Transforming Grace

Ministry burnout was a hot topic a few years ago, especially around the time Peter Brain’s book Going the Distance was published in 2004. I believe there is a link between neonomianism and burnout. Uncertain of God’s acceptance, the neonomian drives himself hard morally and practically to win God’s approval and in doing so burns out.

By enjoying the love and acceptance of God though faith in Christ the pressure to perform for God is off. There is a danger, however, of swinging too far the other way and copping out. There is a balance to be struck between self-sacrifice and self-love. This balance is different for each person according to the way God has put them together. I get mentally tired quite easily and so need to be reminded to watch out for symptoms of burnout without copout. Here’s a list of symptoms of burnout and some checks and balances:

1. Exhaustion and easy tiring
2. Disenchantment with work
3. Feeling isolated–socially, psychologically, and/or physically
4. A growing apathy towards colleagues, customers, clients, family
5. Unprofessional feelings, attitudes or behaviour at work
6. Increase in cynical attitudes
7. An unhealthy increase in alcohol or food consumption or changing healthy behaviors for unhealthy ones
8. Lacking interest in client outcomes
9. Having persistent, recurring thoughts about whether you are in the right profession or about changing jobs
10. Missing work
11. Developing health problems
12. Being slow to return clients’ phone calls or to reschedule canceled meetings.
13. Showing pessimism about outcomes
14. Displaying less enthusiasm and intensity toward client
15. Feeling unappreciated
16. Loss of the ability to laugh or to see the “light side”
17. Dreading going to work
18. Having trouble sleeping

B. PREVENTATIVE MAINTENANCE & OVERCOMING YOUR OWN OR STAFF BURNOUT
The best way to avoid problems due to fatigue, overwork, and burnout is to prevent it. The following are some guidelines of guarding against burnout:

1. Arrange working and environmental conditions so that fatigue and burnout are not likely to occur
2. Schedule short “breathing spaces” during the day
3. Always take a lunch break
4. Develop a support system with other colleagues
5. Consult frequently with your supervisor
6. Arrange your office or work space in a pleasing manner
7. When not working, learn to engage in relaxing activities
8. Don’t bring your work home with you
9. Don’t dwell on what happened at work during leisure time
10. Let off steam about your feelings to an empathic listener
11. Change the size or type of load you carry
12. Take some time off from work (quiet days)
13. Do something each day that in some way is pleasing to you and meets your needs
14. Avoid being taken in by co-workers wanting to abdicate their responsibilities
15. Keep meetings brief and to the point. Have an agenda
16. Exercise selectivity in responding to emergency calls
17. Remind yourself you cannot control other people’s behavior
18. Realize that progress includes setbacks
19. Maintain your sense of humor
20. Avoid alcohol or drug abuse
21. Get adequate rest
22. Watch your physical health and nutrition
23. Get plenty of exercise
24. Keep abreast of current advances in your profession
25. Organize priorities in your work to maintain physical stamina
26. Learn to delegate authority
27. Learn to admit the need for help in the job
28. Limit the number of hours you work

(HT Carroll)

I’m reading George Whitefield’s Journals. Here’s another case of ‘heart failing’ mourning of sin colliding with the grace of God in Christ:

It would be endless to recount the sins and offences of my younger days. They are more in number than the hairs of my head. My heart would fail me at the remembrance of them, was I not assured that my Redeemer liveth, ever to make intercession for me. However the young man in the Gospel might boast how he had kept the commandments from his youth, with shame and confusion of face I confess that I have broken them all from my youth. Whatever foreseen fitness for salvation others may talk of and glory in, I disclaim any such thing. If I trace myself from my cradle to my manhood, I can see nothing in me but a fitness to be damned. [I speak the truth in Christ, I lie not.] If the Almighty bad not prevented me by His grace, and wrought most powerfully upon my soul, quickening me by His free Spirit when dead in trespasses and sins, I had now either been sitting in darkness, and in the shadow of death, or condemned, as the due reward of my crimes, to be for ever lifting up my eyes in torments.

But such was the free grace of God to me, that though corruption worked so strongly in my soul, and produced such early and bitter fruits, yet I can recollect very early movings of the blessed Spirit upon my heart, sufficient to satisfy me that God loved me with an everlasting love, and separated me even from my mother’s womb, for the work to which He afterwards was pleased to call me.

The first aspect of three which leads to the appreciation of grace is this: the sovereign and gracious work of God in bringing sinners to Christ. Charles Spurgeon in his autobiography writes:

When I was coming to Christ, I thought I was doing it all myself, and though I sought the Lord earnestly, I had no idea the Lord was seeking me. I do not think the young convert is at first aware of this. I can recall the very day and hour when first I received those truths [the doctrine of election] in my own soul—when they were, as John Bunyan says, burnt into my heart as with a hot iron, and I can recollect how I felt that I had grown on a sudden from a babe into a man—that I had made progress in Scriptural knowledge, through having found, once for all, that clue to the truth of God.

One week-night, when I was sitting in the house of God, I was not thinking much about the preacher’s sermon, for I did not believe it. The thought struck me, How did you come to be a Christian? I sought the Lord. But how did you come to seek the Lord? The truth flashed across my mind in a moment—I should not have sought Him unless there had been some previous influence in my mind to make me seek Him. I prayed, thought I, but then I asked myself, How came I to pray? I was induced to pray by reading the Scriptures. How came I to read the Scriptures? I did read them, but what led me to do so? Then, in a moment, I saw that God was at the bottom of it all, and that He was the Author of my faith, and so the whole doctrine of grace opened up to me, and from that doctrine I have not departed to this day, and I desire to make this my constant confession, “I ascribe my change wholly to God.

My own conversion began whilst I was venomously opposed to the idea of the existence of God. Yet, I first found myself praying, unexpectedly, at the spot where my grandmother’s dead body had been found. Soon after that I was surrounded by credible, loving Christians. Everywhere I went I couldn’t get away from joyful, believing, dependable believers.

When I finally came to faith I’d been up the previous night until 5am at my 24th birthday party, drinking heavily. But the following night I felt drawn to church against common sense and the good advice of my house mate. As I listened to the words of Psalm 36 which say that because of “the sinfulness of the wicked, there is no fear of God before their eyes” yet “Your steadfast love, O LORD, extends to the heavens, your faithfulness to the clouds. Your righteousness is like the mountains of God; your judgments are like the great deep; man and beast you save, O LORD.” The fact that God knew all about my twisted heart, my spite and evil plots, my wicked words and conceit and yet showed his incomparable steadfast love, faithfulness, righteousness and justice for me in the cross of Christ melted my heart and gave me new eyes. When I look back on my life I am able but don’t echo enough the “constant confession” of Spurgeon, “I ascribe my change wholly to God.”

Ephesians 2:8-9 For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith– and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God– not by works, so that no one can boast.

The following autobiographical account of the conversion of 17th century Scottish preacher Robert Bruce lets us see what happens when a great mourning for sin collides with the grace of God in Christ. In this short account, Bruce demonstrates practically all of the signs of Thomas Watson’s marks of true gospel mourning for sin and none of the hindrances:

At last it pleased God, in the year 1581in the month of August, in the last night thereof, being in the Place of Airth, lying in a chamber called the New Loft Chamber, in the very while I lay, to cite me inwardly, judicially in my conscience, and to present all my sins before me in such sort that He omitted not a circumstance, but made my conscience to see time, place, persons as vividly as in the hour I did them. He made the devil to accuse me so audibly that I heard his voice as vividly as ever I heard anything, not being asleep but awake. And so far as he spake true, my conscience bare him record, and testified against me very clearly. But when he came to be a false accuser, and laid things to my charge which I had never done, then my conscience failed him and would not testify with him. And in these things that were true my conscience condemned me, and the accuser himself tormented me, and made me feel the wroth of God pressing me down as it were to the lower hell. Yea, I was so fearfully and extremely tormented that I would have been content to have been cast into a cauldron of hot melted lead, to have had my soul relieved of that insupportable weight. Always, so far as he spoke true, I confessed, restored God to His glory, and craved God’s mercy for the merits of Christ: yea, appealed sore to His mercy, purchased to me by the blood, death, and passion of Christ. This court of justice holden upon my soul, turned of the bottomless mercy of God into a Court of Mercy to me: for that same night, ere the day dawned or ever the sun rose, He restrained these furies, and these outcries of my justly accusing conscience, and enabled me to rise in the morning.

[Robert Bruce: Minister in the Kirk Edenburg (2nd printing, Banner of Truth, 1961)]