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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Are you stuck in sin? The Lord is able and willing to deliver you! Ask him to convict you of the sin of unbelief and to impress his Word deep into your heart. Only in Heaven will there be complete freedom from the possibility of sinning. But even in this life, Jesus, who paid the penalty for our sin, will break the enslaving power of canceled sin!

“There just isn’t anything else I can say.” My counselor looked at me kindly, but with a very serious face. “If you continue in this pattern, I will still be your friend. But there isn’t anything new I can say to help you other than what I’ve already said.”
Many of us know how hard it is to work up the courage to tell someone for the very first time about a secret sin habit. We’ll often be encouraged to “get help.” But what are we supposed to do when we’ve repeatedly received help yet are still enslaved to habitual sin?
For almost two years, I was stuck in an addictive pattern of sin. Two women spent countless hours giving me biblical counsel, I talked to Ellen Dykas more than once and worked through the entirety of Sexual Sanity for Women. Over time, I became aware that what I was doing was truly wrong and took practical steps to resist temptation. But I kept returning to the same sin despite the wealth of love and biblical teaching that had been poured into me. I felt more and more hopeless about ever breaking free. Nobody, including me, could make me stop.
“You Need a Word from God”
After my counselor told me she didn’t have anything new to say to me, she said I needed “a word from God.” She did not mean hearing God’s voice audibly but having God himself teach me through his Word by impressing it deep into my heart. I needed more than simply being convicted by a specific verse or passage. I needed a word from God that would be life changing—something I would never forget.
Both of us began to pray that the Lord would do this special work in me. Some days I prayed for it very earnestly. Other times, though I prayed, I did so in a rather weak, hopeless way. It was getting harder and harder to believe that something like this could actually happen.
An Endless Pattern of Sin
From the age of 13, through college, and well into my 30s, I had sexual struggles that I kept hidden. At times, I would confess specific sins to the Lord. But for many years I didn’t realize I had a much bigger problem than individual times of giving in to temptation. Heart attitudes that I didn’t think about were driving my actions, and I didn’t realize how enslaved I was to certain habits until I tried to give them up.
One day I was in a very bad mood and went online deliberately looking for what could best be described as the “counsel of the ungodly.” I chose to follow that counsel, and to this day I regret it greatly. That was the beginning of the two-year period of a terribly addictive habit.
Those two years were characterized by a repeating pattern of sin, confession, avoiding sin, drifting spiritually, experiencing intense temptation, and yielding to it once again. I would be like a sane, spiritually-minded Christian one moment and a selfish, stubborn, confused person the next, bringing the reality of my relationship with God into question.
As a child, I professed faith in Christ, and certain things in my life seemed to be evidence of true belief. However, I repeatedly questioned the reality of my salvation because of the power of this sin habit and my seeming inability to break free from it. I knew that, though believers will sin, true believers are no longer mastered by sin because they have died to sin and are alive in Christ (Romans 6).
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Friends, our cultural flashpoints have been seen before. They are precedented. Our fathers and mothers in the faith faced a cultural onslaught that makes ours tame by comparison. And they overcame. Yes, often through great suffering and persecution. And we ought to consider their example. 

I think I am becoming more and more known for my phrase, “These are precedented times.” It is one of my missions in life to help people avoid cultural anxiety and panic, the roots of which are often the sense that the world has never before seen the challenges we face, and the fruits of which are things like desperately clinging to bad people and bad ideas (e.g., Donald Trump, “Christian” Nationalism).
That said, there is a sense in which our challenges are new. They are relatively new for us. It is jarring to live in a culture saturated for so long in Christian atmosphere suddenly obsessed with things like cross-dressing and genital mutilation. In the context of the Christian west this is a very new development. But in the context of pagan societies, it is as old as fallen time: androgyny, cross-dressing, and bodily mutilation has always gone hand-in-hand with paganism. You can read all about it here.
Our current cultural upheavals are best seen as symptoms of a deeper problem. The last wisps of Christendom’s oxygen are fading and we are experiencing the re-paganization of the Western world. You can read all about that in Steven Smith’s Pagans & Christians in the City: Culture Wars From the Tiber to the Potomac. Or, for a more concrete “on the ground” view, Tara Isabella Burton’s Strange Rites: New Religions For a Godless World. The “old gods” never really went away. They went underground, and they are making a strong reemergence right before our eyes.
And what do they care about? Well, what are our cultural flashpoints? Here are my top three. First, racial discord—how can different peoples coexist and settle their grievances? This is manifest in the rise of Critical Theory, and its answers do more to stoke grievances between people groups than settle them. Abortion makes the top three, too, going by the moniker “bodily autonomy.” And, finally, total sexual autonomy; the right to sleep with whomever one wants, to morph and bend one’s sexual behavior and to mutilate one’s body in essence.
Racial identity, disposal of unwanted children, and free sex. Those are the top priorities for a significant segment of western society—perhaps even half of society.
Here is a CNN report just this week: “Under strict abortion law, Texas had nearly 10,000 more births than expected in last nine months of 2022, research suggests.” The article is a fairly straightforward recitation of the facts, but the online world of progressivism put a pretty strong opinion spin on the story: namely, that this is some kind of tragedy. How awful that ten thousand babies were allowed to be born in the oppressive, theocratic state of Texas! Those babies represent, you see, a violation of a woman’s bodily autonomy.
This all brings me to what I really want to share with you this week. The other day I was reading a translation of a very ancient document and was reminded—and just completely astonished—of how … precedented our times are. It was written in the context of the Greco-Roman pagan world. No one knows for certain the identity of its author (although Charles Hill has argued that it’s Polycarp). It simply says, in Greek: “Mathetes.” That could certainly be his name, but “mathetes” in Greek simply means “Disciple.” It could be a term used to preserve anonymity; it is written by a disciple of Jesus.
“Mathetes” wrote a letter to someone named “Diognetus,” and scholars generally date this letter to around A.D. 130—one thousand, nine hundred years ago. Why did he write it? Because this “Diognetus,” apparently a pagan of some sort, was curious about this newfangled group of people called “Christians.” Mathetes writes:
Since I see the, most excellent Diognetus, exceedingly desirous to learn the mode of worshipping God prevalent among the Christians, and inquiring very carefully and earnestly concerning them, what God they trust in, and what form of religion they observe […] I cordially welcome this thy desire, and I implore God, who enables us both to speak and to hear, to grant to me so to speak, that, above all, I may hear you have been edified, and to you so to hear, that I who speak may have no cause of regret for having done so.
Just think of that. We have a document from the very earliest days of the Christian movement, the days when Christians were an extreme minority often suffering brutal persecution. And the document describes who Christians are.
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