaknesses of our cultural narrative that would invite us to slow down with Agnes, even though if Agnes is in our family and now she's in assisted living, we really long for people willing to go slow and tend the one we love.

And we really hope there's a chaplain or a pastor who will prize Agnes and see taking time with her as a great thing of their week, you know, but, yeah, we're awash in a cultural speed that just makes it hard for us.

It incentivizes that old Edenic thing, that wreck of Eden thing that.

That's inside of us.

Talking about faithfulness in ministry, what are some of the warning signs when a pastor starts confusing faithfulness with performance?

That's a great question.

Maybe I'll tell a story, a short story to try to answer that question.

I was with church planters and American church planters.

This particular team had planted a church they'd seen there.

They had seen their house groups moved from three to nine or 10 in a year and grown numerically really much larger.

And when they were all together, I asked them, you know, how do you know that God is at work?

What are you seeing?

And.

And they pointed to this.

You know, we went from three house groups to 10, and God is on the move, and we're seeing more and more people come in.

Then when I met with each person individually, all of them were exhausted, and half of them were wondering if they should stay in ministry or if they needed to step down.

And so you step back and think, what's happening there?

It was a real learning experience for me.

I have so much to learn.

And it was something like this.

The same group of people who were tending the three house groups were now tending nine.

And so they had grown numerically but hadn't factored in internally what that would require relationally of folks.

And so the.

The mission statement was, we want to multiply home groups.

By 3 percentage or, you know, or whatever it was.

So I just said, what?

What if you added a word?

We want to multiply sustainable home groups.

We want to multiply soul nourishing home groups.

You decide what the word is in there.

We want to want to multiply Christ formative home groups by a certain percentage.

Now suddenly there's a new set of questions in the system.

I have to decide, what is soul nourishing biblically?

What provides soul nourishment?

Then I have to look at our home group curriculum.

Are we doing home groups in such a way that souls are nourished?

And then I have to think, do we have leaders who know how to nourish a soul biblically?

And now everything starts to slow down.

And now the question of measurement shifts.

Before we would just say God is on the move because we had a numerical shift.

We actually did multiply from this number to that number.

So God is on the move.

But now that's not the measure.

The measure is, are those who are attending our home groups being nourished in their soul?

Are they being formed in likeness to Jesus?

And that's a completely different set of questions than did they come?

Did they attend?

And that kind of question would now allow the team to say, are we so nourished?

Do we know how to nourish the soul?

Do we know how to have our souls nourished?

And now we get to ask each other, how are you doing?

Have you had a day off?

Are you being able to pause in order to keep going?

The same kinds of criterion to nourish a soul group, a home group now becomes a part of the criterion for us as a team.

And if you added that one phrase, multiplies soul nourishing home groups, all of this now comes into play.

Play.

And ultimately everything would slow down.

You, you probably wouldn't go from three to nine home groups in that speed.

It would slow it all down.

Your new numerical growth would slow down unless people were patient enough to stick around with you.

But it might take two years rather than one to do that.

And your team is probably still intact and rejuvenated over that two year period.

And you know, 20 years from now, if it took you one year or it took you two years, we're not going to be disturbed about that.

But something like that, faithfulness and productivity, productivity, culturally speaking, as a results oriented point of view, but productivity in, as a pastor is people growing in likeness to Jesus.

And that's a slow business.

That's a slow business.

And, and so faithfulness has to continue to be, to be relocated.

In this whatever phrase you would add to that sentence.

The cultural productivity is I want to multiply home groups by 3%.

The pastoral productivity, biblical productivity is I need to.

I gotta have another phrase in there, soul nourishing or whatever it might be so that faithfulness can come back into play.

Relational loving, a neighbor comes back into play.

Whereas the numerical value, as important as it might be, it doesn't account for the love, the neighbor love part.

So many different churches unintentionally do that, which makes it harder for pastors to live within human limits.

Would you agree with that?

Yes.

And how do we see that's not the right way to go?

So someone comes to our church.

This is a true story.

Someone comes to our church.

They've been there for two Sundays and they say, I want to be in a home group.

It's got to meet on Tuesday night.

It needs to have, it has to meet after 6:30 because I get off work.

It's got to be located in what, what that person just did is order at Starbucks.

They don't realize they are.

I want a half caf latte grande.

You know, they don't realize they are.

They're asking the entire church to bend around their particular schedule.

And, and that's an earnest person, loves Jesus, wants the scripture.

I mean, goodness, they're asking to be in a home group.

You know, but if you're a smaller church, you, as a younger pastor, I would have tried, I would bend all the volunteers we have to try to create the program to meet what's being asked for.

I just don't do that anymore.

Why?

Because first of all, that person's been there two Sundays and the volunteers have been fully committed for however many years.

I don't even know if this person will be committed.

I don't even know anything about them yet.

And they don't know anything about us yet.

But second, I'll learn a lot if I say this.

You know what we don't have?

We just formed our house groups.

We don't have one forming.

It's going to be another two months before we have a house group form for me.

And, and I can't guarantee it'll be at that time on that day in that location.

But I do care about you.

I'd love to connect you with Guy and this and Ty, who care about house groups.

I'd love, you know, Joe and Carol would love to meet with you.

I'd be glad to have some coffee with you.

If a person can handle this relational invitation, then they'll likely be in a house group in a few months, you know, but if they can't handle that relational invitation, all they see is, I gotta wait.

And this is a little, you know, literally, so I gotta wait.

You're asking me to wait 12 weeks before I get in the house group.

And so they leave.

Yeah, because the people are just like customers and consumers.

I mean, that is.

It's invisible to us.

Like, the kind of person I'm describing is earnest, trying to be in a house group.

Loves the scripture but doesn't realize there.

They.

When they talked to the pastor, they talked like they were talking to a barista.

And they don't realize it.

They don't realize it, you know, and it can be hard for us to realize it.

There was a time, there's a scenario where there were three conversations like that in one week with me.

And I'm typing an email to our volunteer team, and I have a whole new thing, a new program.

I have a name for it.

Let's call it this.

Let's have it at this night.

Maybe these people can volunteer.

We have some folks trying to get connected, and they're having a hard time doing that.

And then two of the.

One of the elders wrote back to me and said, you know, Zach, thanks so much for creating a new program.

I want to remind you of what you've taught us.

What if we slow down and have.

And make a relational move toward each of these people?

And I was like, ah, thank you, thank you, thank you.

Because I just forgot, too.

To ask someone to wait a couple days, to ask someone to wait 12 weeks is not a long time, Especially when you're offering other relational connection points.

And a small church, that's another reason a smaller church can feel small, because an earnest person and unmindful that they're talking like they're talking to a barista, they just see it as a weakness of that church.

And so they go to another church down the road.

And that contributes to the smaller church person feeling like, what are they not doing right?

What are they not?

And shouldn't they by now be this or that?

And no one in that scenario intended to slight the other person.

It's just.

There's a cultural narrative at work, and it's the elephant in the room.

And we're grappling with it.

Yeah, we are grappling with it all the time.

So many pastors that I meet today feel emotionally numb or exhausted.

For those guys that are out there, that are feeling that Right now, where would you encourage them to begin to move to healing and wholeness,.

The steadfast love of the Lord.

And I don't mean that rightly, the theological environment that I'm part of.

Our real strength is justification by faith alone.

And I don't want less than that.

My goodness, where would we be without the grace of God justifying sinners?

But what that means is that the language is courtroom language, our strength.

Where I'm from, not everyone's from this, but where I'm from, courtroom language is our strength.

Substitution, penalty, paid judgment, and so redemption.

But what that means is in the midst of that strength, we don't have a lot of love language in our regular talk that we're the beloved, that the apostle Paul says, I've been crucified with Christ, I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.

The life I live by in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me.

And at that point he doesn't say who loved us.

And of course Paul teaches us that God loves us, but he said, who loved me and that steadfast love.

So there's one of the Psalms says something like this, let he who is wise meditate on this.

The steadfast love of the Lord endures forever.

And if you were to, there's three entire psalms on the steadfast love of the Lord.

And if you were to just search steadfast love in your ESV Bible search or whatever, you know, translation you're doing, you're going to be just reminded the steadfast love of the Lord just cascades like waterfall of verses over us.

And let me, let me hear, this is one of the psalms, maybe Psalm 90, I'm forgetting, but let me hear of your steadfast love in the morning so that I may rejoice all and be glad all my days.

How is it that I can have some kind of joy, sustaining joy all my days?

What's the cause of that?

Hearing of the steadfast love of the Lord in the morning.

And so you know, that steadfast love is hesed.

That's that covenant love, that's original, untransactional, distinctive love of God.

And we, we need big doses of the Father's love to know that we're his beloved and that nothing can separate us from that love in Christ Jesus that we are.

We, we imitate him because we're dearly loved children.

Ephesians 5:1, not the other way around.

We don't imitate him to get loved.

We imitate him as dearly loved children.

And so this is where I'd want to begin with each other regardless right now of what you can or can't do, what the church can or can't do.

The truest thing about you is that you are the beloved of God in Christ and nothing can separate you from that.

Zach, can I come into the end of our time here?

What is one concluding thought you want to give those weary pastors out there today?

Being an ordinary human being is enough to walk in the garden with the in the cool of the day, to enjoy everything except the one tree was enough.

That was the big vision.

And and so being an ordinary person in an ordinary place, doing ordinary human things in God's world is enough.

You.

The Lord delights in you.

He's with you and nothing would change that.

Well, I want to thank you for coming on the show.

For those that are out there, Zach has reminded us that pastors are never meant to carry the weight of being everywhere, fixing everything, every problem that we find, and holding everyone together.

We are human beings before we are ministry leaders, and maybe the freedom we've been looking for begins there.

If today's conversation has encouraged you, challenged you, or something simply helped to give you a moment to breathe a little deeper, I would encourage you to pick up his book.

If you haven't read it, the Imperfect Pastor.

It's thoughtful, honest, deeply pastoral, and honestly and maybe one of the healthiest books a ministry leader can read right now.

And if you know another pastor out there, church leader or weary ministry leader who needs this conversation, share this episode with them and everyone listening.

If this episode encouraged you or challenged you the way you think about pastoral ministry, then make sure to subscribe to Ministry Deep Dive wherever you get your podcast and never miss an episode.

You can also find more conversations@apolloswater.org until next time, stay curious, stay grounded, and keep pursuing deeper conversations that help us to follow Jesus more faithfully in this changing world.

This is Travis Michael Fleming signing off from Apollos Water.

Stay watered everybody.