...examine your own heart, your motives, very carefully. Very few ministers serve large, thriving churches. If that is your vision of what is ahead discount it. God may open up such formidable doors of opportunity; but you cannot count on it, and it must form no part of your decision. The overwhelming majority of pastors serve relatively small and unprepossessing churches. Many of them are called on to do what no amount of money could ever reimburse them for - officiating at the funeral of the town drunk whose intoxicated live-in girlfriend shrieks and mutters throughout the sparesly attended funeral service; burying a child dead of cancer at the age of nine months; presiding over a church broken up by angry and powerful members who show nothing of forebearance or grace (or even good sense). Out of the heat of these and countless other impossibily difficult circumstances, a heart for ministry (in the old sense of that word) is confirmed.
Read through Paul's epistles rather rapidly in three or four sittings and observe that it was his relations with Christians that gave him the greatest pain. Should you end up in vocational ministry, your experience will not be any different. By all means, talk to the leaders of your church and work through the Biblical passages on elders, pastors and overseers; but above all seek the Lord's face in prayer. You need not demand a kind of Damacus-road experience - few enjoy so immediate an experience of call. But if you know nothing of Spirit-prompted compulsion and a servant heart that has, as far as you know, counted the cost, I beg of you to relinquish all aspirations to pastoral ministry.
DA Carson & John D Woodbridge
Letters Along the Way, (Crossway 1993), p136
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