Faithfulness

This post is part three in Monday morning truths: things I have to tell myself each Monday. This week’s truth is this:

I spend more time questioning whether I have what it takes to be a pastor on Monday than I do any other day of the week. I question everything on Monday. From the Sunday School class I teach, to the guests I welcomed, to the sermon I preached, to the way I ended the service, I have to go to war with my own self-doubt every single Monday. It’s a good thing to evaluate and examine what we are doing, no doubt, but I am finding that in order to do that, I have to remind myself that the reality is I probably did some of those things poorly. What’s even more relevant is this: there are certainly some people who are pretty convinced that I did those things poorly. That is why I need this reminder of exactly what God has called me to do:

God has called me to be faithful.

Ultimately, I have to remember that faithfulness is the mark of effective ministry. In order to remember this, I have to also look at the things I am not called to be.

1. He has not called me to be smart – which is probably really good news. There is a good chance someone else listening may know more about something than I do. It isn’t my job to do ministry with a sort of functional omniscience. It’s my calling to be faithful, to be confident that I have done the best job I can as a limited, weak, sinner and rest in God’s promise that despite the weakness of the messenger, a faithful message will not return void. I’m not called to be smart, I’m called to be faithful.

2. He has not called me to be winsome – sometimes, people don’t like me. I don’t need to be intentionally difficult, or crabby, or aloof; but sometimes people will think these things of me despite my best intentions. Sometimes, people won’t like me because I’m too young, too old, too modern, too contemporary, too opinionated (or I won’t share their opinions), or any number of things. But I am not called to be any of those things; I am called to be faithful.

3. He has not called me to be successful – there isn’t one person in ministry (or any profession, for that matter) that is called to be the next version of some other successful person. Yet, many of us in ministry spend our time evaluating our fruitfulness based on how “successful” someone else is (which itself is tricky, because it is a very dangerous thing to evaluate success in ministry and work anyway). I have found that, even in the years that nearly everyone would have called ministry in my context a success, there is always at least one or two people who would evaluate my work and call it a failure. But I’m not called to be successful; I’m called to be faithful.

4. He has not called me to be popular – the number of people that watch me on Facebook live, the number of people who quote my sermons on social media, the number of people that tell me they enjoyed my sermon, or who pat me on the back in some way, or even the number of people who come to Sunday morning worship are not any indicators of whether or not God has called me to the work. He has not called me to win a popularity contest of any shape, no matter what it may look like. He has called me to be faithful.

5. He has not called me to be effective – I may preach the Gospel until my face falls off, and people may continually reject it. I may call people with dull ears to change and see absolutely no change. I may lay out a brilliant 10 year strategy for reaching our community and it end up having no effect. In reality, this isn’t super likely in a context like mine, but it could still happen. If it does, that is no indicator of my calling. I sometimes fear that we have so wrongly defined what “effective” means in pastoral ministry that we would look at some of the great pastors of history, or even some of the laborers discussed in the Bible, and conclude that they were massive failures. I absolutely want to be effective. I want to see people change. I want to see people freed. I want to see the church grow. But underneath that is the reality that God hasn’t called me to effectiveness; He has called me to faithfulness.

The day in, day out work that it takes to be faithful is so opposed to our microwave culture that I think that this could almost sound heretical. We want so badly to feel like we have achieved something, that we fail to recognize that faithfulness to God is the first and primary achievement of the Christian life. When we are with Him in eternity, He will not evaluate our lives based on how successful we were. God’s commendation to His children is not “well done, good and successful servant.” Be faithful. Faithfulness to God, to His work (whatever that may look like), to your family, to your local church – faithfulness is what God has freed us to pursue.

I don’t know what your job is. You may be a caregiver, taking care of an ailing parent, or young children, or a dying spouse. The eternal God of heaven and earth is pleased with faithfulness. You may be working a job no one notices, doing work you think no one cares about. God notices, and cares, and is pleased with faithfulness. You may be a super successful person, who has placed all your identity on your achievements on the outside, but the inside is hollow and empty. God desires faithfulness. You might even be an average person, one that no one sees as particularly smart, or winsome, or successful or popular, or effective. God hasn’t called you to be those things. He desires your faithfulness. The issue isn’t really that “just” being faithful isn’t good enough for God. It’s that it often isn’t good enough for us.

Let’s be a people who pursue faithfulness. God’s glory is most seen when we run after His pleasure.