Sermon Tone Analysis

I. Reason for Shepherding

So, I exhort the elders among you,

This is one of those cases I prefer the NASB reading of the opening of Chapter 5.

It reads,

Therefore, I exhort the elders among you,

The main reason is often we can read past the little word so, and miss the context of the verse.

Therefore grabs our attention, causes us to ask, what for?

What is driving Peter to exhort the elders, why does he turn to charging the elders with Christlike shepherding?

Why is it so important for the church to have faithful shepherds?

Remember the context of the letter?

1 Peter 1:

1 Peter 2:

1 Peter 3:

And the immediate context,

1 Peter 4:

It is in the context of gospel centered suffering, suffering for the sake of Christ, according to the will of God that Peter exhorts the elders to shepherd the flock of God.

Consider this, when suffering comes even outside the church, who often gets the call?

The local pastors, when someone dies, often even unbelievers seek a pastor to preach the funeral.

When sickness comes, unbelievers will often ask their believing friends and family to pray, or even reach out to their pastor to pray.

Pastor/elders are known for caring for people in the midst of suffering!

Think about how brothers and sisters in Christ need to be pointed to;

The Gospel in the midst of suffering, reminded that we have a future inheritance reserved for us in heaven kept by the power of God.

This is not our best life now, we are looking forward to the glories to come.

Christ as the one who suffered perfectly for us.

He suffered in our place so that we might not have to suffer the eternal judgment and wrath of God.

But Peter tells us he also suffered that he might be our example in suffering.

Our sanctification in suffering, Peter has spilled no small amount of ink explaining how the Christian ought to live in the midst of suffering and in light of Christ suffering.

We are to live lives separated from sins of the Gentiles, in war with the passions of the flesh, and in submission to God given authority.

How many of us have learned these things over our lifetime?

How did you learn them?

Did you just decide one day;

I believe the gospel!

I understand Jesus Christ is the propitiatory, substitution sacrifice for my sins?

I think I will start growing in holiness today.

I think I will start having a sympathetic and humble mind today.

I am going to commit to loving my brother earnestly from a pure heart today?

Absolutely not, if we came to the understanding of these truths is is because we were fed them by the shepherd of God from the word of God!

Peter knows none of us are going to be saved, sanctified, and suffer like Christ apart from faithful shepherds “taking heed of the flock of God” as the King James says it...

Elders are God’s gift to the church so that she might be conformed into the image of his Son.

Consider the OT promise found in Jeremiah.

Israel had rebelled and the LORD was calling them to repent and return and promising them he would give them shepherds to feed them with knowledge and understanding.

We are not Israel, but isn’t that what God has done for us.

He called us through the preaching of the word to repent and come to Him through faith in Jesus Christ His One and Only Son.

He saved us into a body and placed us under the care of a elder shepherd so that we might be fed with knowledge and understanding of who God is and what He has done for us!

That is why Peter writes,

So, I exhort the elders among you,

In these next few verse Peter is offering exhortation specifically to the elders of the exile church throughout Asia.

Peter here is not just asking these elders to shepherd the flock, he his exhorting, calling, beseeching, imploring these men to this charge.

He is about to lay out their duty, give them their job description, role, and responsibility as an elder/shepherd.

He is calling them to a specific task.

Peter calls these men to faithful leadership since they have been appointed to this task as the church was being built upon the spread of the gospel in the book of Acts.

Peter is continuing to teach and exhort the elders whom had been appointed to care for the church of God that He purchased, and had made them overseers.

Notice what Peter does here, he doesn’t jump right into the thrust of the exhortation.

He doesn’t just start telling the elders what to do and how to do it, Peter first provides his,

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II.

Resume of a Fellow Shepherd.

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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:

The first thing Peter say’s about himself is I exhort you as a,

A. Fellow Elder

Notice the humility with which Peter begins.

Not with his apostolic office, but his qualification as a coequal presbyteroi elder, shepherd, overseer.

He wants these elders to know that he is one of them. he has the same calling, he is committed to the same work.

There is not much that gains someone’s ear and trust as letting them know you understand their work.

This is one of the things I enjoy the most about my role at Osmose.

We are a very organic company so most of our leadership has come up in the field, most of us started out as Foremen, digging holes, inspecting, and treating poles.

Wading through swamps, sweating in the summer til your pants were soaked through, working to the point of exhaustion.

But when we go out and visit new crews in the field most of them don’t know where we come from.

When we send an email exhorting them to do something, they just think we are sitting up in the office making up rules to make their life harder.

However, when we go out in the field and pick up a shovel and the learn that we know how to and still can do what they do (for a little while anyway) all of the sudden they have a desire to listen, they begin to trust that we are telling them things that are true and will help them.

So when Peter tells them I exhort you as a fellow elder, the elders of his day would be ready to read or hear what he was about to say.

Even now, I love learning from other pastor/elders.

Give me a sermon from someone who had been in the trenches, sit me down under a pastor/teach who cannot only exegete the text, but who can explain to me how to shepherd someone through;

Sin, Suffering, Coming death, etc. Give me a pastor/elder who has planted a church, spent years at a small country church with 20-30 people, who has been on the mission field, these are the elders we can learn from.

These are the elders that have suffered and stayed faithful in Christ.

More important than experience, give me an elder that is finds their authority, in the inerrant, infallible, all sufficient word of God.

Peter not only believed in the authority and sufficiency of the Word he was used to write the Word.

Suffering,

In consideration of Peters exhortation as a fellow elder,

Robert Leighton writes, “Oh!

Let us remember to what we are called; to how high and heavy a charge; to what holiness and diligence ; how great is the hazard of our miscarriage and how great the reward of our fidelity.

They should be often whetting and sharpening one another by these weight and holy considerations.”

Notice Peter’s next, qualification, he was a,

B. Witness of the Sufferings of Christ

Peter knew how to Pastor through suffering because he witnessed the one who suffered perfectly.

Peter saw Jesus walk through general suffering, living as an itinerant preacher, rejected by his own people, living without a home, not knowing where his next meal would come from.

Peter heard Jesus predicting his own suffering and death.

Peter saw Christ fulfill his own predictions of suffering on the cross.

Even though Peter essentially ran and refused even knowing Christ at the time of his suffering, he saw it.

This was not a highlight of Peter’s life, this may have been one of the lowest points of Peter’s walk with Christ.

When hem mentions being a witness of the sufferings of Christ people will probably remember Peter’s weakness when Jesus’s suffering was the greatest.

The point here is not to point to Peter’s weakness, but to the mercy and grace of Christ.

The fact that Peter failed and Christ fully forgave and restored him would be the thrust of Peter’s statement.

The most beautiful thing about Peter’s witnessing of Christ’s suffering was his being restored when Christ returned from the dead, when Jesus walked up on that beach when Peter was fishing with the disciples.

Let’s take a minute and read this account from .

When we look at this text and see the exchange between Peter and Jesus you can almost here the desperation and sincerity in Peter’s voice as Jesus continues to question him Do you love me?

One of my favorite statements in these verses is Peter saying, Yes Lord; you know that I love you.

Peter not only professes his love for the Lord, but he professes his faith and understanding the Jesus is the Omniscient Son of God that knows all things.

The lessons are clear.

First, no Christian leader is self-qualified, morally or spiritually.