What Pastors Are Called To Be

I would like to recommend a book to everybody reading this. If you're like me, you have a million books I'm sure you'd like to get to. You'll even fall into the trap of buying more books before you read the ones that you already have! I get that, I really do. But that being said, I'm still going to encourage that you read Preaching the Cross. This book is a compilation of talks that were given at the Together For Gospel conference. Each chapter is a talk from that conference. The talks are from Mark Dever, J. Ligon Duncan III, C.J. Mahaney, John Piper, RC Sproul, John MacArthur, Albert Mohler Jr. You can get the table of contents here. This book is important for two types of people:

1. The individual that feels God's call to full time ministry. This book helps guide us through what the Bible says the role of the pastor IS, not what many are trying to make it into. Jim Hamilton is right when he says that this book should be required reading for those preaching or in pastoral/ministries. I would submit that pastors read this book every year as a good reminder of what the WORD says we are to be as pastors.
   
2. People that are currently church members. At first I thought this book was just for preachers, but I am now convinced that every church member should read this book in effort to know what the Word says the Pastoral role is to be and ask ourselves if the pastors of the churches we attend are being true to the Word. Not in an effort to be more critical, but rather, biblical.

Furthermore, thanks to our friends at Sovereign Grace Ministries, you can download the actual talks that this book is written from for free (See the post below this one)! If we read these words and hear these words, we have a better chance of remembering these words and retaining what we are attempting to learn.