I’d like to quote from James Stewart’s classic, Heralds of God (p20).  After this quote, I will only have the briefest of comments to share:

If you as preachers would speak a bracing, reinforcing word to the need of the age, there must be no place for the disillusioned mood in your own life.  Like your Master, you will have meat to eat that the world knows not of; and that spiritual sustenance, in so far as you partake of it daily, will strengthen your powers of resistance to the dangerous infection.  Surely there are few figures so pitiable as the disillusioned minister of the Gospel.  High hopes once cheered him on his way: but now the indifference and the recalcitrance of the world, the lack of striking visible results, the discovery of the appalling pettiness and spite and touchiness and complacency which can lodge in narrow hearts, the feeling of personal futility – all these have seared his soul.  No longer does the zeal of God’s House devour him.  No longer does he mount the pulpit steps in thrilled expectancy that Jesus Christ will come amongst His folk that day, travelling in the greatness of His strength, mighty to save.  Dully and drearily he speaks now about what once seemed to him the most dramatic tidings in the world.  the edge and verve and passion of the message of divine forgiveness, the exultant, lyrical assurance of the presence of the risen Lord, the amazement of supernatural grace, the urge to cry “Woe is me if I preach not the Gospel” – all have gone.  The man has lost heart.  He is disillusioned.  And that, for an ambassador of Christ, is tragedy.

Amen.