Written by Nicholas T. Batzig |
Monday, April 15, 2024
The ultimate encouragement to help ministers press through the discouragements they experience when they face trials and challenges is that we were created, redeemed and called into ministry in order to bring glory to Christ. The cry of the ministers heart must ever be, “He must increase, I must decrease.” The ministries to which we have been called by God are not for our own glory. So often the discouragements that ministers feel are on account of a wrong view of ministry.

It is the common lot of those God has called into gospel ministry to become discouraged on account of the challenges and trials that come from serving as a pastor. I can almost always sense when a brother is weighed down by the pressures, demands, and discouragements that come with serving as a pastor of a congregation, because I have known them throughout my own pastoral service. The apostle Paul intimated the challenges that pastors face in the church when he added to the external opposition he experienced from the unbelieving world the care that he had for the church. He wrote, “apart from other things, there is the daily pressure on me of my anxiety for all the churches” (2 Cor. 11:28). So what are ministers to do when they feel overwhelmed by the discouragements of ministry? Here are a seven important biblical truths to keep in mind: 

Remember your need to be sanctified. Just as marriage helps us recognize our need for sanctification in areas that we might not otherwise have seen, so too does pastoral ministry. When the hardships and trials come, we must remember that we need to be sanctified in areas of our lives that we might not have otherwise seen were the trials and challenges not there. For instance, pastors might not realize sinful anger that remains in their hearts until some injustice takes place in the church and that anger begins to well up within. Pastors may not recognize their need to listen better or communicate better until some issue arises that helps them see their own sinful deficiencies. God may have placed this trial or challenge in your ministry to sanctify you as a pastor.
Remember your need to grow in wisdom. Just as we need sanctification, pastors need wisdom. A faithful pastor will want to grow as a wise shepherd of the flock. Solomon asked the Lord for wisdom above everything else because he wanted to pastor God’s people with great skill (1 Kings 3:6-9). I have, many times, sought out older and wiser men for counsel as I face trials and challenges in ministry; and, I hope that, to some degree, I am growing in wisdom as I press through one challenge and head into another. The experience gleaned from both successes and failures often brings with it a greater measure of wisdom. We learn this from the book of Ecclesiastes. There were things that Solomon learned from the experiences of life. Often the trials and challenges of ministry serve as the vehicle by which God grows ministers in wisdom.
Remember your insufficiency for ministry. The Apostle Paul repeatedly told the members of the church in Corinth that ministers are insufficient, in and of themselves, for ministry (2 Cor. 2:16; 3:5: 12:9). This was necessary because there were certain “super apostles” who cast aspersions on the Apostle Paul were boasting as if they were sufficient. When trials and challenges come, ministers feel their own insufficiency. In the midst of challenges with congregants, ministers remember that they cannot change the hearts of the people to whom God has sent them to shepherd. In many cases, the only course of action in a particular trial is go to the throne of grace and plead with the Lord to bring whatever we are facing to a felicitous end.

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These debates about language and terminology don’t seem like a big deal to many. But they are the opening battle in the progressive war to change society’s perception of reality. We would do well to pay very close attention.

I am keenly aware of how easy it is, at this stage in the sexual revolution, to produce commentary that seems prone to panic or is designed to provoke anger or fear. But I also think that it is essential, considering the breathtaking and lightning-fast speed of cultural change over the last ten years, to keep our eyes wide open. Remember: We were told for decades that much of what has occurred over the past few years was impossible by the very people working to bring it about.
With that stated, I would like to draw your attention to a story from a CBS affiliate revealing that the Sex Offender Management Board in Colorado, which sets standards for the state, voted on November 22 to abandon the term “sex offender” to something more “person-first.” From CBS:
The Sex Offender Management Board, which is made up of everyone from public defenders to prosecutors, sets standards and guidelines for treatment providers so the new terminology will only be used in that context. It doesn’t change the term sex offender in law or the criminal justice system, but some worry it’s a step in that direction.
“I’m involved today after hearing that it would be improper or offensive in some manner for me to refer to the man who raped me, as a sex offender,” Kimberly Corbin, a rape survivor, told KCNC-TV in Denver.
Corbin is among those who spoke out against changing the term sex offender to something less stigmatizing, saying labels based on traits people can’t control is one thing. “It’s very, very damaging for those who people who are labeled when it has to do with gender, race, sexuality, ability, but those are not their choices, the biggest thing for me is these are choices that sex offenders make,” she said.
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Echol’s book is not a theology of death, yet teaches that God reigns over death and provides ultimate hope beyond it. This is a beautiful, hopeful little book and one I’m glad to recommend.

I don’t know what it is like to lose a spouse. I don’t know what it is like to bid farewell to the person with whom I’ve built a home and had a family and shared a life. I don’t know the unique griefs, the unique sorrows, the unique traumas that come with so devastating a separation. On the one hand I can’t know without actually enduring it myself, but on the other hand, I can learn from those who have experienced it and have recorded it. I can learn so I can better serve those in my life who are enduring this trial.
Mary Echols lost her husband very suddenly and unexpectedly after he suffered a heart attack. And in the aftermath of her loss she was desperate to find out how much of her experience of loss was typical. “I began looking for something I could read that would allow me into someone else’s journey and help me to see that the little things I was stressing over were okay,” she says. “I needed to know that someone else couldn’t change the sheets, that someone else washed her spouse’s clothes with hers, that someone else would open his bathroom drawer that held hairbrush, aftershave, cologne, and breathe in his scent. I needed to have these things validated!” Because she couldn’t find anything, she decided to journal her journey and the result is And Then There Was One: An Emotionally Raw Journey Through Spousal Grief.
The book’s format is what I have found typical for a book that has been written in a time of deep grief in that it is comprised of short thoughts that are often very urgent and very poignant. Some of it is written as if to her husband, some as if to herself, and some as if to an unknown reader like you and me. She recounts returning home to find her husband slumped in his chair and tells, how though she was a seasoned RN, nothing had prepared her for the moment. She tells about the early hours in which, as if in a terrible dream, she went through the motions of calling her children, and the early days in which she cried herself to sleep in a bed that was now cold and empty.
But time passes and she finds that, though time does not heal all wounds (as some insensitively suggest) it does provide space in which healing can begin to take place. She observes that the initial stages of healing seem to proceed in six-week increments where every six weeks she realizes she has begun to see some change in herself, some new ability, some new acceptance. She begins to do those things all grieving spouses must—write thank you notes to people who have brought her a meal, box up her husband’s possessions, learn to shop for one instead of two.
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