where they keep watch over your souls as those who will give an account, so that they will do this with joy and not with groaning, for this would be unprofitable for you. Pray for us. We are convinced that we have a good conscience, desiring to conduct ourselves well in all things, and I urge you all the more to do this so that I may be restored to you the sooner. Preaching on church leadership is not easy. No matter how hard he may try, when a pastor or elder says, obey your leaders and submit to them, it's going to sound self-serving. It's like a husband telling his wife she is supposed to submit to him. That's not an easy thing to do. But we can't avoid this subject just because it's hard. In fact, this subject is just as important for church leaders to hear and understand and follow as it is for the congregation. Over the last several weeks, as the Lord has given me the opportunity to preach, I've been dealing with different sections of the book of Hebrews, making an effort to deal with certain scriptures and certain topics that have been topical, at least in the sense that it's not been sequential messages. But within those topics and those certain scriptures, we've been trying to stay within the context of the overarching truth of this letter to the Hebrews. That topic being, that truth being, the Lord Jesus Christ is better. He introduces a better hope. He's the guarantee and mediator of a better covenant, which is established on better promises. He's a better sacrifice. He provides a better possession. He's a better priest. He's better. That is the overarching truth, the overarching theme of this letter to the Hebrews. So whatever truth we see in this letter, whatever truth we find in this letter, including the responsibilities of those leading and those being led within the Lord's church, all of that is ultimately about Christ being better. So this topic, even though it is difficult to preach, we must take seriously, whether we are in the pulpit or in the pew, because the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ is at stake. As we come to our text, the letter to Hebrews is almost to an end. The writer, whoever that may be, is not sure he will ever see the recipients of this letter again. So he asked them in verse 19 to pray for him, or verse 18 and 19, to pray for him and those with him so they might, if God wills, be restored to them for ongoing fellowship. But that may not happen. Where then will the people look for spiritual leadership? The answer is they will look to their leaders within the local church. So it's not surprising that in this last chapter, the writer refers to the leaders of the church three times after not mentioning them at all previously in the letter. In verse seven, we read, remember your leaders who spoke the word of God to you and considering the results of their conduct, imitate their faith. Verse 24, greet all of your leaders and all the saints. Those from Italy greet you. And here in our text in verse 17 that we just read, obey your leaders and submit to them for they keep watch over your souls as those who give an account so that they will do this with joy and not with groaning for this would be unprofitable for you. We know from a multitude of texts in the New Testament that the Lord designed for the church to have leadership, to have leaders. So we can assume that the writer of this text, this scripture, approved of that and wanted to strengthen the relationship between the people, between the congregation and their leaders. He's almost finished with this letter and the influence that would come through this letter and he may never see these people again. So he begins to turn their attention in this last chapter to their leaders. When he is finished, the leaders will then be able to carry on the work of being teachers and examples to the people. particularly in regards to the truths that have been laid out within this letter. We are Baptists by conviction and Americans by the providence of God. Why is this important when talking about church leadership? Because Americans, like most humans, have a love affair with individualism and do not like being told to submit to anyone. And Baptists believe in the biblical doctrine of the priesthood of all believers. That's why I think it's been challenging for Baptists over the years to accept the idea of plurality of eldership. Because there is a truth within God's Word that we are to be congregational and that we all are priests in the sense that we have a direct relationship with God. We don't have to go through a mediator, a human mediator like a human priest. But yet, that doesn't negate the fact that God's work teaches us that we are to follow the leadership that He's placed over us. So we Baptist Americans are doubly prone to be very wary about leadership and the call for submission. Therefore, it's doubly important that we pay attention to these passages on church leadership. As we said earlier, the New Testament is unmistakable in its teaching that a local church should have leaders. The way this teaching relates to all that has come before in this letter to the Hebrews is simply this. When the book has been read in the congregation, and we've talked about this more so in our First Peter study in our adult Sunday school class, you have to remember when this letter would have been presented to the church or churches that it was written to, these Hebrew saints, They wouldn't have just read it in pieces. They would have read the entire letter. And so at the end of that reading, they would have come to this section in Hebrews 13. Of course, they didn't have chapter and verses, but this section of the letter, the end of the letter. And they would have heard this instruction from the writer of Hebrews and ultimately from the Holy Spirit that leaders and these leaders who have read this letter most likely would have been the ones reading it and presenting it to the congregation in whatever form they did so. At the end, these leaders would have heard this instruction to live out and teach and apply what had been presented in this book to the lives of the people. And the people were then to watch them and imitate them and become responsive and compliant to their leadership. In other words, the biblical truth is about Christ being better. Again, the overarching theme of this book, this letter, Those biblical truths that we've been touching on over the last couple of months are meant to be embodied in the leaders of the church, this church, Elder Grove Baptist Church, so that you, the flock, see them lived out and hear them taught and have God-centered models to imitate and God-centered teachings to follow. That's what these last words of instruction, particularly verse 17 that we'll be focusing on this morning, are meant to convey. So we're gonna take verse seven, we're gonna examine it in more detail in order to develop this idea of how the Lord uses the leadership that he's placed within the church, and particularly in the context of this letter to the Hebrews, to show and imitate, and then for the people to follow that Christ is better. That's what really, that's what we need to see this morning. And we'll see that in three different points. First, what's the aim of leadership? the aim of godly church leadership, the means of leadership, and the response to leadership. Let's read again verse 17, because that will be where we spend most of our time this morning. Obey your leaders and submit to them, for they keep watch over your souls as those who will give an account, so that we'll do this with joy and not with groaning, for this would be unprofitable for you. Two phrases in this verse point to the aim of church leadership, the aim of godly church leadership. One is, that would be unprofitable for you. That's a negative statement that helps us see what the aim of leadership is. And the other statement is, they keep watch over your souls. Or literally, they keep watch on behalf of your souls. We can conclude from these two phrases that the aim of leadership in this verse is the profit or the benefit of the people. The leadership and the response to that leadership should not be unprofitable for you, so therefore it should be profitable. We can take that negative statement about something being unprofitable and say that the aim, the purpose of leadership within the Lord's churches, at least from the context of this verse, is profit or benefit. And when it says that leaders are watching or staying on the alert as it can be understood, on behalf of your souls, it means the same thing. It is for the good of your souls that leaders are vigilant and awake and watchful. So in both of those phrases, the point is the same. The aim of leadership within the church is the profit or the good of the people, especially the good of their souls. What sort of profit or good does the writer and ultimately the Holy Spirit have in mind? The answer should be clear from the entire book, and I know we haven't gone through the entire book, but I think we've seen enough from the message that we've touched on, and we can go back to Tom's preaching through the book several years ago, what we can recall. There's that, and again, we want to keep that in view, that Christ is better. That is ultimately what the profit of that would be to these Hebrew Saints and to us by following church leadership is That to know and to believe and to live out that Christ is better, so that's the that's the sense the entire book But there's one specific verse that I think will help us even narrow down on the purpose or the aim What is the profit or benefit that comes from following church leadership and church leaders? leading the way they should Listen to Hebrews 1039, but we are not of those who shrink back to destruction, but are those who have faith to the preserving of the soul. The aim of this book, in addition to promoting that Christ is better, but the purpose of telling these people that and telling us that is to help people not shrink back from the faith. Remember, if you remember the full, this letter was written to Hebrews who were struggling with the transition from the Old Testament worship system and struggling with coming to full faith and trust that Christ truly is better and not shrinking back from that as they dealt with persecution and temptation and just lack of faith. So that's what we need to keep in view, that the aim of this book is to help people not do that, not shrink back and have their soul destroyed, but rather to persevere in faith to the end and preserve their soul. The book of Hebrews is about perseverance. Over and over, it calls us to be vigilant concerning our souls and to endure to the end in faith and obedience. We could read verse after verse, text after text, that where the writer of Hebrews talks about perseverance, Enduring. We looked at Hebrews 12, running that race of faith and enduring that race, that struggle, race, talking about agony. Those, that's throughout this book. So the aim of spiritual leadership, the aim of spiritual, godly church leadership is primarily the salvation of the soul. And that salvation is not seen in the book of Hebrews as a one time event or decision, but a lifelong battle against temptation and unbelief. The job of the elders of this church primarily is to help you persevere in faith and be saved. In other words, since perseverance is at stake day after day, the aim of leadership is not simply to get people to trust in Jesus, at the front end of the Christian life, but so to teach and so live and so admonish that professing Christians in the church not shrink back from destruction, but have faith in the preserving of the soul. As church leaders, we must take serious what Jesus said in Mark 13, 13, the one who endures to the end will be saved. This is the message of Hebrews, and it means that all messages and all meetings are salvation meetings. Not because we only aim at bringing people to that initial faith and trust in Christ, although that is part of our work as leaders, but because our final salvation comes to us through persevering faith, not just a one-time decision. Salvation of the soul is the ongoing work of God, day after day, week after week, month after month, to preserve us safe in Jesus by preserving our faith. And that happens through the teaching and modeling and admonishing and correcting of faithful leaders in the church. Let's hear it again from Hebrews 10 39. We are not of those who shrink back to destruction, but of those who have faith to the preserving of the soul. That is the aim of church leadership, the preserving of the soul for eternity in the presence of God for everlasting righteousness and joy. We watch over We lead the way we should for the good of the people, ultimately, so their faith perseveres. So that is the aim of leadership. What about the means of leadership? How are the souls of God's people persevered and not destroyed? I think we can see three answers to that question in verse 17. Watchfulness, joyfulness, and seriousness. First leaders preserve the souls of the people, the souls of the flock that they've been given responsibility for by watchfulness. Obey your teachers and submit to them for they keep watch over your souls. Or we really could say it, translate that, keep watch on behalf of your souls. The spiritual leaders of the congregation are the watchers, the wakeful ones, the ones who above all others are alert and vigilant in spiritual matters. The word over, and keep watch over your souls does not mean that leaders just watch the souls of their people. Although there is a sense in which we do watch, there's an attentiveness that we have to give to seeing what's going on within the flock and trying to know the people that's found elsewhere in God's Word. But in this particular case, the word over refers to on behalf of or for the sake of. So the watching that church leaders do is on behalf of the souls of the people or for the sake of their souls. What do leaders watch so that people's souls will be preserved and not destroyed? Based on the book of Hebrews, I think we can see three, excuse me, four things, four things that church leaders are responsible to watch on behalf of their congregations, the people of their church's souls, their church, not their church, the Lord's church, the church that they've been given responsibility for as spiritual leaders. Spiritual leaders watch the word of God. They must ever be alert to the accurate meaning and the preciousness and the truthfulness and the power of God's word. Back at verse seven of Hebrews 13, we touched on it earlier. It says, remember those who led you, who spoke the word of God to you. This is the main function of church leaders. They lead by the word of God, not their own word. They are men under authority, not just with authority. This is why the people are called to obey them and submit to them. The main issue of perseverance is whether we drift away from the word or keep hearing it, believing it, loving it, and obeying it. That is how we persevere, by continuing to follow God's word. Hebrews 2.1 says, we must pay much closer attention to what we have heard, speaking of the word of God, so that we may not drift away from it. The job of church leaders is to help the congregation pay close attention to God's word and so not drift away from it and so persevere in faith in it and ultimately be saved. The first watch that we do as church leaders that we have responsibility for the souls of God's people is we watch the Word of God. Secondly, spiritual leaders watch Christ. We've said it over and over again, Christ is what this book and all of God's Word is about. Hebrews 1-2, in these the last days God has spoken to us in son. It says, it's translated probably, most of your translation is in his son, but literally The word His is not there, that's added to for clarification. It literally says, has spoken to us in Son, in the language of His Son, Jesus Christ. So when we're watching over the word, or watching the word for the benefit, for the profit of God's people, we do so by making sure that the word is Christ-focused, Christ-centered, because He is what the word is all about. The Son is the Word, and He's literally the Word, capital W-O-R-D, that we need to hear most of all. Hebrews 3.1 says it this way, Therefore, holy brethren, partakers of a heavenly calling, consider Jesus. That's what leaders say over and over again, consider Jesus. To do that, leaders must watch Jesus and be alert to Jesus and know Jesus and love Jesus above everything. Hebrews 12 too, which we looked at last time together when I was able to preach, says this, fix your eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith. If it is the aim of leaders to preserve faith, and I think we can see that, that's evident from what we've already touched on, and if Jesus is the author and finisher, the author and perfecter of faith, that trailblazer that we follow after, The leaders must relentlessly say this with their mouth and with their lives, fix your eyes on Jesus. That is what we are to do. We watch for the souls of people of the congregation that we've been given responsibility for by fixing our eyes on Jesus and telling others to fix their eyes on Jesus. Spiritual leaders watch their own conduct. Hebrews 13, seven, again, we read this earlier. Remember those who led you, considering the result of their conduct, imitate their faith. And when I said this is just as necessary for the leader as it is for the hearer, this is pretty convicting for me as an elder to hear the responsibility that we have to watch for our own conduct. because we are to do so so that people can imitate us. That's a great responsibility. The people are called to consider the leader's conduct and imitate their faith. This means that leaders are more accountable to God for their behavior than other Christians and must watch it. All Christians should be godly. We've set good examples, but on top of that, God himself instructs the church to look at the lives of its leaders and follow. Paul said it himself, follow me as I follow after Christ. Again, that creates a great responsibility. That is why there should be higher standards for leadership in the church than for membership of the church. That is also why failures in leaders are worse than failures in members, and why restoration to leadership should be much more difficult than restoration to membership. Paul says something similar to that in 1 Timothy 4.16, play close attention to yourself and to your teaching. He's speaking to a church elder who then was to take that instruction to the other elders within the Ephesus church and then to the congregation. So when he says, he's talking to Timothy as a church elder, as a church leader saying, pay close attention to yourself and to your teaching. Persevere in these things for as you do this, you will ensure salvation both for yourself and for those who hear you. So the salvation of our hearers depends in some measure on the faithfulness of leaders to be watchful over themselves, our conduct, as well as our doctrine. And fourthly, spiritual leaders watch the people. Hebrews 10.25 says, let us consider one another for provoking or stirring up to love and good deeds. That's one of the texts we looked at a few weeks back was Hebrews 10.25 and the necessity for us to gather together, not forsake the assembling ourselves together in order that we could consider one another for provoking or stirring up to love and good deeds. If the people are to watch each other for the sake of stirring each other up to love, how much more its leaders. In fact, in view of this word in Hebrews 10.25, it's plain that the watching over the flock is a shared effort among leaders and the congregation. This is why fellowship and communion among the church is so important and necessary. The elders cannot know all of what's going on within Lord's Church, although we should try to do so as best we can by knowing our flock. But there may be things that we're not aware of. And so that requires other members of the flock giving personal care and exhortation to one another. That is why we must be intentional to watch each other and strengthen each other's faith and stir each other up to love and call each other to account. That's the responsibility of all of God's people within the local church. But that is, again, part of also the leadership that the Lord has placed with the church's elders and pastors is to foster that kind of fellowship communion. Not where we're policing the church. That's not at all the idea here is we love one another. We know one another. We care about one another to the point that we stir one another up to love and good works. And sometimes that requires holding one another accountable. It's not just the responsibility of the elders to do that. It's the responsibility of all of the flock. But again, the leaders of God's church, the Lord's church, the ones he's given responsibility for leadership are to model that. And so together we Again, show that love for one another. So watchfulness is the first meaning of leadership. Watchfulness of the word, watchfulness of Christ, watchfulness over ourselves, and watchfulness for the people, the congregation. Now the second means of leadership is that leaders should be joyful in their leading. You see this at the end of Hebrews 13, 17. Let them, speaking of the leaders, do this with joy and not with grief. not with groaning as it's translated in the legacy standard that I'm reading from, for that would be unprofitable for you. The profit, the profitableness of spiritual leadership for the people comes through joy, the leader's joy, them being able to lead and serve with joy. The implications of this are profound. It's really difficult to get away from how important this idea of leading with joy is. It means that a leader who's indifferent to his joy in God is also indifferent to the benefit of his people. If we're not fostering joy within our lives and living in the joy of the Lord as we're called to do, as all of us are called to do, but in this particular context as the leaders are called to do, we actually are becoming unprofitable to God's people. If we do our work begrudgingly and with complaining and groaning and sadness, and I'm not saying there aren't going to be times when we have to struggle and it's not easy to get up here and preach or easy to do whatever we have to do as the leaders that God has placed over his flock, but we still should do so with a general sense of joy. Again, if we don't do that, we're becoming unprofitable to the flock, to you. Our loving you depends on our delighting, our being joyful in our service to the Lord in our ministry here at Al Grove. It really shouldn't be hard to see how important that is. If God is not the satisfying portion of those who give their lives to knowing his word and living it, why should anyone in the church have joy in serving the Lord? If those who have been called and placed in the position to know God's word and live it out, and they can't do that, why should we expect anyone else to do that? And if you can't live with joy in who God is, your faith will fail and not persevere. So the joy of leadership is not optional, it's essential. Paul says this in 2 Corinthians 1.24, not that we lorded over your faith, but we are workers with you for your joy. Joy is not something you can take for granted. It takes work to maintain joy in God. Our fallen nature tries to find joy in everything but God. Even good things that God's given us, family, work, all those are good things, but if we find our joy in those things, our ultimate joy, then we're gonna, our faith is gonna fail. We're not gonna persevere. Our joy, ultimate joy must be in God. We must be directed back over and over again, back to his all satisfying greatness. over and over. You hear Tom say it, he is our everything. That's what he's talking about. That's the sense of our joy must come ultimately from him by recognizing that he is our everything and that must be modeled out by the leaders that God's placed over his flock. We must do that for each other and we must do it for God's people. And it's important that even the people are commanded to help us do our work with joy. Let them do this with joy and not with grief, for this would be improbable for you. That brings us to the third means of leadership, seriousness. We've looked at watchfulness, we looked at joyfulness, now we see seriousness. We find this in verse 17 in the phrase, as those who give an account. There in the middle of the verse, We read this, they keep watch on behalf of your souls as those who will give an account. This means that when the elders of the Lord's church and particularly as we're making an application to Ella Grove Baptist Church. When we stand before the judgment seat of Christ, he's going to say something like, what did you do to preserve the faith and obedience of the members of El Grove? What did you teach? How did you live? What steps did you take in the case of the disobedient, the rebellious, the suffering, the grieving, the perplexed, the lonely, the aged, the teenagers, the children? And we will have to give an account for how we did that. So this is unbelievably serious business. The joyfulness that we are to have as we serve God's people, as the leaders that he's placed over his flock, is not a flippant or trivial or shallow thing. It is immensely weighty. It's not to be sad, it's not to be burdensome, not depressing, but it is to be serious. One of our answers at the judgment when we are called to account for how we led how we served as leaders of God's people is we should be able to say we sought to maintain a happiness, a joy in the Lord and then to lead people into a joy that could not be destroyed by cancer or calamity or criticism or culture. That's the kind of joy that we are to foster in God's people as we live out and serve with joy. And that's a serious, serious matter. So we've seen the aim, we've seen the ways we go about the means of our leadership, and then lastly, the response to leadership. I told you this was as much, maybe more so for the leader as it was for the follower because two thirds of the message is about the leader's responsibility. Now we come to the church's responsibility, people's responsibility. How do we respond to leadership? And I say we, because I have much responsibility. I have other elders that the Lord has, we don't, we serve together, but we have responsibility as members of this flock to submit to the other elders, to obey them. So it's not just, I'm not just saying that to you, I'm saying that to myself. We all have a response to the leadership that the Lord has placed over us. And the response God appoints here in Hebrews 13, 17 is, Obey your leaders and submit to them. I could spend a long time talking about what the words obey and submit mean. They mean obey and submit. It's the same word obey that's used when it says children obey your parents. Same exact word. It's the same word that's used when Paul told wives to submit to their husbands. Same words. So I'll just leave it at that. Our response, our response to the leaders that God has placed over us as they do what they're supposed to do in watching, caring, leading, is to respond to that leadership with obedience and submission. As I said earlier, this is a challenging subject on which to preach, both personally and just general. There are cultural reasons and biblical reasons that make this subject difficult. Culturally, the defining spirit, as we already said earlier, is individualism, self-determination, pulling your own self up by your bootstraps. That's an American thing. That's something that we, as Americans, look to and promote, pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps. And that often is contrary to submitting to others, to obedience to others. The ultimate value in America is the unencumbered self. Anything that enhances on my liberty, my individual liberty to do as I please as good is not a good thing. That's our mindset culturally. Hopefully it's not within the church, but we know culture creeps into the church and definitely has in American culture. Anything that encumbers me and limits my ability to do as I please is bad. Self is king. And autonomy is the highest law. Now, we see that on hyperspeed now with all these things that are more obvious, like the LGBTQ stuff, and the transgender, and people just doing whatever they want to do. But that's not just a new thing. Now, how it's carried out in our culture is new. But really, if you go back 200 years, America has always been about self-determination, self-promotion, individual liberty. And that's not a bad thing unless it's abused. And it has become very abused. But it's not just in relation to those obvious things. It's just in our everyday lives that doing what we want to do and being able to have freedom and liberty is a good thing unless it becomes where we're not willing to submit because you can't tell me what to do kind of mindset. And that is definitely an American mindset. So this makes the idea of obey your teachers to mention culturally outrageous in our culture that is not something that is would be accepted easily. Another part of our culture that makes this text difficult is that authority and power have been so often abused that there are legitimate misgivings about making obedience and submission the norm. There are all kinds of books today on spiritual abuse and churches that abuse And what they have in mind in part is the abuse of power to manipulate and coerce and use people to enhance the leader's status and stroke the leader's ego and sometimes line the leader's pockets. We can't not deny that is a common occurrence within modern Christianity, particularly American Western Christianity. We hear it, see it all the time. Now again, there are those who take it to the extreme and use it to excuse not submitting to church leadership. But it doesn't mean it's not there, it doesn't have to be part, it's not part of our thought process when we think about submitting and obeying church leadership. We've experienced it right here in Ella Grove, that kind of abusive leadership. And so that's a legitimate thing that we have to continue when we talk about this idea of obedience and submission to those that the Lord has placed in authority over us. Again, since there are legitimate cases of spiritual abuse in our culture, church members are wary of putting too much trust in their spiritual leaders. But there are more important biblical reasons other than just cultural reasons for why this text and this idea of obedience submission to church leadership is difficult to preach on. Because it's not easy to know exactly what disobedience looks like on a day-to-day basis. We know it's not the leaders just lording it over God's people. We know that. We're going to touch on that in a minute. We also know it's not everybody doing their own thing and just I'll listen to them when I want to listen to them. I did either. It's not either one of those. And there's biblical basis for that. It's not just a cultural thing. It's really a biblical thing. So we're going to consider quickly four biblical facts about church leadership that feed into how we hear this command to obey and how we follow it. The Bible teaches, first and foremost, the Bible teaches that elders sometimes go bad and teach wrong things and do wrong things. If you remember in Acts 20, that's one of the most, you know, instructive text on church leadership. It's Paul speaking to a group of elders there as he's sending them back to their churches and he tells them this in Acts 20 verse 30, from among your own selves, among this group of elders, these men that God has placed in spiritual leadership over these churches, men will arise speaking perverse things to draw away the disciples after them. Paul said that to church elders, that there were going to be men among them that would rise up to draw them away from following after God. The clear implication is that some elders will turn bad and will try to lead disciples away and that these elders should not be obeyed. We've seen this again in our own lives, in our own culture. It's tragic and Paul warns that what happened, this means that command to obey elders is not absolute. It's not because there could be bad elders who are attempting to lead in the wrong direction. Paul confirms this in Galatians 1.8 when he says that the gospel is so sacred that you should not obey anyone who comes with another message, not even an angel. But even if we are an angel from heaven, Paul himself and those that are with him, even if they were to preach a gospel contrary to what we have preached to you, he is to be accursed. The truth of God is the litmus paper of all true leadership. If I don't preach God's truth, I don't preach God's truth, don't believe what I preach. no matter what it says about obeying and submitting to church leaders. That is what the Apostle says in Galatians 1.8. Neither I nor any of the other elders of Elder Grove have final authority. The gospel does. Christ does. 1 Timothy 5, 19 and 20, Paul instructs Timothy what to do if an elder is found to be in sin. He says, do not receive an accusation against an elder except on the basis of two or three witnesses. Those who continue in sin, those elders who continue in sin, rebuke in the presence of all so that the rest also will be fearful of sinning. In other words, individual elders are not perfect, and a procedure must be in place for correcting and disciplining them even to the point of public rebuke. We, as elders, are not above error and mistake. There will be times when we must repent and make public apology. In 1 Peter 5, 2 and 3, Paul tells elders, and we touched on this earlier, that we should be good examples of the flock and not use our office to lord over or particularly to gain anything. Shepherd the flock of God among you, exercise the oversight, not for sordid gain, primarily there financial gain, but with eagerness, not yet as lording it over those allotted to your charge, but proving to be examples to the flock. This is a very important word to how the relationship of leader-followers to work in the church. There is real leadership and real authority. God has given that, placed that real leadership and real authority in the hands of pastors and elders, but there should not be what Peter calls lording it over the flock. This is probably the closest thing we have in the New Testament to the modern idea of spiritual abuse. The Greek word translated lording it over means using power without a servant's heart and trying to sway people without setting an example for them. and then exerting influence ultimately for their own purposes, their own status, their own financial gain, not ultimately for the glory of God and the good of the people. That's what lording it over means. And that is not what elders are to do when they hear the command for the church to obey them. This command should make them tremble with the weight of spiritual responsibility rather than gloat over the right to rule. When we think in terms of power rather than responsibility of spiritual leadership and service to those that God's given us responsibility for, that is going to result in us lording it over the flock, which we are called not to do. Now, just because we have these warnings, very clear warnings in God's Word, not just cultural aspects, but clear biblical things that make temper our, and should help us find a balance in this idea of obedience and submission, doesn't nullify that Hebrews 13, 17 still says, obey and submit to them, speaking of church leadership. A church should have a bent toward trusting its leaders. You should have a disposition to be supportive in your attitudes and actions toward their goals and directions. You should want to imitate their faith, and you should have a happy and joyful inclination to comply with their instructions. Listen again to those phrases, a bent toward trusting, a disposition to support, a wanting to imitate, an inclination to comply. What these phrases are meant to convey, meant to capture, is there's two sides to this biblical truth. One, elders are fallible and should not lord it over the flock, and two, the flock should follow good leadership. Where these two truths are working, where they are happening, beautiful thing. It's a godly thing. It's a wonderful thing. It's a thing that will promote Christ. It will promote Him as being better. So we should pray with all of our hearts that God preserves these things within Ella Grove and deepen it among us both for the good of the people and for the glory of the Lord Jesus Christ. We serve, we lead as God instructs. We watch, we do so with joyfulness and with seriousness and we do so because the Lord's people are called to obey and submit to the leaders that he has placed in responsibility over them. And we do again all that because we do it because Lord Jesus Christ is better and he deserves to be glorified as better and the way he's part of the way he's shown to be better is through this model of church leadership, how God works through those he's placed in authority, and how he uses them to lead his people to see that Christ is better and to serve him in the way that glorifies him. That is what I hope we see this morning from this text. Let's be dismissed in prayer. Father, we do thank