Dennis Tuuri

Come before God at the reading of his word with prayer and singing. Please stand. You may or may not have noticed that for the last few weeks, and for the next few weeks, the opening song that we have is really geared at reminding us that this is the day that the Lord hath made. This is the Christian Sabbath, the Lord’s day. And so our opening part of our worship, after we’re called to worship through the reading of God’s word, is to acknowledge that and sing about that and rejoice in that.

Isaiah 58:13-14. If thou turn away thy foot from the Sabbath, from doing thy pleasure on my holy day, and call the Sabbath a delight, the holy of the Lord, honorable, and shalt honor him, not doing thine own ways, nor finding thine own pleasure, nor speaking thine own words, then shalt thou delight thyself in the Lord, and I will cause thee to ride upon the high places of the earth, and feed thee with the heritage of Jacob thy father, for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it.

Let’s pray. Almighty God, we thank you for calling us into holy convocation this Lord’s day. We thank you, Father, for your Sabbath laws of the Old Testament, pointing forward to the finished work of Jesus Christ and what that work would usher in—a new creation. We stand before you, Father, not without sin, but having those sins forgiven through the shed blood of Jesus Christ and not trusting in our own eternal righteousness, but rather coming before you clothed in the imputed righteousness of Jesus Christ, our peace.

We thank you, Father, for the peace that he has made with us, between us and you, and that he has brought us into a new creation, a new spiritual race of those who have been born of the spirit. And we thank you, Lord God, that you call us forward this day to commemorate that, to rejoice in that, to rest in that new creation, and to rejoice greatly now and forever in the finished work of Jesus Christ.

We thank you, Father, for the blessing that as we turn aside our foot from doing our own ways this day, that you will bless us and cause us to ride upon the high places of the earth. And indeed, we do ride in those high places in Jesus Christ, our Savior. Father, may this service redound to your glory and to our edification. We ask it in the name of Jesus, our Savior. Amen.

Open to me the gates of righteousness. I will go into them and I will praise the Lord. This gate of the Lord into which the righteous shall enter. I will praise thee for thou hast heard me and art become my salvation. The stone which the builders refused is become the headstone of the corner. This is the Lord’s doing. It is marvelous in our eyes. This is the day which the Lord hath made. We will rejoice and be glad in it.

Blessed are the undefiled in the way. Blessed are they that keep his testimonies. They also do no iniquity. Thou hast commanded us to keep thy precepts diligently. Then shall I not be ashamed. I will praise thee with a brightness of heart. I will keep thy statutes. Wherewith all shall a young man cleanse his way. With my whole heart have I sought thee. Thy word have I hid in mine heart. Blessed art Thou, oh Lord, with my lips have I declared all the judgments of thy mouth.

I will meditate on thy precepts. I will delight myself in thy statutes.

Sermon scripture is 1 Timothy 3. 1 Timothy, chapter 3. This is a true saying. If a man desire the office of a bishop, he desireth a good work. A bishop then must be blameless, the husband of one wife, vigilant, sober, of good behavior, given to hospitality, apt to teach, not given to wine, no striker, not greedy, a filthy looker, but patient. Not a brawler, not covetous, one that ruleth well his own house, having his children in subjection with all gravity.

For if a man know not how to rule his own house, how shall he take care of the church of God? Not a novice, lest being lifted up with pride, he fall into the condemnation of the devil. Moreover, he must have a good report of them which are without, lest he fall into reproach and the snare of the devil. Likewise must the deacons be grave, not double-tongued, not given to much wine, not greedy of filthy lucre, holding the mystery of the faith in a pure conscience.

And let these also first be proved. Then let them use the office of a deacon, being found blameless. Even so, must their wives be grave, not slanderers, sober, faithful in all things. Let the deacons be the husbands of one wife, ruling their children and their own houses well. For they that have used the office of a deacon will purchase to themselves a good degree and great boldness in the faith which is in Christ Jesus.

These things write I unto thee, hoping to come unto thee shortly. But if I tarry long, that thou mayest know how thou oughtest to behave thyself in the house of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth. And without controversy great is the mystery of godliness. God was manifested in the flesh, justified in the spirit, seen of angels, preached unto the Gentiles, believed on in the world, received up into glory.

An overview of much of what we shared a couple of years ago: we went through the old and new testament offices. We began by speaking first of all about the government of the church, comparing the three forms of polity, and talking about the fact that there are two specific offices in the new testament. And I’ve used this illustration before, but as the Westminster Confession and Catechism says, that in the old covenant there were many and diverse signs and seals of the covenant that are all kind of narrowed down and all distilled, as it were, to the two signs and seals of the covenant in the New Testament—those being communion and baptism. So also there are many diverse offices described in the Old Testament in terms of the church, and most other institutions are distilled down to these two offices of elders and deacons in the New Testament church. And so we have to understand the continuity in order to understand what these offices are all about and what our polity should look like.

We then move from there to a consideration of the office of elder, and then last week the office of deacon. And this morning we’re going to talk about qualifications for office. Now this is a very important subject. The purpose of this series—of course these six series—is to prepare us all for a heads of households meeting to be held in May, at which we’re going to discuss church officers and look at selection, or at least consideration of some men in different offices.

And so it’s quite important and very timely for us to go through this series. The text itself tells us in 1 Timothy 3 that these are important things. First of all, when we read verses 14 and 15 a little earlier, it pointed out quite clearly that Paul was giving Timothy instruction, and in case he couldn’t get to him personally, he gave him these instructions in writing for the institutional church, the house of God.

And if you understand the relevance—that this is the house of God and the institutional church has a function—and that these epistles, this epistle from Paul and also the one to Titus that we’ll be quoting from later, both were given specifically to prepare them in terms of how to select, train, etc., officers in the church. And you see it’s quite an important topic. The house of God is the church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth.

Last year I gave a workshop up in Seattle on the importance of the church, and if you understand the relevance of the church to the other institutions—that it instructs, leads, guides, counsels the state and the family and what they’re to do correctly from the word of God, encourages, admonishes, exhorts, etc.—you understand that the pillar of the truth and the ground of the truth is that the church demonstrates the truth of God as a manifestation of it, as the temple of the living God.

Now it’s a manifestation of the glory of God’s truth, the glory of salvation, and it’s also the ground or support of the truth. And so the offices of the church that undergird the institutional church in this manifestation are really quite very important. In 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1 are given specifically to indicate the qualifications for office. Now additionally in the text—we didn’t read this, but in 1 Timothy 4:1—he goes on after instructing Timothy to instruct these men and what the qualifications for office are, to talk about people that would come that depart from the faith and would teach the doctrines of devils.

And so he immediately follows the instruction for these church officers by saying there’s going to be hard times ahead in terms of false teachings and ungodly men, even inside the church, who would seek to draw some away from the faith. Indeed, in Titus 1, the instructions for the qualifications there are also followed in the context of problems. In verse 11 of Titus 1, there’ll be men who come whose mouths must be stopped, who subvert whole houses and draw them away from the truth.

And so if you recognize that the church is always in the context of those that would seek to harm the advance of the preaching of the gospel of the kingdom of Jesus Christ through subversion, then you recognize that these officers also are quite important for that reason. Additionally, for the context in which we live today in this country, the time of judgment that we’re involved with, the church is very important, and as a result the officers of the church are very important. And that’s really the subject of my talk in Seattle this year, this coming Friday evening—the church as a covenant community of blessing and life in a time of judgment and death and cursing from God on those outside of the faith.

And so the church has an important role to play in helping people be buffered, as it were, from the judgments of God outside the church, in a defensive posture. And additionally, the church has a big role to play in the reconstruction and a turning of the judgment from curse to blessing in the terms of the country through the propagation of the truth. And so the church is a vital institution in all this.

And for those reasons, the men that are the officers of the church are extremely important. We must make sure that you pick qualified officers. We’ve said it before—it’s quite obvious—but at these heads of households meeting, the selection process will be that the congregation will nominate particular people to office, and that there’ll be a twofold witness: then I would also be, as the sitting eldership, approving that selection. But what I’m saying is you have an active, vital role in that selection process—it’s one that you must exercise diligently with great care, with much prayer.

Samuel Miller, writing in a little book that’s been reprinted called “An Able and Faithful Ministry,” gives the historical Presbyterian thrust, which is true throughout the generations. He wrote in the 1800s, but ever since the time of the Reformation, the Presbyterian church has always been very insistent that men who fill church offices be qualified. It’s not enough just to fill up a number. You must have qualified men. Miller in that little booklet, “Able and Faithful Ministry”—and I think we have that in the church library—talks about it in terms of an analogy: if you have a community of thousands of people who are sick, it’s better to send twelve well-trained doctors who know what they’re doing than fifty people that don’t know medicine.

So numbers are not the ultimate importance. They must be qualified. And that’s the importance of going through these qualifications. Now, one other thing to get your attention this morning in terms of attending to these qualifications is that here at Reformation Covenant Church, we have tried to apply ourselves to the reconstruction of the institutional church. And that has implications. Perhaps the churches you’ve been in the past—elders, deacons, trustees, whatever you called them—everybody except the pastor wasn’t too important.

But in this church, they are vitally important. The eldership sits in judgment, and one of the things that it does specifically is rule, as well as teach, and rules on the basis of God’s law. There are church courts held here. To kind of bring out this point, I had a letter once from a gentleman several years ago who were having a bit of a problem with, and I’ll just read a portion of this without discussing the particular context of it.

It says: “Since biblical laws demand very real consequences that are far-reaching, and Reformation Covenant Church demonstrably expects obedience to the letter of the law, and since these real sanctions tremendously affect our lives, [therefore] I’ve got to know some things about RCC and the sitting eldership before I can figure out what I should do here.”

This particular individual came up smack dab, because of a particular situation that happened—which is not germane to the discussion this morning—but he came smack dab with the realization that we mean business, okay? And that if you have a particular sin that you or a member of your household is engaged in, and the scriptures tell us specifically what the corrective measure to be taken for that sin is, we’re going to apply whatever we can do to bring you to repentance for that sin and obedience and conformity to the law of God.

Okay? So this is serious business. And in terms of the eldership, you must think through the implications of assigning a man into office who may well sit in judgment on a case involving you, or maybe involved a disciplinary action involving you at some point in time in the future. These are very real things. And in terms of the deacon’s functions here, we’ve tried to stress—as it says in Acts 6, which we talked about last week—they have charge over this business.

They supervise men, and they will admonish you and they will exhort you, and if need be, they will severely rebuke you for failure to act in conformity to God’s law in those particular areas which they have oversight and control. And so these are real things, real implications for your lives. And it behooves you then to know men well and to look at God’s qualifications for office that we’ll look at in a couple of minutes here.

The church suffers through ill-equipped, ill-trained, or ill-suited men who are ill-suited for the job of church office when they are placed into it by an unknowing congregation. The men who are put into that office suffer because they then burden, having this burden on them, a requirement that God has not called them to do. The families suffer because frequently decisions are made incorrectly.

The cause of Christ suffers in the society because the church then doesn’t instruct through the service of the word and the service of the table. Through orthodoxy and orthopraxis—that is, distinguished in the church that does not have properly suited officers—and as a result the instructional capabilities, the proclamation of the gospel and its effects, and what we think and what we do to the world around us is diminished. The cause of Christ is hurt. All that is to get your attention. I guess it’s the first point of our outline, but it’s really kind of the introduction, to make sure that you attend to these things.

I know it’s a beautiful day outside. I know we probably are going to have a good time this afternoon relaxing with our friends and enjoying the Sabbath rest that God has given to us, getting together, enjoying the outside. But right now, we want to think about these qualifications and continue to think about them in the weeks to come, because they’re going to be very important for how you will live your life in the context of Reformation Covenant Church.

Okay, having said that, let’s look at some of those qualifications in terms of the content of the qualifications having looked at the importance of the qualifications. Let’s look at the context now, or the content specifically. And first we’ll look at three what I call selection passages. In Exodus 18, a selection passage of the heads of tens, fifties, hundreds, thousands, etc.—heads of tens, fifties, hundreds, thousands—the judges.

Deuteronomy 1 is the selection passage where Moses conflates, brings together, both Exodus 18 and Numbers 11—the judges and the officers—and talks about the men in that sense in Deuteronomy 1. And Acts 6 is the selection process for the diaconate. And just briefly, we can’t spend a lot of time on this, but it is important to recognize that each of these seems to have three essential qualities to them.

In Acts 6, rather, we read that they were to pick out men that the apostles would appoint over the business. Those men were to have three qualifications. One: of honest report. Okay, honest report. They’re to be known, understood, evaluated by the people to be seen to have an honest report among the group from which they were serving. Second, they’re to be full of the Holy Ghost—spirit-filled men—understanding that the Holy Ghost of course teaches and writes God’s law upon our heart. That has implications for that. And then third, they were to be full of wisdom. Full of Holy Ghost and wisdom. And wisdom comes from the fear of God and knows how to apply what God’s law says to specific situations. And these men were to have these three qualifications.

Now, these parallel quite nicely from Deuteronomy 1:13. And we talked about this a little bit last week. We’ll mention it again here. Moses said that I told you to take these men and I’d make them rulers over you. And he lists three qualifications. First, he says they’re to be wise men, full of wisdom. Second, they are to be men of understanding. They’re to have the Holy Spirit that would instruct them in God’s law and discern obedience from disobedience. And third, they’re to be known among your tribes. So wisdom matches up with wisdom. Of course, understanding is the gift of the Holy Spirit and teaching us the law of God.

And known among your tribes—honest report—as in Acts 6. Additionally, in Exodus 18, where we have the specific selection of the judges, we read that they are to have three characteristics. One, they are to be able men, having an ability and gifting to do what they’re required to do. And that correlates, I believe, with men who are known among your tribes with an honest report. They are supposed to be known and evaluated by the people again in terms of what they had already done and proven themselves to be able.

Secondly, there were those who fear God, and the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, of course. And third, to be men of truth who hate dishonest gain. And again, there—that is, the ability to understand and distinguish between right and wrong—is taught by the Holy Spirit. Now this term, just briefly: the correlation here of some of these terms is quite interesting, and I want to talk just for a minute about understanding and wisdom and how those are seen together in the scriptures. And the common denominator is that God gives these things to men primarily through his law.

In Deuteronomy 4:6—most of you probably have Deuteronomy 4, 5, and 6 memorized. It’s one of the good proof texts, if you want to look at it that way, for the application of God’s law to the civil magistrate. And Deuteronomy 4:6 says, in terms of the statutes that God has given to them: “Keep therefore and do them, for this is your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the nations.” Wisdom and understanding.

And when you look at men who have to have both wisdom and understanding, that means that qualification means they must be familiar with the law of God and obedient to it. It’s the law that is wisdom and understanding in the sight of the nations. It’s the law and the Holy Spirit writing that law that gives us wisdom and understanding. Understanding—discerning good and evil. Wisdom—applying the good to specific situations in our lives. And these things are put together frequently throughout the scriptures.

I’ll just give a couple of the references, and you won’t look them up now, but 1 Kings 3:7 and following talks about this as well. Solomon prays there that God give him an understanding heart to judge the people, so that I may discern between good and bad. And of course, God grants Solomon wisdom, and that is connected here to the understanding of God’s word to discern good and bad.

Psalm 119:33—David says, “Give me understanding and I shall keep thy law.” The correlation to God’s law again. Daniel 2:21 says that it is God who sovereignly sets up kings, removes them. And it’s he who gives wisdom to the wise and knowledge to them that know understanding. These are sovereign enablements by God, and they come through the mechanism of his law. Psalm 111:10 says, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. A good understanding have all they that do his commandments.” The correlation to the command word of God again.

And then finally in Hebrews 5:14, we read there that strong meat belongs to those that are of full age—even those who, by reason of use, applying the word of God to their lives, growing in grace, have their senses exercised to discern both good and evil. And so those qualifications listed there in those three selection passages means that we must have men who are full of the Holy Ghost, who are known among us, and full of the Holy Ghost in terms of demonstrating the word of God in discerning, and then applying in wisdom, the good portions of God’s law to a particular situation.

All this means, of course, that the men must have—regardless of whether they’re officers or judges in the Old Testament or elders or deacons in the New Testament—they must have a knowledge of the word of God and specifically the law word of God, the command portions of that word that instruct us how to discern things and give us wisdom how to apply it. And so if you’re concerned about a particular candidate for office in this church, and you want to know whether or not you should put your amen to that person, you’ve got to know whether they discern the law word of God.

You’ve got to examine them personally by yourselves here. Talk to them about the scriptures to discern their depth of the law of God as it applies to every area of life and thought. Okay, those are generally. Now specifically, as demonstrated by the requirements of the special offices. And so we’ve talked about the selection passages, and now we’re going to talk a little bit about what these offices do. Again, remind ourselves what we’ve talked about for the last couple of weeks in terms of elders and deacons.

And if we understand the functional requirements, then we’ll understand what God says they have to have to fulfill those requirements before we get to the list of qualifications in 1 Timothy 3. Okay, elders. And I’ve there’s lots of ways to break this out, but I’ve put down the functional qualifications of eldership. What do they have to be able to do functionally? They have to be able to guard the church and nourish the church.

Okay? And we get that from—we’ve talked about that a lot in this church. It flows throughout the scriptures. These are primary callings of men in terms of every office and function and functional authority that they have. And it’s certainly true in the church. And when Paul addresses the Ephesians, the elders, he really points this out quite well: their necessity to guard and nourish the church. But in any event, that implies then that there must be means by which God gives us to guard and nourish.

And of course, the scriptures tell us those things as well: the word of God and prayer. And you remember the priests in order to guard and nourish. The Levites did two things. They taught people the word of God, and they offered up sacrifices. And the sacrifices are like the prayers today. And the scriptures even talk about the sacrifice of our lips in the Old Testament and certainly in the book of Hebrews as well.

And again in Acts 6, when the apostles pick out the elders, they say that “we may devote ourselves to the study of God’s word and to prayer.” And so the word of God—again, a knowledge of the word of God and a study of it—and a prayer life on the part of the elder candidate are necessary means by which God brings them to the ability to function by guarding and nourishing the church of Jesus Christ that he has put under their supervision and control.

Now, in terms of how this works out, of course, the specific functions, as we’ve talked about, are that the elders must be able to teach. They must instruct people in that word of God. They don’t just study it to get knowledge into their heads. They study it so they might share it with other people and teach it to people and so help them administer their lives. And that teaching goes on in the context of large group situations, preaching, etc., or Bible studies. But it also goes on in small group situations, one-to-one.

There is a biblical requirement or validity to counseling. I know it’s been blown way out of proportion in our day and age, when counseling is divorced from the word of God and becomes psychological, etc. But biblical counseling is pointed out when Paul tells the Ephesian elders that he admonished them and exhorted them from house to house. He would visit with them personally and admonish and exhort them to faithfulness in a particular area in which they may be having problems or in which Satan may be attacking them.

And so counseling is to be seen as teaching—but teaching one-to-one in specific application and wisdom understanding of God’s word to a particular calling. And so if a man is to become an elder in the church, he must demonstrate some sort of proven ability to do this. He must be an able man, able to do the work that God has called him to do. He must have a good report on the part of the people, and he must have demonstrated some ability to already perform this function. So that is very important to recognize.

In the other situation, of course, as we’ve talked about, is his judicial rule. He will have to be able to make decisions based upon the word of God and communicate those decisions. He must have communication skills, education skills, judicial skills, and understanding and applying God’s righteous judgment to a situation. And these are all things you ought to be thinking about as you think through the list of people that you think may be qualified to be added to the role of elders in this church.

Additionally, I think that the procedural qualification of the word and studying the word here means that men who are called to the eldership should demonstrate a love for the word of God. It shouldn’t be a matter they only study when they have to study. They should actually have demonstrated a propensity to love the study of God’s word and engage themselves in it. Now, obviously, of course, we all need encouragement and exhortation to do what we are called to do, and even things we like to do. But what I’m trying to say here is I’m not saying you’ve got to have a guy who loves to study so much he’s studying four or five hours a night, and just, you know, it’s always what he’s doing.

What I’m saying though, on the other hand, is that if you have a fellow who really has a hard time studying and must be pushed and pushed and pushed in preparing for his communion talk, for instance, then that fella is probably not right now at the place where you want him in a position of fulfilling these requirements because he doesn’t love the study of God’s word. He hasn’t been able to devote himself to it in the time he’s already been given by God.

And if you’re not faithful in small things, you won’t be faithful in large things. And of course, that implies an ability to discern the word of God, to know how to study, to know some exegetical skills involved in the study of God’s word. And of course it also implies an adherence to the doctrinal statement of the church. Now if some guy’s going to sit in judgment over you on a judicial court case, or if you’re going to be called to be submissive to his instruction from the word of God relative to a particular problem you’re having in your life, you better make sure that his standard is the same standard that you have—being the law word of God.

Now, we all have signed that statement, but I would suggest here that it’s certainly appropriate and probably a very good idea to talk to any candidate again that you may be considering in your mind for elder, to talk to him about the application of the law of God, maybe case law application, etc., and try to figure out where he’s at in terms of how he applies that to today. Very important that he knows how to do that because, as I said, you may be required to submit to either his teaching or his instruction.

And so it’s very important that he have doctrinal adherence to the confessional statement of the church. Now, in this regard, this is one reason why it’s good to have a bit of a more developed secondary standard than we presently have at Reformation Covenant Church. For those of you who are new and look at this little one-page, double-sided confessional statement of RCC, it looks pretty minimalistic. That isn’t necessarily by design.

That came about because when we first started the church, we studied through—a group of men did—the Westminster Confession and the standards of the Westminster divines, but also the Belgic Confession, the Heidelberg Catechism, descendants of Dort, the three-fold form of unity for the continental reformers. And we just weren’t able to figure it all out, you know. We were young men not been trained in Reformed theology, not been trained in a lot of anything frankly, as men are not trained very well these days in our schools. And so we couldn’t necessarily put our amen to some of that stuff, and there are specific portions that we had specific questions about as well. And so that’s the reason why we came up with what is then considered an interim solution: this double-page confessional statement that one of the fellows will be signing this morning in a little bit.

But it was an interim step. I still see it as an interim step to adoption of broader secondary standards. I bring this up now because when you talk about doctrinal adherence, it would be a good thing again for you to ask people, potential candidates, if they’re familiar with the Westminster standards and at what point they disagree or agree with them. Okay? Because it’s much more exhaustive and broad than our statement is, and we would agree with ninety-five or ninety-eight percent of it.

I can tell you, for instance, right now if you came up to me after the service and said, “What do you think about the Westminster standards? Are there anything specifically that you object to?” The one thing—I, one of the areas in which I have questions is the whole idea of divorce. And we spoke on divorce a year, a year or two years ago, and I don’t believe that their position as stated in the catechism and confessions is correct on divorce.

Well, and you can think about that and say, “Well, I wonder if, you know, he’s right or wrong or whatever.” But you should know at what point elder candidates do not agree with the traditional standards of the reformed faith as found in those two sets of standards: the Westminster standards and then the three-fold form of unity—the Belgic, Heidelberg, and Stewart. Okay.

And as I said, the functional or the procedural qualifications to achieve guarding and nourishing are the word of God, which we’ve talked about, and also prayer. And it’s appropriate for you to ask elder candidates what their prayer life is like and if they are in prayer now for the people in the church, because they’re called upon to do that in an official capacity. It’s an important part of what they do. It’s one of the two things that the Levites did, and it’s one of the two things that the New Testament officer of elder does for the church of God.

He protects them by applying the word of God, and he protects them also by prayer and calling upon God to demonstrate to yield forth a super-abundant measure of his grace to those people in our church and to minister to them in that way. And so that’s also a qualification requirement of the office of elder.

Now the diaconate office is somewhat different. Obviously they have to know the word of God. We’ve talked about that. You can’t be wise without knowing and applying the word of God. You can’t be discerning. But their particular functional qualification is the ability to serve. Now very important to point out here real quickly, before you start getting your hackles up as you should when I make a statement like that: it’s not that the deacon serves and the elder doesn’t serve. We’ve said before that leadership in the scriptures is repeatedly demonstrated to be one of service and ministry, and Jesus came to serve. So the elders also serve the congregation as well. And that’s good to point out and remember. But it’s also good to realize that the office of the deacon has in its very title—the deacon itself means to serve.

And you can’t get around that. Now, I’d suggest something here that you might want to ponder and think through. The service of the deacon is a much more visible sort of thing frequently than the service of the eldership. Now, I’m the only elder in this church so far, and I’m pretty visible every Sunday. But remember, if you’ve got a board of four, five, six elders eventually, or whatever, and it may be that some of those elders are more involved in the preaching and teaching ministry than the official capacity of sermon preparation, etc., and others are really teaching more one-on-one or ruling, etc., they’re not going to have a great deal of visibility, usually—hopefully not—going to have a lot of court cases in which they would demonstrate their ability to judge correctly, and much of their procedural requirements of studying the word of God in prayer are things that are done out there someplace, not in the context of a large group of people.

That study goes on in their homes. Whereas the diaconate office is one of more external, visible service. And so it’s going to be—you’re going to see that demonstrated in a much more visible sense than you would with the elders. And I bring this up to say that in terms of the pre-existent functioning—which I know a lot of you don’t like that term. I haven’t come up with a good replacement for it yet. “Able man” might be a good one. I don’t know. But that they’re functioning in that capacity already—it’s going to be more easy to discern who is functioning in a capacity of service externally, in the temporal affairs of the church, the business affairs of the church, etc.

That’s going to be easier for you to discern and see the meaning of this qualification than would be for the eldership. You’ve got to pry more at the elder. But in any event, the external service—the deacon has to have that ability to serve the church and also then to alleviate the eldership from performing those administrative functions that really another office is called to do. The procedural qualification to achieve that is the gift of administration.

Scriptures call it the gift of helps and administration. And so the deacon candidate must be able to first of all serve and lead through service. And then he also must have the ability to administer in terms of service and appoint other men over specific functions to get that work done. We said this before, but it doesn’t hurt to repeat it over and over again: it’s not that I study the scriptures and you don’t. I study the scriptures to then teach you and to direct your studies and to help you to apply the word of God to your life. And it’s not that the deacon serves and you don’t. It’s that he helps you to serve by organizing and administering the affairs of the church that are under his supervision.

And so it’s not that he does all the work; it’s that he encourages, exhorts, and assists you in doing that work, and does it specifically through administering the men of the church—specifically, normally in these particular tasks and functions. And so because of those needs of his office, that means he has particular functional requirements that you must examine as you look at a deacon candidate. And as I said, it’s a little easier on that side because things are more visible.

Now it’s important here just to sum up this section that there’s a differentiation of function that goes on between the eldership and the diaconate. They’re not a training position for the other. They’re two separate offices. We’ve talked about that a lot. Ministry through the service of God’s word. Ministry through the service of the tables—which indicate the whole administrative function of the church in terms of its external affairs. And these two things are different. The elders study the word of God, determine what programs, for instance, the church maybe should be involved with, what areas of work would be good to get involved in based upon the word of God, applying it to our situation of the community. The deacon then administers those programs and makes sure they happen smoothly and well. Like when the sharing goes out, and instructs the men, “Here’s what you’ve got to do in order to be involved with the army.” He then administers that program through the congregation. So when you are called upon, if you have a particular need in the church and you’re trying to figure out if you should go to deacons or you should go to elders, remember these functional separations.

Now, I was going to bring the overview of the job description for the deacon that we prepared last year, and I didn’t get it run off in time. I’ll have copies not next week—I won’t be here next week—but the following week. And that’ll help you in some of this. But it shows lots of administrative functions under the specific supervision of the deacon. And then there are much fewer functions under the supervision of the elder.

And that has again to do with this thing about visibility of service, because there’s a lot of areas of requirement in terms of administration of various things, as opposed to studying things out. It takes much more effort on the part of the people to administer those things. So the deacon is a much broader functional responsibility, and it’ll help you to discern if I’ve got a particular problem, do I go to a deacon or do I go to an elder? It’s not to be on the basis of who’s busiest. That’s not the idea. The idea is they’re particularly called to separate offices. And when you look at qualifications for elder and deacon, and we’re going to talk a little bit about shared qualifications, what I’m pointing out here is there are separate qualifications because these are two separate offices that handle two separate functions within the church.

And you’ve got to think that through when you’re thinking about an elder candidate or you’re thinking about a deacon candidate—the two different functions that they’ll administer. Okay. Finally, before we leave this section, these are church officers, covenant community officers. And so it’s very important that your elder or deacon candidate have a strong sense of covenant both in terms of his understanding of the scriptures and the covenant teaching in the scriptures and then in the application of the concept of covenant in terms of the local church.

And I’ve said this before, I’ll say it again: that one of the tremendous strengths that Roy Garrett brings to this church and brings to the office of deacon is a strong sense of covenant. I’ve said this before: that if things happen, things don’t go well in this church somehow, and the whole thing falls apart in the next year, Roy Garrett will be the last one to turn out the light as the doors are being locked up. Not because he has been told by somebody to stand behind and do it, but because he has a sense of commitment to this church, and he’s not going to bug out when things get tough or when problem areas come up. He’s going to be here serving.

And that’s what you want also to look at in terms of these qualifications for elder and deacon: men who have a commitment to this church, to servicing the people of this church, to helping them grow, not a desire to lord it over people, but a desire to serve people and cause them to grow, to grow mature in the faith. Okay.

Now, we’re going to turn to the specific qualifications listed in the sheets that hopefully you have there. “Qualifications for Office” is the header I put on it. And I would like to just briefly say that this was compilation of 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1. If you were here a couple years ago, we talked about qualifications for office. We passed out a list then too, which was much messier than this one is and much less helpful, I’m sure.

And this is the product of—I guess—almost a year’s worth of work on the part of the men who were in the original elder training program or men’s study group. And I really appreciate those men and the work they put into it. I think it’s a very usable document. Now we’ll just walk through, I guess, some of these. We won’t have time to go over exhaustively all of them, but just briefly walking through some of them.

And I’ll point out here that many of these qualifications here are specifically from the list relating to elders from 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1. But they’re also repeated, most of them, in terms of the diaconate. And I’ll point out similarities and differences there as we go through it.

Blameless, for instance, is repeated in 1 Timothy 3:10 when it says the deacons must first be proved and then let them use the office of a deacon, being found blameless. Same concept. Titus 1:6 has this concept of blameless found in 1 Timothy 3, and also repeated in Titus 1:6. Tony Osti was the man who simply looked at this particular qualification and essentially saw it, I think correctly, so as an overview of everything else that follows. And so it doesn’t have separate content necessarily. It should be seen essentially as an overview of all that follows. And so that’s why there are no questions under number one, where there are questions under each of the other ones.

This form is being used by all the men involved in the men’s study group. What we’re having is we’re having their wives evaluate them, going through this list and going through these questions specifically. And so that’s why we put it in this format: a brief description of the characteristic and then some questions to help apply that to our day and age and specific problems.

Secondly, the husband of one wife. Tony also did this one, and essentially he came up to the conclusion that it just means ban on polygamy. That may well be what it means. Others have asserted—just so you’ll know—the other opinions that are out there. Some have asserted here the necessity of marriage in terms of an office. Others have asserted—as I said, as Tony believes—that the ban on polygamy. And still others assert here a need to be sexually chaste, noting that fornication and pederasty were much more frequent occurrences in the times in which these epistles were written than really was polygamy.

And so they think that here it’s the idea of a devotion to one’s wife and not fooling around with other gals. Obviously those last two are biblical, and you know, in either in any event, they can be used in that way to indicate that this qualification—the requirement for marriage in terms of holding office—is an interesting one that could take up lots of time in terms of discussion and debate.

I think that probably the better place to look at that for your own consideration and study is the characteristic we’ll talk about in a couple of minutes: the qualification that he has to be able to rule his household well, and whether or not a single man can really demonstrate the ability to rule his household or not. Because obviously the thing that’s really talking about primarily is the way the officer interacts with people in his household and in the extended household of the church.

But in any event, we don’t have to cross that river at this point in time. We don’t have any single men in our church who have desired an aspiration at this point in time to be considered for office, either deacon or elder. If we do at some point in time, we’ll have to study that more in depth and look at those requirements. But it isn’t particularly pertinent to number two. It’s more pertinent to ruling your own household well.

Third: Temperate and prudent. And we put together a couple here. Steve Bicker worked on this, and I think correctly put those two essentially together. And he explains that under point number three. And again, here this is a qualification of the deacon. It says in verse 8 of 1 Timothy 3 that the deacon must be grave. And it’s interesting—and without going into great detail again—that word “grave” is not one of these two words, “tempered” or “prudent,” that refers to the eldership.

However, in Titus 2:2, we read that the aged men are supposed to be sober, grave, and temperate. And those are the three words that are found in 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1 referring to qualifications for elders and deacons. The three things mentioned in Titus 2:2 about the aged men must have these three qualifications together are the same three as we take the tempered and prudent and add on the grave of the diaconate requirement in verse 8.

Reason I bring all that up is I think appropriate to lump these two together and also lump the gravity required of the diaconate candidate from verse 8 of 1 Timothy 3 in there as well. I know we’re going through this awful fast, but we’ve got a lot of stuff here. So you can always look at this later and just add the notes that I bring up now that are not really on here. And that note about gravity isn’t on here. You could add that into point number three. The deacon must be grave.

One of the questions for instance that was developed by the group there was: “Have you reached a point of relative stability in your intellectual, philosophical, theological development, or do you find yourself changing views frequently? Have you given serious enough thought to your core tenants to discern whether they are in conflict at some points or in harmony with each other?”

And here the idea here is one who is settled, essentially. He has a gravity, a sobriety, a temperance to his life that’s based upon a settled perspective of God’s word. You don’t want some guy who flits around here and there. It is related, I suppose, in that way to the idea of not being a novice but includes rather the character qualification of a settledness, a temperance, and a gravity to his lifestyle.

Point number four: Of good behavior. I think Keith Hansen did this and did an excellent job on it. By the way, Keith also had the herculean task of taking pages and pages that some men had written on these specific qualifications and funneling it all down to a couple of paragraphs for each one. And he did an excellent job. In any event, on number four, he basically—the idea is having your life in order. The word is “cosmos,” which means “well-ordered.” And so the idea there of having good behavior is a properly ordered life under God.

I suppose that’s related to the concept of peace—you know, in the scriptures, in the Beatitude, it talks about “blessed are the peacemakers.” A peacemaker is somebody who brings God’s order to a situation. It doesn’t mean that he gets rid of conflict or through the absence of hostilities, but rather he brings God’s order as found in his word to a particular situation and produces orderliness, peace, and a good ordered environment as a result of that.

And the illustration that really helps, if we’re going to teach these to our children, is that they’re going to be peacemakers if they clean up their room nice and neat. And that gives them a visible, exterior sort of object lesson for what they’re supposed to be doing with the rest of their life. They’re supposed to be at peace with men through having rightly ordered relationships, and all of their behavior is supposed to represent an order, eventually as they mature in the faith.

I mention that because it would be a not a bad idea at all to go through some of these things in your family devotions with your children, and maybe every so often with them as they grow up, evaluate them according to these standards as well, and pick out particular areas in which they’re falling short. Be very appropriate to do that.

Let’s see. Given to hospitality. It actually says in Titus 1:8, “a lover of hospitality.” And that should remind us that the requirement, the three requirements that God makes of a man from the book of Micah—if you remember that—is that you must be a lover of kindness. Not only are we called, not only are we called