A sermon preached at Covenant Presbyterian Church of Fort Smith, Arkansas on August 25, 2024.
Remember your leaders, those who spoke to you the word of God. Consider the outcome of their way of life, and imitate their faith. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever (Hebrews 13:7–8).[1]
Rupert Murdoch purportedly said, “Today’s news is tomorrow’s fish wrappers.” If you’ve ever read a month-old newspaper, you know how true this statement is. There’s not much shelf life to what is pushed at us so urgently, appealing to our seemingly insatiable appetite to know something new today, leading philosopher Rolf Dobelli to surmise, “News is to the mind what sugar is to the body.”[2] It’s also hard to stop, because it feeds our bias: We value today over yesterday almost as much as we value tomorrow over today. C.S. Lewis, who lived his life oblivious to the news, called this phenomenon, “chronological snobbery,” over-valuing the new at the expense of the old (curable by regularly reading old books).
It is perhaps because of this innate human tendency that we read repeatedly in Scripture the imperative to remember, because we are prone to forget, even the recent past. In reading Israel’s exodus out of Egypt and settlement in Canaan, we may wonder at times if they had the attention spans of today’ social media addicts. Could the instruction regarding manna on the Sabbath, for example, been any clearer? And yet, seven days later they were sitting down to a dinner of jarred maggots![3] (Turns out, there are multi-faceted benefits to remembering, even dietary.)
Having watched Israel repeatedly behave in this way, Moses said to them before they entered the land,
Remember the days of old;
consider the years of many generations;
ask your father, and he will show you,
your elders, and they will tell you (Deut. 32:7).
He didn’t tell them to look for some new work of the Lord in the land but remember the testimony of what he had done in the past, because the Lord is “the same yesterday, today, and forever” (8). Moses charged them to remember what God did in the lives of those who had gone before them, and if they did not remember, then they were to ask their fathers and elders. The remedy for a forgetful people is looking back and retelling the works of God. God repeatedly points his children back to what he has done, because what he has done tells us about who he is, what he does, and how he cares for us, and in this he is glorified.
It should not surprise us that the majority of our canon of Scripture is history, and we remember in part by returning to it, reading and considering, yes, remembering the days of old. This is one of the many benefits of reading the Scriptures daily; as we read, we familiarize ourselves more and more with the works and ways of the Lord. This includes the personalities of Scripture: We remember the saints of old that we may learn from them, the good, the bad, and the ugly of their lives. And this also applies to the personalities of Church history, including our own. And it is here that we find a connection between Moses’ counsel to remember and the writer of Hebrews’ counsel to remember our leaders. Because in remembering the lives of the faithful, we find the essence of their faithfulness to be their faith in Christ.
Remember your leaders
Authority in the church is by God’s design. “For there is no authority except from God,” the Apostle Paul explains, “and those that exist have been instituted by God” (Rom. 13:1b). For this reason, the apostle instructs the church “to respect those who labor among you and are over you in the Lord and admonish you, and to esteem them very highly in love because of their work” (1 Thess. 5:12-13a). While the church recognizes its leaders, it is the Lord who raises them up, gifting them to serve his church. It is the Lord’s work through the church’s leaders that the church receives and so respectfully responds in love.
The writer of Hebrews adds to this counsel with command: “Obey your leaders and submit to them, for they are keeping watch over your souls, as those who will have to give an account. Let them do this with joy and not with groaning, for that would be of no advantage to you” (Heb. 13:17).
The imperatives to the congregation of obedience and submission are coupled with instruction to the leaders with purpose in both. The congregation is commanded to obey and submit not because the leaders are perfect or sinless but because God has called them and placed them in their respective offices, and they “will have to give an account” to God. Leaders in the church then serve first and foremost the Lord, who has called them to serve his church. The church leader who misaligns his allegiance will inevitably devolve into ecclesiastical serfdom and become a chronic complainer about the church’s many sins rather than rejoicing in her progressive sanctification. But the church leader who understands his calling is first to the Lord will joyfully find his master’s yoke easy and his burden light.[4] This is of great benefit to the church, who is to regard her leaders with respect. And part of respect is remembering.
The verb translated “remember” in verse seven connotes not mere memory but regard and contextually implies both the living and the dead. Contextually, the writer is probably referring to the first generation of church leaders in the local church, the church planters, so to speak, and specifically “those who spoke to you the word of God” (7). The writer’s emphasis on “the word of God” is similar to Paul’s counsel to Timothy, when he wrote, “Let the elders who rule well be considered worthy of double honor, especially those who labor in preaching and teaching” (1 Tim. 5:17). Why “those who spoke to you the word of God”? Why “especially those who labor in preaching and teaching”? Because, God has chosen the preaching and teaching of his Word to be the preeminent means of edifying the church. While the highly-educated and worldly-wise Apostle Paul, for example, could have benefited the Corinthians in many ways, he chose to intentionally narrow his ministry to preaching Christ crucified.[5] There are many good things the leaders of a church may do, but especially for the minister, there is no greater duty than “rightly handling the word of truth” (2 Tim. 2:15).
Consider their lives
When a ruling elder is ordained in a particular church of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), the church is asked to affirm the following question:
Do you, the members of this church, acknowledge and receive this brother as a ruling elder, and do you promise to yield him all that honor, encouragement and obedience in the Lord to which his office, according to the Word of God and the Constitution of this Church, entitles him?[6]
It’s a powerful affirmation, acknowledging and receiving the brother as a leader in the church. The church promises to honor him, encourage him, and obey him “in the Lord,” according to his office as Scripture teaches. What then should we look for in our leaders? For starters, what does he look like in public? In the case of an elder, the Apostle describes him as one who “must be above reproach, the husband of one wife, sober-minded, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, not a drunkard, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money. …he must be well thought of by outsiders, so that he may not fall into disgrace, into a snare of the devil” (1 Tim. 3:2-3, 7). What does this elder look like in private? “He must manage his own household well, with all dignity keeping his children submissive, for if someone does not know how to manage his own household, how will he care for God’s church?” (1 Tim. 3:4-5). What about his Christian maturity? “He must not be a recent convert, or he may become puffed up with conceit and fall into the condemnation of the devil” (1 Tim. 3:6). What’s my point in all of this? If the man does not possess the character and conduct worthy of honor, encouragement, and obedience, he should neither be elected nor ordained.
The church is to look to her present leaders not for perfection but submission to Christ. And a helpful way of objectively doing this is by looking at the lives our leaders from the past. This is one of the reasons why good, reputable Christian biographies can be such a benefit to the church. It is a blessing to look back at the lives of faithful saints that have gone before us, reading about them “warts and all.” I just finished reading Andrew Bonar’s short biography of Robert Murray M’Cheyne, who faithfully served as a minister in Dundee, Scotland in the mid-nineteenth century, who helped launch the Scottish mission to the Jewish people, who helped spark a revival in his own church and others, and after he had done all of this and more, died at the ripe old age of twenty-nine. He was an intellectual and spiritual giant in a small, sickly body, but what struck me most in reading the biography was his zeal for preaching the Word of God. It was as if M’Cheyne was shouting from the grave: “preach the word,” John, “be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching” (2 Tim. 4:2). Remembering our leaders of the past can helps us pray for our leaders today.
Imitate their faith
In 1775, John Howie published his most famous work, Biographia Scoticana, also known as The Scots Worthies, a collection of mini biographies of sixteenth and seventeenth Scottish Presbyterians, seeking to provide biographical encouragement to a national Church that had strayed from the centrality of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Of his day, Howie lamented,
Ah! Scotland, Scotland! ‘How is the gold become dim; how is the most fine gold changed?’ Ah! where is the God of Elijah, and where is His glory? Where is that Scottish zeal that once flamed in the breasts of thy nobility, barons, ministers, and commoners of all sorts? Ah! where is that true courage and heroic resolution for religion and the liberties of the nation, that did once animate all ranks in the land! Alas! alas! true Scots blood now runs cool in our veins! The cloud is now gone up in a great measure from off our assemblies; because we have deserted and relinquished the Lord’s most noble cause and testimony, by a plain, palpable, and perpetual course of backsliding—‘The crown is fallen from our head; woe unto us, for we have sinned.’[7]
Howie believed that the best way to encourage revival in the church was by remembering their leaders of old, those who faithfully preached the Word of God, and to consider “the outcome of their way of life, and imitate their faith” (7). Howie’s biographical sketches can at times sound overly heroic, but his intent was for his reader to discern what could be learned and emulated. And so, he offered this caution:
… we are not to sit down or rest ourselves upon the person, principle, or practice of any man, yea, the best saint we have ever read or heard of, but only to seek those gifts and graces that most eminently shone forth in them. …Neither are we, on the other hand, to dwell too much upon the faults or failings that have sometimes been discovered in some of God’s own dear children … they were sons of Adam also.[8]
Rather, Howie clarified, “it is the peculiar honour and dignity of Jesus Christ alone, to be worthy of being imitated by all men absolutely.”[9] Our leaders, past and present, are worthy of our imitation, only in as much as they imitate Christ. Or, as the Apostle Paul put it, “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ” (1 Cor. 11:1).
Remember your leaders, yes! Consider their lives, yes! Imitate their faith, yes! But only in as much as their lives imitate Christ! Our leaders, old and new, are in the end “sons of Adam also.” For this reason, every Christian should guard against making too much of man, when we may make much of Christ. There is only one who is “the Alpha and the Omega,” only one “who is and who was and who is to come,” only one who is “the Almighty” (Rev. 1:8), the Lord Jesus Christ, who “is the same yesterday and today and forever” (8). Consider that he “was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made” (John 1:2-3). Consider that he willingly became a man, humbling “to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Phil. 2:6-8). Consider that “God raised him up, loosing the pangs of death, because it was not possible for him to be held by it” (Acts 2:24). Consider that “God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Phil. 2:9-11).
And so, we remember the days of old to see God’s work in the lives of sinners like you and me. We remember the days of old to remember that God has always been at work in and through the leaders of his church. We remember the days of old to be encouraged by the saints who have gone before us, who by God’s grace have lived lives imitating Christ to the glory of God. We remember the days of old that we too may glorify God in our lives today. Or, in the words of John Howie,
“When we are endeavouring to perpetuate the memory of these Worthies, and commemorate what the Lord did by and for our forefathers, in the days of old, may we be so happy as to have somewhat to declare of His goodness and wonderful works done for us in our day and generation also.[10]
[1] Unless referenced otherwise, all Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version (Wheaton: Crossway Bibles, 2001).
[2] Rolf Dobelli, Stop Reading the News: A Manifesto for a Happier, Calmer, and Wiser Life (UK: Sceptre, 2020).
[3] Ex. 16:19-20
[4] Matt. 11:30
[5] 1 Cor. 1:22-24
[6] The Book of Church Order of the Presbyterian Church in America (Lawrenceville: The Office of the Stated Clerk of the General Assembly, 2023), 24-6.
[7] John Howie, The Scots Worthies (Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth Trust, 2001), xxv.
[8] Ibid., xx.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Ibid., xxxii.
Planter, Pastor, Preacher 