Transcript:
Welcome back. Last time we looked at watchfulness as the foundational rhythm that helps us remain resilient in ministry. We examined Acts 20:28 and 1 Timothy 4:16, where Paul pushes forward this call: watch yourself. Be on guard over yourself. Watch your life and watch your doctrine.
Watching our lives is so important because cynicism, bitterness, and cold-heartedness toward ministry — and even toward God — can easily settle in. And when they do, they lead to a lack of joy in serving God’s people, and even harshness toward them. So watching ourselves requires us to return to Jesus daily — watching Him faithfully shepherd, confessing to Him any attitudes that are contrary to His character, and asking the Spirit to transform us into shepherds after His own heart.
The Remedy: A Fresh Contemplation of Christ
Michael Reeves captures this well. He writes that amid our hectic lives, amid all our challenges and trials, it is the fresh contemplation of the glory of God that will bring the right, bigger, healthier, happier perspective to all we are going through. It is seeing Jesus clearly that helps us move in a way that remains faithful to Him.[1]
John Owen is a powerful example of this. He was, by all accounts, a man painfully familiar with heartbreak. In the second half of his life, not only was he hampered in ministry and harassed by the government — he also witnessed the burial of all eleven of his children, as well as his wife Mary. This was a man who had to fight for resilience in ministry. And yet, after the death of the first ten children, he wrote these words:
“A due contemplation of the glory of Christ will restore and compose the mind. It will lift the minds and hearts of believers above all the troubles of this life, and is the sovereign antidote that will expel all the poison that is in them, which otherwise might perplex and enslave their souls.”[2]
This is a pastor writing in the midst of crushing grief, and his conclusion is this: what is most important, even then, is a due contemplation on the glory of Christ.
The Practice: Placing Yourself Where Jesus Passes By
So here is the encouragement as you watch your heart: make sure you have a God-given diagnostic tool for that watching — one where you can see Christ clearly.
David Mathis, in his book Habits of Grace, speaks of this. He says that you and I need to place ourselves in the places where Jesus is faithfully passing by on a daily basis.[3] He passes by in Scripture. That is where we get to contemplate the glory of Christ. And then, through communing with the Holy Spirit, He helps us to see Christ clearly as well.
So eat for yourself. As you study Scripture, schedule seasons where you can, as it were, binge eat Scripture. Many of us carve out time to binge-watch a favorite television series. Here I am urging you to binge-eat Scripture instead.
I remember practicing this watchfulness during a season when I had been called to replant a church. We were facing an extraordinarily difficult stretch — walking into a congregation of nine people, carrying the weight of that calling. And what sustained me was holding on to the realities that are true in Jesus Christ. So have seasons where you are eating more and more of His Word.
Consider Psalm 110 — the declaration of the Lord to my Lord. And Psalm 112:1: “Hallelujah! Happy is the person who fears the Lord, taking great delight in his commands.” (CSB) It is in seeing Jesus on the throne, seated at the right hand of the Father, ruling until His enemies are made His footstool, ruling with a scepter from Zion — it is out of that contemplation that we rise up and say, yes, we will volunteer on your day of battle. We give ourselves to ministry after — and out of — contemplation of Jesus.
So we must be filled with holy ambition in prayer, and practice proactive dependence even as we evangelize. Watch your heart — notice where you are prone to wander, where you are prone to drift. What is your heart susceptible to? What do you need in order to thrive? We are always fighting to get a fresh glimpse of who Jesus is at every single step.
Ruling Passions and the Idolatry of the Heart
Dave Wiedis, in his book The Spiritually Healthy Leader — and I conducted an interview with him that I will link here — makes this point: we are designed by God to be driven by a ruling passion to live wholeheartedly coram Deo, before the face of God.[4]
But sin has thrown everything off. So what he shows us is how a competing ruling passion comes in and distorts that chief ruling passion — and we have to keep fighting to replace it. He defines a ruling passion as “an extraordinarily strong desire that rules or controls us in such a way that we desire achieving that goal as our ultimate priority.”
Sometimes you will hear leaders say things like: I want to serve God with my whole life. I want people to know Jesus. Those are great aspirations, genuinely shaped by the Word of God. But Wiedis says — and this is sobering — that in reality, these aspiration statements are often contradicted by actual, often unconscious, ultimate heart commitments that are more accurately summarized as: I will be liked. I will be admired. I will avoid pain. I will be a peacekeeper.
And then he says this:
“The degree to which we are unaware of our ruling passions is the degree to which we will engage in idolatry of the heart.”
What becomes so important, then, is learning to live coram Deo — before the face of God — contemplating Him on a daily basis, so that our passions are transformed and our ruling desire becomes this: to love the Lord our God with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our strength, with all our mind, and our neighbor as ourselves.
A Warning from Revelation: The Danger of Unwatchfulness
Let me leave you with a passage that illustrates what is at stake if watchfulness is neglected. Revelation 3:1–3 says:
“These are the words of the one who has the seven spirits of God and the seven stars: I know your works; you have a reputation for being alive, but you are dead. Be alert and strengthen what remains, which is about to die, for I have not found your works complete before my God. Remember, then, what you have received and heard; keep it and repent. If you are not alert, I will come like a thief, and you have no idea at what hour I will come upon you.” (CSB)
Pastors can have a reputation for being alive — we can appear to have it all together — and yet Jesus sees exactly what is there and says: you are dead. The solution He gives is watchfulness: be alert, strengthen what remains, remember what you have received, repent.
What we have received is the gospel. It is to contemplate Jesus and come to know Him in His fullness.
Robert Mounce, in his commentary on Revelation, notes that the exhortation to watchfulness in this passage would have carried special weight for the church at Sardis — because twice in the history of the Sardian acropolis, the city fell to the enemy due to a lack of vigilance on the part of its defenders.[5]
In 549 BC, Cyrus captured the acropolis by deploying a climber to work his way up a crevice in one of the nearly perpendicular walls of the mountain fortress. Then, late in the third century, the city fell again in precisely the same way — a Cretan named Lagoras discovered a vulnerable point and, with a band of fifteen men, made a daring ascent, opened the gates from within, and allowed the forces of Antiochus the Great to overpower the rebel Archaeus in 216 BC.
As in history, so in the life of the pastor: to consider oneself secure and fail to remain alert is to court disaster.
So here is the final question to sit with when it comes to watching your heart: Where has the enemy been prone to breaking in? Where has he caused havoc before? Whether it is in ambitions, in hurts and wounds, in past traumas, past betrayals, or in habits — if we are not watchful in those specific places, the enemy will sack us in the same spot over and over again, just as he did with Sardis.
What is needed, then, is a fresh contemplation of Jesus in relation to that area — and continuing to let Jesus, and the benefits of His salvation and the gospel, bear onto those vulnerable places.
Thank you so much for joining us. God bless.
Let me close in prayer:
Jesus, would you help us? King of Kings, would you help us. Help us to make it a priority — through the power of the Holy Spirit — to contemplate you on a daily basis, so that in seeing you, we may find the perfect solution for every one of our heart’s problems. In your name we pray. Amen. God bless.
[1]Michael Reeves, Rejoice and Tremble: The Surprising Good News of the Fear of the Lord (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2021), 72–73.
[2]John Owen, The Glory of Christ, vol. 1 of The Works of John Owen, ed. William H. Goold (repr., Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1965), 279. Owen continues on p. 395: “Do any of us find decays in grace prevailing in us;—deadness, coldness, lukewarmness, a kind of spiritual stupidity and senselessness coming upon us? . . . Let us assure ourselves there is no better way for our healing and deliverance, yea, no other way but this alone,—namely, the obtaining a fresh view of the glory of Christ by faith, and a steady abiding therein. Constant contemplation of Christ and his glory, putting forth its transforming power unto the revival of all grace, is the only relief in this case.”
[3]David Mathis, Habits of Grace: Enjoying Jesus through the Spiritual Disciplines (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2016), 29. Mathis writes: “Zacchaeus may have been a wee little man, but he modeled this big reality by positioning himself along the path of grace. He couldn’t force Jesus’s hand, he couldn’t make grace flow automatically, but he could put himself by faith along the path where Grace was coming (Luke 19:1–10). The same was true of blind Bartimaeus (Luke 18:35–43). He couldn’t earn the restoration of his sight, but he could station himself along the route of grace where Jesus might give the gift as he passed that way. ‘Think of the Spiritual Disciplines,’ says Donald S. Whitney, ‘as ways we can place ourselves in the path of God’s grace and seek him as Bartimaeus and Zacchaeus placed themselves in Jesus’s path and sought him.’ Or as Jonathan Edwards put it, you can ‘endeavor to promote spiritual appetites by laying yourself in the way of allurement.’ We cannot force Jesus’s hand, but we can put ourselves along the paths of grace where we can be expectant of his blessing.”
[4]Dave Wiedis, The Spiritually Healthy Leader: Finding Freedom from Self-Sabotage (Greensboro, NC: New Growth Press, 2025), 6–7.
[5]Robert H. Mounce, The Book of Revelation, The New International Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1997), 93–94. Mounce writes: “The first of five imperatives in vv. 2 and 3 is joined to a participle and should be translated ‘be watchful’ rather than ‘wake up’ (as in the translations by Moffatt, Beck, and others). The exhortations to watchfulness would carry special weight in Sardis because twice in its history the acropolis had fallen to the enemy due to a lack of vigilance on the part of the defenders. In 549 b.c. Cyrus captured the acropolis by deploying a climber to work his way up a crevice on one of the nearly perpendicular walls of the mountain fortress. Late in the third century the city was again captured in the same way. A Cretan by the name of Lagoras discovered a vulnerable point and with a band of fifteen men made a daring ascent, opened the gates from within, and allowed the armies of Antiochus the Great to overpower the rebel Archaeus (216 b.c.). As in history, so in life, to consider oneself secure and fail to remain alert is to court disaster.”
