REMEMBER YOUR LEADERS
Andrew Burr
I bring this verse forward because we were enjoying the relationship between the principle of leadership and faith last week; and because we have heard this evening about the voice of the Lord Jesus and how we hear it. As our brother has said, we must not begin to make that abstract. What the Lord says, that the sheep know him, as He knows the Father, and the Father knows him, is as far from abstraction as it is possible to be. It is absolute reality, eternal reality. As far as we are concerned, we enter into it by the Spirit, but if one was looking for what was more absolutely real than anything else, you could not find anything more real than that verse. It is wonderful to see our knowledge of Jesus put on that level. It must need the Spirit, because there is nothing certain about what we are naturally. In fact there is comfort in that verse, that, as the hymn says ‘nature’s voice is silent’ and ‘what yet of nature is lies silent through that heavenly call, no earthly voice like this’. There is nothing of nature in the speaking and nothing of nature in the hearing. All the doubt and questions and uncertainties that belong, inescapably, to nature, are absent. Would that we knew more about this! I believe our brother’s word has helped us about it.
I simply put these thoughts into what I have read, because here we have a reference to the word of God being spoken, not by Jesus, but by our leaders. I trust that I will not be thought to be stretching this passage, but it goes on to refer to manner of life or conversation. It is interesting that the word conversation is used, because that conveys the idea of speaking. That is not really meant here; it conveys the wider idea of a manner of life. When we were speaking about leadership last week, we were helped to see that it is not simply that a lead is given in ministry, but it is more the idea that a lead is given by example. The example especially in mind here is of faith. I have been led to go on thinking about that because attention is drawn from time to time to brethren who have gone on a very long time. Our brother Mr Palmer in hospital is an example of one who has been in this path for as long as anyone here can remember, perhaps as long as he can remember. Our sister who was buried last week is another of the kind - we have a brother and a sister under our special attention at the moment. There are others. They have come through many trials, and faith has brought them through. I believe it would be fair to say that their faith speaks to us, and in the voice of their faith, there is the word of God.
Our brother has referred to how we hear. We might say we hear by the Spirit, but does not what is expressed by those who are examples among us speak to us? If it does, what does it say, and how do we hear it? Do we hear it? I trust I am right in saying that there is no sense in which older ones are in any way discounted among us; they are very much esteemed. We know little of the early years of some of them, and some of the trials and difficulties; the mood of the day is to leave all that behind as things that belong to an old past, but for these brethren they lie on their pathway of faith. Through them the measure of faith that we see has been formed. What we have seen is a readiness to make sacrifice and to bear reproach; a desire to put the Lord’s things where they should be; a readiness to serve the brethren in practical ways as well as in more prominent ways; a readiness to serve unseen. There has been no seeking of recognition or prominence. The writer here says, they must not be forgotten, because what they have done speaks. A day will come when those who die in the Lord are blessed and their works follow with them. It would be a shame if works began to follow only after people have died, when we have living examples among us through whom the word of God has come to us. The word of God has come in what they have said, in their advice, in the way that they have looked at the Scriptures; in the practical way they have spoken about the brethren. It has come in the way they have given expression to their affections and desires for the brethren, their prayers. All these things enter into what they have said, and their manner of life speaks to us as well.
I feel the importance of this. Our brother has referred to what is continuing. Jesus Christ is the Same, it says, and He would be the same to us as He has been to those who have gone before - the Same, yesterday and today. Therefore I believe that there is something to be especially taken account of. I suppose it would be true to say that the proportion of elderly ones among us is relatively high; in a sense the generation that is thin is my own, because diversions among us claimed a disproportionate number of those who were then young. Another generation is growing up for which we can be thankful, who knew nothing of those times, for whom the elder brethren have the greatest affection. Let us bind one another together in the learning of these lessons so that we are strengthened by what never changes in Jesus Himself, that has been learned and would be expressed in the lives of one another.
May He bless the word.
LONDON
11 January 2000