Amen. Last week we introduced the concept of discipline as a means of grace. We talked about discipline as kind of training and we began talking about the passage out of 1st Timothy that talks about disciplining ourselves or training ourselves for the purpose of godliness. Paul talks about that and exhorts Timothy to that and so we talked about this whole concept of of the capacity, and we had a bit of a philosophical discussion, and I thought about that a little bit this week, but I would still maintain that practically speaking, what we're doing is, in discipline, is we're overcoming powerful desires to do, we're overcoming powerful desires when they, we're overcoming them when they conflict with what we ought to do or what we need to do. And that's not to say, you know, you can get, you can get complicated philosophically and you can say, well, but we always do what we want to do. And that's true. It's true. But our desires, what our strongest desire is at any given moment waivers or it changes. And there's a, you know, again you could describe Christian doctrine. We talked about this. I mean this is one of the things that I kind of countered with last week when we were going back and forth on this. It's a good thing John's not here today because we might go back and forth again. But so I get a monopoly here. But what What I would say about it is that, like I said last week, you could look at the whole process of Christian growth as a program of developing the quality of our strongest desire being what pleases God. And I'm talking about on a consistent basis. Because again, really if you look at your life, depending on the presence of a powerful temptation or a neglect of the means of grace or lots of factors can at any given moment create a stronger desire in us than to do what God wants us to do. And really what we're trying to do is we're trying to cultivate our strongest desire in most incidents being precisely to please God along with the understanding of what that is. But I think all of us, regardless of how we look at this philosophically, how we define things, all of us recognize that there are times when although the Christian wants to please God in general. If you ask him, the true Christian, and again, we've looked at Romans 8, and Romans 8 talks about this. If a person is a true Christian, then they have the Spirit of God, they're led by the Spirit of God, and the Spirit of God really is dominant. But does that mean that he never sins? No, it doesn't mean that. And when he does sin, what does that mean? That means his strongest desire at that moment was to do the sin. That doesn't change Romans 8. That doesn't change the fact that there's an overall dominance of God's Spirit in his life, which means that there is a fundamental desire to please God. But then you've got the chapter before Paul's talked about, Romans 7. I do not do what I want to do. He says that. I do not do what I want to do, but what I do not want to do, this I keep on doing." What's he saying there? He's saying that in those given moments, I find myself in moments wanting more to disobey God than to obey Him. Now, this is where my understanding or what I'm saying about discipline comes in. Because discipline, I think, really, is the capacity, when those desires become very strong, to be able to resist. And not just on the basis of the fact that, now, again, philosophically you could say, You're accessing a stronger desire. Okay, I give. Yeah, that's what you're doing. But how do you do that? How do you access that more fundamental desire when you've got a very strong, whatever you want to call it, proximate desire to disobey? And we all experience that, don't we? We all know what that's like, right? I mean, you know what it's like to be in the midst of a temptation and say, I know God doesn't want me to do this, but you do it anyway. I mean, I can give examples, but we've all been in that type of situation. So what I'm saying is that discipline, there's a self-discipline, just like in theories of government, I mean, I think a biblical theory of government begins with self-government. And to the degree that we have self-government, to that degree we're fit for freedom. We're fit for liberty. That is the absence of someone outside having to come impose the law on us. This is why, this is one of the reasons why increasing sin in Israel, among the people of God historically, led to bondage. It's why as people embrace a more lawless type of idea of freedom. We've talked about this before. True freedom not being the absence of restraints or the absence of law, but the removal of obstacles to doing what God wants me to do. That's true freedom. When we embrace a more licentious idea of freedom, then the more we need strong, the strong imposition of order upon us from outside. That's why following the French Revolution, which was a lawless revolution, unlike the more scripturally based American Revolution. if you can call it a revolution, war for independence. Immediately following that was a dictator, Napoleon, because we know that what that produced was chaos. So self-government is the first thing. If you want to have true liberty, The best system is a very, I don't want to say weak, but limited, a government that's limited in power. But if you're going to have a government that's limited in power, you need You need a virtuous people. It's just like James Madison said, our Constitution is written for a virtuous people. It's wholly unfit for the government of any other. We begin with self-government, we begin with self-discipline in the manner of godliness. You need the capacity to say no to yourself in the moment of temptation. But if you don't have that, how do you get it? That's what we started talking about at the end of last week. If you don't have that, how do you acquire it? And my contention, my thesis is, you acquire self-discipline, you can increase self-discipline for a time or through the process of coming under the discipline of another. Really, although this is a system that God has ordained, usually it's voluntary. We come under the discipline of another. Now, what we're going to see is that in a sense it is voluntary and in another sense it's not in God's system. I think this is why we have an evangelicalism You know, it's interesting how we have sort of substitutes for the scriptural practice or something that God's ordained in evangelicalism. And I think usually through our, especially in America, but largely through our ignorance of what God has said. For instance, we have coming forward to the front of the church to rededicate yourself. Okay? And altar calls. But God already has something that does that in more scriptural categories. We renew our covenant with God. Covenant renewal. That's a very scriptural practice. And it includes all kinds of things that aren't included in the notion of rededicating oneself. But the essence of it is the same thing. We just impoverish it by limiting it to rededicating yourself. It's covenant renewal. And where do we do that? We do it every Sunday when we take the Lord's Supper. That's why the Lord's Supper should be every Sunday. One of the reasons. Because we need covenant renewal. That's part of what formal public worship does for us. But we've replaced it with something else. We have communion. That's meant to be joined to all of the significance of the Lord's Supper. Everything that goes into the Lord's Supper, and it's very multifaceted, I hope as you can see from if you've been attending this church for a while, the Lord's Supper has many facets to it. And all of those things are to be thought of in connection with what we're doing when we're renewing our covenant and when we're enjoying a covenant meal with God. there are elements of fellowship, there are elements of atonement, there are elements of all kinds of things, empowerment, sanctification, all these things, union with Christ, all of these things are meant to be combined with that. So, usually our American evangelical substitutes impoverish the concepts, but instinctively we know that we need certain things and so we've come up with ways to do this. Well, one of those things is accountability. And we know that there's accountability within the body of Christ, and this is why accountability groups have become so popular. Because if I don't have self-discipline myself, what do I need? I need someone outside of myself to hold my feet to the fire, at least for a time. And so people say, they recognize, well I need this, so we're going to have accountability groups. Now, you know, I would say accountability, and again we're not getting to the discussion of our passage yet, but kind of setting the stage for it. We could look at and we could spend a lot of time on this. And there is a level of accountability that is there within the body of Christ. We talked about fellowship for how many weeks? Three weeks? Four weeks? In a sense, so many things get back to fellowship. Fellowship would be really the largest means of grace in terms of conceptually how we thought of it. We could spend weeks and weeks on it because it has an element of, like we saw, of teaching the Word. In fact, really, that's what all of it is. We're applying the Word to each other in fellowship. But we saw how the Word comes through rank and file believers. Well, that's an aspect of fellowship. We could have dealt with that under fellowship instead of as an avenue of the Word. You know, corporate prayer, same thing. Accountability. There is an accountability to each other. And if you know each other and you have a relationship, we're supposed to be... Again, when we looked at that passage out of Colossians about how the Word comes through each other, what does it say? Let the Word of Christ dwell in you richly as you teach and admonish. What does it mean to admonish somebody? We talked about it. It means that you're warning them, essentially. It carries a sense of rebuking, almost. You're saying, watch out. Don't go that way. There's danger that way. This is what we're supposed to be doing for each other. The Scriptures say if anyone turns a sinner away from his sin, I can't remember the end of the verse now. Something's happening to me. But if someone wanders from the path and someone turns him away from his sin, well, that's what we're supposed to be doing for each other. That's not talking about just what pastors do. So yeah, there is this. body of Christ general accountability that we should be developing. And again, you know, everything we said about fellowship then brings this into play. Because if you're going to do that, you have to know each other, you have to be involved in each other's lives, you have to know what a person's needs are, you have to know what his particular struggles are with sin. If you're going to do that, and that means we've got to know each other. And, you know, the American notion that we're all kind of, we have our castles, and we maintain these walls that we never that we never penetrate. And so but we get together on Sunday, it's people who don't really know each other. And we're gonna, we're gonna worship them, we're gonna go home, and it's going to be the same. That is not a picture of the church of the biblical church. It's just not. So there is that level of accountability. But we read last week a passage that I think talks about a very fundamental level of accountability that some of these, that things like accountability groups, and again, usually accountability groups in an evangelical sense, are composed of people who aren't very close to us. I wonder why that is in terms of our church. Usually, if you're in an accountability, at least in my experience, if you're in an accountability group, it's from people in the church across town or other places. And I tend to think maybe that's because these people aren't close enough to really see me enough consistently to really know what I need. We're limiting it to people whose only knowledge of me is carefully filtered through what I tell them and what I choose to reveal. Isn't that interesting? And how can it be really true accountability if that's the case? But that's why, I think, that God has given us a system of accountability already in the Scriptures. And let's read again the first passage that we want to talk about in that regard. It's in Hebrews 13, and I'm not going to go back and give you the background to Hebrews again. But Hebrews chapter 13, verse 17. And this is, again, I said I'm not going to give you the background, but just so that you remember the context of this. This is written to a particular local congregation. It's not written to all Hebrew Christians everywhere. There is a particular local congregation, probably largely if not completely composed of Jewish Christians, and their struggle is in their relationship to the law and the temptation, because of a Judaizing influence, to trust in their adherence to the old covenant system, particularly the ceremonial laws of the old covenant, to make them right with God. So he's giving them, in this final chapter, some exhortations that can help them to incorporate the theological truths into which he has delved in the rest of the book into their lives. That's the practical import of this last part of Hebrew. He's saying, okay, if they're going to do this, what do they need to do? If they're really going to take this to heart, if they're going to put this into practice, the things that we've said, what do they need? And one of the things is verse 17, in the midst of a strong temptation for them. So what does he say? Obey your leaders and submit to them for they are keeping watch over your souls as those who will have to give an account. Let them do this with joy and not with groaning for that would be of no advantage to you. That's a very interesting verse. There's a lot in there. But he says, obey your leaders. Now I left you with a question last week. I'm not going to ask that right away because it's going to lead us into our next passage. So first I want to ask you, how does he describe leaders in this passage? He says, obey your leaders. Okay, they keep watch over our souls, so it's a spiritual, they have a spiritual authority, okay, and they keep watch. So, scripturally, you know, the idea of a watchman is there, is developed in scripture. What does it mean to keep watch over someone's soul, do you think? Big report? Okay, yeah, there's an idea of alertness, isn't there? Yeah, because if the watchman falls asleep, then the city's in trouble, right? Okay, what else? Okay, they themselves are accountable. They keep watch over yourselves as those who must give an account. To whom? To whom are they accountable? Isn't it interesting? We're talking about accountability. The people who have responsibility for providing accountability and so forth themselves are accountable. Right? To whom? to God. What does that mean for us practically? God says we have leaders. And He says, you know, nobody said this, but I'm going to go ahead and point it out. They have authority. These leaders have authority. They are spiritual leaders God has given us a spiritual leader, otherwise He wouldn't have said obey your leaders. There are spiritual leaders who have authority. We are to obey them. And I think, you know, our sin doesn't like authority. But it says these leaders must give an account. They keep watch, they have a task, keeping watch over your souls, and then it's given account to God. What's the practical import of that? What does that mean to you practically, that that's true? Is there a practical import? Well, that's the next question that leads us to the next passage, and it's a very good question, but let me just provisionally for this, for what I'm asking you and the purpose of discussion, it's church, because that's what he's talking about. In the context, he's writing to a local congregation, and he's saying obey your leaders. So, I don't think he's talking about civil authorities, because they don't keep watch over our souls. You know, I think parents do have a spiritual authority, but I don't think he's just talking about parents, is he? Because he's talking to the whole church. Some of them don't have living parents. He can't just be talking about the family. He can't just be talking about parents. He's talking about other leaders. He's saying, you know, so for now, it's enough to say you have spiritual leaders who have authority. But again, does it make any difference that they are accountable? Okay, what difference does it make? And what difference does it make that I know they are accountable to God? Yeah, yeah. What makes us nervous about authority? It's abuse, yeah. It has the capacity to be abused, and it often is, right? So, does God know that authority can be abused? That's why He says they're accountable to Him. But I think the practical import is, for us, comes in the way that we relate to authority. Isn't it? Because I can relate to authority by saying, I've got to make sure that you're not abusing it and that you're doing the right thing before I will submit to your authority. Right? Isn't that what we tend to do? But if that's my relationship to authority, is it truly authority? I'll submit to you as long as I approve what you're wanting me to do. As long as I approve the exercise of your authority, okay, exercise your authority. But is that true authority? Does someone have authority over me if I only obey whatever I approve? That's not really authority, is it? Isn't it funny, though, that that's a lot of kind of what we think of as the ideal thing and what we gravitate toward? And I think what's important is to realize that it's not my responsibility to make sure that those who have authority over me are doing the right thing. That's not my responsibility. because in a certain sense, now there are some things when we talk about government and there are some ways in which this is qualified and we're going to talk about that in just a second. So it's not totally true, but for the most part God has said that's my responsibility. I'm the one who holds people who are in authority accountable because it's my authority that's been delegated to them. Nobody has any authority unless I've given it to them. And so God is the one to whom they're accountable. But doesn't it also give me some comfort that if someone's abusing authority, they're not doing it with impunity? They're not doing it ultimately. They're not going to get away with it. God is going to hold them accountable. There is someone who will hold their feet to the fire. And it makes it harder to submit to authority if I think they're unaccountable, doesn't it? If I think that there's no answer for the abuse of that authority. There's no one that they have to answer to. It makes it harder to submit to it, doesn't it? But he also, okay, so they're overseers, or they watch over our souls. That word, do y'all know what the word is for overseer? in the Scripture. It doesn't use the word in the Greek in this passage, but it does talk about watching over. An overseer, the word is episkopos. What word do we get from that? Episcopal. Episcopal churches are those who are governed by the overseers. The word is usually translated. Anybody know what the word is usually translated as? is usually translated Bishop or Overseer. Those are interchangeable words. Bishop and Overseer are interchangeable words. If a Presbyterian is translating the passage, he's probably going to translate it Overseer. And if an Episcopal Bishop is translating it, he's probably going to translate it Bishop. But they're interchangeable. So there are people whose task, leaders in the church, whose task God has given to oversee the spiritual welfare of Christians. Now, he gives an exhortation at the end of this passage. And it's a little bit ambiguous in the ESV translation, which is one of the things I like about the ESV translation. It leaves the translation ambiguous where the Greek is ambiguous. But I think the whole sentence indicates what he means when he says, he says, let them do this with joy and not with groaning. That almost sounds like an exhortation to the overseers, to the leaders. Let them do this with joy and not with groaning. But then what does he say in the next breath? Yeah. Wait a minute, I can't hear you. Yeah, this would be unprofitable for you. What? What would be unprofitable? Yeah, with groaning. Yeah. What does that look like? They let them exercise their authority to do this oversight with joy and not with groaning. What are they talking about doing it with groaning? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, here's what I think about in a contemporary example. And that's a great example, Angie. And I'm sure Moses groaned a lot when he was praying for the Israelites, you know. But I think about taking your kids to Disney World, and if your kids aren't well behaved, they're not disciplined. And you're trying to help them to see, you know, they're running around, they're touching everything, they're getting into all kinds of trouble and things, and you're saying. If you just behave yourselves, there's so much to enjoy. You'd have so much more fun if you just listen to me and we do this and this. But you're missing out on everything. And you're frustrated. And why are you so frustrated? It's not that it's messing up your trip to Disney World. It's that you realize they're not experiencing what they could because they're so undisciplined. And they won't behave themselves. They'd have so much more fun. You'd have so much more fun as a family. And so you start to groan. This whole trip to Disney World is just a big trial. It's a disaster. Nobody's enjoying it. And so we groan, because they won't submit to your leadership, when your leadership would lead them to the best experience they've ever had. That's the kind of groaning that leaders who are godly and who are trying to lead in the right way experience. But that gets the point because he says, when they do it with groaning and not with joy, that would be unprofitable for you. You see his point? What's his point? What's his point about our whole approach to spiritual authority, to leadership, about the way we relate to it? What's his point? It should help you, yes. What about my attitude toward it? What causes groaning in the leaders when they're exercising their authority? What causes them to groan? What robs them of their joy in that? Yeah. When you're like the psalmist says, when you're like the horse, don't be like the mule that needs bit and bridle or it will not come to you. Don't be like that. And God's talking about the way we relate to Him and His authority. Don't be like that. And this is the one who's saying, Look, I have something good for you. Don't make this a trial, because what happens, let me ask you, practically speaking, if we relate to spiritual authority to leaders that way, what will tend to happen in them? Discouraged, which then causes what? Do you think somebody who's groaning as they exercise spiritual authority is more likely to be diligent in that responsibility? What's the tendency? What's the tendency going to be? Just let it go. I don't want to fool with this. You know? And frankly speaking, you know, in the analogy of parents and children and discipline of A lot of parents don't discipline their children well. Why? Because they're worn out. They're beat up. And they say, I punt. You know, I'm done. I can't do this. So they stop. And that would not be profitable for you. You hear him? I love the way the NIV says this. You know, it does do some interpretive stuff, and that's not great for a translation, but I think it's a good interpretation. He says, he says, do this, I think, I can't remember the exact wording now, but he says, do this, submit to them, obey your leaders, do it so that their leadership, they keep watching yourselves as though someone's giving an account. Do this so that it is not a burden to them, for that would be of no advantage to you. If you make spiritual oversight a burden to those who are charged with this responsibility, it doesn't serve you. It doesn't do you good. It actually will harm you, because the tendency is going to be for them to say, okay, I don't want to do that. That's of no advantage to you. These are very, very wise words. Now, let's get to the question. Who are these leaders? Who are the leaders? Remember I told you the story at the end of last week? I'm doing campus ministry. There's a guy who's in more than one campus ministry. He's in our ministry. He's in RUF. He's in another one. He comes to me and says, I'm not going to go to this. It was a parachurch ministry. I'm not going to go to this ministry anymore because the guy is telling me he's trying to dictate all kinds of things in my life. and even down to what classes I take. And I said, you know, who are you to tell me that? And he says, and he quoted Hebrews 13, 17, obey your leaders. You're supposed to obey me, I'm your leader. Well, is he? He was a spiritual leader of sorts. This guy had learned scripture from him. He had taught him the Bible and Bible studies. Does that make him a leader in this sense? Should he obey him? How should he obey him? Well, those are great questions, aren't they? a ministry when I, there was another ministry when I was in college, and I don't know if any, I'm going to go ahead and tell the name of this one because they're fruitcakes, but they would come through, they would come through the campus, blitz through the campus, and they would try to bring, get as many people out of the campus as they could into their group, and they would have the, usually kind of rent this or buy this place where they all live together. And their goal was to just get them out of the sinful environment of the campus. They were blitzed through, get as many out as they could, and living in this kind of commune-type situation. And it was, their name of it was Maranatha, Maranatha Ministries. I don't even know if they're around anymore. But one of the things they would do, and I knew, I had a couple of friends who got involved in this, you know, and they quit going to class, but they were living on campus, you know, or living near campus. And one of the big things about their group was their leaders would come to them and they would tell them, God told me that you're supposed to marry so-and-so. And so they would get married. Because the leader said, God told me that this is who you're supposed to marry. And I can remember thinking, this is a nightmare. But hey, this is one of the passages they'd point to. Obey your leaders. Just obey your leaders. Now I think instinctively most of us have enough common sense to know there's something wrong with that, right? But in terms of the principle, how do we know what's wrong with that? Who are our leaders? Does the Bible tell us? Yeah? Those guys would have said, we're watching over their souls. So are there any standards? Is there any way to know? Is a spiritual leader just anybody who adopts this posture toward me? Yeah? Okay. Okay. Okay? And we've seen this. So we're supposed to be Bereans. We're supposed to be examining the Scriptures to see if what they say is true. So that's a big part of even the identification of leaders. We're at the end of our time, so I'm just going to read the passage and we're going to talk about this. This is the passage we're going to go to right away next Sunday. It's 1 Peter 5, 1 through 5. so I exhort the elders among you as a fellow elder and a witness of the sufferings of Christ as well as a partaker in the glory that is going to be revealed, shepherd the flock of God that is among you, exercising oversight not under compulsion, but willingly, as God would have you, not for shameful gain, but eagerly, not domineering over those in your charge, but being examples to the flock. And when the chief shepherd appears, you will receive the unfading clarion of glory. Likewise, you who are younger, be subject to the elders. Clothe yourselves, all of you, with humility toward one another, for God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble." Okay, close with this statement. It's elders. And the eldership is something that doesn't begin... it's interesting, the New Testament just starts using the term elders. It doesn't explain it. It doesn't define it. So where is it defined? In the Old Testament. The whole Bible has developed a theology of eldership and it begins in the Old Testament. It begins with Moses, by the way. And the office of elder is the oldest office among God's people and it's the one that endures all the way through from Old Testament into New Testament. So, Office of King? No. Office of Prophet? No. Office of Priest? No. Office of Elder? Yes. So, we'll look at this in more detail next week.