I was led to Jesus by my father, my mother, and a church family in a small farm town in Kansas called Mulvane. I could still give you their names.

My father preached. I sat under him for years, and I could not give you one of those sermons back now. What stayed was the invitation. Every time, at the end: the problem, the solution, the steps. I can still see it on the overhead, the fan running under the light. That is nearly all I kept from those years. It may be the only part that was built to be carried out the door.

My mother never stood behind a pulpit, and what she handed me was harder to point at and went in deeper. She was calm when things went wrong. She believed God held what she could not hold, and she lived that way in front of her children, which is a different thing than hearing it from your mother when you’re an anxious child. Whatever peace I have in following Jesus, I first saw it on her face before I could have explained a word of it.

Discipleship came after the water. I was baptized first. Then somebody put me on the list to lead a prayer, and I stood up and prayed out loud in front of people I had only just met. We were new to Texas. They barely knew my name and they put me up front anyway. That was one congregation, and it was years behind me by the time I signed up to teach a class of teenagers. I wanted to shape them the way I had been shaped. Three churches, counting Mulvane. Different states, different decades, nobody comparing notes. Neither of them was recruiting me. I already belonged to God when they started handing me things, and what they were doing was building up somebody who was already leading.

None of them were building anything for themselves. It’s rare to see someone build a following out of a Wednesday night Bible class.

Every one of them I really listened to shaped me. I can tell you now which ones stayed with me, and it was never the ones I admired most. It was the ones where I forgot who was talking. Nothing he gave me came from him. What reached me was Scripture, and God speaking in it.

They led and I followed, and sometimes I followed in the wrong direction — never because a man taught me something false, but because I had my eyes on the brilliance of how he was speaking so powerfully. That is the whole danger, and I was inside it before I could name it.

On his way to Jerusalem, Paul stopped at a coastal town called Miletus and sent for the elders of the church at Ephesus. It is the only sermon in Acts to Christians that Luke gives us any of, and he knew it was the last time he would stand in front of them. He told them plainly they would not see his face again. Then he gave them their charge.

“Pay careful attention to yourselves and to all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to care for the church of God, which he obtained with his own blood.” (Acts 20:28, ESV)

Look at what he does to those men in one sentence. He hands them the flock and tells them in the same breath that it is not theirs. The Spirit set them there; they did not set themselves there. The church belongs to God, and the price of it was blood, and it was not their blood. Everything else he says that day rests on it. A man who believes that is already out of the middle, and he never had to work at humility to get there. He was simply told whose the church was, and he took it.

Paul said that to elders. He did not say it to me. But a man does not have to hold that office to be standing in the middle of something, whether it is a class, a song service, or a house. The charge belongs to elders. The danger in it reaches anybody people look at.

Then the warning.

“I know that after my departure fierce wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock; and from among your own selves will arise men speaking twisted things, to draw away the disciples after them.” (Acts 20:29–30, ESV)

After them.

Notice where they come from. The wolves come in among you. These men arise from among your own selves. That is the harder thing, because he is already in the room and he is one of theirs.

And notice what the twisting is for. Not the error by itself. The pull, men drawing disciples after themselves. The teaching is the road and the men are where it ends, because a man who wants to be followed will eventually find something to teach that requires him. Often the error exists to justify the pull.

Not sparing the flock. That is who pays for it. A man can want to be followed and never think of it as costing anybody anything. Paul says the sheep are what it costs.

So Paul does the opposite in front of them.

“And now I commend you to God and to the word of his grace, which is able to build you up and to give you the inheritance among all those who are sanctified.” (Acts 20:32, ESV)

Able. Paul is not the one who can do that, and he says so out loud while they are still looking at him. He hands them to God and to the word, and he names the two things they will need once he is out of reach: something that can build them up, and something that can give them the inheritance when he is not there to hand it over. He had given those men three years. He taught them in public and from house to house. He called for elders, plural, and there were elders there to call.

He had already worked this out somewhere else, with a church that was coming apart over which preacher belonged to whom.

“What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you believed, as the Lord assigned to each. I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth.” (1 Corinthians 3:5–7, ESV)

He does not rank himself above Apollos or beneath him. He takes both names off the table. Neither man is anything, and both of them knew it.

I want to slow down here, because this argument runs off the road easily and I have seen it run off.

In (Acts 20:29–30, ESV), Paul says flock. He did not invent that word for the occasion, and it runs back through the whole Old Testament. Moses used it at the end of his own life, when he asked God for one last thing.

“Let the LORD, the God of the spirits of all flesh, appoint a man over the congregation who shall go out before them and come in before them, who shall lead them out and bring them in, that the congregation of the LORD may not be as sheep that have no shepherd.” (Numbers 27:16–17, ESV)

Forty years he carried those people, and his request is not that they remember him. It is that they not be left standing there without somebody to go out in front of them. He asked God to replace him. God did, and Israel crossed a river Moses never crossed.

God gave elders. God gave teachers. He said so through Paul, and he meant it to be a gift. Sheep are not independent animals, and the New Testament does not treat them as if they were. The question was never whether people would depend on somebody. They will. The question is what they are depending on, and whether the man standing in the middle of it is content to be a hand passing something along, or has started to enjoy being what people come for. Most men do not decide to make that turn. They notice it late, if at all. A man can make it while doing everything right on the outside, and the first sign is usually not false doctrine. It is quieter than that. Ask what the room does when he is not in it.

That is the test, and it is hard because it does not measure your gifts at all. Men who are good at this fail it. Gather people, teach well, solve what needs solving, carry what nobody else will carry, do every bit of it, and still leave behind a room that cannot move without you.

Ask it plainly. If you were gone this month, what would be standing.

Paul said something close to this to a different church, and it belongs next to the other.

“Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, so now, not only as in my presence but much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling,” (Philippians 2:12, ESV)

He is not saying he would rather be gone. He is saying their obedience never ran on his supervision, and he did not want them finding that out the first time he was not there.

My father is still living. He still preaches. He is still giving that same invitation. Whatever preacher there is in me came from watching him do it plainly, out of the word, with nothing added to make it land. A man who preaches that way has already decided the sermon is not going to be about him. He is not at the center of anything, and I have watched him long enough to know that was on purpose. My mother’s steadiness never needed an audience either. Those congregations have scattered or died or grown old, and what they built is still standing, and I am standing in it. It never required any of them to stay.

Which leaves the question where I would rather not leave it. Not with them. With me, and with any man reading this who has a room he is responsible for. If the honest answer is that things would come apart, that is not a verdict on you. It is a place to start, and the work in it can start this week.

The flock was bought with blood that was not yours. Commend them to God and to the word of his grace, and get out from in front of Jesus.

HEB

This devotional was developed using AI-assisted writing tools. The theological direction, governing observations, personal territory, text selections, and editorial judgments are the author’s. AI contributed structural framing, connective prose, and iterative refinement under the author’s direction. The final piece reflects the author’s voice, convictions, and relationship to the text.