Craig Groeschel
Before God blesses your ministry publicly, he’ll often allow you to suffer with integrity privately.
Personal pain often precedes public gain. A.W. Tozer said, “It is doubtful that God can bless a man greatly until He has hurt him deeply.”
Scripture seems to imply that God will often test us before God blesses us. He wants to know if we’ll be faithful before giving us more.
The biggest tests I’ve faced involved doing the right thing when no one else knows. One time I had to make a public and controversial stand without the freedom to explain the reason. To expose the reason would have hurt too many innocent people.
I believe God called me to endure the criticism from uninformed people on behalf of those who were innocent. One explanation would have silenced all the critics, but also compromised my integrity.
I chose to stand alone. God knew the whole story. That had to be enough for me.
You may have to do the same. If you are facing private pain, rejoice that God might be preparing you for ministry gain.
Young ministers (like me and many of the other people who blog here) would do well to listen to what Craig has to say on this issue. I think this flies in the face of our short-term commitment, self-absorbed and quick-fix culture and gets to the heart of a biblical view of ministry.
Check out 2 Corinthians (the whole book) and you will see a man (Paul) who is in a world of pain because of the back-stabbing, in-fighting, deliberate defamation and rumours of the Corinthian church, and those who had infiltrated it, against him. See the way he deals with the criticism, lies and insults… he remains honest, keeps his integrity and absorbs the suffering for the sake of the gospel.
It is too easy for young people to cop criticsm of their ministry and fire up, stick to their guns and basically burn bridges. In the church culture at the moment their are plenty of choices and plenty of options for ministry, so if you cop criticism it is too easy just to write that group of people off and run off and work somewhere else, and you can fire off a couple of parting shots that prove your “rightness” as you go! Unfortunately, there will always be other people and other ministries that will affirm you doing this, and maybe even encourage you to do it, they will make you feel as though you are right and are justified in burning the bridges and walking away. They will tell you that, “those people will go on with their hard hearts and suffer, you need to get away from them.” But this is not how we are called to minister.
As hard as it is, it is better to absorb the suffering, be humble and submissive, to not always be right, to trust God to vindicate you, to let the Christlikeness of your character shine as you draw your strength and identiity from Him, and to be prepared for other people to think you are wrong when you actually were right! Ministry is meant to involve personal suffering and sacrifice… the concept of passion is directly linked with suffering, so if you want to be a passionate minister of the gospel, then we must be prepared to suffer for it, from both the world and the church.