Dangerous Calling: Confronting the Unique Challenges of Pastoral Ministry

by Paul David Tripp

I know how this calling can seem unbearably burdensome and how it can be a sheer delight.

If you aren’t daily admitting to yourself that you are a mess and in daily and rather desperate need for forgiving and transforming grace, and if the evidence around has not caused you to abandon your confidence in your own righteousness, then you are going to give yourself to the work of convincing yourself that you are okay.

The impact of all of these things together is that you find your ministry less and less a privilege and a joy and more and more a burden and a duty.

All creation is meant to be a finger pointing us to ultimate glory, the only glory that can ever satisfy the human heart, the glory of God.

Is it not dangerous for students to become comfortable with the message of the Bible while not being broken, grieved, and convicted by it?

When the Word of God, faithfully taught by the people of God and empowered by the Spirit of God, falls down, people become different.

I am convinced that the crisis of pastoral culture often begins in the seminary class.

His study of the Word brings him again and again to his desk, but it seldom brings him to his knees.

I have no difficulty recognizing the sin of the people around me, but I can be quite unprepared when my sin is pointed out.

This goes back to the reality that no one gives grace better than a person who knows he desperately needs it himself.

I have realized how much I need warning, encouragement, rebuke, correction, protection, grace, and love.

You’d better be committed to being honest about the battles that are going on in your own heart.

No one gives grace better than a person who is deeply persuaded that he needs it himself and is being given it in Christ.

A functional awe of God really is the key to your heart’s not being ruled by fear.

Have the circumstances captured your meditation? Are there ways in which you have grown weaker in faith? Or do the eyes of your heart focus on a God who is infinitely greater than anything you will ever face?

So, without being conscious of it, they have begun to offer their hearts to other glories, hoping that somehow, someway, satisfaction will be found.

It is here again that we are faced with the fact that our ministries are not shaped just by knowledge, experience, and skill but by the true condition of our hearts. Excellence in ministry flows from a heart that is in holy, reverential, life-rearranging, motivation-capturing awe of the Lord of glory.

I will want each ministry of the church to be done in excellence so that they will faithfully display the excellence of the One who calls out of darkness into his marvelous light.

The problem is that we have lost our awe, and in losing our awe we are all too comfortable with representing God’s excellence in a way that is anything but excellent.

You must meditate, pray, labor, wrestle, and work on how to communicate the truths that you have come to understand to the particular people who are in your care.

When I hear a sermon that is essentially law-driven, that is, asking the law to do what only the grace of Jesus Christ can accomplish, I am immediately concerned about the preacher. I immediately wonder about his view of himself, because if he had any self-consciousness about his own weakness and sin, he would find little hope and comfort for himself and his hearers in that kind of sermon.

It is Christ and Christ alone who builds his church. This is humbling stuff because it requires us to admit that we have no power whatsoever to change anyone.

don’t seek the courage-giving encouragement of others. If you don’t see your sin, you won’t see the value of confessing it to those who can counsel and warn you.

We cannot remind ourselves enough that without his presence, power, and grace, our ministries are nothing. This is the inescapable bottom line.

You and I must not become pastors who are all too aware of our positions. We must not give way to protecting and polishing our power and prominence. We must resist feeling privileged, special, or in a different category. We must not think of ourselves as deserving or entitled. We must not demand to be treated differently or put on some ministry pedestal. We must not minister from above but from alongside.

I am sad as I reflect on my many years of ministry, but I am not depressed. I am not, because in all of my weakness, the God of amazing grace has rescued and restored again and again.

One of the great dangers for all of us is this: we have the perverse ability to look around and not see the amazing glory of God. Even though, as Isaiah put it, “the whole earth is full of his glory” (Isa. 6:3), we can be incredibly blind to the display that is everywhere around us.

Daily Bible study, meditation, and prayer have the power and potential to make the glory of God big in our eyes once again.

You need to remember that you don’t have to attempt to do in your ministry what only that grace has the power to do.

You are in great danger if the grief you experience over the condition of others is greater than the grief you feel for your own sin.

Grace enables you to be a good soldier.

I have been freed from the bondage of convincing myself and others that I am worthy.

You are in trouble as a pastor when you need regular doses of appreciation and respect in order to continue.

No, you could argue that it is your admission of weakness that protects your ministry from becoming all about human reputation and kingdom building. And it is your weakness that protects you from the dangers of self-righteousness and self-reliance.

We must preach to ourselves a gospel of ongoing weakness and sufficient grace.

There is a way in which pastoral ministry will make you either sad or delusional. Because ministry will expose your weakness, it has the power to produce in you a wholesome sadness, an abandonment of your own righteousness that will drive you to the cross for forgiveness, healing, and comfort.

Grief will cause you to find joy in being an ambassador of the King of grace.

We need to take the time to pray words of confession and commit to concrete steps of repentance.

I have been humbled to see again why my standing with my Heavenly Father will never be based on my performance but on Christ’s.

1 Peter 5:6–11:

Perhaps there is nothing more important in ministry than knowing your place.

There will be moments when it will feel as though God has given you neither the wisdom nor the strength to do what he’s called you to do.

If we rest in God’s care only when we understand just what he’s doing, there will be many times and places where we won’t rest in his care.

When in your ministry you begin to look horizontally for what you have already been given vertically, you place yourself and your ministry in spiritual danger.

your eternal future carries with it the sure promise that you will have all the grace you need to do what you’ve been called to do between the time you came to Christ and the time you will go home to be with him forever.

Also, the hope for your ministry is not the success of your pastoral control or ingenuity but that a sovereign Savior will complete his plan for his church.