I am forever writing something that I hope will help someone else to face the same test or circumstances about which I am writing. I write from experience, study and the anointing of the Spirit of God – as any good Christian writer should. I am as you are when you give a testimony to the grace of God bestowed on you in any area: You speak what you know.
About six years ago I had been mulling over a possible second retirement. The first, bona-fide retirement was from my position as Director of External Studies at Aenon Bible College in 1991. I had looked around me in 1990 and seen that my usefulness to Aenon was rapidly dwindling due to my insufficient academic credentials, so I submitted my resignation to the Board of Directors, which resignation was to become effective approximately a year later.
There was no friction between me and anyone at the College; it was simply the right time as I am sure God already knew. That was what I would term a resignation from a “secular” position although it was doing a work for God. Nevertheless there comes a time in the fortunes of all persons of advanced age when they need to face the fact that their physical energy and stamina are gone and/or when their usefulness at a particular task is ended or fast diminishing. Both cases obtained with me.
But, looking at the situation from a certain perspective, my employment at Aenon was a secular position. I did a job and I was paid for doing it. At the same time however I was employed by God to do a spiritual work for which He paid me in more than a monetary way. From the latter job I can never retire. I may wear out so that I can no longer write “as the oracles of God” or I may die at my post, but I do not have the “luxury” of retiring. God knows what He wants from me and He knows what I need in a physical and spiritual way to fulfill ALL His will concerning one Aaron J. Smith.
A number of years after my resignation from Aenon in 1991, I felt impelled to write a post on my Written Word blog; it was titled “There Is No Retirement in Christ.” As it usually is with all my writings, I wrote from experience and under the anointing of God (this is not a boast but a statement that others in other callings of God should be able to make). Now in the year of the Lord 2011, I can strongly reiterate those words: there is indeed no retirement in Christ, not from any job to which He has called you.
As a pastor, you may have to resign from your “secular” job as pastor as I resigned from Aenon Bible College, but you will always feel the compulsion to teach, lecture, counsel, write or express what God says to you in some way. Why? There is no retirement in Christ. You do what you can for as long as you can and when physical and mental strictures prevent your working any further, you give in to the inevitable – but you can never make the decision to retire.
I wonder at times how long I can presume to write for God; but it is not a presumption, it is a necessity. My efforts to write may dwindle to a few words here and there directed by the Spirit to a very few people thither and yon, but when the Spirit moves me I still have the need to vent what the Spirit is saying to me.
To sum it up: I am only the puppet who dances to the puppet Master’s tune and at His will. If the time should come when I no longer feel the unction upon me to write, then I will have to cease writing – but voluntarily retire? Never! Since when does the puppet follow its own will? A puppet has no will of its own. I want to be God’s perfect puppet to work as long as He says work and to quit only when He ceases to pull my strings.
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