The carol service was going beautifully. The church was full to the walls, with extra plastic chairs lined up outside under the canopy, and the generator was holding steady for once. Onome had been music director for nine years, and this was the service he planned for from September. Four choirs. A brass section borrowed from a secondary school. Candles for the final carol.
They reached the last verse of “O Come, All Ye Faithful,” and Onome lifted his hands for the refrain. O come, let us adore Him. The choir swelled. The congregation stood. And somewhere between the second and third repetition, a thought arrived in his mind so clearly that he nearly lost the beat. When did you last adore Him when nobody was watching?
He could not answer. He tried to remember the last time he had prayed for more than a few minutes outside a rehearsal, or opened his Bible for any reason other than finding a Scripture reading for the order of service. He could not remember that either. His weeks had a shape he knew by heart: rehearsal on Tuesday, rehearsal on Thursday, the Friday vigil, two services on Sunday, the youth band on Sunday evening, and a WhatsApp group that never slept. Every one of those things was good. Every one of them was for God. And somewhere in the middle of them, he had stopped meeting God.
After the service he sat in his car in the church compound with the engine running for the air conditioning and the candles still flickering through the windows. “I had spent the evening leading two thousand people to a place I had not visited myself in months,” he told me. “I felt like a tour guide who had never been inside the building.”
I have met many Onomes. Ushers, choristers, Sunday school teachers, pastors, administrators, intercessors who no longer pray except in meetings. Most of them love Jesus sincerely. Almost none of them meant for this to happen. That is why it is worth looking at carefully.
How service can crowd out the Lord
Few believers abandon their walk with God for something obviously sinful while they are busy in church. The drift is quieter than that. The work of ministry simply expands until it fills the space once given to fellowship with God, and because the work is spiritual, the change is hard to see. You are still talking about Him all the time. You are preparing lessons about prayer, rehearsing songs about His presence and organising programmes in His name. It feels like nearness. It may be the opposite.
There is a line in the Song of Solomon that has become a proverb for this condition:
Look not upon me, because I am black, because the sun hath looked upon me: my mother’s children were angry with me; they made me the keeper of the vineyards; but mine own vineyard have I not kept.
In the poem itself, the young woman is explaining why her skin is darkened by the sun. Her brothers, angry with her, had sent her out to work in their vineyards, and in tending theirs she had neglected her own. We should not force the Song into a sermon outline. But many readers through the centuries have heard in her words a description of something that happens in ministry. “They made me the keeper of the vineyards; but mine own vineyard have I not kept.” She worked hard. She worked in the heat. And her own garden ran wild.
Many servants of God could write that sentence about their spiritual lives. They have watered other people’s faith faithfully while their own has grown thin. They know the condition of every department and very little about the condition of their own soul.
It helps to be honest about why this happens, because the reasons are not always noble. Service is visible. People thank you for it, and leaders rely on you because of it. It can be counted: the number of rehearsals, the attendance figures, the programmes delivered. Time alone with God produces nothing anybody can see. Some of us also find that busyness spares us from silence, and silence is where the things we have not dealt with tend to surface: a grief we have not wept over, a resentment toward a leader, a disappointment with God Himself. It is easier to stay in the kitchen.
None of that makes a person a hypocrite. It makes him human. But it does mean that the drift will not correct itself. A believer who is serving heavily will need to protect his walk with God deliberately, because nothing in the church calendar will protect it for him.
What Jesus protected in Martha’s house
Luke tells us that, on one of His journeys, Jesus entered a village “and a certain woman named Martha received him into her house” (Luke 10:38). We often read this story as though Martha were the villain, and that is unfair to her. She opened her home. Hospitality to a travelling teacher and His disciples meant a great deal of work, and she took it on. Her service was a form of love.
But Luke says that Martha “was cumbered about much serving” (Luke 10:40), pulled in many directions by it. Then she came to Jesus with a complaint: “Lord, dost thou not care that my sister hath left me to serve alone? bid her therefore that she help me” (Luke 10:40).
Notice two things in that sentence that busy church workers will recognise.
The first is the loneliness. “Left me to serve alone.” Martha was not only tired. She felt abandoned with the work. Many people serving in churches feel exactly this. The same few faces at every programme, the same names on every rota, and a growing resentment toward those who seem to enjoy the services that others are labouring to produce. Jesus does not mock that feeling. He answers it with tenderness: “Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things” (Luke 10:41).
The second is the request. Martha wanted Jesus to take Mary away from His feet and put her to work in the kitchen. Her service had become so pressing that it now required someone else’s devotion to be sacrificed for it. And this is where Jesus draws a line. “But one thing is needful: and Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her” (Luke 10:42).
Shall not be taken away from her. Jesus refused to let the demands of the work confiscate a person’s time with Him. He did not tell Martha that her work was worthless. He told her that it could not be allowed to swallow the one thing needful.
That is a word for leaders who measure commitment by attendance at meetings and treat a worker’s quiet hours with God as wasted time. It is also a word for the Martha inside many of us. Something in us keeps marching into the place where we sit with Jesus and demanding that we get up and get busy, because the programme is on Saturday and nothing is ready. Jesus has already ruled on that demand. The good part shall not be taken away.
There is a related moment earlier in the same chapter. Jesus had sent out seventy disciples, and they came back thrilled: even the devils were subject to them. Jesus shared their joy, and then He redirected it: “Notwithstanding in this rejoice not, that the spirits are subject unto you; but rather rejoice, because your names are written in heaven” (Luke 10:20). Successful ministry is a real cause for gratitude. But it cannot be the foundation of your joy. Luke 10 begins with a mission and ends in a sitting room, and in both places Jesus moves His followers’ attention from what they are doing to whom they belong.
The branch does not bear fruit of itself
On the night before the cross, Jesus described the relationship from which all fruitful service grows:
I am the true vine, and my Father is the husbandman. Every branch in me that beareth not fruit he taketh away: and every branch that beareth fruit, he purgeth it, that it may bring forth more fruit. Now ye are clean through the word which I have spoken unto you. Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine; no more can ye, except ye abide in me. I am the vine, ye are the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing. If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and men gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned. If ye abide in me, and my words abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto you. Herein is my Father glorified, that ye bear much fruit; so shall ye be my disciples.
Start where Jesus starts. “Now ye are clean through the word which I have spoken unto you.” Before He says anything about bearing fruit, He tells the disciples what they already are. Their relationship with Him rests on His word and His work, not on their productivity. That matters, because a servant who believes his standing with God depends on his output will never feel free to stop and simply be with the Lord. He will always feel that time spent in fellowship is time stolen from work.
Then the invitation: “Abide in me, and I in you.” The word abide means to remain, to stay, to make your home. It is the language of a settled relationship, not an occasional visit. A branch does not strain to produce grapes. It stays connected, and the life of the vine flows through it.
“For without me ye can do nothing.” Of course, it is possible to do a great deal of religious activity without abiding in Christ. People organise conferences, run departments and preach sermons from sheer competence. But Jesus is speaking about fruit, the kind of result that glorifies the Father and lasts. Activity can be produced by talent and pressure. Fruit is produced by life.
Notice also the Father’s care for the fruitful branch: “every branch that beareth fruit, he purgeth it, that it may bring forth more fruit.” The word means to cleanse or prune. A vinedresser cuts back healthy branches so that the plant’s life is not wasted on leaves. Sometimes God’s pruning in a busy servant’s life looks like a role being taken away, a season of illness, a door closing on an opportunity. It can feel like rejection. Often it is the Father removing what has been draining the life of the branch.
A little later in the same chapter Jesus says, “As the Father hath loved me, so have I loved you: continue ye in my love” (John 15:9). That is what abiding looks like at its heart. It is remaining in His love. Your service should grow out of that love, the way grapes grow out of a branch that is quietly, constantly drawing on the vine.
PunchlineFruitful service grows out of a relationship with Christ. When the work begins to replace the relationship, the work itself begins to wither.
Called to be with Him before being sent
When Jesus chose the twelve, Mark records the purpose in a particular order: “he ordained twelve, that they should be with him, and that he might send them forth to preach” (Mark 3:14). With Him first. Sent second. The sending never cancelled the being with Him. Throughout the Gospels the disciples go out and come back, and the coming back is part of the design.
Jesus lived this rhythm Himself. As His fame spread and great crowds gathered to hear Him and be healed, Luke tells us: “And he withdrew himself into the wilderness, and prayed” (Luke 5:16). The demand on Him was greater than on any minister who has ever lived, and He still withdrew. When the disciples returned from a demanding mission, He said to them, “Come ye yourselves apart into a desert place, and rest a while: for there were many coming and going, and they had no leisure so much as to eat” (Mark 6:31). He insisted on rest for His workers, and the reason Mark gives sounds very modern. Too many people coming and going. No time even to eat.
David knew what it was to be cut off from the public worship he loved. Psalm 63 is headed as a psalm he wrote in the wilderness of Judah, far from the tabernacle and its gatherings:
O God, thou art my God; early will I seek thee: my soul thirsteth for thee, my flesh longeth for thee in a dry and thirsty land, where no water is; To see thy power and thy glory, so as I have seen thee in the sanctuary. Because thy lovingkindness is better than life, my lips shall praise thee.
“O God, thou art my God; early will I seek thee.” David’s relationship with God did not depend on the sanctuary. He had seen God’s power and glory there, but in the dry land he sought the same God personally. The psalm describes a hunger that no public role can satisfy on its own behalf. “Because thy lovingkindness is better than life, my lips shall praise thee.”
A personal walk with God is exactly that: personal. It is what remains when the microphone is switched off, the rota is finished and the building is locked. If your relationship with God only exists inside church activities, it will feel very fragile in the wilderness seasons, and it will be quietly starved in the busy ones.
Take heed unto yourselves
When Paul said farewell to the elders of the church in Ephesus, he gave them a charge that has lost none of its force:
Take heed therefore unto yourselves, and to all the flock, over the which the Holy Ghost hath made you overseers, to feed the church of God, which he hath purchased with his own blood.
Look at the order. “Take heed therefore unto yourselves, and to all the flock.” Yourselves first. This is not selfishness. A shepherd who neglects his own health cannot care for sheep for long, and a minister who neglects his own soul will eventually feed the flock from an empty store. Paul says the same to Timothy: “Take heed unto thyself, and unto the doctrine” (1 Timothy 4:16).
Then notice whose flock it is. “The Holy Ghost hath made you overseers.” Not the founder, not the congregation, not your own sense of indispensability. And the church is “the church of God, which he hath purchased with his own blood.” It belongs to Him. That truth carries great comfort for the overworked servant. You are a steward of something that is precious to God, but you are not its saviour. He bought it. He will keep it. You can rest without the church collapsing, because the church never rested on you.
Paul applied this to himself with real seriousness. He spoke of disciplining his own life “lest that by any means, when I have preached to others, I myself should be a castaway” (1 Corinthians 9:27). Interpreters understand that word differently, some of losing his reward and others of being disqualified from his ministry. But on any view, Paul saw the possibility of a servant who helps others while neglecting his own walk, and he took steps to avoid becoming that man.
A church that worked hard and left its first love
Some decades after Paul’s farewell, the risen Christ sent a message to the same church in Ephesus:
I know thy works, and thy labour, and thy patience, and how thou canst not bear them which are evil: and thou hast tried them which say they are apostles, and are not, and hast found them liars: And hast borne, and hast patience, and for my name’s sake hast laboured, and hast not fainted. Nevertheless I have somewhat against thee, because thou hast left thy first love. Remember therefore from whence thou art fallen, and repent, and do the first works; or else I will come unto thee quickly, and will remove thy candlestick out of his place, except thou repent.
Read the commendation first, because it is substantial. Works. Labour. Patience. Doctrinal vigilance: they had tested false apostles and found them liars. Endurance: “for my name’s sake hast laboured, and hast not fainted.” By most standards, this was an excellent church. Its workers were committed, its teaching was guarded and its members did not give up.
“Nevertheless I have somewhat against thee, because thou hast left thy first love.”
The Ephesian church had kept the work and lost the love. It is possible, then, for an entire congregation to remain busy, orthodox and faithful in its tasks while the warmth of devotion to Christ cools underneath. That warning is not meant to make every tired church worker anxious. It is meant to show that labour, however sincere, is no substitute for love.
Notice the remedy. “Remember therefore from whence thou art fallen, and repent, and do the first works.” Remember what it was like when you first knew Him. Turn back. And do the first works, the things love did at the beginning: the eager prayer, the hunger for His word, the gladness in His presence. Jesus does not prescribe more labour. He calls them back to love. After His resurrection, when He restored Peter, He asked first, “Simon, son of Jonas, lovest thou me more than these?” (John 21:15). Only then did He say, “Feed my lambs.” The feeding flows out of the loving.
Honest limits are a form of humility
When Moses was judging the people from morning until evening by himself, his father-in-law Jethro watched for a day and gave a blunt verdict: “Thou wilt surely wear away, both thou, and this people that is with thee” (Exodus 18:18). Moses’ intentions were good. The people needed help. But the arrangement was wearing out both the leader and those he served, and Jethro’s counsel was to share the load.
Limits are not a sign of weak commitment. They are an admission that you are a creature and not the Creator. Only God neither slumbers nor sleeps. “It is vain for you to rise up early, to sit up late, to eat the bread of sorrows: for so he giveth his beloved sleep” (Psalm 127:2).
Here are some honest questions to ask.
How many roles am I carrying? If the honest answer is four or five, ask which one you could hand over, and to whom. Your departure from one role may be the opportunity someone else has been waiting for.
Is there any regular time in my week when I meet with God without preparing for something? If not, that is the first thing to restore. Read the Scriptures for your own soul, and not only for the lesson. Pray about your own life, and not only the programme.
NuggetDo I ever worship as a worshipper? Many musicians, ushers and technicians have not sat through a service in years. Sometimes it is worth asking your leader for a Sunday off so that you can simply receive.
Does my family see the best of me, or only what is left over? Paul linked a leader’s household with his fitness for leadership (1 Timothy 3:4-5). A ministry that consumes a worker’s marriage and children is not honouring God, however busy it keeps him.
Is my tiredness becoming something more? Persistent exhaustion, loss of joy, sleeplessness, irritability and a sense of emptiness can be signs of burnout or depression. These deserve attention from a doctor and, where needed, a qualified counsellor. Seeking that help is wise stewardship of the body God gave you.
Leaders have responsibilities here too. Do not measure a worker’s devotion by the hours he gives you. Train backups. Build rotas that allow rest. Ask your workers how their souls are, and mean the question. And never treat a worker who steps back to recover his walk with God as disloyal. Jesus defended Mary’s place at His feet. A pastor should defend it too.
Of course, there are seasons when service is intense: a crusade, a crisis in the congregation, a building project, a funeral. The Lord gives grace for those. “He giveth power to the faint; and to them that have no might he increaseth strength” (Isaiah 40:29). The problem comes when emergency becomes the permanent rhythm, and the renewal the prophet goes on to promise is never sought:
Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall: But they that wait upon the LORD shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.
“They that wait upon the LORD shall renew their strength.” Waiting on the Lord is not idleness. It is the posture of a servant who knows that his strength has a source outside himself and keeps returning to it.
Onome did not resign from his post after the carol service. But in January he went to his pastor and told him the truth. To his surprise, the pastor did not argue. “I have been worried about you for a year,” he said.
They made changes together. Onome handed the youth band to the young man who had been his assistant for three years and was more than ready. He stopped attending the Friday vigil as a leader and went, on some Fridays, simply to pray. He kept his Tuesday and Thursday rehearsals, but he began to arrive at church on Sunday mornings forty minutes earlier than before, not to set up the music stands but to sit in the empty building with his Bible open to the Psalms. Some Sundays he read. Some Sundays he just sat.
Punchline“It felt like wasted time at first,” he said. “There was always something I could be fixing. Then one morning I realised I was looking forward to it more than the service.”
The following December the carol service came round again. Same church, same canopy, same borrowed brass. When they reached the last verse of “O Come, All Ye Faithful,” Onome lifted his hands for the refrain and, for the first time in years, he sang it himself. O come, let us adore Him. He told me he could hardly see the choir for tears, and that the sopranos were a little flat, and that he did not mind at all.
Serve the Lord with everything He has given you. But do not let the vineyard you keep for others become the reason your own is overgrown. The good part is still available. It shall not be taken away from you.
Teaching Companion
For Reflection
- When did you last spend time with God that was not preparation for something you had to do?
- In what ways have you felt like Martha, “left to serve alone”? How does Jesus’ tender answer speak to that feeling?
- Is there anything in your current pattern of service that is taking away “the good part” from you or from someone you lead?
- What would “do the first works” look like for you this month?
- Which of your responsibilities could you honestly share or hand over, and who might be ready to receive it?
This Week
This week, protect one unhurried hour with God that has nothing to do with your ministry responsibilities. Put it in your diary as you would a rehearsal or meeting. Read a Psalm and a chapter of one of the Gospels for your own soul, then pray about your own life. Before the week ends, write down every role you currently carry in church and share the list with your leader or a trusted friend, asking honestly whether any of them should be shared, paused or handed over.
A Prayer
Lord Jesus, You are the true vine and I am a branch. Thank You that I am clean through the word You have spoken, and that my place with You rests on Your love and not on my usefulness. Forgive me for the times I have kept other vineyards and neglected my own, and for the times I have let the work take away the good part. Call me back to my first love. Teach me to be with You before I go out for You, to take heed to myself as well as to the flock, and to accept the limits You have given me with humility. Renew my strength as I wait on You, and let all my service grow out of abiding in Your love. Amen.
Truth received brings freedom. Truth believed establishes the heart.
Scripture quotations are from the King James Version. · Illustrations using first names only are composites unless stated otherwise.