SO YOU QUIT the ministry.
You said you weren’t giving up your faith in Jesus Christ. Not that. It was people’s indifference to your message of the Gospel that made you decide. They liked to have you “pass the time of day,” but when you followed up with deeper spiritual truths, they seemed to “hasten you to the door.” The “banker” even said you’d better “ease up or you’d have to leave.”
After prayer and serious thought and talking it over with your wife, you finally decided to quit. I don’t blame you. You’ve expressed what many earnest servants of Christ have experienced not only in the “east” but in the west and north and south as well. Many a minister has been on the verge of asking: “Shall I quit?”
But, young man, don’t quit! Discouragement is hard for anybody to take, and the minister is no exception. I know. I’ve been discouraged many times myself. So has every other minister. The obstacles are real, the disappointments enough to break any man.
When you and I accepted Christ’s call to the ministry, we claimed the glorious truth that Christ is “King of kings and Lord of lords.” And indeed, Christ will triumph! What’s more, his triumph applies to us—our “faith is the victory that overcomes the world”!
We also accepted the assignment to “take up our cross and follow him.” In “taking up our cross,” as you intimated, we didn’t expect everything to be easy.
It’s between these two—the victories of faith and the seeming defeats of cross-bearing—that we labor and minister in the Gospel, meeting both discouragement and joy. We cannot give up! His victory is bound to prove true, even though the path to that victory will often be the way of the cross.
You must not quit—you are one with us and we are one with you both in our disappointments and in our victories. We may not be a blazing success in the world’s eyes. But Jesus Christ is going to have his victory—and until that day comes is using us toward that end.
What we do for Christ does have an effect! Last Sunday I saw a young couple in church whose home several years ago almost broke apart in divorce. Often it seemed as if hardheartedness, selfishness, pride would win, as if prayer had no effect. But today that young couple would gladly witness to what Christ has done in their home. In the months I ministered to that problem I was often tempted to quit. Suppose I had?
The Lord has probably used you to help more people than you realize. And “those faithful few” you talk about. Your ministry to and through them may be more effective than you think. I remember a young couple both of whose children died at birth. How we prayed together through both times of sorrow! How very real was the comfort of Christ! One day while I was calling on a new couple to interest them in Christ and the church, the phone rang. Who do you think were wanting to come over? Yes, the young couple who in their times of sorrow had experienced the comfort of Christ wanted to share it with someone else.
When you speak of Christ people take you far more seriously than you suspect. When a news editor on the Denver Post confessed faith in Christ, I learned a printer had been quietly witnessing for Christ by his life. That converted news editor now works for a newspaper in Honolulu, and both he and his wife teach Bible school classes.
Even those who oppose your message of Christ or those who do not respond may yet discover their spiritual need. I remember a young woman whose very first words when I called on her were: “I don’t believe in religion for myself. I just want my child to go to Sunday school.” Some time later she said: “When I brought my little girl to your church, everybody seemed so happy!” Those words betrayed a wistfulness, an unspoken yearning for some of that happiness. I remember another person who waited 17 years before accepting Christ. Young man, we can’t quit. We’ve got to keep on. Someone may respond to our witness for Christ in the coming weeks and months.
One oft-learned lesson helps me meet these “dark moments of the soul”: looking to people brings disappointment, but looking to Christ restores the sense of purpose. To keep thinking about how people disappoint me would make it easy to give up. Aware of this, however, if I replace these thoughts with thoughts of Christ and set my mind “on things above” I regain the sense of his purpose for me. Things like “the banker telling us we may have to leave” fall into proper perspective when we see the crucified Christ calling us to “take up our cross and follow him.” Our twisted emotions untangle and line up once again with his purpose.
If people were a “finished product,” you and I wouldn’t need to bring them the Gospel of Christ. We wouldn’t be needed to bear the message of his mercy and forgiveness and strength and newness of life. But they’re not a “finished product.” For that very reason we must keep on for Christ. Man’s sin is not the barrier before which to capitulate; it’s the battlefront where we attack with the Gospel. People are by nature unresponsive to the Gospel, prayerless and powerless: this is the way people are. This is where we, too, begin—needing Christ. But we don’t quit where we start. That is the very place to go on!
When I urge you not to quit, I’m thinking of other young ministers, too, who will face these same disappointments in their service for Christ. Of the 30 young ministers or missionaries who have gone out from our church in recent years, some are facing galling opposition and lack of response this very hour in Africa, in Thailand, in rural towns of the west, in city churches. Will they quit?
A team of four young ministerial students served in our church last summer. The joy and confidence of their faith was a blessing to all of us. But in time these young men will face the same kinds of people and the same kinds of churches that you and I have faced.
Two of my sons are preparing for the ministry. I know they, too, will have to face what you have gone through in recent months. There will come a day when they will want to quit. So I’m telling them just what I’m saying to you: don’t quit! Keep on with Christ! The world needs the Gospel which you proclaim. And Christ needs you to proclaim it.—The Rev. ROBERT S. LUTZ, Minister, Corona Presbyterian Church, Denver, Colorado.
