Thank you very much. We want to give a word of welcome to our radio audience today. We are having our annual Bible Conference at the Washington Heights Chapel, twenty six hundred South St. Mary Street in Sioux City, Iowa, and Morningside. We invite you to our afternoon service, which will continue live over the air until four thirty today, and then our service this evening at seven thirty. We invite our listening audience to this meeting, which will be the closing service of our annual Bible conference. Our first speaker today will be Mr. John Walden from Colorado Springs, Colorado. Brother Walden is the director of the Christian Home for Children in Colorado Springs, and for quite some time we heard his messages on the Book of Romans over KTFC. Brother Walden will be speaking tonight. We trust that you'll be with us. Now we turn this first part up by meeting over to our Brother Law. Thank you, Brother Bob. Ephesians, the first chapter for our reading this afternoon. Ephesians, the first chapter. My part of this conference has been to emphasize the lordship and headship of Christ. We live in lawless days. I hardly need to tell you that. You read your papers and listen to the TV and radio and you know. that we live in days of rebellion and lawlessness. And whatever reason people may have, and we have plenty of reasons, to protest, we do know that there must be law and order. We're glad that our government is doing all it can to restore this. We trust that it will be in our nation. And yet we are living in days when which are leading up to, I believe, leading up to the time when the Antichrist, the man of sin, the man of lawlessness, will take over and the whole world, after the rapture and the taking away of the church, the whole world will be swallowed up in a time of complete lawlessness. From Ephesians chapter one, Verse twenty two I read that God has put all things under his feet under the feet of the Lord Jesus Christ and gave him to be the head over all things to the church which is his body the fullness of him that filleth all in all. God has made the Lord Jesus Christ the head of the church and the church is called his body. We talked about this yesterday afternoon and saw that the Lord Jesus is fully responsible for his body, the Church, and that the Church is fully responsible to obey him as the head of the Church. I'd like to talk to you a little more today about how he administers this headship. It's going to be a little difficult for you if your mind is filled with traditionalism. You have always thought that it's this way or that way. But I ask you to keep an open mind anyway, as I try to point out from the Scriptures, that God's order is different from man's order. His ways are not our ways. His thoughts are not our thoughts. When I speak of the Church, I'm not speaking of this organization or that organization, however old or hallowed his traditions may be. These are only human organizations. The church is composed of all true believers from the day of Pentecost until Christ comes back again. Now, that church, of course, has only been all together at one time, which was its inception. On the day of Pentecost, all the church was together at one time. Since that time, this has not been true. Of course, the church was not really complete then, so you can't say that the whole church, which is his body, will all be together until the Lord comes back and we're caught up to meet him in the air. Then we will all be together. So the instructions that are given in the New Testament are given for the local church, the local congregation of believers, or assembly of believers, is intended to be a perfect demonstration of this whole thing that the Lord is doing. And every congregation of believers is responsible to be a little replica of the total work of God in this present age. Now the Lord Jesus has constituted the head of the church. We saw yesterday in Colossians two in verse nineteen that some are not holding the head. That means that they are not subject to the head. And I told you about a friend of mine who said that Dr. Poo Ball was the head of his church. And I asked him, what about Christ? And he said, oh yes, he is too. I don't believe in two heads. I can't imagine anybody, human or animal, who would get along very well with two heads. And I can't imagine a church that gets along well with two heads. I think that one or the other of them is going to be neglected. And since the Lord is in heaven and is invisible, it's pretty apparent who it is is going to be in charge of things. And God never intended this. Organization is not God's plan at all. What he has is an organism, a living body. And you and I are brought into that body we saw yesterday by receiving the Lord Jesus as personal Savior. You cannot join God's church. If you can join it, it isn't His. You cannot join God's church. You must be born into it by the new birth. The Holy Spirit puts us into that one body. First Corinthians chapter twelve and verse thirteen is my authority for that. By one spirit are we all, all we believers, baptized into one body. So you became a child of God and you became a member of the body of Christ of the true church when you receive Christ as your Savior. Now the Lord is administering his authority in the church in two ways. First of all, through the Holy Spirit. The Spirit of God not only baptizes us into the one body, but the Holy Spirit is the one who leads us and guides us and teaches us, and who gives to each member the gift that he or she is supposed to use in pleasing him. These gifts are mentioned in a number of places. No one place is a total list. You have some gifts that were temporary because they were signed gifts. They were given in order to convince the Jews that the Lord Jesus really was the Messiah and to convince the Jews that the Holy Spirit really had come and had begun a new thing on earth. And these temporary gifts, we're told, were to subside. And it's very plain from the writings of the Apostle Paul that they had subsided by the time that he had written some of his later epistles. But some of these gifts are permanent gifts. And notably, these are mentioned in the fourth chapter of Ephesians, where he tells us that he gave some apostles and prophets who belonged in the early days of the church. They're part of the foundation. And then he gave evangelists, pastors, and teachers. And these men, these people, who were given gifts from God, in turn were given to the church. Let me say that again now so you don't have any confusion on this. God does not give gifts to the church. No church has any gifts that they can dispense, either through a school or through any other means. No church has any gifts that they can dispense to people. The gifts are given to men. When He ascended on high, He gave gifts unto men. And the men, in turn, are given to the church, either to the whole church, if they may have a gift which can be used by the whole church in the present day or individually to some specific local congregation of believers. So the Holy Spirit gives these gifts, and these men are to exercise their gifts, are to do what they are able to do. These are not native ability. Let me say again, this is not your natural ability, but this is a divinely given spiritual gift which you are to use for the edification of the whole body of Christ. No divisions among God's people. This is not God's way. He does not want his people divided and siblings among the people of God at all. He wants us to be one, and he wants us to be concerned about every other believer. We're told this in First Corinthians chapter twelve, which is a classic passage on this subject. But then the other way that the Spirit of God administers this work among us, the other way in which the head functions among his members, is by means of the local government of the church in the hand of elders. Now this requires some explanation too because we have a great many misconceptions about these things. I read in the Sunday school paper recently that the elders are elected and then from the elders are chosen the bishops. And I picked that up in a fundamental Sunday school and I said to the people, is this the kind of stuff that you're feeding your children? This isn't taught in the Word of God at all. Elders are not elected. Ephesians chapter twenty and verse twenty eight says, Take heed to yourselves and to the flock over which the Holy Ghost has made you overseers. Only the Spirit of God can make a man an overseer. Now the word overseer is the word bishop or episcopose in the language in which our New Testament is given. The word for elder is the word presbyteros, which simply means old men. And they're exactly the same people, as you'll see from the twentieth chapter of Acts. He sent to Ephesus and called for the elders of the church, and he said to them, the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, or bishops. So the elders were the bishops, and the bishops were the elders. Now, a man is not automatically an elder because he is an older man, because the book of Proverbs says, old men are not always wise. There are some older men who have no concern about spiritual things or about the care of the flock. So a man does not automatically become an elder in the scriptural sense of the word because he is an older man. He becomes such because the Spirit of God has stirred him up to be concerned about his fellow Christians. There is no such thing in the New Testament as a bishop over a district. It simply isn't there. There is no such thing as one man being the elder over a church. It just isn't there. You will find elders in every case in the plural, and you will find that the bishops are the elders and that they have only local authority, only in the church where they themselves live. There is no such thing as a man having authority over the area. Now, this may necessitate our just taking a little bypass here and explaining to you how this all came about. When the Lord founded the church in the beginning, he gave by theings of the Holy Spirit men that could look after this church locally, each one of these local churches, he gave them men who could look after them, and the Spirit of God pointed them out. Because the Bible was not yet given, he left it in the hands of the apostles, Paul and others, to point out the men who had these qualifications. and you will find that they ordained elders in every city. Now some people say that since we have no apostles today, then of course we don't have any elders. Well this is ridiculous. The only reason the apostles had to point them out is because the scriptures were not yet given so that we could all know who they are. Now those scriptures are in our hand. First Timothy chapter three, the first chapter of Titus, all of these passages that relate to elders tell us exactly how we can identify an elder. And these men are known by their concern for the people of God and by the work which they are doing. You are not elected to this job. The sheep never choose their shepherds. And nowhere in the Bible do we read about anyone holding an election for the choice of elders. They are raised up in every congregation of believers by the Holy Spirit Himself. Now, not only does God give these elders, but He gives in every congregation of believers other men whom He calls deacons. And these men, while the word deacon really means a servant, these men are the servants of the local church. These men are the ones who are responsible mainly for the temporal affairs of a local congregation of believers. There may be other things, of course, which deacons do. And some of the deacons soon left that particular work and went on to do other things, such as Philip, who became an evangelist, and such as Stephen, who became the first martyr. But originally these men were chosen by the church. Acts chapter six tells us about this. There are also three other passages in Corinthians and Philippians that tell us that the church chooses men to take care of the temporal affairs of the local church. These men were chosen to go with Paul to carry money to Jerusalem, or in other cases they were chosen by the church to do other temporal things, such as looking after the widows or carrying some of their gifts to Paul himself. The deacons then are chosen by the local congregation, and they're chosen to do the temporal work that is necessary to be done where that congregation meets. There is no such thing in the New Testament as hiring a minister. I don't want to hurt anybody's feelings, but I didn't write this Bible and I don't have any right to change it. This is God's order. God's order is that those who have the gifts to preach the Word are to exercise that gift and they are to do it freely. When the Christians here asked me to come to this conference, they made no bargain with me whatever. If they desire to be helpful to me, and to help to supply my temporal needs, that's their responsibility. And it's a matter of my being thankful for whatever they see fit to do for me. But if I said, I will come to this conference if you give me a certain amount of money, then that becomes, in the words of the New Testament, filthy Lucre. Whenever anybody demands so much for so much that he does, this becomes filthy Lucre. And whenever you hire a man to do everything that's done in a local church, you immediately hinder the direction of the Spirit of God, because the Spirit of God has a right to raise up men here and there and to give to each one of these some particular gift. Now, that's not to say that I believe in this taking turns kind of thing. This was not taught in the Word of God. There's no such thing as the Bible, in the Bible as everybody having a turn to preach. This is just as wrong as one man ministry. Every man ministry simply doesn't work because every member of the body doesn't have the same function. Every person is not given the gift of an evangelist. Every person is not given the gift of teaching. Some people are so muddled in their thinking that they couldn't explain anything. And why should you put somebody like that up to try to teach the word? You have to know what you're talking about or you can't impart it to anyone else. And not only this, but you have to be apt to teach, as he says, about the elders. So the Lord has not told us that we are to just take turns and everybody see what he can do. That's not right. The responsibility is that each of us find out our function and that we use the gift that God has given to us. And so far as the elders and the deacons are concerned, these are not gifts. These are jobs. These are jobs. They're called offices in the New Testament, but this is hardly right because office gives an officious thought to it. It's really the word is work. If a man desire the work of an overseer, he desires a good work. And it is work. And the Lord expects those who have been given this responsibility to function in this way, to be a help to the people of God. Now, I'd like to say a little bit about the responsibility of the elders. God has given them some things that he expects them to do. First of all, we're told, let's turn to this verse in Plenty of Acts, because there's several things here that I'd like to point out to you. Acts chapter twenty, this is Paul's last visit to this part of the world, and he stopped at the seacoast town of Miletus, and from Miletus he said to Ephesus, and called the elders of Ephesus to come and meet him there at Miletus. And he wanted to talk to them about their responsibility. And he tells them what he did. He said in verse eighteen, you know, from the first day that I came into Asia, after what manner I have been with you at all seasons. serving the Lord with all humility of mind and with many tears and temptations which befell me by the lying in way to the Jews. And now I kept back nothing that was profitable unto you, but I have showed you and have taught you publicly and from house to house, testifying both to the Jews and also to the Greeks, repentance toward God and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ. Let me just digress here a moment and say that this is the universal remedy for sin. You don't need to know anything about a person. All you need to know is that God demands that he repents and that he put his trust in the Lord Jesus Christ. Repentance is the acknowledgement of our needs and faith is the confidence that we put in the Savior himself. And so God expects every unsaved person to acknowledge that he is a sinner. That is repentance. It has nothing to do with how sorry you feel. Godly sorrow works repentance, but repentance is the change of mind. The word comes from a Greek word which means to have another mind. And repentance doesn't mean that you have any emotionalism connected with it at all. It just simply means that you acknowledge that you're wrong and you're willing to turn around. And then, of course, the only way that you can turn is to turn to Christ. The Lord Jesus did the work. He finished the work at Calvary's Cross. That's the last thing that he said to the world. It is finished. And I believe it. I believe that Christ did finish the work. I believe that my sins were put away when he died forming on the cross. And so he asks us as sinners to acknowledge that we are sinners and to receive the Lord Jesus. And when you accept Christ, this is what he calls faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ. The faith itself doesn't have any value. People say, well, I think if I have enough faith, I'll get to heaven. Well, it depends on what you have it in. You can have faith in the wrong remedy and die from poisoning. You can have faith in a person to invest your money with him and get taken because he's a scoundrel. You can have faith in all kinds of things. You can have faith in your church, or you can have faith in some ordinance, or you can have faith in your own good works, or you can have faith in yourself. But this doesn't save anybody. Faith is like the coupler on the end of a box card. And you hook that onto another dead box car and nothing happens. But you hook it onto an engine with power there and the thing begins to move. And it depends on whether you've ever made the coupling, whether you've ever accepted Christ or not. Accepting the church wouldn't do you any good. Accepting baptism wouldn't do you any good. Without Christ you've got nothing to move you. And when you receive Christ as your Savior, it's the Lord who saves and not your faith. Now he said, Behold, I go bound in the Spirit unto Jerusalem, not knowing the things that shall befall me there. Say that the Holy Ghost witnesses in every city saying that bonds and afflictions abide me. But none of these things move me. Neither can't I myself dear, my life dear unto myself, so that I might finish my course with joy and the ministry which I have received of the Lord Jesus to testify the gospel of the grace of God. And now, behold, I know that ye all, among whom I have gone preaching the kingdom of God, shall see my face no more. Wherefore, I take you to record this day that I am pure from the blood of all men. For I have not shunned to declare unto you all the counsel of God. He was a fearless preacher. But, of course, he wasn't hired by these people. He was the Lord's servant, and he was free to say what he knew needed to be said. And so he preached exactly what the Scriptures say. Now, his final advice to them in verse twenty-eight says, Take heed therefore unto yourselves and to all the flock. If you're going to be a help to God's people, if you're going to be an overseer, a leader, an elder among God's people, you've got to take heed to yourself. You've got to keep your life above reproach. The qualifications for an elder are given clearly in First Timothy chapter three. He has to be one whose home life is right. Now, I'm not saying that anyone perfectly meets all of the qualifications that are written down there in First Timothy three. I don't want to discourage people, but I'm saying that this is what we shoot for. This is what is expected. This is the way we ought to live. This is the way men are expected to be who are going to be a help to God's people. And so he said, take heed to yourselves, and then take heed to the flock, to all the flock, those who are hard to handle, those who are disinterested, those who stay away, take heed to all the flock, over which the Holy Ghost has made you overseers, to feed the Church of God. This then is the first function of an elder, to feed the Church of God. The biggest responsibility, that you men have who are taking responsibility for a local congregation of believers is to see that they're fed. And you can't feed them on wind. You can't feed them on men's opinion. There was a man who was preaching in a certain place, and the people were not getting anything, and somebody printed on a paper and fastened it to the pulpit. Sir, we would see Jesus. And the man realized he had not been feeding them. He had not been giving them Christ. He had not been helping them really, spiritually. And so he changed his style of preaching, and he began to minister Christ to them. And then he found another piece of paper on the pulpit, and it said, Then were the disciples glad when they saw the Lord. I tell you, if you want to help God's people, you bring Christ before them. Tell them about this one. Tell them about him in his sufferings. Tell them about him in his exaltation. Tell them what he did when he was here on earth. Tell them what he's doing up there in heaven now. Tell them what they have. Tell them about Christ. Feed them. Now, exhortation is not feeding. The difference, I think, is this. When I was a boy, we had a stove in our living room, and I had to carry the coal in and the ashes out. We were using southern Iowa coal, and you took in one bucket of coal, and you took out two buckets of ashes. I never understood it, but that's the way it works. We were pretty busy boys, I tell you, keeping the fire going in the wintertime. And my job was to see that there was coal in there. Now, sometimes when the coal was getting low, I thought I could get around this job, save going out, maybe until after supper, and then it would be my brother's time, something that I could do to keep the thing going, and so I'd get the poker, and I'd stir it real hard. And I remember my dad saying to him, Johnny, you're going to stir that fire out. You see, it didn't need stirring at all. It just needed fuel. Now, fuel is the teaching. If you teach people what the Word of God says, you are putting fuel on their fire. But if you stir them, that's to get the clinkers out of the road. That's to get the air through so that what's there will burn. Now, there are many Christians who have gotten entirely too much material that they're not using. Mr. A.N. O'Brien used to say a great deal of what some people have in their head ought to be lowered about a foot down into their hearts. It's possible for you to know a lot of things and never make any use of it. Now people like that need a good stirring. They need the poker taken to them. They don't like it, but they need it. There's still a third type of ministry, and that's called comfort. Now not all people need comfort. They all like it. They just lap it up like a cat does nil. And they sing that song about speak thou in tender tones. Let me now hear these whispers. Everybody loves to be comforted. They just love to be taken and rocked back to sleep. The only people who really need comfort are the people who are going through affliction and trouble. And when people are afflicted, we ought to comfort them. And the rest of the time we ought to feed them and we ought to stir them up. And so he says to these people who are responsible to help God's people, he said, feed them. There was a man up in Wyoming who has done very well with sheep. I'm cattle man myself, but in the sheep country they say that they can tell a man who really is a good sheep man by one thing. You know what it is? They take care of the land. That's the way you become a good sheep man. You take care of the land. Do you know how to be a help to God's people? Take care of the land. What are you doing about those young people? Well, you say, I give them fish. Well, that's probably why they have fish. It might be better if you gave them a little food. Well, some people seem to think that feeding young Christians means that you have to bring in somebody who can talk their language, and I don't know what all, and they're supposed to get something only from younger people. This is nonsense. You feed lambs exactly the same thing you feed the sheep, only you just break it up in smaller pieces. That's the only difference. And then some people, because they've been to school, feel that they're able to feed the lambs. They say, well, all our young people are better educated now, but instead of feeding lambs, they're feeding giraffes. They're putting it up so high, they're putting it in such language that nobody gets anything from it. All you have to do to feed the lambs of God is just as if it gives them Christ and say it in words that they can understand. How when we feed the flock of God, we'll be a help to them. But this isn't all that we do. He says, feed the flock of God, which ye have purchased with his own blood, or with the blood of his own. For I know this, that after my departing shall grievous wolves enter in among you, not sparing the flock. So the next thing that an elder has to do is to protect. He has to be concerned about protecting the people of God from wolves. They're called wolves in sheep's clothing because they profess. to be leaders of the flock of God. They profess to be believers when they're not real at all. Just recently, a man who has caused a great deal of havoc among the people of God for his infidel writings and talks has decided that he wants nothing more to do with the church. And I think the people must be really relieved that he has finally done this because they tried to put him out and weren't able to do it in this particular association where he was. The man should have gotten out a long time ago because it's very plain that he was nothing but a wolf in sheep's clothing. He said he did not believe the Bible. He said he did not believe that Jesus was anything more than any other man. He said he did not believe in the resurrection, and he said he wasn't even sure if there was a God. And yet he was supposed to be a leader of God's people. Yeah, you know who he was. Think of Christ. What a great mercy that the man has finally said, I want nothing more to do with the church. He's pretty busy right now with spiritism. You see, he doesn't know that the Bible has a message for us, and so he's out looking for it among the spirits. And he's laying himself wide open for all kinds of deception. Now, this is only one example. There are hundreds of them. And if you're going to help the people of God, you've got to do what you can to protect them from false teaching, to be a guard for the people of God. And then he said, also in verse thirty of your own selves shall men arise. That is men who are really believers, speaking perverse things to draw away disciples after them. Now this is another great danger among the people of God, division that comes because some men would like to have a following. What a crime. The Lord Jesus himself is the head. Why should anybody want a following for himself? Why should anyone want to lead God's people after himself? Why wouldn't we want to attach them closer to the Lord Jesus? I suppose if a person feels insecure, feels that he has to get people on his side, feels that he's got to do all he can to nail down friends, he might do a thing of this kind. But we need to help the people of God that they don't get sorted off into little cliques and divisions of any kind. This is one of the things that elders are responsible to do to eliminate division among God's people. Eliminate cliques and divisions of any kind. Anything that divides us from one another is wrong. The Lord wants us to enjoy unity with each other as well as with himself. But there's several other things that the Lord wants us to do. One of the words for overseer in the New Testament is a word which is closely related to another word for visiting. And you can see why this is true. If you're really going to oversee the people, you've got to go where they are to see them. You can't wait until they come back. They may not get back. The Lord Jesus gave us that example in the story that he told about a man who had a sheep that had strayed away. And he went after it until he found it. And it meant a great deal for him to do that. The old Psalm says, None of the ransomed ever knew how deep were the waters crossed, nor how dark was the night that the Lord passed through. There he found the sheep that was lost. Our blessed Savior went through terrible deep waters and darkness to find us. And now he expects those who are going to really shepherd the sheep to go out and find those who are away. I was visiting the place a while back and I missed the man that I had seen when I was there ten years before, and I asked what had become of him. And one of the men who was supposed to be an elder and a helper among the Lord's people said, oh, he's gone somewhere, but we didn't need him anyway. And I said, First Corinthians chapter twelve says, the head cannot say to the feet, I have no need of thee. The Lord Jesus himself, who is the head, never says to the feet, the member who is the farthest away from the head. He never says, I don't need you. The Lord needs his own. And if you don't need them, there's something wrong. Of course we need every child of God. And if you're a child of God and you're out of touch with the Lord, let me tell you, the Lord does need you. And I need you. And you need me. We need each other because we are members of that one body. And no body is complete. No human body is complete. That one member, one part of that body is severed or is... or is paralyzed, we need each other. But not only are we to do this, we're told that the responsibility of elders is to discipline. Now, while discipline is administered by the whole congregation, the elders are responsible, of course, to initiate it and to lead in this. There are seven kinds of discipline in the New Testament. They begin with a simple rebuke, and they may go as far as the putting away or excommunication, putting away from among yourselves that wicked person, as is described in First Corinthians chapter five. You ought to be familiar with this. All of you who are taking a place of leadership among the Lord's people, you ought to be familiar with these different kinds of discipline to know what is to be done to help an unruly member. The Lord's people... are not always happy and hearty. We get our noses out of joint. We get so we're a little hard to live with. We get to where we don't know how to get along with our fellow Christians. And somebody has to be wise enough to go to that person and help to get him reconciled to his brother if that's the problem. Or if he's being overtaken in the false to heal that person, restore. The word for restore there is a medical term which means to set a broken bone. You have to know how to set a broken bone. You have to know how to help a Christian to get back to the Lord. Some people get away from the Lord and they don't know how to get back. They've never been told that they can get back by the simple expedient of confession and forsaking of sin. A man told me that he was away from the Lord for ten years. And he said, people said to me, well, you got off the track, you'll have to go back where you got off and get back on. He said, I didn't even know where I got off. How did I know where to get back on? All I knew was I found myself out of touch with the Lord. He said, finally, somebody had the good sense to say to me, First John chapter one and verse nine says, if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. And he said to me, brother, if you just get before the Lord and tell him what you've done, he'll be glad to take you back. And he said, I got back to the Lord. I got back in fellowship with him right away when somebody had the good sense to tell me how. This was part of our work. helping the Lord's people to get restored and to go on well with himself. Now, there are many other things that a man is responsible to do, but I'll just say this much, that we're told that finally they must give account to God. Let's read that. In the last chapter of Hebrews, there are two or three things here that I think are very important for us to understand. Hebrews, the last chapter, verse seven. Remember them which have the rule over you. Now, I'm reading from the King James Version. If you'll read any revised version, you'll see that the word rule is really the word to guide or to lead. It doesn't mean authority in the sense of being a boss. In First Peter chapter five, he plainly says that we're not to be lords over God's heritage. The Lord never intended for elders to lord it over them, to say, You do what I tell you to do. Not that at all, but simply to be guides. I saw where five of our Americans were killed in the fall from one of the higher mountains in the Himalayas, and two guides were along with them, lost their lives also. And those Sherpa guides are supposed to be real experts in mountain climbing. But they say it was nobody's fault. It was an ice avalanche, and those seven men were buried underneath that. Now, those guides were there not to boss people around, but to lead them the right way, to show them the best way to get there. And that's the word that's used here. Remember them which have the rule over you, or who are your guides, who have spoken unto you the Word of God. This is the way we guide people. We don't say, well, now, we believe, or our church says, or this is the way we've always done it. Forget it. I'm not even interested in the way it's always been done. If you can't show me from the Word of God, you haven't anything to show anyway. And this is what's wrong in many places. They are going by the tradition of the elders instead of finding it in the Word of God. So he says here, they have spoken unto you the Word of God whose faith felt followed. And then again in verse seventeen, Obey them, that same word, them that guide you, and submit yourselves, for they watch for your souls as they that must give account. Give account to whom? To the head bishop? There's no such thing. Not in the word of God. There's no such thing as a man to whom these men are accountable. To whom do they give account? Why do the chief shepherds? That's what he says in... First Peter's epistle. He says, you shepherds, I'm a shepherd, you are shepherds, I want you to take care of the flock. And then he said, when the chief shepherd appears, then he will give you a crown. The chief shepherd is the Lord Jesus himself. And as under shepherds, you will give an account to him. Now, I believe that elders ought to do this regularly. I don't believe this is just at the judgment seat of Christ at all. I believe that as an elder, you have a responsibility to get before the Lord often. to give account of his sheep, to tell him exactly what you found and what you see is needed among his sheep. Well, you say he knows, doesn't he? Well, that's true. He knows your needs, too, but you always are pretty careful about telling those, aren't you? This is something that we're to bring to the Lord in our prayers. We're to come to him and tell the Lord about these sheep. And sometimes when the Lord is told about a sheep that a shepherd has failed to bring back, then he takes on the job of bringing him back. Let me tell you, young people, if you're not subject to the elder, you may have to deal directly with the chief shepherd. I'm not saying this to frighten you. I'm just saying you cannot get by with wrong behavior. The Lord will bring you back to himself one way or another. If you're not disciplined by the local elders, you may have to be disciplined much more severely. So they are to give account. And this is the work of elders, then, to see that they are cared for properly. Now what's to be our attitude toward the elders, those whom God has placed in his local assembly and given the responsibility of caring for the flock? Well, first of all, we're told in First Thessalonians chapter five that we are to know them. And the word for know there is a word which means, it's a strengthened form of the word to know, and it means to recognize. Now, this is not a recognition dinner. You don't have a recognition dinner. You don't put their names up on a bulletin board or anything of that kind. It's just simply that you know them. How do you know them? Well, you know them by the qualifications that are given here in the Word of God. I remember one time being in a place where they said, we don't know who the elders are. And I knew that was just whenever people say that, you know that somebody is dissatisfied. So I was teaching the young people's group. And I got them together and I had taught them what the qualifications of an elder were and their responsibility to be obedient to them. So I just passed out slips of paper and pencils and I said, now put down the name of the man or man in this congregation that you look to as spiritual guide, the man whom you regard as being elders. Don't show it to anybody, don't consult with anybody. And I took up fifty papers from those young people and the same three names were on every paper. Some of them had four and five and six names, but there were three names that appeared on every paper. And the rest of the names that appeared were quite common, too. But there were three men that every one of those fifty young people knew was an elder. So then I told them at the midweek meeting, now I'm going to tell you who the elders are. So everybody was there, you know. And I got up and told them the story that I've just told you. And I said, if you don't know who they are, you just ask any teenager because they all know. Well, there was no complaint after that because who's going to admit that he doesn't know as much as a teenager? That stopped the whole group. Of course they knew. Every young person there knew. And so did every older person know. And you know. You know who the men are who really care about you. Maybe they're only one or two or three or four. And maybe some of the others are usurping this place. Maybe some other people are setting themselves up to be leaders who are not really. Don't you worry about that. The head of the church will take care of that in his own good time. But you say, if a man is made an elder by an overseer, suppose that he ceases to function. Well, and of course he ceases to be an elder. It's automatic. You don't get a man in an office by election that you've got to put up with the rest of your days when you follow the New Testament pattern. If he ceases to function as an elder, he just isn't. That's all. Because the work of an elder is the work. And if he isn't working, he isn't in business. It's really very simple and it's very effective. It works, brothers and sisters. We are to recognize them by the work that they're doing and by the qualifications that are laid down in the Scripture. And then we are to obey them. God expects us to be obedient to those who are responsible for us. We live in days when nobody wants to be obedient to anybody. Young people are not willing to be obedient to their own parents. And students are not willing to be obedient to their teachers. And drivers are not willing to be obedient to the traffic officers. And people who are in the services are not willing to be obedient to their officers. And people who are in politics are not willing to be obedient to those who are over them. We're living in that kind of day. And you've got it in your system too. What do you know you have or not? And if you'll be honest about it, you'll get into God's presence. You'll have to admit that there's a little touch of rebellion in your own soul. Now, if you confess this as a sin and tell the Lord that you really want to be subject to him as the head, and you really want to be subject to the overseers whom he has placed in the local congregation of believers, and you are obedient to them, you'll find out that they are really quite human. You'll find out that they need your help. as well as you're needing their help. You ought to pray for them. Are you praying for the elders? Do you ever pray for those who are taking the responsibility in your local assembly? Well, my brother, they need it badly. They need it. They face all kinds of things. Just recently I was asked to meet with a group of elders because they had some problems. And I listened to those men pray, seven of them. I listened to them pray. And I saw the tears on their cheeks when they had finished praying. If you could see these things, you'd know that these men are not there because of what they get out of it. It's not really an honor. It's a job. And it's a thankless job. And if you would spend time in prayer for them, you would be better able to honor them. Are we to honor them? Oh, yes. He says some of them are worthy of double honor. And we are to honor them. And then, in some cases, they are to be supported. I don't mean there to be hired, but I mean their needs there to be met. If they give all their time to the work of the Lord, their needs are to be met. I don't go hiring somebody out of Bible school or a seminary and expect them to do this. They're not going to do it. They'll fleece you. That's all they'll do. There's a trend in our day to think that we can put all of our responsibility over in somebody that we hire to do this job. It has never worked wherever it's been tried. All you have to do is to ask the ones that are faced with this kind of thing. If you've got a good man, you're doing fine. If you get a bad one, you're sadly living until you can unload him and hope that you get a better one. That isn't God's order at all. And furthermore, it results in the superdevelopment of one person and the rest of them, the rest of the other parts of the body, are undeveloped. What would I look like if I only used my right arm for everything, walking included? I'd have some right arm. But the rest of my body would be totally atrified. And many a church... Many a local congregation of believers is suffering from spiritual atrophy just for this reason. Well, I hope that you will get these things into your own mind and into your own heart and recognize that God has placed his son as the head over the church and that his son has set the Holy Spirit to be his vicar on earth and that the Holy Spirit has raised up men in every congregation who are responsible to lead and guide the flock of God. Now, don't saddle your elders. with the responsibility of putting in the window lights and painting that room and mowing the lawn. Lead them free to look after the people of God and appoint deacons for that job. Put the business affairs in the hands of deacons. And don't substitute for a meeting of elders, a town hall meeting, a business meeting. There is absolutely nothing in the Word of God for a business meeting. And anybody who substitutes... The democratic form of government, or the scriptural form of government, is in trouble clear up to here. Don't you be drawn into this because that's the way it's always done in our kind of meetings. It isn't scriptural at all. When you put the thing into the hands or leave the thing in the hands of those whom God has raised up, you will find that the people of God will be blessed and held. Thank you so much, Brother Walden. Before our brother Hoffman comes to the platform, shall we rise, please? Turn to him number three hundred and sixty-two. Let's sing the first and the last stanza together. Take my life and let it be. Consecrate it, Lord, to be. Take my hands and let them move. at the impulse of thy love, the firstanza and the fourth, number three, sixty-two. Take my life as there is me, I'll be grateful for you. Take my life as you have been. Take my life as you have come from my heart, and give me hope from my love. you