When I first became a pastor

I don’t know when exactly I became a pastor. The first official service at Victory happened just over 7 years ago. But I remember very well waking up at 5 o’ clock one morning well over a year earlier, gripped by a sense that everything in my life had dramatically and irreversibly changed.

I had been dreaming about starting a church, and planning to be a pastor one day, from the time I was 20 years old. But suddenly, this wasn’t a pipe dream or abstract theoretical rhetoric anymore. I now had people who were taking a risk so that they could call me their pastor, and follow me where God led. They were counting on me to be their man of God. You talk about frightening.

I remember crawling out of bed well before the sun came up that morning, pulling out my Bible, and reading Joshua 1, the part about not being afraid, over and over again. Then I read the Pastoral Epistles-particularly the requirements of an elder/overseer. (Even reading the word elder and applying it to myself was comedic and intimidating.
I read those qualifications many times over the next few weeks. I listed them out and I carried around with me.
And I begged God in my heart that by His grace He would shape me to be that kind of man to lead His Church for His glory.
What a standard! What an undeserved honor…and an incomparable life pursuit.