Cultivating Love for Jesus
Because pastors belong to Jesus, they love Jesus the most.
That looks obvious, at least on paper. But we have the problem of losing our first love. Our relationship and passion for Jesus can be diminished by our reaction to our relative success in ministry.
Let me clarify that ministry success and ministry faithfulness are two different things. The externals of our work for the Lord—church growth, baptisms, growing budgets, larger influence and fame from an ever-expanding online audience, and similar metrics—are perhaps indicators of the reach of our ministry (and for some that equals success). But attaining these things does not require ministry faithfulness. Ministry faithfulness requires doing the work of pastoring and shepherding by the means and in the manner we are called to biblically. First Timothy 4:5 gives us a cue for the shaping dynamic of ministry faithfulness. Like everything else “created good,” the church also is “made holy by the word of God and prayer.” Jesus presents “the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing” by the washing of the Word (Eph. 5:26–27). The relationship between apostles and the proto-deacons in Acts 6 is a template for the function of ministry pastors are to prioritize today: prayer and the ministry of the Word. Pastors of the church are to dedicate themselves to these two dynamics above all.
Yet the call of ministry success can take us away from these practices. We can have ministry success without ministry faithfulness. Furthermore, we may believe that because we are experiencing some evidence of ministry success we are doing it the right way, and therefore being successful. It is in this space that our loves can become disordered.
If we want to keep our hearts and loves well-ordered, we must cultivate a life and ministry method that tethers us to what is of highest importance and is in keeping with Jesus as our first love. In the seasons of work when people are coming to Christ, the church is growing, budgets are solid, and speaking and itinerate ministry opportunities beyond our congregation abound, we must keep our hearts so that we aren’t lured away by lesser loves. We have to keep our affections properly ordered.
At the point in my dating relationship when I began to say to my wife Stephanie, “I love you,” she would ask (usually with a flirtatious grin), “Why?” We’d start playing a game where I would tell her reasons why my fascination and affection for her were growing. A little list would start to form of qualities and actions that drew me to her. I’d rehearse the list from time to time and watch her beam with delight at my observations. This practice was a means for me to think about Stephanie’s qualities and characteristics that were attractive to me. It was a way for me to verbalize my affection and heart for her. Playing “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways” built up a language of love between us. It’s a practice to keep my loves rightly ordered with my wife.
So how do we as pastors keep up our affections for Jesus? How do we cultivate a love for Jesus that supersedes all other loves?
Thankfully, the church is not in need of radical innovation or new invention to supply pastors with the means to cultivate and rightly order our loves. If we could turn the tables for just a moment and put ourselves in the seat of a member within our congregations coming to us for spiritual direction about our disordered loves, what spiritual practices would we most likely point them to? Regardless of what church tradition you come from, most of us would point to the two dynamics of ministry faithfulness above: receiving the cleansing Word of God and responding in prayer. James K. A. Smith puts it like this: “If the heart is like a compass . . . then we need to (regularly) calibrate our hearts, tuning them to be directed to the Creator, our magnetic north. It is crucial for us to recognize that our ultimate loves, longings, desires and cravings are learned. And because love is a habit, our hearts are calibrated through imitating exemplars and being immersed in practices that, over time, index our hearts to a certain end” (You Are What You Love, 20–21).
Our churches and traditions are rich in the resources to help even us pastors cultivate deeper and fuller love for Jesus amid the abundance of competing loves. While it may sound boring or even cliché to suggest that daily reflection in the Word of God and prayer are the means of cultivating love, especially when those practices can become mechanical and feel like going through the motions, few married couples would say that the constant presence and pursuit of their spouse toward them would be unwelcome. If anything, the regular giving of words of affirmation and affection, as well as showing up with real presence, would be the very practices to keep love aflame in a marriage.
I’ve become increasingly helped by higher liturgical traditions of keeping the Daily Office of Morning and Evening Prayer, specifically by the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. Not being an Anglican myself, I often looked with suspicion on the traditions that used (or even needed) prayer books to feed words into the soul for speaking to God. I had come to believe that re-praying the same things on a daily basis was the very kind of “empty phrases” Jesus warned against heaping up in Matthew 6:7. Yet year after year I would find myself desperately frustrated that I didn’t possess the discipline to keep up with a read-the-Bible-in-one-year plan, find ways to impress the prayers of the Psalms into my heart, and give myself to praying for the right things at the right times every day. I had become good at ministry success externally, and even busy about doing the right work, but I was deficient in the interior resources of cultivating love for Jesus. I knew the accepted low-church formula of praying ACTS (Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, Supplication) was a helpful pattern, but I needed more than just a structure. I needed words to fit in that structure, and I was often frustrated and exhausted at trying to come up with my own.
When my brother-in-law shared with me a few years ago that his family had started attending an Anglican congregation in their area, it provoked a curiosity in me. At family holiday gatherings when we would stay over a few nights I noticed a copy of the Book of Common Prayer in the living room. I was intrigued but nothing more. Then the pandemic hit. I was out of sync, out of rhythm, out of words. Someone suggested I pick up the Daily Office of Morning and Evening Prayer.
The Book of Common Prayer became an invitation to ordering my affections through the Word and prayer every day. I found it didn’t impose a new law of religious performance on me to tell me whether I was being successful; it invited me into the love of God through reciting and receiving the very Word of God and then responding back again with his Word in prayer. I was given daily language with which to confess my sins and disordered heart. I was reminded of the atoning work of Christ for my justification, sanctification, and ultimate glorification. The prayer book invited me into a rhythm of worship walking through sequences of remembering “sin, grace, and faith,” which J. I. Packer calls “evangelical worship”(The Gospel in the Prayer Book).
My posture has changed from trying to succeed in checking off the boxes of reading the Bible daily to receiving the Word of Christ with faith each and every day. Instead of praying to pivot God into blessing my ambitions and plans, I now respond with love to him because he first loved me (1 John 4:19). The rhythm of cultivating love through receiving the Word and responding in prayer centers me on the gospel of God’s love and allows me to live out of that love in my life.
I share this to invite you to the dynamics of spiritual renewal in being made holy by the Word and prayer. Whatever your tradition might be, the invitation the Lord makes to “stand by the roads, and look, and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way is; and walk in it, and find rest for your souls” is available (Jer. 6:16). Whether through the practices of Morning and Evening Prayer, lectio divina, silence and solitude with the Word of God, or a daily “quiet time” of reading and praying through a read-the-Bible-in-one-year plan, we need the renewing and revitalizing washing of the Word to cultivate love for Christ within our hearts.
Excerpt published with permission from Pastor, Jesus Is Enough: Hope for the Weary, the Burned Out, and the Broken by Jeremy Writebol (Lexham Press, 2023).
Jeremy Writebol is the Executive Director of Gospel-Centered Discipleship and the Lead Campus Pastor at Woodside Bible Church in Plymouth, Michigan. He is the author of Pastor, Jesus Is Enough: Hope for the Weary, the Burned Out, and the Broken and GCD Books publication everPresent: How the Gospel Relocates Us in the Present as well as contributing to other books. You can find him on Twitter at @jwritebol.
