Grace Means Suffering: Elders
Grace Means Suffering: Elders
1 Peter 5:1-4
It is somewhat strange what you are being asked to do, as members of a local church, listening to a pastor preach a text essentially telling himself what to do. But that’s what Peter intended; these letters would be read aloud in local churches, and chapter five begins with the words, “So I exhort the elders among you…”
You’re supposed to hear this, so that you can see the difference between a good under-shepherd of Christ and a pretender; the Lord would protect you from bad men and bad shepherds through his Word.
As we make our way through the text, there are almost certainly going to be moments where specific failures of your elders will come to mind, areas where you are going to think, “What you’re saying is that an elder should be like this, but you are not like that.” Or, “I remember that time when you personally fell so short of that it was hard even tell if you were aiming for it.” And I’m not going to ask you to stuff those thoughts under the rug or pretend like they’re not real. They are. We are weak, sinful men - and it is a good gift from our Lord and part of his good rule that we are to be judged more strictly as ministers of God’s Word in this local church.
We strive to take this and other Scripture where pastors receive their orders very seriously and very soberly. We long to be good under-shepherds. But where we fail and fall short, my plea to you is that you would look past us and look with hope and joy at the Chief Shepherd over us all, Jesus Christ.
There is a lot in verse 1 that could stand as its own sermon. Peter who witnessed the very sufferings of Christ, calling himself a fellow elder. There’s a sermon on the foundation of eyewitness testimony the gospel accounts are built on that.
What I want you to see here is what Peter emphasizes that is true of every elder and shepherd in a local church: The shepherd’s sheepness - that he is not only a shepherd of the flock, but himself part of the flock. He is a mere Christian before he is a pastor of Christians.
Peter calls himself not only a witness of the sufferings of Christ, but “...a partaker in the glory that is going to be revealed.”
Partaker. You have no part in the Kingdom of God unless you join him, unless you sit down at the same table Peter sits at, pull up a plate and a cup, and partake. Partake of the free grace of Christ Jesus, his body given for you and his blood poured out for you.
Peter won’t let us pastors forget it. Your pastors are forgiven sinners, partakers of Christ, just as you are. We kneel at the cross together; a shepherd is first a sheep. Peter describes duties of the shepherd:
Shepherd the flock of God among you.
When you envision the office of elder, pastor, overseer, minister, shepherd - a certain class of images probably come to mind: Depending on your church background, either robes and vestments and stained glass, or faux hawks, ripped jeans, and soul patches.
But Peter tells his fellow elders that pastoral work is, pastoral—meaning earthy, blue collar, dirt-under-your-fingernails kind of work. The very word “pastoral” comes into our language from the Latin pastoralis, meaning “related to the shepherd.” We should be able to look at David keeping his flocks as a boy and learn about pastoral ministry in the local church.
The work of an elder is the work of a shepherd. He is to feed the sheep on the riches of God’s sustaining word and the true bread of Jesus Christ. He is to lead the sheep away from the deserts of self-help and self-rule, to lead them away from the sheer, deadly cliffs of false saviors and idols - and lead them to the green pastures of God’s salvation through Christ.
He is to protect the sheep from wolves in sheep’s clothing - rightly dividing the Word of God in order to identify those peddling false doctrine and false gospels. And he is to protect the flock from the predators outside the church who would seek to deceive them. The ministry is therefore not a place for the lazy who will not study to show himself a workman approved to handle and carefully divide Word.
It is therefore not a place for proud fools who will not be taught - for those who won’t have their minds changed by the Word when his ways of thinking challenged by it. The ministry is not a place for cowardly people who will never say “No!” or “Over my dead body!” It is no place for those who want to please everyone.
When those who should not be shepherds become shepherds, the sheep become prey to theological predators. They waste away before theological disease. They wander after their own hearts into deserts and off cliffs. And the Lord hates it, and he is against such false shepherds.
Peter defines not only the activity of an elder but also the object of that activity. The pastoral call is not a call to shepherd “the flock of God,” but rather, “the flock of God among you.”
Shepherd the flock through careful oversight.
All elders must be able to teach, oversee and manage well - starting in their own households - but there is a particular calling to a ruling sort of elder and a teaching sort of elder. Paul, in 1 Timothy 5:17, talks about the elder who rules well, and the elder who specifically does this in teaching.
God often calls some elders to a team that are particularly gifted in teaching, and some who are particularly gifted in the work of oversight, in managing. The word translated “oversight” in the ESV here is the word that also gives us the word “bishop”. The idea is an organizing guardianship, caring for souls and guarding them through proper managing oversight.
Shepherd the flock willingly.
Verse 2, “...shepherd the flock of God that is among you, exercising oversight, not under compulsion, but willingly, as God would have you.”
In 1917, a young C.S. Lewis won a scholarship to the Oxford University. But, just after winning the scholarship, Lewis dropped everything to voluntarily join the British army as an officer to go to fight in Europe’s Great War.
He fought and was wounded by a shell that killed the man next to him on 15 April, 1918 and spent the rest of his time as a soldier recovering in a hospital. Lewis didn’t have to go to the Great War, at least not when he did. But he joined because he couldn’t bear the thought of being drafted into the army, as if to say that he wasn’t willing to put his body between those he loved and those who would do them harm unless the government made him.
Pastors are volunteers, not drafted. That’s Peter’s point in verse 2. They are to serve at the inward compelling of God’s Spirit, out of a deep desire and call, not out of compulsion. A pastor who has to be forced to be a pastor by others should step down or not step up in the first place.
Shepherd the flock for divine glory, not shameful gain.
Speaking of C.S. Lewis, there’s this great couple of paragraphs in sermon he gave and later published in a collection of essays called The Weight of Glory. He said,
“If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.
We must not be troubled by unbelievers when they say that this promise of reward makes the Christian life a mercenary affair. There are different kinds of reward. There is the reward which has no natural connection with the things you do to earn it, and is quite foreign to the desires that ought to accompany those things. Money is not the natural reward of love; that is why we call a man mercenary if he marries a woman for the sake of her money. But marriage is the proper reward for a real lover, and he is not mercenary for desiring it. A general who fights well in order to get a peerage is mercenary; a general who fights for victory is not, victory being the proper reward of battle as marriage is the proper reward of love. The proper rewards are not simply tacked on to the activity for which they are given, but are the activity itself in consummation.” -C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory
A pastor who pastors for money is far too easily pleased. Money is a proper aid to ministry—the workman is worthy of his wages and the elder who rules well is to be given a double honor, Paul says. But it is not the proper reward, or motivation, for ministry.
This is why Peter tells us in verse 2 that a pastor is to serve, “...not for shameful gain, but eagerly.” He is to serve eagerly for the sake of the reward of new life and sin forgiven and saints obeying the Lord and the crown of glory from Christ, but not for money.
This isn’t a poverty theology, as if pastors must take a vow of poverty. But it is good reason why we all taste a certain disgust in our mouths when we see pastors in $55-million jets and wearing $3,500 sneakers. Those pastors may just be mercenaries rather than shepherds.
Shepherd the flock by example, not domination.
The work of a pastor is not the work of a dictator, but rather an imperfect example following the perfect example, Jesus Christ.
Verse 3 tells us that he is to serve eagerly “...not domineering over those in your charge, but being examples to the flock.” -1 Peter 5:3
The pastor is not a little dictator when he stands in the pulpit. This doesn’t mean that a pastor doesn’t tell you what to do—that is literally part of his job description when Paul tells Timothy to preach the Word in season and out of season, to rebuke, exhort, correct, whatever is necessary to teach the Lord’s people to obey the Lord’s teaching.
It does mean that he leads the sheep to trust and obey the Shepherd first by trusting and obeying the Shepherd. It means their home, finances, mouth, and heart - ought to be examples of an imperfect, grace-dependent person following the Lord.
A Shepherd’s Promise “And when the chief Shepherd appears, you will receive the unfading crown of glory.” 1 Peter 5:4
The Lord Jesus is truly a good, gracious, forgiving, and patient Chief Shepherd to his weak under-shepherds. He promises faithful pastors a crown of glory at his appearing.
Shepherding done right is hard work, and the Lord motivates the shepherd, not by telling him to be disinterested in his own gain, but very interested; he just grounds that interest in the proper object - the reward of God - rather than the improper objects - the rewards of money, pride, and man.