A Few Good Men with a Noble Task

And now I commend you to God and to the word of His grace, which is able to build you up and to give you the inheritance among all those who are sanctified. I coveted no one's silver or gold or apparel. You yourselves know that these hands ministered to my necessities and to those who were with me. In all things, I have shown you that by working hard in this way, we must help the weak and remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how He Himself said, it is more blessed to give than to receive. And when he had said these things, he knelt down and prayed with them all.

And there was much weeping on the part of all. They embraced Paul and kissed him, being sorrowful most of all because of the words he had spoken, that they would not see his face again. And they accompanied him to the ship. So far our reading, this is the word of the Lord. We come to our passage this morning at a significant shift in the narrative of the book of Acts.

From Acts chapter 20 right through to the end in chapter 28, Paul sets his face towards Jerusalem, and we will see over the next few weeks, especially next week, how from Jerusalem, he is then taken, he is captured, and then he is put on various trials as he works his way towards Rome, where he finishes in Acts 28. Now, we find Paul in Acts 20 travelling from a place called Troas to a city called Miletus with his fellow missionaries. Luke, who is the writer of Acts, is one of these companions because he describes the events by using the first person we. So for example, in verse 13, he says, we set sail for Assos. He says, we came to Chios.

We touched down in Samos. We are told that the final destination for Paul, however, is Jerusalem. Verse 16. And he says there that he wants to hasten. He wants to go to Jerusalem as quickly as possible because he wants to reach it by the day of Pentecost.

But there is something ominous as he makes his way there. And this farewell to the Ephesian elders gives us the content of that ominous situation. In our passage, we find Paul calling for the elders to come to him from Ephesus, and that is about a day to two days journey from where he is staying in Miletus. Paul has a parting conversation with these men who, remember, we saw last week and the week before, in his three year ministry, he would have personally put them in place as elders in Ephesus. And so he asked them to come to him for one particular reason, and that is to say goodbye.

This is a farewell moment. It is a gospel goodbye. And so what we find here in chapter 20 is actually the first set of several farewell discourses and farewell scenes as Paul makes his way through all the various cities, encouraging the churches that he's planted as he makes his way back to Jerusalem. Paul will tell the elders here that the Holy Spirit has somehow revealed to him that his return to Jerusalem was going to lead to something drastic. He doesn't know what that will entail, but he says it will certainly mean imprisonment.

But he also knows through the Holy Spirit that he will not see these elders again. And so in Miletus, calling the elders to himself for one final moment together, he takes the opportunity to review the life of his ministry with them. He alerts them to the danger of false teaching and disunity of wolves coming among the flock, and then he commits them to the Lord. What we find in Paul's speech is a wonderful expression of the preciousness of God's church. He will explain it as being the object that God had bought through the very precious blood of Jesus Christ.

And it is in view of this preciousness that Paul charges the elders with the responsibility of their oversight. And that oversight is to oversee both their own lifestyles and also the conduct of the church, the flock of which God has called them to be shepherds. So this morning, we explore what it means for a church, the church of God, as has been the theme, to be shepherded by certain men called elders. And what our blokes in this church need to aspire to be as they aspire to be elders. In the recent Australia Talks survey that was conducted by the ABC, 60,000 Australians were interviewed, and they were asked a wide range of questions about life in Australia, including religious trends.

One of the most disheartening results that came out of the survey for me was that 41% of these Australians, 41% of 60,000 interviewed, said that they don't trust religious leaders at all. Not just somewhat. 41% don't trust religious leaders at all. With one of our most famous pastors at the moment, Brian Houston, founder of the Hillsong Church, currently facing court charges at the highest courts in Australia over historical cover ups of his dad's abuse of children. We might conclude, it's no wonder that 41% of Aussies don't trust religious leaders.

There's no doubt that the credibility of church leaders has taken a massive hit in recent years. Highly publicised abuse scandals, along with the deeply disturbing findings of the Royal Commission into institutional abuse, have impacted the reputation of all churches and Christian organisations. Alongside this, conservative churches have been on a collision course with the dominant views of society on issues that are a touchstone for Australian society on gender and sexuality. Through this collision course, there's been a perpetuating of the image of Christian leaders being unloving and out of touch. Whether that is true or not is debatable.

Nevertheless, it is enough to make a pastor think twice when asked, what do you do for a living? You may as well be telling them you're a lawyer. That one's for Rick. But this work is an incredibly important work and we will say amen to that. It has inherent value and glory associated with it.

So much so that Paul will tell the church in First Timothy three, and remember that wasn't too long ago that we dealt with that passage. Paul tells Timothy that an elder is a noble task to aspire to. A noble task worthy of honour. Now, we saw back then that the Greek word for noble is kalos, and that can variously be translated as honourable, beautiful, honest, fair, or noble. But most plainly, that word is simply translated as good.

The word for task in noble task, the word task is also just the ordinary word for work. In other words, to be an elder is good work. To be an elder is to do good work. And so as we come to meditate on Paul's farewell to the Ephesian elders, remembering that the book of Acts is about the church of God. I want to speak to you as a church and then 50% of our church as men about what it means to aspire to be elders within the church of God.

You will need to be convinced that contrary to much popular opinion, it is a work that is good inherently. In other words, of all the things that we can do with our lives, this is one of the best. And so this morning, we explore from our passage, but also what Paul has said throughout his other letters about the good work of eldership, about the important task of being these shepherds of God's flock. So what is so good about this good work? Well, there are four things, at least, mentioned in this passage referred to by Paul, but then fleshed out in some of his other letters.

I've been really struck by Murray Kaple, who is the principal of RTC, the Reformed Theological College that I studied at and now work at in some of his writings on this topic. And so I'm reflecting a lot of what he has said as well. The first thing about this good work is it is good to be busy with the thing that God treasures more than anything else on earth, and that is the church of the Lord Jesus Christ. It is good to treasure what God treasures. There are all sorts of good causes, aren't there, and activities for us to be busy with.

The older we get, it seems the busier we become. Which parent here isn't tempted by the thousands of different things that we can get involved with with our kids, school activities, sporting events, coaching. We can get involved in the relationships and the friendships of our family of family members. We can organise community events, neighbourhood watches. We can organise street barbecues and parties.

We have more than enough activities to be busy with that we might consider to be good. But the church is a work particularly close to God's own heart. And Paul reminds the elders in Ephesus that it was the Holy Spirit Himself who made them overseers of this good work. Have a look at verse 28. The work was for them to care for the church of God, which He obtained by His own blood.

In other words, the church is so precious in God's sight that He would give His one and only Son to redeem her. And the church is not only saved by Christ, verse 32 will tell us, it is also being sanctified by Him as well through that sacrifice. The language used here, and there's plenty that commentators write about this particular phrase, obtained by the blood of Jesus. The language here is strongly covenantal. It ties back to the Old Testament of the blood of lamb, remember, in Egypt that was spread on the doorposts of all the Israelites.

And then later in the temple worship, the day of atonement, the sacrifice of an animal to cover the sin of the people. And then remember what Jesus Himself said in the upper room the night before going to the cross, saying, this wine represents My blood shed on the cross. It is a sign, He says, of the new covenant. The church has been joined to Christ in a covenant. We have been joined like a husband and a wife are joined in a wedding covenant, the Bible will tell us.

That sacred promise between a husband and a wife. So that the Bible will talk to us about this relationship between us and Jesus as us being the bride of Christ. And as the bride, Jesus loves His church. And He promises that this church will one day be perfectly united with Him in the end, with a great celebration at the end called the wedding supper of the Lamb, the wedding feast. What this means is that God could not have a higher view of the church.

And so serving as a leader in this great project is very good work. Now, of course, much of the time, the church seems like a motley collection of extremely ordinary people. And you can interpret that in a way that Aussies say ordinary. He's a bit of an ordinary bloke. Or just ordinary.

Just normal. But that's the staggering thing of what God is doing. By His grace, He is calling ordinary people to Himself, and He is forming these ordinary people into a new community transformed by that grace. In the ordinary, God is doing the extraordinary. And as an elder, you have the privilege to commit your time and your energy and your gifts and your love toward that good work.

It is an astounding privilege. The second good thing about the work of eldership is the opportunity to invest in the lives of God's people. As we've said, the church is made up of ordinary people. We are so ordinary that Paul calls us sheep. Elders are to be shepherds of the flock.

You are a sheep, and I am a sheep. And sheep need shepherds. Church elders are charged with caring for the flock by knowing their sheep, by leading them, by feeding and protecting them. And what that means is that elders must get involved in your lives. Church leaders are commanded by God to care for the weak sheep who are struggling.

They have to run after the strained sheep that need to be brought back into the fold. They need to carry in their arms the newly born lambs who have just come to Christ. They are to train the healthy sheep that follow, that sort of lead the other sheep. They are to train those mature sheep to lead well, and they need to work at bringing sheep from the other folds into the flock of Christ. More and more, however, I'm finding that this responsibility that we have towards you is viewed with suspicion and sometimes disdain.

Aussie culture is generally privacy focused. Stay out of my business. But an elder, by Scripture's command, tells us to get involved in your life. So here we find a challenge to both elders and the church. Firstly, your elders need to lead you.

And secondly, you need to be willing to be led. That is a significant challenge. Now, this shepherding care at both a church wide and at an individual level demands things like the privilege of engaging in spiritual conversations. We have to engage in discipleship and mentoring. We need to care for people in some of the most intense moments of their lives.

We need to be able to encourage and equip and mobilise people to apply their gifts to the ministry of the church. We need to be able to look you in the eye and say things like, why aren't you coming to church anymore? Why are you living with a boyfriend? Why have you forsaken your first love, Jesus Christ? And so elders have the task and have the opportunity to invest their lives, their hearts into God's people with the result that they will grow spiritually into mature Christians.

And this is also good work. Thirdly, it is good to be active in advancing the work of the gospel. In his speech, in his farewell to the elders in verse 32, Paul says that he is commending them, entrusting them to God, and it says, to the word of His grace, which is able to build you up and to give you the inheritance among all those who are sanctified. What this means is that not only is God calling elders to do the work of guarding and protecting the church, not only is the gospel the means by which different sheep are brought into the fold, but the word of His grace, which means the message of Jesus Christ. This is what is used to build up the church and to make it holy.

It's the amazing power of the message of Jesus. The gospel is not a statement about facts that once there was a man named Jesus and he lived in Nazareth, and he died a torturous death on the cross. It is not a statement of fact, the gospel. The gospel has inherent power to bring some of the most amazing transformation that can happen in the human life. Now a few months ago, like I said, we worked through the First Letter to Timothy, and we saw how Paul talked about the gospel all the time.

Remember, he talked about sound doctrine, guarding that good deposit, protecting and teaching the word. He talks about it all the time, and he tells Timothy and the elders to not be ashamed of that gospel, to guard it, to keep it, to remember it, and to pass it on. Why? Because the gospel does the work of both establishing the church and bringing it to maturity. And so as a church council, as pastor and elders, we have to have a sharp focus on the gospel as we oversee the church and its life.

As the highest authority in the local church under Christ Himself, the church council shapes the entire mission and the vision of that church. But if that mission is tied to establishing and maturing the flock of Christ, the tool by which we do this is exactly what Paul says here in verse 32, the word of Christ, the word of grace that you have received. It means that we need to oversee the right preaching of the gospel on the pulpit every Sunday. We are to ensure that the teaching and the worship of this church is biblically sound and gospel focused. It means that our elders are responsible for ensuring that the church is outward looking and serious about reaching the lost because there are lost sheep that can only become part of the flock of Christ through the gospel.

Elders are to be constantly working for gospel clarity, striving to keep away all the distractions that Satan loves to throw to the church. And so you can say that, in a way, this good work of being an elder is actually a very simple task because it's all tied with the gospel. And yet, we know that it remains a constant vigil because all of us are constantly tempted to take our eyes off that gospel. But the work of elders is good. It is noble when it is active in advancing the gospel.

And then fourth and finally, it is a good work to be men worthy of following. Paul exhorts the Ephesian elders to be careful, to pay attention to themselves. Even as they are to keep an eye on the flock, they have to keep both eyes on their own hearts. We said earlier that 41% of the Australian population don't trust religious leaders at all. Part of the reality, or part of the reason at least, is certainly this: the spell that Satan has cast on unregenerate hearts and minds who seek all manner of reasons to ignore the gospel call.

That is definitely part of it. It could have been this reason, but it can be a thousand other reasons. And yet, we would say as Christians, there are definitely opportunities in some of these scandals to find reasons to excuse ourselves from receiving the gospel message. So elders don't simply need to advance the work of the gospel by preaching. They are to advance it by their application to their own lives.

They have to know the word of God so that they can defend the church against error so that these scandals don't happen. But they have to protect their own hearts from the deceit of sin, which causes them personally to fall into these scandals. And so pastors and elders have to teach the word publicly and privately so that the saints are equipped, so that the saints are trained for ministry, but also that they will be equipped for every good work. Those who are called to the good task of eldership must therefore be good men. You can only undertake this noble task if you have noble character.

That's why Paul goes on to list some of those key qualities in First Timothy and Titus. If the church is full of leaders that are greedy, power hungry, abusive, sexually impure, dishonest, ill tempered, untrustworthy, or in any other way, not above reproach. They bring dishonour on Christ and on His beloved precious church. So there's a danger that we, as men, whether you are an elder or not, we must constantly be vigilant about. Why?

Because as men, we have a natural affinity, a natural desire for leadership. Even if you say to yourself, I'll never be an elder. There's something in you that says, I want to be a leader though. And this natural desire is where sin hijacks those natural persuasions. And as men, we can pursue leadership at all costs.

And what happens then is selfish ambition or greed or sexual abuse, all of these sins that have caused so many people to lose respect for the church. It comes about when that natural desire for men to rule in leadership. As they clutch at those things, they're not doing it with the quiet groundwork that should have happened in the maturing of their faith, in the maturing of their character. Paul writes, for example, to the fathers or the older men in Titus two, and we read that passage earlier this morning. I think the ESV calls it, uses the word, to be dignified. And in the NIV, I think it's called to be worthy of respect.

Worthy of respect, and I like that term. When sin hijacks the drive for leadership in us men, men demand respect by their level of authority. You shall obey because I am the pastor. You shall obey because I am the head of this house. You shall obey because I am your dad and I am telling you so.

Meanwhile, the gospel makes men worthy of respect. And if they are worthy of respect, then they are worthy of leadership. We easily follow those we admire and look up to. And so elders must pay careful attention to themselves that we walk the talk, that we listen to the gospel even as we preach it to others. Now there is so much more that is good about being an elder, but these are four key aspects of this good work.

Of course, if you don't care one bit for these four areas, if you don't care about the preciousness of the church, if you don't care about the lives of other people, if you don't care about the advance and the power and the victory of the gospel, if you don't care about a respect worthy life, then you will not consider the work of eldership a noble task. But in God's economy, these things are of supreme importance, and they are to be thoughtfully engaged in. Because to be busy with that is to be busy with good work. And there are good men in this church. These men should aspire to this role of elder.

So this morning, maybe you are one of them and perhaps you don't consider yourself ready for that task yet. Perhaps there are men in this church who know that they are not perfect by any means, but they are honest and they are dignified and they are faithful and caring. And they love God. And they love His people. And they know the gospel, that glorious message of Jesus Christ.

They are committed to the truth of the Bible. And they are gifted to lead. And their lives are worthy of respect. Such men should aspire to this noble task. It is a good work.

It is a noble task. Let's pray. Lord Jesus, even as we reflect on these things and we have a men's breakfast next weekend, where we talk about just what it means to be a Christian and a man in this life, in this place in Australia. Even as we look at the world and we weigh up what is good and bad, and we see people on our TV screens and we think, these are not the type of people I would like to emulate or these are some of the men I would like to be like. Lord, help us to hear Your desire.

Help us to foremost love those that You have sent to be our leaders. In the midst of the context of suspicion over leaders and the deep disappointments of many of them. Lord, help us to have a gospel centred optimism as well that this precious church that You have brought with Your own blood, that God, You will not hand over to the consequences of the sin of a few. This church is still Your church and this church will always be simply established, not by gifted men, but by the word of grace. Not simply established, but perfected and matured.

And so, Lord, as we reflect on our willingness to weigh up what is good and bad, what is dignified and disrespectful. Lord, help us to be moved this morning by the great vision You have for the leaders of Your church. And so, Lord, we pray, may we be led well and be willing to be led. And then for others, may we aspire to be leaders, counted worthy of leading this precious body, this precious entity, the church of Jesus Christ. For our current elders, Lord, we pray protection.

You will guard our hearts from seeing this work as mundane or unworthy. Lord, for getting stuck in the admin and the detail and the mundaneness of just what it means to be part of an organisation, to have the structures and the things set in place. Help us not to get lost in those things, to even obsess over those things. But Lord, help us to see the grand vision of the purpose of Your church. Keep sin and Satan very far from our elders and protect them in every single way.

Guard their relationships with their wives. Help them to be well tempered. Help them to have no selfish ambition in their hearts, help them not to be conceited and proud, help them to see themselves as servants of all for the sake of Christ. And then, Father, we pray that You will raise more pastors and elders for this church, but for the Australian church. God, we have vacant churches who need more preachers.

We have sheep crying out for shepherds. And, God, will You crush our hearts with that burden? That we may be aware of that need and yet we ignore it. O God, will You raise those leaders? O God, will You cause men in this church to be convicted by that great need, to put up their hand, to serve, to be a part of the best, the best work we can do here on earth.

Oh, but God, we thank You finally that because the Holy Spirit is both the instigator of this church and this movement, but also our daily guide. We thank You that we can trust that You will do what is right and good because You love this body so much. And so even in the hardship and even in the scandal, God, we know that You win and Your church, Your people with You. Protect Your church, guard Your church, raise the people that need to be raised and Father, we commit ourselves to You again. In Jesus' name, amen.