Shepherds need your prayers.  Do you understand the onslaught of Satan against those that are in leadership in this hour?  It is vital that doctrine remains pure.  Smite the shepherd; the sheep will scatter.  Tragically, we see today so many of these shepherds have become superstars, personalities, powerful, and wealthy.  What a tragedy to watch men who were in the light fall into this great deception and deceive whole congregations when the Scripture speaks very clearly of the responsibility of these individuals.

If we want to learn something about shepherding, we might as well start at the top, amen?  “The Lord is my shepherd.” (Psalm 23:1) Aren’t you thankful that Jesus is the Chief Shepherd?  There are under shepherds that have been given authority, by the Chief Shepherd, to bind on earth, and God will honor and bind it in heaven.  Authority has been given to the church to mark people even to the place of the destruction of their very lives, that their souls might be saved.  This authority in the church, because of that independent spirit that we were talking of, that people misunderstand how this priesthood, the personal priesthood works, find themselves many times moving in that spirit that not only is an expression of heresy, which is just putting self-will off on others.  Whatever it is—this new revelation, this other gospel, there in the Gnostic realm, those who think they have a deeper knowledge this mystery knowledge of God.  There is no mystery; God has revealed Himself in His Word, amen?  There’s not another thing to be revealed about God that is not in this Scripture—I’m talking about it as it pertains to our life here in time and space until Jesus comes and the judgment of all things manifests itself.  So, we realize, then, that God has established an order.

 “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.”  Hallelujah!  Well, the responsibility of the shepherd, then, is to see that the flock wants for nothing.  That’s done in many different ways.  One of the things that God did to keep want from manifesting in the church is in addition to these elders, there were deacons that were established.  Why?  So, the flock could be provided for, so there’s no want.  So, that’s the shepherd’s job.  My job isn’t necessarily to go down and sit with every one of you and have coffee every day, though my job is to know the state of the flock, amen?  So how do we do that?  We have the Jethro principle from the Old Testament.  God established the diakoneō in the New Testament—the deacons.  They go out, minister to the people, hear what the needs of the people are, bring it back to the shepherd, and the shepherd finds some way to make sure that there is no want in the church.  That’s our job.  That’s part of what we do.  “I shall not want.”

The care of the flock is to be out of love, “willingly,” 1 Peter, Chapter 5 says.  “Not by constraint,” amen?  The role of the shepherd, and what we’re going to see is the Greek word for shepherd (poimainō), is to lead and to feed.  And that’s the primary responsibility of this office, of this gift, Ephesians calls it, to the church: to feed and to lead, to make sure that we come to maturity, to perfection, that the body might receive ministry and have the same care one of another, that we become mature and not tossed to and fro by every wind of doctrine.  That’s why we need to see and appreciate this gift for what it is and pray for wisdom, that God would speak to and through these gifts that He put into the church.  It’s going to keep us safe in this hour.