The Faithful Understand the Time

If you were to drive a couple of hours North-West of Dublin, until you find the Middle-of-Nowhere, then take a left down a very bumpy, pot-hole filled road, cross a bridge, down another few roads with grass growing up them, you will come across a little village. It is a single street, with a couple of houses on either side, along with a few other buildings. One of those buildings belongs to a church. That’s the church where I was discipled, down the hill from which I was baptised in a lake while the ducks watched on.

About 35 years ago that church had 3 members. In its heyday it had had over a hundred. But over the decades it had dwindled due to people leaving the area. In that small hall, an elderly man and two elderly women met, and prayed. One prayer that the old man prayed was that “I would not die before seeing the light of testimony continue in this place.”

Other churches in the same dire straits were closing their doors forever. Maybe some readers would consider that it was foolish to remain open. And yet, about this time, a family moved there with the express purpose of full-time ministry. The ministry they carried out from that place has gone on to see thousands of young people reached with the gospel, many saved, and people who were either part of that church or associated with that church, sent out to the farthest parts of the earth (ourselves not withstanding). And today that church is only slightly lower than average size compared to other places in Ireland. And hundreds are being blessed from the ministry there.

This story arose in my mind when I considered the following question:

What is the difference between success and faithfulness?

This question arose at a conference I recently attended and is one which has stuck in my mind since.

The basis of the question was an attempt to assess what we are doing, so that our ministry is not simply spinning our wheels in the mud, doing things, but that it is actually engaging with the things that need to be engaged with. The danger that was raised was that we can sometimes be spinning our wheels, getting nowhere, and pass it off as “that’s just what faithfulness looks like in a hard place…”, when in fact we ought to be reassessing our priorities.

Nonetheless, there was some back and forth on whether or not faithfulness is itself success. Are results dependent on us? Is there a measurable difference?

As I pondered these things, I was reading in Matthew’s gospel of what a faithful man looks like:

“Who then is the faithful and wise servant, whom his master has set over his household, to give them their food at the proper time? Blessed is that servant whom his master will find so doing when he comes.”

– Matthew 24:45-46

In a well-known verse, a phrase jumped out that I had never noticed before, “to give them their food at the proper time”. The mark of faithfulness in this blessed steward was that he knew not just his task, but when to do it. The master was not interested in his servant simply providing food. Obviously, a meal sitting out cold for hours would be helpful to no one. No, this faithful servant discerns the correct time for each part of his duty to be completed. Success to him, is a meal on the table at dinner time, just as his master wished.

“Success” indicates that there is a goal to achieve, and it is achieved. So, the first question to ask is, “whose goal is it?”. First and foremost, it must be the Masters’s goal. Therefore, “success” is when God completes the goal he has set. Whether we live to see the start of that in a particular context, the middle of it, or the end result is not important. If we are workers in his harvest, then we are not chasing our own goals, but his. This gives our identity/work an inherent value, not a fluctuating one.

On the one hand, we have practical need to plan. Of course we have goals that we desire that are downstream of God’s overarching plan. So, success would be the completion of those goals. If we are not “successful” then we either have to ask:

Were we unfaithful?

Were we bad stewards?

Were our goals not actually in line with God’s bigger goals?

Or: If all the above are answered in the negative, are we maybe measuring success on the wrong timeline?

For example, if we have a goal for a certain number of churches/converts, where does that goal come from? Is that a goal that God has (for a certain number of churches)? If it is, are we being faithful in how we try to achieve that? If yes, do we necessarily have to see it in our lifetime for it to be successful? Or, do we just keep doing what we’re doing without asking questions because we don’t want to admit we may have been doing things wrong?

So enters our friend the faithful servant. The one who discerns the time.

I think some of our frustration/discouragement in ministry can come not from a lack of zeal, or investment, or hard work, but because we are not discerning enough of the time. So, we do things for the sake of doing them, or because they’ve always been done that way. We’re doing good things, but not when the Master wants us to.

But then conversely, the opposite danger can creep in. Rather than getting stuck in our ways which may not be faithful stewarding, we get itchy to try something new and see something done quickly. We sometimes begin to measure success by the world of business rather than the world of Scripture. Success in the Scriptures is exclusively contrary to the world’s expectations.

It is not a typical success story to rest your hopes of progeny on yourself and your aged wife’s non-existent fertility. Abraham may have been accused of acting in vain, spinning his wheels. Of course that method wasn’t going to work… in fact he fell for that lie too.

It doesn’t make worldly sense to rebel against your master with an army and chariots, when you are slaves with nothing to hope for. What they needed was better strategy.

It wasn’t a good business model to choose twelve mostly illiterate village bumpkins to promote your cause. Jesus should have strategised a bit better perhaps.

What would discerning the time mean for Abraham, for Moses, for Jesus himself, and for every other servant of God in the Scriptures and through the ages? Keep being faithful, in spite of how weak it looks, because God has said to do it in this way, at this time.

Every turn of the page of Scripture we’re confronted with men and women who have the choice of planning things out by themselves, or waiting upon God in utter weakness and dependency, and seeing him do something out of nothing.

Every mission story that we admire is not impressive because it involved wonderful strategy and great methodology, but because people like George Muller and Hudson Talyor had nothing, and yet in their weakness they prayed to a big God and saw something happen. They discerned the time of obedience, in spite of a lack of resources etc., because they simply sought God.

This is not “measurable success”. If we follow Christ, often our decisions will be out of line with what the world believes to be a good decision. Like keeping a church open with 3 people. Now, maybe there are times those churches should close/merge, and that is the wisest choice. It is not the laying of a law though, to say that there are cases when some faithful servants should keep going on in weakness. It is about discerning the time, not about laying down case law.

Strategy is helpful, planning is good (especially with a holy imagination). George Muller, Hudson Taylor and the Apostle Paul were all men with plans. But maybe, just maybe, a godly disposition that discerns the time, and a willingness to embrace weakness, rather than use strategy to strive against it, will serve us better in the long run. These men held their plans loosely, and so discerned the time.

Recently I read online a couple of articles relating to things like Church Planting Movements (CPM) and other contextualisation in general. And I laughed with Dee about it. These articles were clapping themselves on the back for finding a place of healthy use of these principles in the modern missions age, avoiding the excess of those who promoted them on an extreme level.

And it’s something we see time and time again, especially in the mission’s world. It is very understandable that, in really difficult places, when someone comes along with a “silver bullet” methodology, we want to jump right on board. People are weary. If there’s something that will work better, they want it! They want their ministry to be worthwhile.

And so, the initial wave swings high on the pendulum, trying to generate momentum for its cause, sometimes verging into very dangerous territory. Then over time, people realise that while there might be a couple of good ideas in there, it really wasn’t the silver bullet that it seemed, and that excesses were made, so we ought to temper ourselves and become more balanced on the issue. Then, after all the ink has been spilled on books arguing for and against, all the problems are left on the mission field, and damaged lives start to recover, people clap themselves on the back for having found a balanced perspective. Which is simply the returning to the place from which it all started. (Hence, why I laughed). Meanwhile, those who were either very sceptical, or just out of the loop entirely, have been plugging away faithfully, doing that very same thing all along, that the silver bullet people have now settled on as a “balanced position”.

In other words, those others just kept being faithful, providing food at the right time. The trends come and go, the new methodologies blaze through, filling a paragraph on a page of the history books. And the faithful keep plodding. They don’t look for the big and fancy. They simply look, in their humble, servant position, to do the Master’s bidding at the time they’re meant to do it. Daily making meals, daily washing dishes, daily cleaning toilets.

It must be acknowledged, that at times, it is a very hard thing to discern when is the right time to change, and when we ought to persevere in doing the right thing at that time. After all, progress is only progress if it is in the right direction. And we all have tendencies to prefer sticking to one way or trying something new, so we need to be aware of our own personal pitfalls.

But ultimately, I think it comes to a matter of the heart. If we are content in our identity, without need for validation or encouragement of numbers etc, but simply to be God’s labourer, then we are much freer within ourselves to discern the times for change/moving on etc. If we are a little unstable in this way it is easy to fall into the sunk-cost fallacy, (where we feel we need to invest more because we’ve invested so much already) and spin our wheels for no reason because our judgement is clouded by a wrong view of success.

But perhaps less of a focus on “measurable success” and new means of achieving it, could actually free our vision and discernment to make us more successful. Being content in weakness, and certain about how the Kingdom economy works, we can labour day-in-day-out without much visible change, because we know that the seed sown in weakness will bring forth eternal fruit. Our labour is not in vain in the Lord.