Paul’s Charge To The Ephesian Elders Series

Today’s passage has a lot to tell us about the job of a minister or pastor or elder. Maybe you think, ‘I’m not a minister or pastor or elder. This doesn’t apply to me’! But all of us have responsibilities towards other people. This passage has something to say to all of us.

Before I get started, I’d like to say something about the word ‘pastor’. In Baptist churches in the UK, the main leader of a church is often called the ‘pastor’. But in most Bibles, the word pastor only comes once. That’s in Ephesians 4:11: ‘So Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the PASTORS and teachers…’

You might think that this is rather strange. Surely a pastor is an important person in a church? So why does the word ‘pastor’ come only once in the Bible? Actually, the ESV doesn’t use the word ‘pastor’ even once! It has the word SHEPHERDS instead of pastors. That’s because the word that’s translated ‘pastor’ in most Bibles is literally ‘shepherd.’

So, when we think about a ‘pastor’ of a church, we need to imagine a ‘shepherd.’ And we shouldn’t imagine a shepherd in a UK setting. We should imagine a shepherd in the time of the Bible.

Let’s now go back to our passage.

The apostle Paul is on his third missionary journey. He’s travelled through ‘Asia’, the area we know as Turkey. On his way, he visited Ephesus. He found some disciples there and ended up staying there three years. It looks like the church in Ephesus grew during this time. When Paul arrived, he found disciples. When he left, there were elders.

Paul left Ephesus and went to Greece. But now he’s decided to go to Jerusalem. On the way to Jerusalem, he wants to see the elders of the church in Ephesus.

Rather than stop in Ephesus, he decides to stop at Miletus, thirty miles south. When he gets there he asks the elders of the Ephesian church to come over. As I mentioned, Miletus was about thirty miles from Ephesus. Paul wouldn’t have asked the elders to make that trip if he didn’t have something important to say.

In the 500 or so words that he says, Paul has basically one instruction for the elders of the Ephesian church:

‘Be on guard for yourselves and for all THE FLOCK, among which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, TO SHEPHERD the church of God which He purchased with His own blood’ [Acts 20:28, NASB].

Paul talks about THE FLOCK and he talks about SHEPHERDING the church of God. He likens the job of looking after God’s people to the job of a shepherd looking after a flock.

Paul’s first three words are ‘Be on guard.’ That is his key message to the Ephesian elders. In a moment, we’ll take a look at that.

But first, I want to go back a bit. Paul has a lot to say to the Ephesian elders. He doesn’t start with this instruction to be on guard. What else does he talk about?

Paul first needs to set the scene, to bring the Ephesian elders up to speed. He tells the elders that he’s on his way to Jerusalem. He doesn’t know what will happen to him there. ‘But’, he says, ‘the Holy Spirit testifies to me in every city that imprisonment and afflictions await me.’ Then he continues, ‘None of you among whom I have gone about proclaiming the kingdom will see my face again’ [v.22-23,25]. To summarise: Paul is going to Jerusalem. He’s expecting trouble. He’s departing the scene.

Because Paul believes he will no longer be around he wants to tell the elders of the Ephesian church three main things.

THE FIRST PART of what Paul tells the Ephesian elders is ACCOUNTING.

I once worked on a large relief and development project in Azerbaijan. We rebuilt schools and clinics which had been damaged in fighting, got wells working again, supplied seed for farmers and so on. When we got to the end, we had to write a FINAL REPORT. And we had a ‘lessons learned’ session.

Paul is saying, ‘I’ve come to the end of my time with you. This is my FINAL REPORT.’

Or another analogy. You finish working for a company. Then you might have an ACCOUNTING. You hand back any company equipment you’ve been using: the laptop, the mobile phone, the company credit card.

Paul is saying, ‘I’ve come to the end of my time with you. This is my ACCOUNTING.’

You might think that in Christian ministry, God is the one to judge. Our own evaluation of our work is meaningless. But it isn’t! Baptist ministers are taught to be ‘reflective practitioners.’ We’re supposed to reflect on what we’ve been doing. In the project in Azerbaijan, we wouldn’t have learned anything if we hadn’t had a ‘lessons learned’ session, if we hadn’t reflected.