I posted at InFocus yesterday morning on the honest epitaph.

Funerals are awkward things. At a time when people are most attuned to the hard realities of truth, we often sigh as speaker after speaker tries desperately to make a halo fit around the horns of the dearly deceased. I’ve often thought, therefore, what it would be like if someone could invent a tombstone that gave an honest epitaph. You know, the real one.

But you’re a minister. You probably don’t live with dad and mum and play Xbox all day. So your honest epitaph is likely to look better than that of others. Herein is the danger.

Perhaps your honest epitaph would go a little more like this: “He loved the ministry.”

This would be a tragedy.

Paul Tripp, speaking in Sydney recently, made this statement: “Ministry is a miserable place to look for your identity.”

I don’t know whether you minister as an elder, a deacon, or in some other capacity, but I do know that if your life is primarily about the ministry, you shouldn’t be in ministry. In other words, the closer something is to the real thing, the harder it often is to discern from the real thing.

The better the counterfeit, the harder it is to spot. But it is still counterfeit. And if you invest in it, you will find it worthless in the end.

If your life is about ministry for God instead of the God for whom you minister, you’re missing it and what’s left at the end will be of little worth.

Don’t let God be the elephant in the room of your ministry or your life. Make him the explicit, central focus of all that you are. Let everything else become subservient—indeed expendable—before this superior person with whom we have to do.

When you come to die, let them speak, not of your ministry, but of the God for whom you ministered. And know that what you say and do today will be determinative in that matter.

God is better than ministry! God himself.

May we enjoy him today.

Grace to you.

Originally published 12 September, 2014 on the thinkingofgod.org blog.