The most important book, I believe, you should study is the Bible. Read it, memorize portions of it, meditate upon it, and learn it. It may seem cliché, but the most important book you can read to get ready for attending seminary is your Bible.

Ensure that people are not alone in the building without taking precautionary security measures. Yes, we should trust the Lord to care for us, but he also gave us brains and common sense. So, trust the Lord but keep your powder dry!

Handling loss graciously is not about being a good sport but rather revealing the cross of Christ and accepting God’s providence rather than responding in anger, crying foul, or thinking the worst of others. Only God’s grace in Christ through the Spirit will enable you to lose graciously, so seek him in all circumstances, whether when you win or lose.

In the end, there is no hack, no shortcut, no easy road for sanctification. Only by drawing nigh to Christ through the means of grace will bring us in greater conformity to Christ.

All of this is to say, in any dispute you need to do your best to listen to both sides of the argument. How fair is it to prejudice one side over the other? Would you want to be snubbed and have someone completely ignore your point of view and then write it off?

You therefore need both an internal call, a personal sense that you need to serve as a pastor, as well as the external call, the confirmation and encouragement from the church that you genuinely possess the gifts to pursue the pastorate.

Sometimes it’s best to start from scratch—get out a new sheet of paper (or a new digital document) and begin the process afresh. Your inclination might be to use your initial effort, and that might be possible in some cases, but in others, it’s undesirable. Sometimes when you’re writing a sermon, your first idea isn’t always your best. And sometimes, you have to discard old notes no matter how valuable you might think they are, so it forces you to reexamine material and write new information.

All of this is to say, ministers must be prepared to accept criticism for their sermons. And ministers should not live or die by the comments (positive or negative) they receive. With many comments, you have to be prepared to ignore them, not out of pride, but out of the firm conviction that you have prepared well. With other comments, you have to be humble enough to take the criticism and adjust your preaching.

When tragedy strikes, resist the temptation to have everything immediately figured out. Rest in Christ and take things slowly, one step at a time. Do the next thing.

I think it is difficult for use to comprehend just how confused the gospel and politics became at the turn of the twentieth-century. Progressive clergy set aside the pure gold of the gospel and mixed it with the fool’s gold of political policies and the social gospel.