This series on the five-fold ministry is based off my handwritten notes, which I took as I attended a church conference on this topic in Mar 2025.

You cannot be more spiritual than scriptural.

Exo 25:17-22:

Wood represents Jesus humanity

Good represents His diety

Isa 44:

Pastoring churches, ministry, discerning God’s call in your life can melt you down, like molten gold.

But when we give ourselves to God, we are anything but he can use, put and service.

If we allow him to do his work in us, he keeps forming and fashioning, with each blow, from the hammer.

So he says let’s work on that attitude, that prayer life, your mercy level, compassion too, to be a pastor.

Because I know where I’m going, and what I want to see in you.

One more prayer, one more time of worship, and one more day in my courts.

That’s what I’m saying Moses, now I have moulded you, here I am, at the burning bush.

2 Cor 4:17: Your light affliction is momentary, but it brings out God’s glory in ministries and things he wants us to do for him.

What happens when the hammer is in the wrong hand?

In the right hand, it’s an instrument of edification.

In the wrong hands, it’s an instrument of destruction.

Joseph favoured by his father given a coat of many colours.

But his brothers were jealous, took his coat and tricked his father, that he has been killed.

He was thrown into prison, at Potiphar’s house, but God gave him favour to be ruler in Egypt.

The hammer in the wrong hands, put him in the prison.

But God uses that to shape him.

Joseph said to his brothers who visited him later in Egypt, you threw me in the pit and meant it for my destruction, but God meant it for good.

The word “meant”, has the meaning to weave the threads / carpet.

While you weave that against me, but God was also weaving.

Satan’s schemes always have a loose thread in his plans.

And God found that loose thread in Satan’s plan for Joseph, and says he doesn’t even need new threads.

But I’m going to use the existing loose threads you have, and make you a new garment of glory.

So sometimes the hammer gets in the wrong hands, people get crushed and hurt.

But God says, give me that hammer.

And he fashions them, in the way he purposes you and I to be.

Don’t despise what God may be doing in your life right now, don’t despise the fiery trial, but let God’s work set in.

If we have been in ministry, anyone would have a story to tell of a trial, that brings us to a place of breaking.

But God uses that to build us up, to be effective in his kingdom.

There is one more part of the process, when the work is finished, the fingerprints and thumbprints of the smith, have to be polished away.

So God takes the polishing cloth of worship, praise, mercy, and grace, and he wipes away the scars left by the flesh.

The only final thing we can see now is God’s hand in our life, like his signature.