Paul David Tripp

In his latest book, biblical counselor Paul David Tripp addresses the challenges and temptations that are unique to or intensified by pastoral ministry. In his counseling ministry, Tripp has seen all too much evidence of a real breakdown in how pastoral ministry is both viewed and practiced. Many pastors operate above or outside of the sanctifying ministry of the Body of Christ, as if they don't need the same accountability, admonishment, and encouragement that the rest of us do. This is a show more result of both our natural sin nature and the propensity of seminaries to reduce the faith to a set of theological rules while neglecting the students' ongoing need to be pastored.

Tripp starts by telling his own story: how he, as a young pastor, fell into all the various traps of arrival, pride, spiritual blindness, secretiveness, and a refusal to receive ministry as just another member of the Body of Christ. There was a big disconnect between Tripp's private life and his public ministry persona, and he didn't see its severity or the danger it brought to his ministry. He had learned to live with the discrepancy. When, by God's grace, he finally saw his sin for what it was, he was utterly broken. It was a long process to change, but God, who is faithful to reveal our sin, is also faithful to sanctify us as we realize our perpetual need for moment-by-moment grace.

Tripp talks about how our seminary culture unwittingly fosters the breakdown in pastoral ministry. During the busy years of seminary, many young men are working in addition to taking rigorous classes, and many also are married with family responsibilities. This leaves little time for meaningful involvement in a local church, and many students justify this lack by their coursework, which is of course centered on the Bible. Seminary professors, far from approaching their students with a pastoral heart, tend to become embroiled in petty internal turf wars. So seminaries regularly turn out graduates who have been removed from the ministry of the Body for several years, and who are puffed up with all the knowledge they have mastered.

But it is extremely dangerous to equate biblical knowledge with spiritual maturity. Many young pastors have great grades and are bursting with knowledge, but are not actually all that spiritually mature in their own lives. Knowing something chapter and verse means little if you aren't applying it in your own life.

Tripp also warns against the dangers of secrecy. He says an overweening desire for privacy should be a big red flag for pastors who are struggling with the discrepancies between their private and public lives. Often the wives of these men have very few and limited real friendships in the church because they are afraid to let anyone know what is really going on in their home. If a pastor is very secretive and skilled at deflecting personal questions, he is probably in deep waters. We can't let these men just hide until they can't take it anymore; we have to be lovingly invasive.

The feeling of arrival is another danger lurking for those in pastoral ministry. When we believe we have arrived spiritually, we become prideful and resistant to others in our church and life who would try to minister to us or even perhaps point out areas where we can improve. If we have arrived, we have nothing left to improve; we view ourselves as having it all together already. This breeds pride, as many pastors cut themselves off from the life of the Body because they don't feel they need it anymore. Again and again, Tripp emphasizes our constant need for transforming grace. We never "arrive" this side of heaven, and that is why God has provided us with abundant grace.

Tripp does more than just analyze the problem (though he certainly does that very thoroughly): he offers the solution. It really boils down to two foundational truths pastors must live: they must recognize their ongoing need for empowering grace, and they must submit themselves to the ministry of the church. This means that they must let people into their lives and be transparent about their failings and need for help. They are in the same boat as the rest of the church, and need grace just as much as anyone else.

How can laypeople in the church help our pastors? We need to understand their temptations and work to engage them on a personal level. Invite them to our homes for dinner. Involve them in activities where they aren't specifically functioning as the spiritual leader of the group. Get to know their family. Ask for accountability — and ask probing questions with an eye to how you can encourage them. Allow them regular time off, and insist they take it. Pray for them faithfully. There are so many ways we can serve our pastors, and it's more than just telling them we appreciate their ministry. If we want to guard our pastor and his family and ministry, we need to help them function as part of the Body of Christ, with all the accountability and exhortation and personal sharing that involves.

I have spoken in terms of "we" and "us" in this review, but I am not a pastor. I have used these terms because as I listened to this audiobook (read wonderfully by Maurice England), I often heard myself in Tripp's words. This is because pastors and laypeople are not really different; we are all sinners in constant need of grace, and we are all tempted to cover our sin and shy away from transparency and the cost it entails. Though written for pastors, this book is also incredibly valuable to seminaries as well as laypeople in the church like myself.

I'm thankful for Tripp and the essential ministry he carries out in the life of the church. I'm also thankful to the friend who distributed these audiobooks throughout our church body; what a blessing that is! This richly biblical book is another immensely practical, theologically accurate source of help and encouragement, and one that I would purchase for my pastor if I didn't know he's already read it twice. Excellent! show less

Dangerous Calling: Confronting the Unique Challenges of Pastoral Ministry by Paul David Tripp made a number of top-10 lists last year. I have read several of his other books and they have been excellent. One, Instruments in the Redeemer’s Hands, is among the five best books I’ve ever read. After reading Dangerous Calling it is easy to see why so many people included it on their 2012 lists. It is that good.

Dangerous Calling is written primarily to pastors and those who either live with show more or lead ministry among them. It is meant to warn and encourage pastors of the hazards of their profession. It is a topic of which Tripp knows well, from his own experience in pastoral ministry and his current work, which includes consulting with churches and pastors on ministry leadership.

He divides the book into three parts. The first addresses the culture in which pastors are formed and live. This includes a critique of the weaknesses of many seminaries in the formation of pastoral identity and the pitfalls awaiting these new pastors as they move into their congregations.

Parts Two and Three are the Danger of Losing Your Awe (Forgetting Who God Is), and The Danger of Arrival (Forgetting Who You Are). In these two parts of the book Tripp gets to the heart of the dangers of pastoral ministry, dangers that all too often result in someone who is called to ministry becoming someone who is just doing a job rather than in living in service to the Lord God Almighty. He shows how easy it is for a pastor to slide in either the direction of living as if God is not God, or living as if the pastor is functionally God.

Tripp is no ministry idealist, with the mistaken belief that every pastor is capable of always ministering perfectly. Much like the central thesis of Instruments in the Redeemer’s Hands, that imperfect and broken people are active in the healing of imperfect and broken people, he knows that while all Christians are being shaped in the image of Christ they will never fully achieve that image in this life. Time-and-again he uses examples from his own ministry and the churches and pastors he has consulted among to show that all pastors are just like the people in their congregations, equally in need of hearing anew the same Gospel they are preaching.

In his closing thoughts Tripp writes this: “It is in the moments of hardship when what God is doing doesn't make any sense that it is all the more important to preach to ourselves the gospel of his unshakable, unrelenting, ever-present care. He is actively caring for you and me even in those moments when we don't understand his care and can't figure out what he is doing." (217)

Pastoral ministry is dangerous work, strewn with hazards that can adversely affect the pastor, their family and the congregation. In Dangerous Calling Tripp has written an excellent book to help pastors stay on track in the places where God has called them to serve, for the sake of God’s kingdom and the magnification of God’s glory. show less

First sentence: Genesis begins with the most brilliant, mind-bending, and heart-engaging introduction to a book ever written.

Usually devotionals are not my thing. Usually. There are always a few exceptions and Paul David Tripp's newest book is such an exception. This devotional walks you--the reader--through the Bible reading it cover to cover, Genesis to Revelation. It is a Bible reading plan and a devotional.

The devotional entries spring [mostly] naturally from that day's reading. All show more tend to pointing readers back to gospel truths. Some tell more personal stories that shine a little more light in how one can live out Scripture. If it was just personal stories and the focus was only on his personal life, his ups and downs, his family, lessons he'd learned, then, I probably would not be gushing about this one.

I really love the gospel focus. So many essential, foundational gospel truths are shared day after day after day after day. I do believe that we as believers do need to hear the gospel often, even every day often.

There were so many sentences/paragraphs that I underlined/highlighted. This one isn't only occasionally good, it is frequently good. I could see myself sharing what I've read with others.

How much did I love this one? After reading it from the library, I bought it for myself for Christmas. show less

Years ago, my wife’s shoe fell apart after a day at Omaha's Henry Doorly Zoo. The sole came off with no warning, clinging to the heel while the rest flopped in our hands. We got a good laugh out of it, and this is not an example of suffering. Rather, it's a good analogy of what suffering does: the shoe sustained enough pressure that its sole detached. If you’re a Christian whose soul has detached under pressure, pastor and author Paul David Tripp intends to help you put your shoe back show more together.

“Suffering: Gospel Hope When Life Doesn’t Make Sense” is thoroughly autobiographical, grounded on Tripp’s own brush with death in the form of acute kidney failure. After enduring pain so intense that he wanted to die, medical trauma over multiple surgeries, and now-lifelong limitations, he sees suffering from the inside. First and foremost, in his experience, life-altering pain and loss is an identity crisis: “Suffering causes us to scan our lives and face the fact that we control very little. So we mourn not only our suffering but also what it has forced us to admit about ourselves.”

The identity Tripp wants to help you recover is that of a Christian who hasn’t given up on God. He offers multiple case studies of people whose belief in God’s goodness cratered along with their lives. It’s this loss of spiritual identity that Tripp wants to help you through. This is not a clinic of pain management techniques, a manual of therapeutic methodology, or even a theodical attempt to justify belief in God’s goodness, power, or existence in such a world (I noticed just one comment about God’s existence in the entire book). Tripp assumes you believe God exists; you’re just no longer sure he cares.

Tripp vectors in on your identity crisis through two opening chapters where he lays bare his own as a Type A personality reduced to a shell: “Suffering doesn’t make us weak; it simply exposes the weaknesses that have been there all along. It exposes the delusion of our sovereignty and independent capability. It’s painful to be confronted with who we really are and how needy and dependent we are.” He learned that the contours of suffering are “more powerfully shaped by what’s in your heart than by what’s in your body or in the world around you…The way I experienced all those harsh realities was shaped by the thoughts, desires, dreams, expectations, cravings, fears, and assumptions of my heart.”

Tripp aims to fortify your heart against a loss of Christian identity, starting with six chapters that warn of the traps — awareness, fear, envy, doubt, denial, and discouragement — that lurk within suffering. The meta-trap that includes all of these is pain’s tendency to usurp self-understanding: “The identity you assign to yourself determines how you assess your expectations, how you measure your potential, and how you act, react, and respond to your everyday situations and relationships. This is why it is so important to fight the temptation to let what you suffer define who you are.”

Once you let loss displace you from your own life, the game is over. Hope is what keeps us going when going hurts, and hope is intimately bound up in what we think about ourselves: “If tragedy robs you of your true identity and redefines who you are, then it also dents, damages, or destroys your hope. When travail becomes your identity, it robs you of the one thing that all human beings need to have, what they were designed to be, and to do what they were called to do: expectancy. Loss of hope renders you weak and timid, lacking in motivation and courage.”

For a Christian, of course, identity is more than just knowing yourself — it’s knowing yourself as a person who is hidden with Christ in God. Having cautioned you about suffering’s traps, Tripp turns to six chapters offering the comforts of God: his grace, presence, sovereignty, purpose, people, and rest. God is not flippant about our suffering, nor is it without a good purpose. Jesus himself cried out on the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Romans 8:28 is always true, though perhaps not in the way we would prefer. We want happy endings, when God’s purpose might be a godly ending. Aligning our wills to his, learning anew what faith is all about, can help the Christian recover hope.

Faith and hope are well and good, but what of love? The pain within a Christian’s pain is the fear that God no longer loves him, and that’s all any of us want: “There is a cry deep in the heart of every human being. It is the cry to be loved. What do we all long for but to be loved, not just on our good days, not just when we are strong, not just when it is attractive to do so, and not just in those moments when we feel we deserve it. We all want to be loved when we’re weak, broken, confused, unattractive, and unable to love fully in return. We all want someone who loves us to hold us tight and never let us go.”

Dear Christian, Tripp would say, you have someone who loves you, and you are someone who is loved. Perhaps you’ve forgotten who he is and who you are, but he hasn’t. You may feel trapped in an endless free-fall or a tiny box, but there are arms to catch you and hands to open the lid. Remembering this is the first step out of the darkness that comes when our limitations and mortality become all too real. “Everything in life ends or dies in some way,” Tripp writes. “Nothing in this world remains the same forever. Many of the things we bank on end up failing us in the end. But God never will.” The path through suffering is still and always faith, hope, and love; and the greatest of these is love. show less