The Pastor’s Private Prayer
Prayer, as Calvin puts it, is our chief expression of faith. Prayer is how faith is manifested and expressed. If you don’t believe there is a God or that you need God, then you don’t pray. But if you do believe there is a God who hears, if you believe that you need Him, then the way you express that belief is through prayer.
So far in this series on pastoral character, we’ve considered the role of the pastor’s piety and the pastor’s holiness upon his ministry. Those articles have largely been cautionary, warning pastors against the particular temptations that come in ministry. But what should a pastor cultivate positively in order to grow in pastoral character? Spurgeon’s first answer would likely be the importance of cultivating communion with Christ, expressed in the pastor’s private prayer.
The Problem: Ministerialism
One of the greatest dangers that the minister faces is the danger of what Spurgeon calls formalism or officialism or ministerialism. Listen to his description:
The worst [snare a minister can face] is the temptation to ministerialism — the tendency to read our Bibles as ministers, to pray as ministers, to get into doing the whole of our religion as not ourselves personally, but only relatively concerned in it. To lose the personality of repentance and faith is a loss indeed…
I hate ministerialism, yet I often find it creeping upon me. One gets inside a pulpit, and begins to feel that he is not as other men are; but I like, if I can, to preach as a sinner to sinners; as one saved by grace to tell the love which Christ had towards me, the chief of sinners, and “less than the least of all saints.” I do not doubt that, as soon as you get out your little book to take with you, you feel like a missionary, and not simply like a sinner saved by grace. But, I pray you, do not feel like a missionary; feel like a sinner who has been washed in the precious blood of Jesus. You will never do good if you go to your work simply because of your office, [rather than] because of your soul being in it, because your heart yearns toward sinners, because you must have them saved. Strive not against any habits that are good; but against that evil tendency which, somehow or other, Satan, who is exceedingly crafty, manages to cast over our very best habits.
In other words, even as we pursue holiness and fight sin, we have to keep the gospel central. We have to cultivate a deep awareness and sorrow over our personal sin and the temptations of our hearts. We have to live in dependence on God’s grace in Christ. And then we speak as sinners saved by grace. This is how our holiness becomes warm and attractive.
Apart from our own personal grasp of the gospel, all our efforts at piety and holiness will become a stumbling block to our own sanctification and ministry. The strange thing is that people don’t always notice ministerialism in their pastor. The unspiritual people in the congregation won’t mind that their pastor doesn’t demonstrate any spiritual life before them. Even while the minister is just keeping up appearances, a church can have a growing budget and the congregation can be entertained. But in the end, as far as the pastor is concerned, it’s all external rituals and no spiritual life.
Spurgeon describes one such situation:
I read the other day, that no phase of evil presented so marvelous a power for destruction, as the unconverted minister of a parish, with a £1200 organ, a choir of ungodly singers, and an aristocratic congregation. It was the opinion of the writer, that there could be no greater instrument for damnation out of hell than that. People go to their place of worship and sit down comfortably, and think they must be Christians, when all the time all that their religion consists in, is listening to an orator, having their ears tickled with music, and perhaps their eyes amused with graceful action and fashionable manners; the whole being no better than what they hear and see at the opera — not so good, perhaps, in point of aesthetic beauty, and not an atom more spiritual. Thousands are congratulating themselves, and even blessing God that they are devout worshippers, when at the same time they are living in an unregenerate Christless state, having the form of godliness, but denying the power thereof. He who presides over a system which aims at nothing higher than formalism, is far more a servant of the devil than a minister of God.
May such words never be said of our ministries.
The Answer: Private Prayer
So what’s the solution? How do we fight against formalism? We fight by cultivating our private prayer lives, our communion with God. And Spurgeon particularly emphasizes prayer… Not just Bible reading, but prayer, i.e. communion with Christ.
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I Am One of The Eighty-Five Percent Who Did Not Persist in Pastoral Ministry
After 4 years of wrestling with burnout, supported by loved ones and guided by mentors, I stand even more firm in Jesus’s gospel and love, although I am not ready to go back to ministry. Nevertheless, I can testify to God’s faithfulness amid these trials. He has brought healing in my first church, to my wife and two sons, and His Word and gospel have never been so intimate in my heart and soul.
Numerous scholarly works, podcasts, and leadership materials reference a well-known Duke University study that stated 85% of seminary graduates leave the pastoral ministry within 5 years of completing their studies. But rarely do we hear firsthand from one of these individuals.
Well, I am one of the 85% who did not persist in pastoral ministry.
Allow me to share my story, and if it is a familiar story to you, I pray that this will be an encouragement to your weary soul, and even if ever so slightly, give you hope into believing that God is working in and through you still to this day.
How I Became a Pastor
Back in my days as a seminary student, anyone in my life would have told you that I was born to be a pastor. After leaving my life of pursuing a career in medical sciences, when I heard God’s calling, I left behind everything and started pursuing the pastoral calling.
I spent endless hours and sleepless nights trying to make financial ends meet during my time as a seminary student, all the while serving as an interning pastor at my local church. For over 8 years of my adult life, my entire identity was wrapped around earning the title of being a pastor.
Eventually, within 4 years of graduating, I was offered a co-leading pastoral position at my home church in downtown Toronto. It was an exciting time for everyone, especially for those who sacrificed greatly, like my family, my fiancé, church leadership, and longtime congregation members.
By that time, being a pastor had become more than just a personality or vocation, but my entire identity. Everything in my life was so intricately tied to being a pastor. Almost immediately after beginning as a co-leading pastor, the weekly feedback and criticisms of my sermons, my leadership, comparisons to other churches, and complaints about the ministry began to break my soul deep within.
Just to be clear, these things existed in my life before becoming the co-lead pastor, but the intensity of how personally I took them to heart became that much greater. Eventually, instead of drawing from God’s daily grace and the power of the gospel, I began to try and solve all the issues on my own strengths. Not long after, I fell into a deep depression believing I was a bad pastor.
How Depression Affected Me
That deep depression led to an abrupt stop in my ability to continue pastoring, and before my 5th year as a graduate and less than 1 year into my co-leading role at the church, I realized I could not continue.
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It May Be Music to Your Ears, But What About to Your Heart?
Written by Darrell B. Harrison |
Saturday, August 19, 2023
Scripture teaches that all good gifts come from God (Eccl. 2:24-25; 1 Tim. 6:17b), and music is one of God’s good gifts. Sadly, however, many professing Christians today view music as an idol, a “golden calf” that they serve and worship and that they do not want to part with (Ex. 32:4). But as those who have been spiritually reborn in Christ (2 Cor. 5:17; Gal. 2:20), we must not carry on as if music, or any other medium of entertainment in which we engage, is somehow a separate area of our lives to which God’s Word does not apply.As professing Christians, the music we choose to listen to can have an adverse effect in terms of our walk with, and witness for, Jesus Christ. Regardless of genre, music can be a tool the enemy uses to draw believers into a state of dullness and apathy about the things of God which, consequently, can impede our spiritual growth (Col. 1:10; 1 Pet. 2:2; 2 Pet. 3:18). As the seventeenth-century Puritan, William Spurstowe (1605-1666), warns in his book The Wiles of Satan,
“Satan is wholly bent to evil, and makes it his only study to dive and search into men so that he may better fasten his temptations upon them. . . . He does not go forward a step without noting every man’s estate, temper, age, calling, and company so that he may with greater advantage tempt to evil, and thereby bring men into the same misery and condition as himself.”[4]
Music, as well as other forms of media, is not merely a static proposition. What I mean is that the music we choose to listen to never only enters our ears and that is as far as it goes. It is also through our ears that music—and the messages it conveys—enters our minds and, subsequently, our hearts.
There is a dimensional relationship between the music we listen to, our mind, and our heart (1 Sam. 16:23; Ps. 71:23; Prov. 25:20; 1 Cor. 14:15). That is why biblical discernment is so important (Phil. 1:9-10). As Dr. Burk Parsons, senior pastor of Saint Andrew’s Chapel in Sanford, Florida, writes in the July 2017 issue of Tabletalk magazine,
“Entertainment affects our minds, our homes, our culture, and our churches. Consequently, we must be vigilant as we use discernment in how we enjoy entertainment—looking to the light of God’s Word to guide us and inform our consciences.”[1]
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Stop Calling Faithfulness a Sacrifice
We need to stop talking about faithfulness as sacrifice. It isn’t. It is for our own good that we obey the commands of Christ. It is in full knowledge that there is something better for us in being faithful.
We need to stop calling obedience and faithfulness to the commands of Christ “sacrifice”. There, I said it. It is not sacrifice to do what Jesus asks us to do. Full stop.
There are a bunch of reasons we need to stop this. First, we subtly convey God’s commands to be hard and burdensome. But Jesus specifically said, ‘my yoke is easy and my burden in light’ (Matthew 11:30). John tells us ‘this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome” (1 John 5:3). The Bible insists these things are NOT hard. When we call our obedience and faithfulness a matter of sacrifice, we suggest otherwise.
Second, not only do we suggest Jesus’ commands are difficult and burdensome when he says they aren’t, but we also convey that they are not fundamentally good when we call it a sacrifice to do them. The reason Jesus commands the things he does is not because he loves bossing us about. It is because he ultimately wants our good. Indeed, his commands are good because he is good. But when we call it a sacrifice to obey, we are suggesting that we are having to give up something good for the sake of Christ.
But this simply isn’t true. When we reject sin, we are giving up something bad for us and pursuing what is specifically good for us. We are shunning the sin that would ensnare and ruin us and pursuing what Jesus says makes for human flourishing. The language of sacrifice suggests Jesus is keeping us from good stuff and we nobly give it up because we love him and he wants us not to do it. But actually, we are rejecting what will damage us and obeying Jesus because his commands keep us from what will not serve our good.Related Posts:
