Your requests are many, and they touch upon body, soul, and spirit, some light, some weighty as eternity. You cry for health, work, the payment of bills, the renewal of a prayer meeting, a coffee machine for the church, purity of heart, and then from the depths you wail over the impossibility of marriage and children, and a pastor’s calling that hangs upon that hope. All this you bring, and it is well, for the Lord would have us pour out everything before Him, great and small.
Yet I would have you weigh these petitions in the balances of the sanctuary. You pray for purity, and you do well; for charity without purity profits nothing, it is the white robe of the soul without which no man shall see the Lord. Despise not inward holiness in the pursuit of outward comforts. And here I charge you: when you speak of purity, let the desire be true and efficacious; see that it drives you to fly temptation, to keep yourself unspotted from the world. The Lord desires truth in the inward parts, and a mere passing wish that costs no struggle is but a painted fire. If your desire for purity is genuine, it will make you wait upon God in the night, when distractions fade, and with all your soul long for Him alone.
As to your earthly needs, health, work, and the settling of bills, cast these upon the Lord, for He careth for you. But do not suffer these to become the main desire. Seek first the kingdom, and the coffee machine and the daily bread will be added in their measure. The church may well use such a thing for the refreshment of the saints, yet it is a small matter; better to be famished in body and feasted in soul than the reverse.
Now to the groan of your spirit: you ache for wife and child, and you say it is impossible, and that without these you cannot become a pastor. Are you sure that your pastoral desire is kindled by the love of Christ, or by the love of a certain condition? The Lord may not build His house with your blueprints. He sent Joseph not to the ease he might have chosen, but to a dungeon by way of a slave-market, and there trained him. The desire for marriage and children is natural and often holy; I do not chide you for it. True religion is ever a matter of desire, and if you truly desire to fear God, to rear a godly seed, to feed the flock, then God accepts the will for the deed when the deed is withheld by His hand. Yet if you say, “I will serve as pastor only upon my own terms,” take heed lest you desire the office more than the Master. He who is the Desire of all nations must be your chief desire; let Christ be all, and then, whether you have wife and children or walk alone, you will be complete in Him.
And as to impossibility, since when is any good thing impossible with our God? Did not Hannah’s closed womb open? Did not Sarah, past age, conceive? If the Lord has planted this longing in you, trust Him either to fulfill it or to transform it into something higher. Delight yourself in Him, and He shall give you the desires of your heart, not always by granting them, but by so filling your heart with Himself that lesser desires melt into the one great desire to depart and be with Christ, which is far better. Do not nurse your despair; nurse your faith. The soul that in the night season pants after God alone shall not be ashamed.
Pray for your friend to renew the prayer meeting, good, for holy fellowship fans the flame. But if the meeting tarries, let your own closet be all the sweeter. In the end, no true desire after God shall be lost; the Lord will bring you to your desired haven, though the storms be many and the helm seem broken. Only keep your garments pure, your heart fixed on Him, and your will flexible in His hand.