Getting the Tough/Tender Balance Right
00:00:00.000 | Hello, this is Pastor John. I get to start this episode by talking about another Pastor
00:00:08.720 | John, John Newton. Newton was a key leader in England in the 18th century, as you know,
00:00:16.440 | the author of the incredibly popular hymn Amazing Grace. Newton was a former captain
00:00:23.280 | of a slave trading ship and was dramatically converted from this life of sin and eventually
00:00:29.920 | helped William Wilberforce in the British slave trade. So I wanted to take a moment
00:00:35.880 | to introduce you to a new book about a part of Newton's life that goes overlooked. His
00:00:41.240 | 40 plus years in pastoral ministry and the amazing ministry of writing letters to people
00:00:49.720 | in need. The book is written by Tony Reinke, the host of this podcast. Tony calls his book
00:00:56.080 | Pastoral Synthesis. He wants you to be pastored by John Newton. And so he gathered up all
00:01:02.640 | of Newton's many published letters, about a thousand of them in various collections,
00:01:09.360 | many of them preserved in old, rare, fragile volumes in libraries around the world. He
00:01:14.960 | found them, studied them, and then identified Newton's key answers to the perennial questions
00:01:22.340 | of the Christian life. And then Tony wrote all his findings into a guided tour of Newton's
00:01:29.360 | thought. It's a kind of Ask Pastor John Newton. The book releases this week. It's titled
00:01:37.640 | Newton on the Christian Life to Live as Christ. I commend it very highly.
00:01:43.680 | Well, it's not easy to find examples of Christians who got the tough and tender balance
00:01:57.460 | just right in the Christian life. Jesus is of course the supreme example of this. Another
00:02:03.220 | example of fallen example comes from England in the 18th century and a pastor named John
00:02:08.940 | Newton. John Piper explained in his 2001 message to pastors titled, "John Newton, the Tough
00:02:15.500 | Roots of His Habitual Tenderness." Here's what he said.
00:02:20.900 | John Newton was born July 24, 1725 in London, 1725, so picture yourself now how long ago
00:02:28.820 | that was, to a godly mother and an irreligious seafaring father. She died when he was six,
00:02:37.420 | left mainly to himself. He became a debauched sailor, a miserable outcast on the west coast
00:02:45.020 | of Africa for a couple of years, a slave trading sea captain until an epileptic seizure ended
00:02:54.300 | his sea going career, a well-paid surveyor of tides in Liverpool, a devoted and loved
00:03:06.660 | pastor of two congregations in Olney and London for a total of 43 years, a devoted husband
00:03:15.220 | to Mary for 40 years until she died in 1790, and last of all, the writer of the most famous
00:03:23.100 | hymn in the English language, "Amazing Grace," which you heard and sang exactly as he wrote
00:03:29.220 | it, not with that wonderful last verse which we love and he did not write. And he died
00:03:39.060 | in 1807 at 82. So why am I interested in this man? What's my agenda before you this morning?
00:03:49.140 | I'm interested in him because of my great desire to see Christian pastors be as strong
00:04:00.180 | and durable as redwood trees and as tender and fragrant as a field of clover. I want
00:04:09.780 | to see you become rugged in the defense and confirmation of the truth and relentlessly
00:04:18.780 | humble and patient and merciful in dealing with people.
00:04:26.180 | Ever since I came to Bethlehem in 1980, I've had this vision of what I want to be and what
00:04:31.540 | I want to be the means of others becoming because in the early 1980s, I read Matthew
00:04:39.260 | and Mark in my Greek Testament, writing in the margin, T.E. and T.O. beside every tender
00:04:48.180 | thing Jesus said or did and every tough thing Jesus said or did. And when I got done, the
00:04:56.620 | mixture was amazing. No man ever spoke, no man ever lived like this man spoke and lived.
00:05:05.500 | There's nobody like Jesus pastoring today. And I want to be more like that. And I want
00:05:12.340 | you to be more like that. And therefore, as I look at pastors in history and around and
00:05:18.620 | I find one who got something that we need, then I bank on it for a while. And that's
00:05:25.060 | what I've been doing since July with Newton. And I know that this drunk peasant who can't
00:05:32.340 | stay on the donkey is where we all are. Everybody in this room is falling off the horse on one
00:05:40.580 | side or the other on this matter of toughness and tenderness. And so it's risky business
00:05:47.620 | in this room to say what I'm going to say. There are a lot of us who are wimping out
00:05:56.660 | on truth when we ought to be lionhearted. And there are a lot who are wrangling with
00:06:03.540 | anger when we ought to be weeping. And so I know I'm going to say some things that are
00:06:09.900 | not what some of you should hear. Some of you need a good, tender kick in the pants
00:06:20.100 | to be more courageous with truth. And some of you need to realize that courage is not
00:06:29.260 | what William Cooper, Newton's good friend, called a furious and abusive zeal. Oh, how
00:06:37.380 | rare are the pastors who speak with a tender heart and have theological backbones of steel.
00:06:49.060 | Oh, how rare it is. And not to be rare. And I don't want it to be rare. Theological truth,
00:07:00.420 | biblical backbones of steel and as soft as clover so that children come to you and broken
00:07:11.660 | people come to you and homosexuals come to you.
00:07:16.060 | Amen. That was from John Piper's 2001 message to pastors titled John Newton, the tough roots
00:07:22.820 | of his habitual tenderness. Special thanks to cellist Patricia White for her rendition
00:07:29.060 | of Amazing Grace off her album, Be Still My Soul, which we are using in this episode.
00:07:34.540 | And thank you to Pastor John for promoting my new book here and for writing the forward
00:07:37.740 | to it. You can read us forward and find more information online at desiringgod.org/newton.
00:07:45.620 | We return tomorrow with Pastor John to answer a perplexing question about how we read our
00:07:49.740 | Bibles. I'm your host Tony Ranke. Thanks for listening to the Ask Pastor John podcast.
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