"Rarely does a week go by in my life when I am not involved personally with some pastor who is feeling the agonies of an unappreciative, unloving, even cruel and abusive congregation. It seems to go, sadly, with the territory.
Even Jonathan Edwards, one of the great preachers in the history of the church – maybe the greatest theologian in America’s history, certainly the main instrument of God in the Great Awakening in America, our greatest revival historically. Jonathan Edwards pastored the same congregation for 23 years, and through those 23 years, while they were hearing the truth of God from the greatest theological mind in the world at the time, they were unappreciative, and in the twenty-third year, they ran him out of the church and did everything they could to destroy his reputation so no other church would call him as pastor. And he ended up his life ministry with a little bit more than a dozen Indians, speaking to them about the very basic things of the Christian faith. After all that time, all that profound and blessed preaching, they threw him out of the church.
I read that story some years ago, and it was such a tragic story that it never has left my conscious mind. And I always think, too, of Spurgeon, the greatest Baptist preacher of his day, the greatest preacher of his day period. His sermons would be preached, and then he would edit them, and they would be on every ship, they said, that left England. And they would go all around the world. There was no one even like him. And yet he was thrown out of the Baptist Union, and the vote was made to do that, and it was seconded by his associate pastor who was his brother. Talk about wounded in the house of your friends. He never really recovered physically from that, died a premature death. And I think it was contributed to, in some measure, by the severe disappointment.
It doesn’t seem to matter how gifted, doesn’t seem to matter how faithful, how diligent, how hardworking a pastor and a shepherd may be. It’s amazing how people can treat him with cruelty. I understand what it is to be wounded in the house of your friends. I understand what betrayal means. Anybody in Christian ministry does. The enemy, of course, of the church, Satan himself, does anything he can to orchestrate that kind of thing."
John MacArthur
"Pastors, seek your people's joy. People seek your pastor's joy. Grow your joy in Jesus together." John Piper
TEXT; 1 THESSALONIANS 5:12,13
SONGS: I BELIEVE, JONATHAN HESSLER
HEART OF WORSHIP, BRANDON LAKE
FOR THIS CAUSE, RESOLVED WEST COAST TEAM