Dr. Joel R. Beeke

Ten Commandments for Pastors

1. Give priority to your personal communion with God. Put your own soul first: your maintaining communion with God is a prerequisite for being an effective pastor to your people. “Take heed therefore unto yourselves, and to the flock, over the which the Holy Ghost hath made you overseers” (Acts 20:28).

2. Give priority to prayer and holiness. Undertake no sermon, no pastoral work, no task of the ministry without seeking God’s face in Jesus Christ. Follow John Bunyan’s advice, “You can do more than pray after you have prayed, but you cannot do more than pray until you have prayed.” Personal holiness is not only a necessary pursuit but a joyful one and is usually inseparable from divine success in the ministry.

3. Be bibline all your life. Be like Bunyan, of whom Spurgeon said, that if you pricked any vein, the blood that would flow out would be bibline. Read the Word, study the Word, believe the Word, pray over the Word, love the Word, live the Word, memorize the Word, meditate on the Word, sing the Word, and practice the Word.

4. Remember that preaching is the primary task of the ministry, and that to do it rightly, you need the Holy Spirit two times for every sermon: once in the study and then again on the pulpit.

5. Be profoundly thankful and humbled for the honor of being an ambassador of Jesus Christ. Remain convinced all your life that you have a crucial vocation, for you are dealing with never-dying souls for a never-ending eternity.

6. Preach Christ to the full. Be determined to know no man after the flesh—including yourself—and to glory in nothing except Jesus Christ and Him crucified, exalted, and coming again! Be a self-forgetter and a Christ-preacher. You can never preach Him enough. Devote the best energy of your life into preaching Him biblically, doctrinally, experientially, and practically. Resolve, like Thomas Boston, to leave the savor of Christ behind in all that you do.

7. Love. Love the triune God; love your wife and children; love people; love your work.

8. Maintain a radical sense of dependency on the anointing of the Holy Spirit in all that you think, say, and do. Lean upon the Spirit at all times.

9. Ask God to give you a few, very close pastoral friends with whom you can hold each other accountable. Love your brethren in the ministry, and do not compete with them.

10. Live every day with an eternal perspective that fuels evangelistic urgency for the lost and pastoral love for the saints’ maturation. Keep eternity in view in all that you do, so that on the great day you may give a good account of your ministry and may hear your Master say, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant…enter thou into the joy of thy Lord” (Matt. 25:21).

Ten Commandments for Church Members Toward their Pastor

1. Don’t idolize your pastor. Don’t expect him to be able to do what only God can do. Don’t make a savior of him.

2. Don’t criticize your pastor unless he departs from the truth, and then do it with tears. And please don’t expect perfection. He is a mere man—a weak, sinful man at that, just like you. His office is divine, but his person is human. He sets before you treasure in an earthen vessel. If you don’t remember that, you will cry “Hosanna” today but will crucify him tomorrow.

3. Don’t avoid your pastor. Go to him, tell him your needs, open your soul. It is your duty and privilege to go to him with your questions and spiritual troubles—and that will be to his encouragement and joy.

4. Do pray for your pastor. Pray for his soul, that he would be kept humble and holy. Pray for his body, that he would be kept strong and spared for many years. Pray that he would be a burning and shining light. Pray for his ministry, that it would be abundantly blessed. Pray for his wife, his family, his sermon preparation, his delivery, his counseling. Pray your minister full and he will preach you full.

5. Be a good listener to and doer of the sermons your pastor preaches. Listen to and obey your pastor. As long as he preaches the Scriptures, receive it as the very word of God. Remember, he is Christ’s gift to you.

6. Be interested in your pastor. Don’t let all your conversation with him be focused only on you. Be kind to him. Show interest in him, his life, and the life of his family; he is human too!

7. Remember to appreciate your pastor’s strengths and minimize his weaknesses, always reminding yourself that your next pastor may not have your present pastor’s strengths. Don’t compare pastors to each other, but learn to appreciate the unique gifts that God has given to each pastor He sends to you.

8. Look above and beyond your pastor. Look to Him whom your pastor sets before you.

9. Be coworkers with your pastor and the consistory. Be self-forgetters, Christ-exalters, and co-laborers. Covet humility, wisdom, peace, unity—and put on charity.

10. Keep an eternal perspective of your pastor’s ministry. Ask God that your pastor would be able to give a good account of your soul on Judgment Day. Remember that you don’t have to give an account of your pastor’s blemishes and strengths on the day of days, but you do have to give an account of what you have done with the word that he brings you. If you are yet unsaved, look on his ministry as one more major opportunity God is giving you to receive with meekness His engrafted Word. Through his ministry, the Lord is saying that He has more people from your church to be gathered into His eternal harvest—and why should it not be you? Oh, that you would know the day of your visitation under your pastor’s ministry!

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Dr. Joel R. Beeke is president and professor of Systematic Theology and Homiletics at Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary, and a pastor of the Heritage Netherlands Reformed Congregation of Grand Rapids, Michigan. These twenty commandments are drawn from a brief word spoken at the ordination of Rev. Ian Macleod in the Free Reformed Church of Grand Rapids.

Published by The Banner of Sovereign Grace Truth, used with permission.