One of the greatest mistakes that people make in serving God is short-changing their preparation so that they can rush and go to do ministry work. They often think that the time of waiting and learning and growing is not as well spent as the time actually doing ministry work.
But of course, Jesus’ life, the life of the disciples, and medical sciences today prove otherwise. A well-prepared person can do in two years what a person who is not so well prepared can do in ten years. A person who is well prepared not only avoids harming others but most importantly improves their lives.
A “foolish” young minister came in wanting to do a more comprehensive program to prepare himself to serve. After tasting a small portion of the training that was prepared for people like him, he wrote his teachers saying he felt well prepared to go out and serve. This is the same young man who only a little while earlier had confessed he knew nothing about how to serve. After taking 20% of the training, he changed his mind. He said what he had learned had taught him so much he felt ready to serve. And off he went to serve the poor. And because there is no licensure requirement and no governing body to ask him to show proof of adequate training, he goes off to do with the poor whatever he wants–all with a good heart.
I see that in medicine all the time. A patient is sick and comes in and I write them antibiotics that are meant to be taken for ten days. They take the antibiotics for two days and feel better. They abandon the remaining eight days and go out to work excited to be feeling strong again. I’m not sure if these patients ever stop to think whether the well-drained doctor who prescribed ten days of antibiotics instead of two knew something they might not have known. Doctors know that patients will feel better in 2-3 days. If they didn’t, it would mean the antibiotic was not going to work at all. But the antibiotics are prescribed for ten days to kill every pathogenic bacteria so that none is left to develop antibiotic resistance which will render the patient worse off in the future.
I think young people preparing for ministry often do that. They short-change their training because they feel good about the little they have learned and rush to go and serve, not knowing that they are in the long run going to hurt themselves. Knowledge puffs up and makes proud!
I wouldn’t love a doctor who short-changed their training to come care for me. I also wouldn’t prefer a minister who short-changed their training.
If you are like this “foolish” young minister, I do not condemn you. I also do not want to impose on you but to “warn” you for your benefit. This also doesn’t mean that if you do what you are doing, God will never use you. That’s not what I mean at all. All of life is about training. If we short-change our training, God works like a GPS. He will redirect us. He will give us another path to reach the end destination. He will never change the destination, which is full maturity. But the redirect is often going to take you longer to get to the destination than the initial path. And the redirect is often more painful than the original path.
