Be More Stubborn
What more can we do? We’ve visited. Reached out. We’ve received wise counsel and acted on it. We sent a strongly worded letter, then visited again.
And what resulted? Nothing, to our eyes. No response. The person continues unrepentant in their sin, stays on their self-destructive trajectory.
At the elders’ meeting, someone asks, “What more can we do for them when they won’t do anything themselves?” The question hangs in the air without an easy answer. If there will be no openness to our admonition, no conversation about how we can help them walk with God—if there will be no change—what can we do?
We are frustrated, disappointed, and perplexed.
Here is the pastor’s need to be stubborn—or, to put it more positively, persistent. Many books on pastoral care speak about being kind and gentle with God’s people. A pastor needs to be tender, but he also needs to be tough and resilient.
It is the example that God sets in Ezekiel 34: “I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak” (v. 16). Activities like seeking and recovering the strayed and the lost are demanding labors. This will not be easy pastoral work but necessary work. It takes tenderness, yes, but also toughness to persevere.
Jesus describes the same pastoral determination: “If a man has a hundred sheep, and one of them has gone astray, does he not leave the ninety-nine on the mountains and go in search of the one that went astray?” (Matt. 18:12).
To find a straying sheep in the open country will take time and resilience. The shepherd will need to be persistent: to climb yet one more hill so that he can scan the valley below; to enter yet one more ravine so that he can listen for woebegone bleating.
He will stubbornly press on because he loves his sheep.
God wants none of his sheep to be lost in the wilderness. He wants no sinner to perish but all to come to a knowledge of the truth (2 Peter 3:9).
Since this is what God wants, his pastors should want the same. You should persist in seeking the lost and trying to help the broken. Without giving up, you should pray that a better day will come for those who are wandering and for those under discipline. You want to rejoice with God and his angels, celebrating when a sheep who was lost has been found (Luke 15:7).
Every pastor will need this sanctified stubbornness. Some church members can be so obstinate, so resistant to good counsel, so incommunicative, that a pastor comes close to giving up and walking away.
During my ministry, the people I found most frustrating were those who stymied all our attempts to help. They did not return (repeated) phone calls or answer (repeated) text messages. Time and again, they didn’t show up for planned visits with the elders or with me. They barely flinched when put under church discipline. They were stubbornly silent and persistently resistant.
But if there is always a reason behind a person’s stubbornness—a love of their sin, a fear of changing, a suspicion of church authority—we have a reason to be stubborner still. We have the gospel, prayer, the mighty Spirit, and God’s sure promises of the forgiveness of sins and life everlasting. Simply put, we have every reason to keep trying.
We have every reason to reach out again with God’s Word of judgment and salvation.
Sometimes we’ll have to press people hard for a visit when they don’t want one, but we trust and pray that it’ll be for their good. For we come with the authority and the love of Jesus Christ himself, the chief Shepherd of the sheep, who always seeks his own.
Some years ago, a young woman in my congregation had stopped coming to the worship services and was in an adulterous relationship. The elders had been reaching out to her often but with no success. She was put under church discipline and eventually left the congregation. So there was no happy ending (as far as we could see).
But after she left, I had the opportunity once to speak with her. She said a surprising thing, that although she always put up high walls against the elders, and as irritating as she found us, she always knew that the elders cared for her. She knew that we would keep calling. She knew that we would keep showing up at her door. She knew that we hadn’t given up on her, and she found that reassuring. Maybe Christ will use that experience of the church’s stubborn, loving care to draw her back one day into his sheepfold.
Be more stubborn than they are.
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