Lewis Allen calls preachers to fight for a simple joy in the Lord as they patiently wait for fruit
Every pastor, like those he serves, is a failure. Leaders need the blood of Christ as much and often more than anyone else.
Grace, though, is never a cover for sin. Leaders and followers must strive for the holiness without which no one will see the Lord. They must never be fakes. They must be manifestly Christlike in all of their dealings with others. That will only happen if they’re intentionally submitting to Christ in all of their dealings with Him. If Christian leaders are to be kept from falling, and from causing others to stumble, they must never let go of a sense of the sheer privilege of knowing and serving their Lord. Contentment in Christ will, ultimately, save all of our souls.
Contentment in the Lord Jesus is vital for His servants because, if they lose it or never had it, they will step out of true service. Instead of being servants they will be exploiters, using and abusing others in the pursuit of satisfaction.
Tragically, Christian leaders are not all they appear to be. At least that’s the conclusion many have reached, as they look out on the church in our country, and maybe also at the people who lead their own local church. Recent high-profile cases have shocked our UK corner of the evangelical world, as we’ve seen pastors who have served long and impacting ministries finishing them in terrible failure. With one of these, at least, the failure (for failure, read sin) has been going on for many years, with devastating impact on many. Now it’s in the open, countless believers have been processing the trauma they’ve experienced, and even questioning the goodness of the God they had thought they could trust.
The Preacher’s Catechism
Most leaders and preachers will never have a big platform for their ministry. They will be spared the temptations of great influence. They may well experience, though, the fierce temptations to be frustrated or resentful if they sense that their work is undervalued, or lacking in obvious fruit. Give in to those temptations, and the way ahead of them may well be marked by secret sin, controlling leadership, or just about anything which a cold heart finds to warm itself by.
The following was written with preachers particularly in mind, as a very brief exposition of a brief psalm, Psalm 134. The challenges of the psalm are for us all, and the Spirit of God is well able to use them to make us contented and Christlike servants of God, whatever our earthly calling.
Psalm 134 is the second shortest of the 150, having just three verses. But it packs a massive and surprising punch for every servant of God. Here we are challenged to find our hearts’ rest in the love of God, even when life is at its most humdrum. And we preachers are called, for the most part, to humdrum lives.
The psalm is the last of the collection known as the Psalms of Ascent. These are 15 songs for God’s people seeking to walk with God. For Israel, that meant songs for the three-times-a-year journeys to worship in Jerusalem, and for Christians today, the whole life of journeying by faith. In Psalm 134 the Jerusalem pilgrims are most likely setting off, perhaps before sunrise, back to their homes in Israel. They give a last thought to the priests in the temple: you servants of the LORD, who stand
by night in the house of the LORD (v.1).
Their work, even in the dwelling place of the Almighty, was nonetheless pretty unexciting, especially at night, when they would have been working effectively as security guards and cleaners. And at night no one would have seen them to acknowledge their work with thanks. It was tiring and tedious, and came with very few earthly rewards.
Unexciting, unseen, and unappreciated. Maybe the priest thought he was called to so much more. Most preachers do. We want response, growth, revival, and maybe plenty of affirmation along the way. Some preachers do get that. But they are the exceptions, and we need to know it.
Most of us are working the night shift. To be sure, preaching is often a thrilling business. People are won to Christ through our ministry, believers mature through the preached word, problems are dealt with as people understand Bible preaching and apply it to their lives, and individuals are slowly shaped together into authentic Christian communities. There are times when glory breaks in and God is powerfully present and at work among His people. Most of our work, though, is torchlight work, carried out in the often dim light of faith.
The work is slow, and progress is usually the fruit of preaching week in, week out, and decade upon decade. Our labours are often unrecognised, and the demands of this mostly unseen and often unappreciated work take their toll on preachers and their families. When results are few and the costs are high, every preacher needs to ask himself regularly, why am I doing this?
Allow that fleeting temple scene in the psalm to reach you. The pilgrims encourage the priests not to lose heart: Lift up your hands to the holy place and bless the LORD! (v.2).
Worship Him, in other words, when no-one notices you and when the work is unexciting. Remember in those times that God loves you; He sees you and honours all your labours. Remember that in due season you will receive your reward if you don’t give up (Gal. 6:9). Self-pity is as much out of place in Christian ministry as self-promotion is. Worship Him because of who He is, the Lord of heaven and earth.
You’re preaching for God. You’re preaching because He has been pleased to call and equip you to preach, and He is pleased as you preach. If He ordains that you find the tasks of preparing and delivering your sermon enjoyable, then He gets the glory. If He makes your preaching obviously fruitful, again, it’s for His name’s sake. But if you preach only because you enjoy it, or even because people seem to value it, then you are in trouble. The minute those things vanish, your heart will be laid bare, and you will see yourself (maybe others will, too) for what you were all along – a preacher more taken up with his own desires than with the glory of God.
The life of a Christian, and of a Christian preacher, is a moment- by-moment giving of all his heart to God and God’s grace, in the power of the Holy Spirit. Keep your heart – or even a piece of it – for yourself, and you are in great trouble. James K. A. Smith explains: ‘Our hearts … are like existential compasses and embodied homing beacons: our loves are pulled magnetically to some north toward which our hearts have been calibrated. Our actions and behaviour – indeed, a whole way of life – are pulled out of us by this attraction to some vision of the good life.’
This is our daily fight, and this is where the path to joyful service lies. Get your heart pulled in its deepest impulses to God in Jesus Christ, and your preaching ministry, however difficult, will be a fitting expression of your life’s worship.
