A saint cannot serve if he is not prepared to suffer ... because all servants have a cross that comes with their calling. So wrote the Puritan William Gurnall in 1662.
One of the clear qualifications of a calling to the Christian ministry is the willingness to suffer for the sake of Christ and the Gospel. The Gospel is God's 'change agent' in the world, and change will be contested at every point by that God-defying world. Change is an unwelcome intrusion into a comfortably sinful world (and church), and will be resisted at every stage once change has been proposed.
But the called minister will have already embraced the hostile resistance to him and his message, and be prepared to suffer for it, long before he has been ordained to the Christian ministry. He will have 'considered' and 'reckoned' what ordination to the Christian ministry will cost, and concluded that he is prepared to accept the attendant suffering.
This suffering will be completely misunderstood by the unbelieving world, and also by the unbelieving church, a fact that, in itself, adds to the minister's suffering. Sometimes, he will misunderstand it himself, and even his own family, his nearest and dearest, will not understand the situation. As Gurnall do rightly says, 'Whoever may be the instrument of trouble to a saint, the sword is always in God's control.'
But, if he is not prepared to suffer, even greviously, he has disqualified himself from service in Christ's Kingdom! If he is not prepared to walk the same road his Master trod, service for his Master is impossible! Service in Christ's Kingdom is predicated on daily and willing cross-bearing. How sad and pathetic are those usurpers in Christ's church who seek 'peace at any price, or none,' for the sake of 'getting on' with their people and in their chosen 'career'! How cowardly are those who run close to the world in some vain attempt to gain and hold its worldly young people! It is clear from this that such men are not serving the Christ Who revealed Himself in the Scriptures, but another Christ made in their own image. He is not the Saviour Who suffered and died for the world on Calvary. Nor is He the Lord who told His disciplines that if they refused to take up their cross daily and follow Him, they could not be His disciples. He was
disqualifying them for service in His Kingdom.
Oh, how sweet and disturbing a thing it is to realise that it is the Lord Who determines the qualifications for service, and Who will remove from His service those who do not meet His criteria.
That does not necessarily mean, of course, that men who once served in the church and are no longer there, have been removed from the church by the church's Lord because they were disqualified for service! Hardly. It is often the case that the gracious Lord showed His compassion and tender care to His faithful servants who were suffering at the hands of the church because of her unwillingness to serve her suffering Lord! To follow the Lord against all pressure is to display a humility and obedient spirit that is most rare!
As Gurnall says, if there is no cross in a man's calling, the calling is absent. Ministers who are at ease in the Christian ministry are as ugly as members who are at ease in Zion.
Hence every minister can test his calling by the presence of the Cross. Those men who do not preach the Cross - and I'm not talking about preaching 'about' the Cross, for there is a difference- will never experience what it means to suffer as a Christian minister. If the suffering is because of faithfulness to the self-crucifying ministry of the cross-centred Gospel, then that man has been truly and divinely called to the work of the ministry; but if that man has concocted an admixture of Gospel and world, and suffers for that, then he needs to make speedy and radical amends. But if he has forsaken the Cross for a life of ease, then he had better examine the foundations once again; his ministry is resting on very shaky foundations. And who suffers as a consequence? Himself, his congregation and the entire Christian church worldwide.
In conclusion, if the Cross is absent, so also is the calling. If God's servants actually flee the Cross - and such is unknown within even reformed evangelicalism - then they are usurping the place God had set apart for His true servants. No minister can serve the Suffering Saviour who does not himself suffer for that Saviour.
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