Seeing Christ in the Psalms, Avoiding Burnout and Pastoral Preaching with Christopher Ash

[00:00:00] The Psalms are God's way of harnessing our affections and our thinking together so that we think right and feel right instead of having disordered thinking and disordered feeling. And I love it for that.

[00:00:18] Hey, welcome to the Expositors Collective Podcast, episode 348. I'm your host, Mike Neglia. And the voice that you heard is our guest for this week, Christopher Ash.

[00:00:30] Christopher is someone that I've been learning from and reading his books for years and years and years.

[00:00:38] And so when the opportunity came up to speak with him about his latest book, a Christ-centered commentary on the Psalms published by our friends at Crossway, I jumped at the opportunity to speak with him.

[00:00:54] We talk not only about preaching the Psalms, but also a lifelong, sustainable ministry, how to avoid burnout in the midst of the long hours and the exhausting demands of Christian and pastoral ministry.

[00:01:14] There's a lot of great content in this. This is valuable for preachers considering the book of Psalms,

[00:01:20] but also for everyone who is laboring in Christ's kingdom.

[00:01:26] And if you are a preacher, I would like to commend to you the sponsor of this week's episode.

[00:01:33] Sermons.com is an online resource that is free for you to access.

[00:01:39] There's more options that you can opt into, but even the free version of sermons.com

[00:01:46] is really designed to help you in your sermon prep process.

[00:01:52] There's illustrations that are kind of alphabetically laid out.

[00:01:56] There's connections between current events and scriptural truths,

[00:02:01] as well as most importantly, resources to help you dive into what the text actually says.

[00:02:09] Personally, I'm not the best at coming up with illustrations or pulling in current events.

[00:02:16] And so sermons.com is great for that.

[00:02:20] So again, thanks to our sponsor this week, sermons.com.

[00:02:25] If you are interested in sponsoring a future episode of Expositors Collective, do get in touch.

[00:02:32] You can reach us through our social media.

[00:02:35] You can direct message and we can begin the process of setting up an episode sponsorship for you.

[00:02:43] Well, thanks to sermons.com for bringing us this great conversation with Christopher Ashe about showing Christ in the book of Psalms.

[00:02:58] Well, hey, welcome to the Expositors Collective podcast.

[00:03:01] I'm honored to be speaking with Christopher Ashe.

[00:03:04] We're going to talk about the Psalms, how we can read them better, how we can preach them better.

[00:03:11] But thank you, Christopher, for coming on.

[00:03:14] The first question that we ask every guest is kind of a way to get to know people is,

[00:03:19] do you remember the first time that you taught the Bible and where was that?

[00:03:23] How did it go?

[00:03:24] And then we'll take it from there.

[00:03:26] Sure.

[00:03:28] I remember when I was just a very young Christian.

[00:03:32] I'd only been a believer for about, I came to Christ when I was 17.

[00:03:38] And I guess when I was about 19 or 20, I was helping with a youth venture, Christian youth camp.

[00:03:47] And it gave my first Bible talk.

[00:03:51] I remember being painfully nervous.

[00:03:53] And the man who used to run those ventures said to me afterwards, he asked if I had toothache, which wasn't very flattering.

[00:04:03] But I was very nervous.

[00:04:05] And I can remember that.

[00:04:07] But I remember being just thrilled at the privilege of being able to share something of the good news of Jesus with those teenagers.

[00:04:19] And that was quite a while ago.

[00:04:21] Do you remember what that something was?

[00:04:23] It was about 50 years ago.

[00:04:26] Sure.

[00:04:27] That's seriously old, isn't it?

[00:04:29] And you're meant to say to me, you don't look that old.

[00:04:33] You don't look that old.

[00:04:34] Thank you.

[00:04:37] Well, yeah, 50 years.

[00:04:39] I'd love to come back later on.

[00:04:41] If you've been preaching for 50 years, I bet you've...

[00:04:45] Yeah, actually, so if you've been preaching for 50 years, what are the things that you've noticed, even about yourself?

[00:04:52] And I've heard many recordings of you preach over the years.

[00:04:55] You don't sound like you have a toothache anymore.

[00:04:57] You don't sound nervous anymore.

[00:05:00] What has changed?

[00:05:02] How have you grown and improved?

[00:05:04] Or maybe even what were the ups and downs of preaching over these five decades?

[00:05:09] Yeah, that's a really good question.

[00:05:11] I'm temperamentally nervous.

[00:05:13] I don't like being at the front.

[00:05:15] I've never liked being at the front.

[00:05:17] I've never liked being the focus of attention.

[00:05:19] I guess in God's kindness, I've just got used to it.

[00:05:22] But I think one of the things that's changed is that when I started, I had this strong sense that it was...

[00:05:30] Not that I needed to entertain, but I needed to work hard so that it was interesting.

[00:05:37] And I think I'm less worried about that now.

[00:05:41] I hope that there's a seriousness to it.

[00:05:46] You know, the old saying of a dying man preaching to dying men.

[00:05:50] And I think that as I get older, it probably feels a little bit more like that.

[00:05:55] Just that I'm speaking as one who's in Christ to others.

[00:06:01] And there's a weight to it that I think I perhaps didn't have earlier on.

[00:06:08] Yeah, I mean, there are other things I'm trying to learn and still struggle with.

[00:06:12] Preaching isn't easy.

[00:06:15] No, no.

[00:06:17] You said that you used to work hard so that it was interesting.

[00:06:24] Are there any regrets that you would have had over the decades of, you know, maybe working too hard or having novelty or attention-grabbing devices that you look back on and wish that you didn't invest that time into?

[00:06:40] Yeah, possibly.

[00:06:41] I think I used to bring in illustrative material from outside the text much more than I do now.

[00:06:49] And it's not that it's wrong to do that.

[00:06:52] But increasingly, I think I hope I'm learning to bring out the colour, if I can put it like that, that's in the text.

[00:07:01] Because all Bible books, all Bible texts have masses of colour and interest.

[00:07:07] And I think I would have, I wish I'd learned earlier not to bring in so much from outside to, I don't know if I would quite have said to liven it up.

[00:07:19] But that's sort of in the back of your mind as a young preacher sometimes.

[00:07:25] And I think I have a greater confidence that the scripture itself has everything we need.

[00:07:34] Yeah.

[00:07:35] Yeah.

[00:07:36] And in these, yeah, five decades of preaching experience, maybe this is a crass way to ask the question, but were there like better years?

[00:07:48] Has it been a steady increase year after year after year?

[00:07:53] Or were there times when you think, I think maybe 95 was, I really peaked in 95?

[00:08:00] Well, I guess like a lot of preachers, I often still, just as I always did, I sit down and wish that the floor would open up to swallow me up.

[00:08:11] And it's not a false modesty.

[00:08:12] I just think, oh, Lord, that was terrible.

[00:08:15] And I think many preachers genuinely feel that.

[00:08:19] It's not something you put on.

[00:08:20] I think for me, the time, I don't know if I preached best, but the time I look back on as a difficult time, but in some ways the best time, was when I was the pastor of a local church.

[00:08:33] And just, it was quite a small local church.

[00:08:36] It was a church plant from a big church where I'd been an assistant pastor.

[00:08:42] And I guess probably 100 people or something.

[00:08:45] It really was quite small.

[00:08:47] And just the fact that I was preaching Sunday by Sunday to men and women with whom I was doing life and whom I loved and cared for.

[00:09:01] And I think they loved and cared for me.

[00:09:03] And I prayed for them.

[00:09:05] And I knew them as a pastor does.

[00:09:09] And I don't think any of things come close to that.

[00:09:13] I mean, I preach occasionally in the church where we now belong.

[00:09:16] And that's lovely.

[00:09:17] I preach about once a month.

[00:09:18] And I love that because it's the closest approximation to being preaching as a pastor.

[00:09:27] And I really think that's the best thing a man can do.

[00:09:34] You know, people often think, oh, if only I could speak at a conference or a convention or something or other.

[00:09:41] It feels more glamorous and so on.

[00:09:44] But actually preaching on a Sunday in whatever size church it is to the men and women you care for and pastor.

[00:09:53] I think those seven or eight years were probably the best from that point of view.

[00:10:02] Yeah, I am.

[00:10:04] I'm entering into, I think, my 18th year of pastoring the church that I'm currently at.

[00:10:12] And then also with ministry responsibilities stroke opportunities, I do get to preach elsewhere, you know, with some regularity.

[00:10:22] And yes, there is kind of a it's a bit exciting to preach somewhere else.

[00:10:26] You get to go back and find that great sermon, you know, and then you get to do it again.

[00:10:30] Or you get to kind of pull all of your cool stories in.

[00:10:34] And you can't particularly do that in the local church because they've heard all of your cool stories before.

[00:10:40] And you have to.

[00:10:41] But but yeah, but there is like just such a like a sigh of relief and comfortability, if you can say that with like, yeah, these are people.

[00:10:51] And and I've married like I perform I've performed weddings and marriages for many of these people.

[00:10:57] I've, you know, stood by them at gravesides.

[00:11:01] We've seen kids graduate.

[00:11:03] And that is just it's wonderful.

[00:11:05] It's better than any a green room at some conference.

[00:11:08] It's being with these people, this particular community of God's people.

[00:11:12] Much better.

[00:11:13] I couldn't agree with you more.

[00:11:14] And I wish there's a sort of worldliness that gets into pastoral circles where a man thinks if only I could get to preach more away or a bigger occasions, that would be like a promotion.

[00:11:28] But it isn't at all.

[00:11:30] It's in a way it's a step back from the front line.

[00:11:35] Yeah, in fact, maybe a final thought on this, but somebody, you know, from from this church, Jacqueline, she went and found, you know, some of the audios of me preaching elsewhere.

[00:11:46] And she said that it was yeah, it was nice.

[00:11:49] But like I didn't I didn't sound like me there that it was kind of there was a lack of familiarity.

[00:11:56] And it's it's true.

[00:11:57] I don't know these people and can, you know, don't have maybe a freedom or or even like a fatherly tone.

[00:12:07] I don't really have a fatherly tone as I'm a guest speaker somewhere else.

[00:12:12] So but yeah, thank you for highlighting that.

[00:12:14] I'm pleased that this conversation has taken this this turn of the importance of pastoral preaching to a congregation versus just simply well-constructed sermons that are accurate, Christ centered and are out there to the masses.

[00:12:30] Sure.

[00:12:32] Well, I often say to young men that it will be better for the people they pastor to hear them preaching than to hear whoever their favorite people are online of the big the superstars, as it were, in our glamorous world.

[00:12:50] And it's because because you know them and love them.

[00:12:56] Yeah.

[00:12:57] Yeah.

[00:12:58] Yeah.

[00:12:58] Well, speaking of of Christ centered preaching, I'm holding in my hands now one of your recently published books, The Psalms, a Christ centered commentary.

[00:13:11] And in preparation for this, like I've discovered you've written like I think four other books about the Psalms over over the years.

[00:13:21] Like my first question is, why write on the Psalms yet again?

[00:13:27] What is it about these things that keep drawing you back to this part of sacred scripture?

[00:13:31] And then maybe a more follow up and perhaps more serious question after that.

[00:13:35] Yeah.

[00:13:36] Yeah.

[00:13:36] I guess I've been having a long love affair with the Psalms for a while.

[00:13:41] And I taught the Psalms at the Cornhill training course in London where I used to serve.

[00:13:50] And I love doing that because the Psalms are God's way of harnessing our affections and our thinking together so that we think right and feel right instead of having disordered thinking and disordered feeling.

[00:14:09] And I love it for that.

[00:14:11] So, yes.

[00:14:12] The other thing is that I've been the Psalms are difficult.

[00:14:17] I wrote a little devotional book on Psalm 119 called Bible Delight, which I love writing.

[00:14:24] And then I wrote a couple of little volumes of a Christian focus on teaching Psalms, which was my first attempt really of thinking, how do you set about doing that?

[00:14:33] I wrote a little book for the good book company called Psalms for you, which was a selection of Psalms.

[00:14:40] And then about five or six years ago, I think I said to Justin Taylor at Crossway, I said, look, how about my trying to do this work through this Christ centred approach thoroughly?

[00:14:55] And to my surprise, he said, yes.

[00:14:58] And so that's what I've been doing with God's help.

[00:15:05] You mentioned, yeah, having a Christ centred approach to the Psalms.

[00:15:10] Now, maybe someone would hear that and they would think, OK, well, yeah, like Psalm 22.

[00:15:15] That is a that's a Christ centred Psalm.

[00:15:17] It speaks about the cross or Psalm 110, which Jesus quotes.

[00:15:24] But but but you you don't seem to I have a feeling you don't mean just those two.

[00:15:28] You don't mean the so-called messianic Psalms.

[00:15:31] It seems that you have an approach of Christ centredness that goes beyond the the famous ones that are messianic.

[00:15:39] Yeah, I guess so.

[00:15:40] I guess I've gradually come to the conviction that the Psalms only make sense in the light of Christ.

[00:15:46] And I guess there are three reasons for that, really.

[00:15:50] One is that the book of Psalms, the Psalter, is crying out for fulfillment later.

[00:16:00] Why do you go on singing Psalm 2?

[00:16:02] There's going to be a king in David's line.

[00:16:04] He's going to rule the world.

[00:16:06] And you go on seeing that after the exile when there isn't a king at all.

[00:16:10] And then the only reason you sing it is you believe that one day there will be.

[00:16:13] And and so the Psalter itself is crying out for future fulfillment.

[00:16:19] And there are all sorts of things in it that don't really fit unless there's a future fulfillment.

[00:16:24] The main reason is, though, studying how the New Testament, how Jesus, how the apostolic writers, how they quote and how they allude to or echo the Psalms.

[00:16:37] And I did a really careful study.

[00:16:40] It's probably the core of volume one of this this new commentary series of what picture is built up, how the Holy Spirit guided the apostolic writers to understand the Psalms.

[00:16:54] And the short answer is they guided the writers to understand the Psalms so that Christ is central in one way or another.

[00:17:06] But there's a third strand, which isn't so important.

[00:17:09] But it was just really interesting to see how the Psalms have been read in Christian history and to discover that probably up to about 1800,

[00:17:23] just about every Orthodox Christian writer read the Psalms with Christ pretty near the front of the picture.

[00:17:35] And it was just remarkable.

[00:17:36] I thought, well, you don't get that now.

[00:17:39] You pick an academic commentary off the shelves.

[00:17:42] You won't find that.

[00:17:43] Christ is maybe a footnote or maybe not there at all.

[00:17:48] And so I'm thinking, well, what's happened?

[00:17:50] There's been this eclipse.

[00:17:52] And, you know, maybe all the old writers were wrong, but it just might be that they're not.

[00:17:58] So those were the things that fed into it, but mainly the New Testament.

[00:18:02] Yes.

[00:18:02] And of course, yes, the New Testament ought to take priority.

[00:18:06] But I'm really interested in that third thing that you said.

[00:18:09] In your research or in your prep, looking into this, like what happened in the 1800s that caused the Psalms to be looked at by Christians as a exclusively Hebrew book?

[00:18:26] Yeah.

[00:18:27] I mean, somebody could do a PhD on that.

[00:18:30] It'd be very, very interesting to do.

[00:18:32] Maybe someone's listening right now and that's just twigging a thought in them right there.

[00:18:36] It'd be really interesting for someone to do.

[00:18:38] I think the answer is mostly to do with the so-called enlightenment.

[00:18:45] And it's a sort of denial of the supernatural, a denial that there really is a living God who is outside of time, that prophecy can speak of the future.

[00:19:00] All that sort of thing, I think, fed into it in quite a big way.

[00:19:05] And so there's been this tremendous sense of just trying to understand what it meant to the original writer.

[00:19:10] But sometimes a denial of the fact that God can cause a writer to speak better than they knew.

[00:19:20] And so it's not in contradiction to what they thought, but there may be a fuller meaning than that.

[00:19:28] So I think a lot of it's probably to do with the so-called enlightenment, which was largely a skeptical and ultimately anti-Christian movement.

[00:19:41] Yeah.

[00:19:41] Yeah.

[00:19:42] Yeah.

[00:19:42] Yeah.

[00:19:42] And if 1 Peter chapter 1 is true, it means exactly what you were saying, that the Spirit of God can move the prophets to write in such a way that makes sense to them, but then also goes beyond what makes sense to them.

[00:19:59] Yes.

[00:19:59] Yes.

[00:19:59] I mean, I've often found that in 1 Peter 1, that the prophets, they were searching and inquiring carefully.

[00:20:08] And the Spirit of Christ within them was revealing something of the sufferings of Christ and the subsequent glory.

[00:20:16] And there's something, they didn't cross every T and dot every I, they didn't have everything clear,

[00:20:23] but there's something there going on beyond what they perhaps consciously could formulate.

[00:20:32] Yeah, I believe that.

[00:20:34] Well, thank you for also believing that.

[00:20:37] And then thank you for, yeah, reading through and then giving us this four-volume guide through this altar to help maybe discover and understand

[00:20:46] and then apply what David and others wrote and saw, what the followers of Yahweh have been worshiping with for three millennia.

[00:21:01] Yeah.

[00:21:01] And so what if somebody misses out on this?

[00:21:06] Like what's the risk or what's the loss if someone fails to read the Psalms through the lens of Christ?

[00:21:12] Like what's the absence?

[00:21:14] Yeah, that's a really good question.

[00:21:15] I think a number of things can go wrong.

[00:21:19] One is that we can end up with cherry picking.

[00:21:25] We just read, most of us when we're young Christians, we read the Psalms, there are bits we don't get,

[00:21:31] and we home in on the nice bits that we like.

[00:21:34] And that's not completely wrong, but it's inadequate.

[00:21:38] And you think, well, I do need to get to grips with the bits I find difficult to understand.

[00:21:45] And a number of those things don't, I think, really begin to come into focus, except with the King, the anointed King, ultimately Christ.

[00:21:56] Another thing is we can end up losing the gospel.

[00:22:01] So, for example, often in the Psalms, you get exhortations to praise the Lord.

[00:22:09] Or the psalmist will say, like Psalm 145, David says, I'm going to praise the Lord, you know, all the time, in every way.

[00:22:16] It's going to be wonderful.

[00:22:17] And when you're preaching it, if you forget about Christ, you can't just beat people over the head and say, come on, guys, your praise life isn't good enough.

[00:22:26] You need to try harder.

[00:22:28] And so what is in Christ glorious gospel becomes just law.

[00:22:34] And then when we see Christ as the leader of our praises, as he's the leader of our prayers, then it becomes gospel.

[00:22:43] I think there are a number of other things that can go wrong.

[00:22:46] We struggle with having any sense of how to read or sing the bits in the Psalms where the psalmist pray for God to judge the wicked.

[00:23:01] And I think reading them in Christ is the only way, really, to make clear sense of those.

[00:23:10] Does that give a little bit of a flavor of some of the things that can go wrong?

[00:23:14] Yes, certainly.

[00:23:15] Yeah.

[00:23:15] And you mentioned it's a common objection that I've heard when the topic of, you know, preaching the Psalter as a, you know, Christian book or a Christ-centered book.

[00:23:27] People often say, well, what about these, you know, imprecatory prayers, these prayers of judgment?

[00:23:32] And you've kind of mentioned it a bit.

[00:23:34] Would you, like, give us another minute or two of your thoughts on, like, how to handle these imprecatory psalms?

[00:23:41] Yeah, sure.

[00:23:42] So there's a chapter in my volume one which speaks about this, but some headline things that may be helpful is that they're prayers rather than curses.

[00:23:54] So they're addressed to God rather than cursing people.

[00:23:58] So in a sense, although they're always called imprecatory, I'm with some other scholars who think that this actually is probably not the right word to use.

[00:24:08] But everybody does.

[00:24:09] Forgive me for my blunder.

[00:24:10] Forgive me for my blunder.

[00:24:11] Everybody does.

[00:24:12] So we know what you mean by that.

[00:24:15] They're prayers to God and they're prayers to God to do what he has promised he'll do.

[00:24:20] So there's big connections between the prayers and the covenant curses and the prophecies in which the prophets say God says he's going to punish the impenitent in these ways.

[00:24:34] And in a sense, every time we pray in the Lord's prayer, your kingdom come.

[00:24:39] We're praying for the last judgment.

[00:24:42] We're praying that one day evil will be removed from this created order.

[00:24:48] And so, you know, there's something you need.

[00:24:52] It's interesting.

[00:24:53] It's often in wealthy, comfortable countries like, you know, perhaps ours that these things are found very difficult.

[00:25:04] And in contexts where people are really struggling with persecution, they often find it a little bit easier to get why it matters so much.

[00:25:17] So it's a position for us speaking out of our privilege.

[00:25:21] This makes us feel uncomfortable.

[00:25:22] But for a suffering stroke, persecuted believer, this is a more vital prayer.

[00:25:32] Yeah, I've heard I've heard stories of of persecuted Christians saying they they get they can feel why you would pray to God to judge the world in righteousness.

[00:25:47] I mean, we we pray because we know we ought to pray it.

[00:25:51] But they really feel it that this is something good and necessary.

[00:25:58] Yes.

[00:25:58] Well, this is this is anecdotal.

[00:26:01] And this is like, you know, my own life.

[00:26:04] But my my barber is reading the Bible for the very first time.

[00:26:10] I gave him a Bible about a month ago.

[00:26:12] And he's been just like he's been loving it.

[00:26:14] He's been reading through it every night.

[00:26:16] I had a long conversation with him this morning, actually, before this call.

[00:26:21] And and he likes the Psalms.

[00:26:25] And he he noticed he's like, but there's a lot of stuff about enemies in there.

[00:26:30] Like and he's trying to make connections between, you know, his life and God's word, which is actually a very good thing for him to do.

[00:26:40] So, but he was surprised that in the Psalms there is so much about enemies, vindication, these these types of these types of things.

[00:26:51] And yeah, I'm just excited about God's work in his life and using the Psalms in in Sean's life.

[00:26:58] I'm excited about that.

[00:27:00] And particularly he noticed some of those things that we're even talking about right now.

[00:27:04] Great.

[00:27:05] Great.

[00:27:07] All right.

[00:27:07] So you've mentioned, yeah, there's there's different even groups of people that read these passages and notice even certain things.

[00:27:15] And then in this book, there's language about how the Psalms are significant to David or they're significant to the various authors.

[00:27:24] Then they're significant to Jesus.

[00:27:27] Jesus loved the Psalms.

[00:27:29] He quotes them often or they even were his, you know, worship content.

[00:27:35] And there's also layers of significance to the church.

[00:27:38] So it's significant to the writers, significant to Jesus, significant to us.

[00:27:43] What do you think is missing out in today's preaching?

[00:27:47] You mentioned that at Cornhill, you taught a class on how to preach the Psalms.

[00:27:51] I know you've even written the same thing.

[00:27:53] What is the thing that needs to be emphasized the most?

[00:27:56] What's the layer of interpretation that needs to be emphasized in our preaching?

[00:28:00] I think it's the middle one.

[00:28:02] Okay.

[00:28:03] That we've neglected to.

[00:28:06] I think it's because we've downplayed the human, the true humanity, the human nature of the Son of God incarnate.

[00:28:15] And that Jesus was in his days, in the days of his flesh, a believer who lived by faith and prayed with loud cries and tears, according to Hebrews chapter five.

[00:28:31] And who walked before us as a kind of forerunner, the life of faith.

[00:28:40] And I think we've downplayed that or sometimes completely lost that.

[00:28:45] So, for example, Psalm 23, we immediately say, well, the Lord is my shepherd.

[00:28:50] Jesus is my good shepherd.

[00:28:51] So this is about Jesus, which is true.

[00:28:55] But we forget that Jesus in the days of his flesh would have prayed Psalm 23 and his father would have been his shepherd.

[00:29:05] And so he needed it before we do.

[00:29:09] And I think what that leads to is a recognition that the Psalms are our songs.

[00:29:16] But there are songs because we're in Christ.

[00:29:20] And there is a it's a legacy of the German Romantic movement.

[00:29:24] I think there's a sense that some people think, well, I love the Psalms, whether or not I'm a Christian, because they make me feel nice.

[00:29:31] And I want to say, no, if you're in Christ, these are all your songs.

[00:29:39] They're all your prayers and praises.

[00:29:41] If you're outside of Christ, you need to come in to Christ for the Psalms to be yours.

[00:29:53] Yeah. So should I say this to Sean, my barber?

[00:29:57] Yes, there's a lot of stuff in there about enemies and there's et cetera.

[00:30:02] But in order for this to be for you, you need to be in the one to whom they're focusing on or pointing towards.

[00:30:10] Yeah, I think so. And it might be I mean, he could probably get, you know, if you say.

[00:30:15] If you think about Jesus, he had he had enemies, bitter enemies who wanted to kill him and who did kill him.

[00:30:23] And he needed vindication so that he'd be publicly seen to be righteous.

[00:30:30] And and so many of these things come into focus.

[00:30:34] And then you think, oh, yeah, I can see why I can see why he would need to pray.

[00:30:39] Yeah. So that might be a way forward.

[00:30:41] Yeah. Well, thank you. You know, like I'm a huge advocate of Christ centered preaching.

[00:30:47] It's one of my, you know, drums that I bang all the time.

[00:30:50] But but also, man, it's got to have Christ centered conversations, Christ centered interpretations.

[00:30:56] And maybe sometimes it's easier, you know, sitting in the comfort of your desk, crafting this, you know, this thing, consulting the commentaries.

[00:31:04] But yeah, when you're just in the barber's chair and you're just talking about the Psalms, maybe these things, I guess they need to be deeper in my own heart.

[00:31:11] That those type of connections can come up in on the fly.

[00:31:15] I think that's right. And of course, the barber's chair is a slightly dangerous place when somebody has a sharp instrument.

[00:31:22] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:31:26] As you're speaking about like how these Psalms were important to Jesus, actually, I opened up to Mark 14.

[00:31:33] This is on the spot. I didn't. But this is the Last Supper, the Lord's Supper.

[00:31:38] And in 1426, right after there's the it speaks about the blood of the covenant poured out for many.

[00:31:47] I will no longer drink of the fruit of the vine until I drink it anew in the kingdom of God.

[00:31:51] Then verse 26, after singing a hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives.

[00:31:59] So Jesus sang a hymn. In your understanding, like, is that likely a one of the Psalms that they sang?

[00:32:08] Yes, very likely.

[00:32:09] OK.

[00:32:09] Yes. The words that are translated Psalms, hymns and spiritual songs in Ephesians 5 and Colossians 3, the Greek words.

[00:32:22] In the Greek translation of the Old Testament, most, the overwhelming majority of uses of those three words refer to the biblical Psalms.

[00:32:32] Not all of them, but the majority do. So singing a hymn, we think he's singing Charles Wesley or Isaac Watts.

[00:32:42] He reaches into the future and then pulls out a classic hymn or something.

[00:32:49] But obviously he wasn't. Almost certainly it was a psalm.

[00:32:52] I mean, people think it was probably, you know, Psalms 111 to 118.

[00:32:56] Might have been. We don't know for sure.

[00:32:59] OK. Well, it's a beautiful, it's a complicated thought to think of our Lord.

[00:33:06] Yeah, not just treasuring and praying these things, but then even on the eve of his betrayal, then singing these Psalms.

[00:33:14] Yeah, it's a very moving thought, isn't it?

[00:33:16] I often say to people as a kind of a question that often opens up a psalm is to say you read the psalm and you think to yourself,

[00:33:24] now what might this have meant to Jesus in the days of his flesh to say or to sing these words?

[00:33:32] Yeah. Well, thank you for putting that vocabulary or that, you know, a lot of preachers listen to this and you've just put that thought into all of our heads.

[00:33:42] So thank you for that.

[00:33:45] There's something else, maybe to pivot a little bit.

[00:33:47] I want to just say like I wanted to publicly thank you for a little book of yours that I don't know if it's as well known as it should be,

[00:33:55] but it's a short little book called Zeal Without Burnout.

[00:33:58] This is a book that myself and our leadership team, we all went through two years ago.

[00:34:03] And it was just a very refreshing, very encouraging, like look at the life of ministry as one of, to quote you, long-term sustainable sacrifice.

[00:34:16] And yeah, what prompted you to write that?

[00:34:20] And then even now after five decades in, after sustainable sacrificing for so long,

[00:34:26] is there anything that you would add to that little booklet if there's a revised version coming out?

[00:34:33] It was prompted by in 2012, 12 years ago, I went through what you'd probably call some kind of a breakdown, a number of factors,

[00:34:45] partly my elderly parents failing and there were all sorts of things that combined outside my control largely, but it was a dark time.

[00:34:56] And after that, I went to speak for Alistair Begg at his pastor's conference in Ohio.

[00:35:04] And they said, as well as doing the main talks I was doing, could I do a seminar?

[00:35:10] And I thought, well, this is a live thing for me at the moment.

[00:35:13] How do you keep going, sacrificing, but with a sustainable zeal?

[00:35:21] So I did a seminar on that.

[00:35:24] I had no idea if it was any use, but the internet being what it is, I began to get messages from people saying they'd seen the recording of it and they'd appreciated it.

[00:35:34] And so I said to the Good Book Company, maybe this could be a useful book.

[00:35:40] And judging by the feedback I've had, I think it probably is.

[00:35:43] But it has, I think I would probably stress even more the Sabbath principle written hardwired into creation.

[00:35:55] And that when we human beings live as though it weren't, as though we were above and beyond that, we always store up trouble for ourselves.

[00:36:06] And I think particularly for people in pastoral ministry, there's a sort of pride that creeps in.

[00:36:14] You know, other people, ordinary mortals have to have Sabbath rests, but maybe I don't.

[00:36:23] Maybe I can just achieve that little bit more by not bothering.

[00:36:26] And it always leads to trouble one way or another.

[00:36:30] That's probably what I would turn the volume up on in the book.

[00:36:36] Yeah.

[00:36:37] Yeah, well, thank you for it.

[00:36:39] Yeah, so in 2012, you gave a workshop and it's blessed, you know, a church team here in Ireland and I'm sure all over the face of the earth.

[00:36:50] So yeah, thank you.

[00:36:52] Thank you for that.

[00:36:52] There'll be a link in the description for that.

[00:36:55] It actually, it helped our team so much that I wanted to just cram it in.

[00:37:00] I know we're talking about the Psalms.

[00:37:01] Everything is going great.

[00:37:02] I'm just cramming this in there because I want the people who are listening to know about this.

[00:37:08] And I'm sure it can be an infusion of health into weary volunteers and staff.

[00:37:15] Right.

[00:37:16] Thank you.

[00:37:16] Yeah, well, speaking of, I guess I wanted to plug one of your books.

[00:37:20] What about you?

[00:37:22] I know that currently, yeah, you are like a, is it a writer in residence at Tyndale House?

[00:37:27] Which means you're probably, there's more work to come.

[00:37:31] And I also know that you formerly were at Corn Hill Training Course with the Proclamation Trust.

[00:37:40] So I bet you probably have many other things to recommend to the teachers and preachers who are listening to this.

[00:37:46] Sure, sure.

[00:37:48] I mean, I'm, the Proclamation Trust, I was working at the Corn Hill Training Course up to 2015.

[00:37:55] And so I'm most familiar with things before that.

[00:37:58] There's lots of resources on the Proclamation Trust website from the Evangelical Ministry Assembly.

[00:38:04] That's right.

[00:38:05] Really helpful things.

[00:38:07] All sorts of ministers conferences for senior ministers, younger ministers, women in ministry, ministry wives, all sorts of different things.

[00:38:17] And there's lots of good stuff there.

[00:38:20] And the Corn Hill Training Course itself, which is still continuing and flourishing, has been found by many people to be a really helpful foundation for expository ministry.

[00:38:34] So Proclamation Trust, I'd warmly recommend these things.

[00:38:38] A friend of mine is just about to go and take over leadership of it, Robin Sidsurf.

[00:38:44] So lots of good things there.

[00:38:46] And then Tyndale House, where I now work, is slightly different.

[00:38:51] It's more encouraging good biblical scholarship for the church.

[00:38:58] And people can sign up free to get regular email news.

[00:39:03] And there's a really good magazine, mostly comes out digitally, called Ink, I-N-K, from Tyndale House.

[00:39:12] And that has some fascinating articles, making good biblical scholarship accessible to people.

[00:39:21] And then from time to time, there are the World of the Bible Days, so far mostly in the United Kingdom or Northern Ireland.

[00:39:32] But they're all advertised on the website.

[00:39:37] And those can be really good.

[00:39:39] Lots of good resources.

[00:39:40] Some fine, faithful scholars at Tyndale House.

[00:39:46] Yeah, I know that you look back fondly on your years of pastoring a local church.

[00:39:52] But I think you've served many, many local churches through your investments with, yeah,

[00:39:57] Cornhill and certainly now at Tyndale House.

[00:40:00] Like, you're helping us all to be better.

[00:40:02] So we thank you.

[00:40:03] We appreciate you.

[00:40:04] Thank you.

[00:40:05] And so as a writer in residence, are you writing something now?

[00:40:09] What's the next Christopher Ashe book going to be?

[00:40:12] Well, if God gives strength.

[00:40:14] I'm trying to, the Psalms commentary was a bit of a marathon.

[00:40:17] Yeah, yeah.

[00:40:18] I can imagine.

[00:40:21] More than once I wrote mental letters or emails to Crossway saying I can't do this.

[00:40:28] So I'm probably a bit weary, but I'm trying to write a little pastoral book on what it means to be a faithful disciple of Jesus in your, roughly speaking, your 50s and 60s, which I want to call the afternoon of life.

[00:40:44] In most of the world and most of history, of course, it's the evening of life.

[00:40:48] But in rich countries, often it's more like the afternoon.

[00:40:52] So I'm not writing about old, old age, but about that kind of in-between stage where if you've married and had kids, they're beginning to leave or they've left home.

[00:41:04] You may be approaching the end of your paid employment towards the end at some point in that.

[00:41:11] You may still have one, two, three, four elderly parents who need care.

[00:41:17] You might have a bit more money that you can spend.

[00:41:20] And you might have a bit more time at your disposal.

[00:41:23] And you might have good health or you might not.

[00:41:26] But a number of people fit with some of those things.

[00:41:29] So I'm trying to look at some of the dangers and some of the opportunities at that stage of life.

[00:41:35] Well, I'm not the one to write that.

[00:41:38] It seems that you are.

[00:41:41] Well, I am.

[00:41:42] I've turned 70, so I think I've got the right to have a go at that.

[00:41:45] So you write it and then I'll buy it when I need it.

[00:41:49] When you get there.

[00:41:50] Yeah.

[00:41:51] Lord willing, I'm on the way in that direction.

[00:41:54] Yeah.

[00:41:55] What a need.

[00:41:56] And then I guess the final question, like every interview always begins by asking about your first time teaching the Bible.

[00:42:01] And then every interview ends with asking essentially like, how would you like to improve?

[00:42:07] I love finding people that I think we can all learn from.

[00:42:10] And it's a it's a nice notion that even even they even you are still trying to improve or get better.

[00:42:16] So what would you like to do better the next time you're in the pulpit?

[00:42:21] I would.

[00:42:23] I would.

[00:42:23] Preaching isn't easy, is it?

[00:42:25] And I don't think it gets easier.

[00:42:26] I'm I'm particularly burdened to try to preach in such a way that takes the scriptures and preaches to the human heart.

[00:42:40] And one of the things I'm trying to do is towards the end of a sermon to have more time when I'm not giving fresh cognitive content.

[00:42:52] Not just adding in some more content, but just giving time to press it home to hearts and minds and consciences and to allow hearers to have time and space to begin to respond as God's spirit prompts them.

[00:43:11] That's really I feel burdened to try to.

[00:43:14] I've never felt I'm good at that.

[00:43:16] I long for that more and more.

[00:43:20] So by leaving like are you talking about leaving open time at the end?

[00:43:26] No, no, I'm I'm I'm I'm saying I try to finish.

[00:43:32] The cognitive content of what I'm teaching before the end of the sermon.

[00:43:38] So there's time to sort of pull it together and press it home with challenge or encouragement or whatever's appropriate from the passage.

[00:43:51] So not open time, but time when and I may well not have it really terribly carefully prepared in my notes.

[00:43:59] But but time to to press home the message I've been seeking to open out from the text.

[00:44:06] Yeah, well, yesterday was was Sunday and I found my notes to be I did drive my mother in law to the airport earlier that morning.

[00:44:17] And I was going to, you know, basically this is my long excuse of saying I never really wrote a proper conclusion.

[00:44:24] And my my notes kind of ended maybe even a little bit earlier than I thought they were going to.

[00:44:30] And as I looked at the clock and then looked at the end of my notes, I realized I got a few minutes here and I felt a bit of, yeah, just freedom to to to just to maybe to do that.

[00:44:43] But, um, however, imperfectly and but it was just a matter of like, you know, and guys, here's what we've seen.

[00:44:49] Here's what this could look like. And here's what I here's what I yeah.

[00:44:52] Pastorally, here's what I want for you.

[00:44:55] And, um, well, I wouldn't advise driving your mother in law to the airport on a Sunday morning or any of those things or not writing your conclusion.

[00:45:04] Uh, it's it felt it felt right. And it's not something that I do. Maybe everything's often quite crafted and carefully, you know, tidied up.

[00:45:13] Um, so if that's what you're talking about, I want that to I want that to not just be an occasional thing.

[00:45:20] Yeah, no, that is what I'm talking about. And it's slightly scary.

[00:45:25] Well, yeah, you know, especially I think when I was a less experienced preacher, I would have found it scary.

[00:45:32] But but what you've just described, I would often do deliberately.

[00:45:38] Okay, well, it was an accident when I did it.

[00:45:43] Okay, well, that's, that's a great. Yeah, again, as I mentioned, it's it's great to hear that that, you know, even the the Cornhill training director like is still trying to grow and to improve.

[00:45:54] So, uh, well, that's, that's excellent. Well, well, thank you very much for your time. And to the listeners of this podcast, I hope that this conversation and all that we do at Expositors Collective helps you to grow in your personal study and public proclamation of God's word. Thank you very much.

[00:46:12] Thank you for inviting me on.

[00:46:14] Yeah, what a joy.

[00:46:54] Thank you.

[00:47:25] Thank you.

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