The Ultimate Lens on Life

When he invited me to have dinner with him and his wife, I knew it wasn’t going to be a social occasion. The man on the phone seemed frustrated, exhausted and overwhelmed. As I looked across the table at him after a long dinner of tough conversation about a marriage gone bad, he had the look of a beaten man. I asked him to tell me what he was thinking and he said, “People are so complicated, it seems impossible for relationships to work. I can’t figure out why I do the things I do, let alone understand my wife. It’s hard for me to sit here and find any reason for hope.”
He was right. People are complicated and not always easy to understand. Relationships are difficult and sometimes seem like a minefield of potential explosions. There are moments when life, this side of eternity, seems hopeless. Perhaps there are many more exhausted and overwhelmed people around us than we think. I didn’t seek to comfort my friend by telling him his view of life was inaccurate, but by helping him understand that it was incomplete. I drove home that night deeply thankful for the cross of Jesus Christ. Perhaps you’re thinking, “The cross? Paul, I thought the cross was about forgiveness and eternal life. What, on that evening, made you thankful for the cross?” The answer is that I was hit once again how the cross of Jesus is the ultimate, most accurate lens on human life. There is nothing that understands, defines and explains the human struggle like the cross. Let me explain.

The Cross Tells Us What’s Wrong with Us

The cross tells us that our biggest, deepest and most abiding problem is to be found inside us, not outside us. Yes, the people in our lives have had a significant impact on us, the experiences of our lives have helped shape the way we see our world, and the locations of our lives have been formative as well. People, locations and the situations of life all influence what we think and what we do; but they're not determinative. No, the most powerful life-complicating problem for us all is to be found deep inside each one of us. It’s the reason for the cross of Jesus Christ. It’s the thing that the cross was ordained to defeat. It’s the thing that distorts our thoughts, desires, emotions, choices, words and actions. It’s the universal human dilemma, the inescapable pathology. It’s the one disease from which we all suffer. It’s the problem that none of us has the wisdom or power to solve. What is it? Sin. It’s the condition of the heart that’s the fundamental reason for a vast array of personal and interpersonal brokenness. The cross requires us to admit that we too have been infected with the virus and are people in desperate need of help. We’ve not just been afflicted with a fallen world and flawed people. No, we’ve all been infected with sin.

The Cross Tells How What’s Wrong Will Get Fixed

You simply can’t decry the value of knowledge, personal insight, accurate perspective, self-awareness and careful analysis. They’re all very helpful; they just happen not to be curative. If what’s broken inside us could have been cured by a body of knowledge or a system of insights, Jesus wouldn’t have needed to come and the cross wouldn’t have been necessary. A cross-shaped view of peoples’ problems requires us to say something radical. For lasting change to take place in us we need more than a system; we need a Redeemer. Only the grace of a Redeemer, who on the cross defeated our deepest problem, is able to rescue us from us and give us the power to live in brand new ways. If sin is the universal human pathology, then the person and work of the Redeemer, the Lord Jesus Christ, is our only hope of lasting healing. The cross not only provides for us the only truly accurate diagnosis, but also the only reliable cure.

The Depressed Pastor: The Setup

I was there the week it happened. His wife asked to see me. Tearfully she told me that he'd walked into the church building that week and announced to his staff that he was "done." He said he couldn't face preaching another sermon; that all that he really wanted to do was to run away from his own life. Sam was forty-five and the pastor of a vibrant and growing church. I am convinced that there are important changes needed in pastoral culture, and that the number of pastors who find themselves in that range from discouraged to depressed gives clear evidence.

Let me suggest four potential setups of this discouragement/depression cycle.

1. Unrealistic Expectations. I taught a class at Westminster Seminary on pastoral care and I was alarmed year after year of how unrealistic the expectations of my future-pastor students were. Year after year my students seemed to forget the two things that consistently make pastoral ministry hard. What are they? The harsh reality of life in a dramatically broken world and what remaining sin does to the hearts of all of us. These two things make pastoral ministry a day by day spiritual war. But there’s another area of unrealistic expectations. It’s the congregation's unrealistic expectation of the pastor. Churches forget that they've called a person who's a man in the midst of his own sanctification. This tends to drive the pastor into hiding, afraid to confess whats true of him and everyone to whom he ministers. There's a direct connection between unrealistic expectations and deepening cycles of disappointment.

2. Family Tensions. There's often a significant gulf between the public persona of the ministry family and the realities of the day by day struggles in their home. We almost assume that the pastor will feel regularly torn between ministry and family and will often be forced to make "the lesser of two evils" choices. Yet this tension isn't a major theme in the Pastoral Epistles. Could it be that we're asking too much of our pastors? Could it be that, as pastors, we're seeking to get things out of ministry that we shouldn’t get and therefore make choices that potentially harm our families? This tension between family and ministry robs pastoral ministry of its joy and it’s seemingly insurmountability is a sure set up for depression.

3. Fear of Man. The very public nature of pastoral ministry makes it fertile soil for this temptation. I know what it's like to be all too aware of the critical person's responses to me as I’m preaching on a Sunday morning. I also know the temptation of thinking of what would win that person as I'm preparing the sermon! Fear of man is actually asking people to give you what only God can deliver. It’s rooted in a Gospel amnesia that causes me to seek again and again for what I’ve already been given in Christ. This tends to cause me to watch for and care too much about the reactions of others, and because I do this, to feel that I get way more criticism than I deserve. Each new duty begins to be viewed as another forum for the criticism of others and with this, the emotional life of the pastor begins to spiral downward.

4. Kingdom Confusion. It’s very tempting for the pastor to do his work in pursuit of glories other than the glory of God, and for purposes other than the purposes of God's kingdom. Personal acclaim and reputation, power and control, comfort and appreciation and ministry success are the subtle little kingdom idols that greet every pastor. Yet in pastoral ministry, the kingdom of self is a costume kingdom. It does a great job of masquerading as the kingdom of God because the way you seek to build the kingdom of self in ministry is by doing ministry!

The reality is that the God who the pastor serves has no allegiance whatsoever to the pastor's little kingdom of self. In fact I’m persuaded that much of the ministry opposition that we attribute to the enemy is actually God getting in the way of the little kingdom intentions of the pastor. It’s God, in grace, rescuing the pastor from himself. So as the pastor wants recognition, his Lord wants Gospel transformation. As God is calling the pastor to spiritual war, what the pastor wants is to be liked. As the pastor is wanting just a little bit of control, God is demonstrating that he’s in control. It's discouraging and exhausting to be serving God, yet not be on God's agenda page. This kingdom confusion robs the pastor of the deep sense of privilege that should motivate the service of every pastor. My pastor friend said it well to his wife, "I just want to go somewhere where life is easy!"

Depression in the pastor may be set up by the culture that surrounds him, but it’s a disease of the heart, and for that we have the presence, promises, and provisions of the Savior. Pastor, he’s in you and with you and for you. No one cares more about the use of your gifts than the Giver. No one cares more about your suffering than the One who suffered for you. And no one shoulders the burden of the church like the One who is the Head of the church and who gave himself up for it. In your despondency, don't run from him, run to him. Jesus really does offer you the hope and healing that you can find no where else.

You're Fooling Yourself

There’s loads of knowledge to be found, but wisdom is a rare commodity. Why? Because wisdom is one of sin’s first casualties. It's hard to admit, but true none the less, that sin reduces all of us to fools. And the fact is that no one is more victimized by your foolishness than you are. You see the empirical evidence of the foolishness of sin on almost every page of Scripture. For example, you see foolishness in full operation in the tragic story of David and Bathsheba. This is why David says, “Surely you desire truth in the inner parts; you teach me wisdom in the inmost place” (v. 6 NIV).

You read the story of David’s sin, and you say to yourself, “What was he thinking? Did he really believe that he’d get away with that? Did he completely forget who he was? Did he think that God was going to stand idly by and let this happen?” But David is not some extreme case of foolishness gone wild; you see evidence of the same foolishness in each of our lives daily. People could say of us again and again, “What was he thinking? What was she thinking?”

What does foolishness look like? Here are four of its most significant aspects.

1) The Foolishness of Self-centeredness

We were created to live for something, someone bigger than ourselves. We were designed to live with, for, and through the Lord. God is meant to be the motivation and hope of everything we do. His pleasure, his honor, and his will are the things for which we are meant to live. But the foolishness of sin really does cause us to reduce our lives to the size and shape of our lives. Often our living has no greater purpose than self-satisfaction and self-fulfillment. Does this sound harsh? Well, ask yourself, “Why do I ever get impatient with others?” “Why do I ever say things I shouldn’t say?” “Why do I get discouraged with my circumstances?” “Why do I give way to anger or give in to self-pity?” The answer is that, like me, you want your own way, and when things don’t go your way or people are in your way, you lash out in anger or you turn inward in discouragement.

2) The Foolishness of Self-deception

We’re all very good at making ourselves feel good about what God says is bad. We’re all very skilled at recasting what we’ve done so what was wrong doesn’t look so wrong to us. I’ll tell myself that I didn’t really lash out in anger; no, I was speaking as one of God’s prophets. I’ll tell myself that that second look wasn’t lust; I am simply a man who enjoys beauty. I’ll tell myself that I’m not craving power; I’m just exercising God-given leadership gifts. Foolishness is able to do something dangerous. It’s able to look at wrong and see right. Had David been able to see himself with accuracy and if he’d been able to see his sin for what it really was, it’s hard to imagine that he would have continued to travel down that pathway.

3) The Foolishness of Self-sufficiency.

We all like to think of ourselves as more independently capable than we actually are. We weren’t created to be independent, autonomous, or self-sufficient. We were made to live in a humble, worshipful, and loving dependency upon God and in a loving and humble interdependency with others. Our lives were designed to be community projects. Yet the foolishness of sin tells us that we’ve all that we need within ourselves. So we settle for relationships that never go beneath the casual. We defend ourselves when the people around us point out a weakness or a wrong. We hold our struggles within, not taking advantage of the resources that God has given us. The lie of the garden was that Adam and Eve could be like God, independent and self-sufficient. We still tend to buy into that lie.

4) The Foolishness of Self-righteousness

Why don’t we celebrate grace more? Why aren’t we more amazed by the wonderful gifts that are ours as the children of God? Why don’t we live with a deep sense of need, coupled with a deep sense of gratitude for how each need has been met by God’s grace? Well, the answer is clear. You’ll never celebrate grace as much as you should when you think you’re more righteous than you actually are. Grace is the plea of sinners. Mercy is the hope of the wicked. Acceptance is the prayer of those who know that they could never do anything to earn it. But the foolishness of sin makes me righteous in my own eyes. When I tell my stories, I become more the hero than I ever was. I look wiser in my narratives than I could have been. In my view of my history, my choices were better than what they actually were. Often it isn’t my sin that keeps me from coming to God. Sadly, I don’t come to him because I don’t think I need the grace that can be found only in him.

Here is what all of us must face; sin really does reduce us all to fools, but happily the story doesn’t end there. The One who is the ultimate source of everything that’s good, true, trustworthy, right, and wise is also a God of amazing grace. You don’t get freed from your foolishness by education or experience. You don’t get wisdom by research and analysis. You get wisdom by means of a relationship with the One who is Wisdom. The radical claim of the Bible is that wisdom isn’t first a book, or a system, or a set of commands or principles. No, wisdom is a person, and his name is Jesus Christ. When you and I are graced into acceptance with him, we’re drawn into a personal relationship with Wisdom, and Wisdom begins a lifelong process of freeing us from the stronghold that the foolishness of sin has on us. We aren’t yet completely free, but there will be a day when our every thought, desire, choice, action, and word will be fundamentally wise!

It makes such sense then, that a repentant man (David) would reflect on his need of wisdom. Sin, in reducing us to fools, causes us to do foolish things, even though we think we’re wise. And for this we need more than information, education, and experience. We need exactly what we find in Christ—grace. Wisdom is the product of grace; there is simply nowhere else it can be found.