Love led Jesus to come to us. Love of Christ leads us to love others. And love leads us to minister.

And whether you are old or young, eloquent or plain, people will not despise those who come to them in love. We must produce pastors who love. But you also must love Christ and love others in order for them to receive your message.

Here is a fourth and final feature I would draw your attention to in Paul’s portrait.

A minister approved by Christ Jesus is a devoted minister (vv. 13-16).

In the last three verses of this passage, Paul calls Timothy to  “devote yourself,” to “not neglect the gift you have,” to “practice these things, devote yourself to them,” to “keep a close watch on yourself and on the teaching,” and finally to “persist in this,” for in doing so you will save yourself and your hearers.

To be called to the ministry is to be called to a life of devotion. Indeed, to be called to be a Christian is to be called to a life of devotion.

We must all be devoted to the Word of God. For the minister, he is to devote himself, as we see here, to the public ministry of the Word, to reading it as well as preaching it. I believe that the minister of the gospel is to be so involved with the public ministry of the Word in worship that nothing in the service goes outside of his purview.

I was the 12th pastor since 1838 when I served at First Presbyterian Church of Chattanooga. One of my predecessors was Dr. James Fowle. And I have heard, by those who sat under his ministry during the late ’40s all the way through 1968, that he apparently spent as much time working on the pastoral prayer as he did the sermon. Some said he spent as much time on practicing the reading of the Scriptures as he did in preaching them!

But this is an example of what the Bible is saying. We aim to produce ministers who hear this message. In an age where so many want to be entertained, we believe that pastors ought to spend time in the Word and lead worship according to the Word of God. And for all of us, as the people of God, where is our focus in worship? Where is our focus in discipleship? It must be in the Bible. Some bizarre things have come into the church because preachers have given in to the strange, television-influenced cravings of our people. Oh, that God would raise up a generation of Christians who demand the Word of God in worship! Then would our pastors become all the more encouraged in doing what God has called them to d to be devoted to the public reading of the Word of God.

We also must be devoted to watching over our own lives. The devil goes about like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour, and lions like weak prey. A minister who has lost his way, stopped devoting himself to the Word and to prayer, lost his love of the gospel of grace in his own life, lost the love of his flock and lost a love of the lost and of seeing the Kingdom of Jesus going to the ends of the earth is like a wounded gazelle who has strayed from the herd. He is a prime target for the crouched lion to spring at him and rip him to shreds. The percentage of ministers who are falling is astounding. It is, in fact, epidemic. A study was revealed by the Schaeffer Institute: “…30 percent [of pastors they interviewed] said they had either been in an ongoing affair or a one-time sexual encounter with a parishioner.”1

We must devote ourselves to Jesus each and every day. Oh, that Christ would take me home to be with Himself rather than let me fall into sin and hurt my wife and son and our children and our seminary and our church and the body of Christ. But it doesn’t have to be that way—for me or for you—if we devote ourselves to the faith personally and privately each and every day and all through the day. The prayed-up preacher, the prayed-over believer, is safe from the fiery darts of the devil. Keep watch over yourselves.

But we must also surely devote ourselves to the teaching of Jesus Christ. It is so easy to preach a “do this and do that” religion rather than the gospel of God’s grace. Remember that this is what is before Timothy and what has precipitated this charge. There were those who were