FRIDAY EDWARDS EXCERPT: On Being a Minister of the Gospel

This weekend I had the privilege of traveling to meet a wonderful group of brothers and sisters in Christ, new friends that I pray become old friends in the near future. Our time was extremely well organized and, in my opinion, packed with the kind of sweet conversation that only a genuine love for the church and godly wisdom distilled by the fiery trials of divine providence can produce. But deeply contemplating gospel ministry, what the Puritans called the cure of souls, can be exhausting and sometimes even daunting.

Last night as I prepared for the Lord's Day worship, my soul was weary and thirsty, not because of any burdensome thing but due to the immensity of it all (or was it the Glennfiddich?). So I spent some time before bed drinking from that deep cool spring that still flows from the pen of Jonathan Edwards. The sermon was entitled "Ministers Need the Power of God" (2 Cornithins 4:7, "But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us.") recently published in The Salvation of Souls: Nine Previously Unpublished Sermons on the Call of the Ministry and the Gospel by Jonathan Edwards. The context in which this particular sermon was written is quite interesting.

Edwards's grandfather and longtime pastor of the church in Northampton, Solomon Stoddard, had just passed away. Stoddard's ministry was considered to have been extraordinarily successful. The 26 year-old Jonathan was chosen to be his successor. There was, of course, uncertainty as to whether God would bless his ministry to the degree he had blessed his grandfather's. Can you imagine the pressure Edwards must have felt succeeding his grandfather, the only minister Northampton had known for the previous 57 years? The editors' introduction says:

Edwards charted a course for his ministry in this sermon in which he addressed the uncertainties. God's Spirit and power had accompanied Stoddard's ministry, Edwards said, and the people should now pray that the same might accompany his own ministry. Edwards's conviction that God, not the minister, determined the success of the ministerial labors was central to his view of the ministry. Edwards saw ministers as "earthen vessels" in the hands of the Almighty, who uses them for his own glory. He asserted that ministers are "utterly insufficient" to carry on the work of God's grace.

As I read Edwards's sermon last night my soul was greatly comforted and refreshed in remembering that ultimately God bears the yoke of ministry. We are earthen vessels. He is the treasure. He is the beautiful one, the beatific vision, that fills the eyes of his faithful children. He is the balm with which souls are cured. Ministers are only able to do their work as they themselves have their eyes filled with divine glory and their hearts saturated with divine love, because God is the one who does the work in his good time. What a wonderfully freeing truth! Praise be to God!

A few passages of Edwards sermon were particularly beautiful to me:

[Ministers] can as soon create a reflection of the sun['s] beams when the sun does not shine as enlighten the soul of man when God does not shine into it. . . .

Surely physicians are, of themselves, none of them able to raise the dead. You may apply what medicines you please to a dead man, you cannot fetch him to life. You may set what food you will before him, it will not nourish him. You may represent what objects you will, he will not see. If you charm in his ears ever so wisely, he will not hear. You can do no good at all to a dead man. Nothing that you do will have influence upon him. So nothing that ministers can do, if God does nothing, can have any influence at all upon the souls of sinners, their conversion or spiritual good. . . .

There are some works that none can do but God, not men nor angels. Such is creation, and such is raising from the dead, and such is the conversion of the soul, which is both a creation and a resurrection. The grace of God is a gift that never any can bestow but God. It is a jewel that God has in his own keeping and never commits to any but his own Son to bestow.

If ministers knew perfectly the circumstances of every soul, knew all his thoughts and workings of his heart, and so knew how to suit the world exactly to his case; if he could set forth the gospel in the most powerful, moving, and convincing manner that the nature of words will allow of, yet if the matter be left there and God does nothing, nothing will be done. The soul will remain dead as before. . . .

[Ministers] should go to Christ, the great Prophet who calls them and sends them forth to labor in his vineyard. They should not depend upon their own parts, or learning, or eloquence, or on the goodness of their preparations, or in the good opinion that men have of them, but their eyes should be to God. They should look to him to bless them in this great work.

But just in case Edwards's hearers began to think that he had succumbed to some sort of antinomian passivism in his doctrine of ministry he writes:

Those that are about to undertake this work should do it with the greatest seriousness and consideration of the vast importance of the work, how great a thing it is to have the care of precious souls committed to them, and with a suitable concern upon their minds, considering the great difficulties, dangers, and temptations that do accompany it. . . .

And [ministers] should beg of God that his Spirit may accompany their administration. If their own abilities and performances are but mean, yet if they have a true love to souls and desire of advancing the kingdom of Christ, God is able to make the weapons of their warfare mighty to the pulling down of strongholds, as he made David that appeared so weak and insufficient a warrior to prevail over Goliath without sword or shield or spear, with only the instruments of a shepherd. . . .

Let us give all the glory to God when there is any success of the Gospel. This is what God designs by giving the treasure to earthen vessels, that we may acknowledge the treasure to be from God and not from the vessel itself, as we should be ready to think if the vessels were golden vessels.

I highly recommend this sermon to anyone either contemplating or involved in ministry. It is a garden of encouragement and challenge rooted in biblical truth.