Dear Friends,

Have you ever watched a church disintegrate? It is a fearful sight. It’s cause? No one seems to know who is supposed to be in charge! Sometimes it’s a pastor who thinks he should control everything. Sometimes it is people in the church who think they should control everything. The Bible says that God is to be in control. He exercised that control by His Word and through His elders. Who’s in charge in your church? God bless you.

Because of Calvary,

John Janney

• Hebrews 13:17

  Hebrews 13:17   English Standard Version
  17 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.

Hebrews 13:17

“I have before told you that when I was coming to London, there was a queer old man in the prayer-meeting who…asked the Lord that I might be….‘delivered from the bleating of the sheep;’ and, for the life of me, I could not make out what he meant. I am not sure that he understood it himself, but I quite understand it now. There is no leader of the flock who will not occasionally wish to be delivered from the bleating of the sheep, for they bleat such different tunes sometimes. You may listen to the bleating of one sheep and another, — some bellwether, perhaps, that is not bleating in the right style; but it is a great thing to feel, ‘Now, I am not going to be guided by the way these sheep bleat. I am set to guide them rather than to let them guide me, but I am going to be guided by a higher voice than the bleating of the sheep, namely, the voice of the Great Shepherd.’”
[Charles Haddon Spurgeon, The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit XLIII, (London: Passmore and Alabaster, 1897), p. 260-261]