Jesus ministered to mankind without letting His ministry interfere with His relationship with His Heavenly Father. He very often took some time to commune with His Father in prayers and scriptural meditations. Jesus meditated on the Old Testament, which was the only part of the Bible that existed in His days. He acquainted Himself with every aspect of it and filled His mind with its inspired words to keep Himself on track with His Father’s will. That was how He could go about doing so much good without losing sight of His mission and His total dependence on His Father to successfully accomplish it.
Jesus’ ministry was a very demanding task for one man to carry out without the danger of losing sight of the heavenly. However, Jesus made sure to totally depend on His Father for the power to do the things He did through the help of the Holy Spirit. All of this, spite of the fact that He had the abilities of His Father and could have done whatever He wanted with His abilities. He was a perfect example of humility and total submission to God because He, who was as divine as His Father, willingly laid aside His divinity and took upon Himself the humanity that it was His mission to minister to and redeem.
As Jesus gave His disciples the necessary missionary training that would equip them to carry the Gospel to the uttermost parts of the earth, he did everything in His powers to teach them to follow His example of totally depending on God the Father to supply all their needs naturally and supernaturally and to submit to His will in their ministry. The most difficult part of being a minister of the Gospel is being disciplined enough to always realize that ministering to men and leading them to God isn’t a feat to be accomplished by human abilities. It’s very easy to lose sight of the place of God’s will and wisdom and the workings of the Holy Spirit in the conversion of souls.
That’s why missionaries easily feel defeated when they don’t realize their projected goals of soul winning and church planting. Some missionaries have expressed disappointment in their perceived poor missionary performances to the extent of quitting the ministry completely. Some have lost confidence in God and severed their relationships with Him because of such experiences. A story was told of a missionary who left his civilized world behind and toiled so hard to win souls and establish a church for the Lord in a savage community.
On the course of his ministry, his wife took ill and died. He toiled on in the hope of accomplishing some good to show for his precious wife’s death. However, he was able to win only one soul for the Lord, after all his sacrifices and laborious efforts. He concluded he was a failure as a minister and didn’t have God’s approval, and so he quitted the ministry. In fact, he became angry with God for obvious reasons, or so it seemed.
Several years later, shortly before the disappointed missionary died, news got to him that the one soul he could baptize, in his last missionary endeavor, had become a spirit filled preacher of the Gospel who had won many souls and planted many churches in the savage community where he was converted. With a tear-stained face, the disappointed missionary realized his gross mistake a little too late for continued service in the Lord’s vineyard.
That missionary felt like a failure because he had lost sight of his dependence on God to successfully carry out his work as a minister of the Gospel. Jesus guarded against this mistake throughout His ministry on earth, which was why His mission was successfully accomplished while His relationship with His Father stayed intact. All ministers of the Gospel must always endeavor to remember that they’re nothing but messengers whose accomplishments depend solely on the One who sent them into the spiritual field of labor. That way, their mission will be accomplished successfully and their relationship with God will be preserved.
