Rayburn concludes his magisterial essay by speaking of the ministerial role:
It is the work of a lifetime and the whole work of a lifetime to preach the Word of God with the humanity, earnestness, accuracy, insight, and power which the great subjects of the Word and the great issues of a congregation’s everlasting salvation require. Only the man who loves to preach and lives to preach will be adequate to such a work, demanding as it does the continual cultivation and full exercise of all his powers. And that holy consecration, I have come firmly to believe, depends upon a man seeing himself to be not an elder, but always and only a minister of the Word of God.
