This was initially presented as a devotional for a meeting of pastors on January 29, 2021.
Psalm 100
1 Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth!
2 Serve the Lord with gladness!
Come into his presence with singing!
3 Know that the Lord, he is God!
It is he who made us, and we are his;
we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.
4 Enter his gates with thanksgiving,
and his courts with praise!
Give thanks to him; bless his name!
5 For the Lord is good;
his steadfast love endures forever,
and his faithfulness to all generations.
Psalm 100 encourages Jewish worshipers to enter into God’s temple singing songs and making joyful noises of praise to the Lord their God. It is, according to the subscript, “a psalm for giving thanks.”
I would like to focus our attention on one line in verse 2, where the Psalmist gives this command: “Serve the Lord with gladness!” And I would like to reflect on this command within the context of pastoral ministry. I’ll speak to us as pastors, because many of us are pastors, or closely connected to pastoral ministry. What does it mean for us, as pastors, to serve the Lord with gladness?
Now, I know what you’re thinking, because you’re all astute and wide awake. You’re thinking, Adam, you just told us the historical context was of Jews entering the temple to worship and praise the Lord. You can’t just brush aside that historical context and apply it to a completely different contemporary context of pastoral ministry. You can’t just change contexts willy-nilly like this. This is sloppy exegesis!
Well, fair enough, but let me remind you, this is a devotional, not a lecture, or even a sermon, and a devotional is only as good as its exegesis is sloppy. You can quote me on that and take it to the bank, because it’s probably the best part of what I’m going to say.
Serve the Lord with gladness. Serve the Lord in your pastoral ministry with gladness.
The word “serve” here refers to work, and hard work even. It can be translated toil or labor. It’s the hard work of the ancient servant or slave who toiled in the field, sleeves rolled up, hands dirty, sweating, aching.
Pastoral ministry is hard work.
A lot of people think pastors are all like Joel Osteen. That we are celebrities with large crowds of adoring fans lined up to buy our books and fund our lavish lifestyles.
Maybe that is what your pastoral ministry looks like, though I have my doubts. The reality for me and for every pastor I know is that ministry is hard work performed as a daily grind, and it is rarely glamorous, never lucrative.
This past Monday morning was not unusual, as I was alone in our church building plunging a toilet in the men’s room that someone had clogged on Sunday. Everything had dissolved and the bowl was filled to the brim. As the plunger disappeared into this toilet bowl mocha, I knew that I probably did not have Covid, because I still had a very acute sense of smell. It’s the latest development in rapid Covid testing!
Ministry is not glamorous. It is a grind.
Every Sunday a sermon needs to be preached, and Sunday comes with alarming regularity. Preach a sermon and get through a Sunday, then there’s a brief feeling of relief on Monday, followed quickly by the realization that there are only six days left to prepare, because Sunday is coming again. Week after week after week.
There is always another passage to study, another lesson to prepare, another sermon to write. A sick person to visit. A family in crisis to counsel. A funeral to plan. A conflict to resolve. Write a card. Make a phone call. Send an email. An elder meeting here, a staff meeting there.
The work is at times rewarding, and we could all talk about the rewarding parts of ministry – changed lives, conversions, baptisms, baby dedications, weddings, and also fun times, retreats, camps, and barbecues. Pastoring has its rewards.
But all of us have also experienced the pastoral hardships of being ignored, rejected, and criticized, of laboring to build ministries only to watch them fall apart, of sacrificing deeply to love people who then leave the church with the finger pointed at us.
Yet we are here today, pastors still, because apparently we are among those who have found sufficient grit for the grind and, at least to this point in our ministries, we have endured. Like Dory – just keep swimming, just keep swimming – we just keep serving, just keep serving.
But do we serve the Lord with gladness?
This has been a hard year to be glad as a pastor. Covid has cut the tail off the pastoral mullet. You know the mullet – business in the front, party in the back. Covid has cut off the tail. No parties, all business. Covid has taken away the fun parts of pastoral ministry and left behind the toil and the grind.
Covid cancelled retreats and camps and church events. No more potlucks or barbecues. No coffee or lunch meetings. No games in the church lawn. No VBS. No handshakes or hugs. No meals in homes, no hospitality. You can still smile, but it must be covered by a mask.
The fun is cancelled but the grind remains.
And the grind, if anything, is harder than ever. How many times can we reinvent the worship service? In the past year, our worship service has been online, drive-in, then outside, then inside, then outside, then inside again. Every one of those changes was an extraordinary amount of work and stress.
Further, there is the added work of trying to stay in contact with church members. People have isolated themselves from us in their homes. We are banned from hospitals and nursing homes, cut off from the community, told and treated like we are not essential. Conversations are hard. Some people are afraid, panicked even, others are angry, everyone is anxious. The collective blood pressure of our church has climbed to an unhealthy level.
On top of all of this, we are called upon to navigate Covid protocols, to adjudicate between the anti-maskers and the mask police. I’m sorry, I missed the class in seminary where we talked about the efficacy of masks for mitigating the spread of contagious diseases in a worship service!
And the criticism is fierce. If we gather for worship, to make a joyful noise, we are murderers, or if we don’t gather for worship, we are faithlessly bowing down to a secular government. It’s an impossible situation. No pastor that I know has escaped unscathed.
In times such as these, how do we endure not only in serving the Lord, but in serving the Lord with gladness?
Earlier this week, I was praying and lamenting about how hard it is, about how much less joy I have in pastoral ministry right now, and confessing that the attitude of my heart has been increasingly frustrated and irritable.
And as I was praying, Psalm 100 came to mind, which I had read earlier that day. Serve the Lord with gladness. And it gave words to my prayer. I’m serving you, Lord, because that’s my duty, it’s what I am called to do and I will discharge my pastoral duty, but I’m just trying to survive the grind. Forgive me for not serving you with gladness. Lord, transform my heart, renew my joy, so I will again serve you with gladness.
What is the source of our gladness in ministry? How do we renew our gladness when it has slipped away?
We could probably answer this question in a lot of different ways. Take a break. Go on vacation. Honor the Sabbath. Find a hobby. Do something that is lifegiving. These are all good things.
Psalm 100 takes us back to the source, back to this foundational question: to whom do I belong?
Know that the Lord, he is God! It is he who made us, and we are his; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.
Get this in your brain, the Psalmist says. The Lord is God, not you or me, and we belong to him. He created us and we are his sheep. He’s the shepherd.
To whom do I belong? I belong to the Lord, who is God.
And what kind of God is he, this Lord to whom I belong?
For the Lord is good; his steadfast love endures forever, and his faithfulness to all generations.
The Psalmist says three things here. The Lord is good, loving, and faithful. These are his eternal attributes. He has always been and he always will be good, loving, and faithful. Even in the past year, and still today, this has not ceased to be true, that God is good, loving, and faithful, and that we belong to him.
In Psalm 100, this truth is the foundation for the joy that infuses the entire psalm. It is why we are called to enter his presence with singing and joyful noise, to give him thanks and to bless his name, and to serve the Lord with gladness. We do these things because of what we know to be true, that we belong to the Lord our God, who is eternally good, loving, and faithful.
Knowing to whom we belong brings forth gladness in our pastoral ministry. Not naïve or superficial happiness, as if hardships no longer exist. But this is joy in the midst of hardships, a deep-rooted gladness in our hearts even when our service is a grind, because our focus has shifted from looking at our circumstances and saying, Lord, this is hard, to looking to the Lord our God and saying, Lord, you are good.
Pastors, this is a football. Let’s remember what we already know and recalibrate our hearts around this truth. The Lord is God. He made us, and we are his people, his sheep. And the Lord is good, his steadfast love endures forever, his faithfulness to all generations.
Therefore, we have great joy in him, and our joy is expressed not only in our singing and giving thanks in the assembly of God’s people – see, I didn’t forget the historical context after all! – but also in how we serve the Lord as pastors with gladness.
Adam Copenhaver is the Pastor at Mabton Grace Brethren Church in Mabton, WA. He studied at Grace College (BA in Biblical Studies), Grace Theological Seminary (MDiv in Pastoral Ministries), Westminster Theological Seminary (ThM in Old Testament), and Highland Theological College, University of Aberdeen (PhD in New Testament). Adam is a member of the St. Peter Fellowship of the Center for Pastor Theologians.
