You Lift Me Up

Overcoming Ministry Challenges

Albert N. Martin

• Publisher: Christian Focus Publication
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781781912782

One

What Is Ministerial Backsliding and Burnout?

My initial task will be to define the terms of our title, ‘ministerial backsliding and burnout’.

First, what do I mean by the words ‘ministerial backsliding’? In using these words I am referring to several aspects of spiritual experience. First of all, I am referring to that erosion of spiritual reality, spiritual vigor and spiritual growth which can overtake a man of God, often imperceptibly, even in the midst of the most active and externally-faithful ministerial labors. I am alluding to a declension which is manifested, not immediately in the pulpit, but rather in the prayer closet. It is a declension which may not be discerned at all in the substance of a man’s teaching and preaching, but in the degree to which the fire and passion of the truths he conveys to others have lost much of their felt impression upon his own heart. In the deep chambers of his heart, in the quiet moments of honest self-examination, the haunting awareness of his condition stabs his conscience. His ministerial backsliding becomes a gnawing irritation of the soul, constantly reminding the man that all is not now as it once was between himself and his God.

Ministerial backsliding also describes that condition which prevails when a man of God has declined in his grace-motivated, Spirit-enabled, scrupulous obedience to the revealed will of God. Jesus said, ‘Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me. And he who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him’ (John 14:21). When love burns toward the Savior a sincere passion to render obedience to all of His precepts is our desire, our delight and our holy obsession. When a man begins to pick and choose which commands he will obey so that the honest pursuit of what the old writers called ‘universal obedience’ is no longer his holy obsession, he has entered a backslidden state. A spiritually-healthy man can say with the psalmist, ‘Therefore I consider all your precepts to be right; I hate every false way’ (Ps. 119:128). He can also pray from the heart these words of the psalmist: ‘Oh that my ways may be steadfast in keeping your statutes! Then I shall not be put to shame, having my eyes fixed on all your commandments’ (Ps. 119:5-6).

This backsliding may eventually come to expression in the outcropping of specific forms of carnality. Laziness, self-indulgence, peevishness and a host of other sins which, while not quite scandalous, begin to manifest themselves and deeply affect a man’s usefulness as he lives and labors among his family and his flock. By ministerial backsliding I mean a condition in which we reflect the opposite of that which the apostle Paul enjoined upon his spiritual son Timothy in 1 Timothy 4:15: ‘Practice these things, immerse yourself in them, so that all may see your progress.’

Second, what about the phrase ‘ministerial burnout’? You may say, ‘I have read my Bible through 40 times and have never encountered the term “ministerial burnout”.’ Since strictly speaking it is not a biblical term, I ought to supply a precise definition of my intended meaning. I am referring to a gradual erosion of one’s mental, emotional, psychological, and physical resiliency and buoyancy which begins to hang like an ominous dark cloud over the entirety of one’s life and ministry. Like ministerial backsliding, this condition can overtake us in the context of a very active and faithful ministry. I am not referring to the inevitable declension in physical and mental strength which may be part of the normal aging process – that which the apostle Paul designated as the ‘wasting away’ of our outer nature (2 Cor. 4:16).

Rather, ministerial burnout has overtaken us when our mental activities are not occasionally dull and sluggish, but chronically and overwhelmingly dull and sluggish. We are afflicted with this condition when serious and concentrated study becomes a crushing and galling burden. When the appointed hour comes to engage in the labor of serious exegetical spadework, instead of coming to that task with mental alacrity and spiritual excitement, we find ourselves under necessity to whip ourselves to the desk. We also find that we must whip ourselves while engaged in the task itself. When we leave our desks, we are further whipped by a condemning conscience. Even though we have the privilege of rooting around in the Word of God – and the benefit of being paid for our labors – we feel that we are miserable wretches because we have come to consider this privileged labor a wearisome burden.

Further, by ministerial burnout I am referring to that mental condition in which the particularly inventive and creative elements of sermon preparation such as organization, illustration, application, and imagery, seem to elude our powers. When we attempt to fix our minds on a mass of exegetical and homiletical material that desperately needs sorting and putting into acceptable rhetorical categories, we are powerless to discern one brick of thought from another, to decide the right pile for any given brick, and then how to build all those raw materials into a well-constructed sermon. At times we may even come perilously close to taking all the results of our labors, now embedded in our study notes, and sweep them off our desks and onto the floor saying to ourselves that there must be a more suitable way to serve God and to make an honest living! My dear reader, I have been in that condition more than once.

Furthermore, in identifying the nature of ministerial burnout, I am referring to that condition in which we lose most of our ability to feel deeply concerning the great realities in which we constantly traffic. The emotions which ought naturally to accompany us in the secret place and in our public and private ministries to the people of God seem almost neutered.

At another level ministerial burnout refers to our condition when physical energy and resiliency have left us, and so that even one additional or unusual demand may leave us in a heap for days. Or, from a legitimate sense of self-preservation, we may avoid opportunities to do good because we dread the subsequent weariness and weakness that will surely come on the heels of taking on that additional burden. Can you as a pastor and a preacher relate to anything I have said in describing ministerial backsliding and burnout?

Let me add a word of qualification. By these definitions and descriptions I am not in any way implying that there are not divinely-appointed seasons in our lives and ministries in which there will be a different range of spiritual, emotional, intellectual and even physical vigor as part of the ebb and flow of normal Christian experience. There are indeed sovereignly-imposed periods of spiritual desertion and sovereignly-imposed seasons of spiritual discipline that may find expression in physical and mental weakness or in emotional dullness (see Isa. 50:10-11; Ps. 56-57; 88). However, what I am saying is that as an ordinary rule the servants of God ought not to be carrying on their ministries in a prevailing state of ministerial backsliding or ministerial burnout as I have described them. The norm of our lives and ministries should be a fulfillment of that which is beautifully expressed in Psalm 92:12-15 where God promises, ‘The righteous flourish like the palm tree and grow like a cedar in Lebanon. They are planted in the house of the LORD; they flourish in the courts of our God. They still bear fruit in old age; they are ever full of sap and green, to declare that the LORDis upright; he is my rock, and there is no unrighteousness in him.’

With advancing years many men become brittle and sapless. Rather than becoming the epitome of ripened godliness, spiritual vigor and ministerial energy, they become like dried trees – half dead, with autumn leaves barely hanging upon them and with very little fruitfulness. With promises like Psalm 92 to encourage us, why should we accept ministerial backsliding or burnout as a tolerable norm?

Now that I have defined and described what I mean by the terms ministerial backsliding and burnout, it is my purpose to set before you eight specific warnings relative to these two conditions. The first three focus primarily upon ministerial backsliding. The fourth is a transition concern that applies to both conditions. The last four focus primarily upon ministerial burnout. The final warning also moves into the area that I have chosen to call ‘credibility washout’. I will define that term when it is first used in connection with the final warning. While there is some overlapping and interpenetration of these things, each of the warnings is distinct enough to warrant a separate treatment.

Warnings

Against

Ministerial Backsliding

Two

Beware of Distractions from Devotion

Warning number one is this: if you would avoid ministerial backsliding, beware of allowing the demands of your official ministerial duties to erode the disciplines of the devotional nurture of your own soul.

I would be greatly surprised if each of my readers did not at one time or another hear the old dictum that ‘the life of the minister is the life of his ministry’. Those words are simply one man’s way of attempting to express what the Holy Spirit has said to us in two of the most pivotal passages in Scripture with reference to our primary ministerial duties.

The first of these is Acts 20:28. Paul is charging the Ephesian elders (that is, pastors) with their solemn responsibilities now that he is about to leave them. Henceforth, the care of the church will be entirely upon their shoulders under the Lordship of Christ. Paul’s words to these elders are: ‘Pay careful attention (that is, pay constant and close attention) to yourselves and to all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers’. As these elders no doubt reflected upon and discussed together Paul’s exhortation to them, I wonder what their thinking and the substance of their conversation might have been. Would they not have been surprised to hear Paul insisting their fundamental and primary responsibility was taking heed to themselves? In those words Paul was saying to them in effect, ‘You men are God’s chosen instruments through whom Christ will carry on the work of caring for His flock at Ephesus. As is the instrument, so will be the work. Therefore, you must above all else take heed to yourselves. Only then will you be fit to take care of the flock in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers.’ God has never rescinded that divine order of priority concerning the fundamental responsibilities of pastors.

The second passage is 1 Timothy 4:16. After Paul laid upon Timothy a vast spectrum of ministerial duties in conjunction with ordering and superintending behavior in the house of God at Ephesus (1 Tim. 3:15-16), he then turns his attention to Timothy himself (4:6 ff.). His exhortations to Timothy culminate in verse 16 where he says to him, ‘Keep a close watch (again, pay constant, close and careful attention) on yourself and on the teaching. Persist in this.’ Persist in what? Obviously, the things just mentioned, namely the constant care and nurture of himself and of his teaching. Then Paul buttresses his exhortation by reminding Timothy of the blessed results that will come from his obedience to the clear directions concerning his responsibility to engage in a constant and careful watch over himself and over his teaching. He promises Timothy that in the course of his compliance with these directives he will both save himself and those that hear him. Paul clearly says to his spiritual son and ministerial colleague that his own personal salvation is to be his first and fundamental responsibility. Only as he fulfills that responsibility can he be assured that he will be an instrument in the hands of God to secure the salvation of his hearers.

In spite of these two passages with their unmistakably clear directives, it is a tragic reality that all too often we allow our conscientious pursuit of our ministerial duties to the flock to become the occasion of neglecting the nurture of our own souls. Let me describe the descent into a state of ministerial backsliding.

I doubt it is possible to find one preacher in a thousand who was found on any given Monday morning enjoying a rich, fruitful devotional nurture of his own soul as his primary ministerial exercise who then, by Tuesday morning, had degenerated into a backslidden state – a state in which the devotional reading of the Word of God, self-examination, prayer for increased communion with and conformity to Christ had been all but abandoned. No! It is a much more subtle process of erosion. A little neglect here and a little neglect there. The process goes on until, alas, sometimes it takes a grievous fall to bring a man back to the place where he says to himself, ‘How did I get to the position where I could fall into this horrible sin?’ He looks back and then discovers that there had been a subtle, almost imperceptible, process of erosion in the disciplines connected with the nurture of his own soul. You see, my brethren, the means ordained of God for the nurture and ongoing health of the inner life of a pastor are not one bit different than they are for any child of God, regardless of his or her calling.

While writing this book I have been rereading John Owen’s treatise, ‘The Grace and Duty of Being Spiritually Minded’. He addresses this very issue when he writes:

Take heed of decays! Whatever ground the Gospel loseth in our minds, sin possesseth it for itself and its own ends. Let none say it is otherwise with them. Men grow cold and negligent in the duties of Gospel worship, public and private; which is to reject Gospel light. Let them say and pretend what they please, that in other things, in their minds and conversations, it is well with them: indeed it is not so. Sin will, sin doth, one way or other, make an increase in them proportionate unto these decays, and will sooner or later discover itself so to do; and themselves, if they are not utterly hardened, may greatly discover it, inwardly in their peace, or outwardly in their lives. ¹

The Bible

Among the means ordained by God for the nurture of the inner life, none is more vital than assimilating the Word of God in a prayerful and reflective frame of mind and heart. This assimilation should always involve honest self-examination, but of the kind expressed by David in his prayer at the end of Psalm 139:23-24, ‘Search me, O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts! And see if there be any grievous way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting!’ This assimilation must be structured and regular. In it we come to the Word of God as disciples to be taught by our Lord, and not as ministers to receive material for teaching others. In it we come to sit at our Savior’s feet – not primarily to learn what we should speak in His name to others, but to know what He would speak in His own name and Person to our own hearts. This is what I mean by the devotional assimilation of the Scriptures.

Jeremiah expressed it beautifully when he wrote, ‘Your words were found, and I ate them, and your words became to me a joy and the delight of my heart, for I am called by your name, O LORD, God of hosts’ (Jer. 15:16). Or, in the language of the first Psalm, the blessed and fruitful man is the one who meditates on the law of God day and night. The law of God (that is, the whole of inscripturated revelation) is his own internal delight, the meat upon which he feeds his own soul, and that drink by which he refreshes his own inner life.

Hear the challenging words of Thomas Murphy:

To every pastor, then, would we say, Study the Bible with constant and close self-application. Make its chapters and verses familiar, not merely by the effort to gain an intellectual understanding of them, but by the blessed comfort you have found from them in your own souls. Adopt some rule of systematic devotional reading, and let it not be intermitted for any trivial consideration. Let your study of the word be profound, so as to get down to its very marrow and sweetness. Let your meditations be constant, so that all the day long you may have some Scripture before the mind. Let it be with you as his biographer says of McCheyne, that ‘he fed on the word, not in order to prepare himself for his people, but for personal edification. To do so was a fundamental rule with him.’ And let all this devotional study of the word be mingled with prayer, that the same Spirit who inspired it would give it life and power in its effects upon your own soul. ²

Our blessed Lord was the great pattern of One who assimilated the words of His heavenly Father in this regular and structured way. It is none other than the Servant of the Lord (a title of Jesus) who says in Isaiah 50:4, ‘The Lord GOD has given me the tongue of those who are taught, that I may know how to sustain with a word him who is weary. Morning by morning he awakens; he awakens my ear to hear as those who are taught.’ According to this passage our Lord’s ability to speak as He spoke to the refreshment, instruction and conviction of others had its taproot in the fact that His own ear was wakened morning by morning to hear the voice of His heavenly Father. Remember the words of John, ‘whoever says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked’ (1 John 2:6).

Prayer

And then, of course, another vital discipline of the inner life is the maintenance of the habit and spirit of secret prayer. Jesus said that men ‘ought always to pray and not lose heart’ (Luke 18:1). The apostle Paul concluded his description of the Christian’s armor with the exhortation that the people of God are to be found ‘praying at all times in the Spirit, with all prayer and supplication. To that end keep alert with all perseverance, making supplication for all the saints’ (Eph. 6:18). We must maintain both the habit and the spirit of secret prayer. As the old writers said, ‘We must be determined to pray until we have prayed.’ We must not be content that we have merely spent a fixed time in an activity that we call prayer. Rather, we should be restless and discontent if in those times of prayer a pattern emerges in which we have had no conscious engagement of God Himself, no conscious enlargement of desire after God, no conscious communion with Christ and no conscious breaking up of the fallow ground of our hearts. If we do not maintain the habit and spirit of secret prayer it will only be a matter of time before a chronic chill of backsliding will set in upon our souls.

Spiritual reading

Then I believe there is a peculiar responsibility and opportunity laid upon those of us set apart from the ordinary means of employment in order to ‘labor in the word and in doctrine’. Not only should we engage in the two disciplines already addressed – disciplines which the Word of God makes plain are the duties and privileges of all believers – but I would urge you to consider a further discipline calculated to nurture the inner man. Though I have no biblical warrant to bind anyone’s conscience to this activity, I believe it is reasonable as well as profitable to engage in it.

Furthermore, there is a rich and historical precedent for this particular discipline: exposing our minds and hearts on a regular basis to those men and their writings who are masters of the believer’s inner life. Consider the words of J. W. Alexander writing to men who aspire to be and already are ministers of the Gospel:

I hope you will let no kind of reading keep you from looking daily, if only for five minutes, into a class of writers who are not attractive in regard to letters, but who unite great talents, great Bible knowledge, and great unction. At the head of these stands Owen. My father used to say that one should read Owen’s Spiritual Mindedness once a year. ³

God’s servants have often testified to the blessing that has come to them when they have set themselves down in the presence of God and taken up one of these masters of the inner life with a view to the nurture of their own walk with God. With one of these old masters in their hands they have prayed, ‘Oh Lord, this man whose writings I take into my hands is a unique gift of the risen Christ to His church. Use his words to instruct me, to search me, to stir me, to convict me, and above all, to show me my Savior.’ How often God has used these men and their writings to minister deeply and profoundly to my own heart! I am not at all suggesting there are no modern ‘masters of the inner life’ whose writings can be of great profit to us. However, time has proven the great worth of these older works; we rob ourselves of immense blessing if we do not tap in to that rich legacy. However, even though some of us may have known rich blessing in the past through our interaction with such writers, we have by degrees allowed the pressure of our official ministerial duties to crowd out such reading. Our subsequent incipient backsliding is an eloquent witness to our folly. Perhaps it is time to call to mind the words of the risen Christ to the church at Ephesus, ‘Remember therefore from where you have fallen; repent, and do the works you did at first’ (Rev. 2:5).

Seasons of protracted waiting upon God

In our effort to resist or to recover from ministerial backsliding there is one final discipline I would commend. I refer to seasons of protracted waiting upon God, seasons of intense self-examination, seasons, if necessary, of fasting joined to prayer. Even though there may be consistency in the ordinary disciplines aimed at keeping our souls in a healthy state, so powerful are the actions of indwelling sin, so subtle are the seductions of the world, and so insidious are the machinations of the Devil, we can be afflicted with an almost imperceptible form of ministerial backsliding if we do not periodically give ourselves to seasons of protracted waiting upon God.

We can become like a sailing vessel that has no leaks in its hull but has picked up a barnacle here and a barnacle there, more barnacles here and yet more barnacles there, until the whole hull is infested with barnacles. Although the sails are hoisted and properly trimmed the mariner somehow senses that the ship is not plowing through the water at its ordinary speed. He checks the automatic bilge pumps, and because they are not active, he knows that the ship is not drawing any water, and the sails have no rips. What does he need to do? He knows he must put his ship into dry dock as soon as possible to expose the hull and scrape off the barnacles. We need times in a spiritual ‘dry dock’ to scrape from our souls the spiritual barnacles impeding our walk with God. The prophet Jeremiah said, ‘Let us test and examine our ways’ (Lam. 3:40). If we are not concerned enough about this issue of maintaining spiritual vigor occasionally to block out everything from our schedules other than intense and serious dealings with God, sooner or later it is most likely that we will begin to suffer one or more of the manifestations of ministerial backsliding.

Application

So, my fellow servant of God, I issue this first warning: beware of allowing the demands of your official ministerial duties to erode the disciplines of the devotional nurture of your own soul. The human heart is so deceitful. We are quite capable of willingly and quickly deceiving ourselves. If we do not keep some kind of a record of what we have read in the Word of God, and how long it has taken us to get from Genesis to Revelation, we will continually fool ourselves. Do not allow yourself the luxury of vague notions as to whether or not you are reading through the whole compass of the Word of God for the nurture of your own soul at least once every year or two. Whatever your Bible reading schedule may be, you must be certain that you are soaking your soul in ‘every word that comes from the mouth of God’.

Furthermore, we must not kid ourselves that we are maintaining the habit and spirit of secret prayer without keeping some account of ourselves. You ...

Table of contents

• Testimonial
• Title
• Indicia
• Contents
• Dedication
• Introduction: A Brief Account of This Material’s Present Form
• 1. What Is Ministerial Backsliding and Burnout?
• Warnings Against Ministerial Backsliding
• Warnings Against Ministerial Burnout
• Warnings Against Credibility Washout
• Restoration of the Convicted Pastor
• Christian Focus