“Tell Bud, ministry isn’t everything. Jesus is.”

Ray Ortlund Jr. tells the story of his father’s last words for him. Ray and his wife were overseas on July 22, 2007, when Ray Sr. awoke in his hospital room in Newport Beach, California, and realized that day would be his last. The rest of the family gathered to read Scripture and sing. Then the dying patriarch went around the room addressing his beloved with final blessings and admonitions.

“Bud” wasn’t in the room, so Ray Sr. left these memorable, and beautiful, last words to pass along to the son who had followed him into full-time ministry.

For two decades, beginning in the late fifties, Ray Sr. had been pastor of Lake Avenue Congregational Church in Pasadena, where he had pastored a young seminarian named John Piper and convinced him that, despite the talk of the late sixties, the local church had a future, and always would. Ray Sr.’s name and signature are affixed to Piper’s ordination certificate dated June 8, 1975.

Ray Sr. loved the church, and gave decades of his life to full-time Christian ministry. So, on his deathbed in 2007, he was no armchair critic throwing shade on his beloved son. But he was a man who knew his own heart, and his son’s. He knew both the remarkable joys of pastoral work and the attendant dangers. And he knew where his final counsel should terminate: on the one who is the sovereign Joy.

Good Work, Great Joys

At the outset of the pastor-elder qualifications, the apostle talks joy: “If anyone aspires to the office of overseer, he desires a noble task” (1 Timothy 3:1). This labor is bound up with aspiration, desire, joy.

“Noble task” here is literally “good work.” He desires a good work. Christian ministry is good work — and work to be done by those who desire it. Ministry is not for those who don’t really want to do it but can exercise their will to make the sacrifice for Jesus. Rather, in this calling, aspiration and the desire for joy are nonnegotiable.

In the pastoral vocation, as distinct from other callings, laboring from joy, with joy, and for joy is essential. According to Hebrews 13:17, pastors must labor “with joy and not with groaning” if they are to be an “advantage” to their people’s faith, rather than a disadvantage. So too Peter requires that pastor-elders work “not under compulsion, but willingly, as God would have you; not for shameful gain, but eagerly” (1 Peter 5:2).

Christian ministry is good work, and often joyful, to be undertaken by those who desire and anticipate the joys that will make its many hardships sufferable. Yet in such good and joy-giving work lies a danger. It’s the good, more often than the overtly evil, that inches its way past Christ himself as foremost in the Christian minister’s heart.

Ministry Joys, Amen

Jesus himself puts his finger, and surpassingly powerful words, on this precise point in Luke 10:20.

“In the pastoral vocation, as distinct from other callings, laboring from joy, with joy, and for joy is essential.”

Jesus had sent six dozen “others,” beyond the twelve disciples, “on ahead of him, two by two, into every town and place where he himself was about to go” (Luke 10:1). He commissioned these 72 with solemnity, warning them about rejection and being “as lambs in the midst of wolves” (Luke 10:2–16). Yet their training exercise proved far more fruitful than they might have anticipated, and they were thrilled. They return with joy, exclaiming, “Lord, even the demons are subject to us in your name!” (Luke 10:17).

Jesus, the master teacher, seizes upon the importance of this moment. Here is an opportunity to leave an impression for a lifetime, and for the whole church age. To be sure, it is no evil to rejoice in ministry fruit, to find joy in what God Almighty graciously chooses to accomplish through his people in the lives of others, whether in preaching and teaching, or offering cold water, or dispatching demons.

Here the 72 marvel, in part, at “even the demons.” Their joys were not only those of steady-stream, ordinary ministry but the pulsing thrills of the extraordinary, the delight of the unexpected, the felt-sense of supernatural power. Clearly their ministry had been fruitful. The 72 were not mistaken in what they observed and reported. Jesus affirms it, and their joy: “Behold, I have given you authority to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy” (Luke 10:19). “Yes,” Jesus says, in effect. “These are real joys and good ones. It is right to rejoice at seeing God’s kingdom advance and oppressed souls set free.”

Then comes the twist.

Ten Thousand Times Better

Jesus stuns the delighted ministers by transposing their song into a different register. He honors ministry joys, and does so by taking them up into heaven, making the moment electric by drawing attention to what is even more important:

Nevertheless, do not rejoice in this, that the spirits are subject to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven. (Luke 10:20)

Surprising as it may be, spirits subject to you is really a small thing in Jesus’s way of reckoning. Even greater than what God does through his ministers, even over supernatural powers, is what he does for them. Far surpassing a ministry name below is the etching of their names above. With the declaration “your names are written in heaven,” Jesus puts ministry joys in their place — for the 72 and for us — not by talking them down, but by talking up something even better.

How much better? As good and right as it can be to rejoice in ministry fruit, here Jesus would have us feel the force of the contrast. He says, “Rejoice not in this . . .” Jesus does not oppose ministry joys, or charge us, universally, to never rejoice in them. Rather, Luke 10:20 is an acutely comparative statement, cast in these simple, stark terms to emphasize how much greater our rejoicing can be, should be, will be, in what God does for us than in what he chooses to do through us.

Which is why “names written in heaven” matters so much.

Where We Enjoy God Himself

“Names written in heaven” is so significant because God himself, in Christ, is the sovereign Joy, the Joy of all joys, and heaven is where he is. “Names written in heaven” is the surpassingly superior joy not because heaven gives us all that our hearts want apart from God, but because there, in the immediate presence of God, we get proximity to him, closeness to him, unhindered enjoyment of him.

“The heart of Christian ministry is the person and work of Christ, not the person and work of the minister.”

In heaven we get God himself. Heaven is where, finally, the many barriers and distractions and veils of earth are removed, that we, without further obstruction and distortion, might more fully know and enjoy the one we were made to know and enjoy.

Which brings us back to the dangers that accompany ministry joys, as good and important as they are.

Made for More Than Ministry

When working for Christ takes the place of Christ himself as the chief enjoyment in the soul, the shift is both subtle and significant. The incremental incursions can be so small as to be hardly recognizable at first, but if the pattern persists, the long arc will be utterly devastating — to the minister himself and to his people. Paul thought it perilous enough to issue repeated warnings to ministers to pay careful attention not only to the flock and to their teaching but to themselves. “Pay careful attention to yourselves” (Acts 20:28). “Keep a close watch on yourself” (1 Timothy 4:16).

Christian ministry is undermined, and soon utterly corrupted and ruined, when the ministry itself becomes first and foremost in the soul. The nature of Christian ministry is such that it cannot long operate, and will not in the end prove fruitful (no matter how successful it seems in the moment), if it turns in on itself as the sovereign joy. The very nature of Christian ministry is that the person and work of Christ himself is the origin and essence, not the person and work of the minister for him. The minister’s work is important, but as a second principle; Christ’s work, and Christ himself, is vital as the first and final principle.

Ministry for the King can be treasonous if it becomes a replacement of the King himself. And the peril is in how subtle and common a shift it is, even for the healthiest of Christian workers. Yet we have this hope: how readily the hearts of healthy ministers fly back to their first love when awakened to marks of the subtle shift.

Practically, the return can happen each new morning, with our nose in the humbling word and prayer. It comes through knowing our sin and being honest about our ongoing failures, weaknesses, and needs for change. It comes, then, through never letting the world-changing weight and wonder of Matthew 9:2 become old hat: “Take heart, my son; your sins are forgiven.” And apart from our initiative, it comes through God’s special brew of providence in our lives, his particular humbling moments, seasons, and conditions for each of us. He has his ways. For some, it’s marriage or parenting. For others, it’s finances. For others still, disease, disability, chronic pain, the devastating setback.

Ministry Isn’t Everything

Ray Sr.’s final words to “Bud” were perceptive. And much like Jesus’s own to the 72. And every pastor and minister and missionary — all those in full-time ministry vocations and beyond, in all posts of formal and informal labor — will do well to heed them from Ray Sr., as Bud did, and all the more from Jesus.

Jesus is the Joy of all our joys. Apart from him as central and supreme, ministry joys soon hollow and spoil. Yet, with the King of kings himself on the throne of our soul, the ministry joys of sharing him with others are real and substantial, and continually lead us back to him.

If you have strained or broken relationships with parents (even deceased ones), how can you forgive them for their sinful failings and defects? How can you learn to view them through gracious lenses?

I’m not a trained counselor, but I had a strained relationship with my dad (who died in 1984), and over the last few years I have walked a slow journey toward understanding, mercy, and forgiveness. So let me try to answer these two questions by sharing some parts of my story. My story is unique, as is everyone’s. But perhaps, as you consider the path God has led me down, your own next steps will become clearer.

How Can I Forgive?

Let’s start with the question of forgiveness. It’s easier to forgive when we can see some of the benefits a bad experience brought. Since my father did not abuse me or harm me in the ways we sometimes read about in newspapers — others have it tougher — I eventually realized that my father’s defects actually made my life easier in three ways: easier to feel successful, easier to do what I wanted, and easier, through God’s grace, to profess Christ.

Good from the Bad

It was easier to feel successful because, as I grew up, my mother constantly disparaged my father, essentially labeling him a lazy loser. That wasn’t fair: he worked consistently for forty years, didn’t get drunk, and didn’t beat her — but he was also an underachieving Harvard graduate. She didn’t respect him because he didn’t get the respect she thought he deserved.

The other day, half a century after seeing it in a theater, I streamed Love Story, set at Harvard. A successful student-athlete there has an ultra-strained relationship with his father, an old-money, elite lawyer who competed in the 1928 Olympics. The son, who calls his dad “Sir,” has a high bar to leap and feels he can never meet Sir’s expectations. I, on the other hand, could feel successful by leaping over a low bar. That’s not bad.

My dad was not absent, but he was distant. I suffered in some ways as a result, but I also gained independence by not caring much what my father thought. I left Judaism at age fourteen without worrying about his disapproval. Later I could tell him about my coming to faith in Christ and my upcoming marriage to a shicksa, a non-Jew, without concern about his disapproval.

I believe I’d have had the guts and good sense to marry Susan regardless, but a few Jews with good paternal relationships become petrified at that point. More are lassoed by Jesus but keep tugging on the rope — or they at least keep their changed thinking secret to avoid upsetting parents. That’s not sensible, since Yeshua proclaimed his Jewishness as he said he’s the Christ. Either way, I never had that problem.

Unseen Sacrifices

Forgiveness in Christianity, of course, means more than relenting in resenting: it involves sacrifice. God forgives us because of Christ’s supreme expression of love. The famous line in Love Story is “love means never having to say you’re sorry,” but I truly love my father only by sacrificing my pride and being sorry for never thanking him for all he did for me.

“Forgiveness in Christianity means more than relenting in resenting: it involves sacrifice.”

His gift started with giving me life, of course, and continued to his material provision for me. I was able to graduate from an expensive college with almost no debt. My father had no car until he was thirty, but I grew up with driving privileges and did not have to pay for them. He grew up poor during the Depression, but he made sure his family had a home. We never went hungry.

The intangibles, though, are now more tangible to me. My research into his experiences leaves me 80 percent sure that he faced abundant anti-Semitism as a teenager. He never told me about that. I’m 90 percent sure that immediately after World War II he saw concentration camps while working as a translator and expediter for survivors and refugees. He never talked about that.

What if, as I was growing up, my father had embedded in me the gruesome detail he almost certainly saw while sweeping up the ruins of the Third Reich? What if he had told me how some of my great-grandparents probably received bullets in the head from Nazi soldiers and collaborators?

As I wrote in Lament for a Father, a book published earlier this year, I grew up without consciousness of anti-Semitism. It was undoubtedly there, but I was unaware. What if my father had rat-a-tat-tatted into my brain a sense that the world was against me? For a decade in the late 1960s and early 1970s, I went seriously astray but retained an overall optimism unmarred by nightmares about Holocaust horrors. I regret as an adult not pressing my father further for information about his past, but I now see method in his reticence.

I suspect my father, like a murder detective who doesn’t tell his wife what he saw that day, also spared my mother the specific detail. But as those law-and-order TV shows have frequently informed us, there’s a cost to the person who psychologically isolates himself to keep the virus of pessimism from spreading. My father was hostile to Christianity and its central theme of supreme sacrifice for others, but he did sacrifice — and I belatedly thank him for that.

How Can I Show Grace?

To address question two: Is that viewing him through gracious lenses? If we say in a secular way, “Give me grace,” we mean, “Understand what I’m going through.” I can imagine what a blow it was when my father changed his theology to one acceptable at Harvard, only to be kicked out of Harvard’s graduate school when he didn’t fit socially. I can imagine what it was like to see Jewish corpses stacked up like logs in Germany. I can imagine what it’s like to be deeply disrespected by a wife — and then disrespected by his sons. Those are three strikes, so no wonder he struck out.

Understanding can also mean seeing parallels. My grandfather probably disappointed his father by heading to America and never again seeing him. My father disappointed my grandfather by leaving Orthodox Judaism and embracing Jewish Reconstructionism, which is like a fundamentalist joining today’s Episcopal Church. I disappointed my father by believing in Christ. My research into the past helped me see that I’m a family traditionalist.

How then should I react? Psychiatrist Abraham Twerski said, “Human beings need four things: air, food, drink, and someone to blame” (quoted in Prager, The Rational Bible: Genesis, 53). People angry with absent fathers tend to think of them as stick figures rather than complex humans, so researching a father’s life fleshes him out. It may knock out the blame game and create opportunity for a good relationship if the father is alive, and more understanding if he’s not. Regardless, God commands us to honor our fathers and mothers for their sakes and our own. It’s the only commandment that comes with a gift certificate: obey it so “your days may be long in the land the Lord your God is giving you” (Exodus 20:12; see also Ephesians 6:2).

Again, I’ve had it easy: my father was distant, not devilish. Either way, we need to realize that we all fall short — in different ways and to different degrees, yes, but all without exception. Fathers often aspire to do better for their children than their fathers did for them, often by giving them what they wanted to get and did not — but the children may want something different from what the fathers provide. The road to reconnection starts with the realization that we’re all sinners, and that we should condemn not, lest we be condemned (Luke 6:37).

Breaking the Iron Chain

So I can certainly forgive my father his sins, and hope others will forgive mine. I can view him through gracious lenses only because God gave me glasses, and because God in his infinite mercy views me graciously. Otherwise, we just pass on original sin in our natural wretchedness. At first glance, an iron chain binds generation to generation. Yet sometimes, with God’s grace and mercy, that iron chain becomes a readily breakable daisy chain.

“I can view him through gracious lenses only because God gave me glasses.”

Those who see the miraculous transition cry out joyfully, as the apostle Paul did, “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Romans 7:24–25). When we have faith in God, we can look squarely at our own sin because nothing is a surprise to God. We learn that we’re worse than we have imagined but more loved than we could have hoped for.

I love my father, who was wounded — as was my mother, as was her father, as is everyone. But no wound is too deep for Christ to heal.

Were you to survey married couples about their money-management goals, most answers would focus on some form of financial success. Most people strive to accumulate better houses, nicer cars, more toys, and bigger retirement accounts. But when it comes to the dream of financial prosperity and security, we should ask, “Whose dream is it?” It may be the American dream — but is it the dream of the risen Jesus? And since what glorifies him is also for our good, is it a dream that’s ultimately in the best interests of our family?

The process of discovering God’s countercultural will about money and possessions can both excite and liberate. For my late wife, Nanci, and me, our growth in financial stewardship paralleled our spiritual growth. In fact, it propelled it. We learned about faith, grace, commitment, generosity, and God’s provision. We had challenging giving discussions that ultimately strengthened our marriage and bonded us around the common goal of investing in eternity.

Using the word makarios, which means “happy-making,” Jesus said, “There is more happiness in giving than in receiving” (Acts 20:35 GNT). Nanci and I found that happiness, not duty, permeates a God-honoring theology of money. When grace-saturated, kingdom-minded disciples use God’s money and possessions, we fulfill the first and second greatest commandments. We store up treasures in heaven and “take hold of that which is truly life” (1 Timothy 6:19).

The following principles can help you and your spouse develop a lifestyle of good stewardship that will yield dividends, now and forever.

1. Recognize the dangers of a possessions-centered life.

Although there is nothing inherently wrong with money, something is desperately wrong with devotion to money. “Those who desire to be rich fall into temptation, into a snare. . . . For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evils” (1 Timothy 6:9–10).

Understanding the dangers of materialism can liberate us to experience the joys of Christ-centered stewardship. Jesus speaks of the “deceitfulness of riches” (Mark 4:19). The psalmist warns, “Though your riches increase, do not set your heart on them” (Psalm 62:10 NIV). None of us is immune to the value-changing nature of wealth.

Things have mass, mass exerts gravity, and gravity holds us in orbit around the things we accumulate. A friend told me that when he and his wife were first married, they spent their time taking walks, playing games, and reading together. They were content. Later, as their income rose, they found themselves trapped by shifting priorities. Little by little, money and possessions took precedence over God, church, and meaningful time together.

Studies and anecdotal evidence have shown a connection between an increase in income and marital infidelity. Of course, the point is not the income itself but the lifestyle it underwrites. A Christian can make a million dollars a year, give generously, live modestly, and avoid much of that added temptation to immorality. It is not how much we make that matters. It is how much we keep.

How can we recognize if we are falling into materialism’s trap? “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matthew 6:21). Jesus is saying, “Show me your bank statement, your credit card statement, and your receipts, and I’ll show you where your heart is.” What we do with our money is an inarguable statement of our values.

God declares, “Whatever is under the whole heaven is mine” (Job 41:11). God’s ownership of everything provides the foundation of a biblical theology of money and the antidote to materialism. Acutely aware of the fact that what we have is God’s and not ours, faithful money-managing stewards regularly consult him to implement his biblical investment priorities.

2. Make generous giving a priority.

I encourage you to commit to giving regularly to your local church and, above and beyond that, to missions and other ministries. Begin by setting an amount to give — I recommend not less than 10 percent — and stick with it so you honor God with your firstfruits (Proverbs 3:9). If you want him to bless your family’s finances, don’t place yourself under the curse of disobedience.

“Happiness, not duty, permeates a God-honoring theology of money.”

As thunder follows lightning, giving follows grace (2 Corinthians 8:1–2). If God’s grace touches you, you can’t help but give generously! Then, when God entrusts you with more, remind yourselves why: “So that you can be generous on every occasion” (2 Corinthians 9:11 NIV). (Contrary to the health-and-wealth gospel, God prospers us not to raise our standard of living, but to raise our standard of giving.)

If you have not been in the habit of giving, it can be challenging to begin. However, I ask people, “If you got a 10 percent pay cut, would you die?” Of course not! God is big enough to take care of you if you step out in faith and return to him what is his in the first place.

What if you and your spouse are not on the same page about giving? I learned over the years that my desire to give sacrificially could sometimes feel insensitive to Nanci. When I learned to be more generous with her (and our daughters), Nanci no longer felt that giving to kingdom causes competed with our family’s needs. Through many conversations, she learned to find increasing joy in giving, and I learned to find increasing joy in growing together and leading — but not pushing or pulling. We were holding hands, even if sometimes one of us was a step ahead. (As the years went by, the one ahead was increasingly her.)

Of course, God wants us to do many good things with money that do not involve giving. We must provide for our family’s basic material needs, for example (1 Timothy 5:8). But these good things are only a beginning. The money God entrusts to us is eternal investment capital. Every day is an opportunity to buy up more shares in his kingdom!

3. Set a budget so you can spend and save wisely.

Since the long-term consequences are severe when a couple disagrees about money, I can’t stress enough the importance of discussing financial matters. Start by making a careful record of spending so you can find out where your money is currently going. Then determine where it should be going. This will become the basis for your budget. (When I was a pastor, I met with families who followed a budget and did fine on a meager income. I met with others who made much more and were regularly in financial crisis.)

For some, the most practical way to budget is the envelope system. When paychecks are cashed, the cash goes into envelopes designated for giving, housing, food, gas, utilities, entertainment, clothing, saving, and so on. If nothing is left in the entertainment envelope halfway through the month, no more movies or eating out. If we overspend in one area, we must underspend elsewhere to compensate. The envelope system may seem antiquated, but it teaches us that resources are limited, which is an invaluable lesson.

What is the right balance between how much we give, use for needs and wants, and save? I believe the tension reflected in that question is healthy. We can prayerfully seek God’s guidance, determined to follow his lead as best as we can discern it.

Jesus tells us, “Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things [what you eat, drink, and wear] will be given to you” (Matthew 6:33 NIV). Unlike the pagans who “run after all these things” and “worry about tomorrow,” believers can trust God (Matthew 6:25–34). If we believe that God can create us, redeem us, and bring us through death to spend eternity with him, we can take him at his word when he says he will provide for our material needs.

4. Avoid debt, except in rare instances.

The choice to live under debt (except in manageable amounts, such as with a mortgage payment well within your means) is ultimately deadening to the soul and to a marriage. It is always unwise to live above your income. It will invariably produce conflict in your marriage.

Trust means believing God will take care of our needs. When we go into debt, however, we usually do so to obtain wants, not needs. So the Bible cautions us against debt. The ESV translates the beginning of Romans 13:8, “Owe no one anything.” This would appear to prohibit debt. The NIV reads, “Let no debt remain outstanding.” This would allow debt, if paid off as soon as possible.

Not all debt is the same, however. I’m sympathetic to those in situations where, after prayer and evaluation, debt seems the only alternative. In such cases, nothing is wiser than giving first to God, cutting back expenditures, and systematically paying off debt as aggressively as possible.

Some consider mortgages an exception to avoiding debt, and a case can be made for borrowing to buy a reasonably priced house instead of renting. Unfortunately, many aspiring homeowners buy a house outside their budget. A couple I know assumed a large mortgage that depended on both of their incomes. When the wife became pregnant, they realized that to keep the house, they would have to violate their convictions against leaving their child in a daycare center while the mother worked.

What about credit cards? Some use them for convenience, paying off the amount owed on every statement to avoid interest. Nanci and I did this. This approach has advantages, but it also has drawbacks. The very convenience of having a credit card is often a liability — and constitutes temptation. Here are some prudent guidelines:

Never use credit cards for anything except budgeted purchases.
Pay off your credit cards every month.
The first month you have a credit card bill you cannot pay in full, destroy the card, pay it off, and don’t get another one.

5. Enjoy life to God’s glory.

As believers in a materialistic culture, we should embrace lifestyles that free up money to further the progress of the gospel. And yet, the answer is not asceticism, believing that money and possessions are inherently evil. Our God is a lavish giver (Romans 8:32). He provides pleasures and comforts he desires us to enjoy: “So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Corinthians 10:31).

Over the years, Nanci and I spent reasonable amounts of money on vacations that served to renew us. Even when our girls were small, we would have a date night, believing one of the best things we could do for our children was to maintain a strong marriage. (Make it a priority to date your spouse. Put it in your schedule and budget!)

Scripture says we are to put our hope not in material things but “in God, who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment” (1 Timothy 6:17 NIV). That means we shouldn’t feel guilty for enjoying his provisions! God does not expect his followers to live like prisoners in a cell, never feasting or celebrating life. He entrusts us with money to care for our needs and the needs of others, but also so we can take pleasure in the life he has given us.

Invest in Eternity — Together

Many Christians store up their treasures on earth. They end up backing into eternity, heading away from their treasures. Christ calls us to turn it around — to store up our treasures in heaven. That way, every day moves us closer to our Treasure.

In her last years, Nanci and I reflected on the ways, by God’s grace, we had invested in eternity and served the Lord Jesus together. What lay behind us was meaningful, but what awaited us on death’s other side was what we spent our lives preparing for.

Shortly before she died, I was holding Nanci’s hand, and she said, with a smile and tears, “Randy, thank you for my life.” I replied, also crying, “Nanci, thank you for my life.” God had used us to grow each other spiritually and make us better followers of Jesus. We certainly didn’t do everything right, but with God’s help, we sought to store up far greater treasures in heaven than on earth.

I encourage you to put Christ in the center of your marriage and finances. You will never regret it. The eternal payoffs will forever bring you joy and your Savior glory!