Don’t be a pastor if you want a low-stress job. Remember the doctrine of providence. In addition to this being par for the pastoral course, they aren’t random sand traps. Nothing is outside of God’s sovereign control. God in his infinite power upholds, directs, disposes, and governs all creatures and things.” (2LCF 5:1) The trials are not merely permitted; they are ordained, for our good and his glory (James 1:2–3; Rom. 8:28). Far from being accidental, random, or pointless—they are, like everything else, according to the counsel of his will, to the praise of his glory (Eph. 1:11–12).  

[Note: this post is part of the series on enduring in ministry. Other posts can be found here]
It’s early morning, and you wake up with a knot in your stomach. Thinking about the difficult conversations from the day before has you reeling. You head over to make a cup of coffee and check your phone. Attempting to resist the inbox and get your mind on something else, you check the news for a few minutes. But soon enough, you give in and check your email. Two messages in there get your attention. The first is a cryptic request for a meeting from a person with whom you suspect there is trouble. And the other a summary of the giving trend, reflecting a substantial deficit for the year. You take a sip of coffee and wince. You want to return to bed, and the day hasn’t started. 
And right here, you have a choice to make. You may not realize it, but it’s an important decision. How are you going to respond to this?
What’s going on? You’re experiencing the stress of pastoral ministry. If you want to endure long-term, you have to be able to identify if and properly deal with it.
A Description of the Problem
Stress is our body’s response to difficulty. These are often undesirable circumstances. And if you think about it for a minute, pastoral ministry has many of these types of situations. 
Any of the following would be considered normal or routine in a 6–12 month span of ministry:

Seeing a church member fall into sin leading him away from Christ.
Watching a marriage implode over sin.
Trying to bring healing after abuse.
Counseling a grieving family after the death of a loved one.
Having key families leave your church.
Enduring uncharitable and untrue characterizations of your motives.
Watching church members argue about peripheral matters.
Receiving the estimate for the repair project in the church.
Looking at the calendar and seeing Sunday getting closer.

This is the pastor’s life, week after week, month after month, year after year. Like waves bringing debris from the sea, the pastor’s life is a steady wave of the residue from the fall.  
Any one of these, by themselves, gets our attention. But what if you get them in pairs or triplets or more?
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“Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever,” says the Westminster Shorter Catechism. But which doctrine describes how He brings us into a relationship so that we might enjoy Him? Justification by God’s grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone.
This marvelous centerground of the biblical gospel proves the all-sufficiency of Christ the only Savior. Through it, God is glorified as utterly merciful and good, as both supremely holy and compassionate—and therefore people can find their comfort and delight in Him. Through this doctrine, even struggling believers can know a firm standing before God, gleefully knowing Him as their “Abba, Father,” confident that He is powerful to save and to keep us to the uttermost.
Comfort and Joy
To grasp this, consider how differently Roman Catholic and Reformation theologies think of our assurance of salvation. Can a believer know he is saved?
On the side of the Reformation, the Puritan Richard Sibbes argued that without such assurance, we simply cannot live Christian lives as God would have us. God, he said, wants us to be thankful, cheerful, rejoicing, and strong in faith, but we will be none of these things unless we are sure that God and Christ are ours for good.
There be many duties and dispositions that God requires which we can not be in without assurance of salvation on good grounds. What is that? God bids us be thankful in all things. How can I know that, unless I know God is mine and Christ is mine? . . . God enjoineth us to rejoice. “Rejoice, and again I say, rejoice,” Philip, iv. 4. Can a man rejoice that his name is written in heaven, and not know his name is written there? . . . Alas! how can I perform cheerful service to God, when I doubt whether he be my God and Father or no? . . . God requires a disposition in us that we should be full of encouragements, and strong in the Lord; and that we should be courageous for his cause in withstanding his enemies and our enemies. How can there be courage in resisting our corruptions, Satan’s temptations? How can there be courage in suffering persecution and crosses in the world, if there be not some particular interest we have in Christ and in God?
Yet the very confidence that Sibbes upheld as a Christian privilege was damned by Roman Catholic theology as the sin of presumption. It was precisely one of the charges made against Joan of Arc at her trial in 1431. There, the judges proclaimed:
This woman sins when she says she is as certain of being received into Paradise as if she were already a partaker of . . . glory, seeing that on this earthly journey no pilgrim knows if he is worthy of glory or of punishment, which the sovereign judge alone can tell.
That judgment made complete sense within the logic of the Roman Catholic system: if we can enter heaven only because we have (by God’s enabling grace) become personally worthy of it, of course nobody can be sure. By that line of reasoning, I can only have as much confidence in heaven as I have confidence in my own sinlessness.

Jesus came to set us free, not enslave us to the law. All of the Protestant Reformers agreed upon this point and spoke of its importance. This is the doctrine by which the church stands or falls. If Christian liberty is not the defining characteristic of the Christian life, then the doctrine of justification is not properly understood. 

If anything is worth defending it is Christian freedom.  In the face of the threat to such liberty posed by the Judaizers, Paul issues a stern warning to the Galatians– “for freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery” (Galatians 5:1).  Anyone who seeks to be justified by obedience to the law of Moses, through receiving circumcision, through the keeping of Jewish dietary laws, or in observing the Jewish religious calendar, will fall from grace and come under God’s curse (Galatians 5:4).[1] 
Paul has already pointed out that those who seek to be justified on the basis of works of law (Galatians 2:16), or who place their confidence in what Paul identifies as the basic principles of the world (stoichiea) will find themselves in eternal danger.  In Galatians 5:1-12, Paul contrasts the Judaizing campaign of enslavement to the law with Christian liberty in Christ.  This is yet another important plank in his case against the Judaizers.
In the first four chapters of Galatians, Paul issues several responses to Judaizing legalism.  In chapter 5, we move into what some identify as the “practical section” of Paul’s Galatian letter, when the apostle takes up the practice of Christian liberty and exhorts the Galatians to defend it.[2]  While Paul does change focus a bit from those redemptive historical events which culminate in the death of Jesus and justification through faith, here he describes the Christian life in light of the gospel revealed to him by Jesus Christ.[3]  The apostle continues to set out sharp contrasts between opposing positions.  Readers of Galatians are now well aware that Paul is fond of antithesis (contrast) as a rhetorical critique and he uses it repeatedly. 
Following up his analogy between Hagar and Sarah in Galatians 4:21-4:31, when Paul turned the Jewish understanding of redemptive history on its head, in Galatians 5:1-12, he contrasts faith and works yet again, proving that they are diametrically opposed to the other when it comes to the justification of sinners.  To seek to be justified by works of law or through observing of dietary laws, feast days, or circumcision, is to return to slavery to sin and bondage to the basic principles which characterize this present evil age.  This is a very serious misstep since Jesus Christ came for the purpose of setting us free from bondage to sin and the law.  The gravity of this misstep is identified in verse 1 of chapter 5, when Paul challenges the Galatians with the uncompromising declaration, “for freedom Christ has set us free.” 
This is where the Christian life begins for the Galatians and the readers of this epistle–with freedom from the guilt of sin and its enslaving power.  Christian freedom is a central concept in terms of our standing before God, as well as a major theme in the Galatian letter.[4]  The agitators in Antioch and Galatia deplore Paul’s stress on Christian freedom and see it as the chief sign of a low bar of entrance for Gentiles and an affront to the traditions of their fathers.
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