How can a busy pastor tend to his own soul?

Dr. Ligon Duncan reminds us that pastors need the means of grace just as much as the people they serve. To shepherd others well, ministers must feed on God’s Word, sit under faithful preaching, and guard against unnecessary busyness.

The following is a transcript of the video above. 

How can a busy pastor tend to his own soul?

Busy pastors need the means of grace for our own souls. The way that we minister the means of grace to the people of God. In ministry, we need to nourish ourselves on the Word. Sometimes we do that even as we prepare lessons, messages, and sermons. As we study to teach the people of God, we will be very deliberate and self-conscious in our preparation of our own souls with that message. The preparation is used to prepare our own hearts to believe that truth as we prepare to proclaim it to others. But very often we will also set aside time to study the Word of God for our own souls. Ministers need to be in the Word of God regularly just for our own edification, so that we believe the message that we’re preaching to others, so that the truth is working on us and transforming us. We want to see our people believe. We want to see our people change and grow. Well, we wanna believe and we want to be changed and grow by the Word of God. And so we must attend to the Word of God regularly ourselves, so that we may grow in grace. We will want to make sure that even as we approach the Lord’s Day as those who have to minister the Word, we have to do that necessary work of leading the people of God in the praises of God, we will nevertheless want to deliberately use that day as our day of rest and gladness.

I also wanna say this. Ministers need to be regularly under the preaching of God’s Word. It was my joy for so many years to sit under the regular preaching, especially on Lord’s Day evenings, of Derek Thomas, and he ministered to my soul. What a wonderful thing it is when a pastor can sit under the preaching of fellow pastors and be fed by the Word, by a faithful shepherd who is giving us the means of grace for our growth in grace. Pastors need to listen to preaching, and then we need to read rich scripture-saturated truth in sound theological books. We need to be nourished by the great classic truths of God’s people, as revealed in some of the great literature of Christian history. We need to be constantly growing and always learning, so that we are nourished, and in turn, we can feed God’s people.

An index of our ministry will be our own Christian maturity. We need to grow in grace if we want our people to grow in grace. And so we need to tend to our own souls. And really, in the question that I’ve been asked, there’s a little secret to this. We’ve talked about “busy pastors”. We need to make sure that we are busy with the things that we should be doing, and that we are not caught up in unnecessary busyness. As I look back over my ministry, I see a lot of unnecessary busyness. I devoted myself in time and in energy to things that were not the most important things. Make sure that what you’re devoting yourself to is the things that really matter, that you’re not caught up in extraneous busyness, but that your energy and your time, your efforts and your work is focused on the most important things, things that matter eternally. That takes wisdom and counsel from other ministers. But protecting ourselves from unnecessary busyness is one of the ways that we keep our souls in a state of flourishing as we seek to serve God in gospel ministry.