Qualifications for Overseers

February 9, 2020 Preacher: Luis A. Cardenas Series: Church Leadership

Topic: English Passage: 1 Timothy 3:2-3

 

One of the common misconceptions in Christianity is that Jesus commands us to be salt and light in the world. That’s a misconception based on what we read in Matthew chapter 5, verses 13 and 14. Turn there with me, if you want. This is part of what we call the Sermon on the Mount, and it comes immediately after The Beatitudes. Matthew chapter 5, verses 13 and 14.

You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people's feet. You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house.

If you have committed your life to Jesus, He isn’t commanding you to be the salt and the light of the world. Jesus isn’t saying: “Go be the salt and the light of the world.” He’s saying: “You are the salt and light of the world, and so you need to think about how to be that faithfully and effectively.”

Salt, in Jesus’ culture, was primarily intended for preserving food. Salt fights against decay. And light, as we know, fights against darkness.

We are the salt and the light in the sense that we preserve this world from its corruption. The corruption is going to come, and things will keep getting worse, but God’s people help slow that process down. And we do that by shining God’s light of truth and holiness.

The heart of the gospel is that Jesus came to save sinners. He came to trade places with sinners under the wrath of God. And then He rose from the dead in victory. Everyone who embraces hat truth and surrenders their life to Jesus the Lord will be saved forever based on what Jesus has done. His death and Resurrection was a one-time deal. It was a one-for-all sacrifice.

But ever since then, even after Jesus returned to heaven, people have continued be saved. That has happened because those saved sinners are were used by Jesus to save more sinners. People become citizens of Christ’s kingdom because they hear the message about judgment, and about salvation in the death and resurrection of Jesus. That’s the only way to be saved, and that’s the message you and I are called to take to this world—not just in a Sunday sermon, but in our everyday lives.

Being salt and light has two major components. We preach the message, and we live in accordance with that message. We preach the message because we know people need Jesus. And we live in accordance with our message because people need to see a distinction.

First Peter says we are a chosen race, a holy nation. We’re supposed to be different than this world. We’re supposed to be showcasing the character of our heavenly Father. And in doing that, we proclaim His excellencies.

So, along those lines, notice the command of Matthew 5:16. This should sound familiar to a lot of you. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.

The point Jesus is making is that since we are the light of this world, we’re supposed to do what we can to make sure this world gets exposed to that light. We are distinct from the world, but we’re not supposed to isolate ourselves from it. We’re supposed to set ourselves in a position so that the world can benefit from who we are.

If you consider your life to be holy and righteous, but it’s invisible to others around you, you’re working against Jesus’ design. And on the flip side, if you’re interacting with the world, but you don’t look any different, you’re ruining Christ’s design too.

One of the more popular ways people have put it is to say that we are still in the world, but we are not of the world. Hopefully that makes sense to you. We’re in the world, but we’re not of the world.

What Jesus had in mind, when He said “Let your light shine,” was not how you vote on a ballot. And it wasn’t the generic ideas of improving society. What Jesus has in mind particularly is personal righteousness, personal holiness. That’s what He had just finished talking about in the Beatitudes. And that’s what He’s going to talk about in the rest of the Sermon on the Mount.

Be humble. Mourn over your sin. Be gentle. Be a peacemaker. Be merciful. Be pure in heart. Persevere through persecution. Fight against anger. Fight against lust. Turn the other cheek. Love your enemies. Those are examples of the things you do that make you different than the rest of the world. And we should all be growing in that.

Jesus wants you to grow in that. And in order to help us grow, he wants our church to have men who serve as examples for us. In Hebrews 13:7, speaking of the leaders in the church, it says we are to “consider the outcome of their way of life, and imitate their faith.”

What kind of characteristics should we be imitating? That’s the question we’re continuing to answer today in our study of 1 Timothy chapter 3. Go ahead and go back there with me.

We’re working through a list that Paul gave to Timothy regarding who to consider for the role of a pastor or elder in the church in Ephesus. But we also know that it’s a list God intended for every local churche. This is what we’re supposed to be looking for in an elder because this is what God wants the church to look like.

So, as we continue through our list this morning, I want to make sure we’re looking at it from both angles. Leaders need to have these qualities. And we all need to be demonstrating these qualities as well. This is how the church of God, which is the pillar and support of the truth, stands out. This is what helps authenticate our message to the world.

We’re coming to the world with a message of forgiveness and spiritual transformation. It’s about our great Savior and our great Redeemer. And if we want this world to be more open to the message, we need to show them a transformed life, a redeemed life. And even if we’re going through some kind of difficulty, they should see us walking in newness of life.

What does that newness look like? Let’s continue on our list. We’re picking up near the end of verse 2. And there you’ll find the word “hospitable.” That’s our first characteristic for today. The church and its leaders are supposed to be hospitable. What does that mean?

Hospitality has been a trait esteemed by many, many societies throughout history. And it was very important because historically groups were much more segregated than they are now. There was no Google translate. There was no Google maps. So, if someone came to a country or to a village from the outside, it could be a very unnerving experience.

 The Greek word for hospitality combines the word for friendship or love, with the word for a foreigner or an outsider. Literally, we could say, then, hospitality is a love for an outsider.

In the Old Testament, God gave Israel very clear commands about how to treat foreigners. Foreigners who stayed in Israel were expected to keep the Israelite laws, even if they didn’t always have the same rights and privileges. The Israelites, on the other hand, were commanded to live with them in love.

For example, Leviticus 19:34 says: “When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.”

Now, if you know Israel’s history, God had them destroy the Canaanite nations because they were pagan. Israel was God’s instrument of judgment on them. So, this isn’t talking about pagan people who are opposed to God and hostile to Israel. This is talking about a foreigner who would have come peacefully to Israel, and probably for the purpose of uniting himself to their God. Think about women like Rahab or Ruth. They were foreigners.

Israel had a special place in God’s plan, but that didn’t give them any excuse to be showing favoritism or racism, as we’d call it today. That was prohibited by God for Israel.

Well, when we come to the New Testament, this idea of hospitality comes through again, but it takes a different emphasis. The focus is not on national hospitality, but on personal hospitality, and it’s particularly aimed at brothers and sisters in the faith. That’s what Paul would have had in mind here.

You might remember the story of Jesus separating the sheep and the goats, and He says to the sheep, “I was a stranger and you welcomed me.” The rest of the passage tells us that Jesus was talking about showing love to brothers in the faith, and He lists it as a mark of genuine salvation.

Jesus cared about hospitality, and so did the Apostles. Not only is it listed as a requirement for elders here and in Titus, it’s also a command to all of us. And you can see that for yourself in Romans 12, Hebrews 13, 1 Peter 4, and 3 John. Hospitality is a big deal.

Why? Hospitality matters because it’s a reflection of God’s love. Ephesians 2 says we were outsiders of God’s family. We were strangers. But in Christ, God brought us near. God made us part of His family. That’s the picture you want in your mind when you think about this word.

Hospitality, in the Bible, is not about baking tasty cookies and entertaining guests with games and movies. That’s the worldly view aimed at impressing people. Biblical hospitality is the opening up of your life, and the opening of your home, so that those outside of your immediate family can enter in.

In the time of the New Testament, hospitality was critical for the travelling preachers and missionaries. That’s how the disciples ministered. They depended on people opening their homes for them.

Staying in someone’s home kept them safe from the physical threats of sleeping in the streets and from the financial expenses and the sexual temptations that came with staying at a public inn. Those are still dangers today. Motels and hotels can be risky physically, financially, and spiritually. So, hospitality played a big part.

It was important, though, to have wisdom for whom you showed hospitality to. Second John, for example, specifically talks about fake missionaries preaching a false gospel, and it says there: “Don’t accept them into your home.” In other words, don’t give them the impression that they are one of you, and don’t contribute to what they’re doing.

If someone is a genuine brother in the faith, however, the Bible pushes us toward opening our homes to them as an act of love. Hospitality is a visible demonstration of our unity in Christ.

In today’s life, it might not always mean somebody has to sleep over, but it does mean that we’re opening up our homes and our lives so that others can come in.

You know, the team that helps set up tables and bread and coffee for us is called the Hospitality Team. And that’s not a bad thing. But we should never get the idea that FBBC’s hospitality only happens on Sunday morning. It’s supposed ot be part of our culture.

Sadly though, hospitality, like so many other Christian virtues, is a lot better when somebody else does it. It’s hard to initiate. It’s difficult to take that first step.

Let me share with you what I think are some enemies to biblical hospitality. And I hope these help you as you evaluate your own life and your own home.

The first enemy to hospitality is indifference. It’s a lack of love. It’s what the Bible describes when it condemns the brother who says, “Well, I hope God takes care of you. God bless you. Be warm and be filled.” But he doesn’t actually do anything about it. He’s not concerned enough to actually meet a need. The Bible actually doesn’t call that indifference, it calls it hatred.

You know, American culture doesn’t feel comfortable stepping into other people’s lives, because we don’t want people stepping into our own lives. It’s easier to open your home up to people who are already part of it, right? I go visit my brother or my sister or my parents, and it’s not so big a deal. But biblical hospitality is more than that. It’s taking people who aren’t family, and taking deliberate steps to help them feel like family.

A lot of times, showing love for another person means stepping into their life. It means asking them a direct question, like: How are things at home? How’s it going with your wife? Or with your kids? How are you doing financially?

Maybe the fellowship time outside with bread and coffee isn’t the best time for that. Maybe it is. But at the very least, it can be a doorway into an ongoing conversation, motivated, not by gossip or by nosiness, but by real, brotherly love. And maybe, in a conversation like that, God will make you aware of how you can step into this person’s life even more to help them.

A second enemy to hospitality is greed. This obviously includes money, but it also includes other resources, like sleep or entertainment. Bringing someone else into your life, or into your home, takes work, right? It forces me to eliminate something from my own life.

If I invite someone to mu house for dinner, I lose whatever else I could have done that night. If I take someone out to eat, that’s going to cost me. If they’re staying in my home, they’re using my electricity. They’re eating my precious cereal and milk. If they shower, they’re using up my soap and my shampoo. And then, once their gone, I have to wash the plates and wash the blankets they used. It takes work to host somebody. And a greedy man or a lazy man will not do it easily.

Enemy number 3 is privacy—indifference, greed, and privacy. Biblical hospitality means you’re letting someone look into your life. They’re going to see how I talk to my wife. They’re going to see how I talk to my kids. They gonna see my movie collection or my viewing history on Netflix, right? They’re going to see my messy garage. It’s very difficult to combine privacy with biblical hospitality. It’s a whole lot easier to hear about someone else’s life than it is to share about your own.

Biblical hospitality means there’s an open home and an open life. You are someone who is accessible. That doesn’t mean everybody knows everything about you, but if someone wanted to spend some focused time with you, you would find a way to make it happen.

This is so important for leadership because we don’t want guys who are admired from a distance. We want men whom the church knows.

You know, sometimes a story will break about a celebrity and something he or she did. And people respond with shock. “I can’t believe he did that! He was such a nice guy!” Really, did you know him personally? Probably not. Our minds just see a public persona and we start filling in the blanks. The same can happen with pastors or elders.

People see them teaching every Sunday. And their life looks good. But maybe he’s keeping everybody at a distance. If he’s hospitable, there will be people who have looked into his life. He will not be seeking a life of privacy.

Fourthly, and I’ll this little list here, a final enemy of biblical hospitality is fear. And I think this is a big one in our culture. Like I said, American hospitality is about entertaining or impressing people. It’s about making a good impression. We could call that fear of man.

Biblical hospitality is not about making a good impression; it’s about making someone feel at home. And fear of man is a big enemy. What if my house isn’t clean enough? What if my cooking isn’t good enough? What if my dogs, or my kids, aren’t behaved enough? And the list goes on. What if this person steals from me?

The remedy to all that is not to hire a maid or to buy a better safe for all your valuable. The answer to all that is confidence in God. And it’s the same things we’ve been saying already. Pursue love. Pursue humility. Pursue an open life with others, and God will begin opening your heart and your home.

The church of Jesus Christ, whether here on Sundays, or in your homes throughout the week, should be one of the most welcoming and inviting and loving places for those who are drawing near to Jesus Christ. Hospitality matters.

Well, my intention is to finish verses 2 and 3 today, so we’re going to be moving much faster now.

Our next attribute is the end of verse 2. This is the qualification that sets an elder apart from a deacon. Elders are not just men who are mature. They are men who are “able to teach.”

That is talking about an ability to teach right doctrine. In Titus, it says “He must hold firm to the trustworthy word as taught, so that he may be able to give instruction in sound doctrine and also to rebuke those who contradict it.”

What does the ability to teach require? Obviously there’s a spectrum here, and it might look different from congregation to congregation, but the ability to teach requires certain things.

First of all, it requires the humility and the discipline to learn. A good teacher is a good learner. Secondly, it requires an ability to organize and to retain that information in your mind, and to know how those things fit together. For an elder, that’s going to include Bible knowledge and theological knowledge.

 But that’s not enough. For someone to have an ability to teach means they can articulate or express that truth in some understandable or clear way. And if you take that one step further, a superb teacher knows how to produce in others a desire to want to hear more. Not by tickling their ears, but by feeding them with God’s truth.

Added to that would also be the character to speak boldly when needed and to speak patiently and gently as well. And it takes wisdom to know the difference sometimes.

A helpful passage long those lines is 2 Timothy 2:24-26. This is a helpful passage for any pastor or teacher to know. Look at it with me real quick.

And the Lord's servant must not be quarrelsome but kind to everyone, able to teach, patiently enduring evil, correcting his opponents with gentleness. God may perhaps grant them repentance leading to a knowledge of the truth, and they may come to their senses and escape from the snare of the devil, after being captured by him to do his will.

Well, let’s go back to our list in First Timothy 3. And now we’re on verse 3. An elder must not be a drunkard. And again, this is not something unique to elders, but it is especially important for them.

They need to be sober-minded. They need to be men controlled by the truth, not by their desires, not by any worldly appetites. And they need to be ready, at any moment, I would say, to step forward and lead if the occasion calls for it. A man who’s a drunkard isn’t ready for that.

This is not the time for a sermon on whether or not it’s okay to drink alcohol. That’s for another day. But I just want to point out that God has always held a higher standard for his leaders.

One of the most famous examples is the Old Testament Nazirite vow, but we also have the words of Proverbs 31:4-5, which say: “it is not for kings to drink wine, or for rulers to take strong drink, lest they drink and forget what has been decreed and pervert the rights of all the afflicted.”

That’s the wisdom being passed from one generation of rulers to the next. Leaders are to be self-controlled, and one clear example of that is that he be a man from the control of alcohol. Whether it’s a times of despair, or a time of joy, an elder should always be seeking to honor the Lord and be sober-minded.

Can you imagine calling an elder in the middle of the night because of some emergency, and his response to you is, “Ummm. Okay. Gimme a second. Actually, can you come get me?” That would be a disaster. That’s not what God wants for leaders in the church. In fact, it’s not what He wants for any man in the church. We need to be able to think clearly. So this idea applies to alcohol, but it would also apply to any other mind-altering substances. We need to look different than the world. We need them to see that we are no longer slaves to sin.

For the fourth characteristic on our list for today, I’m going to lump together the middle of verse 3. ESV says there “not violent, but gentle, not quarrelsome.”

This could definitely be an outflow of the previous characteristic. There’s a strong connection between drunkenness and violence. But even if a man never lashes out physically, he need to me a man in control of his emotions, in control of his mouth and his attitude.

Maybe, as you grew up, you knew some kid who was always looking for a fight, or looking for an argument. This is the guy who feels like he needs to prove something. And so, he’s basically a bully—physically or verbally.

How does this person talk to his wife when they disagree? How does he interact with his kids, if they’re having trouble learning something? How does he interact with his coworkers? How does he respond to people who criticize him or get in his way? In today’s age, that would include the way he behaves online, the way he interacts with others.

More recently, there have been pastors in the news who have been fired, basically because they were acting like bullies. The accusations were that they had developed a closed leadership structure, and there was a culture of fear.

That may not get as much news as a man who cheats on his wife, but it’s just as tragic and just as shameful to the church. We can’t look like the world.

The opposite of violence here is gentleness. It means you’re not pulling out some law or code every time you get your toes stepped on. Gentleness is a willingness to yield. There’s a patience there, like what we saw in 2 Timothy.

If we phrased it as a question, it would be: “Is this person more concerned with peace than his own personal rights?” That’s a tough question to answer, right? But that’s what sets the church apart from the world. That’s the light that people need to see.

The highest example of gentleness is Jesus. He was holy God in human flesh, but he talked with people who were weak in their faith, and He showed them mercy. He grieved over their sin way more than He scolded them. He knew that sanctification was a process. And so, even his corrections with believers were tender. Jesus was not quarrelsome.

We might like to see how He battled with the Pharisees, but Jesus’ heart, even in the harshest opposition, was not to score points over his enemies. It was to minister the truth, and to protect those who were seeking the truth.

James 3:17 say that the wisdom from above is pure, and it’s peaceable.

We don’t really have a whole lot of time for our final characteristic for today, but hopefully you can see that they’re all basically connected. These are all attributes that flow out of a person who is committed to honoring Jesus Christ more than anything else. That’s the dominating pursuit.

Our final characteristic is at the end of verse 3—not a lover of money. There’s nothing inherently wrong with having a lot of money. And there’s not inherently wrong with having a little. The issue here is the person’s heart.

I mentioned this attribute when we were in Acts 20 a couple weeks ago. Is this man known for contentment? Or does he see the position of elder as a means of gaining something for himself?

If you and I are going to be preoccupied with he kingdom of Jesus Christ, then we can’t be stuck in the materialism of this world. Our checkbooks needs to prove that our treasure is in heaven.

Again, that doesn’t mean it’s a sin to have more money than others. But the issue is how we’re handling it. What are the priorities?

Dads, we all need to guard our hearts in this area. On the one hand, we want to provide for our families. But at the same time, we don’t want to be measuring ourselves by the world’s standards. We don’t want to be feeding our ego with the things of this world.

A man who doesn’t love money is going to be generous. He’s going to think of others, even when extra money comes in that he didn’t expect. He’s going to be honest, even if it costs him. Tax seasons has just started, and that’s one way you can see whether or not someone loves money.

It’s one thing to be tax-savvy and take advantages of credits or deductions the government allows. It’s a whole other thing when you start fudging with the number because it’ll gain you more money on your return. That’s the love of money.

On a relate note, I heard this past week about a book that was written by someone who used to work for a high-profile TV preacher. And he came out discussing all the shady business practices he had seen. This pastor was writing books out of his own publishing house, and then he would turn around and sell hundreds of thousands of them to his own organization. And he was making a dollar from every book sold.

So he’s using donor’s funds to buy books off himself and keep raking in the money. That’s the kids of stuff that goes on. And the world can see it. There’s a whole lot of religious people being deceived, but the people of this world, they’re just giving themselves more reasons to avoid coming to church. Because they can see the hypocrisy.

A local church that honors Christ needs to look different. We need to exemplify the heart of Christ in everything that we do.

Well, I hope this has been helpful and challenging for you. We’ve still got verses 4-7 to cover, and that is going to finish up this list of elder qualifications. But we’ll be looking at those next week. Let’s pray.

 

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