When Samuel (God’s prophet and judge – 1 Samuel 3:20; 1 Samuel 7:15) grew old, he appointed his sons to preside as judges over Israel (1 Samuel 8:1). Unfortunately, their character and disposition of heart was not like that of their father (1 Samuel 8:3; cf. 1 Samuel 3:10; 1 Samuel 3:19).<\/p>\n
In response to this problem, Israel’s leaders said to Samuel, “Look, you are old, and your sons do not walk in your ways. Now make for us a king to judge us like all the nations” (1 Samuel 8:5). These men recognized the problem of a morally corrupt leadership, but their fatal mistake was putting their complete trust in a mistake-prone human being (i.e., “a king …. like all the nations”), instead of in the all-knowing God (1 John 3:20; cf. Psalm 4:5; Psalm 37:3 ; Psalm 40:4; Psalm 62:7-8; Psalm 118:8-9).<\/p>\n
As Samuel prayed to the Lord about the matter, the Lord told Samuel, “Heed the voice of the people in all that they say to you; for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected Me, that I should not reign over them” (1 Samuel 8:7).<\/p>\n
When the New Testament church began experiencing similar difficulties in the early second century, they unfortunately followed a similar pattern the end result being their adoption of a man-made hierarchy in church government similar to that of the Roman Empire. However, a man-made hierarchy was never God’s desire or design.<\/p>\n
In the Lord’s church, there is no board of trustees, no president, no hierarchy of religious “officials,” and no pope. Rather, every member is directly responsible to God and Christ (cf. 1 Corinthians 11:3; Ephesians 5:23). While there is no human hierarchy in the Lord’s church, there is God-ordained leadership. The inspired writer Paul notes the existence of “bishops and deacons” in a local congregation (Philippians 1:1).<\/p>\n
These terms are simply describing spiritual roles of “service” within the Lord’s church nothing else. Deacons are servants given specific responsibilities requiring godly character (1 Timothy 3:8-12). Bishops (also called elders or overseers (Acts 20:17; Acts 20:28), oversee<\/strong> the congregation’s spiritual needs and provide the most expedient way for them to implement God’s will (cf. Acts 20:28; 1 Peter 5:1-3).<\/p>\n While elders, deacons, and preachers have no authority within themselves<\/strong> to legislate behavior, they do have the authorization to implement divinely legislated<\/strong> behavior (Hebrews 13:17).<\/p>\n The Lord’s church is not a democracy, but a spiritual kingdom (Matthew 16:18-19; John 18:36). Jesus is our King (1 Timothy 6:14-15) “ we are His servants (cf. Romans 1:1; Philippians 1:1; Titus 1:1. Therefore, congregational leadership is based on those individuals who have a proven record of spiritual service<\/strong> to the Lord (Mark 10:42-45).<\/p>\n Let us therefore honor these servant-leaders of the Lord’s church by giving them our respect and full support (1 Timothy 5:17-18; cf. Matthew 10:10).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When Samuel (God’s prophet and judge – 1 Samuel 3:20; 1 Samuel 7:15) grew old, he appointed his sons to preside as judges over Israel (1 Samuel 8:1). Unfortunately, their character and disposition of heart was not like that of their father (1 Samuel 8:3; cf. 1 Samuel 3:10; 1 Samuel 3:19). In response to … Continue reading “The Leadership Of The Church \u2014 God Governed – Bible study”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-46657","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sermons"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46657","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46657"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46657\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46657"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46657"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46657"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}