So we've talked about the centrality of God in the heart of the pastor, making the

assumption that for God to be central in our heart he has to be central in our joy.

He has to be the gladness of our joy. He has to be there permeating the joys in anything else so that they

are all joys in him. And that produces an overflow of love so that we become more caring and

sacrificial shepherds. So in order to be a faithful, loving, lay down your life kind of shepherd, you need to pursue your joy in God all the time and fight like heaven for this joy.

And then the centrality of God in our minds and in our thinking, mainly I simply

tackle the fact that the Bible encourages us to use our minds for his word to

inform our hearts, our hope, our joy so that true joy glorifies him.

Because if joy is based on something else,

then truth, then it won't magnify the true God. It won't glorify God.

The only way our hearts can magnify God is for our hearts to be rooted in right doctrinal

understanding of what God is like and what he does in the world. Therefore I

put a huge premium on getting our understanding of the

Bible as right as we can and articulating what the Bible says about Christ, says

about salvation, says about Christ says about salvation says about God accurately

and building that into our people's lives so that they have solidity in their lives and when the waves break over them or the

craftiness comes after them they stand they stand So I find the dumbing down of the church and the absence of doctrine.

You go to too many. I want to say typical, but I'll just say too many church planting assessment centers and the like and it is standard operating procedure that doctrine divides and doesn't grow churches.

And other things do, which I think is an assault on scripture.

I think the Bible is intended to be understood coherently.

And if you think you can preach to real ordinary down to earth common sense people without connecting a verse in chapter 5 with the verse in chapter 6 with verse in chapter 7

You're wrong you will be training them to think badly about the Bible if you

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