Reading the opening verses of the fifth chapter
of 1 Peter, down to verse 4.
The elders which are among you I exhort,
who am also an elder, and a witness
of the sufferings of Christ, and also a
partaker of the glory that shall be revealed.
Feed the flock of God which is among
you, taking the oversight thereof, not by constraint,
but willingly, not for filthy lucre, but of
a ready mind.
Neither is being lords over God's heritage, but
being ensamples to the flock.
And when the chief shepherd shall appear, ye
shall receive a crown of glory that fadeth
not away.
Now he addresses these remarks through the ones
he calls the elders among you.
Let me say a word about the idea
of elders in the New Testament.
The elders were men who, by reason of
years and experience, were wiser than the average
member of the Church, and by reason of
superior sanctity, were worthy of every honor.
So they were put in the place of
authority and leadership in the Church.
Now this system is the scriptural one, and
it is followed more or less loosely by
almost all Christian churches.
And even where it is not officially followed,
even in those churches, non-denominational or independent
churches, where they shrug off the idea of
organization and leadership, particularly the leadership of elders,
without meaning to do it and without knowing
they do it, they nevertheless arrive at something
like this by a sort of spiritual gravitation.
Even in those churches where there is no
one officially designated as an elder, there is
bound to be certain ones who, by virtue
of sanctity and greater wisdom, are looked to
by the others, and they therefore assume an
unofficial kind of leadership, which may not be
the best, but which certainly shows that when
Peter and Paul, under the direction of our
Lord, laid out the idea of leadership in
the Church by means of wise and experienced
and good men, they laid down a rule
which was perfectly right and good and natural,
which is approved even by those who do
not approve of the theory of it.
It is regrettable that to some extent the
leadership of the elders has passed to the
leadership of the in some sections, which of
course is not good.
Not that the younger are not worthy, but
that they do not have the experience, nor
the years, nor mostly they do not have
the spiritual sanctity which makes them to be
revered.
Now, Paul said he was addressing his remarks
in his fifth chapter to the elders among
you, and he said, I address you, I
also am an elder, I exhort.
Now, Peter here had that rare combination, authority
with humility.
He was an apostle.
He was one of the twelve, and he
had the authority to command them, and this
is a command, of course.
He knew his calling and his commission.
He knew that he had been called of
the Lord to be the great apostle to
the circumcised, as Paul was to the Gentiles.
He knew that.
He knew that he was among the twelve,
the great twelve apostles.
But he only thought of himself as an
elder.
He calls himself elsewhere a servant, and thus
he had authority with humility.
And he identifies himself with the other elders,
though he certainly was above them in authority,
and thus he exhorts instead of commands.
He said, I, an elder, exhort you other
elders to feed the flock of God which
is among you.
Now, the idea of a church as being
composed of sheep, that is, spiritual sheep, is
a favorite figure both of the Old Testament
and of the New.
There are a good many points of likeness
between a sheep in the natural and a
redeemed Christian in the spiritual.
The sheep, for instance, was a clean animal.
It could be offered in sacrifice, or it
could be eaten, so that it stood ceremonially
before God as being a clean animal.
God could not have likened his people to
the unclean beast that could not be offered
on the altar.
He could not call them dogs.
He called them sheep.
He could not call them camels.
He called them sheep.
The camel was a beast of burden, but
not clean ceremonially.
So he said, the people of God are
sheep.
Then the sheep is harmless.
About the most harmless creature on any farm
would be, among the most harmless, would be
the sheep.
Nobody, a woman, ever ran out of a
farmhouse screaming, oh, hurry, hurry, get our child,
little Junior, out among the sheep, because Junior
could lie down there among the sheep and
go to sleep, and they wouldn't bother.
But certainly many a farm woman has screamed,
rush out, hurry, get out there.
Little Junior is among the horses or cattle
or pigs.
They're dangerous, even though, mildly so, still they're
dangerous, but not sheep.
And the sheep are productive, and they are
meek, and they're one-man creatures.
They can form, even more than a dog,
they can form attachment to the shepherd.
And they're gregarious.
No sheep likes to be alone.
A wolf can be alone, and many other
animals can wander off alone, but the sheep
like to be together, always together.
And then shall I say this also about
the sheep?
And I speak out of personal experience when
I say this, both in the church and
on the farm, that the sheep are known
as being rather stupid animals.
They haven't the mentality of the others, they
haven't room for it, and there's not much,
many brains there.
They're simply lovable pets, but they're certainly not
very bright.
They're dumb in a nice way.
Nobody ever trained each sheep would go among
all the farmers, and you'll find them who
have trained almost all the animals on the
farm, even chickens sometimes.
But nobody ever said, I want you to
come down, I want to show off my
trained sheep.
They don't try to train sheep, at least
I never heard of them.
There might be a rare man with an
unusual amount of patience, who might sometime have
taken on the difficult, almost impossible job of
training a sheep to do tricks, but mostly
they don't try it.
Sheep are simply lovable pets.
They hang around you, lie down at your
feet, follow you around, but they don't take
well to complicated training.
Now, why did the Lord say that we
were sheep?
I've given you some reasons, I think also
I have fairly given you the last one.
That we don't learn very fast, we Christians.
In the first place, we are learning the
most difficult of all possible lessons, spiritual lessons.
We are learning how to live in heaven
while we are on earth, and that is
the most difficult job.
We're learning something that does not go along
with our natures.
We, you do not make a Christian by
training a sinner.
You do not take a sinner and begin
to work on him, and introduce him into
the realm of moral things, and slowly establish
a moral reflex, so that he begins to
live right.
And instead of living wrongly, he lives rightly.
Instead of lying, he's truthful.
Instead of being dishonest, he's honest.
Instead of being lazy, he's industrious.
That's not the way Christians are made.
Christians are being taught those things which they
never can be trained as sinners to do,
or to understand.
So that the lessons the Lord are teaching
us are most difficult lessons for the natural
man to learn.
And because the natural man is in the
way, it would be a little time, we
find ourselves very slow to learn.
The most humiliating thing in my spiritual experience
has been how quickly I've grabbed some new
spiritual idea, preached about it for a while,
and prayed over it, and talked about it
enthusiastically with people, and then slowly it dissolved
and evaporated.
And months later I found that I had
forgotten it, and had to learn all over
again the thing that I was so delighted
with five or ten months before.
That's been humiliating to me, and it still
is.
But I'm not going to lash myself on
the back too industriously, because I am being
taught spiritual things, and I'm still far from
being a wholly spiritual man.
So there's an awful lot of stupidity in
me.
And if you won't feel badly, I would
say that you too, we together, as the
sheep of his flock, are very far from
being grade A students.
Now, I say that's the reason, perhaps, that
this figure of the sheep is one of
the favorite figures in the Bible.
And a flock of sheep will need the
following things, many more perhaps, but I'll mention,
I think it's four.
A flock of sheep will need leadership.
He leadeth me, it says.
We are his sheep, and he leadeth us.
And he says, when he putteth forth his
sheep, he goeth before them.
That is one clear, ringing thought, that the
sheep needs leadership.
Now, God's way is always to raise up
a leader, and impart his vision to the
leader, and the leader imparts his vision to
the flock.
And God has never been able in, so
far as I know, in Bible history or
since Bible times, God has never been able
to get the ear of a flock.
He can only get the ear of the
leaders of the flock, and then the leaders
of the flock impart the information on to
the flock, and thus the flock gets the
Lord's word.
Democracy is not the Bible way.
Now, if I were in some churches, particularly
in some Baptist churches, I probably would be
led to the door and given the one
way, take it somewhere, because they make a
great deal of democracy in the church.
But the simple fact is that democracy is
not God's way in the church, and never
has been.
And it's never in Old Testament or new
that the Lord ever imposed democracy as a
way of life.
Always there is a spiritual aristocracy which leads
the flock, and God imparts to his leaders
his will, and his leaders impart it to
the flock.
Now, God couldn't get a hold of the
world at the time of Noah.
He couldn't make the world here, so he
called one man aside.
And he said, Noah, you have found favor
in my sight.
And then he laid the plans for the
ark and the redemption through the floodwaters on
the heart of Noah.
And the eighth person, the seven others were
saved, and the race was preserved by God's
intimate revelation to one man who became the
voice to the rest.
When God would lead the children of Israel,
a million strong out of bondage in Egypt,
he did not appear to the Jews, a
million of them.
He did not appear through the democratic processes
to the people of Israel.
He led one man to the backside of
the desert and kept him forty years in
spiritual training, and then appeared to him in
a flame of fire in the midst of
a bush.
And, lo, God spake to him out of
the midst of the bush and said, Moses,
Moses!
And he said, I am the Lord God
of thy fathers, the Lord God of Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob, and I have come to
send you to my people, to say, let
my people go, that they may be delivered
from bondage in Egypt.
So Moses went to the Jews and had
a hard time persuading them, but finally did,
and led them out, a million strong from
four hundred years of slavery.
And when God would take the children of
Israel, that same flock with a few minus,
who had died in the wilderness, when he
would take them across the river Jordan into
the new land of promise, he did not
take them by announcing to all the flock,
now come on, he told Joshua.
And Joshua notified his staff, and they notified
the public, and soon they were going across
the turbulent Jordan, and so with Samuel, and
so with John the Baptist, and with the
apostles, and with the church fathers.
When God would redeem Christendom from the slavery
of potpourri, he did not appear to the
people of God all over Europe, he appeared
to one thick-necked German climbing up a
pair of stairs on his knees, Martin Luther.
And thus he imparted to Martin Luther the
magic words that just shall live by his
faith.
And the Reformation was born, and when that
Reformation declined, and the preachers stood in the
pulpit drunk till the altar boys had to
hold them up while they recited their litanies,
and dense darkness had fallen upon Europe again,
and especially upon England, God did not appear
to all the Anglican churches and say, come
on, lead my people out.
He appeared to six men.
One man particularly took the leadership, and those
six men prayed in the haystack, and out
of it was born the great Wesleyan revival.
When God would lead a people to give
three million dollars a year to missions, and
send out seven hundred and thirty missionaries to
twenty-two fields of the world, he did
not appear to the people, he appeared to
one lonely man who walked on the pebbly
shores of New England with the soles out
of his shoes, and out of it was
born the Christian Missionary Alliance, and so it's
all been done in years.
Now, I call attention to something else, that
every time the flock proposed an idea, they
went wrong.
Every time the flock rose and said, I've
been reading in my private day-by-day
reading, I've been reading about Dathan and Byron,
and the rest of them, and when they
rose against Moses and said, how come you
take the authority on you?
Hasn't God spoken to all of us?
Moses threw himself on his face and said,
God, don't hear him.
Don't hear him, God.
Said, he'll lead us astray.
Don't hear him, this mix of multitude, you
don't know which way to go.
You know, God's judgment fell upon them, and
God put the leadership back in the hand
of Moses.
So, the flock needs leadership, and the flock
needs food.
He leads me in green pastures.
Why did he take him in the green
pastures?
So it would be a soft place to
lie down.
No, green pastures were food.
They were the nourishment.
Now, theoretically, the sheep should have been able
to discover the food for themselves, and there
are those who say, I don't need to
go to church, I have my own Bible.
I don't need to hear a preacher or
a Bible teacher, because I have my own
Bible.
Theoretically, that is all very good.
But the simple fact is, God has said
in the church, pastors and teachers and apostles
and leaders and helpers and governors, that the
church might come unto a perfect man, the
stature of the fullness in Christ Jesus.
So we need the teachers, because they will
give us food.
And then, of course, protection.
Now, the enemies of the flock are many.
We don't know how many.
He prepared the table before me in the
presence of mine enemies.
So the enemies of the flock are many.
There were beasts of various kinds, wolves, lions.
Then there were the serpents, and they were
always dangerous.
And they prepared a table, that is, they
found a green pasture in the middle of
all those enemies.
And the enemies were not afraid of the
sheep, but they were afraid of the shepherd,
because he had his staff there, his rod,
his club.
Now, a wise pastor will protect the flock
from a hundred things, a hundred things, that
they'll never know that they're being protected from,
from false teachers and false brethren.
You read the writings of Paul and of
Peter and of Jude, and you will find
how very meticulously and sharply they were warned
against false teachers and false brethren.
They were protected.
And also the sheep needed healing.
When a flock of sheep had been out
all day, in spite of the best protection
of the shepherd, sometimes they got their heads
into places where they knocked skin off their
noses and off their tough heads.
And I've seen in the split years, they
got into a barbed wire fence somewhere, it
bled an ear.
Or in spite of the best care of
the shepherd, some beast got a little chunk
out of them.
Then just before the shepherd retired, he led
his sheep through, let them come in one
by one into the sheepfold.
And as they entered the sheepfold one by
one, he examined their heads and their legs.
The rest of them were protected by wool,
but their heads and their legs were relatively
naked, and they needed care.
And if there were any scars or any
evidences of recent injuries, he put oil on
them, mollifying ointment to heal it up.
He anointed my head with oil.
And if they were thirsty, he fed them,
he gave them water, and my cup runneth
over.
That was the last thing the shepherd did
at night.
And a shepherd, an elder, should also be
one who is prepared at least to give
some kind of healing to the flock.
Now let us look at the character of
the shepherd's ministry.
A shepherd can be the ruin of a
flock if the flock is unfortunate enough to
get the wrong shepherd.
Now this is one of the perils of
the flock-shepherd idea in the Bible.
And that's why the shepherd is admonished so
sharply to be the right kind of man.
Christ spoke of the hireling shepherd, who did
what he did for pay and had no
heart in it.
Back in Ezekiel, the thirty-fourth chapter, I
have a passage there that I want to
read.
That's in the Old Testament.
And here, the man of God, Ezekiel, deliberately
laid the backsliding of Israel upon the shepherds,
the leaders of Israel, the priests, and those
who were supposed to lead them right.
The word of the Lord came unto me,
saying, Son of man, prophesy against the shepherds
of Israel.
Prophesy and say unto them, Thus saith the
Lord God unto the shepherds, Woe be to
the shepherds of Israel that do feed themselves.
Should not the shepherds feed the flocks?
Ye eat the fat, and ye clothe you
with the wool, and ye kill them that
are fed, but ye feed not the flock.
The diseased have ye not strengthened?
Neither have ye healed that which was sick.
Neither have ye bound up that which was
broken.
Occasionally and all, they'd get caught and get
a broken leg, and the business of the
shepherd was to bind them up.
Neither have ye brought again that which was
driven away.
Neither have ye sought that which was lost,
but with force and with cruelty have ye
ruled them.
And they were scattered, and because there is
no shepherd, and they became meat to all
the beasts of the field when they were
scattered.
My sheep wandered through all the mountains, and
upon every high hill, yea, my flock was
scattered upon all the face of the earth,
and none did search or seek after them.
Therefore, ye shepherds, hear the word of the
Lord.
As I live, says the Lord God, truly
because my flock became a prey, and my
flock became meat to every beast of the
field, because there was no shepherd, neither did
my shepherd search for my flock.
But the shepherds fed themselves, and fed not
the flock.
Therefore, O ye shepherds, hear the word of
the Lord.
Thus said the Lord God.
Behold, I am against the shepherds, and I
will require my flock at their hand, and
cause them to cease from feeding the flock.
Neither shall the shepherds feed themselves any more,
for I will deliver my flock from their
mouth, that they may not be meat.
That was Old Testament.
That ideal was carried over into the New
Testament.
And the shepherd should be himself a man
dedicated to his flock.
He, the good shepherd, will be one who
does his work willingly, and unselfishly, and humbly.
And above all, he will be himself an
example of Godliness.
Then he says, When the chief shepherd shall
appear, ye shall receive a crown of glory.
Now, that shepherd is over all shepherds.
If any shepherd finds himself in disagreement with
the chief shepherd, then I will instantly take
the part of the chief shepherd against the
shepherd.
So I am not saying that you should
blindly follow any pastor, or any teaching, whether
it be over the radio or in person.
I recommend that you do not thus follow
blindly any man.
Check with the chief shepherd.
Appreciate and value the ministry of the under
-shepherd.
But the chief shepherd is over all shepherds,
and they are responsible to him.
And if they fail, God says, Oh, I
am against you, of the flock.
But if they live and serve as true
men, then they will receive a crown of
glory that fadeth not away, in that day
when the chief shepherd shall appear.
And that closes with the direction of our
gaze, when the chief shepherd shall appear.
There never ought to be a shepherd in
all of Christendom who didn't do his work
with expectation in the back of his head.
While his hands were busy in his mouth
and his mind with practical care and feeding
and leadership of the flock, always there ought
to be at least a subconscious expectation that
the chief shepherd will appear.
I said to a preacher this week, this
last week, that I just can't for the
life of me get much interested in things
of earth.
Outboard motors and criss-cross, all this kind
of thing.
I ride in one, somebody else runs it.
But I couldn't get proud of it.
There is a fellow with a Cadillac here,
a Buick here, a powerboat here, and a
cabin cruiser somewhere else.
This one boy from the back side of
the track said, the guy's loaded.
And he was loaded.
And he may be a good man, and
I hope he is, but I just can't
get in.
I can't get interested in things that I'm
going to have suddenly leave behind me.
I'll let them serve me, but I'm not
going to serve them.
I'm not going to feel good from having
them, and I'm not going to feel dejected
from not having them.
Because in the back of my head there
is eternity, and the thought that the chief
shepherd is going to appear.
All I'll have then will be what I
have done for the chief shepherd.
I'll leave my criss-cross.
And all the rest behind me.
I'll leave everything, or you will, and only
what we've done for God will last.
Thank God for the haunting dissatisfaction that's a
part of a Christian heart in life.
Thank God that he looks around and says,
this is not my home.
This is not it.
Thank God I wouldn't part with it.
It keeps me blessedly miserable most of the
time.
But I wouldn't part with it for the
world.
To be a stocky extrovert, happy in this
life, a religious Esau, with my feet sticky
with red earth, and call myself a Christian?
No.
Thank God for the haunting dissatisfaction that tells
me this is not the place of thy
rest.
Take no comfort here.
Seek no repose there.
Get no joy out of that possession.
This is not the place of your rest.
When the chief shepherd shall appear, then you
can relax.
Then you can rest.
Then you can get hold of something and
say, by the grace of God, this is
mine forever.
But now nothing's yours forever, except what you
got inside.