Thirsting for God by Gary L. Thomas

Author:Gary L. Thomas
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780736928908
Publisher: Harvest House Publishers

Don’t Let Pride Determine Your Ministry

Without humility, you may never find God’s preferred place for you to minister. You’ll leave or stay where you are for all the wrong reasons.

This is because an arrogant man or woman runs toward applause as surely as water runs downhill. Humble leaders are so focused on serving others, they don’t gauge success by their followers’ response. Like Paul, their minds are preoccupied with their followers’ spiritual health: “My dear children, for whom I am again in the pains of childbirth until Christ is formed in you…” (Galatians 4:19).

When followers grumble, humble leaders don’t assume it’s time to move on. Rather, they take advantage of the opportunity to grow in humility as they confront and perhaps endure the grumbling. Amazingly, the classic Christian writers actually welcomed rejection, ridicule, and insults.

Francis of Assisi was the master practitioner of this. The monks’ clothes he designed for his early followers purposefully resembled children’s clothes. In the early days of the order, before people became familiar with the Franciscan habit, the monks’ appearance evoked ridicule, as if a contemporary speaker showed up at a formal church service dressed in one-piece pajamas, complete with the little plastic feet covering his toes and Winnie the Pooh embroidered on his chest. People would think he had lost his mind, just as they thought the Franciscans had lost theirs.

And that was precisely the point.

In the early Franciscan classic The Little Flowers of Saint Francis, Brother Ugolino describes the early Franciscans as “crucified men…[who had] a greater desire to receive shame and insults for the love of Christ than the vain honors or respect or praise of the world. On the contrary, they rejoiced in being insulted, and they were made sad by being honored.”3

Bernard, Francis’s first official follower, once walked into a town and peacefully endured much ridicule and abuse by children and townspeople. Finally, a wealthy businessman stopped the abuse by pointing out how Bernard was displaying commendable Christian maturity in the face of never-ending scorn and mockery. In fact, the rich townsman suggested, Bernard might even be a saint. Overnight, the Franciscan friar became a celebrity, and people began sitting at his feet, asking for his opinions, and bringing him choice food, at which point Bernard left that town, explaining to Francis that he needed to find another village where he could be ridiculed instead of praised. “Because of the great honor that is shown me, I am afraid of losing more than I would gain there.”4

We mentioned earlier that Augustine wrote his Confessions so people who knew him only as a bishop wouldn’t have an overly exalted view of him. When Paul was forced to recite his credentials to the Corinthians, he made sure he ended with a humiliating weakness (2 Corinthians 11:22–3:10). We live in a day in which Christian leaders value, proclaim, and guard their résumés and lists of accomplishments. Doing so too earnestly denies the very spirit of Christlikeness all of us should seek to emulate.

Every time

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