Sublime

“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” (Acts 20:28 NIV).

Examples of those wolves might be materialism, sensuality, pluralism, relativism, and the panoply of sins flowing from them. In a culture saturated with these destructive values, the sheep not only need to be warned about the dangers but equipped to stand against them.

The sovereignty of God is the one impregnable rock to which the suffering human heart must cling. The circumstances surrounding our lives are no accident: they may be the work of evil, but that evil is held firmly within the mighty hand of our sovereign God. . . . All evil is subject to Him, and evil cannot touch His children unless He permits it.

In Peter’s words to his fellow elders he reminded them that they were to shepherd the flock, “nor yet as lording it over those allotted to your charge, but proving to be examples to the flock” (1 Peter 5:3).

Some creatures God put on earth to help man, he said, and others to hinder him, and the wolf was a hinderer.

The scale is enormous, the stakes are high. Instead of spiritually dressing up the idols we know people want, let’s give them what they need—God as all in all, the filling of the Spirit, the exaltation of the risen Lord. “See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God” (1 John 3:1). That should be the