Welcome back for part three of my interview with Dr. Wayne Grudem. Read part one here and part two here.

Dr. Grudem, what single bit of counsel has made the most significant difference in your leadership?

A very strong influence throughout my entire life has been the phrase found on the seal of Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia, where I received an M.Div. degree in 1973. The seal says, “pasan tēn boulēn tou theou,” which means “the whole counsel of God.” It is taken from the Greek text of Acts 20:27, where Paul was speaking to the elders of the church in Ephesus, a church where he had ministered for three years.

Paul said to them, “Therefore I testify to you this day that I am innocent of the blood of all of you, for I did not shrink from declaring to you the whole counsel of God.” If this verse is understood, I think it will have a profound impact on all leadership decisions that people make.

Paul was saying that he was blameless before God, as far as he knew, because he had faithfully proclaimed everything that the Word of God taught. He had not shrunk back in fear and avoided unpopular subjects. He faithfully taught everything that he knew from the revealed will of God, both from the Old Testament, and from Jesus’s earthly teachings that had been passed on to him, and from special revelation that God had imparted to him as an apostle.

The implication is that if he had failed to teach on some unpopular subjects, then he would have been accountable before God when the church at Ephesus strayed away on those subjects. If he had failed to teach on sexual purity before marriage, for example, or on the moral wrong of homosexuality, and then after he left some of the teenagers growing up in Ephesus had begun to have sex outside of marriage, or had become homosexuals, God would have held Paul accountable for that on the Last Day. But that was not the case with Paul, for, as far as he knew, he “did not shrink from declaring” to the Ephesian Christians “the whole counsel of God.”

That is why one of the items I pray for myself each day is courage to do what is right and stand for what is right before the Lord.

I know I have not always lived up to Paul’s example in this respect, but in my teaching and preaching, in my writing, and in my influence and leadership in organizations, I want, before God, to be faithful to everything that his Word teaches, even those things that are unpopular. I want to be able at the end of my life to say to the Lord that I have fulfilled whatever stewardship that he entrusted to me, just as Paul said his desire was that “I may finish my course and the ministry that I received from the Lord Jesus” (Acts 20:24).

And even greater than Paul’s example is the example of Jesus, who could say to his Father, “I glorified you on earth, having accomplished the work that you gave me to do” (John 17:4).

As far as human counsel outside of Scripture, God has given me several faithful friends at different points in my life, certainly including you, C.J.! (see question above).

There have been many wonderful comments from these friends. An important one that comes to mind is a brief comment that Robert Lewis said to me a number of years ago, when I was President of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood and Robert was on the board. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I had been trying to minutely manage everything that CBMW did, and I was becoming a bottleneck in the organization, preventing it from growing and moving forward.

During a break from our board meeting, Robert said to me, “Wayne, at Fellowship Bible Church, 80 percent of the things that get done are not done in the way that I would do them. But they get done.” Now I knew that Fellowship Bible Church, where Robert was the lead teaching pastor, had several thousand people attending it and had an incredible number of effective ministries throughout Little Rock, Arkansas, and the surrounding region. How did it all get done? Robert had just told me the secret. And it gave me freedom to release many of those activities to other people.

Join me tomorrow for the fourth and final part of my interview with Dr. Grudem.