Keeping Joy in Your Ministry in Spite of People’s Problems

Randy Alcorn says, “A true Christ-centered church is not a showcase for saints, but a hospital for sinners.” If you’re in ministry, that makes you a spiritual healthcare provider. Gone are the days when problems were simple and the average family actually looked like Leave It to Beaver or Happy Days. People come to us with marriage problems, parenting problems, emotional problems, problems with health, education, and jobs. When people get saved, these problems don’t disappear. Messy lives cause problems with no easy solutions.

Our first concern is for our people, but we also need to watch what is happening in our own lives. If we aren’t careful, the problems of our people can rob us of joy in the ministry. How can we keep that from happening?

We need to listen to what people with needs are saying and, beyond that, to what they are feeling. We need to care about their problems. Sometimes that may mean giving advice, especially when they are ready to listen. Sometimes that may mean helping them. Sometimes we can’t fix their problems, but only be a sounding board and a friend. We can always pray with them or for them. But it doesn’t end there.

After we have listened, cared, helped, and prayed, we need to let it go. We care so much for our people that it’s easy for their problems to consume us. When that happens we have nothing left for others in need. I have learned that I need to keep myself strong to be able to help other people. I need to do things that keep me spiritually and emotionally strong year after year.

I need to cast all my care upon the Lord. (1 Peter 5:7) If my burden is on His back, it’s not on mine anymore. I can be free to enjoy a fun outing with my family when my friend’s family is in ruins. I can buy nice things for myself, within my own budget, while my friend cannot. I can, and should, think about fun, nice, pleasant things even when people around me are hurting. (Philippians 4:6-9) I can focus on God and his good gifts and not let my thought life be dominated by problems to the extent that it robs me of joy in the ministry.

I will post two more blogs about keeping joy in your ministry. What have you learned that keeps you from losing your joy over other people’s problems?

Is God Smiling on my Ministry?

I don’t mind pouring my life out for God—as long as I know he is truly pleased. But how tragic it would be to spend my whole life, working hard for God, and find out I somehow missed the entire target!

Some people evaluate their ministry by results. If lots of people get saved and the church chairs are full, God must be pleased.  If hardly anyone gets saved and numbers are down, God must not be pleased.  Study Jonah, Noah, Jeremiah, Isaiah and you’ll soon realize results are not indicative of God’s approval. So how do you know if your work is good enough for God? How do you know if you are basically pleasing Him?

Warren Wiersbe says, “There is a difference between fruit and results. You can get results by following formulas, etc, but fruit comes from life. Results are counted and soon become silent statistics, but living fruit remains and continues to multiply to the glory of God.”

My husband and I have worked on two different fields for 35 years. We have been through years in which we have seen little visible fruit.  This question—am I pleasing God?—is crucial. If I’m not I might as well go back to America and life a more comfortable life. If I am pleasing God, I will continue to serve in this place as long as He keeps me here. But how do I know?

Steve Saint must have had similar questions when he took his entire family to live, for one year, with a primitive tribe. His teenage daughter died shortly after leaving the tribe. As he reflected on her life he said, “Whenever I got terribly discouraged, she was the one who reminded me that we had not come for results. We had come for love and to be obedient to what we were convinced God wanted us to do. “

At one point, when our work seemed to be failing, I was desperate to know if God was smiling. We felt God had called us to our work there in Taiwan. We had worked hard, doing what we felt he wanted us to do. Our hearts are deceitful by nature  and we can never completely know them, but we felt we were doing our best out of love for the Lord. God wasn’t showing us any major thing we were doing wrong, but, as far as we could see, the work was not moving forward.

I asked God to speak to me and I searched Scripture for answers. This is what I came up with:

God understands.

He knows what we’re like. He’s not impossible to please. If we are searching for what he wants us to do, he will let us know. If we ask Him to show us ways that aren’t pleasing to Him, He will. (Hebrews 4:14-16, Isaiah 40:27-31, Psalm 103:11-14, Psalm 139) Therefore, if I am serving Him the best I know how, depending on Him, following His guidance, and He doesn’t show me otherwise—He must be pleased!

God sees and rewards.

Our labor is not in vain. God won’t forget our work when we serve Him out of sincere love. (1 Corinthians 15:58, Hebrews 6:10) God sees my imperfect efforts. He sees my heart. As an earthly father is pleased with his child’s best effort in drawing him a picture, so God is pleased by our best efforts to show our love for Him.

Have you been through times in your ministry when you struggled to see God’s smile? What verses helped you?

3 Secrets to Totally Avoiding Failure

Nobody likes to fail. Failure makes you feel rotten. If you want to reduce your risk of failure, try following these three rules. They will almost guarantee that you will never fail again.

1. Never try anything new.

When you try new things you lack the experience to pull them off perfectly. You’ll probably make mistakes and embarrass yourself. And your chances for failure are quite high.  Stick with things you already know how to do well.

2. Never try anything hard.

Attempt only those tasks which you know to be well within your range of capabilities. That way you know that, with a minimum of effort, you can do the job well.

3. Never try anything risky.

Don’t do anything until you’re quite sure it will work. Otherwise you just set yourself up for failure.  And never try anything of which people might disapprove. If you do, you may work hard and only receive criticism in return. Criticism is never fun. It makes you feel you’ve failed even if you haven’t. So stay away from risky jobs. Just be content with who you are now. Quit trying to change.

If you follow these three rules you may never fail again.  Aim at nothing, and you’ll hit it every time.

Of course, as you avoid failure, you will probably also eliminate the chances of any kind of significant success. Easy success carries its own high price tag. Before you give up on failure you may want to see if you have underestimated its merits.

Picture the great artist painting in her studio. With seemingly little effort she splashes a new masterpiece onto plain canvas. Empty walls surround her, for her works sell as fast as she can paint them. They bear no resemblance to her first work when, at age one, she scrawled a few colors onto a page. Only a mother could love that drawing. In second grade her best horse picture drew great praise from her teacher. But however well her picture compared to the works of other second graders, the art world would have refused the slightest glance at it. As she grew she improved, but for each picture she displayed, she hid a notebook of drawings she wouldn’t let anyone see. As she reached adulthood her work showed evidence of real genius. Yet even then the critics belittled her work, criticizing her technique, magnifying each supposed flaw. Now we see the artist’s great success. Yet her effortless strokes of paint hide each failure that she evaluated and learned from. Without the failures, the success would have been impossible.

Unseen failures are the raw material of almost all success.

A great photographer snaps lots of pictures and only displays the good ones.

A great writer has lots of ideas and knows how to sort the good ones from the bad.

A great preacher doesn’t happen to have any tapes of his first sermons.

A great gymnast owes a debt of gratitude to the healing process.

You see, failure also goes by other names such as “learning” and “growth.”  The first attempt at anything new, hard, or risky, is bound to be far from perfect. Yet as we evaluate our failures, learn from them, and do better the next time, we improve our abilities.

Some people, however, stop with their first awkward attempt, assuming that they are not “called” or “gifted” for such a task. In such a case failure can go by no other name.

Is God asking you to do some new thing today? Are your afraid to try because you are afraid to fail? Then you have proven true the adage that says, “Fear of failure is the father of failure.”

On the other hand, if you grab onto that difficult task as a precious opportunity for growth, you may not do well on your first attempt. So ask God to help you learn from your failures and try again. Then you’ll probably find that you won’t do too well your second time either. Yet as you continue to try, evaluate, and change, you’ll soon find yourself learning and growing. You’ll experience the joy of learning to trust God and serve Him better. People may criticize you, but you can know the joy of the Heavenly Father’s smile on you. Remember God is pleased by our best efforts, even though they fall short of perfection.

If you’re not failing at anything, you’re probably not trying to do anything very significant. If, on the other hand, you’re turning failure into learning and growth, you’ve learned a secret. Sometimes failure isn’t so bad after all.

Share a lesson you learned through failure that may help us too.