Pastors always want to go to church.
That is an axiom similar to ‘lightning never strikes twice’ or ‘watched pots never boil’. It is an assumed truth rarely questioned.
Some pastors, I humbly offer, do at times want to stay home from church. They shouldn’t, of course, and neither should any other Christian concerned to hang on to Christ alone.
Yesterday morning was not a good one for me. I was coming off a week of vacation, and as well mentally working through a handful of serious concerns. Mornings, especially Sunday mornings, are times when all my weaknesses and faults and failures seem to line themselves up for my perusal and review.
The net result was that I wanted to hide. I wanted to curl up in a quiet corner with a book and enjoy a period of withdrawal and isolation. The last thing I wanted to do was to mingle with chipper and cheery Christians.
But I knew that I must. So I did, trusting that the God of grace would be gracious to me.
He was. His grace was clear in the message preached, not by me, but by our associate Geoff Henderson. And his grace was clear in the closing hymn, one which God has used repeatedly at difficult times in my life.
Again and again it is made clear to me that the times we most want to absent ourselves from worship are the times that we most need to be there. Sorrow, trial, struggle, are all things which mess with our composure and self-confidence. They are the plow which turn over the dirt in our lives. They are the blades which make furrows in our heart ready for the seed of the gospel to be planted.
Undisturbed hearts more easily resist gospel truth. The disturbed heart is disturbed soil, and there, gospel seed is so readily received.