Suffering as Ministry Training

God’s idea of ministry training is a broken vessel. His idea of spiritual preparation is suffering, which includes rejection. Here is the biblical recipe for ministry preparation—a recipe that’s glaringly absent from the pages of most ministry training manuals today:

For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that his life may be revealed in our mortal body. So then, death is at work in us, but life is at work in you. Criticism and rejection are God’s tools for liberating His servants from human control and the desire to please men. To make you a…