When I wish I were doing something else

• Note: This article was originally sent to our audience at A Pastor’s View, a newsletter intended for pastors and other church leaders. The content and call to find our encouragement and purpose in the Lord is relevant to every believer, though, and we believe you will be blessed by prayerfully considering how to apply this message to your own life.

My wife and I went to one of our local hospitals yesterday after church to visit a friend from our Sunday school class. Her husband was undergoing surgery at the time following weeks in the hospital, with weeks more to go if he survived the day. Her children were with her, sharing in her pain and uncertainty. As we have done hundreds of others over the years, we spoke with them, hugged them, and prayed with them.

As we left, the feeling of impotence I have experienced so often in such situations came over me again.

My parents wanted me to go into medicine. At one time, so did I. I carried a premed major into my second year of college before ultimately switching to religion in view of my call to vocational ministry. 

Over the years, however, I have often wondered what it would be like to be a doctor, to be able to save lives through medical means. I have reflected on the feeling of immense satisfaction such work must bring.

In recent years, I have served as an ethicist with a major nonprofit healthcare system. In this context, I have frequently spoken at board meetings and met with medical professionals to discuss various ethical issues. I have often left such meetings with the same old stirrings, envious of those whose daily work makes such a tangible difference in so many lives.

You perhaps know the feeling. We spend our days speaking and writing words in sermons, Bible studies, counseling, staff meetings, and so on. When the day is done, we have little tangible “work product” to show for it. Even the best things that can happen as a result—people coming to faith in Christ, marriages strengthened or saved, people choosing to follow Jesus more closely—are not quantifiable.

When I was a pastor, one of the reasons I enjoyed mowing our home’s lawn was that I could see I had done something when I was done. I enjoyed working on old cars over the years as well, for the same reason. It can be frustrating to spend your days and thus your life doing work that is so difficult to measure and can seem so ephemeral.

These feelings were on my heart today when I read Mark 3 and found a narrative that gave me great encouragement.

“To have authority to cast our demons”

The text reports:

[Jesus] went up on a mountain and called to him those whom he desired, and they came to him. And he appointed twelve (whom he also named apostles) so that they might be with him and he might send them out to preach and to have authority to cast out demons (vv. 13–15).

Note the three purposes for which Jesus “appointed” the twelve apostles:

1. “So that they might be with him.”
2. “He might send them out to preach.”
3. “And to have authority to cast out demons.”

The third is a variation of what I wished yesterday to be able to do—to heal a body, to make a tangible difference in the life of a suffering friend. But reversing Jesus’ order invalidates it. We are able to “cast out demons,” as it were, as a consequence of preaching the gospel. And we are able to preach the gospel effectively only when we are “with” Jesus.

Two problems with this order should be acknowledged.

“Feed the fires we want to see burn”

One: Neither our culture nor our churches reward these priorities.

The harder we work in ways the world can measure, the more the world will celebrate our work. Over my five decades of pastoral ministry, would you like to guess how many times someone in our church encouraged me to spend more time alone with the Lord? Not once. But the hours I spent at the church and in the community serving others were noted by church leaders who measured my success in the same way they measured theirs: by definable output.

It’s been said that we should “feed the fires we want to see burn.” It’s only human nature to do what we are rewarded for doing, to please those whose opinions affect our sense of well-being and even our professional future.

But living without God at the heart of our lives is choosing to be our own god, to repeat the Fall with its “will to power” (Genesis 3:5). And as CS Lewis noted, “Out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history—money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery—the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.”

By contrast, the closer we are to Jesus, the more his Spirit makes us like our Lord (Romans 8:29), and the more our lives count for eternal significance today.

“There is a wind blowing in our faces”

Two: Our spiritual enemy will do all he can to lead us to reverse the priorities of Jesus.

Satan obviously wants us to fall into heinous public sin that destroys our ministries and shames our Lord. Failing this, if we insist on seeking to do good in the world, he will tempt us to make such good our purpose and measure of success. He will lead us to confuse the good with the best, to make the needs of others the definition of our call, to spend our days in a fervor of activity that produces (we hope) enough good to be worth the effort.

The famed preacher Arthur John Gossip once wrote:

Perhaps the ministry was never busier than it is now. Hundreds of men are hoarse from continual speaking, and are wearing out with running here and running there. If things slow down, we evolve yet another type of meeting. And when this new and added wheel is spinning merrily with all the other wheels, there may be no spiritual outcome whatsoever, but there is a wind blowing in our faces; and we hot and sticky engineers have a comfortable feeling that something is going on.

These words were written in 1952. How much worse are things today?

Some years ago, I felt especially overwhelmed with the demands of my work. I shared my discouragement with a trusted colleague who had experienced significant burnout and went through therapy as a result. His wise advice stayed with me: “Their need does not constitute your call.”

In today’s My Utmost For His Highest, Oswald Chambers similarly wrote: “If we are devoted to the cause of humanity, we shall soon be crushed and broken-hearted . . . but if our motive is love to God, no ingratitude can hinder us from serving our fellow men.”

Easter and performance anxiety

I especially need to remember Jesus’ priorities in light of Easter. As you know, Christmas and Easter are by far the busiest seasons of the year for pastors. And Easter Sunday is the “Super Bowl” for us, the day we’ll speak to larger crowds than on any other Sunday of the year.

I can’t speak for you, but I can admit to you the performance anxiety I felt each and every year I preached Easter sermons. Part of me wanted to impress the “Easter only” attenders so much that they would come back the next week. A better part of me wanted to reach them on the one Sunday I had the chance. All the while, I wondered how I would say something new about a subject as old as our faith.

All of this betrays an underlying sense that my performance would define my worth yet again. And a self-reliance that is always self-defeating.

Today is, therefore, a good day to decide that we will spend this season walking with Jesus before we try to work for him. We will draw closer to him than ever before in the knowledge that this is his highest purpose for us. And we will make him known as we know him so that others can do the same.

“How can I blaspheme my King who saved me?”

St. Polycarp died on this day in AD 155. Reliable tradition identifies him as a disciple of John the apostle, also known as the “beloved disciple.” He clearly learned from his mentor the importance of personal intimacy with his Lord as the foundation of his life and work.

When Polycarp was led into the Roman stadium, the proconsul challenged him to renounce his faith and live. He replied, “Eighty-six years I have served him, and he has done me no wrong. How can I blaspheme my King who saved me?”

Sentenced to die by fire, he prayed as the soldiers prepared the wood, thanking God for the privilege of martyrdom. His last words testify to the depth of his love for his Lord:

I praise you, I bless you, I glorify you, through the eternal and heavenly high priest Jesus Christ, your beloved Son, through whom be glory to you and with him and the Holy Spirit, both now and for ages to come. Amen.

No matter what we face today, if we are “with” Jesus in intimate fellowship, we will face it with him. And our words and our lives will glorify our Lord in this world and the next.

Why do you need that word of encouragement today?