I. The flock is the true Church, the spiritual living family of God, and the charge given us concerning them is, "Feed that flock over the which the Holy Ghost hath made you overseers." Then there is food provided? Most undoubtedly abundant food, provision to meet all your requirements, all your possible wants and desires. The provision is absolutely and exclusively in the word of God. All the blessings that faith appropriates wherever the soul is sustained and fed are to be found in the word of God. It is all apprehended by faith, and there is no legitimate object on which faith is fixed but those that are presented to us by the teaching of the Spirit of God on the pages of God's holy word. It is exactly in proportion as the precious things of the word of the living God are brought forth and dealt out in all their richness and profusion in the ministrations of God's ambassadors that souls are fed and nourished and sustained and built up in faith.
II. Consider, next, wherein the qualification of ministers consists for feeding the flock. The qualification is a knowledge of the counsel of God. That was Paul's qualification, and by virtue of his teaching, and the communication by his instrumentality of such qualifications to the elders of the church at Ephesus, they were competent. What is wanted is plain, downright, dogmatical teaching of the word of God the great and glorious doctrines put forth distinctly and positively, no attempting to reconcile what God does not reconcile, but the grand fundamental truths beginning with God's everlasting purpose and man's responsibility in connection therewith; a free, full, finished, present, and everlasting salvation proposed to every child of man willing to receive it; the certainty that God will keep His own and bring them to the haven where they would be; that there is food for every spiritual necessity and requirement, these are things that are wanted in the pulpit. Then will our people be edified and built up, and become trees of God's own planting, bearing abundant fruit to His glory.
III. Look at the motive here assigned for feeding the flock. God hath bought the Church with His own blood. This shows us the value of the Church. It is one of the strongest conceivable motives why the elders of the Church and ministers should devote themselves to the work of the Lord.
C. Molyneux, Penny Pulpit,No. 390.
References: Acts 20:28. Christian World Pulpit,vol. viii., p. 95 Preacher's Monthly,vol. ii., pp. 100, 140, 243, 244.Acts 20:31. J. H. Hitchens, Christian World Pulpit,vol. v., p. 20; B. Gregory, Ibid.,vol. xviii., p. 81; J. Edmunds, Fifteen Sermons,p. 343.Acts 20:32. A. Barry. Cheltenham College Sermons,p. 216; J. J. S. Perowne, Sermons,p. 120.