The Pastor’s Confidence

You are a Christian pastor. You have dedicated your life to preaching the gospel, giving men and women answers for their questions, comfort for their sorrows, hope for their fears, and wisdom for their doubts. You spend your days and years strengthening the faithful, restoring the fallen, and warning the foolish. You love the people God has sent you to serve, and you desire nothing more than to help them on their way to the heavenly city.

But sometimes you find yourself questioning whether you really are helping anyone along that road. Your people seem determined to live their own way instead of God’s. They come to you for counsel but go and do just the opposite of what you advise. The friends you rely on prove untrustworthy. Those for whom you spend the most time and effort turn against you, slander you, forget you, even leave the faith altogether. Your sermons fall on deaf ears, while outside the church your neighbors do not even pretend to have an interest in the truth.

You do not regret going into the Lord’s service; you could not imagine doing anything else. You hope your ministry has done some good, and you know that the results are not up to you anyway. But you cannot help but wonder why God put you where He did. What is the point of a ministry that accomplishes nothing?

Follow that line of thinking too far, and you will come to any one of several crazy conclusions. You might convince yourself, for example, that you made some mistake in your choice of work. Or that God cannot work through you. Or that the people you are among are beyond God’s reach.

Thoughts like that can take your heart out of the ministry, and neither you nor those you are serving can afford that. Where do you go instead to bring your mind back?

You go to Jesus. He is the one who commissioned you, and He is there beside you. Your ministry is all about Him, and if you run into hard things—well, you did expect to learn the fellowship of His sufferings, did you not?

That fellowship is comfort in itself. But it is not all you want. You want to know how to keep the right perspective when ministry is hard—when everything you have labored to build collapses and all you have left is the foundation (thank God, you will always have that). What was your Lord thinking when His ministry apparently went wrong? When His enemies triumphed, His disciples ran away, His God seemed absent, and He hung dying on a tree, how did He respond?

He prayed for God to forgive the people who killed Him. When all seemed lost, when He was about to die, He prayed as if His ministry were going to be successful despite it all. There was no earthly way that prayer would ever be answered, but Jesus expected God to do something anyway.

What gave Him such confidence? Isaiah tells us: “When thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin, he shall see his seed, he shall prolong his days. … He shall see of the travail of his soul, and shall be satisfied” (53:10-11). The world saw Jesus dying on a cross; Jesus saw Himself rising from the grave. The world saw His gospel mocked and rejected; He saw it saving people from all nations. He knew His ministry would be effective, though it meant His death.

Whenever you face disappointment and doubt in Christian service, encourage yourself with the same thoughts. You do not know how God will use your ministry, but you do know that He who commissioned you is going to accomplish His will—for you as well as for the people you labor among. You may have to die first. No matter; keep loving and serving; keep laying down your life with the certain expectation that God is going to raise up something eternally glorious.

And keep praying. Remember that prayer from the cross? Seven weeks later it was answered abundantly.

---

Brendon Johnson is the administrative assistant to the associate dean of the School of Religion at Bob Jones University.