An Overseer, Then, Must Be...#4

So this morning we're going to be back in 1 Timothy chapter 3. And we're working through the qualifications for elders and pastors. And we're going to be reading verses 1 through 7. And this is a week, to be honest with you, that I've been dreading. And if you were to talk to other elders or leaders in the church over the last couple of weeks, they would tell you this has been helpful and hard. last couple of weeks talking about the qualifications of pastors and elders because what's being required of us is that we look in the mirror. And we have to look in the mirror knowing that you're all standing next to us looking in the mirror and seeing the same things we see most likely. And so it can be a difficult thing when we look at the qualifications for pastors and elders because we think of how we fall short and how we don't meet.

the qualifications or where we could grow. And I don't say that to say we don't have hope or that I think all of the men who lead you are unqualified. That's not what I believe. And yet it is hard when you have a passage that's so particular to you. And so I don't necessarily want your sympathy, but I do want you to know that this is a week that's been looming in my mind. It's the talk of... Of households, managing one's household. And the reason it looms in my mind, and I think in the minds of other pastors and elders, is that it's very personal. There's a different weight to it than there is to being above reproach or being gentle and being kind. Those things are public sorts of qualifications. They obviously have personal applications. But when we talk of someone's house, we're getting right into the nucleus of their...

of their life. And when Paul says to us that a man has to manage his own household well and he has to have children who demonstrate these sorts of attributes, it's a very personal thing. And with most of us, since we're Americans, very personal things end up being very private things. And we say personal things and private things are none of your business. And yet here, It's given as a qualification. It's given as something that ought to be examined. It ought to be looked at. It ought to be considered. The management of a man's house. And so my hope and my prayer in preparing for this has been that it would be helpful to me, that it would be helpful to you, and that God would protect our unity and that he would strengthen our faith as we study his word in this area.

I want to read to you now 1 Timothy 3, verses 1-7. Would you please stand for the reading of God's word? This is the word of the Lord, and it is eternally true. It is a trustworthy statement. If any man aspires to the office of overseer, it is a fine work he desires to do. An overseer, then, must be above reproach, the husband of one wife, temperate, prudent, respectable, hospitable, able to teach. not addicted to wine or pugnacious, but gentle, peaceable, free from the love of money. He must be one who manages his own household well, keeping his children under control with all dignity. But if a man does not know how to manage his own household, how will he take care of the church of God, and not a new convert, so that he will not become conceited and fall into the condemnation incurred by the devil? And he must have a good reputation with those outside the church, so that he will not fall into reproach and the snare of the devil.

This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated. As we start looking at the qualification about a man's home, I want you to think about your house for a minute. And I want you to think how willing you are generally to have people into your house. And some of us would be more willing than others to have people into our houses. Just hospitality, just general, come on over for dinner. And I want you to think first about, am I even willing to have people into my house? And what I suspect is that most of us would have some criterion or some level of presentation that we would want to meet before we have people into our house. There would be a certain level of cleanliness or orderliness. Or if we were going to have someone over for dinner, we would have a certain quality of meal. You wouldn't feed the guests the leftovers that you might have if it was just the family.

Right? I'm watching some of you are like, yeah, yeah, no, there's this expectation, there's this level, there's this presentation that we want to maintain for others. And my goal in bringing it up is not to say that's a bad thing or you shouldn't have that or that it's wrong. But it is only to say that you want to maintain a certain level of privacy in your house when people come over. There are certain things you don't want them to see. Maybe it's a mess. Maybe it's your children's behavior. Maybe it's a conflict between you and your spouse. Maybe it's the disrepair of your home. I remember a pastor telling me one time of a family he had in his church. And they'd been in his church for years. And there was a conflict between the husband and wife. And it was very surprising to him when he went to their house. He had never been to their house. And so he went to their house to visit with them. And what he found was chickens living in the cupboards.

Their house was, they lived basically in a chicken coop. They had pigs. Their cabinets had no doors. Their house was an absolute disaster. And they would never have anyone over. Now, you can all understand why they would never have anyone over, right? Because if you had chickens living in your cabinets, you would never want anyone else to know that because you recognize somewhere in your mind that that's not normal and something's wrong with that, right? The funny thing that this pastor said to me was, he says, you know, when they came to church, you would have never, ever known what their house was like based on what they looked like at church. They presented well. They looked good. Their kids were all clean and well-dressed and obedient. And yet their house was unlivable. The thought I had as I was talking to that pastor was, first, How have you had somebody in your church for five years and no one's ever been to their house? Like no one's ever visited them. I don't understand that. But I also realized how deeply ingrained it is in all of us to present well and to hide the unseemly. And I bring this up because pastors and elders are not exempt from these sorts of temptations or these sorts of sins and these sorts of failures. And that's what's being...

under the microscope or called up for examination is the condition of a man's home. What is the condition of his home? How does he manage it? You would understand that if one of your elders had chickens living in his cupboards, you would say, how is he going to take care of the church? Something is disconnected in his brain. Something's broken. He's not fit. Look at what it means for a man to manage his own household well. I want you to think not just of elders and go, well, they're the only ones who have to manage their own household well. As I've said in previous weeks, I want to reiterate to you, these are things that are to be examined in the men who keep watch over your soul, but these are things that all men should aspire to, should seek to emulate to do. Men shouldn't be thinking, well, I'm not an elder, so I don't have to look after my house in the same way that the elder does. That would be a silly thing to say.

A wrong application. So what does it mean for a man to manage his own household well? Well, the first thing I want to tell you is that this is something men have to learn. Men don't come out knowing how to manage their own households well. They don't know what to do. How many of you, if your hot water heater was broken, would know how to fix it? Some of you would. Some of you wouldn't. How long can your family go without hot water before it's a failure, like you're mismanaging something? Or the washer breaks. Men have to learn how to take care of their house. They have to learn how to take care of their families. And it's not something that comes naturally to all men. And a man is supposed to manage his house well, meaning he shouldn't have chickens living in his cupboards. And he shouldn't have cars that leak gasoline or things like that. These are examples that I've heard of men and how they've kept their homes.

He has to manage it well. So there's two aspects of management. One is managing the stuff, and one is managing the people. I've mentioned briefly managing the stuff. A man ought to keep his house in good functioning order and care. He ought to maintain his things. But he also has to learn how to manage the people in his house. So is managing people an easy thing or an enjoyable thing? How many of you like managing people? Little kids? You moms, you like managing little kids? Easy, come naturally. Sometimes, right, when they first get up from their nap and then it's easy. Not when they're sick and it's 2 a.m. About managing two or three or four of them. What about you men in your workplace? Do you like managing people? How's it go, Taylor? At Belltire, you like managing them? You do like managing them because you can fire them? There's this sense in which the house is a different sort of management when it comes to people than any other place.

Out in the world, in terms of management, you can get rid of people who are trouble, but in your home you can't. You can't fire your wife. You can't fire your children. And that makes it very difficult. It makes it harder to manage well in that environment. And you might think, well, why would a man ever want to fire his wife? And I say, are you married? Do you not know? Is it not hard? Is there never a point where the man says, I don't know what to do, and you're driving me crazy? He doesn't know how to manage it. He's trying to figure it out. She's upset or she cries or she's got unreasonable expectations, he thinks, or what have you. He doesn't know what to do, and yet he's supposed to manage his house well, so what's he supposed to do in that situation? He's supposed to manage well. Well, what's that look like? Well, he doesn't know. When we sit in premarital counseling with couples and talk through these things, most of what we say to the men is, don't quit. You guys can't shut down. You've got to work through it.

Don't give up on your relationship. Keep working at it until there's resolution. And then you say to the man, you talk about crying or you talk about feelings or emotions. And the woman's sitting there going, oh, yeah, those are terrible things. And the man's sitting there going, yeah, I don't know what to do with those either. And then I have to say to him, you're not going to make much progress if that's how you think of these things. Managing those sorts of difficulties is not just suppressing them and saying, go away with those. Take those and put them away and then come talk to me like a reasonable person.

Men have to learn how to manage their homes. They have to learn how to manage their wives and their children, and they can't do it by ignoring them or by firing them. They have to give their hearts and their time and their energy to them. And if you're a man who has this work in front of you, it's hard work. It doesn't come naturally to you to know how to love and care for your wife, to know how to nurture and raise up and discipline your children, to train them. It is something you have to learn. And why is it important that he learn how to manage these things well? Well, because other people are going to follow him. They're going to follow his example, whether he wants them to or not. Other people will look and they will see and they'll say, oh, that's how you're supposed to do it. That's how he does it. It must be okay. And so he has to do it well because other people are watching. And so the question of household management is really a question of how a man exercises authority. How does he wield his authority?

authority in his home? How does he go about managing? There are basically two ways men manage households. They either manage them that are bad. There's a third good way. But the bad ways are, the two ditches are, one, he's just a tyrant. And he just wears his wife out to where she just, and his kids, and everyone just walks on eggshells and they're just afraid of dad. Because dad's unpredictable. Dad's angry. Dad's... who knows what dad's going to do. And so everyone just kind of walks on eggshells around him. And that's how he leads his house. That's how he manages it. That's how he keeps trouble from rising up, from springing up. And it doesn't produce good fruit. It's not managing his household well. The other thing men will do is they will try to, they'll trust their wife to make all of the decisions and expect that their job is just to do what their wife says. That their wife's actually the one who tells them how to manage their house well. They become their wife's errand boy.

And so they abdicate, and they say, well, what do you think, honey? What do you think, honey? Well, we'll just do what you think, honey. And I'm not opposed to husbands asking their wives for their help. They need their wives' help, and yet there is a way to do it that's not good, that's an abandonment, an abdication of his responsibility to manage. So how does a man exercise authority? What does he do when his wife disagrees with him? What does he do when his kid brings home a bad grade? What does he do when they don't clean their room or do their chores? How does he handle it? Well, it's fair to ask, how would you know how he handles it?

If you were to take me as an example, how do you know how I handle those sorts of things? Do you? Can you? How can you know? And I could or tell you a certain part of the truth. Di says you're kids. And she's absolutely right. The passage says he must manage his own household while keeping his children under control with all dignity. And what you realize is that children are sort of the window into people's houses because children don't have the, they don't understand the rules of. as well as the parents do about how to hide. So they'll say things they shouldn't say, and they'll do things they shouldn't do, and they'll tell you what it's like. So how's a man supposed to manage his children? Well, he's supposed to keep them under control. Now, this is a million-dollar question. How do you keep your children under control? It's a hard, hard question to answer. How do you control them? And the reason it's a hard question is because how you control a 2-year-old is very different than how you control a 10-year-old, and are you even supposed to control an 18-year-old?

It changes. It grows. It shifts. But generally speaking, if a man wants to keep his children under control, if he wants to make them obey, how does he accomplish it, knowing that the stakes are high? And it's a question that we're all like, I don't know if I want to answer that, because we're asking a private, personal question. It really is a question. What do you do at home when no one is paying attention and no one is around? How do you keep your children under control? What do you expect of them, and how do you get them to do it? I don't know. I think I probably don't do what I should do. I think I'm probably severe. I think I don't, I just don't do it at all. I let them do what they want. I don't keep them under control. If someone were to ask you what are pastor's kids like, PKs, how many of you could have experience with it? PKs, MKs, right, pastor's kids, missionary kids, what are they like? Reza, what are they like? You have a look on your face, you have a thought, what are they like? Perfect, until they're not, right? Usually sometime in high school.

Like everything seems good and clean and everything's together and all of a sudden, trouble. You ever wonder why that is? Why is that so common with pastor's kids, missionary kids? Well, I think it has a lot to do with this passage. That the man knows he's supposed to keep his kids under control and yet he doesn't know how to do it. And so with little children, you can use force of personality or you can use a bunch of rules or you can manipulate them or yell and threaten. And you can get a child to do what you want when they're little. But as they get older, those things become less and less effective. And so then they reach their teenage years or early adulthood, and all of a sudden they decide, I'm not going to do this anymore. I'm not going to keep living this lie. And they're going to demonstrate that they've not been controlled, that they are not under control.

And so the stakes are very high, and for pastors, their livelihood depends on their ability to keep their children under control. And that means the temptation to lie about it, to hide it, to manipulate the perception is very, very great. And you're supposed to look at these men and say, how do they manage their household? What are their children like? Do you have trouble making judgments about other people's children and what their behavior is like and what you think of them? I don't think we do. I think you look at them and you're just like, well, those are good kids. Or you look at them and you're like, well, those are bad kids.

Well, those are selfish kids. Well, those are proud kids. Well, those are helpful kids. And so the real question is how is a man supposed to manage his household well, keep his children under control? How is he supposed to produce obedience in them? It's something that every father worries about. Vanessa and I were just talking about this a few weeks ago with Joseph. He's about to turn 13, become a teenager. You're a teenager. You know your dad's worried about it. Do you know that? He's worried about the tent. I'm telling you, he's worried about it. He's going, I don't know. I don't know if what I've done, I don't know how I've prepared him. And he's still trying and still working at it. The parents are often scared about how their children are going to turn out, what they're going to be like, how they're going to behave, whether they're going to obey when the parents aren't around to enforce it. What are they going to do when they go to school? What are they going to do when they're at the retreat? What are they going to do when they go off to college? How are they going to behave?

And Paul doesn't tell us how they're supposed to do it. He doesn't say, well, if you do this, then your children will turn out and it will be all good and you don't have to worry about it. What he says is you're supposed to do it with all dignity. I asked my kids last night, I said, what is dignity? And they went, doing something well. They weren't really sure. But dignity is to do something with respect, to do something with being worthy of honor, to do something with, literally it means with all seriousness. The fathers are supposed to manage their house with all seriousness, which is different than with all severity. They're not supposed to grind their children into the ground and exasperate them. They're supposed to do it in a way that the children grow and they flourish and they mature, but they're supposed to be serious about it. So we all have opinions about people's children, about pastors' kids, and you all know what the temptation or the likelihood...

What pastor's kids are like? They're like this. They're perfect until they're not. They're hypocritical. They have a higher likelihood of walking away from the faith. So how do you assess a man's calling, his fitness for the office? How do you see if he manages his own household well? That's really the question that we have to answer. How do you make an assessment about a man's management? If you go to his house and it's a mess, do you say he's not fit? If you've got his kid in your youth group or your Sunday school class and he's just talkative and a troublemaker, what do you think of him? Is he fit to be a pastor? Is he fit to be an elder or a deacon? What I've found is that when it comes to management of someone's house, hard and fast rules aren't the best way to do it. They're not the most helpful. I think what you're looking for with a man managing his own household is a question of whether or not he does the work of discipling his children if he does it well,

the question of how his children will respond to it. At what point is a father responsible for how his child behaves? At what age is he doing something in spite of his father's instruction or as a result of it or lack of it? It's just a scary thing, and it's a difficult thing, and it's something that you'll learn about more as you go on. And so I think my encouragement, my exhortation to you is as you evaluate men, with regard to this, that you be humble about it. And I think it'll be easier for you as you have your own children to understand the difficulty of raising them, the difficulty of discipling them, that you have mercy on them, and that you come alongside them. I think one of the difficulties with pastor's children, with elder's children, is that they are expected to be perfect. And that the pastor, because he's the pastor, or the elder because he's the elder, doesn't need any help.

That since it's his job to help everyone else, that no one needs to help him because he knows how to do it all. And pastor's kids are normal kids with normal problems and normal troubles, and they need the same sort of help. I had Christian come up to me a few weeks ago talking about one of my kids at youth group, and he said, well, he was like this. And it wasn't a glowing report of my child. He was being disrespectful. He was being bossy. And what was my response? My response was thankfulness. a Christian. I said, thank you for letting me know. And thank you for telling him to stop. Thank you for helping me. And so I think that's one of the things you want to look for in terms of this qualification. How does the man manage his own household? How does he accept help? Or does he think he's got it all figured out? I think as the kids get older, you can ask them, what's your dad like at home? Ask his wife, what's he like at home? How's he discipline the kids? Does he train them? Does he disciple them?

Does he teach them? Does he pray with them? Does he admit when he's wrong? And the kids will be able to tell you. I can say from my own experience when I'm sitting in counseling and talking to young adults or even older people about what their parents were like, it's very clear that they know what their parents were like and what their parents' failures were. And so I think an important part of this is assessing the children but also going and talking to them and saying, what's daddy like? What's it like when he disciplines you? What's he do? Under what circumstances should a man... be taken out of ministry or out of the role of an overseer because of the condition of his children? Do you think that they, do you do realize there are times when men ought to be removed because of some sort of trouble there? I started out talking about a man having chickens living in his house. He wasn't an officer in the church. But are there things you look for in a man's child that might disqualify him? And they'd say, yeah, here's the pressure. And Titus

where Paul talks about this. He says that elders ought to have children who believe. And so it's a funny thing to talk about because it's something that every parent would desire. It's not something that only pastors and elders would want. If I were to say, oh, you're not a pastor or an elder, do you want your children to believe? Do you expect to have children to believe? Is that what your goal is? And you'd all say, yes, my goal is to have my children believe. And I say, good. That's the pastor's desire and that's the pastor's goal. That's the elder's ambition as well. He wants his children to believe. He wants them to love God. So what happens if one of his children doesn't? If they struggle? Should he be disqualified? There are some who would say yes. Just straight away, yes. If a man's child falters, if he strays, if he stumbles, he should be disqualified. And in some situations that may be true.

But I think what you want to look at when you're assessing this is you want to look at the broader trajectory and the bigger picture of the home. You want to look at the home and the environment that the child was raised in because it's been my experience when I've looked at pastors and elders' families that some of them have children who do well and some of those same families have children that don't do well, sort of like Jacob and Esau. And that's the difficulty and the hardship of having your family on display is that... Not every pastor's kid is a Christian and becomes a Christian or lives like a Christian without ever stumbling or falling or faltering. And so my encouragement to you would be to be gracious and discerning as you evaluate this sort of thing, as you think of a man's family. And then also to say, if you think that a leader has some problem in the way that he manages his house, that he's not keeping his children under control with all dignity, he's not doing those sorts of things, my encouragement would be first not to say, and you're disqualified. My encouragement would be...

Go talk to him. Go see what's going on. Go ask him. Say, hey, it seems like little Billy's a real troublemaker and a pill. Are you aware of that? Little Tommy never does his memory work and is disruptive in Sunday school. Is he like that at home? How can I help? And so to close, I just want to say to you, this is an evaluation you have to make. It's something you ought to keep track of. It's something that you shouldn't be ashamed of looking at when you look at a pastor's family or an elder's kids and you say, well, I don't know. I went to their house and it was a...

The goal is not for you to have to bury that and to say, no, I don't realize that. I don't think about that. I don't acknowledge that. What you ought to do is talk to them about it. Say, man, your house doesn't seem to be doing well. Your wife doesn't seem to be thriving or flourishing. Your children seem to be proud. What do you think about that? And see how he responds. And what you'll find is that the man will either say, he'll either acknowledge it and say, yeah, and we're working on it. And this is what we're doing. And would you pray and would you help? Or he'll get very defensive. And what I'd say to you is the man who gets very, very defensive about it is the sort of man who's probably not managing his household well and isn't fit for the office. You just can't have this expectation that your pastor's and elder's houses are going to be perfectly in order and that they're never going to have any sorts of troubles and that they won't need your help. We do need your help. I want your help. And I've been very appreciative for the help that you guys have given in loving my wife and loving my children and helping me.

grow as a father and as a husband and as a pastor. And so I want to see us to continue to provide that help for each other and that care for each other and that support for each other, even as we evaluate whether a man should be a pastor or an elder or a deacon. Deacons are actually required to do the same sorts of things. And so I want us to be gracious as we examine each other. I want us to care for each other's children, judgment on them and say, well, I just don't think he's fit. Help them and care for them. Help him not to lie.

Because there's a real temptation for pastors and elders to lie about those sorts of things, hide them just like there is for you. So help each other not to lie about it, not to wait until it's too late to have the problems exposed when the kids are older and when they've hardened their hearts.