We often hear that strong doctrine is important. This helps the church to become stable, strong, and protected from the heretical winds that still blow.
But don’t we always hear about the importance of a healthy doctrine for the pastor’s life?How it keeps you stable and strong in the long run. However, good doctrine is crucial to supporting a pastor, and this is especially true in Calvinist doctrine.
- Calvinism biblically balances God’s sovereignty and human responsibility in a way that should produce healthy and renewed ministers.
- Greatly helping to prevent a great occupational risk of pastoral work.
- Namely pastoral exhaustion.
As with any demanding profession, pastors can be exhausted due to the large amount of work that needs to be done in the few hours available a day. The workload can easily become excessive for emotional state.
Unfortunately, counselors advise pastors to avoid wear and tear with the same common sense advice they give anyone: set aside time for recreation and rest; Take care of your family, etc. This is the kind of advice you’ll find in the leadership magazines of any secular organization.
This advice isn’t bad, like I said, it’s common sense. However, Christians should seek a more fundamental source of help: the gospel in which we believe. Pastors, in particular, must remember God’s sovereignty in all things, especially when it comes to salvation.
A Calvinist, said BB Warfield, is he someone who “believes in God unreservedly and is determined that God is God to him in all his thoughts, feelings, and dispositions?”How then can we believe that God is God in all our thoughts, feelings, will, and relationships to prevent ministerial exhaustion?
To begin with, it is liberating to know that God controls all things, especially if we are working in difficult terrain, for the gospel and biblical truth. We learn to work faithfully and leave the fruits to God.
This trust gave the Apostle Paul a balance in ministry. When people compared him to Apollo, I answered, Who is Apollo?And who’s Paulo? Servants you believed in, and this as the Lord gave it to all. I planted, Apollo watered; but growth came from God, so that neither what plant is anything, nor what waters, but God, who grows. (1C 3. 5?7). He didn’t feel compelled to look like Apollo.
This trust also applies to conversions. Calvinist theology says that we are responsible for the prayer and presentation of the gospel, but it prevents us from thinking that we can do anything to provoke the conversion of sinners. We know that regeneration is a sovereign act of God. We have to plant the planting and watering. But only God gives growth. Jesus said, “The wind blows where it wants, you hear his voice, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes; So were they all born of the Spirit?”(Jo 3:8).
Knowledge of God’s sovereignty is an important balance for conscientious shepherds who want to do a good job for the Lord. Knowing that spiritual work is the fruit of the Holy Ghost only frees us from the burden of doing something we cannot do. out-of-place weight of the pastor’s shoulders, but without taking away the responsibility of being faithful.
Finally, the Calvinist’s passion for god’s glory makes a pastor less concerned with the opinions of men. This passion involves more than the development of a ‘hard shell’. On the contrary, as Warfield says, Calvinism is “this vision of the majesty of God that permeates all life and experience. “Is this a positive concern for who really matters in life?God! You are free from work to please men and work more and more to please Only God.
So instead of simply giving pastors common-sense advice on how to avoid exhaustion, let us go further and encourage them to regularly seek to renew themselves from the ancient and strong Calvinist doctrines; In this way, we will turn to God as we work in the trenches of ministry. If we do, we’ll find fewer deaths in our ranks.