v.1 The NIV omits a "therefore" that begins v. 1 of chapter 5, taking it, as is grammatically possible, as a minor connective, smoothing the transition to a new and largely unconnected section of the letter. But, in all likelihood, as the resumption of the general theme of Christian suffering at 5:6ff. would indicate, Peter is now talking about a subject that is very much related to what has preceded it -- the persecution these Christians are suffering. Persecution puts pressure on the church, which is felt especially by its leadership, and which makes their faithful care of the body still more necessary.

A lovely condescension on Peter's part. He was an elder, of course, in that the office of apostle brought up into itself all the lower orders of church office -- for an apostle was a teacher and a ruler of the church even more so than an elder. But Peter places himself with the elders of the church and not above them, and, in so doing, shows them the humility and the spirit of self-sacrifice for the church that he wants to instill in them.

v.2 Peter has used the same ideas together ("shepherding" and "overseeing") already of Christ himself, 2:25. In their leadership of the church, the elders are to take their cue from Christ.

Already at this early point, some elders, particularly those who taught and preached, the ministers in other words, were receiving their living from this work, as both the Lord (Matthew 10:10) and Paul taught they should.

v.4 The fact that godly elders are not to do their work for the sake of worldly gain does not mean that there is not a reward for them. But it comes at the Second Coming when the Chief Shepherd rewards the stewards who have faithfully served him. This note is also sounded several times in the NT. It is difficult work, but the Lord will not forget those who do it faithfully and well.

One of the great advantages of the consecutive exposition of Holy Scripture is that, sooner or later, and much sooner than would otherwise be the case, we come to every subject, every doctrine, every teaching in the Bible. The Holy Spirit saw fit to put this short paragraph also in Peter's first letter. Surely, therefore, there is something for us here, something profitable and necessary for our souls and those of our brethren and children. Church government is not by any means the first thing in the Bible, though clearly it is not the last thing either. But it has importance in its own place and, if we want to live the Christian life as Christ would have us live it, we must pay attention to this subject also. If the church is the mother of the faithful, as the Bible says it is, and if her health is fundamental to our health individually as Christians, then church government is not irrelevant. And that is not really so difficult a thing to prove.

Some of you may have seen in the newspaper some days ago an article reporting that Pope John Paul II has announced that throughout the millennium celebration, penitents who do a charitable deed or give up cigarettes or alcohol for one day can earn an indulgence that will shorten their time in purgatory. [Tacoma News Tribune, Sat. Nov. 28, 1998] The Pope, as you know, is the Bishop over all the other bishops of the Roman Catholic Church. Bishop was the old English translation of the word "overseer" which we have here in 5:2 in a verb form. He is also regarded as the Chief Pastor or Shepherd of the church. Well, is he right to tell us that we can gain time off in purgatory by not smoking for a day during the millennium celebration, or by saying the rosary or attending mass at a designated church? We, of course, do not think so because nothing like this is ever taught in Holy Scripture, nor is purgatory, and the Bible's view of repentance is very different. But, you see, this is a question of church government. Who are the faithful shepherds of the church? Where are they to be found.

On the other hand, we have encountered more and more in recent days Protestant and evangelical churches, Bible-believing, Christ-preaching churches, who do not and will not practice church discipline, one of the functions of the shepherds according to the Bible in both the OT and the NT. Or, you can turn on your television to the Christian station and hear ministers tell you that for a $2,000 contribution to that station, the Lord will bless you with financial prosperity. Are those shepherds taking proper care of the church? What ought the leadership of the church to be doing? How ought it to exercise its authority over the saints? The situation of every professing Christian in the world, in certain respects, boils down, sooner or later, to matters of church government and the fidelity of the shepherds of the church.

One thing that is clear, and it needs to be said plainly in our day, is that the Bible does not regard everyone in the same way in the Church. There is an order and some are above others in authority and leadership. Certain men -- and that is the Bible's teaching here as well; as both the term elder and the reference to young men in contrast in v. 5 indicate; we are talking about men, not women, here -- I say, certain men have an authority in the church; they are over the church, to lead it and rule over it. Their leadership must be exercised in a distinctly Christian way, this is Peter's main point, but it assumes as Peter here declares with his use of the term "overseer", that there is an authority to be exercised. So, we are reading here about church government.

But, all is not completely clear. Who are these elders who are addressed here? Is Peter referring to the men we would call ministers, to the lay-rulers whom we call "elders", or to both? The term "shepherd" itself is used in the OT for priests, prophets, and the kings of Israel. It was their task to feed the people of God with the Word of God, to protect them from their spiritual enemies, to lead them faithfully through life. However, the elders of Israel are never referred to as "shepherds" in any unambiguous passage of the OT. In Ephesians 4:11 Paul refers to one of the offices in the church as that of the pastor/teacher (not two offices but one, as the grammar indicates there). Pastor, you remember, is just an English word for shepherd. The shepherd/teacher. That would agree with the OT practice of referring to priests and prophets as shepherds because they fed the people of God with the Word of God. They were the preachers and teachers of the church, and so the shepherds. So, perhaps we should conclude that Peter is here talking about what we would call ministers.

But, perhaps in the NT the idea has been broadened somewhat and ruling elders -- those with gifts of government or administration as Paul says in Romans 12 and 1 Corinthians 12 -- are also included among the shepherds. You could be a faithful Presbyterian and take either view. To be quite honest, there isn't a great deal of material on church government in the New Testament, certainly there is no precise delineation of its design, its offices, their relation to one another, the authority and responsibility of each, and so on. There is, in truth, a certain vagueness, indefiniteness to it. We are taught certain things clearly enough, but there is a vast scope for a variety of applications and arrangements. The term "elder" which Peter uses here, is sometimes used embracively in the NT -- as it was in Judaism; even Jewish priests could be called elders when church leadership was being spoken of generally (the Sanhedrin was a body of priests and elders, but is referred to as the "elders of the people") -- and sometimes it is used more specifically of a man with one function or another in the government of the church. It is not always easy to tell which use of the term we have before us in any text. So, perhaps it is not so surprising that there are many differences of viewpoint regarding church government even among Christians who share a commitment to similar understandings of the Bible's other doctrines.

I suppose as many, if not more, Presbyterians in the last century and a half have read the valuable works of the Anglican Bishop John Charles Ryle or the Anglican priest J. I. Packer as have Anglicans themselves. Presbyterians love the sermons of the Baptist, and so congregationalist in church government, Charles Spurgeon, as much as Baptists do and much more than many non-Calvinistic Baptists do today. The heros of the evangelical pulpit, for conservative Presbyterians today, are the 18th century Anglicans, such as George Whitefield, and a Congregationalist, such as Jonathan Edwards or Martin Lloyd-Jones. We read the Puritans John Owen and Thomas Goodwin, both of whom were Independents, not Presbyterians. And, of course, we look to Augustine as our great authority on the grace of God, who was as much a Romanist in church government as one could be in that day when the Roman system had not been fully formed.

And that doesn't trouble us very much because, though we can see the importance of church government and its relevance to our Christian lives and the welfare of the church, we know that the Bible places more weight on the character of those who govern and the nature of their work in shepherding Christ's flock than upon the system of government, or the way in which the offices of ministers, elders, and deacons are related to one another in the system of government, and so on. Right-thinking Christians have little difficulty believing that it would be better to have J.C. Ryle or George Whitefield as one's shepherd, though they were Anglican or Episcopalian bishops or priests, than some Presbyterian who lacks the grace of God and the gifts of the ministry. Why we would leap at the opportunity to belong to the congregation at Northhampton, Massachusetts if Jonathan Edwards was again its shepherd. Why, we would rather have the saintly Gregory I, whom some historians call "the first pope" for our shepherd than a great many men who have led Presbyterian churches through the centuries -- men who far from shepherding the flock of God, with the faithful teaching of the Word and pastoral oversight of the saints, instead led the people of God astray with false teaching and, with no true concern for their immortal souls, undermined their faith in God. There have been thousands of Presbyterian "shepherds" so called, who have through the years led the people in their churches to believe that one does not have to be a Christian to be saved, that God loves everyone no matter what, that there is no judgment day to fear, that a worldly and sinful life has no permanent consequences and on and on. Just like so many priests and prophets in the OT, though ostensibly "shepherds", in fact they left the people of God as sheep without a shepherd.

Now Peter here assumes that these elders will be faithful to the Word of God and the gospel of Christ. He has already laid stress on the importance of that earlier in the letter. He concentrates his attention rather on the manner of their leadership. And he says at least four things.

He says that these men should be men of mature and polished godliness. I take that thought from the word "elder" itself. It means, after all, "older man." The Hebrew word for elder is formed from the word for "beard." But the idea is not that of chronological age, per se, as if anyone over 50 or 60 should be an elder. Generally, in the nature of the case, elders will be older men, at least it is hoped. But the reason for that is that it takes time to grow up into Christian maturity. The Christian life is a fruit that takes time to ripen. Nothing can give a man the sort of wisdom that is necessary to lead the people of God apart from long experience of walking with God, of reading God's Word and putting it into practice in his own life, of observing his own heart and the lives of others, of witnessing the Lord's works of grace and judgment in the world.

A Scottish Highlands minister once asked his congregation in a sermon: "What kind of minister would you like as your minister?" The answer he gave to his own question was: "For myself I would like that minister who had been scorched by the law, melted by the Gospel, and much sifted by the temptations of Satan." [John Tallach (ed), I Shall Arise, 14.] Perhaps we should add, that we would like him not only to be much sifted by temptation but to have learned in that sifting how to resist temptations and master them.

In any case, shepherds should be "elders" in the deeper, spiritual sense: men of age, of experience, of maturity, of wisdom, of a polished grace and Christian goodness.

Then, in the second place, these men, true shepherds, should be willing. That is, there should be nothing about them that suggests that they are undertaking leadership in the church in the manner of men who are stuck with a job they wished they didn't have to do. Just as God loves a cheerful giver, not one who gives grudgingly out of a sense of inescapable duty, so God loves a shepherd who is glad for the privilege of serving Christ's church and serving Christ in his church. Peter says as much in v. 2 and says it, no doubt, because already in the straightened circumstances of the church in his day, there were reasons not to take up responsibilities in the church.

In a day of persecution, leadership made a man simply a more visible target. Through the ages, in most persecutions, the enemy has struck at the head not the feet or body. The leaders, ministers and elders have been attacked, jailed, or executed in hopes that once the body is without its head it will wither and die. But, what is more, in days of trial the work of leadership gets more demanding, more thankless, more difficult in every way. Under pressure some Christian people can wilt, cave in, deny the Lord in some way to escape trouble or pain themselves. What is to be done with them? Other Christians often refuse to accept their apology or extend forgiveness to those they see as traitors. Divisions form within the church as a result. The more pressure is applied, the greater the tendency among Christians to define exactly what true faithfulness is and to begin to separate from other Christians who do not see things exactly the same way. This has happened times without number in Christian history. And it leaves the eldership trying to hold together a flock that wants to go apart in every different direction. Not much fun in that. And then so much else. The troubles people have, the ordinary ways in which folk can be exasperating, financial problems for the church, and everything else. I know men who have left the ministry because they simply got fed up with the people of God and tired of dealing with them.

And, I have met already in my life too many ministers and elders who seem embittered by their work, who do not seem to love it, or to be grateful for the privilege of being Christ's stewards and helpers, or to be solemnized by the sense of great responsibility that is laid upon those who would shepherd the flock of God. Instead they are looking wistfully at selling life insurance or are complaining about their pay or the people they have to work with. No, says Peter, this is not the way of the true shepherd. He loves this work for the privilege of it -- to serve Christ and his kingdom -- for the importance of it -- the salvation of souls -- and for the boundless fascination of it -- the work and the life of God in the souls of men.

Then, thirdly, Peter says that these men must think of themselves as servants. Once it was possible to make one's living in the Christian ministry, it became possible to care more for the money than the people of God. And once the Christian Church became more established, it was possible to care more for the position, the reputation, than for the people of God. The Anglican Church in the 18th and 19th centuries required so little of her priests, the religious life of entire communities was so purely a formality, and paid them so acceptably that men went into the ministry precisely so as to be able to devote most of their time to academic pursuits or fishing and hunting, or sleeping in.

There was nothing among these men of the spirit of Richard Baxter who wrote in his classic work The Reformed Pastor (199): "I am afraid, nay, I have no doubt, that the day is near when unfaithful ministers will wish that they had never known the charge of souls; but that they had rather been colliers, or sweeps, or tinkers, than pastors of Christ's flock; when, besides all the rest of their sins, they shall have the blood of so many souls to answer for."

No, says Peter. If a shepherd doesn't understand himself a servant, a man under orders, whose life work it is to serve God and others, a stewardship for which he will be held to account, he does not belong in this work. Money should be for him -- as it is remains so quaintly put even today in our pastoral calls in the Presbyterian Church -- simply that which enables a man "to be free from worldly cares and avocations" so that he can devote himself entirely to the flock of God.

It is that spirit of servanthood that has so often dignified and glorified the Christian ministry. Men, like Samuel Rutherford, whose appetite for work in the service of his small congregation at Anwoth became a legend, until his people used to boast that their minister was "always at his books, always among his parishioners, always at their sick-beds and death-beds, always catechizing their children and always alone with his God!" [Whyte, Samuel Rutherford, 3]

You will appreciate, dear people, how hard it is for me to deliver this sermon, how hard it is for me and Pastor DeMass to hear it, and so also your elders and your deacons, for whom the law of service as shepherds in the kingdom of God is the same, if in a somewhat different way. But I must say such things, for this is the Word of God, and I need to hear it and you need to hear it, humbling, demoralizing, even humiliating as it may be to the one who must preach it! What a high calling it is to be a Christian and, then, still much more, to be a representative Christian. No wonder Paul should say that the man who desires such an office desires a good thing. It is to the everlasting honor of the Christian church that it sets the standards for its officers so impossibly high.

And then, finally, Peter says that these men, these shepherds must be men whose lives are an example of what all Christians should be, who can lead as much by their example as by their words or their decisions, whose lives, that is, are themselves winsome and effective instruction in the Christian life. We've already said this, of course, in different ways in the previous three points. I won't repeat the idea, but Peter sums up his whole remark regarding the shepherds of the church by saying that the method, the manner of their leadership should not be by some kind of haughty and self-aggrandizing exercise of their authority, communicating some sense of their imagined superiority, but rather by commending their words and their decisions to the Christian community by the character of their lives, and bringing other Christians to higher things as much by the inspiring example of their character, their fidelity, their humility, their wisdom, their goodness, as by the justice of their decisions or the orthodoxy of their teaching. Paul would tell his congregations, "Follow me as I follow Christ." Peter tells the elders to be a shepherd like he was. And every elder or minister, in a lesser way, must be able to say the same. He must not be as the Pharisees and the scribes, of whom the Savior said, "Do what they say but not what they do!"

Now, to conclude, and to broaden the scope of this sermon to include all our elders in the direct application, let me tell you of one particular elder. I have come across material like this from time to time in my reading and I always make a note of it for the importance of good examples to us all. Perhaps some of us, as I have, have been fortunate enough to know a man who really, wonderfully, fulfilled Peter's picture of a shepherd here. And these words in 1 Peter take on a special grace and power for us because we have seen what he is talking about in flesh and blood.

Not so long ago I came across another book about Robert Murray McCheyne, the 19th century Scottish pastor, written by a man, J.C. Smith, who was a teenager when the revival broke out at McCheyne's St. Peter's in Dundee in August of 1839. And in that book he expresses his admiration for a Mr. John Mathhewson, who was an elder at St. Peter's when McCheyne was the minister. Mr. Smith remembers his long talks with this man about the times when he and his celebrated minister would go together to a deathbed or speak together to someone who was concerned about his soul. After his retirement from business, Mr. Mathhewson devoted himself to gospel work full-time. He also was known by all as a man of prayer, usually praying for about thirty people whose names he kept on his list. Smith remembers being on that sacred list of favored folks himself at one time and Mathhewson once telling him, "There's not a day but I mind you."

His well-thumbed Bible, Smith says, was a sight to see, notes everywhere and some of the pages nearly dim with use and marking. The 51st Psalm was obviously one which he had turned to so many times because now it was so worn it was difficult to read, and so the 14th chapter of the Gospel of John. It was said that he had read the latter chapters of Hosea hundreds of times. His knowledge of the Bible was legendary and his ability to find a text that spoke directly to a point. Smith and others spoke of how divine things and especially the grace of God and the power of the Holy Spirit to convert sinners to faith in Christ were so often in his speech.

On his deathbed, his Christian doctor, seeing the approach of the end, told him "You will soon get the palm of victory." "I've got it already," was his reply. He died, an old man and full of years, with all the blessings of Christian old age -- "honor, love, obedience, troops of friends" -- while folk around his bed were singing a hymn.

Smith says that after he had died, he laid his hand on the old man's head and prayed that his mantle might fall on us who were left, his mantle of prayer, of believing the Bible, of loving Christ, of having a kind heart to all.

There is an elder, a shepherd. And it is to the everlasting honor of the Christian church that she has produced multitudes of such men through the ages. It is our calling to be like them if we have leadership in the church and to settle for nothing less. It is the church's calling to think it of capital importance that it should be led by men such as that and by no other. To expect such lives, such godliness in her sons, and to cultivate it in them while they are young. I remember a conversation I had in the spring of 1984 with Professor Jan Veenhof at his office at the Free University of Amsterdam. At one point we fell to talking about the Bible's prohibition on women officers in the light of the fact that his church now had them. "Well," he said, "it was a necessity" for in his church it was the women who did all the work. Whether or not he intended to say this, he was admitting that his church did not have such men as could be the shepherds Peter is here describing. Wise, godly, devout men, who love Christ and his church and consider it high privilege to serve, however demanding the service, because they are men looking to their reward. If we love Christ -- who deserves to have his officers be drawn from the very best men, if we love the church, our own souls, and our children, we will care to have such men over us -- such men and no other. Because in that way we shall be led by the Lord Christ himself, the chief shepherd and overseer of our souls.