I have recently been reading Dorothee Soelle's book The Silent Cry, and one of the quotes really intrigued me. "Do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work that you have taken on, essentially an apostolic work, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truths of the work itself" (p232)
The work that I do, the work that any Christian does really, is so often judged by its results. We've inherited that mindset from our culture, and so we look for the number of people in our pews, or quantity of dollars that we've raised fo r our latest missions project, or the enthusiasm of the young people in the youth group as indicators of our "success".
We've come to measure the church the way a business might be measured. Imagine if this business model had been applied to the early church - they wouldn't have been considered too successful! I think there is great Biblical wisdome in Soelle's suggestion. I am learning to evaluate my ministry not on the number of cd's that I have sold or the size of the audiences that I am playing or speaking to but by the content of the message that I have to give.
As I move deeper in the faith, I see more clearly that the value, the rightness and the truths of the Gospel will speak for themselves, and need no human efforts to prop them up. All God desires from me is my love, and that coupled with God's grace, is more than enough.
