Lessons I Wish Someone Had Told Me Before I Was Ordained
Comments on three pastoral essentials - the right facing of affliction, the organising of work, and the need to be listening carers.
by Dr Joel BeekeFROM SWORD & TROWEL 1999 No
2
A MOST IMPORTANT lesson is the value of facing affliction Christianly. I feel
very concerned about this point; I look around at my fellow pastors and fellow Christian workers and I
am disturbed many times. Also when I look at my own heart I see how ill equipped we seem to be to face
our afflictions in a Christian way.
The real question is never - How many afflictions do we have? The real question is - How may we live through our afflictions as Christ did?
The author of Hebrews wrote, ‘Wherefore, holy brethren, partakers of the heavenly calling, consider the Apostle and
High Priest of our profession, Christ Jesus.’ I would say to you, as you seek to handle your afflictions,
consider several things about Christ.
i) Consider how submissive He was when He, as One totally innocent, suffered
so much. Ought not we to be more submissive under suffering, when we are at very best partially guilty
in all our ways? The next time you are in pain, think about His pain. The next time you are
afflicted, think about His affliction and you will find great comfort in so doing.
ii) Consider the power of Christ. He has power to bear infinite sufferings on our behalf. So if
He desires to weigh us down with affliction we ought not to be alarmed, but should look to Him for
strength. The Puritans felt it was a badge of honour to have a great number of afflictions.
When God sends heavy afflictions your way, see it as an opportunity to glorify Him,
especially as a church leader. People will be watching and listening to you. They want to know how we
will respond when we are in a tight spot. They look to see the power in our Christianity. If we walk
uprightly in the midst of affliction our ministry will usually be much more powerful than it could ever be
in times of personal prosperity.
iii) Consider the presence of Christ. Christ is present in every affliction, and in every
darkness. The Bible says, ‘the darkness and the light are both alike to thee’. When we remember that, we
receive great encouragement. ‘What I do thou knowest not now; but thou shalt know hereafter,’
says the Lord. As large waves are quickly beached with but a single roar, so Christ breaks
tomorrow’s impossibilities as they roll across our lives. He will take care of us. The mountain may seem
too great for tomorrow, but we do not need tomorrow’s grace today. Trust in Christ, He will not let
down His servants.
iv) Consider the perseverance of Christ. Jesus ‘having loved his own . . . he loved them unto
the end’. Knowing all things that should come upon Him, He went forth. He knew the whole cup of
suffering.
If He so persevered out of love for us, ought not we to persevere out of love for Him? So the
strength of our perseverance lies in the perseverance of Jesus Christ.
v) Consider the prayers of Christ. He ever liveth to make intercession for us. Joseph Irons
made a radical statement once. He said, ‘If Christ were to stop praying for me for five minutes at the
right hand of God, my place would be in the bottom of hell.’ We have a constantly interceding High
Priest, and His prayers ought to encourage us to pray.
I would suggest to you, that prayer is the number one antidote which helps us ward off
depression in the midst of thick and heavy affliction. A prayerless affliction is like an open sore ripe for
infection. But a prayerful affliction is like an open sore ripe for the balm of Gilead. So, in affliction, pray
without ceasing.
vi) Consider, also, the end of Christ. What is His final purpose in all that He does to His
people? The end is eternal glory. This was the culmination of His afflictions, and it will be the end of our
afflictions. He was afflicted so that He might be highly exalted. You and I are afflicted, so that in the end
we may be ripened for Heaven, to reign as kings and priests with Christ. ‘He that rides to be crowned,’
said John Trapp, ‘will not think much of a rainy day.’ So if you would live through affliction Christianly,
consider Christ’s afflictions, power, presence, perseverance, prayers, and glory.
Organising Work
Now I am making a transition into our actual sphere of work.
I wish now to talk about the value of redeeming and organising time in a life of service. I am
convinced that many pastors whittle away time unnecessarily because they are not organised. There are
three things to be said about organising time.
i) Plan. Many people are efficient but few are effective. An
efficient person does things right, but the effective person does the right things. I think we need (in our
minds if not on paper) to have always three kinds of lists in our planning: first, things we must do;
second, things we ought to do; and third, things we would like to do, if time permits.
Everyone develops their own system. My system runs something like this. The things I
must do I put on the calendar, and project them all through the year. Let us say I have someone
who has been in hospital with cancer and who has now returned home. I am going to keep up with two
phone calls a week. As soon as I hang up from one phone call, I put the next on the calendar immediately
so I do not forget.
Things I ought to do I will put on my calendar as well, usually in parenthesis,
recognising that if time does not allow, I can omit those particular items.
Things I would like to do, I seldom have time for, so I have a separate list of
goals so that if I do have extra time (usually in the summer when I am not teaching in the seminary) I can
accomplish a few of those things. I have my projects lined up years in advance. Once in a year I review,
then I will readjust the order. If we do not plan, we waste a great deal of time. We must have order in our
work.
ii) When it comes to organising your work, I think you need to structure it day by day. You
have your calendar and long-term plans, but you need to organise each day, and set out an order. You
need to see how best you can use the time, and how you can save it.
Many times you can. Many times you can combine things. I have a principle in my ministry
that has been very helpful to me. Anything I do, I try to prepare it as thoroughly as I can and then I try to
do it as flexibly as I can, so that I can use it somewhere else at some other time. My goal is to use
everything I do in the ministry at least twice in terms of preparation. I try to take thorough notes so that I
do not have to re-study all the material later. Try to do everything so that you can use it more than once.
It takes a lot longer, but in the end you save a great deal of time.
The way to organise your daily time is to do it by the hour. I am going to spend two hours on
this. I am going to spend one hour on this. Here I am going to get a fifteen minute walk and take a break.
Do not feel that you have to hold this plan to the minute, but it gives direction for the day, and keeps you
from meandering and spending too long on incidentals. Set a suitable moment for each task. Do not
spend, for example, a precious hour in the morning, when your mind is freshest, opening the mail. So
use common sense.
iii) We not only plan and organise, but then we obey our own organisation. Do
not butterfly your way from one half-completed task to another and end the day unsatisfied. Persevere;
discipline your mind. The more you grow used to disciplining yourself to keep to your plan, the easier it
will come with the passing of the years. You will no longer have those times when you just sit and
sharpen a pencil here and there, and move things around on your desk, but get nothing done.
I am convinced that this is how the great men of God in ages past organised
their time. When you look at worthies of the past, they were men who were disciplined in how they used
their time.
Caring & Listening
It is essential to care and listen in the work of pastoral ministry. One of our greatest failures as
ministers is that we do not know how to listen to our people. We are used to talking and so when they
come to us with problems, we give solutions before we have heard the full scope of the problem. I have
four thoughts I want to lay before you to help you, and to remind myself what it means to listen.
i) Be thorough. Listening takes time, patience and perceptiveness. Those are
scarce commodities. I was once giving out advice to a couple, having thought I had heard their entire
problem. After our third session together I was giving advice when suddenly the lady rose from her chair
in great agony. She paced the room back and forth, and then said, ‘You do not understand. The real
problem is that my husband has had a relationship with my mother.’
That just knocked the breath out of me. I thought that I had heard everything. I was not
perceptive enough. I had not got to the bottom of the problem before I was giving solutions. This does
not mean that we have to go to the other extreme and feel that our counselling is an indefinite listening
period. We certainly have to get beyond listening and into solutions.
ii) Do not minimise your counsellee’s problem. Maybe you have been through
much greater crises in your life than he or she. But they have taken the trouble to come to you. It is not
easy for people to ask for help. They see it as a serious problem. If you say it is not so bad you belittle
them.
iii) Watch for attitudes or mind-sets. If they keep saying ‘can’t’, or ‘impossible’
or ‘hopeless’, that is usually the language of despair or depression. You must listen to their language, to
try to get at what is eating them underneath. Are they filled with internal anger or worry, or guilt or
humiliation? You must lovingly challenge those attitudes that run counter to the Scriptures, and inhibit
their progress in responding to biblical advice.
iv) Leave room for disagreement. You must care enough to say to them you
want them to do God’s will, for that is best for them. To empathise with self-pity is bad, but to empathise
with suffering is right and good. We must be honest with our counsellee. We must build that honesty in a
relationship of trust, warmth, and caring.
The very Old Testament word translated to care has as its root meaning to enquire, and to
search. We must search and enquire, to take care of people, and that includes showing them love and
understanding, but most of all pointing them to biblical solutions.
From a substantial address given at an LRBS part-time Saturday seminar.
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