Sheep of His Pasture

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Transcript:

Please take out your Bibles this morning and turn with me to 1 Peter chapter 5. 1 Peter chapter 5. You’ll find 1 Peter toward the end of your Bible, toward the end of the New Testament, between James and 2 Peter.

Today we’re going to finish our current series on the pictures of the church. During this six-week study, we’ve looked at several of these metaphors that God used to describe the church in the New Testament. And each of these word pictures that we’ve looked at tells us something about God’s view of the church, tells us something about our place in the church or what the church is supposed to do.

And the picture we’re going to see here in 1 Peter 5 is no exception to that. So let’s look at 1 Peter 5, verses 1 through 4 together. It says, I exhort the elders among you as a fellow elder and witness to the sufferings of Christ, as well as one who shares in the glory about to be revealed.

Shepherd God’s flock among you, not overseeing out of compulsion, but willingly, as God would have you, not out of greed for money, but eagerly, not lording it over those entrusted to you, but being examples to the flock. And when the chief shepherd appears, you will receive the unfading crown of glory. So in this passage, God used the apostle Peter to call out a few misbehaving church leaders and to encourage the ones who were faithful, to encourage the faithful ones not to follow their bad examples.

Now, since Peter wrote this specifically to church leaders, some of you may be ready to check out until lunchtime thinking this doesn’t apply to you. But stick with me for a few minutes because this passage does tell us some things about how God views and how God feels about the church as a whole. You see, Peter was addressing the problem of pride among some of the leaders in some of the early churches.

Even back then, even all the way back then, there were church leaders who were treating their churches like they were their personal kingdoms. Sometimes we see that and think it’s just a modern problem, but it happened all the way back then. These men that he was talking about, and two, they were far more interested in feeding their own egos, in increasing their own power, or in accumulating their own wealth than in serving God’s people. God didn’t like that.

So Peter told them that God’s church deserved better than what they were giving them. God loves the church. You hear that this morning?

God loves the church, and he doesn’t want to see it get misused. And so God gave these instructions through Peter to those that he had called to lead. He told the elders in the churches that the church was not their little kingdom.

That’s not what it was meant for. The church didn’t exist for the sake of their pride or their power or their wealth. The church exists, hear this, the church exists for the benefit of the sheep because sheep need to be shepherded.

Now, I want to be clear, that’s just describing one particular aspect of the church. So we shouldn’t assume that the church only exists to take care of its own members. That’s not the case at all, because a church that only focuses inwardly on the care of its own members and neglects the command to carry the gospel to the lost and to reach out and to make disciples is a church that has already begun to die.

A church can’t just be inwardly focused on taking care of its own members, but it should focus on that. So the care of the sheep isn’t the only part of the church that matters. It’s not the only thing the church does that matters, but it is something that matters.

And it certainly mattered a whole lot more than what these wayward elders were building. And so in verse 2, Peter told these elders that they needed to get with the program and start shepherding God’s flock. And it’s no mistake that God described his people as sheep and ministry as shepherding.

He did that on purpose. Ancient readers would have understood what shepherding meant. They would have understood that shepherding is a big responsibility and that there’s a lot of tasks involved in shepherding.

Shepherds had to guide the sheep. And in the same way, pastors are supposed to guide their flocks and help them discern God’s direction. And that doesn’t mean that your average church member, if it’s right to say it that way, that your average church member doesn’t mean they’re incapable of hearing from God or that they’re incapable of discerning God’s will.

But it means that God has called and equipped some people to help support others in the task. And he’s given us that job of helping with that guidance. Some of you will talk to me from time to time about something that you’re facing.

And I know you have a relationship with God. And I know you can read His Word for yourselves. But sometimes, isn’t it helpful just to have somebody along for the journey?

I mean, I found that to be the case. When I’ve talked to others in ministry about things I’m going through, it’s helpful. I can read God’s Word, and I have a relationship with God.

But sometimes it’s just helpful to have that support from somebody who’s along for the walk with you. So shepherds had to guard the sheep. Shepherds also, I’m sorry, they had to guide the sheep.

They also had to guard the sheep. Shepherds had to guard the sheep. Pastors are supposed to do the same thing when it comes to false teachers and bad influences.

We’re supposed to guard the sheep. A few years ago, there was a novel that came out that undermined a lot of people’s confidence in the Bible because what it did was it took made-up events and presented them as historical fact and sort of wove truth and fiction together, And it undermined a lot of people’s confidence in the Bible. And when that was going on, it was my responsibility with the church I was serving at the time to guard the flock and set the record straight about the inaccuracies of what that novel portrayed so that people would understand they could trust God’s word.

Let me say this. If you can’t trust God’s word, you certainly can’t trust Dan Brown’s, all right? And so that was part of my responsibility.

Here’s what the truth is. Here’s what’s made up. Here’s what you need to understand.

because as a leader in the church, it’s my responsibility to protect the flock against the ravenous wolves of false teaching, whether you come across them on TBN or Facebook or anywhere else. When you’re troubled by those things, when you have those questions that trouble you, it’s my job to take you to the Bible and help you discover the answer. Shepherds guard the sheep against those who are determined to lead them astray or worse.

shepherds had to help the sheep. From time to time, sheep would fall into ditches or they’d get stuck in the mud, and the shepherd would have to be there to pull them out. And pastors and other church leaders are here to help the flock when they’re genuinely in need, all right?

Now, we see in the book of Acts, we see a kind of a distinction there that those who are serving in more of an elder-type role are primarily responsible for the spiritual needs, where they appointed the deacons to care for more of the benevolence needs and those sorts of things. But at the same time, there’s some overlap. You know, I don’t know a deacon in this church who would refuse to help you with a spiritual problem if you had one.

And I’m not going to refuse to help you with a physical need if I’m able to help. I mean, I’ve helped church members who are stranded on the side of the road with a broken down car. And I’ve had deacons who have counseled people over spiritual things.

So there’s some overlap there. But at the same time, we have those responsibilities. the main thing is for us to be available to help those who are genuinely in need like a shepherd would.

So then a shepherd would also feed the sheep. They were supposed to be responsible for feeding the sheep. And shepherds, pastors, those who are in church leadership are responsible too for feeding the sheep.

We’re responsible at least for making sure the sheep get fed. Now I don’t know that the shepherd produced a meal, every meal, every feeding time for the sheep, that he was responsible for spoon feeding them. But the shepherd, at the very least, had to make sure to lead the sheep to where they could graze for themselves.

And as a pastor, it’s my job to make sure you get fed. Now, I do that in part by preparing this meal of God’s Word for you a couple times a week. But the bigger and the less obvious part of that is making sure you’re trained and equipped to study God’s Word for yourselves.

That’s some of what we do more so on Wednesday nights and with some other groups that I’m working with that we work on just digging into God’s Word for ourselves so that the sheep can feed themselves. I tell you, if you’ve got a very large flock of sheep, if you’ve got more than a couple, if the shepherd was having to hand feed them every time, some of the sheep aren’t going to get fed. So it’s the responsibility of the shepherd to put out feed when it was necessary, but also lead the sheep to where there was pasture for them to graze in for themselves.

But the shepherd had the responsibility of making sure the sheep got fed. And I have the responsibility of ensuring that I lay out God’s word for you and also equip you as best I can and as best you’re willing to be able to graze on it yourself. Then shepherds also have the responsibility of overseeing the sheep.

They had the responsibility of watching out for the sheep, watching over them, because sheep need to be looked after. Sheep have a tendency to wander away from where they’re supposed to be. They’ll get lost in the hills or in the caves, and they need somebody to look out for them.

They need that overseeing. And as believers, we need someone watching our backs and calling us to faithfulness when we have a tendency to wander. And by the way, I just want to be very clear in this, that church leaders need all these things too.

I don’t want to stand up here and say, sound like I’m super perfect and I’m the answer to all your spiritual problems. That’s not it at all. Church leaders, we’re not a separate class of super spiritual people who are immune to all these problems. We have the same needs. We just also have the added calling from God of being used by him.

We’re really just tools here. We have the added calling of being used by God to help meet those needs for others, that added responsibility. So keeping the responsibilities of the shepherd in mind, keeping in mind those responsibilities, Peter told these elders to shepherd God’s people.

keeping in mind all that men, shepherd God’s people. They were wrong. They were dead wrong.

These men were dead wrong in the way they had built these kingdoms up for themselves and they had placed themselves on the throne. They were wrong to think that the people existed to serve them instead of realizing that God had put them where they were to serve his people. They were wrong.

And in verse 2, Peter said, shepherd God’s flock among you. It’s important we notice that phrase among you. That means get off your little throne, be among God’s people, and shepherd them the way you’ve been called to.

Peter’s message to these elders was go, guide them, guard them, help them, feed them, watch over them, take care of God’s sheep. Peter understood this calling to take care of the sheep because Jesus had told him three times in John 21, 15 through 17 to take care of his sheep. So Peter, of all people, understood that working with sheep can be messy.

ministry can be messy. Working with sheep can be messy. It can be frustrating.

It can be exhausting, but it can also be rewarding. And he made sure they understood that the reward for serving in that capacity wasn’t to get to rule over their own little kingdom. In verse 4, Peter assured them that they were instead looking toward the ultimate reward at the coming of Christ. Don’t work for your rewards here.

Work for the rewards that are to come. And so Peter told them to get back to taking care of God’s sheep. But he also told them that they needed to do it in the right way.

They needed to do it with the right spirit and with the right motivations. Because we all know it’s possible to do the right thing for the wrong reasons, right? We get that.

Have you ever done something you were supposed to do, but you weren’t happy about it? Anybody else? I’m sure most of you have heard the joke about the man whose wife woke him up for church, and he told her he didn’t want to go back because those people there, they didn’t like him, and he didn’t particularly like them either.

And his wife said that he had to go because he was the pastor, right? I don’t know how the story went after that joke. The man might have gotten up out of bed and gone to pastor his church.

But let me tell you, unless he had had a severe attitude adjustment on the way, he did the right thing in the wrong way, didn’t he? And he carried that attitude with him into his work. Peter said that this shepherding needs to be done in a certain way, and it needs to be motivated by love.

That’s the common thread throughout this passage. In verse 2, he began explaining how they were supposed to shepherd the flock by saying this. He said, not overseeing out of compulsion, but willingly as God would have you.

This idea of compulsion means doing something out of a sense of obligation. We do it because we have to. It’s something we do because we have to.

But the Bible tells the shepherd not to serve out of a mere sense of obligation. Instead, ministry is supposed to be something that we embrace deliberately. Peter said that’s the way God wants a man to serve.

God calls church leaders into ministry. He calls us, but we have to embrace that call as well. You see, a man is never going to be an effective shepherd of God’s people if there are heel marks across the parking lot where he got dragged into church.

In all honesty, ministry can be frustrating, tiring work. I mean, We toil away. I’m sure none of your jobs are like this.

We toil away. That was a joke, by the way. I’m sure a lot of you deal with similar circumstances.

We toil away, and we don’t always see that we’re accomplishing anything, at least in the short term, sometimes not even in the long term. It’s hard to tell whether you’ve accomplished something in ministry day to day. But if we’re in it for the love of God and his people, it’s also, hear me on this before you get mad at me, it’s also thrilling to have the privilege to serve and to see what God does do.

And that’s why, even though I initially had other plans for my life, I’d rather embrace the call of God and be a pastor than do anything else. Being governor of Oklahoma or working on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, you know, where they yell as they’re trading cattle futures and stuff. Those are the two things I always wanted to do.

Those might have been good, but God’s way is always better. God’s plans are better. I love what I get to do, and I wouldn’t trade it.

We’re supposed to serve willingly because God, hear me on this, God loves his church and he desires for them to be shepherded by men who are motivated by their love for him, by their love for his people, and their love for the ministry instead of just those who serve out of a sense of obligation. Somebody’s got to do it. So Peter told them not to serve out of compulsion, but willingly as God would have you.

Also in verse 2, Peter told them to serve not out of greed for money, but eagerly. Shepherding is something that should be motivated by love for God and His people rather than by our self-interest. I’ve thought this for a long time. If you see ministry as a way to get ahead in life, you’re doing it wrong.

And today, there are some so-called ministers who luxuriate in their massive mansions, and they fly around on multiple private jets. I don’t know how you need more than one at a time anyway. And they isolate themselves from the little people, some of their words, from the little people whose contributions out of their meager social security checks finance the whole empire.

And if their goal in ministry is gain, then they’re just as wrong as the elders that Peter was addressing here. Ministry doesn’t require necessarily that we live in abject poverty, but it also shouldn’t be the rainbow leading to the pot of gold at the end, where we’re in it just to enrich ourselves. And church leaders who use ministry as an excuse to fleece the flock are not doing what God called them to do.

I don’t care, hear me on this, I don’t care if the work is getting done, I don’t care if the ministry is getting done, if greed is the motivation, it’s wrong. You can do a right thing for wrong reasons. And instead of being motivated by what’s in it for them, these elders were called on to demonstrate an eagerness for the work.

I like the Greek word that they’ve translated here as eagerly, and some of you may wonder from time to time why I bother telling you about the Greek text. I do that because Greek is so descriptive and so precise at times that it adds a whole layer of meaning to our understanding, and you take this word that we’ve translated eagerly, for example. In English, to do something eagerly can mean anything from, I can’t wait for lunch, to, oh, I can’t wait to get this over with.

It runs a whole spectrum of meanings, but in Greek, this word that they’ve translated here as eagerly is a compound of two words. And the second word means a strong feeling like fury, but it’s also a word that can be used to describe the heart or the spirit. The first word in that compound means forward.

So what we get here when we look at the Greek, this compound of these two words, we get the picture. Greek paints a picture where our hearts are leaning forward, sitting on the edge of their seats. How’s that for eagerly?

That’s so much more memorable than do it eagerly. Your heart is sitting on the edge of its seat with anticipation. God wants his people to be shepherded by people.

He wants his people to be served by people who wake up each morning and cannot wait to serve, who cannot wait to do what God’s called them to do among his people. They cannot wait for the work that he’s called them to. God wants that rather than for his people to be shepherded by those who are motivated by what’s in it for them.

Now in verse 3, Peter wrote that these elders ought to be served, I’m sorry, ought to serve by not lording it over those entrusted to you, but being examples to the flock. That word to lord over the people means to subdue them. And it always makes me think of when Benjamin and Charlie play live PD.

We’ll hear the boys wrestling and roughhousing in their room, and then we’ll start hearing Benjamin yell at his little brother, Stop resisting! Stop resisting! You know, Charlie’s a good little resistor.

But eventually, Benjamin will subdue him because he’s bigger. And Charlie will stop resisting, and Benjamin places him under arrest. And hopefully that’s the last time that happens. But when something like that happens in real life, officers will use force to establish dominance over a suspect and subdue them so they can’t resist and so they’re no longer a threat.

That’s what that means to subdue them. They show the suspect that I’m in charge. And that’s what some of these elders would do, just in a presumably a less physical way.

They would dominate the people in their churches. They would subdue them. They set themselves up to be these unquestioned rulers of the church.

And they were acting more like pagan kings than the servant leaders of God’s people. And this is what Jesus warned against in Mark chapter 10 when he said, You know that those who are regarded as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and those in high positions act as tyrants over them. But it is not so among you.

On the contrary, whoever wants to become great among you will be your servant. That’s why Peter told them that they weren’t there to act like kings who needed to be served. You’re not here to lord it over the people and act like kings who needed to be served.

They were there to set an example for the flock as servants. After all, verse 3 says that the flock had been entrusted to them. It’s God’s flock.

These were God’s people, not the elders’ royal subjects. They were God’s people, and God has entrusted his people to the leaders that he’s called and has given those leaders the awesome responsibility of looking after their spiritual welfare. Now, as a church and as church leaders, we strive to present everyone mature in Christ, as it says in Colossians 128.

That’s our goal. So if we’re trying to help the flock become more like Jesus Christ, then church leaders have to set an example for what that looks like and lead as Jesus Christ would lead. Not like these pagan Gentile rulers, but as Jesus Christ would lead. God’s people do not need leaders who rule over them like kings.

They need shepherds who care for them in love and humor. So here you see the text focuses on these instructions to the church leaders, but here’s what it tells us about the church as a whole. If you haven’t picked up on this already, God loves the church.

And he has made the church, he’s made the people of the church, the sheep of his pasture, not the cattle of his slaughterhouse. The church is a collection of people that God loves. He put us together to be cared for and to be nurtured, not to be abused and exploited like some of these were doing.

And it’s important to me that you know this because many people have unfortunately seen examples of churches where those in power treat the people more like cattle than like sheep. And I want to say to you this morning that if an experience like that has led you to think that that’s all the church is, I can understand why you might keep the church at arm’s length. But I also have to tell you that that’s not what the church is supposed to be like.

That’s not what God designed it to be. God established the church in large part for the spiritual good of his people. Not to harm them, but for their spiritual good.

And that’s why his word tells church leaders here to put aside their selfish concerns and shepherd the sheep. Again, it’s not by accident. It’s not by accident that God calls the church a flock of sheep.

Even that terminology describes his love and care for us. You see, more than most animals, sheep need a shepherd. They need someone to look after them.

Some animals take care of themselves. Sheep needs somebody to look after them. But even more importantly, the relationship between the shepherd and the sheep was an intimate one.

They spent their time together. So the shepherd knew the sheep by name, and the sheep knew the shepherd’s voice. The shepherd could look at his flock, and he could tell them apart and know which one was missing.

He knew the personalities of the sheep. He knew their hurts and their ailments. He knew what they were afraid of and what they were spooked by.

He knew what their needs were at any given moment better than anyone could. The shepherd also knew how to protect them. This world is a dangerous place for sheep.

They get lost, they get hurt, and they get eaten. King David had to fight off lions and bears when he was a shepherd. And even today, in the words of Peter in this same chapter we’ve been looking at, he says the devil is prowling around like a roaring lion looking for anyone he can devour.

It’s a dangerous place. But sometimes we resist the idea of being part of the flock, and we want to go our separate way because we want what we perceive as the total freedom to do what we want when we want. But if we understand the threats that sheep face in this world, and if we understand the heart of the shepherd, then we know that the safest place to be is with the flock in his pasture.

So for God to gather us as a flock and provide us with a shepherd shows how much he loves us and how much he cares about protecting and nourishing us. And here’s the most important thing. Nobody, nobody is a better shepherd than Jesus Christ. That’s why Peter called him the chief shepherd in verse 4.

For all the discussion this morning of pastors and elders being shepherds of God’s flock, we’re actually just under-shepherds serving at the pleasure of the chief shepherd. Even the best of us are only pale reflections of his goodness. I won’t shepherd you perfectly.

Not because I don’t want to, but because I can’t. I have flaws, and I’m sure I’ll let you down because I’m just a sheep myself who also needs to be shepherded by the chief shepherd. And the chief shepherd is a shepherd who will never let us down.

You see, he loves you more than any pastor ever could. He can guide you through any step of life. He can protect you.

He can guard you from the gravest of all threats. He can help you with your greatest needs. He can feed you with the bread of life.

He can oversee you, hear this, by discerning what’s hidden away deep in your heart away from view. He knew you before you were ever conceived in your mother’s womb, and he loved you before he ever spoke the universe into existence. He knows you better than you know yourself, and he laid down his own life so that you could live.

Jesus said in John chapter 10, I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. When we chose to sin, the consequence of that sin was death and separation from a holy God.

And to complicate matters, there was no way for us to fix it and save ourselves. No way whatsoever. We owed a penalty that we could never pay, but our shepherd laid down his life for his sheep.

See, Jesus took responsibility for our sins, and he was nailed to the cross in our place, and he shed his blood to pay for our sins, and he died for us, and he rose again. And because he loves us, not because we’re lovable, but because he’s loving, he offers forgiveness to all who come to him by faith. This morning, if you’re a believer, I want you to understand the fact that God has put us together as a church, to be his flock, to be the sheep of his pasture, is an indication of his great love for us.

This morning, if you’ve never trusted Christ as your Savior, I want you to understand that God showed his love in even a greater way, as the book of Romans says, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Jesus also said, no greater love has any man than this, than he would lay down his life for his friends. Jesus Christ, the good shepherd, the chief shepherd, laid down his life for his sheep.

And this morning, if you recognize that you’ve sinned and you’re separated by your sin from the Holy God, if you recognize that you don’t have a relationship with him, if you recognize that you will not spend eternity with him in heaven, if you understand that you’ve sinned and you believe that Jesus Christ laid down his life, he shed his blood and died on that cross to pay for your sins in full and that he rose again to prove it. If you believe that this morning, then you can ask God’s forgiveness and be saved.