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Perseverance in Ministry:
A Meditation on Psalm 90
by Ken Garrett
(Continued from Page 1)
As Moses stood on the heights of Mt. Pisgah and “viewed the landscape o’er the Jordan stream” across a valley he would not cross, he truly was one of a handful of remaining eyewitnesses to some of the most dramatic, epic events in human history. Other than Joshua and Caleb, who would be allowed to enter the Promised Land, those who remembered the parting of the Red Sea could do so only through the blurred memories of childhood. No other Israelite was an eyewitness to the genocide from which Moses was rescued. No one remembered when the nation buzzed with the unbelievable, excited rumor that the adopted son of the queen, Moses, was a Jew! Few remained who had any clear memory of walking-staffs turning into snakes, or waters turning to blood, or Egyptian slave-owners throwing their gold at the feet of their Hebrew slaves in hopes of gaining some sort of merit from their God. As Moses approached the end of his earthly life, he must have wondered what would become of these events; would they be a mere story to read around campfires? A tale to be believed or not believed, heeded or not heeded? He would never tell his story again, for the time on earth allotted him by the Lord was coming to an end.
As pastors, we are big on vision these days—or at least we’re expected to be. A pastor must be able to develop, declare, and duplicate his “vision for this ministry” at the mere raising of an eyebrow. While honoring past traditions of faithful ministry, we are often expected to peer into the future, craft this illusive thing called vision, and cast it before our parishioners like a spell. In Turkey I’ve observed carpet salesmen who skillfully and dramatically unfurl their exquisite silk carpets before easily impressed tourists. Sometimes I feel that our dream/vision/future casting efforts look very similar to these carpet-sellers, and have a similar effect on the people we lead. There is something I’ve noticed about our visions—they are never planned to come to fruition after we’re gone from the scene. Such would be akin to a president designing an economic stimulus plan that he knew would not truly bear its fruit until he was out of office, leaving all the credit and glory to his predecessor! We pastors often fail to devise plans that serve the next life. Instead, we are tempted to form action plans, committees, and goals that all bear one thing in common: their end always comes while we’re still able to hear the applause of the crowd, still able to celebrate how the Lord did a grand work through us. Could this defective, subservient role we’ve taken in regard to time itself be a cause for the superficial, seasonal nature of many of our ministry endeavors today? Last year’s Prayer of Jabez will be this year’s Forty Days of Purpose, which will be next year’s . . . You can be sure of it—there will be something packaged and delivered to our offices promising to give us the vision de jour for which our people clamor.
Moses didn’t have many tomorrows left when he wrote Psalm 90. His vision had to become something enfolded into the grand purposes of a transcendent, timeless God, or there would be no vision at all—at least not one that was worth remembering. Brothers, if our ideas of time are comprised of the comfortable measurement of days, hours, seasons, and years—all passed without a gnawing sense that a timeless God watches us—then, perhaps, we’ve succumbed to the idea that our God is a not a God over time, but exists under time, and works according to the same deadlines we’ve mistakenly assigned to ourselves. But our God is timeless, and as such we must purpose to live above time. We must live and minister in such a way that should we die today it would be plainly evident we have invested ourselves in the only two eternal things that can be found on the earth today—people and the Word of God; two things that, once created, will exist forever. Our weakness is often exposed in how bound we are to time. This weakness can only be addressed by reliance and trust in the One who exists above, before, and beyond time itself.
You have swept them away like a flood, they fall asleep; in the morning they are like grass which sprouts anew. In the morning it flourishes and sprouts anew; toward evening it fades and withers away.
With unwavering consistency, physical life is “swept away like a flood,” isn’t it? The assurance of our inevitable demise is not a popular subject for preachers these days, but it should be. Whether in the news of the day, their memories of those whom they have lost, or the shocking jolt of a phone call in the middle of the night, many of our people come into the sanctuary on Sunday mornings having wrestled with the certainty and pervasiveness of death. But they must be told that death itself has ceased to be tyrant- that it now acts as a mere servant, commanded to carry the King’s sleeping children back home at the end of a long and tiring day. Yes, short of the Lord’s physical return we will all lay down one day in the sleep of death, but only until the day when we are awakened, on the new day that is promised. Before that new day comes, however, there is an evening in which our bodies will fade and wither like cut flowers. Ray Stedman said:
Our own personal death is the hard, harsh, square peg that refuses to fit into all the round holes we plan for our future; it is the sand in our oyster that irritates us and makes our spirits protest against it. Why should we learn all these great lessons of life and, just when we have learned them we must give them all up and there is no opportunity to exercise them? Something about that makes us protest.
Moses writes of what we are afraid to speak of in our pulpits: the certainty of death, and the thumbprint of God Himself that is found at every death scene. But, of course, our message goes far beyond the fact of physical death. Stedman continues:
Now, as I near the end, I can say that looking ahead is a time filled with happy anticipation that God is going to answer all the questions which I have had to leave unanswered, because the full meaning of this present experience will never be brought out until death intervenes. Then will come all the answers, abundantly, satisfyingly, fully.
But we cannot lead our dear people into such “happy anticipation” if we do not stand beside them, as their Moses, and honestly face the inevitable intrusion of death into our lives.
PERSEVERANCE AND SIN-BOUND PEOPLE
From a consideration of the eternity of God, the time-bounded nature of man, and inevitability of death, Moses speaks of the universal problem in the relationship between God and man: God’s righteous indignation at the presence of sin in the people He has created.
For we have been consumed by Your anger and by Your wrath we have been dismayed. You have placed our iniquities before You, our secret sins in the light of Your presence.
I am confident that Moses was not a very seeker-sensitive religious leader. The word here rendered consumed speaks of the end of a process or endeavor; not simply its cessation, but the manner of its end. It is an end likened to being ground down as a result of a process—a grinding process. To be consumed, then, means to be finally, completely ground down, brought to the end by the anger of an offended God. Moses writes of the dismay of those who live under such wrath. We might say that they have “come undone.” Jonathan Edwards wasn’t the only leader who preached that the hand that holds our very lives belongs to an angry, offended God. Moses, too, observed that the initial state of fallen humanity is that of being an object of God’s anger and retribution. Of course, not everyone agreed with Moses that they lived under the sleepless eyes of an all-knowing, offended God, and that their deaths were actually the fulfillment of a sentence pronounced on their parents, Adam and Eve, on the day of their fall in Eden. In like manner, our people struggle with the apparent paradox of trusting a God so full of love that His Son would die to save the world from sin and simultaneously so full of righteous anger at sin that all of creation lives under the persistent heat of His withering glare.
Instead of delivering a soothing message of hope, redemption, and healing, Moses continues to describe the futility of life under such divine displeasure.
For all our days have declined in Your fury; we have finished our years like a sigh.
I suspect this is one of those verses that tempts preachers to cringe, making them feel they need to defend a God who is not as mean as He sometimes sounds; that He is full of love and really doesn’t want to be wrathful. I don’t like to think of God’s people ending this life under the glare of a God whose chief feeling toward them (if only according to this verse) is fury! Do you? I don’t want them to finish their years like a sigh - I want them to live a very full, healthy, productive lives, both physically and spiritually – that end with the warm and grateful recognition of a benevolent God.
