A Tired Family

Maintaining a healthy spiritual life and a vibrant family life requires diligent effort on your part—especially for moms who are on the front lines of ministry at home. The numerous responsibilities of life coupled with the extensive needs of your family, create a lot of work in the Christian home. Since we live in a fallen world, you can expect for this work to be a struggle, make you tired, and tempt you in unique ways. Your carnal desire for comfort will sometimes chafe at the restrictions imposed by the burdens of this ministry, but you must remember that God has imposed these burdens on you for your good and His glory.

As you deal with the realities of ministry in the local church and to your own children, you must remember that the rigors of service are instruments of grace designed by God to keep you humble and focused on Christ. In other words, taking care of your kids and serving the church is not easy because it is not supposed to be. As you engage in arduous kingdom work and tedious household chores, you must be careful to shepherd your heart to avoid ministry fatigue. If you are not careful, which is to say if you do not submit yourself to the truth, the burden of serving will have a hardening effect rather than a sanctifying effect in your life. If you don’t comprehensively submit your life to the calling of God and the circumstances in which you have been placed to fulfill that calling, you will experience burnout, which is a modern and sanitized way of saying you will become embittered toward the ministry you’ve received from God.

In order to avoid this danger you must employ two essentials strategies.

Guard your Heart from the Lies of the Flesh

First, in order to shepherd your heart through ministry fatigue you must guard your heart from the lies of the flesh. Your flesh desires gratification and comfort at all times. In contrast, serving your family requires humility and effort. Given these two realities, there is going to be an internal clash within your heart. Specifically, in the midst of strenuous, backbreaking, and thankless ministry there are some common lies you will be tempted to accept:

• the lies of pride: “I am always the one serving.” “Why do I have to do everything?” “I deserve something better than this.”

• the lies of divisiveness: “They never do anything.” “Why aren’t they serving?” “They don’t deserve someone like me.”

• the lies of selfishness: “What about me, no one ever serves me?” “Why do I never get credit for my ministry?” “Why does this always happen to me?”

• the lies of feelings: “It just feels like….” Train yourself to use Scripture to critically scrutinize any sentence that begins with these four words.

You can organize all of these carnal lies into the category of self-pity!

Protect your Heart with Reminders of Truth

When your mind is flooded with these thoughts train yourself to recognize that these are lies of the flesh not the leading of the Spirit and guard your heart. In addition to guarding your heart from the lies of the flesh, you also need to feed your heart with reminders of the truth. The best way to counter the lies of the flesh is with the truth of God. When you are tempted to think you deserve better, remember your place in God’s kingdom. You are an undeserving saint (Eph 1:11) and an unworthy servant (Luke 17:7-10). You’ve been sanctified for service!

Conclusion:

If you are feeling the burden of the rigors of ministry in your family life, make sure that you are shepherding your heart by guarding it against the lies of the flesh and feeding it with reminders of truth. This is an especially strong temptation for mothers, because their ministry comes with a unique burden and the little ones they minister to are not usually as thankful as they should be. In those times when you just want to quit, remind yourself that there is no greater honor than being totally spent in the service of our glorious Lord and Savior. The Lord sees every changed diaper, all the clean clothes, each carefully prepared meal, and every time you sacrifice a moment of solitude to minister to your child.

You can find more more teaching on how to shepherd a tired family in The Christian Home: Biblical Principles for Managing and Maintaing a Godly Family by Paul Shirley.