When Ministry Becomes a Measure of Your Worth : Stasi Eldredge

Full-Text Transcript

Jason Daye
Hello, friends, and welcome to another insightful episode of FrontStage BackStage. I am your host, Jason Daye. Each and every week, I have the privilege of sitting down with a trusted ministry leader, and together we tackle a topic to help you and pastors, and ministry leaders just like you really thrive in both life and leadership. We’re blessed to be a part of the PastorServe Ministry, and this week I am really excited to have the opportunity to be welcoming Stasi Eldridge to the show. Now, Stasi’s a New York Times best-selling author, and her books have sold nearly 3 million copies worldwide. Not only is Stasi an incredible author, but she’s also a teacher and a conference speaker. She’s the co-founder of Wild at Heart. Many of you have heard of Wild at Heart, along with her husband, John Eldridge. Now, John’s been on the show many times, and he is an audience favorite. Stasi has done some amazing, amazing things, and her most recent book is entitled The Ladder of Love. As we welcome Stasi to the show, we’re excited to have her joining us. Stasi, welcome to FrontStage BackStage. So good to have you on the show.

Stasi Eldridge
Jason, I’m so happy to be here, and I’m so honored to be speaking with pastors, ministers, and all the people that you serve. So, thank you. Thank you for having me.

Jason Daye
Yes, so good to have you with us. Now, Stasi, those of us who are in ministry, we know that we can become so focused on serving God that, without even realizing it, we can sometimes begin measuring our relationship with God by how useful we are to Him. We can kind of fall into that trap. And you actually share in your most recent book, The Ladder of Love, that you experienced something similar in your own life.

Stasi Eldridge
I completely did. Yes.

Jason Daye
Yes. What was happening, Stasi, in your relationship with God, and how did you begin to recognize that that’s what you were kind of beginning to do when it came to your relationship with Him?

Stasi Eldridge
Well, I was passionate about God, and I loved Him, and through that, I wanted to serve Him, and so I became busy about that. I did. I was volunteering at a pregnancy center. I was teaching Bible study, volunteering at the children’s ministry, and somewhere along the line, I started getting tired. I started getting weary of it. And really, I had slipped into duty and obligation, and it wasn’t coming out of response, out of being loved, and I want to love him back. It came out of I realized thinking that if I served him, the more I served him, the more pleased he was going to be with me. So I thought I actually needed to earn approval rather than resting in the fact that I already had it. I kind of became a Martha, you know, the Martha and Mary famous story, and I love Martha. I actually do. I love Mary, but I love Martha. Martha is a wholehearted follower of Christ. She’s an incredible believer, but she was symbolizing me in that I was trading service for God instead of relationship with Him. And service for Him was making me burn out, whereas just relationship with Him – that’s what’s going to see me through the long haul.

Jason Daye
Yeah, absolutely. And so, how did you begin to recognize? I mean, what was going on when you began to recognize that you were making that exchange?

Stasi Eldridge
You know what? It was so subtle, Jason. I think that I had made the exchange and was actually living out of that for some years before I recognized it, and the way I recognized it was the fruit. You shall know them by their fruit, right? I was tired, and I started to become dissatisfied with my faith, with Christianity. It was, I think, a holy dissatisfaction because it spurred me on to know God in a different way. But I was getting tired, and losing motivation, and the desire for it was fading. And I just started to think that what was wanted from me was my service, and that’s what made me good. That’s what made me a valuable Christian was in how much I was doing for God, and it was not a satisfying life.

Jason Daye
Yeah. You know, you mentioned it’s a subtle trap, and I think all of us who are serving in ministry can fall into this subtle trap, right? We get caught up in it because we desire to do for Christ, we desire to do for others. That’s why we’re in ministry, right? Because we want to serve. So we can slip into that trap of the doing rather than the being when it comes to our service to the kingdom. Now, Stasi, in the Ladder of Love, you do describe these different levels. There are different ways that Scripture portrays our relationship with God. You begin with clay in the potter’s hands, and you move through these different ways that we see in Scripture. What’s interesting to me, as you process through these and we can touch on them, is this idea of servant is only the third rung. When you talk about this ladder, as you set it up, it’s the third rung. And when I first saw that, and I was reading through it, I was like, wow, I would think that servant was is higher up there, you know what I mean? Because you think like serving is kind of up there, especially when you’re thinking about ministry, the ministry perspective. For those of us in ministry who spend so much of our lives serving God, what might we be missing if that’s where our understanding of our relationship with God tends to almost kind of climax or stop, right?

Stasi Eldridge
It’s exactly what we’ve been talking about already. Yeah, and what’s cool about the ladder and the ladder of love is that as you progress in knowing God in the multifaceted ways He has revealed Himself, you don’t lose any of the rungs, right? We are always clay. We are always sheep. And we are always called to serve, which I kind of rename as devoted ones, because there’s something about serving, like you’re actually, you’re worshiping him, you’re loving him in response, and that we don’t lose. But also, the very highest rung is partnership with Christ, and that’s tying it all back together. But for many people, we can get stuck on what we talked about, thinking that I need to do for God in order to be acceptable for God, or that what’s really wanted from Him is my activity, a duty, obligation, and if you get stuck there, you will burn out. You’ll get weary, or at the very least, you will miss out on the profound love that God has for you, and your heart, and your individuality, and the unique person that you are. That is far from what you do for him. It’s far from the numbers that you reach. It’s far from anything measurable, which is the temptation. Because in the world, or to prove ourselves effective, we need to say how many books have you sold? Or how many people are attending? How many people, you know, fill in the blank? Whereas, is that really what God does? Is that His priority? No, He told us His priority is to love Him, and that is what will fuel us: is knowing His love and loving Him in return. And doing that will also propel you out of just staying as a, you know, thinking of yourself as lowly, not able to come into the house. A servant has to come in the back door and wipe their feet before they come in. There’s a distance. Whereas God says, Come into my throne room boldly. So, that’s why there is a progression.

Jason Daye
Hey, friends! Just a quick reminder that we provide a free toolkit that complements today’s conversation. You can find this for this episode and every episode at PastorServe.org/network. In the toolkit, you’ll find a number of resources, including our Ministry Leaders Growth Guide. This growth guide includes insights pulled from today’s conversation, as well as reflection questions, so you and the ministry team at your local church can dig more deeply into this topic and see how it relates to your specific ministry context. Again, you can find it at PastorServe.org/network.

Jason Daye
Yeah, I love that. I love that, and that invitation to come into that deeper relationship, as you say, is so very important because it moves you from just that you’re serving to where that relationship deepens. So, can you talk just a little bit about the depth of that relationship and that invitation that God’s pulling us more deeply into?

Stasi Eldridge
Yes, throughout Scripture, Genesis to Revelation, God is saying, Come closer. Know me. Draw near to God, and He will draw near to you. He wants you to. He wants to bathe you, immerse you in this boundless love. So, there are ways that I outline in the book, and that people are living and they know this. So it goes servant to child. A child that barges in the front door, dirty feet, doesn’t care. Can jump on the lap. I love Timothy Keller’s quote: The only person who can wake a king at three in the morning for a glass of water is a child. We have that kind of access. We are invited. We can go, but oftentimes, our own story can prevent us from not only being able to draw closer to who God really is, but to even want to, and that’s why we need the parts about Jesus still coming and healing our broken hearts, and revealing to us where our perspective of God has been warped or distorted from the wounds we’ve received. And He can come, tend to those, reframe it, and let us learn God rightly. So we need that increasingly because, more than we know, we have learned him wrong. Whether that’s through our parents, friendships, siblings or our story. Our story of love, our story of how we have been loved or failed, has shaped our perspective of God more than we might realize. And that’s the invitation for Him to come, walk with you into that, bring some healing there and clarity, and then have you come closer.

Jason Daye
Yeah, absolutely. And, Stasi, I’m glad you touch on the stories because you spend a lot of time on this. The stories that we tell ourselves and how it shapes the love that we see in God, and this is important. I think it’s really especially important for us, I think, in ministry because we tend, in ministry, I think, to convince ourselves maybe that we understand God at a pretty deep level because we’ve studied, we’re teaching others, and we’re discipling people. So, yeah, we should understand God. But as you point out, our stories shape our understanding of God, and we need to come to terms, or come to an understanding that it is shaped, and therefore we need to step back and spend some time with that. You encourage us to spend some time with that so that we can understand. So, Stasi, help us, as pastors and ministry leaders who tend to spend a lot of time understanding God, help us understand the importance of why those stories are so important, not just theologically how we understand God, but personally, the stories and the things that maybe we grew up with. Why is that so important? And why do we need to pay attention to that part?

Stasi Eldridge
It’s really vital. It’s really vital to go by God’s invitation. I’m not encouraging somebody to just go, Oh, I’m going to look at every aspect of my life right now. Where did I learn him wrong? But where is He inviting you? And He does it through different ways. For me, one of the first ways was that I was noticing how all my friends were praying to Father. Father, Abba, Papa, and I’m going, why are they doing that? I prayed to Jesus. I came into Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, and after a while, I realized I don’t know him like that. I don’t know God as my Father, and I wanted to. They’ve got something I don’t have. So I think, again, a holy dissatisfaction, a hunger. Like, how else do you reveal yourself? Because I don’t know you like that. And then to ask Him, I want to know you. So, what do we need to do in order for that to happen? And we need to look at where we’ve learned him wrong. I needed to actually in the relationship of father and child, and in the relationship as sibling, and how I learned sibling wrong from my own siblings. I love them; they love me, but there was harm there. Friendship, the pain that comes in friendship, most people have known betrayal. Jesus certainly did. But he didn’t let it keep him from loving. So, it’s really important to go, God wants more. We will never come to the end of knowing all about God. His invitation is endless to come closer. We’ll never hit a place in eternity where he goes, Well, that’s it. That’s all there is to know about me. But he does want to be known. We bear his image. We want to be known. He has a heart. We have a heart. So, it’s wild that our God wants us to know Him, not just about Him, and He wants us to know Him rightly. And when we do that, we just fall more in love with Him. And there are ways to do that. There are ways, and I know that everybody listening is familiar with spiritual disciplines and spiritual rhythms and practices, and they’re great gifts to us – little handrails to help us dive in. But in our serving, in our loving, in our ministering, we have to guard our own walk with Christ to be the priority, so that we have something to offer from. And it’s really easy with all the need that continues to come – the crises, the SOS calls – to just skim off the surface. Whereas, we need to go deep with Him as our priority.

Jason Daye
Yeah, absolutely. Digging into our own spiritual life with God, apart from the ministry, just ourselves and how we’re living with God. One of the things that you mentioned earlier, Stasi, I want to kind of revisit. You talked a little bit about measuring and that sort of thing. We do live in a society that is high, as you mentioned, on kind of what we produce, right? What we do, how we serve, the numbers, all of those types of things, and I think pastors and ministry leaders especially feel that pressure in the culture in which we live, especially here, I think in the U.S. Western cultures tend to put a high emphasis on production, right? What we’re doing, what we’re producing. As we serve in ministry, that can be a challenge, because oftentimes, we tie our worth to what we’re producing for God, and that can almost get in the way of how we’re just living and receiving love from God.  How can we in ministry, if we’re wrestling with this tension of what we’re producing for God or what we’re trying to, we feel like we have to produce something for God, that gets in the way of just receiving God’s love? How can we begin to unravel that tension in our lives?

Stasi Eldridge
That’s good. I think the first thing is to marry those two, not separate them.  We don’t want to do things for God. We want to do things with God, and it is meant to be a partnership. When we think about it, John talks about how the goal is intimacy, the really knowing, and how when you push your hands together as tight as you can, that’s intimacy. They can’t get any closer. But then when you intertwine your fingers and you don’t know where one ends and one begins, that’s union, and that’s the goal of Christianity. Just as Jesus prayed that we might be one. So, it’s the union, it’s the partnership, that there needs to be, not a differentiation from what we are doing to what we are believing and receiving. It all has to be one to live a wholehearted, integrus life, bring him into everything. Everything. And I know that we are, you know, praying over things, we’re wanting to follow Him, but we’re always needing to cultivate our intimacy with Jesus, with Father, with Holy Spirit. We’re always needing to grow in practicing the conversational intimacy, the listening prayer, the being aligned with what his priorities are, and that can be very different from our board of directors, or what the world is saying, and he’s the one we have to follow. So living in union with him, making that the priority, only doing what he says to do, and doing it with him – that’s going to help.

Jason Daye
At PastorServe, we love walking alongside pastors and ministry leaders just like you. If you want to learn more about how you can qualify for a complimentary coaching session with one of our trusted ministry coaches, please visit PastorServe.org/freesession. You don’t want to miss out on this opportunity. That’s PastorServe.org/freesession.

Jason Daye
Yeah, absolutely. I love that sense of unity. Because oftentimes, I think what we tend to do is we tend to get caught up in this Oh yeah, I’m just doing, doing, doing. I’m producing, producing, producing. And then we’re kind of like, oh, we got to get away from that because I just got to get into my prayer closet, and it’s almost like pulling them apart. But I love what you’re saying. That you actually need to pull them together in such a way that you see them working together. So, what would you say to the pastor or the ministry leader who says, I know how to serve God, but I’m not so sure at this stage of my ministry because I’ve been going through this? I’m going through this. I am feeling exhausted. I know how to serve God, but I’m not sure I know how to let God love me.

Stasi Eldridge
Yes, I just want to say first, mercy. Mercy to you and your beautiful heart that’s been captured by Christ, and now wants to just serve Him. You’ve given Him your life. That is so beautiful, and as you’ve already learned, that’s it’s not enough. It won’t sustain you. So, what I would encourage is to begin some practices to incorporate into your times with God. Those times that you set apart. That’s just you and Him. That are not times of prayer. They’re not times of even asking him for anything, but there are times when you consciously, with effort, turn your gaze inward to your heart where Christ dwells. Remember, He’s taking up residence within. So, to encounter Him, we go within. And to get quiet, turn off your phone. Maybe you play some soft music. I do. I kind of like that. But just to settle in and breathe, notice yourself, slow down, and then invite the Holy Spirit to help you become aware and attuned to the presence of God within. And I would start small. Start with five minutes. It increases. We practice this over time, and you will, because he wants to meet with you. This is the promise: draw near to God, and He will draw near to you. And most people, what the first sense perhaps would be a sense of peace, and then just breathing in his peace, because you’re getting in alignment with the presence of God, and then as you know, when you do that, everything else takes its right perspective, and it shrinks. But it is in His presence that we actually come to know Him and know who we are. So in that place, whatever you’re feeling, whether it’s tired, frustrated, or hopeful, just love him, and in the depth of your soul, begin to love him. Just tell him, I love you, I love you, God. And maybe that’s it. Just stay there. Or maybe you say, Is there anything that you’d like to say to me? And be quiet, and wait, and know that if it’s condemning or accusatory, that that’s not the voice of God, because you know He never speaks to you that way. But just listen, and then say, Let’s do this again. That’s a good beginning. There are Ignatius prayer practices that are awesome. We have a whole history of Christian fathers and mothers that precede us that have given us handrails to help us to do this, and that’s what I want to do in the book, too. At the end of each chapter, is increasing of handrails of how do you do that? How do you sink in? How do you find him? How do you encounter him? And then let’s do it.

Jason Daye
Yeah, that’s super helpful. Stasi, maybe for what you’ve experienced in your own life or experienced with others that you’ve journeyed with, what changes about the way we serve God when we really become secure in the reality that we don’t have to be useful to be loved. What changes?

Stasi Eldridge
Oh, everything changes when you don’t have to prove it. The heaviness lifts, and joy increases because you are, again, you’re in partnership. You’re there with your best friend, with your God, with your champion, who is living your life with you. And then you also know, you can know that I’m about my father’s business. I’m not just chasing my good ideas. I’m in partnership. I’m in union with Him, and so you can go, Yay, and then you do it. And then the other thing that shifts is the joy that comes is that we can stop measuring our success by other people’s reactions to us, and that’s a challenge. But even when you’re speaking or you’re teaching, it’s so easy to look at their faces and see their reactions. Or did anybody say anything? Did you get any comments? What was it? And to let that go. And go, no, I’m doing this with God because I love Him, and we’re doing this together. And the fruit is His. It’s all His. So it really takes the pressure off to perform in some magnificent way.

Jason Daye
Yeah, I love that. I love that. This is so helpful. Stasi, you have the eyes and ears of men and women who are serving on the front lines of ministry, and as we’ve been talking about this love and kind of shifting from the sense of feeling like we are serving and the weightiness of that, and the sense that we often put on our own shoulders to perform, and to play into this, and shifting toward receiving the love that God has for us. What words of encouragement as we kind of wind down this conversation? What words of encouragement do you have for the men and women who are serving on the front lines of ministry?

Stasi Eldridge
You know, I want to say thank you first. It matters. Your life matters, and the impact that you are making, just like you can’t measure how things are going, you can’t measure the impact you’re making. How do you measure one life or one heart? You don’t know, and you probably won’t know until we reach the other side, the fruit of all of it. So, just first, thank you. And I also want to encourage you that when you’re weary, rest. Don’t quit. Rest. And then practice what it is you’re teaching others. Because there are times, you know, Jason, where we are teaching what we’re not living, or we’re having doubts, but we know it’s true. So we’re teaching like it’s true, and that is so powerful. That deep stuff is happening in our hearts. But what I want to say is that your heart is what matters most to God. He’s actually not panting after your service. He doesn’t need what you accomplish for him. But the one thing that you can offer him that he cannot claim unless you give it to him yourself is your love, is your heart, and that’s what he wants. He’s made it clear. What’s the most important commandment? Jesus says, Love God. He says, Love me. Love me. And how do you do that? You do that by learning that you’re loved. We do that in response. So I would just say, pray, ask God, would you please reveal your love for me more deeply? I need to know who I am to you personally, not that I’m loved because you’re love, and you love everybody, and that’s kind of your job, but how you love me, and bring me a revelation, because that’s what I need. So I would pray that. I’d pray for a revelation of His personal love to every person listening, and the unique way that He does, the unique way that He has fashioned you, the things that you love, your sense of humor. Let Him come there and speak to you there, because He would like to.

Jason Daye
Yeah, it’s beautiful. Beautiful, Stasi. Absolutely love it. Very, very encouraging. And for those of you who are watching or listening, Stacy’s latest book is entitled The Ladder of Love, and this is just a taste of what she shares in that book, encouraging us to really move into the depths of the love that Christ invites us into. And for those of us who are serving in ministry, as we said, oftentimes we get stuck on one of these rungs and don’t really experience the depth of what God has for us, even in ministry. And so we encourage you to check that book out. In fact, for those of you watching or listening, we have a toolkit available for this episode. You can find the toolkit for this episode and every episode at PastorServe.org/network, and in there you’ll find a ton of resources, including links to Stasi’s book, The Ladder of Love. So you can get that there. We also have a Ministry Leaders Growth Guide, which has insights pulled out of this conversation that Stasi and I just had, and questions for you and your ministry team to go through to dig more deeply into this conversation. You can find that PastorServe.org/network. So please make sure to check that out. Stasi, certainly appreciate you making time to hang out with us here on FrontStage BackStage, and for your heart for pastors and ministry leaders who are serving. It’s so evident your love for them. So, thank you for coming and being with us on the show.

Stasi Eldridge
Truly an honor. Thank you.

Jason Daye
Thank you. God bless you, Stasi.

Jason Daye
Here at PastorServe, we hope you’re truly finding value through these episodes of FrontStage BackStage. If so, please consider leaving a review for us on your favorite podcast platform. These reviews help other ministry leaders and pastors just like you find the show, so they can benefit as well. Also, consider sharing this episode with a colleague or other ministry friend, and don’t forget our free toolkit, which is available at PastorServe.org/network. This is Jason Daye, encouraging you to love well, live well, and lead well.