In this video, Dr. Sinclair Ferguson shares some notable lessons from years in ministry.
You never feel you’ve really got this old, but when you get to this stage and you look back, I think the thing that really impresses me is the way in which in everything I believed rightly about God and about His ways in Scripture, in every single one of those areas, there has been a kind of development and understanding and growth that makes you think, “I said that and I believed that, but I didn’t really know what I was talking about.”
And I suppose that is everywhere from how I think about God and His graciousness. And because you have got so much more of it to look back on, it’s almost as though you get a bit of depth perception about His providence as well. Just being able to get glimpses of the way He works things out.
As I look back in my life, I’ve made some decisions in my life thinking, “So if it’s this, then it will lead to that.” And it’s led to something completely different. And that has, I think, taught me, and I’m sure I’ve been helped to see this more than I could see it when I was in my early twenties, that you can never actually second guess God and why it is that He’s leading you to the next step. But the one thing you can do is always trust Him. And for me, that has been a great lesson. And I look back and the one or two decisions I’ve made on the basis, I think proper basis. The results have turned out to be entirely different from what I expected. Sometimes the results in my own life have been difficult for me to cope with. But then as you go on, you realize they’ve all been part of God’s plan, purpose for your life.
I love the Lord’s Supper far more than I ever used to. It used to be something you did. I don’t know that anybody ever explained to me what it was we were doing, but the Lord’s Supper become a great delight in my Christian life. A big thing to me over the years has been that when the Word is preached in the power of the Spirit, Christ Himself preaches. And that has helped me a lot personally as a minister and preacher to feel that I’m sitting under the Word when I’m preaching it as much as anyone else. So sometimes people will say to ministers, whose ministry do you sit under? Whose preaching? Do you listen to it? I have to say, I listen to my own preaching, even while I’m preaching, because I’m as much under it and needing to be changed and transformed and helped by it as anyone else.
So, I think it would actually take a book to describe . . . It would need a book of systematic theology and pastor theology and to go through every single section and just reflect on how much one feels one has come to experience and appreciate what in a sense you believed from the beginning, but you didn’t have the experience that went hand in hand in hand with it.