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Bring Your Pastoral Regrets to God
It’s been nearly four years since I retired from my lead-pastor role to serve in a global church ministry. Yet most every week I’m seeing, hearing, or learning something that I might do differently or better or not even at all if I returned as a lead pastor. These insights sometimes lead to regrets.
Amid pastoral regrets, I’m reminded that my standing with God is unchanged by my performance. Fifty years of ministry regrets deepen my reliance on God’s grace. Even now, they lead to God-shaped change and serve as a means of growth. Let’s consider some common categories of pastoral regrets.
Heart Issues
Life is about the heart in relationship to God and others. Fittingly, the older we get, the more we see areas of weakness and need. We recognize times when we’ve neglected spiritual disciplines and failed to value relationships in the church body. We think of paltry attempts to wrestle with sin issues and lameness in furthering friendships. As one dying man told a pastor friend, “The closer I get to heaven, the more I think about the little things”—referring to sins he brushed off earlier in life.
As a septuagenarian, I’ve often replayed that interaction, conscious of my life’s brevity. No doubt, when I consider the grace and love shown to me by my Savior, a brief essay won’t cover the areas I wish I’d done differently. So let me identify three heart issues that ring in my mind.
First, I regret being too quick to give my opinion instead of listening compassionately to a brother or sister. It’s easy to bruise the reed and crush the smoking flax instead of being like Jesus, who welcomes the weary and burdened to give them rest (Matt. 12:20; 11:28–30). Pride in my opinion, along with self-importance, often drove the quick advice I offered without feeling the weight of a fellow struggler.
Second, I regret my lack of patience with church members needing gospel transformation. Rightly, I wanted to see Christ formed in those I shepherded. But even as that kind of transformation has taken time in my own life, I’ve been impatient toward others. This exposes a failure to rely on God’s grace to transform.
Theologically, I knew my words couldn’t transform anyone. Only by Word and Spirit can appropriate maturity and change take place. But that didn’t conform to my schedule. At the root of my impatience lay my unbelief in the sufficiency of God’s power and the wisdom of his providence.
At the root of my impatience lay my unbelief in the sufficiency of God’s power and wisdom of his providence.
Third, I regret not learning the joy of divine providence early in life and ministry. By God’s grace, I’ve limped along in learning lessons of God’s wise, mysterious, and good providence. But how often I drooped when I should have been joyous in knowing that “my faithful Saviour Jesus Christ . . . so preserves me that without the will of my heavenly Father, not a hair can fall from my head” (Heidelberg Catechism). The flock needed to see my example of resting in God’s faithfulness. Savoring God’s providence sustains perseverance.
Ministry Practice
By practice, I mean the activities and engagements foundational to public ministry. We don’t just show up to preach, counsel, encourage, or shepherd without regular practices that feed and sustain us to serve others.
First, I regret not spending more time meditating on the Word in personal devotions and sermon preparation. As a teenager, I spent several days over Christmas break on a survival trip with a dozen friends. Teenage boys without food creates misery. When we divided small game between us, there was only a tiny portion for each. I remember sucking on a bone for hours to get every drop of nutrition out of it. That’s what meditation does. You keep sucking the juices of the gospel to satisfy and sustain your soul.
Later in my ministry, meditation on the Word enriched my life and preaching. But I think of how many years I rushed from text to exegesis to homiletics to pulpit without sucking the juices out of the text to discover its deliciousness for my soul.
Second, I regret not praying more fervently and with greater dependence on the Lord. Yes, we all regret neglecting prayer. But this neglect exposes a lack of dependence on the promises in the gospel. It breeds self-reliance, or what might be termed a mechanical spiritual life. We go through motions, live nice lives, and do our jobs, but show little God-dependency flowing out of the redeeming work of Christ. Fervent prayer relies on what God can do.
Pulpit Ministry
I’ve preached thousands of sermons through the years. But I’m still learning about this “primary task . . . of the Christian minister,” as Martyn Lloyd-Jones put it. If it’s primary, it’s worth a lifetime of wrestling and digging to improve how we communicate the written Word through this God-appointed means—and doing so in the Spirit’s power.
If a pastor gets to the end of his life and thinks he has no more room to improve his preaching, he’s an arrogant and shameful man. Two regrets among many stand out.
First, I regret not being more focused in preaching to prepare my flock for heaven. In the last few years of pastoring, our oldest church member called me. His health had declined, and his mind had begun to slip. He didn’t have long in this world. We had a sweet conversation about the effects of the gospel and the joy of heaven.
When I got off the phone, I wept profusely. I couldn’t stop. My wife thought something terribly wrong had happened. I waved my hand to let her know I was OK, and with halting speech told her, “I finally realized that all these years of pastoring, my biggest responsibility has been to prepare people for heaven.”
I finally realized that all these years of pastoring, my biggest responsibility has been to prepare people for heaven.
I’m not referring to simply preaching sermons on heaven. Rather, the hope and longing of seeing Jesus face-to-face must be paramount in how I apply the sermon. That longing affects our daily walk. Are there other applications? Yes, certainly, and we mustn’t neglect them. But in worship gatherings, we need to build the homing device of eternal hope that we’re preparing to meet Jesus.
Second, I regret not making clearer gospel applications in the Lord’s Supper. For the last third of my ministry, times at the table became sweet, savoring moments of the sermon coming home with gospel power. But for the other two-thirds, I neglected to lead my flock to taste and experience the body and blood of Jesus in gospel application (John 6:52–58).
The supper brings home the mystery of the gospel with simplicity, using the senses to magnify the beauty and power of the Savior’s love, redemption, and promise. When we lead it perfunctorily, we neglect this ordinance gift to the body of Christ, where our senses engage to receive the fruit of Christ’s saving work.
I’m still learning. Regrets motivate me to diligently press on, knowing that one day I’ll see Jesus face to face, and he’ll wipe every tear from my eyes. Then, no more regrets.
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