Internalize For Effective Ministry

“Moreover he said unto me, Son of man, all my words that I shall speak unto thee receive in thine heart, and hear with thine ears.” (Eze 3:10 AV)

This, in particular, would have been hard to do.  Ezekiel is a prophet who was a contemporary of Jeremiah.  His ministry spanned the occupation of Jerusalem and the carry away into captivity.  Which means the majority of his visions would encompass the failures of Judah and their pending judgment.  To internalize nothing but doom and gloom messages would have been a difficult thing to do.  When dealing with bad news day in and day out, it is a temptation to cauterize one’s emotional state against the feelings that would have come by way of the prophecies.  He would have been tempted to harden himself against what he saw so that he didn’t have to live in the reality of tragedy day in and day out.  Yet, the LORD tells Ezekiel to internalize the word of God.  Let it sink in.  Let it bother you.  We see him arriving at his congregation and for the first seven days, does nothing but sit with them.  The word of God tells us he was astonished.  Knowing what he knew and also knowing they would never listen, the full reality of his ministry hit him.  To grow those callouses means to discharge one’s duty in a passionless manner.  In doing so, the urgency is lost.  One must internalize the message or there is no hope of it ever accomplishing anything.

As I have written before, I served in the capacity of a hospital Chaplin.  We had many duties.  We were required to make rounds at least once a night and then be on call overnight.  Most of the time, the calls or visits were uneventful.  However, once in a while we were asked to accompany a doctor or social worker as they delivered bad news.  It always impressed me how a doctor whose job is to deal with life or death, can seem somewhat detached from his patient as he or she shares the bad news.  They would tell the Chaplin he should not get too emotionally involved with the patients.  If he did, he would drive himself into deep despair.  There is some wisdom in that.  This is the reason Chaplin worked in shifts.  We would often deal with the same hospice situations, but since we shared the load, not all of the emotional consequences lay on one single Chaplin.  However, we could not effectively do our job if we did not get emotionally involved.  The diagnosis of cancer is a hard one to deliver.  If we deliver it with a heart that is hardened against another’s pain, we cannot help them through it.  We have to feel what they feel.  We have to understand, at least emotionally, what they might be going through.

Paul put it this way.  “Rejoice with them that do rejoice, and weep with them that weep.” (Ro 12:15 AV)  The only way we can do that is to let the truth of what they need to anchor itself deep in our own hearts.  Truth is stoic.  The nature of it, that is.  Truth is simply absolute fact.  There is no emotion associated with the existence of truth.  Applying truth, on the other hand, involves a great deal of emotion.  It is one thing to say all those who reject Christ are hell-bound.  Quite another when those in the ‘all’ include people that you love.  Living in Chicago for nine years, the sheer number of people was overwhelming.  It was too easy to allow the reality of their eternal soul to get to me.  It was easy to turn off the emotions so the horribleness of the situation didn’t come.  But like Jeremiah, it didn’t last long.  It has to bother us.  It has to be internalized.  To do otherwise would to give the impression what we say is not all that important when it is of the utmost importance.