I knew a man who walked away from Jesus because he did not know what to do on Friday nights. When unbelieving, he knew exactly what to do. As a Christian, he wasn’t sure anymore. Read his Bible? Pray? Hang out with other Christians? It all seemed so, well, unremarkable. Was this it?

Have you felt this way about the Christian life? At times, it feels less momentous than we expect. The means of grace can feel so normal — is it really supernatural? At times we think we hear our spiritual lives speak with the voice of Jacob, but other days we feel only the earthy hands of Esau. Is this really the life God promised? Have we really found what we’re looking for, or shall we look for another? How do we reenchant our love for what feels so ordinary?

Christian, the unimpressive path to glory is no concession. To see this, I want you to meet a man who struggled with the ordinariness of God’s miraculous work.

You Could Be Healed

Naaman was a great man in Syria, a man of war, and although a general highly favored by the king and a soldier fierce on the battlefield, Naaman was losing a different kind of war: “He was a mighty man of valor, but he was a leper” (2 Kings 5:1). His disease struck behind the shield; smirked at Naaman’s sword. Cry as loud as he might, his gods could not heal him.

Yet an unseen (and unthanked) God stood behind Naaman’s many successes. Naaman was great and highly favored because “by him the Lord had given victory to Syria” (2 Kings 5:1). And this Lord placed a witness to himself within Naaman’s household. “The Syrians on one of their raids had carried off a little girl from the land of Israel, and she worked in the service of Naaman’s wife” (2 Kings 5:2). Acquainted with her master’s disease and her mistress’s distress, she boldly approaches her, “Would that my lord were with the prophet who is in Samaria! He would cure him of his leprosy” (2 Kings 5:3).

A glimmer of hope shines upon a sea of desperation. Could it be true? Hoping against hope, the wife tells her husband. Perhaps he resisted a day, then two, but could it be true? He needed to try. He brings the little girl’s words to the king, “thus and so spoke the girl.” The king approves, writes to the King of Israel: “When this letter reaches you, know that I have sent to you Naaman my servant, that you may cure him of his leprosy” (2 Kings 5:6).

The King of Israel tears open the letter one minute; tears his clothes the next. “Am I God, to kill and to make alive, that this man sends word to me to cure a man of his leprosy?” He sees the threat of war behind the request (2 Kings 5:7). King Ahab’s son is not God (nor in particularly good relations with him). What could he do? Elisha, however, hears the news of the king’s dismay, and tells him to send the man to his door “that he [and the king] may know that there is a prophet in Israel” (2 Kings 5:8).

Terms of Recovery

Naaman’s impressive entourage parks outside: “Naaman came with his horses and chariots and stood at the door of Elisha’s house” (2 Kings 5:9). Knock, knock. Nothing. Knock, knock. Finally, Elisha’s servant comes to the door with the terms of recovery: “Go and wash in the Jordan seven times, and your flesh shall be restored, and you shall be clean” (2 Kings 5:10).

Imagine the tense moment of silence after the door thuds shut. Color flashes on scaly cheeks. Jaws clench. Is this guy serious? The provocation hit its mark: he grew furious and stormed off in a rage (2 Kings 5:11–12). We get a transcription of his thoughts as he turns for home:

Behold, I thought that he would surely come out to me and stand and call upon the name of the Lord his God, and wave his hand over the place and cure the leper. Are not Abana and Pharpar, the rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel? Could I not wash in them and be clean? (2 Kings 5:11–12)

No, this would not do. Naaman wanted healing to be an event, something more suitable and spectacular. He wanted the prophet to come out and publicly perform the miracle — he might humbly suggest a loud and eloquent prayer to his God accompanied with hand-waving, you know, a manner worthy of miracle-making. Instead, he sends out a servant to point at some murky river.

“Do not be deceived by the littleness of the ordinary means of grace into neglecting them.”

Had not Naaman done his part to set the stage? Had he not traveled many miles carrying hundreds of pounds of silver and gold to profit the prophet handsomely (“in the vicinity of three-quarters of a billion dollars,” IVP OT Background Commentary)? Had he not stood most politely and expectantly at the healer’s door and brought an audience for his powers? Yet, in the crucial moment, the main actor seems to develop stage fright, forget his lines, and send him away just as he arrived.

Would You Do Something Great?

A servant (again) must come help the soldier rethink his tactics. Here, the ESV diverges from other major translations. The majority translation captures the servants’ reasoning this way:

And his servants came near and spoke to him, and said, “My father, if the prophet had told you to do something great, would you not have done it? How much more then, when he says to you, ‘Wash, and be clean’?” (2 Kings 5:13 NKJV)

If Naaman was told to win the healing by conquering an army that stood between him and the Jordan, would he not have done it? If the prophet told him to recover the rarest plant that grew at the seabed of the Jordan, would he not have accepted the challenge? But just to go dip seven times — why a child could do that.

This seemed way too small, too unnoteworthy to be captured in song. But Naaman, the man accustomed to doing valorous deeds must go to a river where valor is not required. He must leave his heroics on the banks, strip off his pride, and bow beneath Israel’s waters. If he would be healed, he must first be humbled. He would not be saved by his good works or his great ones.

And Naaman did what he would never regret: “he went down and dipped himself seven times in the Jordan, according to the word of the man of God, and his flesh was restored like the flesh of a little child, and he was clean” (2 Kings 5:14).

Have We Refused Healing?

Naaman reconsidered and returned to Elisha’s door, not just cured, but saved. He returned not only with the flesh of the little servant Jewish girl, but with her faith, pledging his allegiance to the one true God alone (2 Kings 5:15, 17).

Reader, take this to heart: he nearly turned away from healing and salvation because of his sense of how he ought to be cured. Have things changed today? How many Naamans will look up at the lake of fire because they looked down upon the muddy surface of the Jordan? So many turn from the only name given under heaven by which men must be saved, Jesus Christ, because they prefer the world’s Abana and Pharpar. The foolish way of faith in the crucified Messiah is still despised and rejected of men, “a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles” (Isaiah 53:3; 1 Corinthians 1:23).

But Naamans also exist who begin dipping, but do not persevere the full seven times. They leave the healing tide because of a false sense of how one ought to be sustained in the faith. These waters don’t feel much different from other rivers they have been in. They dip for a time, feel the ordinariness of the Christian life, and walk away from Jesus because they don’t know what to do on Friday nights.

Deceived by Littleness

If only we could see as the angels do. Let’s reimagine, for a moment, a normal activity of the Christian life: Bible reading. Half-waking you trudge down the stairs, brew some coffee, and open to the next section of Scripture. You come faithfully, expectantly, but is this what the momentous life in Christ looks and feels like? This section of our Affirmation of Faith can transfigure normal times in his word:

11.1 We believe that faith is awakened and sustained by God’s Spirit through His Word and prayer. The good fight of faith is fought mainly by meditating on the Scriptures and praying that God would apply them to our souls.

The good fight of faith is fought mainly by prayerful, meditative Bible reading. Hearing from our Lord, communing with him, bringing his truth into the chambers of our souls, obeying what we read — this is a vital part, a sometimes-unimpressive part, to immortality.

We do not conquer Mount Everest or climb the treetops of the Amazon to receive special revelation and feed faith — we meet Jesus upon the narrow way, the hard way, the simple way of Bible meditation in the Spirit and prayer. Do we take it for granted? Some of us need to be asked: If Jesus dwelled in the Everglades or resided on the moon, and we were told we could hear from him, learn from him, and receive eternal life from him there, would you not make valiant efforts to go to him? Then why do we have three translations of the Bible in our homes that go unread?

As with Elisha, the word comes not in theatrics — not in fire, in thunder, in earthquake — but in a whisper. Will we hear it? As one commentator says, “God often tests us with small things” (Donald Wiseman, 1 and 2 Kings: An Introduction and Commentary, 220). Do not be deceived by the littleness of the ordinary means of grace into neglecting them.

Down to the River

This worn path to glory is exactly how it ought to be. Why? Because the story already has a Hero. Ours are not the shoulders to bear eternity; we are not the ones to crush the serpent’s skull; the spectacle was achieved by the God-man upon the cross and encored at his resurrection. As Naaman, we are not saved by our good or great works, before or after coming to faith; we are saved by his that no man may boast in the presence of God.

So, we quietly go down to the river, or down to the living room, or down to the church gathering, or just down to our knees, and receive from his spoils. We plunge again and again under the waters, and trust him to continue to heal us and sustain us from one degree of glory to the next. We obey his word and believe his promises that he shall finish what he began. We do not tire of this heavenly manna that sustains our souls in favor of Egypt’s steak. Even though we are not often doing anything extraordinary, something extraordinary is happening: God is walking with us, encouraging us, conforming us to his Son’s image, leading us home.

We do not do great things for salvation, nor do we benefit God at all with our wealth. He supplies all of our needs in the person and work of his Son, and gets the glory for it. But we do receive something if we continue upon this humble way: joy now and eternity with him.

As a 73-year old man, it’s okay for me to admit this. We older guys can be a real pain in the neck. For example, when a senior church member looks down on you, a young pastor, with a condescending eye. When your sermon, or your comment in a meeting, or whatever your contribution, doesn’t count for much. And why does this happen? You aren’t being unfaithful to Scripture. You aren’t lapsing into fallacious reasoning. In the moment, there seems to be only one reason why you don’t carry the weight you deserve: your youth. And there is nothing you can do about the sheer fact of your age.

But maybe there is. Paul, the older pastor, advises Timothy, the younger pastor, about this very problem: “Let no one despise you for your youth, but set the believers an example in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith, in purity” (1 Timothy 4:12).

Let’s think our way through this insightful verse, phrase by phrase. It’s in the Bible to help young pastors today.

Let No One Despise You for Your Youth

It’s not that the despisers consciously intend to diminish you. But still, they sometimes do. I respect Paul’s frankness in putting this problem right out on the table in plain view of his young friend: “Sadly, there are some people who will just plain despise you. I understand this insult. You do too.”

Any of us can cheapen, scorn, marginalize, roll our eyes at — these are the ideas behind the word despise — another person within the thoughts of our minds. The other person might have no awareness of what we’ve done. But still, in our mental categories, we relocate that person from serious to frivolous. Then we don’t have to deal with him anymore. This cruelty of heart is a knife-thrust into the body of Christ.

Paul fully expects Timothy, as a young pastor, to be on the receiving end of this foolishness. For example, the despisers might say things like, “Son, when you grow up, you’ll see things my way.” Or, “Son, I was a member of this church before you were born. What do you know?” It can take many forms.

“Don’t let your despisers live rent-free in your head.”

But the apostle, himself an older man, respects his young friend, puts his arm around Timothy’s shoulder, as it were, looks deeply into his eyes, and says quietly, “Don’t let your despisers live rent-free in your head. They have no idea who you are, what you offer, how much your ministry is worth. The Ancient of Days sure never speaks to you the way they do.”

Younger pastors — and older pastors! — should never allow uncomprehending people to define for them their identity and worth. Only God has the right to speak to us at that deep level. Here’s what he says: “You are precious in my eyes, and honored, and I love you” (Isaiah 43:4). Stabilized by the good news of our worth in the eyes of our Lord, any pastor can stand tall with dignity and keep going.

How then can younger pastors best respond to the inevitable slights?

Set the Believers an Example

“But set the believers an example,” Paul says. In other words, “Timothy, you can’t stop the unfairness. But you can still defeat it — and without becoming a jerk along the way. You can win by the undeniable reality of your consistent, publicly obvious example. Your despisers can count your years, but they cannot discount your maturity. Every church needs a grown-up in the room — always. You be the grown-up. It has nothing to do with age. It has everything to do with character.”

Pastor, your best answer to an insult — maybe not your only answer, but your best answer — is to embody the personal magnificence everyone in your church respects. Not that it’s easy. It is so tempting to mouth off at people who mouth off. We feel that itch inside for a quick remedy. But we all know Matthew Henry is right when he comments, “Those who teach by their doctrine must teach by their life, else they pull down with one hand what they build up with the other.”

God offers us deep wisdom in the biblical call to “the patient endurance that [is] in Jesus” (Revelation 1:9). Here is the insight: God uses time. God created time as his servant. And because you are God’s child, time is your servant also. In fact, “all things are yours” (1 Corinthians 3:21). So, the passage of time is working for you. While you keep going with patient endurance, plodding along in the power of the Spirit, not lashing back but doing the next right thing, your servant Mr. Time is quietly and successfully doing his behind-the-scenes job, moving events toward your vindication. You don’t have to make a satisfying outcome happen. God will make it happen, using his servant and your servant — time. Your exemplary character over time is a powerful answer to your detractors.

Yes, I know. We all hate patient waiting. Amazon Prime built its business on our impatience! But whenever we force a hurried victory, it always backfires on us. Humble waiting, filling in the interval with sustained integrity, creates no regrets, leaves no bitter aftertaste.

Here are the actionable areas of growth that can make you admired more and more in the eyes of older Christians:

Speech, Conduct, Love, Faith, Purity

“In speech,” because our words shape the culture of our church, moment by moment. And when the pastor’s words make the moment better, and the people in the room become more hopeful and settled and confident and united, that pastor, however young, will be admired. “The mouth of the righteous is a fountain of life” (Proverbs 10:11).

“In conduct,” because our magnanimous interactions with people in the church and in the community argue forcefully for our nobility of stature. In every conversation, whatever the topic, what’s really happening in that moment is the display of personal character. And no one can keep you from the conduct that even a cynic is compelled to respect.

“In love,” because the tender selflessness of love feels like the presence of the risen Christ. You might or might not be a great preacher of sermons, but every pastor can be a great lover of souls. When exhausted people drag themselves into church on a Sunday, as they do every Sunday, you be their gentle shepherd leading them to their ultimate Shepherd. They will thank you. And the tone of the whole church will change.

“Nothing is so breathtaking as a pastor who believes in God and walks with God.”

“In faith,” because nothing is so breathtaking as a pastor who believes in God and walks with God. I remember my dad quoting Ralph Cushman: “There is something magnificent about these prophet-dreamers who are so sure of God.” That’s you. Go ahead and show it. Your people will be inspired.

“In purity,” because in a predatory world, a man who isn’t out for himself, a man with whom vulnerable people are safe — that man will be sought after. And the younger he is, the more striking his purity will be. A young man with a fatherly heart for people? Anyone who disparages such a pastor will end up only embarrassing himself.

Setting an example in speech, conduct, love, faith, and purity — you don’t need money in the budget for that. You don’t need anyone’s permission to start. You are right now fully equipped in every essential to set an uplifting example for everyone in your church, for God’s glory.

It almost makes me feel sorry for your haughty critics. The future will be hard on them. But your future ministry will be more and more fruitful, because patient, gentle, exemplary saintliness is the greatest power in all the world. God is faithful to make it so — and to keep it so.

Andrew Walls (1928–2021) has been called the “most important person you don’t know.”1 He was a Scottish scholar with an Oxford pedigree who devoted much of his life to serving the African church and challenging the academic community to turn its attention to the remarkable growth of Christianity in the non-Western world.

The numbers are staggering. In the year 1900, some 82 percent of the world’s Christians lived in Europe and North America. By 1970, the number of Christians in the Global South had grown to more than 40 percent, reaching nearly 70 percent in 2020!2 Walls could feel the changes taking place around him while he was teaching church history in Nigeria in the 1950s and 1960s, and he remained active in teaching World Christianity right up until his death at the age of 93.3

How could historians make sense of the explosive growth of Christianity in the Global South?

Missions Is Not the Bomb

One of the many trends Walls noticed was that the church was growing in the main through indigenous witness and local revivals. This was instructive for teaching church history and understanding Christian missions. He insisted that scholars needed to place a greater focus on the African, Asian, and Latin American church in situ rather than simply relegating their entire story to a summary chapter on the history of missions.4 He pleaded with scholars to start teaching “church history” and stop teaching “clan history.”5

At the same time, Walls stressed that “it is difficult to imagine that the change [the rapid growth of Christianity in the Global South] could have occurred without the missionary movement.”6 And then he captured the importance of Christian missions in one sentence: “Missions were not the bomb, but they were the detonator, and as a result Africa and Asia and Latin America have become important theaters of Christian activity, the representative Christianity of the twenty-first century.”7 Missions had triggered the explosive growth of Christianity in the Global South.

Indispensable Detonator

Christian missions as the “detonator” for the explosive growth of Christianity is an insightful metaphor. On the one hand, it tames our pride, reminding missionaries (especially those from the West) that they are part, not the whole, of the work that God is doing in the global church. The Lord of the harvest has poured out his Spirit on all flesh and is using people all over the world to spread the gospel. The work of Western missionaries is only part of the story.

On the other hand, the “detonator” imagery infuses the entire church with a sense of urgency: someone must ignite the Spirit-primed explosion that will set the world aflame with the love of God. As John Piper has taught us, we aim in missions “to bring the nations into the white-hot enjoyment of God’s glory.”8 Missions is essential for this task.

God has been working in powerful ways through the missionary efforts of his people for two thousand years. When the Spirit of God came blowing in, setting tongues on fire in Jerusalem in the early first century, he translated the message into the languages of the earth. The miracle at Pentecost made clear that the good news was for all people “from every nation under heaven” (Acts 2:5). The Acts narrative shows that “word of God increased and multiplied” through missionaries and martyrs who could not remain quiet about the things they had “seen and heard” (Acts 4:20).

In the world of late antiquity, the Christian faith spread along Roman roads to the West, and silk routes to the East. To borrow from the mission historian Stephen Neill, these early witnesses to the gospel were possessed with a “burning conviction” that “a great event had burst upon them in creative power.”9 During the medieval period, contrary to popular imagination, the flame continued to spread through missionaries who followed Paul’s counsel to remain single so that they could offer their lives “with undivided devotion to the Lord” (1 Corinthians 7:35). Missionary monks gave up homes and families to carry the gospel to the “ends of the earth.” 10 During the Age of Discovery, following the European Reformations, Catholic and Protestant missionaries boarded ships, leaving kith and kin, bound for Africa, Asia, and the New World, inflamed by the love of Christ for the salvation of the world.

The evangelical revivals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries created an unprecedented wave of missionary fervor, and helped usher in the new era of world Christianity in our own day.

Igniting Transformation in the Dark

By the year 1900, there were some 62,000 cross-cultural missionaries, increasing to 240,000 by 1970, and some 420,000 by century’s end! 11 Most were young, more than half were women, and many left prestigious schools like the University of Cambridge to lay down their lives for the gospel.12

“Missions is the means God has chosen for igniting transformation in the dark corners of the world.”

Academic presses are now churning out research showing direct causation between missionary fervor and the new era of world Christianity. As it turns out, Barbara Kingsolver’s missionary caricature of a failed Southern Baptist missionary in the Congo is misleading. To quote Philip Jenkins, “The runaway success of Christian missions to Africa and Asia are all the more striking in view of the extraordinarily poor image that such activities possess in Western popular thought.”13 Missionaries set off an explosion that has changed the course of human history.14

The rapid growth of Christianity is cause for celebration, but not complacency. About 40 percent of the world’s population, or approximately 3.5 billion souls, remain culturally cut off from the gospel. The vast majority of these unreached people groups do not know a Christian, do not have access to the Scriptures in their own language, and do not live in proximity to a local church. Missions is the means God has chosen for igniting transformation in the dark corners of the world.15

Can Local Pastors Change the World?

I know from personal experience that one of the great perils of pastoral life is that we become so preoccupied with important matters in our local churches that we can fail to see the urgent needs in the world. It is instructive that the word parochialism, meaning “narrow-minded,” is derived from the Anglo-French word parish. Pastors can become so involved in their local parish that they become parochial parsons. It is easy to do. It can happen to any of us. If you are a pastor or a Christian leader, bringing change to the world may need to begin with you.

“We become so preoccupied our local churches that we can fail to see the urgent needs in the world.”

How might pastors help fan the flame of missions today? Take up and read in order to learn about the work God is doing in the world and the work that remains unfinished. These developments are not happening in a corner. Go and see the church at work in the world — and go to learn. Like Peter in Acts 10, eat and drink with your brothers and sisters and let God change you by your encounter with people in other lands. Encourage people you know to go on short-term trips, and use the help of experienced guides. Don’t just send your people to go paint the orphanage.16 Challenge your people to give to ignite change through giving to worthy causes, such as sending a missionary, translating the gospel into a local language, planting an indigenous church, or equipping underserved pastors, evangelists, and missionaries who have ready access to unreached people groups. Finally, send missionaries out, laying hands on no person quickly (1 Timothy 5:22). Combine zeal with knowledge (Proverbs 19:2).

Don’t waste your influence. Don’t let your people waste their lives. Fan the flame that is in you, and help start a blazing fire somewhere in the world.