Pastors’ Retreat
At his baptism, the Father spoke tender, thundering words over Jesus: you are my beloved. These are the first words we all must hear from the Father, the first words giving us our place in the world, our vocation. What followed, though, was the Spirit leading Jesus into the Wilderness for those grueling weeks of temptation—temptations to grab power and abandon his humanness and use God for his own purposes. This wilderness was Jesus commencing his public ministry, a harbinger of how ministry is often a place of wilderness tempting for many pastors. One of these seductive temptations is to make our sermons and our vocation about us (our personality, our pet issues, our insecurities), rather than allowing Scripture to illuminate the many ways God is calling his people to live out the concrete details of our lives. Faithful ministry — giving away the God who is alive in Scripture—requires first knowing we are the beloved.
