Pastor, This is Your Most Important Business Today
To have your soul happy in the Lord.
Instinctively, you know that this is true. After all, who enjoys being led and pastored by a grumpy person who is lacking in joy? Besides, I’m pretty sure you have preached this idea to others before.
But don’t simply take it from me or one of your own past sermon application points. This is an important exhortation from George Muller, the man who cared for 10,027 orphans, established 117 schools, and checked off more to-do items in a lifetime than most of us. On the most important business every day, Muller wrote:
“I saw more clearly than ever, that the first great and primary business to which I ought to attend every day was, to have my soul happy in the Lord. The first thing to be concerned about was not, how much I might serve the Lord, how I might glorify the Lord; but how I might get my soul into a happy state, and how my inner man might be nourished. For I might seek to set the truth before the unconverted, I might seek to benefit believers, I might seek to relieve the distressed, I might in other ways seek to behave myself as it becomes a child of God in this world; and yet, not being happy in the Lord, and not being nourished and strengthened in my inner man day by day, all this might not be attended to in a right spirit.”
Isn’t it fascinating that something so obvious and simple, is also something that many of us fail regularly? A case in point: on the deadline for submitting this article, I woke up feeling that writing this was the most important business of the day. It wasn’t obvious and simple at all to direct my busy heart and heavy-laden soul to feast on the Lord first.
Pastors, our greatest problem is the same as everyone else. Our knowledge doesn’t solve the deeper problem of our lack of happiness in God. How do we overcome that?
Here’s the good news: we don’t go to God today saying, “Lord, please look at me, and see how regularly I pray and how well I’m doing in my happiness in you.”
We can go to God, even in our darkest struggle for joy and affection, and say to him, “Lord, look at Jesus, my Saviour and Redeemer. Behold Jesus, the shield and fortress that covers me. Look at Christ’s righteousness and obedience that were accomplished for me. Look at Christ’s love and delight in the Father. Thank you for dealing with me not on the basis of how well I’m doing, but on the basis of my Jesus alone.”
The secret to effectual pastoral service is this kind of joy and confidence in Jesus.
The secret to Muller’s accomplishments is to go further than preaching well on trusting and delighting in God, but to really trust and delight in Jesus.
My dear brothers and co-labourers in the gospel, how well-fed is your soul today? Let’s go to him.
