Reflections on His Last Sermon As Pastor
00:00:00.000 | We are recording this episode of Ask Pastor John at the very end of March, and
00:00:08.560 | you've been a pastor at Bethlehem Baptist Church in the Twin Cities now for nearly
00:00:11.840 | 33 years, and on Sunday of this week you will preach for the final time as a
00:00:15.960 | pastor. And your final sermon falls on Easter. What's going on in your mind
00:00:20.040 | right now as you think ahead to this capstone sermon? Well, the irony of that
00:00:25.800 | question, Tony, is that it's Thursday of Holy Week, and I will preach on Easter,
00:00:33.840 | and I will start preparing my sermon tomorrow. And I'm laboring like crazy to
00:00:41.240 | get ready for the Gospel Coalition right now, and to get ready for my Maundy
00:00:46.020 | Thursday talk tonight. But I have chosen my text from Hebrews 13, 20, and 21, and I
00:00:53.420 | do have an idea where I wanted to go. That's why I chose the text, and so I can
00:00:58.720 | say a word about what I'm thinking, though how I'm going to say it, what I'm
00:01:02.180 | going to say, it's not read in any detail at all. I chose that text because it's
00:01:08.400 | Easter, number one, and it begins, "Now may the God of peace who brought again from
00:01:13.840 | the dead, our Lord Jesus, the great Shepherd of the sheep." So I chose it
00:01:18.880 | first because God brought again from the dead our Shepherd, but I chose it
00:01:24.720 | also because I'm a shepherd and I'm leaving my flock. And I want to say to
00:01:29.080 | them, "You have a great Shepherd." Jason Meyer and John Piper are both going to be
00:01:35.720 | dead someday, and you cannot put your final hope in any man, but you have a
00:01:44.800 | great Shepherd. I just love that phrase, "great Shepherd." He brought again from the
00:01:50.200 | dead our Lord Jesus, the great Shepherd of the sheep. He knows there's a lot of
00:01:54.560 | sub-shepherds. Us pitty little, sinful, fallible, failing sub-shepherds that
00:02:02.440 | cause all kinds of trouble in the Church, as well as bring some blessing to the
00:02:06.360 | Church. People have a shepherd, and he has been raised from the dead. He's the
00:02:12.320 | same yesterday, today, and forever, wherever they are in the world, whatever
00:02:16.640 | their circumstances, whatever people have failed them, whatever disappointments
00:02:21.240 | they have in the Church, they have a great Shepherd, and he is alive on Easter
00:02:27.560 | and forever, and therefore John Piper can go, Jason Meyer can go, Jesus will never
00:02:33.840 | ever go. That's the gist of what I want to say. Wonderful. And one of your
00:02:39.920 | heroes in the faith, Jonathan Edwards, who pastored in Northampton for 24 years, he
00:02:44.120 | preached a farewell sermon as well, under much different circumstances, of course.
00:02:47.520 | Are you taking any cues from him on how to do this? I'm not looking to
00:02:52.320 | Edwards for clues for how to do this, because our situations are so, so
00:02:56.200 | different. But now that you've mentioned it, I might go look at it. Well, I said to
00:03:01.940 | Noel, one of the great ironies of this last week is that almost all my
00:03:07.440 | attention and all my energy is thinking beyond Easter. And I wish
00:03:15.680 | that weren't true, in a way. I wish I weren't under such pressure to get ready
00:03:18.880 | for what's coming in the week after Easter, so that I could sit here and
00:03:23.240 | savor more the ending of this 33 years. But in a way, Tony, I said to the
00:03:30.880 | Lord, you know, I don't know why you set it up this way, but in a way it feels
00:03:35.200 | very gratifying, because it feels like, okay, this is not a big cataclysmic end,
00:03:42.800 | "Oh dear, what will I do on the 1st of April when I'm employed by Bethlehem?" It
00:03:49.440 | feels like I'm bouncing up and down on a diving board, and I'm ready to do a
00:03:55.680 | double-gainer into a new pool, and I just happen to have to preach at Bethlehem
00:04:01.000 | one more time in the process. So it's okay. I think the Lord will give me
00:04:06.520 | enough grace tomorrow, when I give myself wholly and emotionally and intellectually
00:04:12.840 | to framing that last sermon, that I will be able to savor this moment very deeply.
00:04:18.320 | Well, it will be very exciting to see the splash you make in this new chapter of
00:04:22.560 | ministry. It looks to be a very busy one. Thank you, Pastor John, and thank you for
00:04:25.600 | listening to this podcast. Please email your questions to us at
00:04:29.200 | john@desiringgod.org. At DesiringGod.org you'll find thousands of other free
00:04:32.720 | resources from John Piper. I'm your host Tony Reinke, thanks for listening.
00:04:37.880 | [BLANK_AUDIO]