Ministering Out Of Weakness (November 7, 2004)

I saw a video clip the other day of an Oklahoma Sooners football player giving a loud and raucous pep talk to his teammates who were gathered in a tight circle around him. After he finished, the other players left but the camera stayed fixed on him as he stood alone for a few seconds. Then he began to wobble like a hypoglycemic who has stood up too fast. He collapsed in a faint so sudden I don't think he had time to buckle his legs.

It was pretty funny. It turned out he was all right, and he even went back into the game later and made a big play.

The fainting defensive tackle struck me as a metaphor of many good Christian servants. These saints do not always look like warriors animated by our Lord's holy energy. Sometimes they look more like sick goofs lying flat on their backs with their eyes rolling back in their heads.

I suppose John Wesley looked that way when a friend came to visit him and found the great evangelist's bad wife dragging him across the floor by his hair. Mother Theresa did not look so strong when she confided to her priest that she doubted her faith and felt no connection to God. In his youth, C. S. Lewis was subjected to impulses which, though not homoerotic, were clearly perverse. The two greatest preachers of the 19th century, Charles Spurgeon and Alexander Maclaren, trudged through crippling psychological depressions - Maclaren even had to leave the pulpit for a year.

My favorite pastor in Colombia was Hernando Cubillos, a quiet man of real depth and humble good cheer. Once when a guest speaker did not show up at church Hernando took the pulpit and spontaneously gave his testimony. He said that he had been fired from his missionary job some years before because he was scared and had not been getting anything done. His supervisor said, "He's useless! Get rid of him!" Hernando told us that that firing "todavia deja sus huellas" - it still leaves its marks (on me).

But, thanks be to God, Hernando was restored. Like the football player who fainted and returned to the game, Hernando came back to the ministry. His role model was John Mark, a missionary who was also fired for just cause (Acts 15:37-38; see 12:13) but who later proved useful to the very apostle who fired him (2 Timothy 4:11).

Listen, any of you who are discouraged. Let us say you are divorced. Or you've spent time in a psych ward. You thought you taught your children well but they treat you and your faith with contempt. The pep talk you gave that so encouraged others has had no such effect on yourself. Spiritually, psychologically or even physically you are lying flat on your back and feeling a mixture of shame, embarrassment and hopelessness.

You may need to lie there for a while to get your bearings. That happens to just about everybody who has tried something hard. But you will get up in due time and continue. Take as your own the great words of 16th century Scottish naval captain Sir Andrew Barton, immortalized in ballad:

"Fight on my men," says Sir Andrew Barton,
"I am hurt, but I am not slain;
I'll lay me down and bleed a while,
And then I'll rise and fight again."