Renew Your Passion For Ministry! - 1 Peter 5:2b Series

1 Peter 5:1-10 Therefore to the elders among you, I appeal as a fellow elder and a witness of Christ's sufferings who also will share in the glory to be revealed: 2 Shepherd God's flock that is under your care, overseeing--not because you must, but because you are willing, as God wants you to be; not pursuing dishonest gain, but eager to serve; 3 not lording it over those entrusted to you, but being examples to the flock. 4 And when the Chief Shepherd appears, you will receive the crown of glory that will never fade away.

The Shepherd’s Tools

Review: The Ministry of the Word and Prayer

The central idea of this passage revolves around the only command in the whole section: shepherd the flock of God. The elders of the church are to shepherd (or if you prefer the Latin word - pastor) the flock. We found last time that shepherding involves feeding, protecting, leading, and nurturing. And all of that is done through the ministry of the Word and prayer. Those are the shepherd’s tools. When the Apostles’ duties became too time-consuming, they passed off some of those duties to others so that they would not have to neglect the ministry of the Word and prayer. As you get busier and busier as a leader in the church, you end up having to spread yourself thinner and thinner – there is no way around that. But two things that must never become thin are the ministry of the Word and prayer. We do not reduce our time spent in all areas proportionally to make room for increased work load. Everything else gets spread thinner, but we guard those two areas. I was given a book to help me with priorities and not overworking, and the author, who is a pastor, said he sets his schedule so that he is finished with his sermon by mid-day on Monday each week. He spends about four hours preparing his sermon. The whole rest of the week is other stuff. Why would we even need a pastor like that? You can study that much on your own. The reason pastors are paid is so they can devote their full time to the ministry of the Word and prayer. But because of the tyranny of the urgent, there is constant pressure to let everything else crowd out what is most important. It’s crucial that we resist that pressure.

The only qualification for a pastor that appears three different times in Scripture is "able to teach" (1 Ti.3:2, 2 Ti.2:24, Tit.1:9). There are three books in the Bible devoted to instructing pastors. We call them the pastoral epistles - 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, and Titus. I went through those three books and picked out each time Paul exhorted us pastors to do something. I found 30 - 30 times pastors are told to do something. Two were about setting a godly example. One was about treating people with respect. One about staying pure. One about avoiding arguments. And 25 about teaching and preaching. Ninety percent of what elders are instructed to do involves some form of teaching God’s Word.

We are to shepherd the flock of God, and that is done through the ministry of the Word and prayer. It is not uncommon for churches to have two different kinds of elders: teaching elders and administrative elders. When you get a guy who seems like he would make a great leader in a lot of ways, but he is just not a teacher, there is a temptation to want to make him an elder. And so very often a church will just ignore the requirement that an elder must be able to teach, and invent this concept of a non-teaching administrative elder. The reason that does not work is because all administration in the church must be guided by the Word of God. You want your administrators and your teachers to be the same people, because in order to properly administrate the church a person must spend a great deal of time in the study of God’s Word.

I gave an example last week of parking lot lights. Right now the lot is too dark. In the wintertime people come for an evening service, and it is poorly lit. But the kind of lights we need are very expensive. Once we know the price, how do we determine whether it is worth it? What does the Bible say about parking lot lights? Plenty. One reason we have lights out there is for kindness. It is a safety issue. And the Bible says a whole lot about kindness, does it not? Picture someone who is elderly or injured or who has poor eyesight, and they have to walk across our very uneven parking lot in the dark. That puts them at risk of falling. What if a couple of the ladies get into a conversation in the parking lot after church and they are still there after everyone else has left? Two women alone in a dark parking lot - not the best situation for making people feel secure.