"Help Wanted" 1 Timothy 3:1 Sunday Evening Worship Service

First Timothy chapter three, one verse.

Paul says, This saying is trustworthy.

If anyone aspires to the office of overseer, he desires a noble task.

I had to give him a ride to our practice Friday.

And uh so we're in my truck together, and he asks me, so do you have any plans this weekend?

This kid's a freshman in high school.

You got any plans this weekend?

I'm like, uh, well, I think um I have church on Sunday, actually.

He was like, yeah, but I mean that's every Sunday.

That's not really a plan.

We've got a point.

So I said, you know, I'm I'm actually a pastor.

So I mean we're like halfway through the season.

He doesn't know this yet, but that's that's okay.

And he laughs and he's like, yeah, right.

What?

Yeah, right.

Yeah, right, you, man.

Now this is this is ICS here is the soccer team.

And so the the the kid asks me, so so what church do you pastor?

I tell him, you know, but you've you've probably never never heard of it.

I'm actually enjoying this.

Uh yeah, the the kid in the back seat, this other player, who takes his phone out and googles my name and just starts laughing.

Um, is the best part of this.

But the kid in the front seat didn't think of that.

And so he's like, no, no, what church you pastor?

And I was like, I mean, it doesn't matter.

It doesn't affect my plans for the weekend.

And he he looks at me and he says, I don't think you're a real pastor.

Like, well, what do you mean?

And he says, I think you're just one of those guys who aspires to be a pastor.

Okay.

Yeah.

It's like, you know what?

That is ex- There's more truth in that sentence than you are able to understand.

It's like, well, which is it?

Are you a pastor?

Or do you he got fixated on this, which is it?

Are you a pastor, or you do you just aspire to be one?

Like, when you get home, you need to look up 1 Timothy chapter 3, verse 1.

1 Timothy 3:1

And then you need to recognize that's not an either-or question.

It is a both hands.

This is what Paul says.

This is a trustworthy statement that everyone who desires the office of an overseer, he better desire the work of it.

He better aspire, is the word in the ESV here.

If anyone aspires, I used to lead a Tuesday morning men's Bible study back before we had the master seminary here.

It was for prospective seminary students, and we called it a team.

And we called it a team based on this verse.

Not that we had no truck and we had no Mr.

T with us.

We called it A-Team.

We called it A-Team because of this word.

Aspire.

It was for men who aspired to the office of overseer.

The concept of aspiration in our society is often much maligned.

Our society, I think, in many regards, not every regard, but in many regards, um, pursues mediocrity and likes to make conformity to make everybody fit in and kind of has hostility towards those who excel or exceed.

And that's so much kind of our worldview now, our postmodern worldview, and it has infected a lot of the way people think.

Where aspiration, especially among men about what they want to do with their lives, aspiration is maligned.

When somebody has a desire to do something or a desire to excel at something, they're often told, you know, it's arrogant to have an aspiration like that.

It's arrogant to desire that.

Who do you think you are?

Couldn't other people do that?

And I'm not even talking about pastoral ministry, I'm talking about anything.

It's arrogant to think you're going to be a lawyer.

It's arrogant to think you're going to be a banker or whatever.

There's others that could do that.

Why don't you settle for something less than that?

And it's a very maligned idea aspiration is in our society.

When the scripture speaks of aspiration, it sometimes has a positive connotation, sometimes a negative connotation.

Here, most certainly a positive connotation.

And that just lets you know that the value of an aspiration is fixed on the worth of its object.

What you aspire to determines whether aspiration is a good thing or a bad thing.

Here, Paul says, if anyone aspires to the office of an overseer.

Now, you should know this about the way the Bible speaks of an elder, the way the New Testament speaks of an elder, it uses these words interchangeably.

Pastor, bishop, elder, overseer, shepherd.

They're all those all five of those names are interchangeable.

There's not one office in the church for pastors and another for elders, and another for bishops, and another for shepherds, another for overseer.

They're all those words are used interchangeably.

They all refer obviously to the same group of people, and you know that because there are even references in scripture where they are used interchangeably.

For example, in Titus 1, verse 5, Paul tells Titus, I want you to go into every city of Crete and appoint elders in all the churches, elders in all the cities.

Titus 1:5

So if there's a gathering with a church there, Paul's task is to appoint elders in that church.

Then when he goes on in first, or in Titus, he describes the qualifications for elders as the qualifications for overseers.

James describes the elders of the church coming together to pray for you, the leadership of the church, James referred to as elders.

Then in Ephesians, Paul refers to that same group of people who gathered together to pray for you as pastors.

That's Ephesians 4, verse 11, where God gave the church pastors and teachers.

Ephesians 4:11

The word Peter prefers more than that is the word for shepherd, 1 Peter 5, verse 2.

1 Peter 5:2

The elders are supposed to shepherd the flock of God among them, and there Peter uses the word elder and shepherd interchangeably.

Paul to the Ephesians, not in the book of Ephesians, but in Acts chapter 20, gathers together the Ephesian elders and he refers to them as the overseers of the church.

Acts 20 · chapter mention

The Greek word here in 1 Timothy 3, verse 1, is the word for episcopas, sometimes translated bishop.

1 Timothy 3:1

I like the English translation overseer better, but it doesn't really matter whether you refer to them as bishops, elders, pastors, shepherds, or overseers.

It's the same group of people.

It's a group of godly men who are recognized as leaders in the church.

Here, as well as Titus chapter 1, Paul introduces a list of qualifications for what these people should be.

Titus 1 · chapter mention

You don't sign up to be an elder in the church.

There's not a clipboard that's passed around, and anybody who wants to be an elder can sign up and they have some kind of rotating function here.

Instead, 1 Timothy 3 and Titus chapter 1 give a list of qualifications.

Titus 1 · chapter mention

Often in our mind, we think the qualifications begin in verse 2.

An overseer must be above reproach.

A husband of one wife, sober-minded, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, not a drunkard, not violent, not gentle, I mean, but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money.

He must manage his own household well with dignity, keeping his children submissive, etc.

But the first qualification begins before that.

The very first qualification to be an elder is found in verse 1, and that is aspiration.

Someone who aspires to it.

Now, the word aspiration, as I mentioned, sometimes positive, sometimes negative.

The word is used later on in 1 Timothy 6, verse 10, as a negative connotation.

1 Timothy 6:10

Someone who, in there it's translated, desires the love of money.

Someone who has an aspiration for money will harm his soul.

He'll plunge his whole life into spiritual peril, and the love of money hurts people with pangs of grief.

But here, that same word is tied to the desire to be an overseer.

The word for aspire here, it has this focus in the Greek language not on the internal action, but on the external action.

So not on the internal fountain, not on the impetus inside your heart, but on what you're doing on the outside, how you're striving for it.

I would say in English we kind of conflate those two.

Aspiration could be an internal action, but there's two different words in Greek, one for internal desire and one for external action.

And they're going to both be used here.

We're going to look at the internal one in a second, but he begins with the external one, the aspiration, somebody who is reaching forward for something.

And Paul encourages it.

Notice that Paul encourages in the church men to aspire to the office of overseer.

And here, remember, aspire here is reaching out, doing something to put yourself forward, stepping forward, stepping out of the line and saying, I want to be a leader in the church.

Now, like I said, there's not a clipboard that comes around and you sign up, but the first qualification is that action, that stepping forward, that saying, I want to serve.

It's externally acted upon, it's visible to other people.

And Paul says it is a good thing.

It's a good thing.

Again, that's very much different than how our society views aspiration.

Generally negative.

No, it's not ambition.

Ambition is a different Greek word and a different English word.

Ambition is negative connotation, usually in English, I think.

If somebody is ambitious, it means they're trying to get ahead, maybe at somebody else's expense.

That's not this word.

Aspiration is different than ambition.

The Greek word for ambition is used in James chapter three a couple times, and there it's negative, it's selfish ambition.

And James, in fact, says that ambition can be the cause of strife and conflict in the church.

That when you have this ambition that wants to separate yourself from other people and put yourself ahead, it can cause conflict.

Certainly not all ambition is equal.

But this word here, as I mentioned, is different.

It's aspiration, it's a desire that you're acting upon to be a leader in the church.

Now it's interesting that Paul says here, if you aspire to the office of overseer.

The word office is not in the Greek, it's it's supplied.

It's the Greek just says to the overseer, to literally to the overseer, to the elder.

Uh the article, the word we translate in English, the, it implies identity.

In other words, if you desire to be identified as an elder, if you desire to be identified as a pastor, that's what Paul is saying is a good thing.

It's good that you want to desire to be identified as such.

Let's translate in the SP, the office of an overseer, and that's fine because he's going to contrast elders from deacons in a second, and you could say the office of a deacon, or perhaps deacon is just recognition.

But generally people say the church has two offices, elders and deacons, and they're not the same people.

Certainly elders are servants in the church, but deacons are recognized for their service, elders are recognized for their leadership.

And that's why deacons, which he's going to get to in verse 8 down through verse 13, are both men and women.

Both men and women can be identified as super servants in the church.

But for elders, for leaders, it's for men.

And Paul introduces it by saying it is good to aspire to it.

And I repeat myself over and over again because I do want to drive home to some of the men who are here into your thinking that it is good to want to be a leader in the church.

It's not false humility.

It's good to chart your course in life to say, you know what, I want to grow up to be an elder.

Now, elders and pastors, as I said, are interchangeable.

Paul is going to use the kind of distinguishing language we use in English.

So in English, you understand the Bible in the Greek, elders and pastors are interchangeable.

They're the same people.

But in English, we often call pastors those who are paid and elders those who are not paid.

In practice, they're both doing the same work.

And Paul's going to make that distinction himself in 1 Timothy chapter 5, where he's going to talk about how you can have lots of elders, but the ones who labor in preaching and teaching should be paid.

1 Timothy 5 · chapter mention

They're worthy of double honor.

Double honor in that sense being being paid for their work.

But here, before he gets to there, he doesn't divide them up yet.

He says, all men who aspire to be an overseer, it's good for them to aspire.

Whether they want to aspire to be a pastor who's ordained and paid for his ministry, or they want to aspire to be an elder who is shepherding and doing it all for free.

They're both good.

So I do want to appeal to some of you younger men here that it is worth thinking through.

If you aspire for the work of a pastor, it's a noble thing to aspire to.

And I repeat that over and over and over again because I want you to believe it.

Man, what a blessing it would be if Emmanuel became a church that was known for raising young men who wanted to go to seminary, wanted to get the training, and wanted to be pastors.

It's trustworthy that that would be a good thing.

And for people that have a career, that have set their life in a certain trajectory, it's also good for them to want to be elders.

And it doesn't mean it does not mean, don't confuse what Paul is saying here, is that every man should want to be an elder.

So wise, your husband is not an elder, don't be hitting him right now.

Come on, man, step up.

He's not saying that every man needs to be an elder.

He's saying it's this is a general trustworthy statement.

If someone wants to be one, that's good.

He doesn't say every man should.

But if a man wants to be one, it's good.

But notice that he doesn't end there.

He now uses a different word.

He now switches to the internal.

So the next word in Greek it's epithetia, which is a strong desire.

Sometimes it's even translated lust, but it's not translated lust here.

Here it's just translated desire in the SV.

Now he switches from the external ambition, the external aspiration, the external work of putting yourself forward.

Now he switches from there to the internal desire of the heart.

And they're translated differently in the SV.

Aspiration verse desire.

Inside the heart is the fountain of desires.

And he says, it's good for him to desire the work.

It's translated in the SV a noble task, but it's the word for work.

Paul says, if you want to be an elder when you grow up, begin here.

Desire the work of an elder, not the office.

You want to aspire to the office.

In order to aspire to the office, you first have to desire the work.

That's the cause and effect.

There have been people who have aspired to the office of a pastor without desiring the work of a pastor.

Or who have aspired to the office of an elder without desiring the work of an elder.

I hope you have not been shepherded by those kind of pastors.

But I know Emmanuel is a big enough church with people from all over the country and all over the world to come in and out of here that it would not surprise me if some of you have been at a church before whose pastor was a pastor kind of in name only, who didn't do the actual work of a pastor.

And Paul says here that if you want to desire the office of an overseer, you have to first desire the work.

Bill Bryson in his book At Home, which is a fascinating book to read.

It's a book that covers things like how we got forks and how of all the spices in the world you get salt and pepper in your house, and you know, why when you have a you know you spend the night somewhere, do you get room and board?

What does the board mean?

He has this fascinating book about the development of all of these things that happen in the home.

And he has a whole section on the book about being a pastor in the 1700s and developing a parsonage.

And uh to write this book, he moved into an old 1700s parsonage in the middle of England and uh tries to live the life of the pastor, the typical British pastor in the 1700s, and it was an extremely lucrative lifestyle.

Everybody gave them food.

He found this one diary of the pastor that lived in his house, and most of this pastor's diary was not like his prayer requests, it was all that he ate.

And Bryson writes that if this doesn't mean that every pastor in the 1700s lived like this, but it certainly describes, if not what was normal, it describes what was possible.

That's a classic Bill Bryson line.

Certainly there has been periods of time where people have wanted to go in the pastoral ministry for some perception of a life of ease.

John Barridge, a Puritan preacher, an Anglican who was soundly converted after he'd been in the ministry 14 years, he got saved.

And you wonder, how does somebody be a pastor?

He's pastoring Everton, which is a massive church.

How how could somebody be a vicar of Everton for so many years and not be regenerate?

Well, when you read about his life, you know, his parents, you know, his dad worked on shoes and was a shoe repairman kind of thing, and he tried that, and that was a lot of work.

And so his parents sent him away to a farm, live on a farm with one of his aunts to teach him to work with his hands.

And man, he hated that.

He didn't like getting his fingernails dirty.

So his aunt let him sneak off to school and he discovered, you know, Hebrew and he became a Hebrew scholar.

And you know, he said at the time he was doing it because it was the only occupation he could find where he didn't get his hands dirty.

So certainly there are some people like Barridge or like Bill Bryson's vicar from the 1700s, and perhaps there's some today that have figured out how to get people to send them to seminary and have found some job that they consider a life of ease, you know.

I've joked before about being a pastor.

People ask, what do you do all week?

And you know, you're only preaching for a couple hours on Sunday.

That's not a 40-hour a week job kind of thing.

And you know, one of my friends, Clint Archer, always says it's like you asking a marathon runner, you know, you only work.

You run the 40 in 12 seconds.

You only work 12 seconds every four years, right?

Certainly there are some people who take the pastoral position like that, that work only for a few hours on Sunday and have a life of ease.

But Paul forbids that in verse one.

He says you have to actually aspire and desire the work.

Again, it's translated task, but it's the word for work.

You desire the actual effort.

Now, this is an important introduction here because Paul's not only talking about professional ministers here.

Paul is still with the group combined here, he's talking about lay elders and pastors.

So he's talking specifically to people that want to be lay elders.

He's saying you want to be a lay elder at your church, you want to be known as an overseer or a bishop or a pastor at your church, and you're not going to be paid by your church, but you want to be known as a leader of your church.

The very first thing is you have to desire to do the actual work.

You have to work to get it.

Perhaps you've heard people say things like, Yeah, I could have played college sports, but I just didn't want to put the work into it.

I was a good baseball player, and I could I could have gone pro, but I didn't want to put the work into it.

No, that's what it means to be a professional athlete.

That's what it means to be able to play at that level, is to put the work into it.

I mean, the anybody could be one if they just put the work into it.

The whole point is not everybody wants to put the work into it.

Sorry, I'm regressing to coaching mode here for a second.

The same thing is true in the church.

I could be an elder if I just put the work into it.

Well, that's that's exactly what the desire is.

Do you desire to put the work into it?

Now, when he says it's the noble work he aspires to or he desires, Paul doesn't go on to describe the work right here.

He's going to describe the work later on in 1 Timothy and uh and 2 Timothy as well, and to Titus.

He's going to describe the work very clearly.

He describes it in Acts chapter 20 to the Ephesian elders.

Acts 20 · chapter mention

He describes the work of an elder and overseer all over the place.

But right here, he just leaves that and he goes on to other qualifications.

So it's worth zooming out a little bit and asking, what is the work that an elder aspires to do?

John Piper says this way, spiritual leadership is knowing where God wants people to be and putting in the effort and taking the initiative to get them there by God's means and God's power.

I think that's a very good definition.

I would say it this way: the main sign of someone who's called to be an elder is the desire to care enough about people, to be involved with their lives, and to direct them to grow in God's word.

And I'm going to read that sentence one more time.

This is how I would describe it.

The main sign of someone's desire to be an elder is that they care enough about people to be involved in their lives and to direct them to grow in God's word.

In other words, the work of an elder is the work of caring about people, firstly.

And then beyond just caring about them, to actually be involved in their lives enough that you can direct them to grow in godliness using God's word.

You know, there's a word for this in the New Testament.

Shepherding.

That's the word.

Shepherding.

You can make any of these nouns into kind of a gerund into a verb.

You can call it eldering.

You can call it pastoring.

You can call it spiritual overseeing.

But my favorite of them is shepherding.

That's the work of an elder.

It's the work of a shepherd.

I'll give you a little outline.

I got four points in this as we go through it.

What is the work of a shepherd?

The first, the work of a shepherd is to care about the sheep.

The work of a shepherd is to care about the sheep.

And this is where I think a lot of, especially younger people who desire the office of an overseer may fail to desire the work of actually caring about sheep.

Not so with older people.

I think older people that are drawn towards being recognized as an elder, they generally have the care for people down.

I mean, that's what they desire at that point.

But I have encountered with some younger, perhaps seminary students, the desire to be a pastor, lacking the commensurate caring for people.

Some are drawn to pastoral ministry for preaching or for discipleship or for theology, but they're not really drawn to the care of a soul, which is requires actual love for the people whom you care for.

You can imagine the stereotypical seminary student who cares more about the pulpit than the people.

Charles Jeffries has an incredible book, one of my favorites called The Minister of Shepherd.

He calls those kind of people pulpit pharaohs.

They're pulpit pharaohs.

Remember the pharaohs of Egypt?

They built these big pyramids out of sand and straw.

And Jeffries in his book, Minister of Shepherd, says there is no shortage of seminary students that are pulpit pharaohs.

They try to build elaborate pyramids out of eloquent words, but all it is is just sand.

The real elders, meanwhile, are with Moses, spending 40 years in the wilderness as a shepherd.

The first mark of the work of a shepherd is the actual care about people knowing them, actually praying for them because you know them and you love them and you care for them.

You would think that would be evident.

Christians all care for each other, but there's a mark of being an elder where there's a real internal care for the life of the church, the love of the people in the church.

Not even the direction of the church, not what the budget of the church is, not what programs are going on with the church.

There's all kinds of people that love this program, but loving a program doesn't make you a pastor.

Being passionate about this form of ministry doesn't make you an elder.

That's not the desire to be an elder.

Loving whatever ministry you serve in doesn't make you an elder.

That's not the feature.

The desire, the aspiration is the love of the people in that ministry.

There's always a temptation to love programs over people or to love, care more about property than the people who are using the property, or to prioritize, you know, we do this ministry because that's what we've always done, and this is a ministry that's important to us, rather than the people who are involved with it.

That's a perennial temptation of eldering, but a true elder desires the work of a shepherd, which begins not with the field.

Shepherds don't love the fields.

Shepherds don't care about the grass in the field except and how it serves the sheep.

Shepherds care and they love the sheep, not the fields.

Secondly, the first work of a shepherd is to care about the sheep.

The second work is to be with the sheep, to spend time with the sheep.

A shepherd can't phone it in.

Imagine a shepherd who's only around his sheep on Sundays.

He would find his sheep diminishing and diminishing and diminishing over time, wouldn't he?

The wolves would be getting fatter.

Shepherd would roll in in the Sunday and say, weren't there more of you last week?

Well, you're not there, shepherd.

The shepherd has to be with his people.

He has to be involved in their lives.

And this requires humility because often the sheep that need the most help are the bitingest sheep.

I don't know if bitingness is a word, but it's working for me there.

A shepherd has to come down to do the work of a shepherd.

A shepherd has to go be with the sheep.

And I'm not talking in the church right now.

I'm talking about actually as a shepherd.

It's humbling to be a shepherd because you do have to condescend.

You do have to go down to be with sheep rather than people, to be with sheep rather than friends.

Charles Jeffries, again in Minister of Shepherd, makes the same point.

I'm going to read you a little bit of a, I'll read you a paragraph from this book.

He says, Many a young man has been sorely troubled on entering his first church because of his feeble love for people.

On examining his heart, he's found it cold and dead.

He's looked at the men and women before him and confessed to himself that for most of them he doesn't care about them.

There seems to be no point of contact.

He studies, meanwhile, they only exist.

They know hardly anything, and he knows a lot.

He's been thinking they don't have a thought at all.

It's by no means easy to make that kind of person into a shepherd.

He can be an orator without difficulty.

He could be a reformer immediately.

He can flourish if he talks about politics or society.

But he will not be a shepherd.

It would take years, if not decades, to patiently travel with a man like that and turn him into a shepherd.

First, a shepherd cares about his sheep.

Second, a shepherd lives with his sheep.

He spends time with them.

He knows what's going on in their lives.

He knows where they struggle.

He knows where they doubt.

He knows where they excel.

And that takes work to do.

You know, you can't have a conversation in a hallway.

So, what are your secret sins?

It's not going to make good hallway conversation.

So it requires time and effort to really understand the lives of the people in the congregation, which is why a church should have lots of elders.

Emmanuel has 900 members or something like that, a thousand members somewhere in that window?

We have 35 elders, count their wives, 70 elders.

So you can do the math here.

That's 10 to 20 people or something like that per elder.

It takes work to understand what's going on in everybody's lives.

Takes actual effort and energy that can't take place on Sunday mornings.

You can have a conversation on Sunday morning and then pick it up next week, and then pick it up next week, and after a year get to a point where maybe it's substantial.

But the real work has to take place even outside of Sunday mornings.

And that's what elders are required to do.

And that is the first qualification.

You understand that?

That's the first qualification to be an elder.

Before you even get to divorce and remarriage, or they're children believers, or all that kind of stuff, can can they preach?

Yeah, their wife says they can preach, but I don't know.

Before you even get to that, you're right.

Do they even love spending time with the people?

To the point they actually know what's going on.

How do you know it?

I mean, do they know what kind of books you're reading?

Christian books you're reading.

I said this to an elder once, and he's like, that would just be impossible.

That would be too much work to know what kind of books the people that I'm shepherding are reading.

That is a question you could ask on Sundays.

That's it's questions like that.

The basic baseline of how are your people doing?

That's the sign of a shepherd.

Thirdly, a shepherd, work of shepherds to feed his sheep.

To feed his sheep.

This is, when you think of a shepherd, this is arguably his main function.

He directs them in spiritual growth.

The quote I read you earlier: a shepherd is someone who cares enough about his people to be involved in their lives and then direct them to grow in God's word.

You direct somebody to grow in God's word by feeding the sheep.

Sheep eat God's word.

But sheep, as is God's providence, can't find good grass on their own.

They don't know where to go on their own.

They will wander off and starve.

They'll fall into a muddy pit.

They need help.

And that's the analogy of an elder.

Here he's called an overseer in verses one and two.

It's somebody who's overseeing where the sheep are eating.

Now, you can use the word leading, but it is interesting.

Paul is going to use the word leading later on in chapter three.

But for now, he doesn't use the word leading.

Now he uses the word overseeing because you want to think carefully about what it means to lead sheep.

You think I'm putting myself forward as a leader of the church.

Well, okay, is leading a flock of sheep an exalted position?

That's the question you have to think about.

You think, oh, it's first among equals.

No, it's first among sheep.

Is it a dignified position to be a leader of sheep?

And how does one lead a sheep?

Well, he picks them up and he cares for them and he nurtures them.

It's a humbling activity.

One commentator calls it leading without lording.

I love that phrase.

Imagine being a boastful shepherd, being proud and boasting to your sheep, like, haha, sheep, I'm your leader.

What?

You lead by feeding, not by lording.

This is why servant leadership is obviously the example that Jesus gives.

You know, he takes his basin.

I love in Tom Joyce's office.

He had a sign above the door in his office.

He says, Got basin, got towel.

He walked out every time he walked out of his office.

That's Christian leadership that you lead by by feeding.

You lead by serving.

Shepherd feeds his sheep by directing them where in the word of God to grow.

This is conversations.

You know, what are you reading in the Bible?

How do you understand what you're reading?

Are you growing in your understanding of godliness, of doctrine, of what the scriptures teach?

Are you growing in the depth of God's word?

Are there passages that comfort you and encourage you, etc.?

That's feeding the sheep.

And fourthly, a shepherd guards the sheep.

A shepherd guards his sheep.

A shepherd guards the flock from danger.

Shepherds warn sheep away from Joel Olstein.

I mean, that's obvious, but beyond that, a shepherd worn sheep away from materialism.

A shepherd warns sheep away from doubt.

A shepherd worns sheep away from harm.

A shepherd could spend less time working on half-dead sheep if he spent more time protecting the sheep from wolves to begin with.

Sometimes guarding sheep looks like tracking down lost sheep.

Somebody who hasn't been in church for a while, somebody who you know that disappeared months ago, haven't seen him in three months.

You track him down.

Sometimes caring for protecting sheep looks like tracking down lost sheep.

Sometimes it looks like ministering to herding sheep or doubting sheep.

All the while aware of his own temptation so he doesn't get taken captive himself.

This is what Paul says to the elders in Galatia.

He says he used spiritual, restore those who are caught in trespasses, being careful to keep watch of yourself so you don't fall into the same trap.

There's no good for a shepherd to rescue a sheep from mud if he himself gets stuck in the mud.

And this is where you get really to the great paradox of being an elder.

The great paradox.

God calls us all sheep.

Jesus is our great shepherd.

God has called under-shepherds to shepherd the flock.

But those under-shepherds are themselves sheep.

That's the great paradox of Christian leadership.

God calls the church to be led by elders, and the elders themselves are sheep.

And some of those elders are hurting, and some of those elders bite, and some of those elders get lost, and some of those elders break their little feet also.

And the work of an elder is to go find such a one and restore him.

This is why, when you circle back to verse one again, the person who aspires for that work, this is the basics of Christian ecclesiology, the basics of Christian doctrine about the church.

It is good to want to be that kind of leader.

It's not the kind of leadership the world would promote, but it is good to be that kind of person who cares for the sheep, spends time with the sheep, who feeds the sheep, who guards the sheep, himself as a sheep.

It's very wicked to aspire the office of an overseer without desiring the work of a shepherd.

But this is a trustworthy statement.

It is good to desire the work of an elder.

Lord, we're thankful that you have designed the church in such a way that it is led by men who are weak, who themselves are sheep.

And yet, Lord, you meet us in our weakness.

Leadership of the church is not like the leadership of a board.

It's not visionaries casting vision for an organization.

We're not principals at a school.

We're certainly not board members of an institution.

But Lord, you chose to have your church led and shepherded by shepherds.

We know that we all give an account for how we shepherded, and we know that every Christian will give an account for how they treated their shepherds.

We want to do so with joy, not with grumbling, because that would be no benefit to anyone.

Knowing that we will all give an account for the one who is the great shepherd who oversees all of us.

So we're thankful for this church that you have through the years, decades of this church, you have led an army of faithful men, many of whom have been raised up in this church.

You've given them a desire to shepherd the flock of God among them.

Men who work jobs in the world, who have families with their own demands in the world, and yet who leave work and come here.

They leave work and go to Bible studies.

They leave work and go to people's houses who are hurting.

They leave work and they go to the hospital.

They leave work and they care for the sheep.

This is a noble thing you've put in their hearts.

We're thankful for so many men like that who aren't even paid, who do it just for their love of the sheep.

And of course, we love the sheep because you are the great shepherd and you laid your life down for the sheep.

So we love you, most of all, Lord.

We're thankful for the men that you've drawn to this church to do just that.

We give you thanks for them in Jesus' name.

Amen.

And now for a parting word from Pastor Jesse Johnson.

Thank you for joining us today.

If you're in the Washington, D.C.

area, I would love to see you at Emmanuel Bible Church.

Our service times and church information are on our website at ibc.church.

For more information about the Master Seminary and their Washington, D.C.

location, go to tms.edu.

I hope this resource has been a blessing to you and it helps you seek the Lord daily, serve others around you, and share the gospel of Jesus Christ with boldness.

May the Lord bless you.