Qualified - Serving God With Integrity And Finishing Your Course With Honor Order Printed Copy

Author: Tony Cooke
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About the Book

"Qualified" by Tony Cooke is a guide to serving God with integrity and finishing your course with honor. The book emphasizes the importance of character, integrity, and faithfulness in ministry, providing practical advice and inspiring stories to help readers navigate ethical challenges and maintain a strong relationship with God. It encourages readers to prioritize their relationship with God above their ministry, and offers guidance on how to remain qualified and effective in serving God throughout their lives.

John Owen

John Owen’s life was incredibly difficult. Born in 1616 and dying in 1683, Owen lived through the deaths of his first wife and all of his children, several of whom died in very early childhood. He supported his last surviving daughter when her marriage broke down. He contributed to a political revolution, watched it fail, saw the monarchy restored and wreak a terrible revenge on republicans, and lived in and around London during the persecution that followed. For twenty years he would have seen the decapitated heads of his friends on display around the city. He died fearing that the dissenting churches had largely abandoned the doctrine of the Trinity and justification by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone; and, with Charles II about to be replaced by his openly Catholic brother James, believing that the English Reformation was almost over. Owen was one of the most published writers in the seventeenth century. He published around 8 million words. These writings included books on theology and spirituality, politics and economics, and ranged in length from the largest commentary ever published on the epistle to the Hebrews to a short Latin poem that has never been reprinted. For not all of Owen’s works have been kept in print. The most widely circulating nineteenth-century edition, most of which is published by the Banner of Truth, did not include Owen’s sermon manuscripts that are kept in various English libraries, nor the book for children that Owen published in 1652. Owen was one of England’s earliest children’s authors. The catechisms that Owen published (1645) outlined what he expected children in his congregation to know. These catechisms were published before the Westminster Assembly published its better-known examples. But Owen’s catechisms are in many ways simpler. The Primer (1652), which Owen prepared after the death of several of his children during the years of poor harvests and disease at the end of the 1640s, showed what Owen expected of an ideal Christian home. Its routine would be built around Bible reading and prayer, he believed, and his little book included sample prayers that children could learn to pray in mornings, evenings, and at meals. Owen argued that those who led church services should take account of the needs of children. Services that were too long, he believed, did no one any good. Adult believers should not need written prayers, he believed, and these should be banned from public worship. But children were different and needed all the help they could get. Owen enjoyed many warm friendships. His social network included many of the most famous writers in seventeenth-century England. Among his friends and rivals were John Milton, Andrew Marvell, John Bunyan, and Lucy Hutchinson. Owen fell out with Milton and became the subject of one of his sonnets. Owen helped Marvell publish one of his most controversial political pamphlets. He encouraged his publisher, Nathanial Ponder, to publish Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. And he appears to have supported Lucy Hutchinson during her move into London, when she attended and took notes upon his preaching and translated large parts of his Theologoumena Pantodapa (1661)—a translation of which has been published with the title Biblical Theology. Owen’s letters reveal his kindness and care as a pastor, especially to mothers grieving their children’s death. Owen was deeply political. He preached to Members of Parliament on the day after the execution of Charles I, and pinned his hopes for the reformation of church and society on their efforts to transform England into a protestant republic. During the 1650s, under the leadership of Oliver Cromwell, Owen served on important committees that sought to establish a religious foundation for the new regime. But he grew dismayed by the ways in which the Cromwell family, and the administration they led, seemed to turn away from godly values. In 1658, he worked with leading army officers to create a crisis that, he likely hoped, would call the regime back to its earlier ideals. It failed, and instead created the crisis that was resolved by the restoration of the monarchy, the return of Charles II, and the persecution of dissenters that followed. During the Restoration, Owen kept his head down, and, as persecution slackened in the later 1660s, published pamphlets that argued that dissenters were the economic lifeblood of the English nation. But he was chastened by his attempts at political intervention and came increasingly to realize that his focus should be on things eternal. Owen often changed his mind. As his developing attitudes to political intervention suggest, Owen committed himself to some beliefs and behaviors that he came to regret. In his early years, he changed his churchmanship from Presbyterianism to Congregationalism. He innovated as a Congregationalist, installing as a co-elder and preacher a man who would not be ordained for several years. He argued for the weekly celebration of the Lord’s Supper, though it is not clear that he ever persuaded any of his congregations to practice it. He thought carefully about the end times and came to believe that, in the latter days, a large number of Jewish people would be converted to Christianity and would return to live in the Promised Land. He dismissed a great deal of discussion about the millennium, but became convinced that the binding of Satan had yet to be achieved. Owen changed his mind because he kept on studying the Bible. Owen was biblical, through and through, and depended just as much on the Holy Spirit. He certainly believed in a learned ministry–after all, he had taught theology at Oxford and done his best to promote godliness within the student body. But he also trusted the Holy Spirit to guide ordinary Christians in small group Bible studies that did not need to be policed by a formally trained expert. Aside from his own Bible study, which advanced on the serious scholarship represented by the three thousand titles that were included in the catalog of his library published soon after his death, Owen encouraged church members to meet together to study Scripture in private. Owen trusted the Bible and the work of the Spirit after writing about both. Owen was not a philosophically-driven, rationalist theologian. His writing abounds in biblical citations. It is molded and contoured by biblical revelation. But he warned that Christians could approach their study of the Bible with absolutely no spiritual advantage to themselves. Christians who approached the study of the Bible without absolute dependence upon the Spirit who inspired and preserved it would gain no more benefit than Jewish readers did from their Scriptures, he argued. Christians should never choose between entire dependence upon the Bible and the Spirit. Owen believed that the goal of the Christian life was knowing God. Before Owen, no one had ever shown clearly how Christians relate to each person of the Trinity. Owen described the goal of the gospel as revealing the love of the Father, who sent the Son as a redeemer of his people, who would be indwelt, provided with gifts, and united together by the Spirit. Owen’s Communion with God is among his most celebrated achievements—and no wonder. It is the exhalation of his devotion to Father, Son, and Spirit, and the discovery of the limitless love of God. Owen is much easier to read than many people imagine. There is a mystique to Owen—a widespread feeling that his books are too difficult and best left to expert theologians. But Owen’s greatest books were written as sermons for an audience of teenagers. Publishers have begun to modernize Owen’s language in new editions of his works. Now more than ever, it’s time to pick up Owen and find his encouragement for the Christian life.

when they hurt you with words

The spirit of the old adage “words will never harm me” is not the sentiment of the Scriptures. Words can hurt, even when directed from an unknown profile online. God made a world in which words are powerful. “Death and life are in the power of the tongue” (Proverbs 18:21). And as public discourse falls to new lows in the digital age, God has not left us without a guide for how to respond to the pain when we are persecuted with words. Leaf through the New Testament, and you’ll find verbal attacks on Jesus, his apostles, and his church on nearly every page. At times, these attacks escalate to physical persecution — the stoning of Stephen, the martyrdom of James, the imprisonments of Peter and Paul, the crucifixion of Christ — but what remains constant, and significant, is a torrent of verbal persecution against Jesus and his people. And verbal persecution is not less than persecution because it’s verbal. Have You Been Reviled? Slander and revile are two of the main words for verbal attack in the English New Testament, and both occur frequently. Early Christians were so accustomed to being spoken against that they developed a rich vocabulary (if you call it that) of being slandered, reviled, insulted, maligned, mocked, and spoken evil against (at least six different Greek verbs, along with several related nouns and adjectives). Of the English terms, revile may be the least common in normal usage today. One dictionary defines it as “to criticize in an abusive or angrily insulting manner.” To take our cues from specific biblical texts, revile can mean “to speak evil against” (Matthew 5:11; Mark 9:39; Acts 19:9; 23:4); it is the opposite of verbally honoring someone (Mark 7:10). Reviling is an attempt to injure with words (1 Peter 3:16). We see it at Jesus’s crucifixion, where “those who passed by derided him” with their words, and the chief priests, scribes, and elders “mocked him,” and “the robbers who were crucified with him also reviled him in the same way” (Matthew 27:39–44). But Jesus not only endured it; he prepared us for it as well. He and his apostles, and the early church, model for us how to receive and respond to slander and reviling. 1. Expect the world to say the worst. Amid this rich vocabulary of verbal attack, the New Testament sends no mixed signals as to whether Christians will be maligned. We will. Jews and Gentiles together bombarded Jesus and his disciples with verbal attacks. Physical persecution came and went, but reviling remained constant. When Paul arrived in Rome, the Jews reported to him, about Christianity, “With regard to this sect we know that everywhere it is spoken against” (Acts 28:22). For Christians, being reviled is not a matter of if but when : “when they speak against you” (1 Peter 2:12). Unbelievers “are surprised when you do not join them in the same flood of debauchery” — so what do they do? “They malign you” (1 Peter 4:4). After all, should we not expect the world, under the power of the devil (1 John 5:19; Ephesians 2:2), to lie about us? The Greek for devil ( diabolos ) actually means slanderer (1 Timothy 3:11; Titus 2:3). As Jesus said to his revilers in John 8:44, “You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. . . . When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies.” 2. Consider the cause. We should not assume that all verbal opposition we receive is good. Being reviled for Jesus’s sake and for his gospel is one thing; being reviled for our own folly and sin is another (1 Peter 3:17; 4:15–16). As far as it depends on us, we want to “give the adversary no occasion for slander” (1 Timothy 5:14). Slander itself is no win for the church. We want to do what we can, within reason and without compromise, to keep God’s name and word and teaching from reviling (1 Timothy 6:1; Titus 2:5). “Do not let what you regard as good be spoken of as evil” (Romans 14:16). But when the world speaks evil against us because of Jesus, we embrace it. “If you are insulted for the name of Christ , you are blessed, because the Spirit of glory and of God rests upon you” (1 Peter 4:14). 3. Do not revile in return. Christ’s calling to his church is crystal clear: Do not respond in kind. Do not stoop to the level of your revilers. “Keep your conduct honorable” (1 Peter 2:12). “Speak evil of no one” (Titus 3:2), including those who have spoken evil of you. Do not become a verbal vigilante, but “entrust yourself to him who judges justly” (1 Peter 2:23). And as his redeemed, taste the joy of walking in his steps: “When he was reviled, he did not revile in return” (1 Peter 2:23). Paul took up the same mantle: “When reviled, we bless; when persecuted, we endure; when slandered, we entreat” (1 Corinthians 4:12–13). So also Peter charges us to respond “with gentleness and respect, having a good conscience, so that, when you are slandered, those who revile your good behavior in Christ may be put to shame” (1 Peter 3:15–16). When we do not “revile in return,” we put our revilers to shame. Christians do not respond in kind. We lose the battle, and undermine our commission, when we let revilers make us into revilers. And it’s not just a matter of strategy, but of spiritual life and death. “Revilers,” 1 Corinthians 6:10 warns, “will not inherit the kingdom of God,” and Christians are instructed “not to associate with anyone who bears the name of brother if he is . . . a reviler” (1 Corinthians 5:11). Christ expects, even demands, that our speech be different from the world’s, even when we respond to the world’s mean words. 4. Leap for joy. Leap for joy? That might seem way over the top. Can’t we just take our cues from the apostles in Acts 5:41? “They left the presence of the council, rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer dishonor for the name.” Amen, rejoice. Yes. Jesus’s own words in the Sermon on the Mount guide us: “Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad , for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.” (Matthew 5:11–12). But Luke 6:22–23 doesn’t leave it at simply rejoicing: “Blessed are you when people hate you and when they exclude you and revile you and spurn your name as evil, on account of the Son of Man! Rejoice in that day, and leap for joy , for behold, your reward is great in heaven; for so their fathers did to the prophets.” Whether you’re just rejoicing in God deep down, or finding the emotional wherewithal, in the Spirit, to “leap for joy,” the point is clear: When others dishonor you, and exclude you, and utter all manner of evil against you, and even spurn your name as evil — and that on Jesus’s account , not on the account of your own folly — this is not new, and you are not alone (“so their fathers did to the prophets”). You have a great cause for joy. Their reviling you for his sake means you are with him! And you will know him more as you share in the verbal persecution he endured (Philippians 3:10). 5. On the contrary, bless. There is one more shocking possibility for Christians, even more astounding than leaping for joy: “Do not repay evil for evil or reviling for reviling, but on the contrary, bless , for to this you were called, that you may obtain a blessing” (1 Peter 3:9). This indeed is the spirit of Christ, and gives the most striking testimony of the Spirit of Christ at work in us. The grace and power of God not only enable us to expect and evaluate reviling, and not respond in kind but even rejoice, but also repay reviling with blessing . This is Christlikeness. This is Christian maturity (Matthew 5:48). This reflects the magnanimous heart of our Father in heaven (Matthew 5:45). This is the enemy-love to which Jesus not only calls us but works in us by his Spirit. “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:44). In Christ, we have found ourselves blessed when we deserved to be cursed. We have come to know a Father who does not revile those who humbly seek him (James 1:5). When reviled, we now have the opportunity to bless undeserving revilers, just as we have been blessed from above — and will be further blessed for doing so (“that you may obtain a blessing,” 1 Peter 3:9). The swelling ocean of reviling in our day is not just an obstacle to be endured. It is an opportunity for gospel advance — and for deeper joy.