Part 2: Characteristics of Spiritual Leaders

Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of spiritual leadership from 1 Timothy 3:1-7.

For those who are facing the kind of suffering that makes us feel as if the heavens are bronze, I can’t forbear to pass on to you the axiom of an Old Testament scholar acquaintance of mine in Australia, F.I. Andersen, Frank Andersen. He’s an old man and increasingly decrepit and feeling all of the infirmities of advanced years, and if you ask him, “Frank, how’s it going?” He says, “I’m not suffering from anything that a good resurrection can’t fix.”

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Now this afternoon we began to look at the Pastoral Epistles as a whole and saw how much this business of false doctrine permeates layer after layer, theme after theme in the book because of certain crucial false beliefs that has affected their relationships, their ethics, their familial relationships, their priorities, (we’ll see later) their approach to money, a variety of things stemming from false belief.

So that inevitably, Titus and Timothy, one in Ephesus and the other in Crete, are mandated by the apostle to confront these false teachers who have arisen within the context of their own churches. That raises the question, however.… Where did these false teachers come from in the first place?

When Paul had spoken to the Ephesian elders in Miletus as reported in Acts 20, he warned that from their own midst these false teachers would arise, and transparently, that’s what has happened. That is why he wants certain pressures to be applied to them, ultimately excommunication to take place. He wants to hand certain people over to Satan that they may learn not to blaspheme.

These are ostensibly, at least, Christian people, leaders, some of them doubtless elders themselves. That raises the question, then, about who should be admitted to the office in the first place. Now one has to admit that in this fallen and broken world, some people are going to get through. There is no way you’re going to create a system that’s going to keep them all out. After all, Jesus himself had his Judas. I know that was in the wise, sovereign plan of God, but just the same, you are going to get in this fallen, broken world people who turn out to be a Demas.

Still, one ought to do the best one can to follow biblical priorities to make as few false and foolish appointments as possible. That is part of the reasoning behind the lists of criteria for elders and the deacons that are offered us in chapter 3 and then in later both 2 Timothy and in Titus.

Now I want to spend two sermons on this matter. This evening I begin with an overview simply of 1 Timothy, chapter 3, verses 1–7. Then tomorrow, we will look at a number of related passages and try to tie these things together as we think through a whole biblical philosophy of pastoral ministry, not least in the context of controversy. Those are important things to understand. First Timothy 3:1–7:

“Here is a trustworthy saying: If anyone sets his heart on being an overseer, he desires a noble task. Now the overseer must be above reproach, the husband of but one wife, temperate, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, not given to drunkenness, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money.

He must manage his own family well and see that his children obey him with proper respect. (If anyone does not know how to manage his own family, how can he take care of God’s church?) He must not be a recent convert, or he may become conceited and fall under the same judgment as the devil. He must also have a good reputation with outsiders, so that he will not fall into disgrace and into the devil’s trap.”

This is the Word of the Lord.

Now before I plunge into this text, it’s worth reminding ourselves of the biblical evidence that a pastor is an elder is a bishop. From about the time of Ignatius, early second century, there developed a theory of a three-fold office; that is, the diaconate, and then the pastor/elder, and then the bishop. The historical pressures that brought this about are understandable. One can read them with a great deal of sympathy; but ultimately, they did a great deal of damage.

In the New Testament itself, however, as far as I can see, there are only two recognized offices: the deacon, and then the pastor/elder/bishop. Now if you want to find this well-defended by an excellent Anglican, read the old essay by J.B. Lightfoot in his Philippians commentary. The evidence is pretty strong. You find these three titles coming together in pairs in various passages.

For example, in Titus, chapter 1, verse 5: “The reason I left you in Crete …” Paul tells Titus, “… was that you might straighten out what was left unfinished and appoint elders in every town.… An elder must be blameless, the husband of but one wife, a man whose children believe …” and so on. Since an overseer is entrusted with God’s work, he must be blameless and so forth. There elder and overseer are tightly tied together.

Or in a passage like 1 Peter, chapter 5, all three come together. First Peter 5: “To the elders among you, I appeal as a fellow elder, a witness of Christ’s sufferings and one who also will share in the glory to be revealed: Be shepherds of God’s flock …” Shepherds is simply pastors. Pastor is simply the Latin root for shepherd. That’s all. Be pastors of God’s flock.

The reason why the NIV has kept shepherds is because we’ve forgotten what pastors means and because we’ve got flock in there somewhere. They put in shepherds to make sure we’d get it, and thus, we’ve lost pastors. But be pastors. “Be shepherds of God’s flock that is under your care, serving as overseers …”

Well, there you’ve got all three now, do you see? The elder terminology comes from the synagogue and Jewish village life, even a lot of pagan village life. It has overtones of experience, of seniority, which turns out in the New Testament not to be as we shall see primarily a question of mere years, but of genuine maturation.

The pastor comes from an agrarian background, a shepherd with other overtones that we’ll come to deal with in due course. The bishop or overseer has notions of direction, even command, oversight. One wants to be careful of mere hierarchism, but there is certainly a note of authority there that we shall come to in due course. So now let’s look at this first list of qualifications. The first thing to observe is …

1. The unexceptionable character of most of the entries

 Look at them. You’re not supposed to get drunk. “Oh, great! Doesn’t sound like a very high standard to me.” You’re not supposed to be violent and beat up on people. You’re supposed to know how to bring up your own family. It’s really quite a remarkable list for being unremarkable.

Nothing here about stellar patterns of leadership. Nothing here about a double first in theology from Cambridge. Nothing here about stellar ability to handle both Greek and Hebrew. Now I’m going to say some more on the other side in due course. Be patient, but you need to understand that when you read through this list, what strikes you in the first instance is how unremarkable all the entries are.

For most of us, that ought to be pretty encouraging. It doesn’t say you have to have a certain personality type. “Unless you’re a dyed-in-the-wool extrovert, you don’t have a chance.” “Unless you’ve got camera smarts and can handle television, give it up!” None of that. Now that doesn’t quite mean that these entries are all ordinary. I don’t mean that quite.

They’re ordinary in the sense (as we shall see in a moment) of being imposed on all believers. They’re not ordinary in the sense of being commonplace, because although they’re imposed somewhere in Scripture on all believers, they’re not all that commonly followed by all believers. That brings me to the second observation.

2. The chief characteristic of the Christian pastor, the Christian elder, the Christian overseer is that his life constantly reflects the Christian virtues that are mandated of all Christians.

This is of fundamental importance. The chief characteristic of the Christian pastor is that his life reflects the virtues that are mandated in Scripture of all Christians.

Now you work through this list, and there are two entries where in some measure you could say that they’re not mandated of other people. Even then, you have to put in a footnote, as we’ll see, but all the rest of them are unambiguously explicitly taught somewhere in Scripture as being mandated by God of all Christians. So the only thing that has happened is that the apostle has brought them all here together and said, “And they jolly well better be in the leaders of those Christians.”

Now go through the list. If somebody desires this task, all right, that is a jolly good thing. Now here are the criteria. Now this notion of a call, the different routes that people can have to getting there, here, by the person’s desire to start testing the territory … we’ll come to that tomorrow. We’ll skip verse 1. We’ll come to that tomorrow.

Now focus on the criteria themselves.

A) He is to be above reproach.

Blameless in that sense. That’s not demanding sinless perfection (or else we might as well go home now and be done with it), but blameless in the sense that there is no obvious transparent inconsistency or character flaw that everyone agrees is there and reproaches the man for it.

He is to be above reproach. Well, on the other hand, exactly the same words are assigned by God to all Christians elsewhere. Does that mean the rest of us are supposed to be beneath reproach? Pastors above reproach; the rest of us beneath reproach? I mean, aren’t all Christians supposed to be above reproach?

B) The husband of but one wife

Now that one is a tricky one, as you may know. Various suggestions have been made. Some think this means that the bloke must be married. He must be husband of but one wife. If so, this has got to be the most awkward way of saying, “He’s got to be married,” that you can possibly choose. In any case, it doesn’t fit very well what Paul says about the advantages of being single.

Now there are some disadvantages, too, but having served as a pastor of a rapidly-growing church while I was still young and single and foolish, I assure you, there are advantages in being single in pastoral ministry. I could put in 90-hour weeks, and I didn’t have to check in with anybody. I could visit in the evening when the men were home, and I got the men. I talked man-to-man. I went after the men; I didn’t go after the women. I was scared of them.

I went after the men, and we saw men converted at the rate of about 2:1 over the women in our church. I could do that because I didn’t have to stay home and change the diapers. There weren’t any diapers to change. Oh, there are advantages to being single. Paul says so. It frees up some time. After all, Jesus himself says that there are some who are eunuchs for the kingdom’s sake. No, no, no, the notion that this means he’s supposed to be married doesn’t stand on any good exegetical base.

Some think this means he is forbidden to remarry should his first wife die; that is, he must not remarry in the event of becoming a widower. But what that would do would be to introduce a double standard, which is against the whole tenor of the entire list, because at the end of the day according to Romans, chapter 7, it simply presupposed that if a Christian spouse dies, the surviving spouse may well remarry in the Lord, no doubt. They may remarry.

I know that we may in our culture have all kinds of sentimental views about not marrying and maybe he didn’t really love her all that much if he can get married in 18 months. I have to tell you, my observation as a pastor has been that sometimes it’s the chaps who have been most profoundly in love with their wives or the women who have been most profoundly in love with their husbands who often get married the fastest afterwards.

There is such a huge hole in their lives. They just can’t imagine being single. It becomes a kind of strange new testimony to the sheer power of the departed loved one. Strange as it may seem, it happens, and in any case, you’d better not start imposing laws that are more severe than God’s.

Some think this means he must not be a polygamist. A lot of people have come to object to that view on the ground that polygamy was never admitted as a viable option in the Christian church. Wait a minute now. If it was never admitted as a viable option in the Christian church, why should it be explicitly stated of Christian pastors since, after all, what we’ve seen is all of things have to do with things that are not admitted amongst Christians in the church.

“Ah, yes,” but they say, “Polygamy wasn’t really practiced very much in the Roman Empire, so why should you even both mentioning it?” But in fact, there has been a lot of very good primary document research on this one recently that has overturned that rather nicely. It’s true that polygamy was not practiced at the lower levels of society in the Roman Empire.

At the upper levels, at the levels of the aristocracy, it was practiced quite a lot. Herod the Great had 10 wives. He never managed to have all 10 at the same time, because he bumped off one or two, but on the other hand, he quite a few of them at the same time. He certainly was a polygamist. It was not uncommon at the upper levels to be polygamous.

On the other hand, just because that person is a leader owing to his class and money and aristocratic background, nobility, that does not mean that once he has become a Christian, he can now continue his role as a Christian leader because, in fact, his polygamy excludes him. Now this is not a big problem in Pennsylvania, I suspect, but there are many parts of Africa where this continues to be a problem.

It is the aristocracy, as it were, the tribal chiefs, who may well have married more than once, and who then because they’re chiefs, become Christians and think that they’re going to have some sort of continuing role of leadership in the church. “No,” Paul says, “It doesn’t quite follow.” The reason for this is, I suspect, primarily, exemplary. That is, each Christian marriage in Paul’s theology is in some sense supposed to reflect the relationship between Christ and the church, and Christ doesn’t have many churches.

In that sense, Christ is not a polygamist. He just has one church. There is an exemplary function here. That is true for all Christians, but it jolly well better be true of the leaders, which suggests once again that Christian marriage is supposed to be seen as very important, when a person is married, in Christian leaders because there is an exemplary function worked out by Paul, for example, in Ephesians 5. The next three all have to do with an orderly life.

C) Temperate

This has nothing to do with the temperance of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, which is a misnomer. It really is the Women’s Christian Abstinence Union. Temperance, here, temperate means something like clear-headed, self-possessed, not an extremist, not over the top, not constantly running off in some half-baked, harebrained extreme.

D) Self-Controlled

After all, elsewhere we’re told in the Pastoral Epistles in 2 Timothy 1:7 that God has not given us a spirit of fear but of power and of love and of self-control. The kind of person who is easily blown, suddenly frothing at the lips, sometimes sticking his mouth in gear before his brain is engaged. That sort of person should not be a pastor in the Christian church. He must be self-controlled.

E) Respectable

That’s a hard word to translate. Respectable for some of us, especially if we’re a little younger than I am, sounds a bit bourgeois. Respectable sounds slightly pompous to some people. I don’t know what better word to choose. Dignified, perhaps, but it sounds a bit pompous, too, nowadays. Everything sounds pompous nowadays we’re so laid back. We’re so laid back today we’re half asleep, but respectable in the sense of being honorable, well-behaved, admirable, with a certain gravitas, perhaps. The next two are bound up with ministry.

F) Hospitable

 In other words, there are some people who really love books. I mean, “The church would be a wonderful place to serve if there were only no people there.” “I just love spending hours and hours and hours studying biblical theology. If they would just get off the phone and stop bothering me. Another funeral, for goodness’ sake! I had two last week.”

There are some people who are, in a sense, able pulpiteers but have the people smarts of an alley cat. They are disqualified from ministry. Understand that. I was brought up in French Canada. The word we have for preacher is predicateur. Recently I’ve been spending more time in French Europe. The word for preacher there is l’orateur.

Scares the willikers out of me because it encourages people to be orators. There is a great deal in French culture that produces very polished people, but I want preachers who speak as the very oracles of God, and that entails a certain view of people. You are far more likely to want to become merely a performer if you don’t love people.

The sermon is never an end in itself. The aim is not to come to the end of the sermon and everybody shakes your hand solemnly and says, “Brilliantly done, pastor. Brilliantly done.” The Word of God is God’s own means for connecting people with God. God discloses himself by his Word born along by the Spirit.

God re-reveals himself in his Word re-presented, born along by the Spirit into people’s lives. It’s not an oration. It’s a heralding. It’s a preaching, and that means a certain view of people. That is reflected, at least in part, by whether you love them enough to want to be hospitable toward them.

You want them in your home. That is where a lot of Bible studies will take place. Oh, I know there are different times of life. I know you have got five kids all under the age of seven. Okay, you’re exempted for a few years. Go on and have your parties at the church building. Fine. Nevertheless, as a general stance, if you are not committed to loving people, stay out of the ministry.

G) Able to teach

I’ll come back to that one because in one sense, this is the first one that may well take a person outside the normal range of experiences of Christians. Although you can hear one has to put in a footnote. There is a sense in which all Christians ought to be passing on something to others. You remember how the author of the epistle to the Hebrews can chew them out for their inability in this regard. “By now,” he says, “you ought to be teachers, and you still have need that somebody go over the basics of the faith to you yet?”

Well, that doesn’t mean that he was expecting everybody in his readership to be preachers, but there is a sense in which we all ought to be growing as teachers of the Word whether in our Sunday School classes or in our own homes or leading in family devotions or evangelistic one-on-one Bible studies or being able to write some notes and pass them on to a sick relative. We ought to be doing something, something to show that we’re growing. In that sense, we’re all teachers. If we’re to make disciples, then we have to be teachers to make the disciples, don’t we?

And yet, apart from this popular demand for all Christians, there is something in Scripture that warns you about teaching in a more vocational sense, so that James can say, “Don’t be many teachers knowing that you’re going to face the first judgment.” There is no passage in all of Scripture that scares me more than that one.

I spend my whole life teaching students, and when I’m not teaching students, I travel all over the world and teach everybody else. That’s a very scary thought. We should be very, very eager to make sure that those whom are trying to commission and encourage toward the teaching ministry of the church, this vocational thing, are not too many, too quick, too presumptuous, not lacking in fear.

To be able to teach presupposes two things: some knowledge and some ability to communicate it. Some people have lots and lots and lots of knowledge, and their communication skills are zilch. They are disqualified from public ministry. They might be great at writing notes for Zondervan, but they’re disqualified from public ministry.

Others are wonderful communicators; they just don’t have anything to say. They are disqualified from public ministry as well. To be able to teach presupposes some knowledge and some ability to communicate it. Of course in the context of this list of qualifications, it presupposes also the character of life that supports it, but we’ll come to that integration in a moment.

H) Not given to much wine.

Verse 3. That is, not only free from drunkenness but free from addiction. The idea is not teetotalism, but the simple axiom that the slave of Jesus Christ must not be a slave to anyone or anything else.

I) Not violent, but gentle

That is, patient, kindly, forbearing in that sense. The word, in fact, is often used with respect to outsiders. It almost means something like selflessness with respect to outsiders.

J) Not quarrelsome

 Not contentious. There are some who are very concerned to contend for the faith by being contentious about the faith. It’s not only that they contend for the faith, and they may even be largely right on the issues which concern them, but they do it in such a way that at the end of the day you have a sneaky suspicion they just love to fight. It’s important to keep reminding ourselves of what else we read in these Pastoral Epistles.

Here is 2 Timothy 2:23: “Don’t have anything to do with foolish and stupid arguments, because you know they produce quarrels. And the Lord’s servant must not quarrel; instead, he must be kind to everyone, able to teach, not resentful. Those who oppose him he must gently instruct, in the hope that God will grant them repentance leading them to a knowledge of the truth, and that they will come to their senses and escape from the trap of the devil, who has taken them captive to do his will.” Not quarrelsome, then. Not with a confrontational mentality.

K) Not a lover of money

Jesus Christ has promised all of his disciples all they need. He has not promised they’ll all get rich. Christian leaders must reflect contentment with that. The worst possible combination occurs when you have a church with the attitude, “Lord, you keep him humble and we’ll keep him poor,” and a minister with the attitude, “I’m serving the King of kings. I ought to be treated at least like a prince.”

The best kind of situation occurs when within the bounds of responsibility for his family, the man really doesn’t give a rip. He really is not grasping at all, and the church for its part just can’t be generous enough because they’ve heard the Word of God which teaches us that those of us who have received spiritual blessings at very least ought to be able to pour out the material blessings on those who provided the instruction. We’ll come back to that one a little later in the series.

L) He must manage his own family well.

Verses 4–5. That is graciously and gravely. The argument in these verses is essentially the argument of the parable of the talents in Matthew 25:14 and following. The one who is faithful in little domains, then, can be trusted with more domains. Of course, if you’re single, we’ve already allowed that, then you might not have a family, and you’re going to have to be tested in some other way. Tested perhaps with a small group and handling other kinds of situations.

But ultimately, if you turn out to be the sort of father who is, quite frankly, to anybody who can see, an international class bully, we don’t want you in the ministry. You’re going to be a bully in the church. Or if you turn out to be one of these nice, mandy-pandy daddies who can’t ever get any sort of discipline and respect out of anybody, you’re too busy being nice, you have to be loved, then we don’t want you in the church either, quite frankly, as a leader.

Now this is not to say that sometimes a wheel doesn’t come off in Christian homes. I understand that. I do think that there is a bad translation in some of our renderings of Titus 1:6 where some texts say, “believing children,” and others say, in my judgment rightly, “faithful children.” If you want to follow it up at length read Knight’s commentary.

The point is that the Christian father must so organize his family that there is a certain kind of respect and gravitas and happiness and maturity about it. It doesn’t mean that a wheel doesn’t come off, and I’d like to what he is going to do when the wheel does come off. If you start saying that all of the children must be believers (which I don’t think is what the Greek word means in any case), then you start asking the question, “At what age must they become believers by?” And then you open up another huge can of worms.

Moreover, you do have to distinguish between those who are under the parental supervision and authority and house and those who are now 28 and are living abroad and are doing their own things somewhere else. If, God forbid, this is in large part because of parental misuse of authority or failure to use authority, then there are some things that are being said about the father.

Yes, that’s correct, but God knows, even those of us who in the mercy of God are blessed with pretty good kids, if we’re honest with ourselves for 30 seconds, we can think of half a dozen instances when we were that close to a wheel coming off. People sometimes ask me, “Don, when are you going to write a book on bringing up children?” I tell them, “I won’t be qualified until my children have successfully reared their children, and by that time, I’m going to be so flipping old that the world is spared another book.”

The fact of the matter is the dangers are everywhere, and the primary thing I’ve learned about bringing up children so far, apart from the things that are explicitly said in Scripture, the primary thing I’ve learned is, apart from the grace of God, I’m done. Still, having said that, there are some responsibilities, aren’t there? I am responsible for how my children respond. I am responsible for how they react. I’m responsible for what discipline I impose and whether I can laugh with them.

I’ve got a son in the Marines. He’s coming home next Sunday. You know what we’re going to do? We’re going to take out our motorcycles and go away for 2 or 3 days together. Yes. My son is right on the edge. I don’t know whether he’s a Christian or not. He doesn’t reject everything, that’s not where he is.

He wants to be a good kid, but at the same time, I think he wants to be a Marine more than he wants to follow Jesus, but I love that kid. For me not to go on a motorcycle ride with him would … he’s the one who wants to do it. “Dad, are we going to go on a motorcycle ride?” “Oh, yeah. Devil’s Lake, here we come.” (That’s a place.)

Somewhere along the line I still have to learn: where do I let out the slack, where do I just love him and give him a bear hug, and where do I say, “Hey, do you really think what you’re doing here?” So I write him long, long, long letters once in a while. Fatherly, pastoral letters, and then I back off and don’t do it again and just tell him about the Bears. He’s going to Afghanistan. You want to add something else to your list? Pray for my Nicholas. We all end up praying for one another’s kids, don’t we?

M) Not a recent convert

Verse 6. This is the other one that obviously can’t be applied to all Christians. Yet here, too, you have to put in a footnote because the text gives us no encouragement for thinking that you’re supposed to remain or you’re permitted to remain or if you’re not a leader you’re allowed to remain a novice, world without end, amen. Moreover, novice is a relative term.

I was brought up in French Canada, and as recently as 1972 in a population of about 6.5 million French speakers, we had a grand total of about 35 or 36 churches, none with more than about 40 people. They were all either Baptist or Brethren. That was it. Then between 1972 and 1980, we grew from 35 churches to 500.

Suddenly, we had scores and scores of churches where nobody in the church had been a Christian for more than a year. Eighteen months was really old. So we started having leaders in the churches. We tried to supervise them with pastors from around, and we were having little bishops almost, weren’t we?

We were trying to supervise these other little churches and appointing leaders and elders in these churches. Twelve months old in the Lord supervising people who were 3 months old in the Lord. What else could you do? Well, there’s good biblical apostolic authority for that, isn’t there?

On the first missionary journey, Paul goes out on the outward trip, and on the way back, not more than a few months later, we’re told he appoints elders in every place. On the other hand, I doubt very much he would have appointed one of them as elders in the church in Jerusalem at that point.

So what “not a novice” means is necessarily going to depend a wee bit on just how mature the surrounding Christians are. Still, the principle is an important one. If you promote people too quickly, you are asking for arrogance, and then deflation, the Devil’s traps, destruction. Far too high a price to pay. And then finally,

N) Have a good reputation with outsiders

That’s interesting, too … with outsiders. This does not mean he is supposed to be one of the boys, just great at going around to the local pub with the rest of them and getting drunk. It means, rather, having such a reputation for integrity. Whether or not a person is liked for all the stances, such a reputation for honesty, for candor, for care, for transparency, for integrity that at the end of the day there is a respect from outsiders for such a person.

Do you know what integrity is? Integrity is nothing more than being on the outside what you are on the inside. That is all it is. That is what Jesus is after when he insists that we be single-eyed. It’s what James is after when he warns that a double-minded man is unstable in all his ways. You get some people, you know, who have an outward show of things, but inside they’re something else, a seething mass of lust, perhaps, or really greedy people, or nurturing bitterness, but they’re so civilized, and they are so restrained.

They’ve been to the right seminaries. They know what sorts of things to say. But somehow in the churchy bunch, they can get away with this for a long time. I’ll tell you who can sniff out the hypocrites. It’s the outsiders. God help us. We are all lacking in integrity in some degree, aren’t we? That’s going to be our wretched condition until the new heaven and the new earth.

But if we’re Christians at all, we’re trying to bring the outside and the inside together, aren’t we? We’re coming back to the cross again and again and asking for forgiveness and suing God for mercy and begging him to fill us with his Spirit and making us one person in Christ Jesus under the lordship of Christ. We’re to have a reputation with outsiders, a good reputation, a reputation for integrity.

Now that’s what the survey is here. Before I close, I want to focus now for my last few minutes on the one distinctive vocational characteristic of the elder/pastor/overseer, this business of being able to teach. Three observations. We’ll have some more tomorrow.

First, there are some who translate the word not able to teach but teachable. I won’t go into the technical explanations. The form of the word does suggest this passive, teachable, but the function of the word, in my judgment, really does mean able to teach.

In all of the parallel passages in the Pastorals where things are spelled out, it is the teaching ability, not the teachability, of the person that is at issue. So even if you don’t like it in this passage, there are lots of other passages to turn to, and we’ll come to more of them tomorrow. In fact, we’ll see a couple more in a few moments.

The second thing to recognize is that this teaching is a balanced combination of example and oversight direction; that is, authority and exemplary living. Let me give just a couple of passages. We’ll come across more in due course.

In 1 Timothy 6, verses 17 and following, regarding those who are well-to-do: “Command those who are rich in this present world not to be arrogant nor to put their hope in wealth, which is so uncertain, but to put their hope in God, who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment. Command them to do good, to be rich in good deeds …” and so on.

That’s pretty authoritative. This is not suggesting that you sort of sidle up to them and make suggestions. There is an authoritative element in teaching that simply cannot be ignored. There is a “thus says the Lord” that cannot be ignored. Yet, at the same time, there is this exemplary element, too, as for instance, 1 Timothy 4:11–12.

“Command and teach these things. Don’t let anyone look down on you because you are young, but set an example for the believers in speech, in life, in love, in faith and in purity.” Set an example. And all this is is working out the list of characteristics already found in chapter 3, verses 1–7, isn’t it?

Do you want your people to be soul winners? You jolly well had better be doing some evangelism yourself. Do you want them to be meek? You’d better display meekness. Do you want them to be caring of the elderly? Are you? Do you want them to have an excellent reputation with outsiders? What is yours like?

When I became pastor of Richmond Baptist Church in Vancouver, I was still quite a young man. I’d been involved in planting two or three other churches, a couple in English, one in French, but then I became pastor of this church. Still young. Sill single. Far too young. Far too green. Sill wet behind the ears but trying to pretend I was older than I was.

We had one remarkable woman in the church, however, who had the habit of coming out every Sunday morning, and she would always take my hand in hers and say in a remarkably stentorian voice, rivaling that of a Zaspel. “Pastor, that was excellent, but you’re so young.” Next Sunday, “Pastor, that was excellent, but you’re so young.” Next Sunday, “Pastor, that was excellent, but you’re so young.”

This went on week after week after week, month after month, and my patience finally cracked. One day after she went through her liturgical recitation, I kept her hand in both of mine, and I said to her, “Yes, indeed. You are right. I am young. I’m working on it, but I’m young. But Scripture says, ‘Let no man despise thy youth.’ No man.”

Well, she withdrew her hand and didn’t speak to me again for three months. There was a part of me that felt blessed relief, but within a couple of weeks, I was already repentant because this text does not say, “Let no one despise your youth, but if they try to, tear a strip off them.” This says, “Let no one despise your youth but be an example to the believers … in humility, love, doctrine …” Do you see? This teaching business has an exemplary function as well as an authority function, and in fact, as we’ll see tomorrow, they come together for theological reasons.

Finally, there is not only a polarity in the teaching in the Pastoral Epistles between exemplary living and authority, there is also a polarity between what we might call sound doctrine and life lived in accordance with sound doctrine. That is, sound in faith, sound in the faith, a common expression, but also with all of the entailments of how to live.

Thus, again and again (we saw a couple of them this morning), there is an importance to upholding the faith, to understanding the faith, to believing the faith, not believing this empty chatter and having false views of the law, a distorted understanding of what the gospel is. No, no, we’re dealing with eternal verities here.

We’re talking about the glorious gospel of the blessed God we saw this morning, and we’ll see tomorrow even the deacons are supposed to be able to hold the deep things of God well and in good conscience. Yet when you work through many of the passages about what these pastors are to teach, well, they’re supposed to teach everything that is in accordance with everything that conforms to this glorious gospel of the blessed God.

And when you work it through, it’s stuff like: older women teach the younger women how to love their husbands and look after their children, and make sure that the men are honest in all of their work and make sure the brothers treat their sisters with respect and make sure marriages are functioning well. You read all of 2 Timothy, chapter 2, and Titus, chapter 2, text after text after text …

“You must teach what is in accord with sound doctrine.” What does that look like? Older men are temperate. They’re worthy of respect. They’re self-controlled. They’re sound, not only in faith, but in love and in endurance. Now for all of our efforts to teach sound doctrine in this doctrinally oriented conference, I want to know how much thought we give to teaching how to live out of the sound doctrine.

The Pastorals are full of it. What are the entailments in how we live? That’s one of the great polarities in these epistles. What does it look like to be a Christian single? What does it look like to be a Christian old man or old woman? What does it look like to be a Christian widower? What does it look like to be a Christian mother with three children under the age of five? What does it look like to be a Christian teacher?

What does it look like to be a Christian business person? What does it look like to live in the world with all of the secular responsibilities of holding down a job? To be a master? Or a slave? Or in our context, an employee? What does it look like? Because that’s the kind of thing that is in accordance with sound doctrine, and that is part of our teaching responsibility in the church. Round two on that one tomorrow. Let’s pray.

We bless you, merciful God, that for many in this room we have not only experienced your unimaginable grace in the redemption that has forgiven our sins and saved us and made us joint heirs with Jesus Christ but further displays of your matchless grace in calling us to vocational ministry. We are actually supported by the people of God so as to be able to study and work through your Word and teach it to others, proclaim it to others.

But while we sense our privilege, Lord God, we sense our responsibility, and we do not want to be workers who are ashamed. Help us to be workers who are not ashamed as we rightly interpret the Word of truth and then apply it to others, our brothers and sisters in Christ, not because we are in any sense superior but because we have received this vocation, this calling to handle these words, as they are indeed, the very oracles of God. Grant us this mercy, faithfulness here, too, we pray. In Jesus’ name, amen.