Can a pastor be an apostle?

BibleAsk Team

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Speaker 1

Alejandro asks, can a pastor be an apostle?

Speaker 2

And to answer that, I’ll quickly say refer you to, I don’t know. Jay, can you go through Ephesians 411?

Speaker 3

Okay, let’s pull it up for eleven. Maybe we can have you read that one, Wendy?

Speaker 1

And he himself gave some to the apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers.

Speaker 3

All right?

Speaker 2

If you keep going for the equipping.

Speaker 1

Of the saints, for the work of ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ.

Speaker 2

And if you keep going, it says that until we all come to the fullness of the body of Christ, so.

Speaker 1

We will come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a perfect man, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.

Speaker 2

So basically when you look at these things, Jesus was all of them. And many people are pastors and evangelists. You can be both from here because I got to go be a mom.

Speaker 1

We are alive. These things happen.

Speaker 3

All right? Really? What is an apostle? What is a pastor? I think that’s important to talk about. Apostle just means sort of like a spokesperson of Jesus. That’s kind of like the New Testament lingo for a prophet. And then what is a pastor? A pastor comes from the Greek word that we get for shepherd. So pastors are really the shepherds. And you have Jesus, for example, who asked Peter three times, peter, feed my sheep. And he’s implying that Peter be a pastor. You could say, but Peter is also an apostle. So it’s not necessarily that these are the Bible sees these as roles that you can only occupy one of these at a time. It’s more like, I think God will be happy if everybody could be a pastor, if everybody could to some degree be an apostle. But as we just saw in Ephesians, god does give more of these different spiritual gifts, spreads them out across the body and going back to humbleness and all this stuff. God doesn’t put everything into one person because then that person will end up with the biggest ego ever. So God in his wisdom gives us all unique ability, spreads it all out throughout the whole church so that we have to depend on each other and work together.

Speaker 3

And that’s just an amazing thing about how God works and how our church should function. And so, yeah, any of us could be any of those things or all those things, any mixture of those things. But yeah, God and his wisdom will usually spread it out.

Speaker 1

It’s a fascinating idea that our limitations, our inabilities are actually part of God’s plan as well. That we are sort of then required to be in relationship and connection with other people. We’re required to work together with other people because if we could do it all ourselves, like you said, we would have the biggest figure in the world, we would be trying to be God instead of just being a conduit of God’s love.

Speaker 3

Yeah. And if you look at nature, there’s absolutely nothing that’s self sufficient. Everything needs other things. The plants need the sun, they need the water, they need the bees, the bees need the plants. You just go down the list of it. Everything is intermeshed and working together, and that’s how the whole ecosystem works.

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