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In the classic sense of a pastor with an office and an oak desk and a door and a day timer, we don't have a pastor.

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And we don’t feel like having one is God’s highest and best will.

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God put up with Saul as king and then went on to bring in David as king and worked with him. God can work with that.

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Some of you guys may be “Davids” who God’s working with. But that’s not His highest order.

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That’s not the way He intended things to be. “It was not so from the beginning.”

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According to what Jesus taught about Moses, God allowed divorce because the hardness of their hearts, but it was not so from the beginning.

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And that’s very much the same situation with this whole subject of church government.

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God’s done some good things within the setup.

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He has saved souls, and he’s brought some saints into higher maturity than they would have been if they were all alone.

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But He doesn't intend there to be a system of pastor, associate pastors, and so on.

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Label them any way you want to label them--call them pastor, reverend, father, priest. Let them be married, let them not be married.

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It’s really all the same thing. And it’s not God’s highest and best way. There should be “in the midst those who serve” with that gift of shepherd.

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If that gift is missing from the body of Christ, lambs will be led astray, they’ll be poorly fed, and they’ll be unprotected and misguided.

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That gift is essential for the growing up of the body of Christ in the unity of faith, in the knowledge of the Son of God,

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and the full measure of His stature, giftedness, character, life--

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--all the attributes of who He was and how He functioned in the marketplace and in His own heart and mind. So His gifts are essential.

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Who is your pastor? Those who have walked in the gift of shepherd can be identified.

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 And there are different measures of the gift, just as there were various kinds of glory that Paul referred to in 1 Corinthians.

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There also were various kinds of apostles listed in the New Testament, some with greater magnitude in their gifting and fruitfulness than others.

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Some apostles you never hear about again, while others go on, and the Holy Spirit turns His eye towards them.

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Much of the book of Acts follows just a couple of men, even though there were several other apostles

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--in fact as many as 23, if you go through the New Testament and count them.

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But there are different levels of gifting. That would also be true of the gift of shepherd, or poimen.

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There are various expressions, depending upon the maturity or the magnitude of the gifting.

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There would be different levels of visibility or such in that gift. But the gift is essential.

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But the office, as it’s usually practiced in a religious way, is very similar to the Saul and Samuel situation.

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Samuel had the gifting. Saul had the title and the position.

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Though the men had some similarities, the organic issue was the one of God’s heart,

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while the systematic or organizational issue harmed God’s purposes, even though some good things happened under King David, for example.

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But it didn’t last long. The blessing made it through Solomon and then just blew apart, because it really wasn’t what God had intended it to be.

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The rest of the question had to do with elders and deacons.

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That’s something that you see in the New Testament as something that doesn’t happen immediately in any given assembly.

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Apparently, in Jerusalem, the first time they show up is in Acts 15. They may have been there sooner,

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but a long time has passed between the birthing of the church at Pentecost and the first time you see the word "elder" referred to.

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The same is true of the word deacon. Those in Acts 6 apparently were not deacons.

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They are referred to as “the Seven” much later in the book of Acts, although the word “deacon” was in common use by that time.

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The point is that elders and deacons are an organic issue also.

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I think it’s important that a house be set in order, as Paul wrote to Titus and Timothy about.

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 Here’s what a man will look like. If he’s going to be a deacon or an elder, here’s the qualifications.

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There’s a certain orderliness about having elders and deacons that we would desire as a church here.

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Any church should desire as a corporate body that there would be an orderliness in having elders and servants.

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(Again, “deacon” is not a good translation of diakonos-- “servant” is a better word.)

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In a particular assembly of believers, those things really ought to be there.

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But to short-circuit the process and take men who do not fit the qualifications that the Holy Spirit has laid out--

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--to say "Well, we need elders, deacons, plurality of elders, etc…,

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and we are going to do it because the scriptures say that’s an order,"

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but then to violate all the things that God said are necessary for a man to be in that position--would be suicidal spiritually.

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And many assemblies have taken men who are not anywhere near that level of maturity and stature and called them elders.

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It’s been to their own destruction that that has happened.

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They’ve chosen men who can’t hear God, who aren’t “full of the Holy Ghost and full of wisdom,”

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 who can’t see “heaven open, and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of the glory of God.”

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If a man is not in touch, if he can’t “see Him who is invisible” as it says in Hebrews--

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--if that's not who he is--he’s going to make a lot of bad decisions.

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He’s going to use carnal reasoning, business sense, rather than Godly wisdom.

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He’s going to use “wisdom from below” which is “unspiritual and from the devil.”

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So elders and deacons (elders and servants), certainly should be a part of a church.

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Ultimately if men are qualified, they should be a part of an assembly of believers, it would seem from the New Testament record.

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But again that record doesn’t seem to indicate that it happened immediately in any assembly.

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There seemed to be a span of time before elders or servants showed up.

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Paul would visit a city and then go back and appoint elders.

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Or he would visit a city and then send someone else back. Maybe Titus would place elders in the assembly.

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It’s almost as if they were calling men to Jesus and then watching to see what gifts began to come forward and to develop...

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...as they cultivated the little seedling into a sapling and then a tree.

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As they watched this new Life grow, they looked at the kind of fruit produced and said, “This guy’s a shepherd. He’s taking responsibility.

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The Holy Spirit has made him an overseer. Let’s recognize this thing and appoint him as such. We’re recognizing what the Holy Spirit has done.

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He is already doing it. Let’s recognize the Spirit’s work publicly for the sake of everyone who would come later

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and for the weaker brothers who can’t really see it with their own eyes.”

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So elders and servants are necessary parts of the body of Christ as it grows.

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