Christian Leadership Training Institute

XVI. Why would a Father allow bad things to happen-Part 2

Think of the misery that comes into our lives by our restless gnawing greed.  We plunge ourselves into enormous debt and then take two and three jobs to stay afloat.  We uproot our Families with unnecessary moves just so we can have a more prestigious house.  We grasp and grab and never have enough.  And most destructive of all our flashy cars and sports spectaculars and backyard pools have a way of crowding out much interest in the family, love of people, and those areas and virtues that make life worth living.  How clearly the Apostle Paul saw this when he warned that our lust for wealth causes us to fall into Many senseless and hurtful desires that plunge men into ruin and destruction" (1 Tim. 6:9).

But we do not need to be imprisoned to greed.  We can be ushered into a life of peace and serenity.

We weary of competing commitments and exhausting schedules.  We desire to be obedient to God in all things, and have a growing knowledge that this frantic scramble is not his will.  We yearn to enter the deep silences that give unity and direction to our lives.

Desire, however, is not enough.  If we expect to enter the inward peace for which we were created, we will need to order our lives in specific ways.  The things we do will not give us peace, but they will put us in the training program where we can receive it.

It is wonderful - this resting in God, this stilling of frantic activity this seeking first His Kingdom. 

We must have a time to still the churning, to quiet the restlessness, to meditate on the almighty God who dwells in our hearts.

The experience of pressure is an intrinsic aspect of all Christian living and it appears that this has always been so.  You are invited to identify with one or more traits or experiences of biblical leaders under pressure, and seek to apply new learning in specific areas of your own life.  There is a flow of experience and wisdom in the community of faith there is much that we can learn from the past.  In particular, the varied dimensions of brokenness portrayed in the lives of biblical leaders, and the rich learning - and sometimes healings - which they experienced by the grace and love of God, may inform and give profound insight to servant - children in the modern church.

The varied dimensions of pressure:

1. Loss of meaning in a living situation.

Many servant - children admit to feelings of meaninglessness in their living.  Such an expression of loss of meaning in the living to which they believe they have been called by God either initiates or helps sustain experiences of stress. Biblical figures such as Jeremiah and David illustrate such feelings of meaninglessness.

Jeremiah is unusual among the Hebrew prophets because of the extent to which the biblical record reveals his personal feelings.  From the outset of his ministry, he experienced a real sense of desperation when confronted with the almost hopeless task of ministering to Judah in her apostasy.  His pent-up mental anguish found expression in passionate outbursts against his lot in life (read Jeremiah 5:10; 20:8, 14, 18).

Repeatedly, Jeremiah is pictured as perceiving his own ministry to be at variance with that of the priests.  He questions both the validity of their ministry, and the capacity of the people to respond appropriately to his own prophetic ministry.  He believes in the validity of his own ministry passionately, but realizes that others do not concur with his estimate.

David reveals himself to be a person who believes that God had been richly present to his ancestors, but experiences an apparent absence of the blessing of God upon his own life.  Elsewhere in Psalm 22, David exposes his feelings of pain and irrelevance as well as concluding that, in an ultimate sense, his ministry is not pointless.  Feelings of inadequacy and irrelevance in living are hardly new; they unfold naturally as part of the biblical story.

2. Loneliness and burden-bearing.

Experiences of personal loneliness by Christians, and the weight of burdens they carry, are common.  Similar experiences of isolation and the weight of suffering are attested by biblical figures.

The book of Jeremiah depicts the agony of Jeremiah as interlocked with the agony of Yahweh himself at Israel's rejection of him.  Yahweh calls the people his daughter, they provoke him to agony, yet Jeremiah feels the wound, and the sickness grabs hold  of his own heart and fills him with anguish and even weeping for what he sees ahead.

Five great confessions of Jeremiah have been identified; take the time to read and reflect on these:

1. 11:18-23 and 12:1-6;
2. 15: 10-21;
3. 19: 12-18;
4. 18: 18-23;
5. 20: 7-28.

All share a highly personal description of Jeremiah's own sufferings and events of lively despair, mixed with a trust in God that reaches out in the dark for help.  Jeremiah's deep feelings well up from his spiritual anguish.

Perhaps the most significant contributing factor to Jeremiah's agony was his intense identification with the people to whom he had to proclaim the judgment of God:

My heart, my heart!  Let me writhe!
O walls of my heart!
My heart is in tumult within:
I cannot keep still,
For the sound of the horn do I hear,
The blast  of battle!

Crash upon  crash it comes -
For all the land is ravaged
Of a sudden my tent is ravaged
In an instant my curtains.

The poems of Jeremiah's inner life do not depict prophetic truth as a bolt from the blue, but as something with a history in the prophet's psyche.  The revelation of God was appropriated by Jeremiah deep within his mind and his spirit, amid personal anguish.  Moreover, this anguish was used repeatedly by God to shape and refine Jeremiah's life.

The burden of his call drove Jeremiah relentlessly towards the fulfillment of his prophetic mission.  He experienced the tension of belief in that call over against the personal agony associated with the response to that call.  On one occasion, he went so far as to say that he would never again speak in the divine name.

Jeremiah might well have been tempted to shrink from the call of God when it summoned him to attack the religious and commercial vested interests of Jerusalem in his day.  The outer circumstances of his life were the context in which Jeremiah's inner, lonely suffering took place.

The New Testament letter of Paul illustrate the pressures of loneliness and burden-bearing.  Nowhere are the dimensions of pressure experienced by Paul so clearly etched as in 2 Corinthians:

Paul also is described as experiencing the grief of having to lose a close companion (Barnabas): and of needing to take tough decisions.  Paul, if he was the author of 2 Timothy, was disappointed and grieved over the departure of Demas, and was apparently lonely because only Luke of all his close friends was with him at the time of writing his second letter to Timothy.  In this context, Paul needed the fellowship of his younger brother in Christ ('Do you best to come  to me soon').

In addition, Paul had to endure many false accusations, sometimes from those who were widely respected in the church.

3.  Personal limitations

One of the paradoxes of being engaged in Christian living is that the person, may frequently experience severe personal limitations and weakness.

The biblical record contains evidence of the leaders of God's people experiencing feelings of personal limitation.  Moses, in the face of God's call to lead the children of Israel into liberation from Egypt, felt utterly incapable of being the spokesman and representative of his People to pharaoh.  Another example is that of Isaiah, who experienced a sense of deep  unworthiness before the vision of a holy God.  Also, Jeremiah believed, like Moses, that he was not gifted in such a way as he thought would be appropriate for the particular nature of God's call for him.

Recent studies in Christology have placed heavy emphasis on the humanity of Jesus.  While these studies, it may be argued, overlook the reality of the divinity of Jesus, they have heightened our contemporary awareness of the full humanness of Jesus which has tended to be at least partly obscured by traditional Christology with its one-sided emphasis on the divinity of Christ.  Because of this emphasis on the divinity of Christ, the relevance of New Testament material attesting the human limitation and experience of Jesus to the ministry of his followers is more apparent.

In Matthew, chapters 8 and 9, Jesus was unable to cater to the needs of the crowds and escaped across the lake from them.  He pointed out to a scribe that to follow him was to step out into insecurity and to share his fate.

Jesus perceived the needs of the crowds were so great that there would be a continuing need over the coming days, and years, for more disciples in order that the crowds might receive effective ministry.  He felt the pressure of his limitations.

A somewhat similar experience of personal limitation is described by the apostle Paul in 2 Corinthians.  The discovery of spiritual power coincidental with physical suffering is described as a humiliation, feelings of inadequacy, and all forms of suffering, as powerful instruments revealing the presence of God.

The credibility of Christian living is at stake if it is assumed that such leaders should be perfect and invulnerable creatures - persons "apart."  The validity of a theology operating upon such an assumption would be highly questionable.  It is worth recalling that the gospel has been communicated iin spite of the frailty of human flesh.  God is able to communicate through sensual, fragile and destructible flesh; 'We have this treasure in earthen vessels, to show the transcendent power belongs to God and not to us.'

For the apostle Paul, power in ministry was experienced in terms of dependence upon the sovereign Lord.  In Paul's understanding, the attributes of his ministry had more to do with an 'unprofessional' understanding of ministry, as that word is usually understood.  Paul considered that the effectiveness of his ministry could not be accounted for in terms of his personal skills, his eloquence, his confidence or any such factor; rather his own performance in ministry was seen by him to be a stumbling demonstration of his incapacity to minister effectively, when contrasted with the power of the Spirit of God (1 Corinthians 2:1-5).  Paul was very aware of his own weakness (the 'thorn in the flesh', 2 Corinthians 12:7-9; his difficulty in writing, Galatians 6:11; his confrontations with difficulty in writing, Galatians 6:11; his confrontations withy opponents in the church, Galatians 2 and 1 Corinthians 2:1-5, 4: 11-13).

The amazing fact is that the gospel is communicated through that which is human finite, and despite sin and illness.  The word of God has been powerfully communicated in spite of Davit's sensual life (2 Samuel 12), Elijah's weariness (1 Kings 19), Jeremiah's sense of burden (Jeremiah 20:7-10), Ezekiel's probable schizophrenia (Ezekiel 1:1), Timothy's digestive problems (1 Timothy 5:23), as well as Francis of Assisi's profligate youth, Luther's self-doubts, and Kierkegaard's and J. B. Phillips' depressions.  It may be that those who acknowledge their place in the midst of suffering humanity are even better equipped to live the gospel that those who compulsively - strive for perfection.

Thus there is no theological justification for an understanding of Christian living being undertaken by peculiar human beings who are beyond mental, spiritual or emotional conflict. On the other hand the realization that human limitation and weakness may be viewed as an ingredient of, rather than a barrier to effective living is a very liberating one.

4.  Extreme Stress

While the designation 'burnout' is a modern one, the condition it describes is as old as events depicted in the Bible.  For example,, in the Psalms, David describes himself as being totally worn out:

"O Lord, rebuke me not in thy anger,
nor chasten me in the wrath.
Be gracious to me, O Lord, for I am Languishing;
O Lord, heal me, for my bones are troubled.
My soul also is sorely troubled.
My soul also is sorely troubled.
But, O Lord, how long?"
(Psalm 6:1-3.  See also 25:19-21, 31:9, 10; 32:3, 4; 38:3, 4; 39:1-3, 7-11).

Jeremiah also appears to have experienced the dark depths of despair and feelings of helplessness and exhaustion implicit in 'burnout' (Jeremiah 4:19-21, 8:18; 9:1; 11:18, 19).

Jesus, especially in the spiritual and emotional battle at the Mount of Olives (Luke 22:42-44) and on Golgotha, is similarly tortured and pressured.  The intensity of that struggle, represented physically by Luke in his reference to Jesus' sweat being 'like great drops of blood falling down upon the ground' (verse 44), must be noted.

The cry of Jesus on the cross, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" (Matthew 27:46), echoing the opening words of Psalm 22, underscores the extent of Jesus' experience of bitter isolation as he approached death.  Already feeling alienated from almost all human companionship, Jesus embraces the darkest desertion of all: alienation from the Father.

These biblical examples suggest that 'burnout' is an acute development of the individual's reaction to other dimensions of pressure.  Certainly, there are echoes of this condition in the forgoing discussion of biblical material.

Ways of Coping

Scripture not only depicts the problem of pressure experienced by God's servant: it also highlights ways of coping with the problem.  We have seen that the biblical record does not minimize the existence of pressure, or the value of it.  Certainly, the suggestion is to be found there that it is possible to 'solve' the problem of pressure for Christians by adopting some kind of life-style that would be free of any such pressure.  The Bible contains insights into various ways in which such pressure can be coped with, and even turned to profit.

1.  Name the problem

Biblical characters, on occasion, are described as enduring extreme stress.  For example, Elijah experienced sheer exhaustion after the Mount Carmel event (1 Kings 19).  Also, Jeremiah's outburst, claiming that at one point in his ministry he had enough and was near to breaking point (Jeremiah 20) illustrates the intensity of this experience: 'Cursed be the day on which I was born.  The day when my mother bore me, let it not be blessed!  Cursed be the man who brought the news to my father, "A son is born to you..."'.

In the New Testament record, Jesus is depicted as undergoing deep agony on the Mount of Olives prior to his arrest, and he begs his Father, 'My Father, if it be possible, let this cup (of suffering) pass from me...'  Also, Paul indicates by letter the sufferings he and his missionary companions had experienced in Asia:'... for we were so utterly, unbearably crushed that we despaired of life itself.  Why, we felt that we had received the sentence of death...'

While there are examples of biblical figures who apparently had no hesitation about articulating to God, and to others, areas of stress, modern Christians are often reticent to do the  same.  yet basic to all endeavors to cope with stress is the willingness to 'own' the stress: to recognize it with or without the help of  others, and to express it in some way.  To be able to name the problem is a significant undergirding factor which predisposes to healthy coping behavior.

2.  Balance between rest and activity.

for humans to engage in work is to experience pain.  The fatigue of work is its pain.  Only the lilies of the field neither "toil' nor are in pain, because they have no anxiety.  The Bible affirms that God, understanding the fatigue experienced by us, gives rest.  Rest, theologically, is both needed by men and women in living, and has its source beyond them.  Such rest is not merely a suspension of activity, but also signifies refreshment, and is to be seen as a corrective over and against the frenzied activism of much living.  While in an ultimate sense 'rest' is an experience, relaxation and refreshment it is also part of God's provision for all people.  Such divine provision must be claimed by Christians making the choices necessary if they are to receive this portion of God's gift of sustenance.  Intentionality on the part of Christians is required.

Such biblical figures as Jeremiah, Jesus and Paul model for us the way a leader in a demanding ministry situation may still retain the initiative  to call for 'timeout', and deliberately making opportunities for withdrawal from ministry with others to engage in prayer and adopt a quiet, contemplative disposition.

3.  From weakness to power; from works to grace.

Whenever a Christian faces and accepts his or her inadequacies, limitations and frustrations, the way is open for a deep nourishment of spirit by the Spirit promised us.  ('For when I am weak, then I am strong' - 2 Corinthians 12:10).  Christians, as part of the community of the church, need to share with all their brothers and sisters in this life-sustaining dependency which in turn creates renewal and  growth.

Rather than the fragility and humanity of the Christian being viewed in scripture in terms of negativity only (as obstacles to spiritual life and authentic living), they are depicted as aspects of God's grace, as instruments of his action in and through the life of his servants.  In this way, scripture encourages Christians to view the varied aspects of their personal vulnerability not as enemies that seek only to destroy effective living, but as allies which, if acknowledged and accepted, may be powerful agents of the Spirit of God, utterly alone and helplessness, which becomes the first step to the recovery of his confidence and hope.

in some cases, servant-children operate in daily life as though they do not stand under the gospel of the unconditional acceptance of them by God.  It is often difficult for Christians to claim and live by grace.

4.  Creative relationships.

Frequently, individuals who are described in scripture as exercising spiritual leadership, are portrayed as being supported in community.  As well as others providing encouragement for them, they provide an accepting environment in which confession may be made.

The benefits of true fellowship with peers or with others are implied in scripture.  Relationships require the expenditure of energy, but it is apparent in the biblical records that such energy is rewarded with the gift of additional energy in return.

The primitive church endeavored to sustain caring relationships that included supportive friendships between key leaders (for example, for some years, between Barnabas and Paul; the apostles in Jerusalem; and Paul and his companions).  It appears that leaders in the primitive church did not operate in total isolation from other Christians and that they would not have desired such a 'lone-ranger' approach in their ministry.  Rather, it was natural for them to consult, support and even dispute with each other for their own good, and the good of the church.

Paul provides an illuminating insight into his personal priority in his ministry of spending time with the elders of the church in Ephesus.  In this, Paul's farewell message to the Ephesian  elders, he reminds them of his practice, over three years when in Ephesus, of counseling and weeping with them and with others in the church at Ephesus, 'day and night'.  No demonstration of the value and significance of creative relationships for Christians could be more instructive.

Individual Reflection

Having considered in this Chapter some of the dimensions of pressure in which biblical servant-child experienced the love of God bathing their areas of brokenness, promoting endurance and healing:

1.  Write down  one or two dimensions of pressure referred to in this Chapter which you know to be true, either now or recently, in your own life:

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Last modified: June 13, 2000