Enjoy the Work, Not Just the Results

by Cole Deike May 3, 2018

I now have two years of evidence that my preaching does not produce the results I wish it would.

I’m young. Two years is my entire body of pastoral work. My entire corpus is now personal, historical proof that my preaching probably won’t result in the stuff of memoirs, church growth success books, or world-change stories.

Not everybody who reads this article is a preacher, but every Christian does have God-ordained ministry work. And maybe you’re like me: perhaps you have naive optimism of personal potential, partly guided your entry into ministry. Like me, it may well be that you refused to be rightly inspired by the stories of the ministry giants and wrongly demanded to be included in them. And you are discouraged by how massive the mountain of ministry work appears before you now that the bowl of fruit seems so small behind you. 

So, when we are not surrounded by a cloud of “You’re the best ministry leader ever!” comments, when the “Best small group leader ever!” badge is pinned to somebody else’s lapel, is there a better metric than “tangible outcomes” to measure the worth of our ministry efforts?

I believe the answer is joy.

When the balance between the work and the reward seems to be out of whack, how precious Paul’s reminder to bondservants has been to me: “Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward. You are serving the Lord Christ” (Colossians 3:23).

When you assess the value of your work, this promise has the power to help you measure its worth, not with tweetable numbers, but with the square footage of Christ’s kingdom. Every little work of ministry performed in the power of Christ’s name will be like a wave in the sea that billows and billows into eternity with no shore to ever break it. Even if it does begin like a small, mysterious ripple.

When your joy is held hostage by measurable, worldly outcomes, scorn will appear while the ministry results are only treasures invisibly stacked in heaven. Bitterness will emerge when your work only produces small victories for the gospel.

Andy Catlett, a character in a Wendell Berry short story, spent his lifetime farming, writing, and advocating for the preservation of topsoil in farming practices and, towards the end of his life, he looks back and evaluates his work:

And so Andy is forced to question the worth of the advocacy that has so occupied him and his friends for so long. He knows that their advocacy has virtually no standing with professors, intellectuals, journalists, economists, let alone the corporations and the politicians of the capitols.

Andy tries to answer the question: has it been worth it?

He refuses, to start with, the sometimes offered consolation that in his advocacy he has written well… Would even the plays of Shakespeare compensate the loss or ruin of topsoil of England?

After mulling over a few wrong answers, Andy finally arrives at the right answer:

But the compensation he is sure of, that apart from any result has mattered most, has been his love for his advocacy… His work, he thinks, the love that was in it, the love that it was for, has given him a happy life.

The margins of my physical copy of this short story are filled with comments, underlinings, and pen markings and, at its conclusion, there is a comment in my own handwriting that I left for myself several readings ago:

Cole, you seem to be returning again and again to this story on Saturday nights before preaching Sunday morning. This is the question you should seek to be answering on Saturday nights: are you doing your sermon preparation in such a way that it is intrinsically joyful apart from any visible results?

There are times when I stress-prep. On Saturdays nights, I sometimes find my shoulders glued to my ears, muscularly tense as I survey my week’s sermon preparation and find it wanting. These moments are red flags that warn me that I am working for men and not for the Lord. Pay very, very close attention to your heart when your work becomes joyless and, in those moments, pause. Ask yourself: "Do you know, employee of the Lord, that you are forfeiting one of your greatest rewards when you work with stress, tension, or anxiety?" Then pray.

It is obsession with results that makes people burn out. It is obsession with results that makes people feel like they are working in hell, even while they are working for the Lord. It is obsession with results that makes Christ appear as less than all-satisfying to those who watch us do our work. When we work, we should not should toil over creating results. We should give our highest efforts to enjoying our work and leaving the results to the Lord.

What the world needs are Christian employees who so delight in Christ’s presence that even if their efforts produce little, they can continue to work without losing their hearts. The spirit-given ability to enjoy your work is richer compensation than any repayment you can imagine; it is superior to the praise of men, building an online platform, and Facebook sermon video views all gift wrapped together in one box.

When you prepare a faithful sermon that makes a little dent in your local church, when you work heartily and receive zero praise from men, it exhilarates the Lord to pinch the tiny corner of your unnoticed work and stretch it all the way into eternity. Oh, how the Lord loves to take what the world thinks of as little and make much of himself with it!

Jesus Christ’s life appeared to be without results. His most public work was performed before an audience of onlookers, evaluators, and assessors. Those who said, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” (John 1:46) surely sneered, “Can anything good come from the cross?” This work was empirically a failure, but invisibly, it was redemption’s greatest success. The cross is the place where God made the most of the least. Maybe, like the cross, the results of your work are hidden in heaven.

If so, then you are free to enjoy your work and free to enjoy your Employer as well.