This sermon is an unusual thing for me. I've felt led to prepare a sermon without first having an audience. I don't know if anyone will ever listen to this or read the sermon notes, but based on what I'm seeing on numerous fronts, I thought it was very important that the scripture be proclaimed to address some mistakes that we're making as elders. I'm an elder at Ferndale Baptist Church in Oakland, Maryland. I've been an elder for about 10 years. I'm in the process of learning to be a better elder to our flock here all the time and I've been a believer for 39 years. I was in Youth for Christ for 15 years so I've rubbed shoulders with a lot of fellow believers in all types of churches. What I've seen has at times been very troubling and as always I believe all the answers we need are found in God's Word. Now, you may not call the leaders of your church elders at your church in your denomination. They may be called trustees or a number of other things. I'm not sure that the title matters, but the job sure does. As far as I can see in scripture, there are elders and deacons with two different jobs. I'm speaking today about the elders position, no matter what your local church might call this position. Our church recently did a church camp on the book of Titus. We studied the passage regarding elders in chapter one. That study was very helpful to me. The teaching sermon can be found on sermonaudio.com if anybody's interested. Today's sermon will touch on some of the highlights and side issues that have come to light in that study and over the years. I pray as I prepare this that God would use it to right some wrongs and I pray that also the church would be a little more edified as a result. Titus 1, 5-9 lists the qualifications for the elder position. This list closely resembles the list found in 1 Timothy 3. I'll focus mostly on the second half of the Titus passage that focuses on the responsibilities of an elder. I'll also refer to Acts 20 verses 25 through 32. To begin, I'd like to clarify what I believe scripture says elders are for. Elders were put in place by God to nurture and protect the local bodies of believers. To nurture and protect just as shepherds tend to sheep. In Psalm 23, we've often heard that thy rod and thy staff they comfort me. Well, most of us can quickly understand how a shepherd's staff can be a comfort. The staff is a long stick that the shepherd would use to aid sheep that were in trouble. It's a tool that they would use to tend their sheep and to meet their needs. The staff is a tool of nurture. But the rod, on the other hand, that's a different story. The rod is a club that often had nails sticking out of it. It was designed to put a major hurt on any wolf or lion or bear that wanted to have mutton for dinner. How is that a comfort to the sheep? I think the answer is simple. The sheep know that they are safe because the shepherd is in many ways not a safe person. The shepherd is dangerous. He is dangerous to the enemies of the sheep. We as elders are to shepherd the flock of God and that shepherding involves both the tender care and the fierce protection of the flock and we are to do it at the risk of our lives and sometimes at the cost of our lives. That in a nutshell is the biblical picture of the elder. Search it out for yourselves, I hope that you will, and I think you will quickly find that what I'm telling you is the truth. If you're an elder, this is what you signed up for. If this isn't what you understood when you agreed to serve, ask yourself now, am I willing to perform this service? Am I willing to nurture and protect the sheep? If you aren't, Do yourself a favor and do your church a favor and step down now. This is too important of a position to have the appearance of the shepherd without the reality of the shepherd. If you're willing to provide this service then apply yourself to it as if the safety and nurture of the church depends upon it because God says it does. Also, look at your church structure and any of your documents. Does it allow you to totally fulfill the biblical role of elder? If they do not, change your documents. Conform your man-made structure to God's infallible guidelines. Don't throw up your hands in despair saying, but this church document won't allow me to obey God in this manner. Change the documents. When you said yes to being an elder you took on the responsibility of eldership the way God defines it. It's His church. So now it's your responsibility to perform this function and overcome any obstacles in your way. Now let's look at Titus chapter 1 verse 9. This is one of the traits of a person who qualifies to be an elder and it says holding fast the faithful word as he has been taught that he may be able by sound doctrine both to exhort and convict those who contradict. Here we see the tool of the elder. Here is both the rod and the staff, and it is the faithful word as he has been taught. This is the word of God. When an elder holds fast to the word of God, when the word of God is his authority, then and only then can he both exhort those who are his true sheep and refute those who are the wolves. The word of God is the primary means of carrying out the elder's job as given to him by God. This is one verse among many like it that should give an elder the proper priority, the proper perspective to his work. Let me show you what I mean by asking you some questions. What has your focus as an elder been lately? What is your time and effort gone into? Now let me ask you this. Where in scripture does God give elders the responsibility for administrating or overseeing plans and programs for church growth? What verse specifically tells you as an elder to do this thing? Where in scripture does God tell the elders that they can delegate their responsibility for knowing scripture and using scripture and holding people to scripture to a full-time minister? What verses tell us this? Where in scripture are we told that any of man's plans or programs for running any area of the church are to be accepted as if they are God's word and as if they carry the same priority as God's word? What scripture says this? The point I hope I'm making is we as elders seem to be sidetracked into doing everything and anything but the thing that God has made us responsible for and we will do it every and any way except using the specific guidelines that he has given us to use. Let me ask you another question. Who in your church is the most responsible for knowing and holding the church to sound doctrine or scriptural teaching? Is it the full-time minister? Is it the teachers? Or is it the elders? The answer is clear in scripture. The responsibility for teaching and preaching the church, for the teaching and the preaching of the church conforming to God's word, is laid squarely on the elders. Like it or not, we are the doctrinal guards of our churches and we must be competent in our job. It's one of the most important jobs we'll ever have. The elder of the smallest church has a more important job than the CEO of the biggest corporation. Every single thing the corporation accomplishes is going to burn up. but the charge of the elder will live forever. Before moving on to the next point, I want to make this challenge. Will you make the priority that God gave you as elder be your top priority? Will you pour yourself into God's Word and rely upon it as your only guide for how to shepherd the flock and your primary tool for ministering to their needs? I believe we would do well to throw out all our man-made plans and programs and get on our knees while reading God's Word and ask God, What most pleases you, Lord? And then as God reveals it to us through the study of His Word, we should get off our knees and do it. Now, on to the next point. I have a question. Does your full-time minister, if you have one, qualify as an elder? Is he one? I have a bias and I'm not going to try to hide it. I have no idea where we came up with the idea of seminaries and our current feeding system of producing so-called pastors. Try to find that in scripture. Good luck. My position is that if the church is God's church, the way the church is run should be God's way. My Bible says that God calls some to be preachers and teachers and that's good enough for me. Some of those called people go to seminary. Some don't. And some who go to seminary have never been called of God. We at our church have an excellent preacher. And what makes him excellent is the combination of being gifted by God to preach and being driven by God to lead a faithful life. I would pick those qualities over a seminary product any day of the week. Just as being in a church doesn't make a person a Christian, so attending a seminary does not make a person a pastor. In fact, much of what I see coming out of seminaries is a dependence upon horses and chariots of man, the methods of man, rather than a trust in God and in His Word. There is such a quest to make the church relevant to our culture that the church ends up with more of our culture than of God's power. And evangelism becomes the focus of the church rather than the natural spiritual fruit of the church. We end up, when we succeed, we succeed in filling our seats with the world and the end result is that we drive true believers out the door in search of something that resembles the Church of Christ. My point is that we as elders are to oversee the flock and if we have a full-time minister, they are part of the flock. If they qualify as an elder, then we can appoint them as one. But in saying this, I wonder how many ministers have actually been tested to see if they qualify as elders before being appointed as an elder. Really, how long does it take to really know if a person meets the qualifications in Titus and in Timothy? I can't imagine if we're doing a thorough job that it would take less than a year to really know the person that you brought in from the outside. It is irresponsible and unbiblical to automatically appoint such a person as an elder. In my experience, much harm would be avoided in churches if they refuse to appoint a minister to this position until the minister has proven that they are a qualified person for that position. And in my opinion, a person coming from the outside should never be a head elder until it's very clear that they intend to stay. Along with this, full-time ministers are still to be submitted to the Word of God, just like any other member. We can't fall for this idea that they are the, quote, Lord's anointed, unquote, and as such untouchable by rebuke or correction. I doubt that anyone was more anointed than David, but Nathan still had a job to do to walk up to David and to severely correct him. Full-time ministers have no special privileges other than having more time to do some of the church work. We as elders must be sure to never lose sight of our responsibility and be sure it is we who are responsible. We can never say, hey it's not my fault, it's the fault of that bad minister that we hired. No, if it happens during our watch, it is our fault. We are the God-appointed elders. And besides, guess who's going to be left to clean up the mess? The full-time minister is likely to shop for another position elsewhere. It's we who will be left with the hurt and with the healing. So why sit back and let it happen? We need to be actively involved. So the first thing we saw in scripture is that elders are responsible for serving and protecting the church using God's word to hold the church to sound doctrine. This implies that we have to know the word, study the word, read the word, and apply the word. Now let's look at verses 9 through 11. It says, holding fast the faithful word as he has been taught that he may be able by sound doctrine both to exhort and convict those who contradict. For there are many insubordinate, both idle talkers and deceivers, especially those of the circumcision, whose mouths must be stopped, who subvert whole households, teaching things which they ought not, for the sake of dishonest gain. We see here that an elder must be prepared to face opposition. Think about this passage. Scripture says there are many insubordinate, both idle talkers and deceivers, whose mouths must be stopped. These are people who do not want to stop their mouths. and they are people who are not limited in their approach by submission to the rule of God. These people can use slander, they can use manipulation, they can weasel their way around, and it does not bother their conscience at all. But it becomes our job to stop them from harming our flocks. There are several things to note here. The rebellion being described here is rebellion against the bat sound doctrine that we saw in verse 9. This is speaking about rebellion against the clearly revealed Word of God as contained in Scripture. This describes a person who hears clear teaching from the Bible and begins to say, no, the Bible isn't true here, or no, I don't have to do what God says here. Now, it's rare to have somebody who comes right out and says that that clearly. Normally it's going to involve a twisting of scripture that over time reveals that a person is not submitted to scripture. And that takes some time. This passage is not describing all opposition to directives and plans that we as elders may come up with. It is describing opposition to God's Word. We as elders, I think as all believers, must become lovers of truth. Truth is not friendly, but it's a friend and it's our friend as believers. And to love truth, we've got to receive truth even from the most unlikely or even unlikable sources. While we as elders may think a plan or direction is perfectly okay, somebody in our body of believers may be given a very clear discernment that our plan is a mistake and is headed in the wrong direction. We have got to be prepared to listen to those people. A ten-year-old with the Bible holds as much authority in the body of Christ as a trained scholar with the Bible. It is the Bible that is the authority. Christ is the head of the body after all. So this passage is not saying we should silence all opposition to our style or mode of leadership. It is saying we should silence opposition to God's word. To the degree that we speak scripture, we speak with authority. To the degree that we speak from our thoughts and imaginations, we do not hold authority and we have got to keep that in perspective. always clarify what is being opposed before coming up with a plan of action of what to do about the opposition. The prophets in the Old Testament were almost always unpopular to the leadership of the country but they were always right. We've got to be very discerning here and pride can't be a factor in our reactions. We've got to be the first people to admit we're wrong when we find out that we are and we have to be very critical of ourselves we should never punish those who evaluate critically if the critics are using God's word as the basis to oppose them is to oppose God the church needs more people who will be critically evaluating, who will know the scripture and apply the scripture. The church needs more people that are able to discern when the leadership is getting off track. To silence a prophetic voice, no matter what the source, is to do great danger to the flock. It's like leprosy that kills all the person's nerve endings. The leopard can't feel pain, so they can't tell when their flesh is being destroyed. The truth of God's Word is the priority and we all must submit to it. It's not the elder's job or privilege to boss people around with some master plan that we've come up with as our next great idea for our church. It's our job to minister God's Word to the flock. Any arbitrary plans or programs, and those are plans or programs that Scripture doesn't specifically address, any arbitrary plans or programs must be kept voluntary for our body members. Next, when the elders speak God's word clearly, some people will rise up in opposition to what God has clearly said. They do this, we see other places, because they are not sheep. They may pretend to be sheep, but they're really wolves. Or they may be wolves who aren't even trying to hide their true character. Either way, they're enemies of God. When this happens, an elder must be prepared to fight for the sheep. A man should know full well when being appointed as an elder that this is part of the job. Fighting for the sheep is part of the job. A man should not be appointed as an elder if he has no backbone or if he's gutless. I'm convinced that there are too many people serving as elders who don't understand this, and it's not really their fault. They don't understand it. They want to help. They want to be of service. They may be successful as businessmen, or they may be retired and have time on their hands. There's a thousand stories, but these men do not understand that this, by its very nature, is a conflict position. We must, as elders, both initiate conflict and respond to conflict when necessary. Personally, I've seen elders abandon their posts because the wolves started getting mean. That's like dropping out of a boxing match because the other guy's hitting us. What do you expect from the devil? Do we think that he will sit back and allow us to minister without interruption? We as elders will be misunderstood. We will be cited against. We will be slandered. And if we're worth our salt, it will cost us. It will cost us time. It will cost us comfort. We will grieve deeply over things that others know nothing about. And we'll sometimes have to look like the bad guys because we can't resort to the same tactics as the wolves use. But think about it. What is the church? Is that not what Christ died for? If that's true, if these people are the ones that Christ viewed as being worth dying for, aren't they worth a little suffering on our part? Really, the difference between a hireling and a shepherd is in his degree of commitment. A hireling is at his post to collect the paycheck. When the paycheck is not worth the price of service to the sheep, he will hit the road. A shepherd will guard the flock at the risk of his life. He is committed to death for the welfare of the sheep. That's a picture of what we are to be as elders. That's a picture of Christ's service to us. Now just in case you think I'm making too much of this text, let's take another look at another text, Acts 20 verses 17 through 32, and you'll see some of the same themes in it. Verse 17, from Miletus, Paul sent to Ephesus and called for the elders of the church. Now let's skip to verse 26. Therefore I testify to you this day that I am innocent of the blood of all men, for I have not shunned to declare to you the whole counsel of God. Therefore take heed to yourself and to all the flock among which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to shepherd the flock to shepherd the church of God which he purchased with his own blood. For I know this, that after my departure, savage wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock. Also from among yourselves men will rise up, speaking perverse things, to draw away the disciples after themselves. Therefore watch and remember that for three years I did not cease to warn everyone night and day with tears. So now, brethren, I commend you to God and to the word of His grace, which is able to build you up and give you an inheritance among all who are sanctified. Now look at verses 25 through 27. How can Paul say this? How can Paul say that he is not guilty of blood guilt? Is it because he administered so well? Or is it because he worked so hard? Or is it because he created such a wonderful evangelism strategy? No. Paul says he has no blood guilt because he has declared the whole counsel of God. He declared everything that God had to say to the needs that were presenting itself. He spoke the truth and the whole truth, even the unpopular truth. He spoke what Christ spoke and he stuck to it. You can also see again the charge given to elders. They are going to face wolves, and there is a cost to be paid to protect the church. It's the same kind of cost that Paul had already displayed by his service to them. Paul tells the elders to take heed to yourself and your flock. Watch out, he says, there'll be wolves from the inside, there'll be wolves from without. That's why Paul worked so hard for three years with the Ephesians. And if you study Ephesians and some of the history involved, Paul worked on tents or saddles in the morning and in the evening. Those were the normal work periods. Then when the rest of the town was sleeping because of the unbearable heat, during the hottest period of the day, Paul was teaching the body. Paul serves as a good example for us as elders. Then Paul goes on to commend them to God and to the Word of His grace. Third is again, God's Word. He starts with it. He ends with it. Why? Because it is able to build us up and give us an inheritance among those who are sanctified. It's not a new program. It's not a new strategy. It's not a new gimmick that will build us up. It is God's Word and only God's Word. I speak to you as elders today with a burden on my heart. I've been involved in church splits where elders quit and ran because of controversy. I've seen churches split because elders blindly backed the plans and the programs of their full-time minister and would not deal with the biblical opposition by their members. I've seen churches split because the elders would not stand up to fellow elders and set things straight. I have watched as elders seem powerless to do the very things that God commissioned them to do. And I've seen churches split because the leaving members no longer wanted to submit to God's Word. Now there's nothing that we can do about the last kind of split. In fact, it's a clarity. It's actually a blessed subtraction, although it will never feel like it. But the other kinds of splits are completely unnecessary. We as elders must do something about them. Our job is to see that based on God's word, no one is excluded from Christ's church that Christ would include, and no one is included who will not submit to Christ's authority and the Lordship over their lives. What this means is that we must carry out all our responsibilities within the boundaries of biblical authority. We only pronounce something as sin if God pronounces it as sin. We don't claim for ourselves any special mystical authority. We only rebuke what God rebukes. We only bless what God blesses. And if we will do this, we will avoid unnecessary splits and will foster the growth and the health of God's sheep. That is our job. So I challenge you today. Are you an elder? Act like it. Don't accept your own excuses. You have a Bible. What does it say? It's your job to minister that truth to your fellow elders, to your full-time ministers, and to your flock. That's the job we need to be about. We are the stewards of the most precious commodity on the planet, the children of God.