“I feel thin…. stretched. Like butter scraped over too much bread.” Pastors can relate to Bilbo’s comments here. Pastoral ministry can wear a man thin, stretching and straining him. Paul expressed something similar as he dealt with the issues in the church of Corinth (2 Corinthians 4:8-20). The weight of pastoral ministry and the weakness of the pastor stretch men beyond their strength. These difficulties persist even in healthy church contexts.
Furthermore, the pastor’s job is of eternal significance. His vocation is soul care. He leads Christ’s sheep to green pastures through the ordinary means of grace. He brings the Word of God to bear on their souls as he preaches. He teaches them to live upon Christ as faithful disciples, observing all that Jesus has commanded. He prays for their souls that the Spirit would keep them from sin and conform them to the image of Christ.
All this soul work takes place amid the battlefield of spiritual warfare. Pastors are often ambushed by friendly fire. Traps and mines are scattered across the field to deter and distract the pastor from his mission. Sometimes, it seems the enemy is gaining ground and erasing every inch of progress. In those moments, the temptation to lose heart intensifies.
There is no other job where the heart of the man and the work of man are so vitally and integrally connected. A pastor must guard his life and doctrine (1 Timothy 3:1-7; 4:11-16; 2 Timothy 2:22-26). He must commune with the Lord for the sake of his soul before he can be of any benefit in his work as a pastor. We have plenty of testimonies of pastors who threw themselves into pastoral ministry while forgetting the vital necessity of pursuing hard after communion with the Lord. These men shipwreck their own lives, damaging their souls, their church, and their families. If a pastor forgets his heart, he will lose the heart of his ministry.
But this article is not a psalm of lament. I want to encourage pastors and help Christians better understand the struggles of their pastors. Here are some principles that are easily forgotten in the fog of war of pastoral ministry:
Commune with the Lord
The Christian life is principally about communion with the Lord (2 Corinthians 13:14). Our union with Christ brings us into fellowship with the Triune God (1 Jn. 1:3-4). We become participants in the love between the persons of the Trinity (John 17:3; 25-26). The Christian life is one of striving to abide in Christ’s love so we grow in our understanding of the Father’s love for his Son and his love for us (John 15:9-11). We must plead with the Spirit that he would never let our hearts be satisfied with a mere intellectual knowledge of the truth or emotionalism apart from the truth. We must pray that God would keep us from a legal-hearted disposition towards doctrine and others.
As pastors, there is a real danger for us to diagnose our souls as safe and secure because of the many works we are doing. But in this moment of deception, we find ourselves in a dangerous place. In all your teaching and all your study time, do it doxologically. But if you lost your pastoral ministry tomorrow, would you still commune daily with the Lord?
Before we can ever be of use in ministry, we must commune with the Lord for our own souls. We must learn to live upon Christ’s righteousness and not our own. When we cease to commune with the Lord, we begin to live upon ourselves. “Self-living” in a minister produces a legal-hearted ministry that turns God into an abstraction—an intellectual proposition. The man not communing with the Lord begins to abstractly preach and teach about God because he lacks experiential knowledge of Him. But when a man lives daily upon Christ and communes with God, it will overflow into his ministry. A man will preach and teach not merely about God in a theoretical way but about God in a practical way because he knows Him intimately.
There is no other job where the heart of the man and the work of man are so vitally and integrally connected. Share on XDo not forsake your family
Pastoral ministry should, in some sense, be a macro expression of our familial ministry to our wives and children. The zeal for pastoral ministry should flow out of a zeal for your home ministry. Oh, how I pray and long for my children to see the beauty and glory of God in Jesus Christ. Yet my zeal in the home to minister the Word to my family is quite puny compared to the church.
But are we not as husbands called to wash our wives in the Word and instruct our children in the ways of the Lord? Are we not called to pray fervently for our children’s salvation and our family’s growth in gospel graces? Should not the souls of our own homes burden us as much as the souls in our congregations? This is why a man must oversee his household well if he is qualified to oversee God’s (Ephesians 5:25-28; 6:4; 1 Tim. 3:4-5). Our families are not an obstacle to pastoral ministry that must be “handled” so they do not get in the way. They are our first ministry and a great asset to our ministries.
Be faithful to what God has entrusted to you
Perhaps nothing can lead a man in ministry to quicker despair than seeking to be faithful to what God has not given him. Each man is called to be faithful to the Lord in proportion to what He has given him. The bi-vocational pastor must be faithful with the time God has given him, not the time the Lord has given a full-time pastor. God’s providence gifts each man differently in talents and time. He places each pastor in different ministry contexts (Matthew 25:14-30; 1 Corinthians 3:5-9; 4:1-7).
There are pastors we admire and seek to emulate, and there is biblical warrant for this; however, if we are not careful, such emulation will quickly turn into a variety of sins that flow from a legal heart of comparison. Why is my ministry not like theirs? Why is God withholding good from the labor of my hands? Why would God not allow me more time to give myself to the ministry? Why has God not gifted me like other pastors? These questions arise from a heart not living upon Christ’s righteousness. These questions reflect a failure to trust the goodness of God’s providence in what He has entrusted you as a gospel minister.
Embrace your limitations as a creature.
Certainly, any pastor worth his salt has a firm grasp on the Creator/creature distinction. We are creatures made by the one true and living God, the Creator of all things. The creature never becomes the Creator. God is not like us. We are weak. God is omnipotent. We lack wisdom and knowledge. God is omniscient. We depend on food and water to sustain the health of our bodies. We are dependent on God for life, but God is self-sufficient.
We confess these wonderful attributes of our God and our weakness as creatures. Yet, we often minister like we are not creatures. We work and labor like we are not weak. We labor in the ministry like it all depends on our effort and strength. We have relegated weakness to refer only to sin. We are weak because we are sinners and prone to temptation. Or we relegate weakness to significant circumstances of affliction and trial. Indeed, we are weak because of these things, but this is only half the picture. We are always weak because we are always creatures.
When we overestimate our strength as creatures, we begin to live upon ourselves and common grace rather than upon Christ and the grace of the gospel. Nothing the Lord commands of his people can be done apart from living upon Christ by the Spirit. Our weakness as creatures should not drive us to despair but instead to a life of dependence upon God. Recognizing this weakness will keep us from demanding of ourselves a level of unrealistic performance and pressure. Work hard, brothers, but work like a creature, not like you are the Creator.
For Christ’s sake, do not lose heart
Paul beautifully elucidates the nature of our work as ministers of the New Covenant in 2 Corinthians 3 and 4. Our ministry is given and sustained by the mercy of God. This is why we are not sufficient for these things. But this ministry is a ministry of proclaiming Jesus Christ as Lord, and we depend on that proclamation for the Spirit of God to bring the voice of Jesus Christ to bear with power upon the hearer (1 Thessalonians 1:5).
Because of this, we preach Christ alone in all sincerity and purity. It is because of this that we minister for Christ’s sake alone. Because of this, we do not lose heart because our ministry depends not on ourselves but on the power of the Spirit in the preached Word of the gospel. We are servants of Christ, and we continue to faithfully serve Christ because of His faithfulness.
Therefore, brothers, do not lose heart; do not grow weary in well-doing, and always abound in the work of the Lord in seasons of evident spiritual fruit and seasons of barrenness. Preach the Word for Christ’s sake. Love Christ’s sheep for Christ’s sake. Continue despite the difficulties of ministry, for Christ’s sake. May the redeeming love of our God in Christ, which is poured upon us by the Spirit, constrain us and compel us to continue in the work of the ministry for Christ’s sake!
John Sweat is a pastor at Heritage Reformed Baptist Church in Fayetteville, Georgia. He and his wife Heather have four daughters. John is a United States Marine Corps veteran, a graduate of Trinity Baptist College and Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, and pursuing a ThM in historical theology from Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary.
