WOLVES IN THE CHURCH

August 27, 2006

Dr. Daniel W. Brown

At this time of year it is natural to be looking ahead, planning, in our personal lives as well as in the church. In many ways fall is a new beginning in our church year. We look ahead to challenges and opportunities. For us this year this is even more important—this is our tenth anniversary year, so there are things we think about that we might not otherwise give much thought to.

So here’s our question for this morning: what should our priorities be as a church? What should the priorities of any church be as they’re looking ahead? What are the greatest challenges that we face as we look ahead to the coming year of ministry? Let me put it practically. If you were in a position to advise the elders—which you all are--you can advise the elders any time you want. They’re all around you. Any time you want to walk up to one of them and say, “You should be doing this,” what can they do? They have to listen to you. So if you were in a position to advise the elders about what the church should be doing, or what they themselves should be doing what advice would you give them? What would it be? Would it be prayer? Prayer is central to the life of the church, to the people of God. Would it be evangelism? Would it be how are we going to make a difference in our community? Or would it be missions, would it be the world? A lot of you, I know, have a heart for the world. What would it be, what would our priorities be?

In Acts 20 Paul gives just this kind of advice to the elders of one of the churches that he planted, the church in the city of Ephesus. What will he say?

Before looking at Paul’s counsel to the Ephesian elders, we need to review his comings and goings, his travels in Acts 17, 18 and 19. It would be helpful to look at a map to grasp the extent of Paul’s travels. We need to see the context before going to Acts 20. In AD50 where had the church been established? We see that it was mostly in Palestine, Samaria and Judea. It is mostly Jewish and there are a few pockets of believers in the province of Asia from Paul’s previous missionary trip.

At the beginning of Acts 17 Paul, with Silas and Timothy, was in Thessalonica where he incited a riot.

He moved on from Thessalonica to the nearby city of Berea taking Silas and Timothy with him. (Verse 10) The Bereans were much more receptive, but the Thessalonians followed him there, stirred up trouble, and he was spirited off to Athens, leaving Silas and Timothy in Berea. (Verse 15)

In Athens Paul gives his famous address to the city council, the Areopagus, one of the best-known passages in the book of Acts. After giving this speech Paul doesn’t stay long before causing trouble. He moves on from Athens to Corinth. (Acts 18)

In Corinth he ran into fierce opposition but he also received this encouragement in verses 9 and 10: “One night the Lord spoke to Paul in a vision: ‘Do not be afraid; keep on speaking, do not be silent. For I am with you, and no one is going to attack and harm you, because I have many people in this city.’”

He also gained important allies—Aquila and Priscilla, recently arrived from Rome. They join Paul in ministry, and they remain among Paul’s closest supporters.

While Paul was in Corinth, he wrote some important letters, I Thessalonians, and then II Thessalonians. These letters, of course, are part of our Bible

After some time in Corinth (verse 18) Paul headed home, leaving some workers in Corinth but taking Priscilla and Aquila with him. On the way he made a stop in the city of Ephesus where he left Priscilla and Aquila. Then he went on to Caesarea, Jerusalem and finally to Antioch, his home church. While Paul is in Antioch, Aquila and Priscilla are working away in Ephesus, and a new person shows up, named Apollos from Alexandria in Egypt. Apollos has nothing to do with Paul at all. He doesn’t know who he is, but he comes to Ephesus where he meets Aquila and Priscilla. He is preaching there, and he is a gifted evangelist. At the end of chapter 18, Apollos is in Ephesus with Priscilla and Aquila, while Paul is traveling back to Ephesus through Galatia and the province of Asia by land. Apollos decides to go to Greece and leaves for Corinth. In the beginning of chapter 19 Paul arrives back in Ephesus where he is reunited with Priscilla and Aquila. He stays there more than two years.

What happens in Ephesus?

Paul wrote I Corinthians from here. He sends some of his companions off to minister in Greece and Macedonia while he stays on in Ephesus. Aquila and Priscilla at some point return to Rome, so they are no longer with him. Then Paul himself goes to Macedonia where he writes the second letter to the Corinthians. He then travels through Greece and Macedonia. Apollos meanwhile—well, we have no idea where he is--but no doubt he was still traveling around the whole area. Paul arrives again in Thessalonica, and we notice, that by this time (Acts 20:4) he has a whole entourage with him. He has a whole list of people that are now his partners in ministry as he travels through Macedonia. He ends up in the city of Troas with this whole company of people. In Troas an interesting thing happens--we have the first instance of a person dying because of a sermon. (Some of you may be feeling like it’s going that way right now.) But Paul preaches all night (don’t feel sorry for yourselves!) so long that a young man sitting in an upstairs window falls asleep. (Who wouldn’t?) He falls out the window and he dies. Paul goes out and raises him back to life. His name is Eutychus, so remember Eutychus in Acts 20. This is the most important happening in the city of Troas. From Troas Paul heads down the coast with his entourage, and ends up in Miletus, which is not too far from Ephesus. That is where he calls on the Ephesian elders to come and meet him and gives them this last piece of advice.

So the context of this whole passage that we are going to focus on is the work that Paul has been doing. He has been traveling tirelessly throughout the known world in Greece and Macedonia and Asia. He is aiming to get to Rome. And what’s the result of all of this? When he arrives back in Jerusalem after approximately eight years, what does the church look like?

We see a remarkable difference from AD50 to 58. We read through these chapters and we get caught in the details and we lose the big picture that this is one of the most remarkable decades in the history of the Christian church. During this decade the church goes from a handful of churches, in a comparatively small area to the point where the church has spread throughout the western world and now spans the Mediterranean Sea. It has gone from being mostly Jewish to being mixed Jewish and Gentiles with a lot of Gentile believers. It has gone from being small to being quite large. It has gone from being local to being what would rightly be called ecumenical. The word ecumenical comes from oikumene which was the word used for the world. The whole Mediterranean world was oikumene. So an ecumenical church was a worldwide church. The church was becoming worldwide. This was a remarkable decade for Paul and his companions.

So we come to the end of this section. Paul is heading to Jerusalem, and he is never going to go back to most of these churches that he has been instrumental in establishing. The question is, what advice is he going to give? What are their priorities? If he is never going to go back to these believers, what would be his last words to them? He can’t get on the cell phone to them later on. He’ll write letters to them, but he won’t be able to call them up. What is he going to say?

Acts 20:25-31 “Now I know that none of you among whom I have gone about preaching the kingdom will ever see me again. Therefore, I declare to you today that I am innocent of the blood of all men. For I have not hesitated to proclaim to you the whole will of God. Keep watch over yourselves and all the flock of which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers. Be shepherds of the church of God, which he bought with his own blood. I know that after I leave, savage wolves will come in among you and will not spare the flock. Even from your own number men will arise and distort the truth in order to draw away disciples after them. So be on your guard! Remember that for three years I never stopped warning each of you night and day with tears.”

This is the central part of Paul’s message to these believers. He also talks a lot about his relationship to them, but this is the biggest priority of what he has to say. This is the greatest danger that they face. And what is it? Is it losing their zeal for evangelism, getting off track that way? Is it that their worship needs to be more upbeat to attract the younger generation of the Ephesians? Is it building programs? What is the biggest challenge? Wolves--wolves are the biggest challenge. This seems quite strange to us that the biggest danger is that wolves will come in and savage the flock of God. Some of these wolves will come from outside, and some of them will come from inside. He says, “even from among your number.” These are leaders of the church, and even from “among your number” these wolves will come. In other words, some of you will be were-wolves. I suggested to my daughter that I might make the title of this sermon “Were-wolves.” I wasn’t brave enough for that, but she was afraid I might use an illustration from a movie we watched recently, “Shaggy Dog” where poor Tim Allen turns into a dog over and over again. This is what a were-wolf does—he looks like an ordinary person and when the moon comes out, he turns into a wolf. So “Were-wolves in the Church” would in some ways be an appropriate title. Some of these Ephesian elders are going to turn into wolves, Paul is saying.

So this is the greatest danger, the greatest priority for the church, and this is the reason Paul is in tears. We can see some of these tears in the letters that he writes, the heart that he has. The biggest challenge for the church, and it is true for them and for us, isn’t from outside, from the culture around us. It’s from inside. We are the biggest danger to the church.

Recently I’ve received several mailings, enough that they have become irritating. A national youth organization is putting out their statistics, and I don’t know where they’re getting them, saying that the next generation of children of Christians is just turning away from the church in droves. They throw out the statistics that twenty years from now, only four per cent of those who have grown up in the church will still be in the church. They are throwing out this fear that somehow the culture is going to destroy the church. That is not going to happen because God said that the gates of hell can’t prevail against his church. The devil has more subtle tactics than that. He doesn’t have to use a frontal assault on the church because he can work from within it. He attacks from within.

So what’s the greatest priority of church leadership?

Acts 20:31: “Be on your guard.”

Be on your guard—that’s Paul’s greatest priority for church leadership and it’s really interesting because we very seldom think of that being our number one priority. But what exactly are we guarding against? Well, we’re guarding against wolves, but what do wolves do? Why should we be worried about wolves? Verse 29 says they do not spare the flock. “Wolves will come in among you and they will not spare the flock.” Think about a shepherd and think about a wolf. What is the shepherd concerned about? The shepherd is concerned about the welfare of the flock, that their needs are met, and that they are kept together. He knows that if he loses a few sheep, they are in serious danger when they go off on their own. But what does a wolf do? The wolf tries to break some sheep off from the flock. He comes in and tries to drive a wedge between and drive some off so that they’re an easier target. That’s what a wolf does. So the first thing a wolf does is to come in and try to divide. He comes in and works within a congregation to try to get a little group of supporters for a particular viewpoint or for himself. He tries to separate them out, not concerned for the whole, concerned for his particular agenda. So he sows doubt, sows dissatisfaction, sows disunity. Wolves do not spare the flock. They are not concerned for the flock, but for their own agenda.

What else do wolves do? Verse 30 says wolves distort the truth. Notice, it doesn’t say wolves bring in what is obviously false. That would be too easy. Wolves bring in what appears to be true, but is a distortion, enough of a distortion that it distracts from the centrality of the message of the Gospel of Jesus. The wolf comes in with a truth that sounds really convincing but the result will be to distract from and drive away from what is really important.

So wolves do not spare the flock and wolves distort the truth, and third, in verse 30, wolves draw disciples after them. Wolves don’t make disciples of Jesus, wolves make disciples of themselves.

In his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul says more about this happening in the church. Turn to I Corinthians 3:1-9: “Brothers, I could not address you as spiritual but as worldly—merely infants in Christ. I gave you milk, not solid food, for you were not yet ready for it. Indeed you are still not ready. You are still worldly. For since there is jealousy and quarreling among you, are you not worldly? Are you not acting like mere men? For when one says, ‘I follow Paul,’ and another ‘I follow Apollos,’ are you not mere men. What after all, is Apollos? And what is Paul? Only servants, through whom you came to believe—as the Lord has assigned to each his task. I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God made it grow. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God, who makes things grow. The man who plants and the man who waters have one purpose, and each will be rewarded according to his own labor. For we are God’s fellow workers; you are God’s field, God’s building.”

What was happening in Corinth was that people were dividing up into factions following this person or that person. Paul says this is absolutely wrong! The church is one and has one head, and that head is Christ. All of us who are working somehow with the church are simply farm laborers. That’s all—we don’t own it. It’s not ours. Anyone who comes into the church and treats it as if it belongs to him is a wolf. It does not belong to any one of us. I could leave this church, and it will still be the church of God. It still continues and it has nothing to do with whether I’m here or not. It is his church and that should be true of any church leader but it is not true of some who presume to be leaders within the church. We have plenty examples in our culture of people who are acting as wolves within the church at large by drawing disciples to themselves rather than drawing disciples to Jesus. We can get some idea of Paul’s perspective on this if we think back to our review of Paul’s travels and the growth of the church in that amazing decade from AD50 to AD 58. Who was moving Paul and Apollos and all those other people around? Where did Apollos come from? Did Paul call him from Alexandria? Where did Aquila and Priscilla come from? Think of all the moving around that is described in Acts 17-20. Who is planning all this? The church belongs to God. He moves people where he will. He has his servants everywhere. It doesn’t belong to Paul. It doesn’t belong to Apollos. God is doing this amazing work in the world and any time that we make disciples of ourselves or anyone makes disciples of themselves within the church they are undermining the very fabric of the people of God. If anyone tries to draw people to himself and his particular teaching, if anyone says, “I have the truth,” rather than the church represents the truth of God and we are all in it together, that person has become a wolf.

Here’s the thing about wolves in the church—they don’t look like wolves. They don’t look like wolves, and they don’t think about themselves as wolves. This is scary, and it’s scary for a reason that should also be convicting. What it means is that anyone of us can become a wolf. Anyone of us can destroy rather than build. Anyone of us can divide rather than bring together. All of us have that potential, so what is at the heart of becoming a wolf? What is at the heart of being a wolf is self being at the center rather than God being at the center--self being at the center rather than the things of God and the people of God. Are you concerned about the things of God or are you concerned about the things that will build you up, about your particular agenda? Are you concerned about the whole or are your concerned about yourself and your part in things? So wolves are hard to recognize unless they’re ourselves. If we look into our own hearts we can see the wolf-ness there. We can all see that potential, and we can tell wolves by the results, and this is where the church must be on guard. They tear the flock about. They sow disunity and they ultimately lead us away from the central core of the gospel.

So what is the greatest challenge for the church, whether it is the church in Ephesus or other churches Paul had planted? It is to guard against wolves. And what priority for our church and our elders? I don’t think it’s any different. The greatest danger to the church has always been from within. The greatest danger to the church has always been that we would somehow tear ourselves apart. The way we guard against this at Stony Brook is to try as best we can to keep the main thing the main thing: to keep the gospel of Jesus Christ, the truth that Jesus died on the cross for our sins, was raised to life so that we could have life. That message should bring enormous joy to us and to those around us, and keeping central to the life of our church. There are things we do disagree on among ourselves as a congregation, but where we’re not acting as wolves, those are things of mild interest. We kind of enjoy disagreeing with each other on some things. They don’t tear us apart from one another. But we cannot disagree on that which is absolutely to the truth.

In applying this, we need to think about guarding against two things. I’m asking you, in application, to guard against the wolf-ness in yourself. Look at the way you are interacting with the people of God, other believers and ask, are there ways in which I am sowing disunity, ways in which I am sowing dissatisfaction rather than contentment? Are there ways that I am discouraging rather than encouraging? This is the first part of the application: make sure you’re acting like a shepherd or a sheep, not a wolf.

Then, be on your guard against wolf-ness in other people. It will be there. Be on your guard against it. This is the job of the elders, but also of the congregation to be alert. If we do that, then the church will be free to do all the things the church should be doing. We won’t have to worry about all this infighting and trouble in the church. We’ll be out there ministering to people with joy. We’ll be able to care for the sick and the needy. We’ll be able to spend out time learning about God and teaching about God rather than fighting with one another. We’ll be available to send people out into the world to do good. We’ll be able to do all that because we have done this central task of guarding against wolves in the church including ourselves. When that happens, the picture we’ll have of the church will be this beautiful picture. That is what Paul is most concerned about, and that is what we should be most concerned about in this coming year.

Let’s pray together: Heavenly Father, we thank you that the work of the church is your work. Thank you for how it is so obvious that you were orchestrating everything that went on in that amazing decade of the growth of the church and that you are still orchestrating everything that goes on. We just ask that you’ll make us your humble servants, willing to put aside our own selves and agendas for the sake of your kingdom and the work that you want us to do in the world. To you we give glory, Lord, and honor, in Jesus Name, Amen.