We pastors are great at telling people the will of God for their lives. But what about following God’s will in our own lives? Truth be told, it’s a lot easier to preach it to others than to put it into practice for ourselves.
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The apostle Paul’s words come to mind:
[If you] know His will and approve the things that are essential, being instructed out of the Law, and are confident that you yourself are a guide to the blind, a light to those who are in darkness, a corrector of the foolish, a teacher of the immature, having in the Law the embodiment of knowledge and of the truth, you, therefore, who teach another, do you not teach yourself? You who preach that one shall not steal, do you steal? You who say that one should not commit adultery, do you commit adultery? You who abhor idols, do you rob temples? You who boast in the Law, through your breaking the Law, do you dishonor God? (Romans 2:18–23)
Paul’s words were directed to Jews who knew (and believed) the Word of God. By principle, that’s us as well.
Let me ask you a penetrating question: are you willing to do God’s will? Really?
No doubt, you’ve run across people who believe that the One who created us is too far removed to concern Himself with the tiny details of life. But that is not the case. God’s plan is running its course right on schedule, exactly as He decreed it.
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This world is not out of control, spinning wildly through space. Nor are earth’s inhabitants at the mercy of meaningless chaos.
Thinking theologically can be a tough thing to do—even for us pastors. That’s because we focus most of our energy and attention on what I all “the horizontal” aspects of ministry. Thinking vertically is a discipline few have mastered.
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We much prefer to live in the here-and-now realm, seeing life horizontally as others see it, dealing with realities we can . . .
- Touch
- Analyze
- Prove
- Explain
We are much more comfortable with the tactile, the familiar, the logic shaped by our culture and lived out in our times.
But God offers a better way to live—one that requires faith as it lifts us above the drag and grind of our immediate little world.
I spent the first ten years of my marriage trying to turn Cynthia into me. (Can you think of anything worse than a female Chuck?) Finally, she’d had enough.
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I’ll never forget when she said to me,
I don’t want you to keep telling people we’re ‘partners’ because we’re not partners. I bear your children, and I cook your meals, and I clean the house, but I’m not really your partner. You’ve never accepted me for who I really am.
Yes, I have.
No, you haven’t.
Yes, I have.
No, you haven’t!
When America’s thirty-fourth president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, began his administration, he instructed his aides and his executive assistant that there should be only two stacks of papers placed on his desk in the Oval Office.
By Юкатан (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
The first would be a stack of those things that were urgent, and only the extremely urgent. The other was to be a stack of the important, and only the extremely important.
He said years later that it was interesting to him how rarely the two were one in the same. He was right.
The conflict between the urgent and the important is inescapable. How easy to get the two confused! Staying busy and working hard can make us feel as if we’re managing the important. But that’s not necessarily the case.
Exactly what does our heavenly Father want to develop within us as pastors? Well, rather than getting over my head in tricky theological waters, I believe the simple answer is found in Christ’s own words.
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Read His declaration of His primary reason for coming:
For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life a ransom for many. (Mark 10:45)
No mumbo jumbo. Just a straight-from-the-shoulder admission. He came to serve and to give. It makes sense, then, to say that God desires the same for us.
In the ministry, monotony and mediocrity often mesh like teeth in gears. One spawns the other, leaving us yawning, bored, and adrift. In referring to monotony, I do not have in mind a lack of activity as much as a lack of purpose.
Even as pastors, we can be busy yet bored, involved yet indifferent. Ministry can become . . .
- Tediously repetitious
- Dull
- Humdrum
- Pedestrian
In a word, blah.
I know, I know—“ministry is serious business.” If I hear that one more time, I think I’ll gag. I fully realize that too much humor can be irritating, even offensive.
By BerLin (Nikon) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
I recognize that it can be taken to such an extreme that it is inappropriate. But doesn’t it seem we have a long way to go before we are guilty of that problem?
I think so.
If some ministry position is the god of your life, then something terrible occurs within when it is no longer a future possibility. If your ministry, however, is simply a part of God’s plan and you keep it in proper perspective, you can handle an unwanted dismissal just as well as you can handle a promotion.
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It all depends on who’s first and what’s first.
Breaking the magnet that draws things ahead of God is a lengthy and sometimes painful process. But God loves us enough to wrench from our hands everything we love more than Him.
Can you remember a recent “gray slush” day? Of course you can. So can I. (For us pastors, it’s often a Monday.) On such days, the laws of fairness and justice are displaced by a couple of Murphy’s Laws.
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Your dream dissolved into a nightmare. High hopes took a hike. Good intentions got lost in a comedy of errors; only this time, nobody was laughing.
You didn’t soar; you slumped. Instead of “pressing on the upward way,” you felt like telling John Bunyan, the author of Pilgrim’s Progress, to move over as you slid down into his Slough of Despond near Doubting Castle, whose owner was Giant Despair.
Discouragement is just plain awful.
