I’m really pleased to be here. This church has meant so much to me and my family over the years. Loretta is a Minnesotan, really a Hebrew of the Hebrews I guess. She went to Bethel College and was in the Baptist General Conference. Her father taught music at the college level. However, how I ended up being a Presbyterian after being raised a Baptist. That’s another story. And in case you’re bothered by that, just consider me a missionary to the Presbyterian church.

But I gather there are a lot of other groups here. John ribs me a lot about that and how much I love his church, and do I love it enough to become a Baptist? I’m praying about that. But thanks for inviting me. I want to speak this morning on the issue of motivation in the ministry and its loss and what I have found to be its cure. This will not be a balanced, systematic, and comprehensive look at motivation in its loss due to the limits of time, my intellect, and experience. This will be just a slice of one man’s life. And my prayer is that as I give you this slice of my life and some of it will give you a glimpse into the ways God might be speaking to you in your own life.

It will be kind of a hybrid address. I’ll be mixing exhortation with confession. Most of what I’m going to say will be illustrated by my own life. I was thinking about it on the way down here. I think almost all of my examples out of my own life are negative examples — what not to do. And this is not a studied attempt to be vulnerable or make myself feel accessible. I just thought of some of the best things I’ve learned. I've learned that way, which is a bit discomforting as I think about the rest of my life. But anyway.

Pastors as Windows

It’s hard to be a pastor. And I want to give you, as I start, three images of what I mean. One is a poem. Don’t glaze over. People start to read poetry and you just lose them. And I beg you to listen to this poem. It’s so good. It’s by my favorite poet and I think the greatest devotional poet that the church has known. That’s the great 17th century Anglican priest and author, George Herbert. Now, every time I say that, someone says, “Well, you should read so-and-so.” I have and I still come away thinking Herbert is the best. But he has one poem. In fact, in this whole series of poems of his, he takes the church and its layout as an extended metaphor for various aspects of the Christian life — the floor, the pillars, the steps, everything. And when he comes to the windows, that’s where he chooses to talk about the preachers.

There’s a bit of vocabulary here in case you’re not aware of it. The process of making windows into stained-glass or colored windows is called annealing. It’s important you know what that means. It’s where glass is heated up and melted, so the colors that can be introduced into it can become part of the glass itself. So with that in mind, let me give you this first image of what we’re about. It says:

Lord, how can man preach thy eternal word?
     He is a brittle crazy glass;
Yet in thy temple thou dost him afford
     This glorious and transcendent place,
     To be a window, through thy grace.

But when thou dost anneal in glass thy story,
     Making thy life to shine within
The holy preachers, then the light and glory
     More reverend grows, and more doth win;
     Which else shows waterish, bleak, and thin.

Doctrine and life, colors and light, in one
     When they combine and mingle, bring
A strong regard and awe; but speech alone
     Doth vanish like a flaring thing,
     And in the ear, not conscience, ring.

Now what I propose to you as you think about your call and my call is that that’s central to what we are as preachers is this process of annealing where the story is blended into our lives. It’s doctrine and life. It’s light and colors. And otherwise, we’re like 17th century glass. It’s bleak. As Herbert said, it is waterish and it’s very thin. But what do you do when the heat is too much? How do you handle it? Sometimes it’s very, very hot in the kitchen in which God blends his story into our lives. That’s one image.

Pastors as Agonizers

The other one I like to give you is a bit of vocabulary that Paul uses in the New Testament to talk about the work of the ministry. The Greek word in its noun form is the word that was originally used to describe a stadium, a place of vigorous athletic contest, agōn. It is the Greek word behind our English word agony. It started out as the place where the struggle took place, and it later on came to mean the struggle itself. I think of that ABC wide world of sports slogan, “The thrill of victory, the agony of defeat.” Paul would say, along with his Greek contemporaries, “the agony of victory.” That’s exactly what was involved in it. It was a vigorous struggle. There’s a very fascinating article in Kittel’s Theological Dictionary that is like reading a sermon. They go through the various passages. But the one I want you to pay close attention to is Colossians 1:28–29. I’ll read it to you. Paul, summing up his ministry, says:

Him we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom, that we may present everyone mature in Christ. For this I toil, struggling with all his energy that he powerfully works within me.

Then in Colossians 2:1, he says:

For I want you to know how great a struggle I have for you and for those at Laodicea and for all who have not seen me face to face . . .

Paul will talk later on in many other places about this agony of his ministry and that it is like an athletic contest. It’s wrestling. It’s hard work. In fact, in Luke’s Gospel, when Jesus says, “Make every effort to enter the kingdom of God,” again, it’s this word. It’s this wrestling. My son has taken up wrestling this year. I have a lot of friends who wrestled in college. My one buddy has this great poster. It’s a picture of Dan Gable, the Olympic champion. And this man has etched over his face the years of struggle as a wrestler. He has a barbell and he’s on his 15th set or whatever and sweat is just pouring off his face. It’s written all over his face. But the poster says, “There are only two kinds of pain: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret.” That really pumps me up sometimes. And I take my middle-aged body down to the gym. I turned 50 last month and my friend called me up and said, “Now Ben, tell me the truth. When you turned 50, did you not add sets and repetitions to your workout?” And I did.

We’re pumped up. It’s wonderful to think of being great athletes for God. To be his wrestlers and boxers, his marathoners, his sprinters. I mean, I love that. But there are other times when I frankly prefer the pain of regret. Have you ever been in a place where you knew exactly what God wanted to do, as I have been periodically over the last three years, where I knew precisely what God expected of me and he couldn’t have been more clear, and I said, “God, will you consider plan B? Something else?”

Pastors as Desert Plants

One last image. And that’s the image that suggested the title of this address. It’s a desert plant called the Ibervillea sonorae. It’s a remarkable plant. It can exist for seemingly indefinite periods without soil or water. This remarkable little plant was kept in the display case of the New York Botanical garden and the rather sadistic botanist wanted to see how long it would go without soil and water. So they laid this plant bare in the display case and they watched it, and every spring, little anticipatory shoots would sort of send out looking for some water and some soil and, finding none, they would go back in. It went on for one year, two years, three years, four years, five years, and six years. There were seven springs. This little plant had no water, no soil, and it sent out shoots and, finding none, went back inside. In the eighth year, the rather sadistic scientists had a dead plant on their hands.

And again, this an image of the ministry. I think most of us know what it means to be well past our seventh season, bereft of soil, thirsty, waiting for the eighth spring and barely enough energy to send out another anticipatory shoot. Now, what brings this about? This giving up. This sense of, “I just don’t have the energy anymore.” Well, it can be simple fatigue. Sometimes, we just work too hard. It’s a lingering illness perhaps. What we need is a good night’s sleep, a walk in the park, a day off, a shot of penicillin, or whatever. And would that it was always that simple. But there are deeper meanings, I think, to our loss of motivation and many if not most, I think, stem from a loss of direction in the ministry. Work becomes intolerably burdensome because we’ve forgotten why we’re doing it. As Thomas Carlisle put it, “There is nothing more terrible than activity without insight.”

And this loss of motivation, I think, comes very close to the deadly sin of sloth or acedia. As you probably know, the medieval theologians liked to catalog the deadly sins. Book-ending many of the catalogs of the seven deadly sins, on one hand would be hubris or pride, and at the other end would be acedia or sloth or laziness. And they weren’t talking about just the kind of spring fever you might get or the occasional desire just to kick back and watch a baseball game. It was a despairing sense of fatigue. Where simple fatigue might say, “I know I need to be working, but I just can’t seem to get the energy up today,” acedia would say, “Why? What difference does it make anyway?” And that, said medieval theologians, was a deadly sin.

The Danger of Acedia

I was handed an article once from the Journal of Internal Medicine. I was talking about the psychological state that is conducive to illness and the doctors were calling this the “Giving Up, Given Up” syndrome. The article was about the actual physiological changes that had been measured in people’s bodies when they were saying of their existence, “Why? What difference does it make? I can try as hard as I want and I’m still going to get nowhere.” And acedia can make our bodies vulnerable to disease and people can become terminally tired of their work.

I noticed early in my ministry, I don’t know if you’ve ever had this experience, it was maddening. I’d be hanging on, white-knuckle kind of hanging on for vacation. I got on vacation and promptly got sick. Have you ever had that happen to you? It makes you wonder about the justice and sovereignty of God, how this could possibly happen to you who so richly deserves vacation? I got terribly sick. I mean, I got terrible illnesses four years in a row. Part of it was just simple fatigue. But I also know that a big part of it was that I was so tired of getting nowhere it seemed that when I finally had the permission to stop, my body just let go. Now I usually rest up for a vacation. I think it’s very important. It’s terrible to waste your vacation being sick or tired.

So there’s acedia. It’s whiling away hours as Richard John Neuhaus says. It’s reading “Time Magazine” or “USA Today” when you should be attending to something that really matters. It’s a sense that it just doesn’t make any difference.

The Danger of Hyperactivity

Another cause of loss of motivation can produce what appears to be its opposite and that’s hyperactivity. And hyperactivity is just another form of a loss of direction, the sense of why. Neuhaus says hyperactivity and sloth are twin sins. We’re like children lost in the forest. The more lost we feel, the faster we run. And hyperactivity is to authentic motivation what junk food is to a nourishing diet. We get the feeling of satisfaction, but we’re starving. It’s the Ephesian syndrome. The church in Ephesus, the risen Christ speaks to them and says, “You’re working so hard but you’ve forgotten your first love, and you’re driving yourself and you’re working because you’ve forgotten why you’re working in the first place.”

I find it what I call the seminar syndrome. Why are we so obsessed with seminars that give us techniques of leadership, techniques of building churches? Why the bull market on these things? It strikes me that when people have forgotten why, they become obsessed with how. Where once there was the creativity and tenderness born of deep love, there’s now only the sex manual. That’s the flip side of acedia. Get busy.

When I was 25, I think I really ran into the first wall of hyperactivity. I’m not a person given to depression. So the more confused I get, usually the busier I find myself getting. I was a senior in seminary. I want you to count this up. My senior year in seminary, I was a full-time student. I was head resident in the men’s dorm at Azusa Pacific University in Southern California. I was area director for Young Life in Riverside, California. And I was on retainer as a speaker for Forest Home Christian Conference Center, also in Southern California. I had three and a half full-time jobs. Why? Well, I lost my sense of direction. I remember coming home one night and going to bed and having a nightmare immediately. I don’t usually remember my dreams, but this dream was vivid.

I was in the men’s dorm. I had an apartment in the men’s dorm. And in this nightmare I was backed into a corner by all these ghoulish creatures and they were plucking at my body and each time they plucked at my body, they took a chunk of flesh off. It was not a pleasant dream and it didn’t take a psychoanalyst to figure it out. I was literally being dismantled by these pale creatures. They were named area director, head resident, full-time student, and preacher. I had so little sense of who I was in Jesus Christ, so little sense of what it meant to be a servant of Jesus Christ, that I was filling up the emptiness with religious activity.

Too Much to Do

You know how it is with nightmares? When you wake up, you lay there for a while and you talk yourself back to reality. Well, I woke up from this one. I could not talk myself out of the horror I was feeling. Do you know why? It was because the dream was real. And I got dressed. I went out and walked the halls at the dorms just to clear my head. I went back to bed about 1:00 a.m., slept till 11 a.m. the next morning, and woke up with a hangover from the sleep and the exhaustion. I thought, “Well, I need to go for a run. I’ve got to get the endorphins going. I got to do something.” I walked over to the college track and the gate was locked. It was about an eight-foot fence. And I climbed that fence many times. But I want you to picture a young man of 25 in good health standing in front of a gate at about noon crying because it was just too much. It was just one more thing to do.

Well, I managed to get over the gate and I ran a few laps, but I knew I was in trouble. The trouble I’d gotten in was that I’d forgotten why I was doing this thing in the first place. The ministry is funny. So little of it is quantifiable. If you’ve forgotten why you’re doing it, what’s left? I mean, it’s hard to come up with a list of statistics and measurable results. God help us. God save us from MBO. These things are awful, especially when we’ve forgotten why we’re doing it. All that’s left is just the number of hours we can put in doing something.

The Danger of Hubris

Well, I think the twin sins of acedia and hyperactivity can be expanded into a third. And that’s hubris or pride. It’s the word the Greeks used to speak of the sin presumption, the folly of trying to be like the gods. It’s the loss of direction par excellence. For Christians, it’s anything we try to do to save ourselves. For pastors, it’s anything we’re doing to make ourselves the savior of the church. It’s ecclesiastical works-righteousness and it can set us up for acedia and for hyperactivity.

I’m a child of the 1960s and I remember I used to read this thing called “The Wittenburg Door.” And we started that in 1971, about four of us. The only thing we had in common was our common anger at the Church of Jesus Christ. Now, we wouldn’t say that. It was the institutional church. It was organized religion, but we were mad at the church. And we differed on just about everything else except the fact that we were just young and mad. That was pretty much the driving force of the magazine in the early days. When we started the magazine, I never thought I’d be a pastor.

I was too proud to be a pastor. As one of my colleagues put it in the magazine, we don’t need renewal, we need revolution. So we’re going to riot and act and experiment. And somewhere along the line, God sort of slid me into the pastorate. But by this time, I was sure. I’d been raised in the church. I’d been in big churches. At my first church was the new church development. Was I thrilled? Can you imagine the thrill of a young 1960s activist finally having a chance to do church right? I mean, I knew what was wrong with the church. I had been in lots of churches and, I mean, I knew what my church would never be. I was going to start a church from scratch and do it right. Irvine Presbyterian Church would be the pinnacle to which 2,000 years of church history had struggled to get to.

I blush to tell you. I had a list of things that would never happen in my church. All of them proceeded to happen over the next 14 years. Every one of them. I can’t tell you how exhausted I got as I watched my baby, my church, screw up at every point that I’d been writing about how the church ought not to screw up.

My kids were going through the attic the other day and they pulled out some old “Wittenburg Doors.” They were aghast at what they saw. I spent 14 years trying to, in this folly, this presumptuousness that somehow I could make the church what the apostle Paul could never make Corinth because it wasn’t Paul’s church. And somehow, I thought I could make the church what Apollos couldn’t make Corinth, or Cephus. And oh, how exhausted I got.

A Cycle of Presumption and Inconsistency

During that period of time. I went through a cycle each week. I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced this. Let me describe the cycle emotionally and then I’ll tell you the events that triggered it. Every Thursday, I began to get a little edgy. I just got a little short with my wife and the people around me. On Friday, I got even more so. You couldn’t live with me on Saturday. And then magically about 9:00 a.m. Sunday morning, I was transformed into a warm, engaging, compassionate, and lovely human being. It lasted about three hours. And inexplicably, sometime Sunday afternoon, I fell apart. I had profound depression. It lasted all the way through Monday again. What a terrible way to spend my day off. I was just depressed. Tuesday, I began to pull out of it. Wednesday, I was normal. This was the cycle week in and week out. I went from edginess to utter beastliness to depression to sweetness.

Well again, it was presumption. Not only was I going to build the greatest church that Christendom had ever seen, but I was also trying to preach the best sermons that the church had ever heard. I sat there in my study with my desk and right in front of me was a row of volumes by Helmut Thielicke, the great German preacher. There were Spurgeon’s collected works. There were Alexander Maclaren’s other volumes of people I admired. And every sermon I wrote, I was envisioning its publishing. Oh, they were literary masterpieces, turns of phrases and marvelous penetrating illustrations. I was flying into the sun. There’s only one thing you can do when your wings are waxed and you’re flying into the sun. It’s crash.

By the way, I want to insert something here. I think there’s probably a sense in which we all ought to feel a little depressed Sunday afternoon. Really. Because our words never match the burning realities that we’re talking about. We ought to feel, I guess weekly, “Oh, I wish I could have said it as it really is.” But my friends, I submit to you, that’s a far cry from the guy who’s trying to preach the best sermons the world ever heard. I was talking about this with one of my staff members coming over here yesterday. I’ve had to repent of trying to preach the best sermons. I’ve had to repent of the essays, the publishable essays, that I’ve tried to turn out much of my ministry. I feel very chastened about that. I’ve heard God saying, “Ben, just get up there and say it. You’re no hot shot.” As Paul said, “You should regard us as servants of Christ, as those entrusted with the mysteries of the gospel.” That’s it. That’s all you are.

Pastoral Forgetfulness

But you can see the devastating impact that this can have on one’s motivation. We’re setting ourselves up for terrible falls. And isn’t it odd how hubris can feed back into hyperactivity and back into acedia? They’re organically related to one another. Well, with the possible exception of simple fatigue, I think all loss of motivation is a form of forgetfulness. It’s losing touch with the why of ministry. It’s being cut off from the vine, as branches we are. It’s keeping busy enough, noisy enough, and narcotized enough to not have to face up to the fundamental disjointedness of our lives. And there’s only one antidote to forgetfulness: remembrance. And that’s what the risen Christ said to the church of Ephesus, wasn’t it? He said, “Remember how far you’ve fallen. Remember your first love.”

One of the great scenes in Pilgrim’s Progress is when the pilgrims are leaving the Delectable Mountains. They’ve stayed there for a while and have been cared for by the shepherds. They’re on their way to the Celestial City and as they are preparing to leave the Delectable Mountains, they are warned as they head on for the Celestial City, they will move out across the plane that’s enchanted. And they’re told that they must resist at all costs the temptation to fall asleep on this plain. Because if they go to sleep on the plain, they will never wake up. Have you ever been so sleepy you just give anything to go to sleep? If you get in touch with a feeling on the enchanted plane, I just think of my presbytery meetings. Maybe it’s a church committee or whatever. I hope not this address right now, but anyway, it’s this overwhelming sense, “Just give me just a second to lay my head down. Just 10 minutes is all I need. Just 10 minutes and I’ll be fine.” And the shepherds tell them, “Do not go to sleep.”

But sure enough, Hopeful is pleading for a nap. Christian’s trying to keep him awake and he asked him this question. He says, “By what means were you led to go on this pilgrimage?” Well, Hopeful starts chatting about it. He starts telling the story. He starts remembering. And he stays awake. And what I want to do with the rest of the time I have before we have a question and answer is to tell you two ways that I have found most helpful in keeping my memory alive in the ministry. And there’s nothing new about these things, as one would expect. But I want to tell you why I found them so helpful.

The two are simply this: the life of prayer and the Sabbath. I’m assuming in a gathering like this, most of you are very committed to prayer. But I still want to talk about it. And I want to talk for a while about what I think is the critical importance for us pastors of the Sabbath, the Lord’s day. The day of rest.

Prayer as Remembrance

But let me talk a bit about prayer as an act of remembrance. And I’m not talking so much about what kind of prayer you’re doing, what kind of techniques. I’m speaking about the brute act of prayer and what that says to us. It says to me two or three things that are vital for my remembrance.

God’s Work Not Ours

The first thing that prayer says to me is that I pray because the work of the church is God’s work, not mine. Remember what Jesus said to Peter when Peter made his confession of faith. He said, “Peter.” Says, “Flesh and blood didn’t reveal this to you. This was not something you came up on your own, but my Father in heaven has revealed it to you.” And then he says this. “I will build my church.” I missed that for so many years. I got kind of hung up on the stuff about the rock upon which he would build his church. And being a good Baptist, I wanted to argue with the Catholics, so I got hung up on that part. But I missed what Jesus said. The best part is that he says, “I will build my church.” Really. He’ll do it.

Remember when Jesus came down the Mount of Transfiguration and he had been up there with Peter and John and the disciples had been down trying to cast out a demon. And they weren’t able to do it. I can’t quite put this together. But it would appear to me, Jesus was impatient with them. It sounded awfully impatient. I don’t know how you interpret it, but it was, “How long do I have to stay with you people?” And he heals the boy who’s possessed. And the disciples want to know why they couldn’t do it. It would seem that the disciples had come to the conclusion that they had been with Jesus long enough that they’d acquired this power that they could sort of use as they needed it. They had a bottle of it and they could dispense it. They said, “Why couldn’t we do this?” And Jesus, remember his response? He says, “This kind comes out only by prayer.”

Now, maybe my hermeneutics are off a bit here, but it would seem to be implied by that statement that Jesus was saying to the disciples, “There are some things you folks can do without prayer. But it just so happens that this one right here, you can’t do without prayer.” Now, here’s the conclusion I’m drawing. I think it is possible to build thriving, growing churches without prayer. I am convinced you could get a team of marketing experts, communication experts, and media people. They could get together. They could have absolutely no faith at all. They could read the public, they could read our language, and they could build a church that would be packed out. There are a lot of things we can do in the church without prayer, but are they worth doing? I don’t think they are. The brute act of prayer, the mere act of prayer, is a potent reminder that I don’t build a church; God does.

Brought to Our Lowest

This first became clear to me about 12 years ago. I ruptured two disks in my lower back. And it’s funny when you get a lower back problem, how many people come out of the woodwork and say, “Me too.” I had no idea up to this point what kind of pain people have who have back problems. I was put on the floor for six weeks. On the floor. I couldn’t even sleep in my bed. It was not firm enough. I had to lay on the floor. The mere act of going to the bathroom was a race between my bladder and my tolerance of pain. Many times, just on the way to the bathroom, I had to stop and lay down on the floor and rest up for the rest of the journey. This was humiliating.

And I was the pastor in this church I’d founded. I was still trying to build the greatest church in Christendom. I was the only pastor. And for six weeks, they had no pastor on duty. It was driving me nuts. And being the kind of personality I am, I thought, “Well, at least I’ll be down for six weeks. I’ll do a lot of reading.” And laying on my back like that, my eyes wouldn’t focus. I read one book in six weeks. It was awful. But it was one book I needed to read, by the way. But during this six week period, I was at a loss. What can I do for my church? And there was only one thing I could do. I could pray. And I asked my wife to bring me the church directory. At this time we had about, I don’t know, 200 members. And I want to be very clear about something here. I was not doing this out of a deep spirituality. I was bored.

And it was literally the only thing I had left to do. And so daily, I laid there on the floor and spent two hours interceding for every person in my congregation. Now, I want to be clear again. I was desperate. I had run out of things to do. So I laid there for two hours a day praying for every member of the church. And very quickly, this became a sweet time, a delightful time. As I came to the end of my convalescence, I remember laying on the floor one day. I’d just gone for a little walk and just kind of loosened my back up. And I spent my time in prayer. And I had this conversation with God. I said, “Lord, this has been wonderful. These two hours we’ve spent today together talking about the people in our church and holding them up before. This has been really sweet.” And you’re going to wince when I tell you what else I said. I said, “It’s too bad I don’t have time to do this when I’m well.”

And God said, “Ben, you have as much time when you’re well as you do when you’re sick. It’s the same 24 hours. The trouble with you is that when you’re well, you think you’re in charge.” Now, I’m not going to tell you I’m the greatest man of prayer in the world, but I want you to know, my life has not been the same since. Christ builds the church. I am forced to remember that every time I pray. Think of the classic postures of prayer. What’s that say about human effort? Christ builds a church.

Forgetting to Pray

Now, the Roman Catholic theologian Hans Küng probably embodies this most. I hate to use him. I’m sure he’s rued this omission many times, but in his book on being a Christian, his great work on the Christian life, if you read that book, there is nothing in that book about prayer. It’s a whole book on the Christian life. And when he was confronted with the fact, his answer was most revealing. And unless we feel proud, we have to say, “I know what you mean, Hans.” He said, “Oh, I forgot. There were publishing deadlines. I was under tremendous pressure from my publisher and I just got so busy, I left it out.” When we pray, we remember who builds the church.

God’s Work Done Through Prayer

That leads to the second thing that prayer reminds me of is that prayer gets God’s work done. That’s the marvelous thing about prayer. Housley, in his book on prayer said:

Whenever we touch his almighty arms, some of his omnipotent streams in upon us, into our souls and into our bodies, and not only that, but through us it streams out to others. This power is so rich and mobile that all we have to do when we pray is point to the persons or things to which we desire to have this power applied and he, the Lord of this power, will direct the necessary power to the desired place at once. This power is entirely independent of time and space. In the very moment we bend our knees and pray for our brethren and sisters in Zulu, Madagascar, Santalistan, China, or the Sudan, in that same instant, his power is transmitted to these people.

Or listen to A.J. Gordon:

You can do more than pray after you’ve prayed, but you can never do more than pray until you’ve prayed.”

I think Os Guiness’s remarks about the impact of modernity on us are never more relevant than at the point of prayer. Is there anything in modern church life, is there anything in our culture that tells us prayer is getting anything done? Paul tells Timothy to direct his people to pray for emperors and those in authority so that we might live quiet and peaceful lives. Do you know what kind of prayer that is? He’s saying, “Pray that whoever the emperor is,” and I gather it was Nero at the time, “That whoever is in charge around here will enact public policy that will make our lives better.” Apparently Paul thought prayer was getting something done.

Consider Paul’s companion Epaphras. I love this man. Paul doesn’t often give anyone the complement of calling them a servant of Jesus Christ. But he said this is about Epaphras. Colossians 4:12–13 says:

Epaphras, who is one of you, a servant of Christ Jesus, greets you, always struggling on your behalf in his prayers, that you may stand mature and fully assured in all the will of God. For I bear him witness that he has worked hard for you and for those in Laodicea and in Hierapolis.

Now, get this. Epaphras is visiting with Paul. He’s not anywhere near Laodicea and Hierapolis. The pastor is gone. And I love Paul’s language here. He says, “I vouch for him.” It’s the kind of letter you write to the elders. Saying, “I assure you, he’s not wasting time.”

In fact, he says, “He is working hard for you.” What kind of work could Epaphras possibly be doing for his people when he is not there to visit them, to lead meetings? Well, the work is his prayer for them. And when I pray, I’m reminded that, not only does Christ build the church, but he is pleased to, among other things, build the church through the prayers of his people. There’s more to be said, but I want to move on to the Sabbath so we can have some dialogue about some of these things.

The Sabbath as Remembrance

The Sabbath is a relatively new discovery for me. I don’t know what it is about my theological development, and I think just the spirituality in the church today. There’s so many of us, we’re very interested in the 10 commandments, at least nine of them. I don’t know how many Christians I’ve talked to who are very excited about not murdering and not committing adultery, but we get vague about the Sabbath. And there’s a lot of reasons why we get vague I suppose. There’s a lot of ways you could look at it. But just again, consider the basic fact that God gave us a command along with “don’t murder,” “don’t commit adultery,” and “have no false god” — right there where he says that, he also says, “You will Shabbat.”

It’s one of those Hebrew words that’s sort of onomono-poetic, isn’t it? Stop. You will stop once a week and honor me and rest. Then I read the words of Jesus that the Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath and I got another angle on it. I was fascinated as I began to think about the Sabbath and what it means in a practical way, especially as it relates to the issue of motivation. There are several passages of the Old Testament that speak of the meaning of the Sabbath and I want to just pick out two.

The Gift of the Sabbath

The first is the passage which really speaks of the Sabbath as a gracious gift from God. Exodus 20:11 says:

For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.

Scripture is telling us that God put into creation a rhythm of creation, of alternation between work and rest where we work and we rest. We work and we stop and we take it in. It’s the pattern, the rhythm of grace. I was very fascinated as I began to understand some of the Jewish understandings of the Sabbath as a day, it was the end of the week, but it was also the day out of which the rest of the week flowed. And then in other Jewish traditions it was the seventh day, but it was really the middle day. Three days were spent getting ready for the Sabbath. Three days were spent reflecting back on it. But in all these cases the Sabbath becomes the fountain out of which the whole week is nourished and fed.

Now, here’s the practical significance of that as I understand it. We move in our work not from work to rest, but rather from rest to work. Take note of this. For the Jew, the Sabbath begins at sundown. The day begins. The next day begins at sundown, not sun up. So what’s the first thing every human being does every day? They go to sleep. And inexplicably, amazingly, God manages to run the universe while we sleep. Do you get the picture? The day doesn’t start when the sun comes. It starts when the sun goes down and we go to bed.

Now, how do you wake up in the morning? I’m drawing an analogy here. When I wake up in the morning, the first thing I think of is my cup of coffee. You can pray for me. But I hit the bed running and the thing I’ve got to do right away, I’ve got to get out there and make something happen. And if I understand the Biblical reckoning of time, and especially the significance of the Sabbath, God says, “Wait. Something’s been happening while you were sleeping. It’s not your job to go out there and make something happen. It’s your job to check in and find out what’s been happening. And you start with me, not by working so you can rest, but by resting so you can really work.” Now that’s an aphorism. It doesn’t say all the things which you might want to say about the Sabbath. But it tells me that I must stop each week to be reminded that I live by grace and noted by works.

Vocation vs. Occupation

In the Deuteronomy accounts of the 10 Commandments where it’s put this way:

You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore the Lord your God commanded you to keep the Sabbath day (Deuteronomy 5:15).

What I found on the Sabbath — and I have my Sabbath, so to speak, on Monday — is that I don’t belong to my work. I need to stop and remember that I don’t run the universe. And for 24 hours, I am to celebrate God and his gifts.

I would propose to you, this is something I do periodically. I do a lot of my work at home. I would propose to you, on the day that you set aside to rest, that you walk up to your desk sometime and look at the stacks of stuff on it, especially if there’s something waiting for you to do the day you get back. Start talking to it. Say, “I don’t belong to you. You don’t own me. I am a child of God. I’m a servant of the King. I don’t belong to my work.” And brothers, I think we need to make a distinction and our vocabulary. When we start talking about our vocation, we need to distinguish between our vocation and our occupation.

My vocation in Jesus Christ is to be his servant and to obey his call on my life. It so happens that I have a job in a church that marvelously coincides or overlaps with that. But I think we have to stop equating our office that we hold in the church with our vocation or calling in Christ because if I were fired tomorrow, my call would remain the same. And the Sabbath reminds me that I don’t belong to the church, the institution for which I work, but I belong to God. And I can stop working. And thereby, I can remain a motivated kind of person.

A Letter from Wormwood

I want to close with this. Sometimes all of this still doesn’t quite do the job and God calls us to nevertheless persevere. I want to read to you my favorite of the Screwtape Letters in this regard. If you’re familiar with the letters, you’ll know that they’re written in a kind of cosmic reversal where the devils correspond with each other over the soul of this man that they’ve been working on. They talk about their “father below” and God is the enemy. But Wormwood has written to his uncle Screwtape and is asking him questions about how they might win permanent possession of the soul of this creature they’ve been working on. I want to read you one of the letters that talks about motivation and what I think is finally the bottom line about it:

My dear Wormwood. So you have great hopes for the patient’s religious phase, that it’s dying away, have you? I always thought the training college had gone to pieces since they put old Slubgob at the head of it and now I’m sure. Has no one ever told you about the law of undulation? Humans are amphibians, half spirit and half animal. The enemy’s determination to produce such a revolting hybrid was one of the things that determined our father to withdraw his support from him. As spirits, they belong to the eternal world, but as animals, they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change. For to be in time means to change. Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation, the repeated return to a level from which they have repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks.

If you would have watched your patient carefully, you would’ve seen this undulation in every department of his life, his interest in his work, his affection for his friends, his physical appetites all go up and down. As long as he lives on earth, periods of emotional and bodily richness and liveliness will alternate with periods of numbness and poverty. The dryness and dullness through which your patient is now going are not, as you fondly suppose, your workmanship. They’re merely a natural phenomenon which will do us no good unless we make a good use of it. To decide the best use of it, you must ask what use the enemy wants to make of it and then do the opposite.

Now, it may surprise you to learn that in his efforts to get permanent possession of a soul, he relies on the troughs even more than on the peaks. Some of his special favorites have gone through longer and deeper troughs than anyone else. The reason is this: to us, a human is primarily food. Our aim is the absorption of its will into ours, the increase of our own area of selfhood at its expense. But the obedience which the enemy demands of men is a quite different thing. One must face the fact that all the talk about his love for men and his service being perfect freedom is not, as one would gladly believe, mere propaganda, but an appalling truth. He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of himself, creatures whose life on its miniature scale will be qualitatively like his own, not because he has absorbed them, but because their wills freely conform to his.

We want cattle who can finally become food. He wants servants who can finally become sons. We want to suck in. He wants to give out. We are empty and would be filled. He is full and flows over. Our war aim is a world in which our father below has drawn all other beings into himself. The enemy wants a world full of beings united to him but still distinct. And that’s where the troughs come in. You must have often wondered why the enemy does not make more use of his power to be sensibly present to human souls in any degree he chooses and at any moment, but you now see that the irresistible and the indisputable are the two weapons which the very nature of his scheme forbids him to use. Merely to override a human will as his felt presence in any but the faintest and most mitigated degree would certainly be, for him, useless. He cannot ravish; he can only woo.

For his ignoble idea is to eat the cake and have it. The creatures are to be one with him, but yet themselves. Merely to cancel them or assimilate them will not serve. He is prepared to do a little overriding at the beginning. He will set them off with communications of his presence, which though faint, seem great to them with emotional sweetness and easy conquest over temptation. But he never allows this state of affairs to last long. Sooner or later, he withdraws, if not in fact, at least from their conscious experience, all those supports and incentives. He leaves the creature to stand on its own legs, to carry out, from the will alone, duties which have lost all relish. It is during such trough periods much more than during the peak periods that it is growing into the sort of creature he wants it to be. Hence, the prayers offered in the state of dryness are those which please him best.

We can drag our patients along by continual tempting because we designed them only for the table and the more their will is interfered with, the better. He cannot tempt to virtue as we do to vice. He wants them to learn to walk and must, therefore, take away his hand. And if only the will to walk is really there, he is pleased even with their stumbles. Do not be deceived, Wormwood, our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring but still intending to do our enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of him seems to have vanished and asks why he has been forsaken and still obeys.

May God give us grace to remember why we’re doing this and to walk even when we don’t feel it.

Questions and Answers

How should we think about pressing on in faithfulness and doing what we know we should be doing when we aren’t seeing any tangible evidence of God’s work in our congregations?

I’m probably in a period of reaction at this point. And I’m not saying we shouldn’t look for some tangible evidence of the work of God in our congregations. I just find it to be a bit presumptuous to build a church around a series of measurable objectives we’ve set up to determine whether or not we’ve done the will of God. I’m not saying it’s necessarily a totally unholy kind of exercise, but I think it sets us up for terrible and unnecessary troughs of disillusionment, or worse, of unwarranted pride in what we’re trying to do. I’m preaching through 1 Corinthians and there’s a statement Paul makes. And maybe it’s unfair to apply at this point, but I’m going to. Paul is defending his ministry and he makes this remark here in 1 Corinthians 4:5. He says, “Therefore judge nothing before the appointed time.”

Now earlier, he just said, “I really don’t care whether I’m judged by you or by any human court. Indeed, I don’t even judge myself.” In other words, Paul said, “I don’t care what you think. I don’t care what I think. The Lord judges me.” And then he says, “He hasn’t said anything yet. Wait for the appointed time. Then the Lord will bring the light what is hidden in darkness and will expose the motives of men’s hearts. At that time, each will receive his praise from God.” Now, I’m of the mind that maybe we should stop trying to judge the success of our ministries by this MBO approach and be a little more humble about the whole thing and say, “I don’t really care what I think or anybody else thinks. We’re going to go ahead and do what we believe to be right and let the Lord judge.”

And frankly, Paul is saying, “The Lord hasn’t said anything yet,” about his own ministry. Wait till he does. Wait till the day he does that. So I guess I’m being a Luddite. Weren’t those the people who were tearing down all the mills in England in the industrial revolution. I’m against progress at this point because I don’t think it is progress. Let me be real provocative I guess. May God save the church from the MBAs.

You’ve spoken about the Sabbath and its importance. How do you practice the Sabbath on Mondays?

Well, I’m just going to say, I don’t want to be legalistic about the day, but the first thing I do is, the rule of thumb for Monday is really two things. And it’s limited because my kids are in school. I think one weakness in this for me is that I regret the fact that my kids very seldom see me at rest. They come up from school and they notice that things are different around the house. But that’s about it. I wish there was some other way to do this. But the keynotes of the day for me is to celebrate the Lord and his gifts. I’ll talk about how I do that in a minute. And the other keynote is, if it has to be done, don’t do it. In other words, it should be a day where we really deny necessity.

What was it Jesus said? “If your ox falls into a ditch, you should pull it out.” I like Billy Graham, who’s comment on that was, “But if your ox keeps falling into the ditch, maybe you should fill the ditch in.” There’s certain things that need to be done sometimes. I was preaching on this in my church in Irvine and a little kid walked up to me. He was really cute. I was saying, “If the ox keeps falling into the ditch, you ought to make some systemic changes in your life so you don’t have to keep doing these necessities.” And this little boy walked up to me after the service and he said, “Pastor Patterson,” he says, “My science project fell in a ditch this weekend. I have to go home and work on it.”

That does happen. But I think to just take this sort of rebellious attitude about the so-called “necessities of life” and just stop and make it a day to celebrate God’s presence and celebrate his gifts. In a very real way, I like to begin the day just quietly. As the kids get off to school, I especially spend some time alone in prayer. And then with my wife, there’s probably not been a Monday this year that we haven’t taken a walk together. Now, that’s just for us. It’s a really special time. When my kids get home from school, we’re relaxed and kicked back. It’s a quiet day that starts with worship and sort of proceeds to celebration. Every Monday, I have breakfast with Loretta after we’ve taken a walk. And it’s a special time that way. I mean, there’s no big ritual or ceremony in the whole thing. I just believe that I must stop once a week and do something resembling what the Lord had in mind when he gave the commandment.

I struggle with the fact that my people don’t know how to rest. It’s funny how weekends are looked at in our culture. In my dad’s generation, the weekend was a time to rest up so you could go back to work. For the people in my congregation, especially the baby boomers, the weekend is the time to reward yourself for the lousy job you had to put up with through the week. But in both cases, the Sabbath is defined by work. I think that the answer here is, we should let our work be defined by the Sabbath. We really move out of the grace of God and it’s not a day to rest up for work or to rest up from work. I like the idea of resting up for the Sabbath rather than using the day of rest to rest up for the work I’m going to do the rest of the week.

Is there ever a time for taking whole days off and going away somewhere? How would you do that?

Yes, I’ve found it very helpful to go away for a day at a time. I can’t say I do it with any prescribed regularity. I’m kind of in a desert period right now as far as those taking whole days off. And for one year, once a month I went away for a day of prayer. There was a local retreat center not too far from us and it was a convenient place to go. I haven’t done that for quite a while but I found days away very helpful and very difficult to take. Again, it’s just this sense of necessity impinging upon me. Do I have time to spend a day in prayer? Luther would say, “Because you don’t have time that’s all the more reason why you should.” But I found that kind of thing very helpful, but I must confess, it’s not been a recent experience of mine.

How do you deal with the fact that churches often have a following of one main person instead of the leadership being split up among all the elders?

It’s inevitable that churches are going to be known by who the most visible person in the church is. It’s regrettable, but I think it’s just always going to be there. And churches that are larger and have other staff members, I think it’s critical that the other staff members of the church get plenty of opportunities to be seen as legitimate and full-fledged pastors in the church and leaders in the church. I think that helps mitigate the thing. I’m kind of fatalistic about this. It’s wrong, but I think it just takes continual repetition and reminders that this is not the pastor’s church.

But maybe it’s not even so much what the pastor says as what the pastor does. I suppose I could get up every Sunday and remind them, “This is not my church. This belongs to Jesus Christ.” But at the end of my week, the way I conduct my ministry may belie that fact, that I have to be at everything, that I’ve got to hover over every activity, well, they’re getting another message. And I really think, we pastors have a tendency to blame our people on our struggles because of what they expect of us. But I’m becoming more and more convinced it’s what I expect and I’m projecting that back on the people. If I really don’t believe that I am the church, that’s going to affect the way I go about the work of the church.

How have you known when to put your head down and keep going in a difficult work and when to quit and move on to something different?

I don’t know how idiosyncratic this is. I can tell you how I knew. I had just gotten back from my vacation and I walked into the church office and I had this sense that there was nothing to do. Now, you ought not to feel that anytime you walk into a church office. There’s always something to do. But I had this growing sense that I was done. It’s very subjective and I was happy. It was a church I’d founded. Again, everything happened that I didn’t want to happen. But 14 years after starting a church, it was a nice fit. I mean, nobody came who didn’t like me. And if you were there, it’s because you enjoyed how I did it. So it was really a comfortable place.

But I had, first of all, a great sense that I was starting to try to think things up, the next thing to do. I find, at least with me, that it’s dangerous when I’m at a place where I’ve got to start dreaming things up to make it interesting. I was just kind of losing interest in that project. I took that as a sign that I needed to be more in prayer. I’m glad I did because I think maybe in another season of my life I would’ve said, “Well, it’s time to start circulating my dossier and start calling up people, checking about what’s available.” I decided it was a time to be more prayerful.

There was a moment something changed. This can’t be systematized. This is very subjective. There’s no equation here. But there was a day when I came home. I’d been praying about what God wanted for my life. Our church had an all church retreat and there were about 200 people in this room and I was sitting in the front row and we just celebrated communion. People were giving testimonies after the meeting. And there was a couple in the back of the church who stood up to say they were saying goodbye to our congregation. They were going to go off and help start a new work in another church 15 miles away. And they were standing up and they were kind of crying and saying how much the church meant to them. I’m sitting in the front row, I’m looking over my shoulder back across the room, and I’m looking over the shoulder of an elder.

This elder had been with the church from the very beginning. And since we were all baby boomers starting a church, our kids were all being born at the same time. We all were sort of hoping we’d grow up together. Our kids would marry each other and we’d just be one happy family until we died. And this one elder was always the one who said, “No, it’s not going to be that way. God’s going to scatter us someday.” So you have to appreciate the subjective impact of sitting there, listening to someone say goodbye to starting new work, looking over the shoulder of someone who has been saying for 14 years, “God will scatter us.” I was deeply touched by that. And I remember thinking, “I wonder if this is the last time I’ll celebrate communion with this congregation at a family camp.”

Well, having that in my mind, we got home that evening from the family retreat and there was a letter in my mail from a person asking me to consider a position in a church. And it just happened to be in an area that I always wanted to live in. That’s a confession. But I looked at it and I said, “Well, maybe the Lord’s saying something here.” But it was the juxtaposition of the subjective experience of feeling like I had to dream up new things to do. There was no sense of calling anymore and God summoning me to do something. It was me kind of standing around with my hands in my pocket and saying, “Well, what’s to be done here?” And this subjective juxtaposition of this feeling of saying goodbye at a communion service, walking home and a letter being on my desk saying, “Will you consider this?” And I said, “I will.” And within a week, I had three churches talking to me about the possibility of a move. I took that as a sign that I needed to be open.

The last church I wanted to go to was the one that ended up being the one God called me to. And how does God speak to you? I’ll tell you how he spoke to me. The church extended the call. I didn’t want to go. My wife and I went away for two days of prayer together. Some friends had given us a gift to stay in a hotel down in San Diego. And we spent the two days in prayer. I fully expected when we went down to San Diego to pray this through, that God would say, “Stay in Irvine for the next season of ministry.” I was hoping he’d say that. And I got down there and we spent two days walking the beaches and praying. I hope this is helpful at some point. The last night we were there I was eating dessert, Marie Callender pies in Coronado, California. I was eating apricot pie a la mode. It’s been heated. The ice cream’s melting on it and we’re talking about this thing. And God spoke.

I mean, it was as clear and as compelling as if it were audible. I was eating pie and God said, “Ben, you’re afraid to go, aren’t you?” I still get choked up. And I said, “Yes, I am.” And he said, “That’s not a good enough reason to stay home.” I said, “I know you’re right.” Loretta and I were talking. But God says, “It’s back there someplace.” And I looked at my wife and I said, “Honey, God’s calling me to go. Called us to go to New Jersey.” She said, “I know.” And I burst into tears there in Marie Callender’s pies. And here are these two people weeping over their dessert. I wish I could talk about all the lighthouses that got lined up in the harbors or going in. And I got it over pie. Well, God probably speaks to you in a different way, but I often have epiphanies while I’m eating.

What do you think about programs within the church to be more effective in our work?

At 50, you’re looking at a burnout case when it comes to programs. I could not be more disenchanted about the effectiveness of programs to do the work of the kingdom. I’m back to blocking and tackling. Just basics. I am calling my church to be a church of prayer and the word and believing that God, out of that, will raise up a church of great ministry in the world. I believe to the degree we’ve done that, that’s exactly what’s happening in our church. But I believe the most imminently practical thing I can do as a pastor is to be a man of prayer and the word and call my people to be the same.

I’ve been harping on this for three years and someone made a comment saying, “We’re having a paralysis of prayer in this church.” And all I could say was, “Only a person who doesn’t pray could say that.” I look around the church and I see God raising up people, people discovering their gifts, hearing God’s call, making a difference in New York City, and making a difference in our community. Once we get clear on the basics, I really think the rest comes. I really am eschewing the notion that I or the elders of the church are grand strategists for the church. I think we have to learn how to listen and obey God. And I think God has a way of getting the work done in really practical, yes, even programmatic ways. But that’s really all I can say at this point. I’ve made a lot of mistakes in the last three years. But I pray to God that when I leave that church that one mistake he won’t say I made was that I was not attentive to the Scriptures and to prayer.

Let me just end this discussion. I know we got to stop, but let me just preach a quick sermon. It seems to me that they’re two indisputable, inarguable realities right now in the world. One is that we’re in a mess. Things are in a mess. And the other one, it seems to me, is the inarguable impotence of the church at this point. I don’t see the church making a difference. Do we really believe that by our committee meetings and our programs and our strategies and all that, that we’re going to make this world any different? I don’t think so. I don’t believe that anymore. I reject that. I renounce that notion altogether. I think unless God has access to us in a radically new way, this won’t get better. The kingdom will go on. It will go on. His name will be vindicated. He will build his church, but he might start building it someplace else. I think the Church of Jesus Christ in this country has to get on its knees and cry out for God’s mercy because we are impotent.

We are not making a difference in this world. So out of those two convictions, I’m back to where I was when I was 19 years old and I first heard God call me in the ministry. I sat in a meeting and listened to Dr. J. Edwin Orr talk about the history of the awakenings in this country. It’s not that we’ve got to replicate everything that happened in those things, but I’m now convinced we need that. I lost that conviction when I went to seminary. I did not recover it until the end of the seventies, that God could do something unusual and extraordinary if his people believed him. And I think it’s as practical as, again, becoming a people of prayer and the word.