I read a sermon by a fellow pastor some time ago. He was announcing to his congregation that he was resigning his pastorate. He said, “I’m just burned out. I have been burning the candle at both ends. I am exhausted, so I am going to take a leave of absence for a year from the ministry. I’m going down to a hospital as an assistant chaplain, and after a year of rest—away from all of the pressures—I hope to find another church and become a pastor again. But right now, I’m just burned out.”
I think that spiritual burnout is a very real problem, but it is not the problem that we face in our church. The problem we face is not spiritual burnout. It is spiritual cool-off. We’ve lost a lot of our desire and our enthusiasm and our zeal for the work of God and it is not because we’ve worked too much, it is because many of us have not worked any at all.