Albert N. Martin
An excerpt from a lecture:
It is an old and oft-repeated saying, and it is old and oft-repeated because it’s true, that a man’s life is the life of his ministry. As it will be demonstrated in specific details, there is no aspect of pastoral duty which does not have its roots in the state of the pastor’s own inner life before God. Proverbs 4:23 is true, “Above all that you guard, guard your heart, for out of it are the issues of life.” Every stream flowing out of a man into the various dimensions of ministerial labor is traced back to the state of his heart.
Hence, right on the threshold, the first requisite of anyone who has any sanctified aspiration for the office of overseer, what is the fundamental requirement? Blameless, blameless, a blameless life. And here again, I found the old writers outstrip contemporary writers in their constant emphasis of this fundamental presupposition. These words of Stalker in his marvelous work, called The Preacher and His Models capture it:
We are so constituted that what we hear depends very much for its effect on how we are disposed to him who speaks. The regular hearers of a minister gradually form in their minds, almost unawares, an image of what he is, into which they put everything which they themselves remember about him, and everything which they’ve heard of his record. And when he rises on Sunday in the pulpit, it is not the man visible there at the moment that they listen to, but this image which stands behind him and determines the precise weight and effect of every sentence that he utters.
Isn’t that true to your experience? You cannot, it is psychologically, morally, spiritually impossible to simply isolate and cocoonize the words and separate them from the instrument that conveys the words. God didn’t make us that way. God doesn’t intend we should be and function that way.
It is said of an old divine, “He fed you with his doctrine, and edified you by his example. He wooed for Christ in his preaching, and he allured you to Christ by his walking.” Wouldn’t it be wonderful? To go to our graves and have people be able to say in truth—he fed you with his doctrine and edified you by his example. He wooed for Christ in his preaching, and allured you to Christ by his walking.
This is an excerpt from the transcript of Unit 1, Lecture 1 of Albert N. Martin’s Pastoral Theology Lecture Series.