The paragraphs below are the opening lines of John Piper’s mini-biography on Charles H. Spurgeon. From nearly 40 years of pastoral ministry, from the work I do with pastors since I left full-time pastoral ministry, I am convinced that these descriptions and observations are spot on. At the end of this post I want to record my reasons for posting them for two different groups and for two different reasons which will make more sense after you read what I record below. Here are the paragraphs:
For Pastors and the Rest of Us
Everyone faces adversity and must find ways to persevere through the oppressing moments of life. Everyone must get up and walk through the routines of making breakfast and washing clothes and going to work and paying bills and disciplining children. We must, in general, keep life going when our hearts are breaking.
But it’s different with pastors—not totally different, but different. The heart is the instrument of our vocation. Charles Spurgeon said, “Ours is more than mental work—it is heart work, the labour of our inmost soul.”1 When a pastor’s heart is breaking, therefore, he must labor with a broken instrument. Preaching is the pastor’s main work, and preaching is heart work, not just mental work. The question becomes, then, not just how you keep living when the marriage is blank or when the finances don’t reach or when the pews are bare and friends forsake you, but How do you keep preaching?
When the heart is overwhelmed, it’s one thing to survive adversity; it is something entirely different to continue preaching Sunday after Sunday, month after month.
Spurgeon said to the students of his Pastors’ College: “One crushing stroke has sometimes laid the minister very low. The brother most relied upon becomes a traitor. . . . Ten years of toil do not take so much life out of us as we lose in a few hours by Ahithophel the traitor, or Demas the apostate.”2 The question for pastors is not, “How do you live through unremitting criticism and distrust and accusation and abandonment?”—but, “How do you preach through it? How do you do heart work when the heart is under siege and ready to fall?”
These are the uppermost questions for many pastors. Preaching great and glorious truth in an atmosphere that is not great and glorious is immensely difficult. To be reminded week in and week out that many people regard his preaching of the glory of God’s grace as hypocrisy pushes a preacher not just into the hills of introspection, but sometimes to the precipice of selfextinction. I don’t mean suicide—but something more complex. I mean the deranging inability to know any longer who you are.
What begins as a searching introspection for the sake of holiness and humility gradually leaves your soul, for various reasons, in a hall of mirrors. You look into one and you’re short and fat; you look into another and you’re tall and lanky; you look into another and you’re upside down. Then the horrible feeling begins to break over you that you don’t know who you are anymore. The center is not holding. If the center doesn’t hold—if there is no fixed “I” able to relate to the fixed “thou” (namely, God), who is supposed to preach next Sunday?
Footnotes
1 Charles Spurgeon, Lectures to My Students (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1972), 156.
2 Ibid., 161.27 Servants of Sovereign Joy
John Piper, p. 779-80
- To pastors: I want them to know that they are not alone, that even the “prince of preachers” suffered the sorrows of preaching with a broken heart and through withering criticism and that there is a way “through” that doesn’t require either hypocrisy or inauthenticity and can instead, yield a healthy spiritual and emotional life.
- To those who have pastors: Pray for your pastors. They have all your kind of struggles but while many (not all) of us can hide from the public when our hearts are broken, they can’t. They still have a flock to shepherd. They still have to treat everyone else’s sorrows, anxieties, depressions, fears, doubts and confusions, everyone else’s needs as more immediately important than their own. They don’t need your pity. But they do need your prayer, that in the midst of their own sorrows and troubles, they would take their refuge in God and find Jesus Christ as intoxicatingly satisfying. Pray for them, and pray for me as I care for them.
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