1 Thessalonians 5:12-13 — And we beseech you, brethren, to know them which labor among you, and are over you in the Lord, and admonish you; and to esteem them very highly in love for their work’s sake. And be at peace among yourselves.
As we go through a season of prayer in our church, based around Matthew 7:7 (“Ask,Seek, Knock”) my thoughts are being drawn to some common prayer themes. One of them is the need to care for our pastoral staff. It starts, of course, with our Senior Pastor who carries a great spiritual burden. But recently I’ve been noticing our other “professionals” and realizing two things. The first is how hard they (and often their families too!) work in their ministries. The second is that (shame on me) I know very little about most of them. When I thought about these things my attention was drawn to these verses — perhaps not surprisingly. When I looked at them, I realized there was much more to them than might be apparent at a superficial glance.
There are those who are to be known and “highly esteemed”. They perform three essential tasks – they labor among us, they are over us, and they admonish us. First, note that these men (for they are over us, and must therefore be men) labor among us. Pastors, deacons, Bible and Life Group leaders — they come along side, they do not lord over us. But still, they are over us, the church is a structured organization, with Christ at the head. And they admonish us. “Admonish” usually means “warn” but the Louw-Nida Greek Lexicon translates the word used here as “to provide instruction as to correct behavior and belief—to instruct, to teach, instruction, teaching”.
Then there is how we are to regard these men. We are not just to obey them, or even to respect them. We are to love them. Why is that? Perhaps it is because they are under an obligation to serve us — not because we deserve it, but as a pure work of grace. Albert Barnes expresses it beautifully: “The very nature of the office requires them to do good to others, and there is no benefactor who should be treated with more affectionate regard than he who endeavors to save us from ruin; to impart to us the consolations of the gospel in affliction; and to bring us and our families to heaven.”
The last thing that strikes me about these verses is the last thing! In a way “And be at peace among yourselves.” seems a strange little tag line. “Continually be at peace with each other”. Yet I think the instruction follows naturally … How best to show love to our leaders? To ease their minds by giving them a flock at peace, rather than a fractious, murmuring, silly lot of sheep!
When we know our leaders, love them, and live at peace we stand in the same relationship to them as Jesus’s sheep do to Him. What could be sweeter?