Dear Ray,
It is easy to look at the denominations and recognize how much of what is called ministry consists of a man’s goals, plans, and projects that he believes God wants him to accomplish. He gathers people, establishes a work, and spends his life maintaining it. We may readily recognize the natural source operating there. But can we recognize the same thing in what we call “our ministry”?
Something does not become spirit because we call it ministry. It does not become life because its teaching is accurate. It does not come from the tree of life simply because its founder experienced God. The question is whether Christ Himself is our present source. Are we living by Zoe, or have we taken something associated with God and made it the occupation of our natural life?
I believe ministry is one of the most serious places where this exchange occurs.
When we are young, we want to be fruitful. We want our lives to matter. We hear that God has a work for us, a function, a ministry. Almost immediately, our attention moves toward discovering what we can become and accomplish. We imagine a future in which we are useful, recognized, and needed.
We may scarcely notice that our center has shifted.
Instead of learning to abide in Christ, we begin developing a spiritual identity around our usefulness. Instead of knowing Him as our life, we seek a work that will demonstrate that we know Him. The desire sounds consecrated. Yet the natural man has found a religious occupation through which to continue living.
He has found “his ministry.”
The tree of the knowledge of good and evil includes good. An obviously evil ambition might trouble our conscience. A ministry ambition may receive encouragement from everyone around us. We pursue it with tremendous energy while believing that our determination is faithfulness to God.
But good is not the same as life.
A correct message can be spoken from the wrong source. A ministry can defend truths concerning Zoe while its daily operation depends upon ambition, pressure, calculation, and control. Its vocabulary concerns the spirit while its actual strength comes from the natural man.
The Old Testament repeatedly exposes our tendency to take something related to God and turn it into an occasion for the flesh.
Gideon received a remarkable deliverance from God. Yet the ephod he later made became a snare to him and his household. The bronze serpent had an actual place in God’s provision. Later, people burned incense to it, and Hezekiah destroyed it. What God had once used had become something that occupied the place belonging to God Himself.
Saul preserved what God had commanded him to destroy and defended his disobedience with the language of sacrifice. Religious usefulness became his explanation for retaining what God had rejected.
Are we immune to this?
Can we take something the Lord genuinely gave and build around it until preserving it matters more to us than obeying Him? Can we become so identified with a ministry that questioning it feels like questioning God?
I believe we can. I believe we do.
The fallen life does not disappear when it acquires a spiritual occupation. The self can feed upon teaching, shepherding, evangelizing, and serving. It enjoys being the one who understands, the one who supplies, the one others need.
Then we join others who have made the same exchange.
Corporately, we reinforce one another’s ambitions. We establish expectations, preserve positions, and measure faithfulness by participation in the work. People become resources for the ministry. Their strength and loyalty are gathered into maintaining something we have already decided must continue.
Where is the freedom of Zoe in this? Where is the willingness to stop when He stops? Where is the room for Christ to speak through someone who has no position?
A ministry that cannot be relinquished has become something we possess.
This introduces another source into the fellowship of the church. It suppresses the exercise of the spirit and blunts the gospel. People encounter our demands and our importance where they should encounter Christ.
And sometimes God is merciful enough to stand in our way.
He blocks the very path we thought would make us fruitful. We wanted to be elders. We believed we had the capacity. We imagined ourselves as apostles, evangelists, or bishops—whatever significance we attached to those names. The possibility seemed so obviously spiritual that we scarcely considered whether our desire had passed through the cross.
Of course God wanted us to serve. Of course He wanted our gifts developed. Surely the open door, the growing work, and the recognition of others would confirm His approval.
Then the door closed.
Someone else was chosen. Our contribution was overlooked. The opportunity disappeared. The work we expected to establish never took shape.
And we cried, “Satan, get behind me,” without considering whether we were resisting the mercy of God.
Every obstacle is not necessarily His intervention. But neither is every obstacle an enemy to overcome. Sometimes the Lord is touching the very thing through which we intended to preserve ourselves. We are asking Him to establish our ministry while He is bringing our ownership of it to an end.
The way of ministry passes through death.
I mean the cross operating upon our ambition, our self-importance, our need to possess the gift and direct its outcome. We want God to make something of us. He brings us into fellowship with Christ’s death so that His life may flow through us.
Paul describes death operating in those who minister and life in those who receive. The minister may experience weakness, loss, and obscurity while others receive nourishment. The life reaches them through a vessel that is learning to relinquish itself.
We want both the dying and the visible reward arranged to our satisfaction. We want assurance that surrender will eventually return us to the position we imagined.
But surrender cannot contain that condition.
Think of John the Baptist. Jesus spoke of his extraordinary greatness, yet John’s earthly course ended in imprisonment and execution. From prison, he sent messengers asking whether Jesus was indeed the One who was to come. The man who had announced Him now faced circumstances he could not reconcile with what he had expected.
Jesus answered him, and added, “Blessed is he who is not offended because of Me.”
That word searches me.
Can I receive a Christ whose dealings overturn my expectations? Can I remain with Him when faithfulness brings no visible enlargement? Can I let Him be Lord when His way leaves my ministry unfinished in my own eyes?
John’s execution was an injustice, not a pattern we should romanticize. Yet his earthly ending exposes how little outward success can tell us about the worth of a life given to God. His place in God exceeded anything his circumstances could reveal.
Zoe does not need our self-preservation. God’s life does not depend upon our obtaining a position, protecting a reputation, or keeping a work alive. It needs room in us—room we often occupy with what we insist we must become.
The issue reaches beyond whether we will surrender a project. Will we surrender the person we intended to become through it?
Will we allow Jesus to bring His cross into our gifts, our usefulness, our cherished ministry, until we no longer demand that His life serve our spiritual future?
I must ask this of myself before I ask it of anyone else.
Am I willing for death to operate in me so that life may reach another? Am I willing to lose the ministry I imagined so that Christ may have the ground I have withheld?
And are we willing, together, to let Him bring our ownership of ministry to an end, so that God Himself—His love, His nature, His uncreated Zoe—may become fully visible through our living on this earth?
