Scripture Reference: 1 Peter 5:1-5
Visit the series page: Exiles: A study in 1 Peter
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Sermon Series: Spiritual Exiles
Message: Godly Shepherds
Airdate: 11/3/2026
Programs: 2392
Godly Shepherds Part A
Let me just offer a quick prayer that God would bless the preaching of His word today. Would you join me? Father, we just ask that You please would indeed take Your word, move it into our hearts, and through our hearts, Lord, we pray that it would do its good and perfect work, that it would conform us to the likeness of Christ, that it would change our church, it would change us individually, that we might be aligned with Your will, which is found in Your word. We thank You for Your word today. Spirit, come and do Your work amongst us, we pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
All right, I’m going to begin by just reading our text today. We’re studying in 1 Peter. We have transition. We’ve been talking about suffering in chapter 4. We get to chapter 5, and Peter now turns his attention to leadership. Leadership in the church. Here’s what he says, 1 Peter 5, verse 1. “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, giving 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 crown.”
So, as I just said, Peter transitions now into the whole matter of leadership, and specifically leadership in the church of Jesus Christ. There is a character and a conduct of church leaders that he identifies as elders. You see that there? Elders. “So I exhort the elders among you.” Now, you could look at that and say, “Oh, he’s referring to the senior citizens in the church.” Those that have been around the block, around the sun a few times, the mature, the experienced, those that are a tad older. And actually, the word here is used at times to refer to chronological age, but that is not what he’s talking about here. He is talking about an office in the church, a role and an office in the church known as elder.
So let’s talk about elders first of all, and then we’ll get into what Peter is saying about elders. But just to talk about elders in the New Testament church. If you read in Acts, begin reading in Acts, you’re going to discover that very quickly on, one of the high priorities in the local church was the establishing of leadership. Establishing of leadership. Luke writes Acts, and you get to Acts 6. So the first leaders in the church, of course, are the apostles. You get to Acts 6, and there’s widows who are not being ministered to and served in an equitable way. And so what do they do? They establish a group of godly men who handle the matter of serving the widows in the church. I believe the prototypes of the later office known as deacon in the church.
You get a little bit longer later in the story, you read through 1 Timothy 3, and by the time Paul writes 1 Timothy 3, there is already an official office in the church known as deacon. Diakonos means literally servant. And deacons from the beginning are those that lead in the serving ministries of the church. And we are very blessed by the deacons of this church, and that office needs to be viewed highly, especially in a place where the leader of the church said, “Greatness in the kingdom of God is to be the servant of all.” To be a diakonos in the church is a high and holy calling. Amen.
But he’s not talking about deacons here. He is talking about elders. So you read through Acts, and a little bit later in the story, all of a sudden in Acts 11, the church at Antioch has elders. Leaders in the church known as elders. By Acts 15, there is a doctrinal issue that the apostles gather with the elders of the church at Jerusalem to collaborate on a resolution. So you had elders at the church of Antioch, you have elders at the Jerusalem church. We find in Acts 14 that the Apostle Paul and Barnabas are retracing their steps from their missionary journey, and the text says this is what they were doing as they went to each city on their way back to Jerusalem. “And when they had appointed elders for them in every church, with prayer and fasting, they committed them to the Lord in whom they had believed.” Now, I’m sure they did a lot of other things. They fellowshiped, they taught. But one of the big priorities was establishing leadership. And they identified them by laying hands on them.
You can read in Titus 1, Paul sends Titus to the island of Crete. And he says, “This is why I left you in Crete, so that you might put what remained in order and appoint elders in every town as I directed you.” Notice, elders, plural, in every town, singular. And we see there and in other places that God’s plan for the local church is a plurality of leaders. Not one leader, a plurality of leaders.
Now you might say, “Well, why a plurality? I mean, why would you have more than one?” For the same reason, I think, that whenever you watch the Tour de France, there’s always groups of five or six guys that have the same jersey on. They’re like the U.S. Postal Team or the whatever team. They’re riding as a team. And they have found over time that if you’re an individual rider, you can’t win the race. Why? Because nobody by himself has all the skills needed to win the Tour de France. You need somebody that’s good at climbing hills that others can draft on. You need somebody that’s a sprinter. You need somebody that’s a strategist. All these different skills, and no one person has everything that’s needed for that team to win. And similarly, in the church, there is nobody but Jesus who has all of the gifts and all of the insights and all of the necessary skills in order to lead a local church. And in the wisdom of God, He has ordained, called us to establishing a plurality of leadership in every local church. Elders is the term that is used here. Working together in harmony. To bring the sheep to maturity.
So just to say specifically, what is an elder? An elder is a recognized and authorized leader and shepherd in the church whose responsibility it is to lead, to feed, and to oversee the church. That is an elder. It’s an elevated role, not because the elder himself is elevated. It’s not an elevated role, even because of the inherent worth of the people of the church. It is an elevated role because of whose church it is. Whose church it is.
It reminds me of a scene in Downton Abbey. Now, I remember we were watching through the Downton Abbey series, and there was this one scene, and I thought, someday I’m going to use that in a sermon. Today’s the day. If you’re not familiar with Downton Abbey, it’s PBS series that there’s an estate and a really beautiful kind of castle mansion that a guy named Lord Grantham is in charge of. He’s the head guy, the Earl of the estate. And there’s a scene where they’re walking, he and this guy named Matthew, who is the heir apparent, are walking, and they look through sort of the trees, and they see Downton Abbey, the building. And there’s this little interchange, and here’s how it goes. Lord Grantham says, “You do not love this place yet.” Matthew Crawley, “Well, obviously it’s...” And Lord Grantham interrupts him, “No, you don’t love it. You see a million bricks that may crumble, a thousand gutters and pipes that may block and leak, and stone that will crack in the frost.”
Now you could look at that and say, “Oh, I get what you’re saying. I get what you’re saying. The elders are like Matthew Crawley.” The Lord of the church is who? Church. It is Jesus Christ. Let’s have that clearly in our minds, right? The Lord of the church is Jesus. The Lord of the estate is Jesus. The elders are the caretakers. The elders are the servants in the church, the stewards of the house. It is not the elder’s life work that makes being an elder or the church valuable and priceless. It is Christ’s life work and serving the church and giving His life and paying the price with His blood to redeem the church that makes every local church precious and the privilege to serve in the church of Jesus Christ as a leader precious. It’s not the elder, and it’s not you the people. It is whose church it is that infuses all of what we are doing here with eternal significance. Jesus said, “I will build my church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it.” The local church in the plan of God as a part of the universal church is high and holy. Because our Savior is high and holy and loves the church and gave Himself up for it.
And so Peter comes in now, and talking about leadership, he says, “I exhort the elders among you as a fellow elder and a witness of the sufferings of Christ.” I find this interesting. Old Peter, remember old Peter? Wanting to argue that he’s the greatest, that he’s better than all the rest. “All the others may fail You, I will never fail You.” Remember Peter, Mr., like, “Oh, I’m the greatest around here.” We see in this statement right here another example of the humility that God had worked in Peter’s heart. He doesn’t say, “I, Peter, the bishop of the church, I, Peter, you know, the head of the disciples, the head of the apostles.” What does he say? He says, “I’m just a fellow elder amongst with you.” He says, “I’m on your level.” And he brings himself down and says, “We’re just all servants in this house, aren’t we?” Love that, love that. And you see the signs of maturity in Peter’s life, which is good because he’s gonna talk about the need to be humble as a leader in the church. And he gives them an example right there in that statement.
So let’s get into now, what is an elder? And by the way, if you’re sitting here thinking to yourself, two things you might think. Number one, why should I care about this? Why should I care about this? Because the value of an elder, the higher, the better the elders in the church, the better it is for the sheep in the church. The better the shepherd, the better the sheep. And so sheep had better be able to identify quality spiritual leadership and what that is supposed to look like. And the failure of sheep to know what that is supposed to look like explains why so many professing Christians go to churches and are involved in ministries where clearly the leadership is fleecing the flock and taking advantage of the church. And it’s the sheep not knowing what they should be looking for that allows them to stay and remain in that.
Second thing that is important in this, as we talk about it, is Peter is going to describe what spiritual leaders look like. But in reality, what he is describing is what spiritual maturity looks like. And when you read through Paul’s list of qualifications for an elder, you can’t look at that and go, “Oh, it doesn’t apply to me. I’m never going to be an elder. They’re never going to ask me. So who cares?” Those are all, these are all things that every godly Christian will aspire to. And when we hold them up and we say, what does spiritual maturity look like? It looks like what Peter and Paul are describing, those that ought to be in leadership, character and the conduct of their life. So for those two reasons, this is important for all of us. And maybe you can come up with some more.
So what is Peter saying here? And you’ll notice that Peter basically gets into this. It’s not this, but this. Not this, but this. We do that in conversation a lot. Not that, but that. And we sort of draw a contrast. That’s what Peter is doing here. Not this, which is all too common, but that, which is really what good shepherding looks like. So notice the first thing that he says is just an exhortation. What are elders to do? They are to shepherd the flock. That’s what he says. “Shepherd the flock of God that is among you, exercising oversight.”
As we develop this thought of what is a spiritual leader, what is an elder, we have a great glimpse at this. And by the way, the words that are used here are the three words that are used for spiritual leaders in the church. We have the word, and this will give you a little church history help as well. The first word for elder is presbyteros in the Greek. Does that sound like anything you’ve heard of? Presbyterian. So the Presbyterians, they take that word and they say that’s our denomination. And that means elder. Second word is episkopos. Does that sound like anything? Episcopalian. They take that, and that’s how they get their name. And the third word that we find here is the verb form of the noun word for pastor. Okay? Pastor. All in one verse. We got the three words here. All of them, I believe, synonymous. And you can look at them this way. Elder is the office. Overseer is the responsibility of the elder. The elder is to give oversight. And shepherd is the heart and the function of the elder, to shepherd the flock.
This is in the imperative. This is a command. If you could hear Peter, like if he was to read this, say, “Peter, read your letter to us. Would you do it?” When he got to this point, he would raise his voice, and he would say, “Elders, shepherd the church,” and get elevated like that. That’s the sense of it here. He is commanding elders to do this. Why? Because nothing is more dishonoring to the glory of the Lord of the house than when those that are in charge of the under shepherds in the house are being passive or being derelict or being lazy. These and many other things do not honor the Lord of the house. And so Peter says, “Shepherd the flock.” Elders need to be about shepherding the flock. How? As I’ve said, elders shepherd the flock by leading, feeding, and overseeing the church. That is their responsibility.
And for us as sheep, and in a sense, this is sort of where the metaphor breaks down because shepherds are sheep themselves. But for us as sheep, we ought to want the highest quality shepherding that we possibly can have. Because again, the better, the higher the quality of the leading and the shepherding by those that are leaders in the church, the better it is for the sheep that are in the church. The worse that it is, the negligent, the derelict leadership in the church, who suffers for that? The church does. The church does. And maybe you’ve been in situations in your sort of spiritual journey where a breakdown in leadership, you saw the effect that it has in that local church and the pain and the divisiveness and all these things. When shepherds aren’t shepherding, it’s the sheep that suffer. So we all want the best shepherds that we can get and to pray that God would equip our shepherds to be even better than they are.
And, you know, this is like right out of my experience this week with our daughter Madeline. When we found out she had a problem, what do we do? Do we just go in the yellow pages and go, “Let’s just find some guy that’ll tell us what we need to know maybe here. Let’s look under here. Pick it at random, one, two, three. Let’s go to him.” Is that what we did? If you think that’s what we did, you don’t know me very well, because... we found out that we needed to get a specialist, and so we said to our pediatrician, “Who would you recommend?” And she gave us a list of five names, three in Chicago, two in Indianapolis, that she would recommend. So he gives us five names.
Well, I call my … years ago, and all these years I’ve had a good friend named Jim Williams, who teaches the kidney at IU Med School, like PhD on the kidney. That’s all he does is the kidney. So I called my friend Jim Williams. I said, “Jim, this is like your area. You’re like an expert in this. Here’s the problem. Who would you recommend?” And he gave a name. And the name he gave as being the top guy in this field was one of the five names that our pediatrician had recommended. So we’re like, “Hmm.” And he said, “I’ll write a personal letter on your behalf to him.” I’m feeling better about this guy in particular at this point. And then we did some checking, and of all the five names, there were only two that were in our network for health insurance, and he was one of them. Sold! Sold! Right there, right? Right there. So guess who we went to see? We went to see this doctor, had a very good visit with him, and felt good that we were getting the highest quality care that we could for our daughter. Because the better the doctor, the more likely the, the better the health for our child.
And spiritually, the same is true. The higher the quality of the eldering and the shepherding and the leading, the better it is for the sheep in the church. And the sheep ought to want that and pray for that and encourage that and understand what is a biblical shepherd. So that if the leadership, for example, of this church starts sort of veering off in some direction, the sheep understand that’s not what it’s supposed to look like right there.
It burdens me. I don’t have time for this, but it’s just a side note. It burdens me to turn on the TV and to see unbiblical shepherding packing out stadiums and people professing to be Christians lauding the unbiblical eldering. And for that to be wildly popular requires sheep who don’t know what a shepherd looks like. That was a side note. Was that a good one? I think maybe there was a good truth to that. And so when people come to me and say, “Have you read this book?” And it’s one of these guys. “This is an awesome book. You need to read this, Pastor Steve.” I think to myself, no. And fact that you are drawn to that unbiblical shepherding tells me something about your understanding of what biblical shepherding should look like. And we want better for you in that.
Now, I will admit, it’s hard to talk about this subject humbly or without, you know, like this is what we’re doing, and so hear my heart in that. I’m acknowledging that it’s hard to talk about this because I am an elder here and a shepherd here. So I feel that tension as I’m talking about this, and I want to approach this in a proper humility. But there’s truth that needs to be said.
Finally, notice here that he says that it is the flock of God. It is the flock of God. Why is that important? Because it’s easy for shepherds to think that this is my flock. This is my church. It’s even easy for sheep to think that it’s their church. One commentator says, “Well, a church that could be ours would only be a false church. So the sheep are not ours for us to use or misuse as we like. If we lose one, we lose another’s property, not our own. And He is not indifferent to what becomes of His flock.” The church is not the pastor’s church. The church is not the church’s church.
I remember many years ago, we were contemplating a big change in the church, and I had somebody that said to me that was not for the change, “We were here before you came, and we’ll be here when you’re gone. This is our church.” Really? Because last time I checked, this church was bought with the precious blood of Jesus. I’ve never seen you shed a drop of blood for this church. This is not your church. And this is not my church. We all better understand whose church this is. This is the Lord Jesus’ church, and this is God’s flock. And we have the privilege of being a part of it.
