A Broken Servant And An Adequate God

"You needn't fear being a broken servant when you have such a kind and adequate God." So wrote Dr Dale Ralph Davis in his commentary on 1 Kings (p.270).

What great encouragement this brings to any servant of Christ who has been rejected and dumped by his church.  Indeed, the same encouragement comes to every Christian who feels the similarly.  Our God is kind and adequate.  Whatever the depths of our condition, the Lord Who saved us and Who called us, is the same Lord Who keeps and sustains us.

What is it that breaks God's servants?  First, the awful spiritual condition of the professing church.  No Christian minister can look at the Christian church in her current spiritual state with any measure of complacency.  Second, the wide-scale infidelity of the church in many countries.  The acceptance of openly immortal people in church membership and in church office is appalling.  Third, the doctrinal indifference of many within the professing church. This is seen in the total acceptance of theological liberalism by professing reformed evangelical ministers, ruling elders and Christian members.  Fourth, the idolatrous pragmatism of many churches, especially within evangelical churches, where the Word is no longer enough to sustain church attendance and resort has to be made to "the ways of the world" to keep, mainly, the young people interested.

You can tell who God's true servants are because they are the ones who get deeply upset for God's sake because of the state of the professing church in the twenty-first century.  No one else will be concerned, and very, very few will articulate what little concerns they have in the public media.  Those who do are, like Elijah when the critical scholars are finished with him, psychological basket cases awaiting the 'men in white coats' coming to take them away.

However, true servants are decidedly more concerned about the state and recovery of the church than are many of her ministers who are more concerned about continuing to draw their salaries and get their pensions.  Time servers, I call them.  Even the presence of time-servers within the church are an offense to God's servants, and this realisation adds to their feeling of brokenness.

"But God."  Here is the antidote to such brokenness - the kindness and adequacy of our covenant God and Saviour.  Faithful servants feel for what they see around them; but they are encouraged by the One they do not see, the Invisible God.  He is sufficient, and we are sufficient in Him.