This is a remarkable passage from the hand of the apostle Paul, describing the nature of his ministry as an apostle and the way in which, in all kinds of difficulties and hardships, he conducted himself so as to commend the Gospel to his hearers. And when he uses the word “we,” he is thinking of the other apostles. This can rightly be applied to pastors because they too are called to minister the Word of God. Yet, at the same time this passage is profitable for whoever we may be, as we serve the Lord in our individual callings. Jesus did not merely send out His disciples to be witnesses in the world, but He sent the Church. And where we go with that message, we experience the kind of things the apostle Paul experienced. Are we conducting ourselves in such experiences in a way that actually commends the Gospel, or do we act in such a way that we bring discredit upon it?
There are two parts to this passage, one negative and the other positive. Paul expresses the negative part in verse 3: “We put no stumbling block in anyone’s path, so that our ministry will not be discredited.” In the ministry especially, it is a very serious thing to mislead another person, whether by teaching or by conduct. Now I know it is not always intentional, but this verse does show the necessity of sound doctrine and the need to faithfully communicate that to others. Other times, however, it is intentional. A gospel ends up being taught that is not the Gospel of Jesus Christ. People blend the Bible with secular psychology, for example, or they misuse Scripture as teaching that every Christian should be materially prosperous.
When preachers or teachers use Scripture to promote themselves, or to make promises that the Bible itself does not make, or when they teach doctrines that are contrary to what God has revealed in His Word, that is tragic and scary because these teachers are one day going to have to stand before God and give an account for what they have done. Paul said he did not want his ministry to cause people to stumble. And if it is true that it is dangerous to cause a person to stumble in this life so that they are misled and enter upon a path of sin, which brings suffering, it is certainly infinitely more serious to preach a gospel that causes people to stumble for the life to come. In this life, you lose your life. But in the life to come, you lose your soul.
This is why if you are in the Christian ministry, or if you are in seminary studying for the ministry, you need to be sure that you are called into the ministry by God. Now I think that the idea of a calling applies to secular areas as well, such as medicine, law, business, or something else. But I think the ministry is in a separate category because there you are speaking about eternal things, and what is at stake are the eternal souls of men and women. So if you dare to speak for God, you better be sure that it is God who has called you to speak. If God calls you into the ministry, then you can speak because you can believe that if you are faithful to Him, and you try to search the Scriptures, and you really pray for help, then God will undergird the message, and will preserve you from the kind of error that can lead people astray.
But if you approach the ministry with a worldly attitude of wanting to pick that career over another because it seems like a nice thing to do, but you are not sure that God is really leading you into it, then you do not have the guarantee that God is going to be with you and guide what you say. And that goes not just for those who want to become pastors, but for volunteer teachers in the church as well.