Dear Pastor (part 2): You are called

Dear Pastor,

Remember the time before you responded to God's call? 

Your inner tension centered on whether or not you would surrender your preferred future for what God wanted. 

Desperately you sought God and spent many nights crying to Him. You prayed, searched God's Word, listened to wise counsel, and had many gut-wrenching conversations with God. 

You wrestled with many important questions. 

"What about my major?" 

"God, do you really want me to give up my career?"

"How will I survive financially? How will I provide for my family? What about security for my future?"

"What will I tell my parents? They will definitely be disappointed with me." 

"What about my quality of life?"

"How can God use someone like me?"

Still, you surrendered your life, your plans, your future, and your hopes to follow Jesus. God's call was overwhelming and undeniable.

In the midst of uncertainty, there was great joy, excitement, anticipation, and hope as you imagined what serving Jesus in full time ministry would look like.  

As time went on, God addressed your concerns, provided for you, and worked in ways you never thought possible. 

But somewhere along the way, you lost sight of God's call. Routines, the mundane, writing and preaching sermons over and over, challenges, success, loss, difficult people, impossible circumstances and many spiritual battles have made pastoring seem more like a job. 

Over time, we may have taken our eyes off Jesus.

As a result...

Discouragement sets in. Obligation replaces joyful obedience. Cynicism replaces hope. Frustration overwhelms your joy. Judgment and legalism have replaced encouragement. 

We look at someone else's ministry and compare. Instead of living for God's praise, we seek affirmation through our circumstances and what others think. 

Our self-worth rises when ministry is going well and when we feel we are doing better than others. We sink when our ministries are not doing well, especially when other ministries are doing well and our's is not.

Ministry becomes our idol. Many of us pastors have the sinful propensity of building our identity around ministry. Outwardly, we work hard and labor for Jesus. But inwardly, we seek self-promotion and glory. 

Our personal agendas lead us away from being Jesus-centered and toward self-centeredness. Ministry becomes the means by which we find self worth, receive recognition, and feel powerful. As a result, we continue to bow down to the idol of ministry--not Jesus.

Difficulties consume, control and crush us. This happens when we leave God out of the picture and depend on our own abilities. We grow tired and weary. We forfeit opportunities to know God more deeply and see Him work powerfully. We depend on ourselves and others more than God's Word and the power of the Gospel. 

When we focus on our difficulties and not Jesus, our difficulties will consume, control and crush us.   

We develop the wrong view of what it means to serve as a pastor. We develop a sense of entitlement and feel that the ministry owes us--that even God owes us. God does not owe us anything--His call to serve Him is a privilege. 

Feeling entitled makes us bitter when we do not receive what we feel we deserve. Entitlement comes in these forms: "I deserve a bigger ministry." "I deserve more pay." "I deserve to be more blessed by God." "I deserve to have my book published." "I deserve to be respected more." "I deserve more influence." "I deserve _____________."

We hide our secret sin. Building our identity on ministry is unhealthy and dangerous. It will lead us to create an outward image of ourselves and avoid dealing with the sin inside of us. Over time, we use ministry as a mask while hiding who we are inside. 

We can hide behind the mask of "pastor" and have everyone think well of us because outwardly, our mask looks good.

Many pastors who keep sin secret hide behind the mask and preach sermons that are theologically spot on and technically great, but spiritually dead.  

In secret, pastors can "manage" sin and continue to internally justify it because we have not experienced any public consequences. As long as we look good outwardly, why deal with it, right? As a result, they continue to justify what they are doing in secret. 

Sin has consequences. Our secret sins will eventually be exposed. Some will experience public humiliation. Others will not. However, there are still consequences. Something inside us dies the longer we hold on to and hide sin--our church, our marriage, our family, our own heart, our relationship with God. 

If this is you, please take time to surrender your struggle, your heart and your life to Jesus. Don't try to fix it on your own. When we surrender to Jesus, He not only forgives sin, He makes us more into His image. Jesus gives us life. He changes us and does the work in us. 

Serving Jesus as a pastor is a calling from God. This is a very difficult task that should never be taken likely. Paul presents the qualifications for those who serve as pastor in 1 Timothy 3:1-7 and Titus 1:5-9. 

In addition...

Paul says that whoever aspires to be an overseer or pastor, "desires a noble task." (1 Timothy 3:1)

James tells us that "Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness." (James 3:1)

Peter tells us that those who are called to serve as pastors should serve "not under compulsion, but willingly, as God would have you, not for shameful gain, but eagerly..." (1 Peter 5:2)

I'll stop right here for now. In my last blog post, I said that I was going to write about trusting Jesus through difficulty and hardship. 

As I began writing, I felt that before I could even write about that, I needed to write about our hearts. We need to know our own brokenness before we look outward. 

God willing, my next blog post, Dear Pastor (part 3), will deal with trusting Jesus through difficulties and hardships in ministry. 

Until then, focus on Jesus, study the Word, teach the Word, be filled with the Holy Spirit and keep growing in your walk with Jesus. 

Be encouraged to today.

In Christ,
James