Count Nicolaus Zinzendorf reportedly said, “Preach the gospel, die, and be forgotten.” My wife likes to point out that he succeeded at only the first two parts of this statement. He preached, he died, but he’s not forgotten.
I’d go even farther. Only the first part of his statement is actionable. We have no control over our death. It’s going to happen whether we like it or not. We also have no control over whether and how we’ll be remembered. I would revise Zinzendorf’s statement slightly: Preach the gospel, die, and leave the results up to God. It’s more accurate, but I doubt they’ll be putting my revised statement on any t-shirts.
Our lives are brief. We don’t know if we’ll be remembered or not. Focus on the one thing you can control: that you make your life about the gospel. Then, leave the rest up to God.
I’m often struck by how many forgotten people lived before us. Their lives mattered a lot. They played an important role in their time. God saw their labours and rewarded them. But their names are lost to history. They lie in unmarked graves, and nobody today is aware of the contribution they made.
Go to an old church, if you can find it, that has pictures of former pastors from decades ago. Find one who served in that church for years. Start to dig around and learn about that pastor’s life and ministry. Chances are that you won’t find out much, and yet that pastor played an important role in that church’s life, and the legacy of that ministry likely continues today in ways we don’t understand.
Many people serve well but feel like failures. I believe every pastor could benefit from reading Memoirs of an Ordinary Pastor by D.A. Carson about his father, Tom Carson, who pastored in Quebec. Tom Carson never achieved ministry success in the world’s eyes. His diaries are filled with doubts about the impact of his ministry. But his ministry was significant, yet he felt like a failure. Many of us can relate.
The reality is that most of us will be forgotten, and many of us will feel like failures. But neither of those are accurate measures of our ministries. The main question is, did we preach the gospel? That’s the only thing we can control. The rest is up to God.
God notices the most obscure person who serves him, even if the results don’t look like much to us. Perhaps that’s why Scripture often highlights seemingly unimportant people: Quartus in Romans 16:23, the woman who anointed Jesus’ feet in Matthew 26:6-13, or the widow who gave a meagre offering at the temple in Luke 21:1-4. It’s almost like God chooses to pick a few people up out of obscurity and highlight them so that we get the idea that although most of us won’t be remembered, obscure people still matter in his economy.
Most people in Scripture pass off the scene without much notice. The book of Acts doesn’t record the fate of most of the apostles. It’s more concerned with the spread of the gospel.
Our lives are important to God, yet we’re not the primary focus. I like Count Zinzendorf’s advice because it reminds me that I’m not the point. I need to stop obsessing over the impact of my ministry. I need to focus on the only thing I can control—making my life about glorifying God and preaching the gospel to the best of my abilities. Everything else is up to God.
We can’t control the results. We can’t even measure the success of what we accomplish. We can’t control whether we’ll be remembered or not. But we can do the one thing that’s up to us: stay faithful to our task. Once you do that, leave the rest up to God, who will do a much better job with our legacies than we ever could.
And in the meantime, we can know that our lives and our efforts matter to him.