So I have three aims in this message tonight.

I'll tell you what they are before we pray together.

Thank you so much.

This is a huge, huge privilege to be with Barnbus and all of you.

Aim number one, I want to impress upon you that the Christian ministry,

especially the pastoral ministry, is a supernatural

ministry. Meaning, all the distinctly Christian aims of the pastoral ministry are humanly impossible.

And God alone is the decisive cause. If he doesn't make them happen in your ministry, they won't happen. That's aim number one. The Christian ministry is

supernatural to impress it upon you. Aim number two, I want to try to show how you go about ministry or life when it's impossible.

How do you use all of your natural powers to become the agent of the supernatural.

Number three, I want to exult with you that the reason God designed it this way is so that he

will get the glory.

So those are the three aims.

And now let's pray that they would happen.

So, Father, I pray that you would press down upon us the reality that the ministry you've called us to is supernatural and if the

distinctive Christian aims of the ministry are not done by you decisively they will

not be done and I ask that you would show us, well, then, what in the world are we to do if we can't do this?

And I pray that as we see the answer in your word, you would indeed get the glory in this message

and then for the next four or five decades in the lives of these graduates.

I pray that in Jesus' name. Amen.

So you could sum them up like this, and to say it like this, I pray that in Jesus' name. Amen.

So you could sum them up like this, and to say it like this tips you off about the answer to the second question.

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