Counting to Control
Like a good son, I looked for ways to antagonize my dad. He was a pharmacist, so at one point I quipped that his job was to count. Count pills and hand them out. If I had been on my game, there might have been a Sesame Street Count von Count voice involved. I don’t think he was amused.
Ironically, I’ve come to realize that a fundamental temptation I face as a church planter and pastor is to reduce my work to counting. Pastors count everything: giving, attendance, budgets, programs—anything where we might be able to measure growth. I can tend toward the obsessive, counting gospel conversations, discipleship relationships, times I pray, pages read, time spent devotional. I want to track it. I want to count it.
Part of this desire to count is that those of us in ministry are trying to wrap our hands around our work. We want something concrete to track spiritual work. We’re searching for a metric for immeasurable work. It’s probably why so many pastors I know have such tangible hobbies. You can measure how far you run. You can taste the barbecue you smoke. You can hold the woodworking project.
Yet, it strikes me that there might be more to this desire to count, something less innocuous. I’ve found that, ever so subtly, I like to find things to count because I think if I can count it, I can control it. This seems to me to be part of the temptation David speaks of in Psalm 20:7
“Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the Lord our God.”
Chariots and horses share the common feature of being easily countable. Psalm 20 is a song before battle. David and his people are preparing for war. Horse-drawn chariots were the preeminent war-fighting technology of his day. The more you had, the more likely you were to emerge victorious. To know your strength, you simply count your horses and chariots. At a later date, David himself will fall into the same sin, looking to a census to measure the strength of his army (2 Samuel 24). But here, David turns our attention to an even greater strength: “but we trust in the name of the Lord our God.” Rather than trusting in what we can count, we should trust the one who is in control.
On the other side of the cross, we have even greater reason to trust in the name of the Lord our God. Psalm 20 is about how God will deliver his people from their enemies through his anointed king, and in Jesus we see the Son of God coming as our new and better David to deliver us from our greatest enemies: sin, death, and Satan. Jesus is the messiah, the anointed one. He is from the line and house of David. He is our king who has conquered death through his own death. More than this, he has risen victoriously from the grave and is now seated at his Father’s right hand where he is ruling and reigning over all things (Eph 1:19-23). King Jesus is “destroying every rule and every authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death” (1 Cor 15:24-26). He is not merely conquering our greatest enemies, but he is crushing them so that his people can enjoy life with him forever in the new creation.
How foolish, then, is it when I look to things that I can count, hoping that I can somehow control them. How much better it is to trust in the one who is in control, our risen and victorious Lord Jesus who is ruling and reigning over all things.
