Puritan pastor John Flavel said the following words in his address, “The Character of a Complete Evangelical Pastor, Drawn By Christ,” as published in The Whole Works of the Reverend John Flavel (Edinburgh, 1820), 6:568-569:

I may say to him that snatched at the ministry, as Henry IV did to his son that hastily snatched at the crown: He little knows what an heap of cares and toils he snatches at.

The labors of the ministry will exhaust the very marrow from your bones, hasten old age and death. They are fitly compared to the toil of men in harvest, to the labors of a woman in travail, and to the agonies of soldiers in the extremity of a battle. We must watch when others sleep.

And indeed it is not so much the expense of our labors, as the loss of them, that kills us. It is not with us, as with other laborers. They find their work as they leave it, so do not we.

Sin and Satan unravel almost all we do, the impressions we make on our people’s souls in one sermon, vanish before the next. How many truths have we to study! How many wiles of Satan, and mysteries of corruption, to detect! How many cases of conscience to resolve! Yea, we must fight in defense of the truths we preach, as well as study them to paleness, and preach them unto faintness.

But well-spent head, heart, lungs, and all; welcome pained breasts, aching backs, and trembling legs; if we can by all but approve ourselves Christ’s faithful servants, and hear that joyful voice from his mouth, ‘Well done, good and faithful servants.’