Ministry of Failure

Many of us have felt failure in our ministry from time to time...but are we in a ministry of failure?  We see no signs of success.  Our message is not received.  Those we minister to never change.  There is no measure of impact during our lifetime. 
If this is the case, and we are not merely experiencing occassional failures but we are in a failing ministry, what do we do about it?

Do we bail? Do we alter our direction? Do we tweak our message?

Or could it be that we are simply called to a ministry of failure like Jeremiah and there is nothing we can or should change about it?

Jeremiah lived in the last days of a decaying nation.  The people failed to take God seriously which is what started their downward spiral. They did not pay much attention to what he had told them The people did what was right in their own eyes rather than carefully examining their behavior in the light of God's revelation and word.  Sound familiar?

Jeremiah's ministry covered about forty years, and during all this time the prophet saw absolutely no signs success in his ministry.  Rather he was bombarded with discouragement and plagued with depression. His message was one of denunciation and reform, and the people never obeyed him. Most other prophets saw some fruit of their labor -- but not Jeremiah. He was called to a ministry of failure, and yet he was enabled to keep going for many long years and to be faithful to God and to accomplish God's purpose: to witness to a nation that had decayed.  Jeremiah endured this kind of persecution in his life without quitting...but he did weep.

He didn't have sorrow just for the nation though.  He cried to God about his own discouragement, dissappointment, depression, persecution, resentment, and bitterness.  At one point, he even accuses God of being a liar and undependable. Strong words? Undoubtedly. Honest words? Absolutely. He is pouring out exactly how he feels. He feels so forsaken that he has begun to wonder if the trouble might after all be with God that he cannot be depended upon.

How often have we felt that we have tried to do the right thing but everybody either just disregards it or comes back to make trouble for us or they mock and deride us?  Think back to the last time you have been weighed down by loneliness and depression of spirit.  We can all understand why Jeremiah constantly fights a battle with discouragement.  Who wouldn't with a ministry like his?  Jeremiah not only spoke a prophecy of ruin -- of desolation and destruction and judgment -- but beyond that he lived it and died it as a prisoner in Egypt.

Why did he suffer so much?  Surely, he wasn't doing something right.  What was his problem?  If Jeremiah was a good friend of ours (but no, he was not a bullfrog =), we might say that the trouble with him is that he has allowed himself to backslide.  Disobedience is the reason he is suffering like that.  It's the cause of his failure and the source of his complaining.  Isn't that sometimes the quick and easy answer we flippantly hand someone who is struggling in their life and wrestling with God? 

But that isn't the case with Jeremiah. He is a praying man. He reads his Bible, feeds on the word, and witnesses.  He is not a backsliding man.  These are actually the very things you need to do if you get depressed and discouraged. You need to pray, read your Bible, witness to others, and keep away from evil. But here is a man who is doing all these things and he is still defeated, still disheartened. Well, then my question is still left unanswered.  What is his problem?

The problem is that he has forgotten his calling. He has forgotten what God has promised to be to and for him. So God reminds him of it.  In Scripture, God always gives this answer to a heart that has grown discouraged: "Come back," God says. "Return. Go back to the beginnings, to the original things."  This is what he told Jeremiah in chapter 15 verse 19b.  But what exactly is he supposed to return to?  Well, what did God say him from the very start?  Notice this man's call back in the first chapter:

Now the word of the Lord came to me saying, "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you: I appointed you a prophet to the nations." Jeremiah 1:4-5

As one commentator describes it: "And when from a mire of depression and discouragement, the prophet is called back to the promise of God; when he is reminded that God is greater than circumstances and that no matter how depressing they may be, or how negative, the God who calls him is the God who is able to sustain him in the midst of it; when he gets his eyes off himself and back on to God (like Peter walking on the water), he begins to walk again.

And in the strength he receives through this lesson he continues with his ministry, through all the discouraging circumstances. Jeremiah was faithful to the end as he learned to walk in the strength of the Lord his God. And he gives us this wonderful prophecy of the grace of God in restoring lives and taking broken, battered, wounded, defeated spirits and making them over again into vessels pleasing to him.

As Jeremiah watched the potter at work, he saw him making a vessel on his wheel, and as the wheel turned the potter shaped the vessel. And as Jeremiah watched, the vessel in the potter's hand was marred and broken. Then the potter took the vessel and once more pushed it all down into a lump of clay, and shaping it the second time, made it into a vessel after the potter's heart.  This is God's great object lesson of what he does with a broken life. He takes it and makes it over again -- not according to the failures and foolish dreams of an individual, but after the potter's heart, for the potter has power over the clay to shape it as he wishes. 

In the end, there is one thing we learn from Jeremiah's experience with God: notwithstanding the fact that divine call may bring rejection and loneliness, the call must creat a stubborn refusal to abandon God, even when this refusal to give up on God may be the source of our complaint."

According to God's measures of success, Jeremiah's ministry was not one of failure although that's what it seemed.  Jeremiah was called to a ministry of failure but still succeeded because he refused to abandon God even when all hope seemed lost.  In God's eyes, he had a ministry of courage and perseverance!

Are you succeeding in your ministry of failure?  Are you turning them into ministries of faith and submission?  Because that's all God really calls us to do - trust and obey.