A couple weeks ago I urged churches to give their pastors adequate vacation time. Not at all opposed to that piece of advice, I now want to urge pastors (and everybody else for that matter) to work extremely hard. Both are true: God wired us for rest and he made us to work.
Ministry is hard work and those engaged in it (whether vocationally or not) should work at it hard. Paul “worked harder than any of them,” though he quickly added, “not I, but the grace of God that is with me” (1 Cor. 15:10). And for all the dead tired missionaries, pastors, moms, dads. teachers, chaplains, elders, and deacons out there–to all who in some measure care for the lives of others–let us say with the Apostle, “I will most gladly spend and be spent for your souls” (2 Cor. 12:15). Every Christian serves, and every Christian who serves well works hard to serve.
Like John Calvin.
I’ve been slowly working my way through Bruce Gordon’s masterful biography of the Genevan Reformer (Yale 2009). Recently I underlined this passage:
And here was a formula that would serve Calvin well throughout his time in the city: extremely hard work on his part combined with the disorganization and failings of his opponents. (133)
No doubt, Luther and Calvin and Owen and Edwards and name-your-hero were brilliant. But they also were indefatigable. They did so much, in part, because God gave them the discipline, the drive, and the single-minded determination to keep their hands to the plow more than almost anyone else.
The combination of teaching, preaching, writing and pastoral care was doubtless exhausting, but was the routine familiar to all sixteenth-century reformers. Melanchthon in Wittenberg, Bullinger in Zurich and Bucer himself in Strasbourg knew nothing other than long days of labour and service that began with early-morning worship and ended with writing and reading texts and letters by candlelight. It was how they had been educated from boyhood, and many had monastic backgrounds. The extraordinary discipline and single-mindedness of the reformers becomes apparent only when we stop to consider how much they achieved. (86)
Take a day off each week. Enjoy your vacations (I just did). If you are in a profession that affords a sabbatical, make the most of it. But never forget we were made to work, be it prayer, writing, teaching, computing, changing bed pans, or swinging a hammer. Whatever good is accomplished in and through the church will be by the grace of God. And normally that grace will flow most (thought not necessarily most noticeably) through those whom God enables to work the hardest.
