Just how much of you is leading your ministry? What if someone told you they cannot see Jesus because there’s too much of you and too little of Him?
Be brave with me, sister. We both need this conversation!
For the courage to address these penetrating questions, meet a wholehearted servant of God who possessed unwavering commitment and fortitude. If you don’t already know her, Helen Roseveare was an English missionary doctor in Congo (later known as Zaire). She believed that holiness is the one quest worth chasing.
Throughout her career, on and off the mission field, Helen was honest about God’s sanctifying work in her life. She never pretended to be someone she wasn’t. For those of us working in ministry, Helen shows us how a personal God lavishly loves and disciplines His treasured servants.
The Great Enemy of Self
Dr. Roseveare began as a missionary with high hopes, tenacity, and an eagerness to fulfill her calling. Although she wasn’t lacking in devotion or drive, she needed to learn a hard lesson after serving four years in the Congo. At that time, Helen had reached a breaking point, weighed down by an impossible workload with endless tasks and responsibilities. In her book Living Holiness, she described being overwhelmed by fatigue and plagued with sinful attitudes of irritability, impatience, and a fiery temper. She knew she was unworthy of the title missionary and “felt crushed by her own wretchedness and oft-repeated failures.”1
Something had to change if Helen was to persevere on the mission field, but what was it? What was she missing?
Helen turned to Pastor Ndugu, a wise African church elder, for counsel. Sitting by the fire with him and his wife, the pastor read Galatians 2:20: “I have been crucified with Christ, and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”
The pastor explained the meaning of the verse by drawing a straight vertical line on the dirt floor and saying, “I, the capital I in our lives, Self, is the great enemy.”2 Then he spoke the hard truth about Helen: “The trouble with you is that we see so much Helen that we cannot see Jesus.”3 Tears rushed to her eyes. To this faithful servant, it must have felt like a spear had been driven straight into the epicenter of her being. Despite being painfully difficult words to hear, the truth was life-transformative. Helen chose to embrace the cross.
The cross was the answer Helen was looking for—it’s the answer you need too. As one old-time preacher would pray before he stepped up to the pulpit, “Lord, hide me behind the cross!” The crucified servant prays for people to see Jesus and be drawn to Him—not to herself. But how?
Jesus, the Crucified Sin-Bearer
Once saved, some Christians see little use for the cross. They lose sight of their enormous need for its precious cleansing blood on a daily basis. They lead with self, trying harder and harder to succeed. They keep trying to avoid dying. Jesus didn’t run from the cross. He lovingly and willingly embraced it to redeem sinful people for Himself.
Philippians 2:5–8 describes how Christ stooped low, lower, and lower before He was exalted:
Adopt the same attitude as that of Christ Jesus,
who, existing in the form of God,
did not consider equality with God
as something to be exploited.
Instead he emptied himself
by assuming the form of a servant,
taking on the likeness of humanity.
And when he had come as a man,
he humbled himself by becoming obedient
to the point of death—
even to death on a cross.
Jesus sank from the highest high to the lowest low. First, God the Son chose not to exercise His divine rights and privileges. He veiled His heavenly glory to step down into a sinful world. Next, He emptied Himself. He made Himself nothing so God the Father could be everything (John 5:19). Jesus freely let go of His superior advantages as God.
Christ the Lord could have rightly come to earth as a King with infinite wealth, power, and a multitude of servants. But instead, Jesus crouched even lower to become a servant Himself. The word servant in Philippians 2:7 literally means slave.
To be crucified with Christ implies we walk the Calvary road until it ends at the cross. Following Jesus, we drop down, down, down by . . .
- Humbling ourselves.
- Dying to our flesh.
- Laying down our rights.
- Emptying self.
- Becoming a servant.
Jesus will never ask us to stoop lower than He has already gone. His body was broken for you. Are you willing to be broken for Him?
Death Releases Life
Life from death is the heart of the gospel. The more we experience His death, the more His abundant life is released through us. “We have all received grace upon grace from his fulness” (John 1:16). When broken, not only will His grace supply divine power and anointing for ministry but His joy and peace will become ours as we crucify sin and self.
The apostle Paul spoke of Christian maturity as being filled to the fullest with Christ Himself (Eph. 4:13). When we’re willing to lay down our lives and die on behalf of others, they will experience the pulsating life of Christ through us. There’s a sweet, life-giving perfume from His presence that blesses others everywhere we go. “Thanks be to God, who always leads us in Christ’s triumphal procession and through us spreads the aroma of the knowledge of him in every place” (2 Cor. 2:14).
Friends, we each will be filled with something. The choice is ours. If we remain full of self, there will be no room for Christ. Oh that we would cling to the cross!
Filled and Pouring Out Christ
God uses all kinds of leaders. There isn’t one type that stands taller than the others. God wants to use all of our sanctified personalities, temperaments, and spiritual gifts to the fullest. But if we’re not emptied of the enemy of self and filled with the Spirit of the living Christ, our vessel has little to pour out that is useful.
From the day God used Pastor Ndugu to convict Helen of the self-life, she “sought, however imperfectly and falteringly, to follow that godly pastor’s ‘simple rule of life,’ allowing the Master Potter to have His way, undoing and remaking the vessel.”4 No one could accuse Helen Roseveare of blocking the light of Christ when she died in 2016 at the age of ninety-one. Over the span of her lifetime, Jesus grew bigger; Helen shrank smaller. You can read more of this valiant servant’s story in (Un)remarkable: Ten (More) Ordinary Women Who Impacted Their World for Christ, a book from Revive Our Hearts.
The more we are stripped of self, the more we will thrive in ministry with continual flowing power from the Holy Spirit. When we stop living for ourselves—for praise, for followers, or for an enviable platform—we will joyfully follow Christ wherever He wants to take us—especially to the cross, which brings honor and glory to the Father.
That’s where we meet the end of the Calvary road: when Jesus is big, and we are small. When He is everything, and we are nothing. Let them see Jesus.
But as for me, I will never boast about anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. The world has been crucified to me through the cross, and I to the world. (Galatians 6:14)
1Helen Roseveare, Living Holiness (Great Britain, Christian Focus Publications: 2008), 75.
2Roseveare, Living Holiness.
3Roseveare, Living Holiness.
4Roseveare, Living Holiness.