Still learning…
5 10 2016Upon my finishing grad school, Beneth and I loaded up a moving truck and relocated to California to serve the Lord full time in ministry. I entered the ministry with a mistaken sense that God had prepared me to serve God. My heart was laced with a sense of pride that manifested itself in an unhealthy confidence in myself and what I had learned. Those first years of ministry were not a time of doing what I had learned but of learning what I didn’t know.
I would love to say that I have outgrown my prideful heart and that my unhealthy confidence has been fully replaced with a humble heart, but I am sad to say that I still struggle just as I did early on in ministry. While the struggle is still there, I am learning more and more, though, that it is not that God prepared me to serve God but that God is always preparing me to serve Him more.
My heart was recently convicted of this anew after reading the following about missionary John Paton.
John G. Paton (1824-1907) served as a missionary in the South Pacific’s New Hebrides islands. Less than twenty-five years earlier, natives clubbed to death the first two missionaries to visit the island, just fifteen minutes after they landed on the beach. The natives then cooked and ate the murdered men in sight of the ship that brought them there. No one dared return to the islands, until Paton did. His first weeks there, illness took his young wife; one week later, their infant died. He suffered intensely. But note Paton’s perspective as he looked back on this years later:
Oftentimes, while passing through the perils and defeats of my first years in the Mission field on Tanna, I wondered, and perhaps the reader hereof has wondered, why God permitted such things. But on looking back now, I already clearly perceive… that the Lord was thereby preparing me for doing… the best work of all my life:
There are times in our ministry that the aim of our ministry is to simply be “done preparing!” We want to be done with the refining work of God in our life. The light at the end of our tunnel that we are aiming for seems to be a life and ministry of ease that is free from the hardships that make us better ministers. If that is our aim, then we have established a goal that will never be reached here on earth.
The aim of our ministry should always be to hear our gracious Lord say, “Well done, thou good and faithful Servant.” Years ago, Dr. John Vaughn shared a simple illustration in regards to this thought that has never left my mind. He used the illustration of a piece of meat on the grill that was to be cooked to the level of “well done.” In order for that steak to reach the level of “well done” it had to remain over the heat for a prolonged length of time. He went on to say that the reason many Christians and ministers will fail to hear those precious words is due to the fact that we did not persist and remain over the fires God placed us on. We quit too soon or we spent our lives and ministries looking for the “cooler” place on the grill to serve out our days.
May God give us each grace today to…
Be steadfast…
unmoveable…
always abounding in the work of the Lord…
Your labor is not in vain in the Lord. Let God keep working on you while He works through you.
