The Charge To Don Smith

Thank you for subscribing to the Shepherd's Church podcast. This is a special episode where we are ordaining to the office of Elder Don Smith. So as you listen to this, may it inspire you to pray for your church and for her elders.

And if the Lord is calling you to the office of Elder, that you would consider it carefully, joyfully, because it is a heavy and a holy burden. With that, God bless you. I'm long-winded, but I would like to charge our brother with what this office entails.

Then I'd like to invite Harold to come with me and us lay hands on Don and pray for Don. And then I would like for Don and I to serve communion together, which is a beautiful, I consider it to be the greatest privilege of my life to serve communion.

I walk away every week with my face muscles hurting from how much I'm smiling. Not even kidding, like it really, it's a workout. But the reason it's so important is because we get to, in a moment of our lives, we get to portray the role of Jesus Christ to his bride.

And you portray the role of the church receiving from him his good blessings. And it is a powerful and yet beautiful thing that happens. So dear Don, I want to read 2 Timothy 2, 3, and 4, and then I want to share some long-winded exhortations.

And I put it in the King James. Don likes the King James.

So do I.

Thou therefore endure hardness as a good shepherd of Jesus Christ. No man that woreth entangleth himself with the affairs of this life that he may please him who hath chosen him to be a soldier. The first thing I'd like to charge you with, brother, is to lift up your head.

Today is not just a mere ceremony. Today is a commissioning. Today the Lord of hosts takes a man out of the ranks and sets him on the front lines. Today he hands you a staff and the staff is also a sword.

Today he puts words in your mouth that will outlive your bones. Do you feel the weight of it? I know you do. Because every man who has ever stood where you are standing has felt the floor shaking underneath him.

Moses trembled. Isaiah cried, woe. Jeremiah said he was but a child in the presence of God. Paul said he was the chief of sinners. And if your knees are steady right now, it is only because the Lord is holding them.

And that, brother, is the only reason any of us stand at all, as Jude says, that he may make us not stumble until the day he presents us to our Lord. So lift up your head. Not because you are great, but because the one who is great has called you into his service and he doesn't lose the war.

The second thing I would like to charge you with, my brother, is preach the word. Preach it bloody and preach it plain. Second Timothy 4 .1. I charge you, therefore, before God and the Lord Jesus Christ, who shall judge the quick and the dead at his appearing and at his kingdom, to preach the word.

Be instant, in season and out of season, which means all seasons. Reprove, rebuke, exhort with all longsuffering and doctrine. Don, the first charge is the oldest charge. Preach the word. Not your opinions, not your feelings, not the shifting consensus of our generation, not the safe platitudes that will earn the invitations to the right dinners and homes.

The word, the very breath of God, exhaled in Hebrew and Aramaic and Greek, carried across centuries on the bloodied backs of martyrs, and delivered now into your hands. When you open that book on the Lord's day, you are not offering up Don Smith.

You are detonating ordinances written by God. Every sermon is a siege engine rolled up to the gates of hell, firing shots at the enemy. Every text is a hammer, and every hammer is looking for a rock to break.

So preach it. Preach it when the room is full, and preach it when the room is three old ladies and a sleeping deacon. Preach it when it costs you friends. Preach it when it costs you sleep. Preach it when the culture laughs, and preach it when the culture rages.

Because the laughter and the rage of the enemies are the same animal with two faces, and neither one of them gets to edit your sermons. Reprove, rebuke, exhort. That is not three words for the same thing.

That is the full armory. Reprove the error, Don, rebuke the sin, and exhort the saint. And do all three with long-suffering, because all of us are slow to learn, and shepherds are not permitted to be cruel.

But long-suffering is not silence. Long-suffering is patient warfare, so do it as a good soldier of Christ. The third thing I would like you to be exhorted with is to feed the sheep and to kill the.

Wolves.

1 Peter 5, 2 and 3, feed the flock of God which is among you, taking the oversight thereof, not by constraint but willingly, not for filthy lucre, but of a ready mind, neither as being lords over God's heritage, but being in samples to the flock.

John Calvin says that the two great works of the pastor is to feed the lambs and to kill the wolves, and that is your two works that you are called to. You can't choose just one. If you feed the sheep, you must kill the wolves.

If you do one without the other, you fail both. So feed them, that is the glad part of the work. Stand in the green pastures of God's word and call them by name. Break the bread small enough for the weakest little lamb, and still rich enough to satisfy the strongest ox.

Do not starve them with novelty, do not poison them with cleverness, give them Christ, give them Christ, give them Christ. Give them Christ in Genesis, and give them Christ in Revelation, and give them Christ in every verse in between, because every verse has his fingerprints on it, and your job is to point them out.

But brother, the staff that guides the lamb also, the lambs must also break the wolves'.

Teeth.

You will not be a faithful shepherd if you only know how to be gentle. The wolves are real. They wear wool now, they quote scripture now, they publish books and build platforms and weep on cue now, and they're coming for the flock that the Lord God has bought with his own blood to which he has called you to be overseer, so you have to stand between them and the wolf.

You will have the bite marks on you before he ever gets to them. You will stand between the false teacher and the young mother who's tired. You will stand between the seducing spirit and the teenage boy who's curious.

You will stand between the smooth mouth and the sheep who have no defense. It's not an optional work, it's your ordination. And when you stand with scripture in your mouth and the fear of God in your eyes, a wolf neither will stay or stand because he cannot stay or stand in the presence of God's.

Word.

The fourth thing I would like to charge you with is to remember that you are not losing and for you to preach and teach and counsel and think and move and have your being like you've already won. First Corinthians 15, 25, for he must reign until he has put all of his enemies under his feet.

The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death. Don, there is a pulpit that is sick today, a pulpit that retreats today. It preaches the rapture of the frightened. It tells young men that the church was born to lose, that the kingdoms of this world are the kingdoms of forever, and that Christ shall only reign after he quits the fields and comes back to clean up what the bride couldn't hold.

That is not the gospel of Matthew chapter 28. That is not the gospel of Psalm chapter 2. That is not the gospel of Daniel 2 or Isaiah 9 or Revelation 11. The word of the Lord is your gospel and he must reign and he will reign.

Not he might reign if the conditions are favorable. He must reign until every last enemy is a footstool for his feet and the last enemy on that list is death. So until death is defeated, reign with that word, knowing that that word wins and that word prevails.

And preach like you believe it. Preach like the stone cut out without hands is actually rolling and growing and really grinding the images of this world into powder and really is filling the whole earth with the glory of God.

Preach like the mustard seed really is becoming a tree, both in this congregation and the life of our members, as well as the universal church. Preach like the leaven really is working its way through the whole lump.

Preach like the meek really are going to inherit the earth because Jesus said so. And Jesus does not misspeak. This doesn't make you a triumphalist. It doesn't make you a Pollyanna, but it does make you obedient.

It also doesn't make the battle easy. Just because we win doesn't mean we don't have scars and you will collect many being on the front line, my friend. But a soldier knows who his king is and who that king, and that that king wins.

So Don, advance. Advance in your preaching. Advance in your praying. Advance in your discipling of households. Advance when you invite people into your home. Advance in the planting of churches through this church.

Advance in the building up and training up of young people. Advance in the training of the next generation of pastors. Take the ground that has been lost one inch at a time until Jesus Christ reigns over it all, whether in your lifetime or in the lifetime of your descendants.

But in all things, advance. The fifth thing that I would call you to is to guard your life because the wolf is not only out there. 1 Timothy 4 .16, Take heed unto thyself and unto thy doctrine. Continue in them, for in doing this thou shalt both save thyself and them that hear thee.

Brother, the shortest distance from the pulpit to future scandal is about seven inches from your head to your heart. It's about seven years of one private sin that no one noticed in year one and two. And I'm not trying to frighten you, I'm trying to help you.

The men who fall do not fall at the front. They fall in the study. They fall on their phones. They fall in their marriages. They fall in the quiet hours when no one's watching. And they forget that someone is always watching because we do everything before the face of God.

So take heed to thyself. As Martin Lloyd-Jones once said, take thyself in hand. I'm not Welsh, so that was my attempt. And then take heed to the doctrine. Not once. Continue. Keep reading it. Keep learning from it.

Keep being sharpened by it. Keep sitting under it and stay in it. The day that you stop studying is the day that you start stealing because you will be serving the sheep leftovers from a fire that you lit 10 years ago.

And you will be giving them the moldy pieces of yesterday's harvest. Stay in the word at all times and in all ways. The sixth thing I would tell you is to love your wife and to shepherd your children and in that order.

1 Timothy 3, 4, and 5. One that ruleth well his own house, having his children in subjection with all gravity. For if a man know not how to rule his own house, how shall he take care of the church of God?

Don, your home is your first congregation and parish. If you lose it, you forfeit the right to pastor anywhere else. Paul doesn't suggest it, he legislates it. A man who cannot shepherd his own household cannot shepherd a congregation because a congregation is only a household much larger and you being a father with much more responsibility.

Love your wife the way that Christ loves his church. Sacrificially, sanctifyingly, and sacramentally. Die a hundred small deaths for her every week and do not keep score. Listen to her like her voice matters above every other person on earth because it does.

Let her sharpen you because she sees the sin that you hide from yourself. A pastor with a bitter wife has already began to sink and the congregation will feel that sink over time. So love her well and care for her well and you have a good wife.

Shepherd your children and teach them the catechisms and teach them to shoot straight and teach them that their father is not ashamed of Jesus Christ and that their father is bold and public as well as the dinner table.

Pray with them, discipline them with gravity and warmth in equal measure because the God of the Bible is both a consuming fire and the father who runs down the road to meet the prodigal son. He is both.

Do this first and do this well and do this every single day, my friend, because this really is the most important charge that I could give you is love your wife and love your children and your ministry will flow out of that.

Number seven, fear God and fear nothing else. Be strong and of good courage, Joshua 1 9 says. Do not be afraid, neither thou be dismayed, for the Lord thy God is with thee wheresoever thou goest. Don, there's a spirit in our age that wants to put a leash on the pulpit.

It doesn't always come with fangs. Sometimes it comes with smiles and grant applications. Sometimes it comes with tax code. Sometimes it comes with a cousin at Thanksgiving who says that you're being a little too extra.

However it comes, the demand will always be the same for you to be softened, for you to shrink and for you to cower and for you to apologize for the word of God, for you to shut up about that one verse, for you to preach a Jesus that's palatable to the modern man who we all can swallow without any conviction.

Brother, that Jesus does not exist. That Jesus is a false idol. And the day you preach him is the day you commit treason. So do not do it. Fear God. That is the whole posture of a faithful pastor. Fear him more than you fear the elder who threatens to leave.

Fear him more than you fear the donor who stops giving because you talked about that thing. Fear him more than you fear the journalist, the blogger, the mob, the state, the Boston Globe who calls you a white supremacist because you read a book about gender to children in a library.

Fear him more than you fear your own failure because your failure is not the final word and his verdict is. If you fear him properly, you will not fear anything else because nothing else has teeth that can actually reach your soul.

The eighth thing that I would like to charge you with is finish. And I say that word intentionally, finish. 2 Timothy 4, 7, and 8. I have fought a good fight. I have finished my race, my course. I've kept the faith.

Henceforth, there's laid up for me a crown of righteousness which the Lord, the righteous judge, shall give to me at that day. Don, today you begin and today is joyful. There will be days that you're in the trenches though.

Today, there's going to be hands on your shoulders and head. There's going to be tears in the aisle. There's going to be a wife who weeps for joy. There's going to be a proud congregation who serves you a ribeye steak on a beautiful platter.

But tomorrow is Monday and then the next day. And on Monday, the hands won't be on you anymore and there won't be as many tears and it will become commonplace and the meal will become Tupperware. And you'll sit at your desk with an empty page and a hard text and a funeral to preach or a marriage to counsel or a man who's struggling with pornography to care for.

That is when the charge becomes real. Today, we feast. We feast like Christians. We feast before the battle because we know we win. But we will walk into the battle. And your job is to finish. Your job is to finish the race and keep the faith and do not quit and do not drift and do not coast.

And do not retire your sword before the Lord retires you. Let you in your deathbed still be swinging. Paul did not write 2 Timothy 4 from a mountaintop. He wrote it from a dungeon. Knowing that the executioner's sword was already being sharpened for his own head.

And Paul says, I have finished. Brother, that is the only testimony that counts. It's not how you start. It's how you finish. And I want you to finish well. The ninth thing that I would charge you with is that you and I now come to the table of the living Christ and serve His people and serve His lambs.

Luke 22, 19 and 20. And He took bread, and He gave, and He broke it. And He gave unto them, saying, This is My body which is given for you, this do in remembrance of Me. Likewise also the cup after supper, saying, This is the New Testament in My blood which is shed for you.

Don, in the moment when you and I are going to stand at this table together for the first time and you and I are going to be feeding Jesus' lambs, I want you to understand it rightly. Your hands might shake, and they should.

And your hands may quake, and they probably should. You are not a master of ceremonies, and neither am I. You are not a distributor of crackers and juice and cheap promises. You are not the manager of a religious ritual.

Brother, when you stand behind that table, you stand in the place of the living Christ to serve and care for His bride. You represent Him to her. You speak with His voice to her. You lift His bread, and you pour His cup.

And what you say in that moment, she receives as if she received it from Him. Because you are a minister, and He has authorized your hands to do what only His hands first did in that upper room. When you break the bread, you are enacting the breaking of His body.

When you lift the cup, you are proclaiming the pouring out of His blood. The Christ who fed the 5 ,000 is feeding His bride again through you, and every week through you. The Christ who said, Take, eat, is saying it again in your mouth.

And the saints who receive at this table are going to hear His voice in your voice, or they will hear nothing at all. So feel the weight of that. A pastor who represents Christ at the table must also imitate Christ at the table.

You cannot lift the bread on the Lord's day and refuse to be broken the rest of the week. You cannot pour out the cup on Sunday and hoard your own life on Monday. The man who provides over this meal must become the meal and must become a living testimony of this meal to the same people who partake of it.

That's the pattern. That's the whole calling. That is what it means to be a pastor in the front lines of the good shepherd who laid his life down for his sheep. So when you stand at the table, Don, give your body.

Give it by studying late when your eyes are burning and you have blood vessels popping out. Give it by driving across town at midnight when a family needs you. Give it by visiting the dying and carrying the casket and rejoicing with those who rejoice and weeping with those who weep and spending yourself until there's nothing left and then some more.

Give it like a wrung-out towel in the hands of Christ. That is the body that you offer to this congregation. That is the bread that you break, and that is the wine that you pour, which is the New Testament unto them.

So let that be your life. The last thing that I want to commission you with is for you to go. I want you to hear the charge of your brothers. I want you to go and preach the word. Go and feed the sheep.

Go and hunt the wolves. Go and guard your life. Go and love your wife. Go and shepherd your children. Go and fear God and fear nothing else and finish the race and go with me and serve the supper as a man who has been duly called and duly qualified to stand in his place for his people and do it with love all your days.

Amen.

I want to invite Harold up to pray for you, Don. We're going to lay hands on you and pray.

Let us pray. Almighty God, our Father, you are a good, holy, and loving God. Father, we are grateful for this man, O Lord God, that you have called to the office of elder, the highest office in your church, O Lord God.

Father, we pray that you might continue to equip this man for all of the good work that lies ahead, the work, O Lord God, of shepherding your people. Father, we pray that this man would be able to do it with grace, with mercy, with love.

Father, we pray that you would give him the conviction of all things that are good and godly. We pray that you would watch over his soul, O Lord, convict him quickly of his sin, that he would run to you and ask for forgiveness.

Father, we pray that you would love Don, keep him, Father, as your own throughout this life and into eternity. Father, we pray, O Lord God, for his family, who, O Lord, will certainly feel the weight of his office.

Equip them even now, we pray, O Lord God, that, Father, we pray for his wife and allow her, O Lord God, to stand strong with Don and see this through with him, O Lord God. Father, again, we are grateful for your leading and prompting upon this man, upon the Shepherd's Church for bringing him forward and approving his ordination.

Father, we now declare this man to be set apart for the service of elder in the Church of God, and in this church in particular. Go before him and add every blessing of heaven to him, we ask. In Jesus' name, amen.

Amen.