Moments in the life of a Pastor

Walking with God

Monthly Archives: September 2012


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15 Serving through the Weariness

Galatians 6:9-10

9 So let’s not get tired of doing what is good. At just the right time we will reap a harvest of blessing if we don’t give up. 10 Therefore, whenever we have the opportunity, we should do good to everyone—especially to those in the family of faith.

 All of us grow weary, we wake up and realize that we are tired. Tired of giving, tired of doing, tired of serving, and that the joy of service is gone. It’s what we call burnout and the bible addresses it more than once. II Thessalonians 3:13 says, “Do not grow weary in doing good.” God knows that we are prone to weariness when it comes to serving because sometimes:

  • There appears to be No observable results.

We live in a result oriented society, sports has given us a score board, even when we go fishing to relax we want to produce a stringer of fish and take a picture as proof. We like to measure our success in tangible ways, but the problem with our service to the Lord is that it isn’t always easy to measure. We may labor for years without knowing the results of our work. We grow weary because we believe that non-visible results mean no results. When God commissioned the prophet Isaiah in Isa 6:9, he told Isaiah to deliver God’s message to a people who would not hear and would not see. Jeremiah was also commissioned by God to deliver his message to the people who would ridicule and ignore him. They seemed to labored for God with no positive results, nothing to measure as seeming success.

  • We face criticism

No matter what the worker in the Lord’s vineyard does, there is always someone who is ready to say, “We don’t do it that way,” or “We’ve never done it that way,” or “we never do THAT!” Serving is hard work and criticism takes what is hard and makes it seem impossible. When it grows dark we turn on a light so we can see but where there is light, there are bugs. It’s that way with serving, there will always be those pesky flies buzzing about.

  • We lose sight of the Harvest.

It’s easy to take our eyes off the goal and get distracted, to grow impatient waiting for the harvest. Paul spoke about reaping a harvest “at the proper time.” Why? Because sometimes the harvest doesn’t come when we expect, or when we desire.  Sometimes the “harvest” takes months, years, even decades. Sometimes the harvest comes too late for us to see it, Moses died before entering the Promised Land. Sometimes the harvest just doesn’t come in this life and our reward is “Well done, good and faithful servant.” Sometimes we’re unaware of who we’ve influenced; and the fruit appears when we’re not around to see it.  We must have an eternal perspective if we are to keep on sowing good seeds.

  •  We miss the harvest

Not only does the fruit sometimes appear at a time we don’t expect; sometimes it appears in a form we don’t expect. We’re expecting passion fruit and we got lemons. Sometimes the result of obedience is not an improvement in our circumstances, but a strengthening of our faith and a refining of our character.

Often from man’s perspective serving stinks! The bible reveals that most of God’s leaders had a rough time. What if Paul had not gone to Jerusalem and Rome, but stayed at Antioch? He could have started the Apostle Paul Seminary, wrote more books and trained more preachers. He could have lived a comfortable life, but Paul would not have been obedient to his call. As I read Philippians, written while Paul’s was in prison, I am struck by the number of times Paul mentions the word joy, eighteen I believe! We want to serve and we want to see the results of that service but we don’t want it to be difficult and we don’t want to have to wait. Yet Paul’s theology was molded in the fires of conflict and adversity as he served.

There is something to be said for those who do not give up easily, those who prevail through persistence. Joseph was a man who had a dream given to him by God that he shared with others, this lead to him being thrown into a pit, sold into slavery, put in prison, and finally a position of power in the palace. Joseph didn’t give up, he kept planting the seeds of good, serving those around him and after over 20 years the dream came true. When we come to that place of giving up we never intend to quit, we tell ourselves that we are just going to take a break for a while, but somehow we just never seem to get started up again.  I know you’re tired…you’re ready to give up… you’re discouraged…it doesn’t seem like God hears you…you can’t even seem to get a prayer through… and you sure don’t see a breakthrough… but quitting is not an option. Keep on serving by sowing, God will bring the harvest.


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Walking among the giants.

James 1:2-4

2 Dear brothers and sisters,[a] when troubles come your way, consider it an opportunity for great joy. 3 For you know that when your faith is tested, your endurance has a chance to grow. 4 So let it grow, for when your endurance is fully developed, you will be perfect and complete, needing nothing.

Gaining perspective can often be the key to the situations we find ourselves in in life.  So many times we find ourselves dwelling on the insignificant things in this life giving over our attention and focus to the unimportant. All of this giving of our attention to the mundane is not so much a giving away but a taking away from what really matters.

In Sequoya National Park there are literally millions of trees, the hills are covered in blue oak and pine but that’s not what draws the thousands of visitors every year. It’s the giant Sequoias that people come to see, trees that tower over everything in the forest, the biggest trees in the world. Walking in the land of these giants you are surrounded by ordinary trees, they’re everywhere, but scattered throughout are the giant sequoias that captivate your attention. There in the silence of the forest you marvel at the majestic greatness of these trees, you reflect not only on their size, but their beauty, they are truly special. These amazing trees grow in groves scattered throughout the park but at a higher elevation than one might think, they like to grow between 5000 to 7000 feet. In order to see these giants you have to wind your way up into the Sierra Nevada mountain range through a narrow and steep road. Higher and higher you go, snaking your way up the mountain pass around corner after corner until suddenly, almost abruptly, there they are. It’s almost an unreal moment, like time is frozen and you step back into the past. There is a prehistoric feel to that moment as you reach out and touch these ancient trees that live to be 3200 years old.

As I walked by these silent trees, guardians of the ancient forest, I stood dwarfed in the shadow of their grandeur and the sheer size of these immense giants put everything into perspective. Staring at the largest sequoia tree in the park, (estimated to be 2200 years old, standing 275 feet tall, weighing over 1400 tons, and with a circumference of 103 feet) it caused me to reflect on what is really important and where I placing my focus. What if I had come to the park and spent my time on the lower slopes focusing on the abundant blue oaks or common pines covering the hill side, filling up my vision with the ordinary and the everyday common things? What if I had been content to leave my visit to the park at that, and then go home, you would have told me I was a fool for wasting my time on the insignificant. You would have told me to make the time and effort to go up the mountain to focus on the truly spectacular. So many times we are consumed with the insignificant things in this life, willingly trapped on the lower slopes of life unable or unwilling to journey up the mountain and experience the extraordinary, the really significant things in this life.

Because these trees live so long it is inevitable that they will not only see natural disasters but lots of them in their life span. Throughout the park you will see many of these giant trees that bear the scars of fire around their trunks. Their bases are blackened by the intense heat that has killed many of the ordinary trees around them and even though the sequoias are scarred, they are very much alive and well because of their incredibly thick protective bark which can be 30 inches thick.

If you live long enough, disasters will strike, trials will come and unlike the trees who don’t try to prevent the fire but to resist it, we often spend much of our lives trying to avoid the trials. We are not ok with being uncomfortable, too much heat and we run, but these trees can’t move and they don’t need to, they are growing where God planted them, in the right soil, at the right elevation, on the right slopes. We will have times of trial, Ephesians 6:13 (“Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand”) tells us that we are to resist the devil, who comes with fiery darts, not avoid. Like the giant trees, our goal is simply to stand, to resist going down in the fire, they do this using their protective outer bark, what do we have? Our protective outer covering is the shield of faith and as I touched the outer covering of these amazing trees and pondered their incredibly thick bark I had to ask myself how thick is my faith? Is it thick enough to resist the heat?

Most of us have a negative view of fire and trials but for the giant sequoias it is the heat of the fire that causes the seeds to be released. Green cones can hang on the trees closed for 20 years but as the fire comes it dries out the cones causing them to open and release their seeds. After a fire is the prime time for seeds to sprout and new trees to grown. The fire has burned the timber of other trees to ash which acts as fertilizer for the soil and it has also created a hole in the forest providing both space and needed sunlight for the new seedlings to grow.

What does the fire of trials do for us? James says it matures us. Sometimes it burns away things around us which lets in the light and gives us a chance to grow. Other times it’s out of the rich ash that we find what we need to grow.

What amazed me the most about these trees was not their incredible size but the size of their pine cones and specifically the size of their seeds. The pine cones are small, the size of a chickens egg, while many other pines that are significantly smaller in stature have much bigger pine cones. The seeds are no bigger than an oat flake, yet from these small seeds comes something great. It’s not so important how we start out but what direction we grow, these giants reach out for the light growing ever higher. What direction am I growing in? What am I reaching for? This truly is a magical place where the giants around me have helped me to regain perspective on what ultimately is important in my life.