Pastor John, I know you're gearing up for the Desiring Guide conference for pastors here in a few weeks in Minneapolis, and you're planning to deliver a biographical sketch this year of poet George Herbert. Is there anything from Herbert's life that you can share with us? Any teasers from your research?

I'm very excited about Herbert. I don't know exactly what I'm going to say yet, but I am immersed in him these days as I move toward the pastors conference. Herbert lived, he was born in 1593, and he didn't live to be 40 years old. He died just short of his 40th year, so he's another one of those saints who didn't live long but had a huge effect.

He was born of a wealthy family and went to Cambridge, became the orator at Cambridge, and thus wrote and spoke before King James, who is responsible for the King James Bible, and battled all of his young life with whether he should yield to the ministry, the call of a pastorate, or whether he should aim at a role in the royal court.

And that's where a lot of his poems come from, is the soul conflict with honor and pleasure and power on the one hand, and a life utterly devoted to Jesus on the other hand. And that's, I think, why some of his poems are so effective. There were about 184 poems, and what's remarkable is that when he was 17, he wrote two sonnets for his mother, who he loved very much, and in those sonnets he pledged himself to write only for the glory of God.

So in spite of all this battle with his public life in the years just after Cambridge, he held to that promise. There are no poems from the pen of George Herbert that we know of that don't deal with God or with the soul in relation to God. He's not like John Donne, who half his life or more was spent writing poems of a more secular, natural kind.

All of his poems were devoted to God, and so he assembled them in a book that he never published during his lifetime, but was given away. So what I'm going to try to do, that book was given to Nicholas Farrar right after he died, and it was published within seven months after he died, and it went through a lot of editions.

What I'm going to try to do is show how God won that victory, and Herbert gave himself over to God and over to the ministry and was a little country pastor in a tiny church called Bremerton for the last three years of his life, and then he died of tuberculosis just short of his 40th birthday, and how his poetry captures that conflict and how poetry figures into this whole issue of brothers, we are still not professionals.

That's what I'm constantly looking at when I read him, is how does Herbert represent for us in his conflicts, in his soul, in his finally yielding to God, in his final years of pastoral ministry, how does he represent for us what I'm trying to say by brothers, we are still not professionals.

So I'm really eager to take his poetry, his life, his ministry, weave them together into a kind of challenge to the pastors along with the others to not be the kind of professional we're talking about. Excellent. Well I'm looking forward to it. February 4, 5, and 6 in Minneapolis, the 2013 Conference for Pastors titled "Brothers, We Are Still Not Professionals." Hope to see you there.

Thank you for joining us for this podcast. If you have a question for Pastor John, please email those to us at AskPastorJohn@DesiringGod.org. Please include your first name and your hometown. You can find thousands of other resources from Pastor John online at DesiringGod.org. I'm your host Tony Reinke, thanks for listening.