Elder Qualifications - Part 1

Well, if you would turn in your copy of God's Word to 1 Timothy 3, my plan is to begin the book of John verse by verse at some point here. I debated between the book of John or the book of Romans, and then decided on John. But then I thought, well, maybe we'll do Jonah or something. And I thought about doing Ruth because of the Bible Bee. I thought that could be interesting.

But just a reminder to you men, when we go to the Bible Bee, Lindsay has graciously offered to teach the younger generation that's going to be there. But we have four meetings, and if the other men would like to volunteer to take one of the weeks to do the teaching for the older, I don't even want to call them kids, the older young people, that would be fantastic. So there's only three weeks to pick from and you could have plenty of notice.

And so let me know. But this was a particularly busy week for me and I had already been fleshing out some work on 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1 and 1 Peter 5 in regard to elders. And so it was kind of an easier prep for me. And I thought it's contemporary for our church right now as not only am I a candidate to be an elder, but we still need to be able to select elders for a long long time hopefully.

One day I hope to have many elders and many deacons of this church and I hope that's not even that far away frankly but you know as the Lord leads in that regard. So notwithstanding my desire to try to go verse by verse here's where we're at we're going to look at 1st Timothy 3 today I'm reading from the LSB. It is a trustworthy saying. If any man aspires to the office of overseer, he desires a good work.

An overseer then must be above reproach. The husband of one wife. Temperate. Sensible. Respectable. Hospitable.

Able to teach. Not addicted to wine or pugnacious, but considerate, peaceable, free from the love of money. Leading his own household well, having his children in submission with all dignity. But if a man does not know how to lead his own household, how will he take care of the church of God? And not a new convert, so that he will not become conceited and fall into the condemnation of the devil. and he must have a good reputation with those outside the church so that he will not fall into reproach and the snare of the devil.

That's reading of God's word. So a few notes on elders. So this is characteristically called the elder qualification passage. And so a couple notes. First of all, I don't think it's by accident that immediately after God tells Timothy in Ephesus that a woman is not supposed to teach or exercise authority over a man, that the very next thing he starts to talk about is the elders of the church.

So I don't want you to miss that. So God has in his providence ordained that there's only, we'll say half the population that he has specifically selected to be elders of a church. I also think deacons fall into that category as well, although I know there's respectable people who disagree with that one. So the first thing to note would be that this is not because women do not have these qualifications.

In fact, many women, the only qualification they lack is they're not a man. There's many women who have all these qualifications of Christian virtue that are listed here. The second thing to note, then, is that not all men are qualified by God. The fact that there's a list of these things that we're supposed to look at helps us to see that there is some limit to who God has chosen to be an elder of a church.

And then the third thing to note is that other than being apt to teach, which I'll make a comment on that in a second, there is not a virtue listed here that should not be striven for by everybody in the room anyway. If you're a Christian and you want to become a better Christian or you want to become a good Christian, whether you're a man or a woman, this is the list of virtues you should be striving for. And so if you decide, well, I don't think God's called me to be an elder, that's fine. this is still your goals you understand and i may you may argue from hebrews i think chapter five that when when the author of hebrew i almost said paul the author of hebrews kind of sarcastically says to the people look you're still drinking milk you should be you should be teaching by now it may be arguable that it's the goal of every christian that you ought to be able to teach I'd like to believe that unless yeah I mean if you're going to be a single person that's some kind of missionary you need to be able to teach and if you're going to be married and you a man you have to be able to teach and if you a mom you have to be able to teach your kids So I think everybody should have that goal Although I don think we going to be too critical of people I think there's a higher bar to be set.

So having established that, a few comments. One, this is present tense. Turn back a couple pages to 1 Timothy 1. In verse 13, Paul says, regarding his own faithful service, God to put him into. I was formerly a blasphemer and a persecutor and a violent aggressor, meaning a violent aggressor of the church. I don't think that Paul would be excluded from being a pastor.

The man that wrote the letters telling pastors how to act and telling the church how to behave and how to select their own pastors, I don't think that man was disqualified because of his past. These are present tense things when you read them. And we'll go through them in a second. This is not a list of things that you had to always have. Particularly, we'll say, before you became a Christian.

I would argue in many people's cases, after you became a Christian, you either had periods of what is commonly called backsliding, which is sometimes a poorly used word. but also sometimes when you become a Christian you're not changed overnight into a brand new behavior. You're a new creature but it sometimes takes a while to shed old behaviors and so I would argue that you could even have a Christian who was a Christian for a period of time who still engaged in what we would consider to be violations of this who later became qualified by God. and we have to be careful with that there's some people that think let's say you were a Christian and you became a pastor and you failed as a pastor you committed some kind of disqualifying sin there's some people that think once you've done that you can never again be a pastor I don't think it says it here I think that it's something that takes a discernment of an individual church functioning autonomously under the lordship of Jesus Christ to decide about the men that they're going to select or elect. Okay, another note.

I will use the terms pastor, elder, or bishop and overseer interchangeably. And I will do that because I think as Reformed Baptists, we believe that they're interchangeable. If you look pretty deep into church history, It wasn't that long after the first century that they had bishops that were a separate position, which were men that were over a bunch of churches and sort of oversaw them.

And that's kind of how Catholics still function and Presbyterians have that kind of oversight. That's not how we see these different terms used in Scripture as Baptists. what we see is we see one role, the role of the officer of the church, who's not the deacon. We see one role described with three different words that describe the various functions of that role.

So the word episkopos is the Greek word that we translate to overseer or oftentimes bishop. That word just means to oversee. So this is the person that's kind of looking over everybody. If you think about what you oversee, you oversee your children, right? It's the person who is seeing things and he's above, kind of looking at things. Not in any kind of status like he's better than people.

It's his role, though. Just like if you're a manager at your job or if you have a manager, a supervisor. A supervisor is just an overseer. It's just from Latin instead of Greek in that case. And so an overseer is one of the functions of the pastor. Now, we don't ever use that word.

But if you think of like the Episcopal Church, you know, they're actually transliterating Episcopos. The other word used for elder, one of them is presbyteros. Presbyteros is where you get the term presbytery or presbyterian from. Presbyteros is generally meaning the elder. So that's used to mean the person who is the leader. It often is used in Scripture also just to denote older men.

And just like even in society in general, we should show respect for older people, older men. Those are usually your leaders. Most companies that you join, I mean, it's a pretty new phenomenon that we have all these 20-something CEOs out there. And we'll see how long that lasts and how well it works. You know, Facebook and Twitter were two of the 20-something CEO things 20 years ago, you know.

And so we'll see how it all works out. Because oftentimes the older people get, assuming they're studying God's Word and they're led by the Spirit, they do grow in wisdom. And so it's not that just because a guy's 60, he's wiser than someone who's 30. But let me put it this way. If you're about 30, I hope you're wiser when you're 60 than you were when you're 30. than you are when you're 30.

You understand me? So if a 60-year-old walks in here, he could be a total fool. Don't get me wrong. But generally speaking, older people have grown in wisdom through usually the experience of failure. So when somebody says they're wise, what they're saying is, I failed a lot already. Learn from me.

Learn from other people's failures. The other term that's most common, though, is pastor. And that's the word poiemen in Greek, and that's the word for shepherd. So if you remember Ezra, Ezra Michael, who's the good shepherd? Do you remember? Who is it?

Jesus is the good shepherd. And Jesus said that I'm the good shepherd. And he made this analogy. And this is throughout scripture. Yahweh is my shepherd. I shall not want.

He makes me lie down in Greek pastures He leads me beside still water Psalm 23 is all about the shepherd analogy So a shepherd then is one who looks over the sheep and he protects the sheep from evil He would kill a predator that was coming to attack the sheep. He also, don't take this too literally, but he also would have to maybe beat the sheep once in a while to get them on the right track. OK.

And so we're not going to take that too literally. And I know there's you know, that's like a trigger right now for probably a lot of people with church abuse and stuff. But the point ends up being that the person who we decide or persons who we decide are overseers and elders and pastors of our church. It's very important because their roles are super important. all right if you think about an elder that concept uh we don't believe in elder rule here but if every single time we had to make a decision we had to gather the whole church together and have a meeting and then wait two weeks to vote on it we'd probably never get anything done the elder is going to have to make a lot of decisions on behalf of the church and he's going to have to be a wise person that understands the heartbeat of the church, that's able to listen to the things that the people say, but then at the same time sometimes make a decision that at least a couple people don't like.

That's going to happen. We're in a church of a very few number of families, and it wouldn't be hard for us to come up with ideas where one family thinks, well, we should do it this way and another family this way. And you can imagine the difficulty that places on the guy that maybe has to kind of decide some things. Obviously we have to vote on some things as well, but there's going to be more minor issues.

So, Hebrews 13, 17 is a reminder to you to submit to your elders and obey them. That has to have meaning. And if the meaning is, I do whatever the elder says as long as I'm in agreement with it, but as soon as I'm not in agreement, I'm either disobeying or I'm out of here, then I don't understand why God would have put it in there because we're all good at that.

It's no different than wives submitting to husbands, children submitting to parents. It's always in the Lord. But there has to be some point where we understand too that the person that we're going to have, and I'll use the word over us, he's an overseer, the people that are going to be over you, making decisions, deciding what we're going to sing and how we're going to pray and the order of the service and other things that will get bigger and broader as we grow, Lord willing, that person has to be someone who we can trust.

And in Hebrews 13, and you can turn there later, one of the points of you obeying them is so that they might do their job with joy and not end up growing bitter at you because you make it difficult for them. Most pastors, y'all should know some pastors. it's good to know pastors especially at other churches because then sometimes they're more honest than they could be in their own church about things you can interview some pastors it's probably true that most of them would say they spend 90% of their time with 10% of the difficulty, the problems that most of the time spent as a pastor is trying to deal with that one guy that he's going to leave anyway and so then the other sheep that are hungry and want to grow they get neglected that's why you need a plurality as well in 1st Timothy 5.17 one other thing to consider just turn over if you want the elders who lead well are to be considered worthy of double honor and he says especially those who labor at preaching the word and teaching preaching is added by the LSB but if you're wondering what double honor means well it's twice as much honor All right? So now you've got to ask, what does honor mean?

Well, if you're trying to figure out what honor means, and if you think it means giving them a certificate after 10 years, and say, hey, thanks, you know, a little picture with it, read the passage before and after. The scripture after says, the scripture says, you shall not muzzle the ox while it's threshing, and the laborer is worthy of his wages. And the scriptures before are all about how the church is to distribute its financial assets to widows, based on whether they're actually qualified to receive it.

And so when the Bible speaks of double honor for pastors, the Bible is just saying what our confession rightly understood, which is that the men who labor at the preaching and teaching of God's Word in particular, and the men who oversee your souls and will give an account to God for them, that is an important enough job that if at all possible, we would rather them be doing that all day, every day, all week long, than sitting behind a desk arguing with people at some secular job. And our confession, chapter 26, paragraph 10, makes that very well stated, better than I could state it right now. But what I want to impress upon you is that the importance of that makes understanding how to select them even more important.

Because I'll tell you what, a bad elder will be the worst thing you can imagine. Have you ever had a bad boss at work? A bad elder at church? Well, yeah, Elijah used to until two days ago. Praise the Lord. But we've all had bad bosses at work.

A bad elder is a thousand times worse because it's your spiritual life and it's your soul that's suffering, not just your temporary position at work for a while. And a bad boss at work can be extremely difficult to deal with. I will know pastors are supposed to shepherd the flock because there's one modern day pastor that some of you know who said, it's not my job to shepherd you.

So just to make it clear, I do think it's pastor's job to shepherd. All right, 1 Timothy 3. We have a list of qualifications. I didn't count them for you, but I divided them into five groupings for you. And I've got the outline. And so far nobody has ever come up and said hey can I see the outline So it here if you want it I starting to like outlines so we see how that goes But first of all he must do it willingly Second of all he has certain character traits Basically, what I said earlier, these are the traits that all Christians should aspire to anyway.

Third of all, you should have some way to test what his responses are to being challenged into difficulties. fourthly has he proven that he's faithful with a little can he do on a small scale what you're hoping he would do on a large scale all right so you don't hire a guy to paint your house who when you ask them to paint your barn you know screwed it up and never finished the job you see what i'm saying and and then fifthly is he ready for battle you may know people who are absolutely what i'll call elder material. People who you have seen them and you think, wow, this guy, this guy can teach, this guy can preach, this guy does xyz, that wow, that seems like the kind of guy who I would want for a pastor. That may be true and it may not be his time yet because God hasn't prepared him properly and there's ways to understand that.

I like to believe I've improved as a preacher and I know I have somewhat objectively understood that. But at the same time, I'll share that I was actually a pretty good preacher a decade ago. I was anointed by the Holy Spirit and I was gifted with preaching. And I wasn't at all ready to even consider being an elder. And then people would say, well, hey, maybe you should be a pastor.

You've preached so well. And I was like, well, if all pastoring was was preaching, then sure. But I wasn't ready. And so had I been thrust into that position a decade ago, it would have been disastrous for myself and anyone who was in my flock. So 1 Timothy 3, verse 1. The first qualification, we'll call them qualifications, we could call them requirements, is that if it's a trustworthy saying that if any man aspires to the office of overseer, he desires a good work.

The first qualification, and one that people often overlook because it's not looked at as a qualification that you achieve to, but is that you must desire it. A guy who doesn't want to be your pastor is not going to be a good pastor. I see some head nods from people who I know some of their experiences. And this is one of the reasons why it's been very difficult for me, and I don't want to make this personal, but it's because I have been wrestling with, do I have the desire? do I have the willingness?

Turn to 1 Peter 5. We'll read a verse there that we'll reference again, so you'll have to just remember it. I don't want you to go back and forth too much. But in 1 Peter 5, verse 2, God says, shepherd the flock of God among you. So interestingly enough, there's no such thing as an internet pastor. And the best man on the internet who you're watching his videos and you're reading his posts, he's not your pastor, and he's not shepherding you.

Okay? You may be growing a lot from this teaching. I've grown a lot from guys online, okay? Listen, I show up here every week and I hear the same sermon you do and it comes out of my own mouth. I need to listen to other guys all week long, okay? Just so I get fed, alright?

But the guys online aren't my pastors. My pastors will be other men in this church. You shepherd the flock of God among you. There's too many people who would sacrifice the people among them for internet fame and notoriety. And that's a problem. Another thing real quick, we don't have bishops in Christianity, in Reformed Baptist Christianity.

So, you know, we're not Catholic and we're not like some of the early church guys. But we've got our celebrity Christians that we think are our leaders. We've got the guys who, if they came out tomorrow and said, this is how you should do church, a lot of us would change the way we do church. And that's what happened during COVID. And that was one of the most damaging things about it. wonderful great man John MacArthur who kept his church closed for a very very long time past the point of any normalcy and it was my church where someone said well why don't we start to get back together and it was the church I went to where the pastor said well MacArthur's hasn't so we all have our bishops functionally we need to watch for that but he says shepherd the flock of God that is among you overseeing he says not under compulsion, but willingly, according to God.

He says not for dishonest gain, but with eagerness. So you can turn back to 1 Timothy 3. The idea here is that a person should want to be a pastor. So one question that will come up is, well, what kind of person wants to be a pastor? And there's been a lot of damage done because there's so many wicked men out there that found out that being a pastor means they can get access to money, they can get access to things that allow them to indulge their sinful lusts and they can get access to just power and fame which is a drug to a lot of people and so we have a lot of people that say I want to be a pastor and we have to ask them, we have to look at them and think well do you want to be a pastor because you want to be famous because you can make it famous now do you want to be a pastor so you can have a YouTube channel and monetize it and make money and not have to work?

Or do you just like doing things you think pastors get to do? Being a pastor should be able to pay enough that you don't have to work. And so a guy who is willing to wake up on Saturday and download a sermon from the internet that he pays a couple bucks for and then practice it a little and preach it dramatically on Sunday and then the rest of the week do practically nothing because his flock doesn't hold him accountable, that's a problem in our society but if aspiring to the office of is a trustworthy saying that it's a good work according to God, then that means even a young man who's not yet ready, who desires to do that, that could be a gift from God to him.

And so we should be looking for people that desire to be pastors. That's why we have the internet search thing we've done. It's why when that one guy visited here, I was really excited. He said, I want to be an elder one day. I said, well, we'll train you. You'd probably get there faster here than some places. but we want people that want the job as well and when I say job I mean the role and so it's okay for someone to want what God has placed in their heart you don't think a person's a bad person because they want to get married but we're overly cautious sometimes and I think we should not hastily lay hands on people but if somebody says yeah I think I want to be a pastor I think that can be okay and we should ask them questions.

Why? What about your desire do you think is gifted by the Holy Spirit to you? Those are the kinds of questions we ask. And there's nothing wrong with that. And if you sit down with a man that says, yeah, I'd like to be an elder or I want to be an elder at this church, and you ask him, well, why do you think God has picked you? They should be able to start answering that question.

And be careful because That sometimes a desire to be humble sometimes can maybe make people not be so forthright with some of that. So the first thing is he must want to do it willingly. You want someone who is not serving under compulsion. All right? This is also true of anyone else that's serving in the church. All right, if I ask, you know, there's one guy here who every Sunday, no matter what, he goes and takes the trash out.

Everybody knows who it is. It's Jeremy. I don't think Jeremy's grumbling when he does it. I don't think Jeremy's wondering, why doesn't somebody else do it? It kind of became his role. He remembers and he takes care of it.

We all should do the things God has called us to do with willingness and a desire. This applies to wives at home, serving your difficult husbands at times. This applies to homeschooling your lovely little children, who sometimes are probably harder than other days, but God gave them to you because he made you, he chose you to have that gift. Well, you do it more willingly, you'll have more joy.

Same as your pastor. The second thing is these character traits. So let's look at some of them. The first one is that he must be above reproach. Now, above reproach can be totally construed one way or another. if above reproach means nobody has ever accused him of anything then Jesus would not be qualified to be your pastor so we have to understand what the Bible must mean by this if above reproach means if the guy never did anything wrong that he could be credibly accused of then Paul who is guilty of being a murderer of Christians wouldn't be able to be a pastor so there has to be some reasonability factor with all of it So again, I think this is a present tense requirement.

It's the fact that he's not infamous for all sorts of dirty deeds in a present tense context. But my opinion is when he says the man must be above reproach, and then he follows it with a list of stuff. The list of stuff is the definition of what it means to be above reproach. So you don't have to sit and figure out what above reproach might mean, and you don't have to try to brainstorm about it.

Just read the rest of the words. I don't think you're going to come up with some other word that Paul didn't include that you think means above reproach that these other words don't already encompass. Does that make sense? So, to be above reproach, you're the husband of one wife. You're not a polygamist. Now, this is the one that a lot of people can take to mean multiple different ways. okay and in the scripture there's a word for wife and there's a word for woman and in the Greek it's the same word so it's always context that the translators have to decide well does this mean one woman man does it mean husband and one wife what does it mean and because let's think about this for a moment if it means that a man has to be married then that would make him a one husband of one wife right present tense he's a husband so if it means he has to be married then you kind of get into some interesting things that I don't think are the point of the passage which is the moment a good pastor the moment his wife dies before he does you got to fire him because now you have to say well you're disqualified according to God and just like if you caught him in adultery and you'd have to get rid of him right away he's disqualified I don't think we can take husband of one wife to mean the man must be married I think we have to be careful thinking these things through I also don think it means a man who has never been divorced So I want to play give you a scenario in your mind here Does everybody know does enough people know who Wilt Chamberlain is?

Wilt Chamberlain is a rather famous basketball player and one of the things he's most famous for is that he is a serial adulterer. He wasn't, he was with many, many, many women. So I want to ask you this. If a man lived a life like Wilt Chamberlain and spent, we'll say, two decades in sexual immorality and then got saved at age 40, let's say, is he somehow differently qualified to be an elder based on just this one qualification than another man who maybe at a young age got married to his high school love.

He was a Christian guy. It was the only girl he loved. Something went bad in the marriage. She left him. And then he's been faithful ever since and maybe he found a second wife. Is one of those guys by this definition qualified and the other one not?

Well, if I say that you can't have been divorced, then yes. The guy who got married at some point and things didn't work out because of a world of sin, compared to the guy that was a serial adulterer, the serial adulterer is now qualified to be a pastor by that one criteria, but the other guy isn't just because he never got married and he never had a divorce. So there's a word for divorce in the Greek.

It's not used here. And this is a debated topic. but the conventional understanding, the traditional understanding of this is that your present tense man is faithful. That if he has a wife, he has only one, and he's faithful to her. Now in the early New Testament times, you would have had men that maybe already had multiple wives. And God was keeping them, they already have enough to deal with, alright?

I mean, one's enough, alright? But a man with multiple wives, he's got enough to deal with on a regular basis. He's not going to be able to take care of a church. So I believe when we say the one woman man, that this does not mean that you have to be married. I don't say that it means that you can never have been divorced. Although your divorce should be up to scrutiny.

And people should be able to find out what were the circumstances about it. how recent it was has an effect. I do think that it means that you can't be a polygamist. You cannot have multiple wives at the same time. I also think a guy could be single. You could have a young man who is qualified to be an elder and he hasn't found a wife yet. Charles Spurgeon was one of those guys.

And he found a good wife. So that one could be a difficult one. There are churches out there that would not even consider a pastoral candidate if he had ever been divorced. There's also churches that think you have to have children, which comes up a little bit later in this one. So that's the second character trait, though. Basically, you're a faithful man.

We're not adultery. Like, if you're an adulterer, you're kind of like already a problem, and the church is going to have to excommunicate you most likely. But as far as pastoral, even kind of still dealing with those sins is a problem. So I'll include here that a man that watches pornography would be totally unqualified to be an elder of a church. But a man who is having difficulty with that and still struggling with it, but confessing and getting prayed for and getting help, he'd still be a church member without excommunication, but he's not ready to lead a church. and in my opinion you shouldn't have a podcast or any of those kinds of things that people do because frankly most of the content you see online is because somebody wasn't qualified to help their own church their own church didn't want them so they made a podcast or a YouTube channel so other than pastors that you watch it's a lot of times the case the third thing in my Bible it says temperate in your Bible it might say vigilant it might say sober minded it might say keeping watch to be temperate has the idea of being sober and controlled all right so this isn't a guy that over indulges all of these qualifications that you're going to read here they all have to be considered under the thought process that nobody other than jesus christ has ever or will ever in this life do them perfectly.

So if you you have to be able to have a reasonability factor and there will be areas for every person as a Christian that are bigger struggles than others. And you need to try to be understanding of is this a person God has called not because he perfectly exhibits these traits but because he does exhibit these traits and he is humbly growing in grace. The next word in my Bible is sensible In yours it might be self So he to be husband of one wife temperate and sensible I just want you to turn to Titus 2 You might be wondering why I said Titus 2, because in Titus 1 is the qualifications for elders from Titus.

But in Titus 2, I want to show you something about the word sensible. verse 2 older men are to be temperate this isn't elders this is just older men in the church this is a command to Christians older men are to be temperate, dignified and he says sensible sound in faith in love and perseverance so pastors are expected to be sensible but so are older men and he says older women likewise are to be reverent in their behavior not malicious gossips nor enslaved to much wine, teaching what is good, so that they may instruct the young women in sensibility. Older women are supposed to be sensible. And they're supposed to teach young women to be sensible.

To love their husbands, to love their children, to be sensible. Pure workers at home, kind, being subject to their own husbands so that the word of God will not be slandered. And then listen, six. So he did older men, older women, younger women. And he says six. Likewise, urge younger men to be sensible.

So, sensibility or being self-controlled is just the expectation of all Christians. And it makes sense considering the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5.23 is self-control. And so we need to understand what these things mean. We also need to understand that these aren't superpowers. your expectations for your pastor should be very high and that's excellent but your expectations for yourself and your fellow brothers and sisters shouldn't be dramatically different the next word is respectable which in my translation uh some of them is modest so in verse 9 of chapter 2 when paul is telling timothy how the women should dress he says they should be modest or respectable.

It's the same word. So you don't need a pastor that's super flashy. A lot of the guys today that you see online, they're not immodest in the way that we think of sometimes with women in their dress. They're immodest in a different way where they're showing off something. A lot of times it's their money. there's some guys who just like they can't help but show their biceps when they're up there like there's some way their shirts are worn you know and they're just they're trying to get attention to something frankly that's other than Jesus Christ and that's that's not the goal whatsoever so you want them to be modest this also has the connotation of just not overindulging things you know if you're going to pay a guy to be waking up in the morning and basically studying the word and praying and doing things like preaching and and then having midweek meetings and visiting people you don't need a guy that you know has to go to starbucks every two hours and buy a five or six dollar coffee i don't know how much they are anymore i don't i don't go there but i know they're overpriced the last one here in this list is able to teach.

I think that one's somewhat obvious. I think most of us can recognize when there's someone who's gifted. Most of us can see, we all know the guys we like to watch online, the books we like to read. When the Holy Spirit has specifically gifted someone for certain things, it becomes quite obvious. There's people with all sorts of gifts of the Holy Spirit.

One of them is being able to teach. I think that carries with it some discernment I think pastors should be able to be discerning you should be able to sit down with your pastor and you might not be able to say hey, off the top of your head, tell me what Obadiah 7 was about you know, whatever but most contemporary issues, the pastor should be able to apply the spiritual ideas from the word of God to them for you to help you think through them he should be a person that is able to help you with with life and not necessarily because he's lived it exactly like you have but because he knows the word of god well enough or at the very least is willing to go study it and answer questions that we have a few years ago a lot of people hadn't thought through should we have church if the governor says you might get covid right and the pastors who are either prepared for that because they'd already thought those things through because it's not alien to the word of god to know what we're supposed to do or the ones who at least are willing to sit down and do the work and study what the people before us said they frankly those are the ones that either never stopped meeting or were regathering very quickly they figured it out and a lot of us are the products of leaving churches maybe not the only reason, but one of the reasons because the church stopped meeting. And we thought we can't follow leaders that don even understand what the Word of God says about what we to do on the Lord day What are his responses to challenges and difficulties So your pastor should want to do it willingly.

And he should have those character traits I just read, which make him above reproach. And so the next next week, we'll try to get through the last three points, which were what are his responses to challenges and difficulty? So just to tease it for you, one of them is not get drunk. He shouldn't be immediately waiting to throw a punch all the time. Can he do on a small scale what he's expected to do on a large scale?

And is he ready for battle? So you can think of those questions as you study through 1 Timothy 3 up to verse 7 if you want to read that over and over a couple times this week. Now, it's important that we understand that whoever becomes a pastor anywhere, but we'll say here, that this person is still a man and a sinner. We could get three pastors, and they could be three men that are all really great, and they could have a plurality within themselves, so they can vote and there's never a stalemate because there's three of them.

There's all sorts of advantages to having at least three, right? But in the end, you're always still underneath someone who, in their best day, is imperfectly trying to imitate Christ, who they are themselves trying to grow in grace. They are suffering from the difficulty of fighting the flesh on a regular basis while also dealing with overseeing the flock.

Dealing with hearing things confessed to them that they don't tell other people. Things they can't tell. Things they shouldn't tell. And there's a burden there. And so as you guys have done very well, I encourage you to keep praying for me. But pray even for our future pastors.

I mean, pray for your kids' spouses and your grandkids, I hope. Pray for our pastors. pray that God would supply us with men who can withstand the schemes of the devil and I never understood this personally until I became a pastor and that is that there is a different level of difficulty that I believe pastors face spiritually I never believed it before I became one I was told it and it's different and the devil seems to know that with most churches if he can get the pastor to fall if he can get the pastor's family to crumble if he can get the pastor to have some kind of breakdown he can scatter the sheep and so you pray for these men and you try to be on their side I think everybody in here is on that page we talk about our government and we're always questioning our government especially lately, you know, and that's part of our role as Americans, is to not trust the government, right? But when God ordains husbands over wives and parents over children and elders over the people, there is a level of, we're actually trying to work together with them, maybe a little more than your government, who you should be rooting for as well.

Just sometimes when the government gets way off, it's easier to just want to separate from them. But so pray, because it's not an easy thing to do, and the weight of doing it well for a man who really wants to do it well is indescribable. Let me put it that way. Let me pray. Father, thank you for your word. We trust that you will supply our church with its every need.

And what our hope, Lord, is that we'll be faithful. Our desire is that we faithfully steward the good gift that you have given us of the gospel and that we would treat everything in your word as true. That we would live lives that show that we desire really nothing beyond faithfulness to you. And we will trust you to provide us with whatever it is that we require.

And we ask you to even provide us with the grace to be content. and so Lord even as we sit here now and we are still waiting for you to provide a plurality of elders to this church we're still waiting for you to provide deacons to this church we ask that you would cause us to be faithful we ask that you would give us patience that we would not go against your word in acquiring these things but we ask that for our sake and for the sake of our faith in Jesus Christ that you would send us these gifts to fulfill these offices that you have promised. And while we wait, we ask you to cause us to remain faithful to Jesus Christ, who is the head of the church and will be the head of the church. The Lord, help us to exalt him today with the rest of our worship.

Amen.