"There is one grace you cannot counterfeit... the grace of perseverance."
-Gardiner Spring
I just began reading Iain Murray's Revival and Revivalism, which I've been meaning to pick up for years. This quote at the beginning already struck me. It seems like in the modern church we tend to take a very short view of ministry. We want to see and judge peoples' fruit tomorrow, or at least in our yearly church reports. However, truly Spirit-filled ministry is tested not next week or next month, not in how many people pray a prayer or do a bible study. Christian ministry is aimed at nourishing a person for the whole of his or her life, at teaching them true repentance and at addressing the deep issues of sin in their hearts so that they might be brought to Christ-likeness. This process takes years, and in truth even after those years the test of whether Christ is working in a person is only seen in their perseverance. "Behold, we consider those blessed who remain steadfast." (James 5:11) Let our aim not be winning souls for tomorrow, but for eternity.
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Something very similar came to my mind a couple of months ago in the wake of the Ted Haggard scandal. I realized that my pastor had faithfully preached and led my church for eight or nine years without scandal or complaint. In that time, one of his daughters miscarried, he went through prostate cancer, and he went through the difficulty of preparing to preach week after week after week in addition to all of the pressures and difficulties of being a pastor. The next time I saw him, I thanked him for being so faithful.
We might all need to thank the pastors who have been in our lives for years--theirs is often a very thankless job. We easily slip into the trap of expecting them to preach, shepherd, and lead while forgetting about how difficult those tasks can be over a number of years.
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