An Overseer, Then, Must Be...#5

I often think when I say, tis the season, or think tis the season now, that we could easily say, tis the season of sickness, as we could say, tis the season with regard to Jesus. I know a number of you are not 100%, myself included. And yet the Lord's brought us here this morning to worship him, and we've come, and so let us give our whole hearts and minds to that now. Excuse me. This morning we're going to be finishing up. Paul's discussion of elders in 1 Timothy chapter 3. We're going to be focusing on the last two verses of that passage. And those verses address a man's spiritual maturity as well as his reputation. And I can tell you from my own experience, not that my experience is the gold standard of things, but I can tell you from my own experience that to see God raise men up to this work, is a glorious thing. It really is sweet because what you see is God's faithfulness to his people. That he gives them leaders to care for and to shepherd and to keep watch over them. And he promised when the Israelites went into the promised land that he would never leave them or forsake them. He told them to be courageous. And then again on the mountain, in the Great Commission, he tells them,

I'll never leave you or forsake you. And one of the ways that he doesn't leave us or forsake us is by giving us faithful men to keep watch over us. And so it's a sweet thing to see him raising men up. And so as we study this text and as we have been over the past couple of weeks, I hope it is exciting to you. And I hope that if you're a young man, you aspire to this sort of work in the Lord's time. It's a good work. This is what Scripture teaches us. So like I said, we'll be studying most of our time in the last two verses.

Would you please stand for the reading of God's Word from 1 Timothy 3, verses 1-7. 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. Now this might seem, we're going to pick up in verse 6, not a new convert.

This may seem like a pretty straightforward thing, but I don't think that it is for a couple of reasons. One, it's a negative command. It says what the man is not supposed to be. And so when you tell someone a negative command, you leave it to them to figure out what the positive requirement is. If we were talking about one of the Ten Commandments, do not, shall, you shall not, you may, you know. These are negative commands. And it's our work to figure out what do they positively require of us. You know, you shall not murder. Okay, well, I'm not supposed to murder. Well, what are you supposed to do instead? You can't positively not murder. So what are you supposed to do instead? Well, you're positively supposed to protect life. Well, it doesn't say that. It just says, don't commit murder.

And so it's left to us to figure out what the positive corollary is. And the same thing is true in this text. It says that the man must not be a new convert. And you say, okay, well, what's the positive of that? What is he supposed to be? And you say, well, he's supposed to be an old convert. But what is old and what is new? And what is it you're positively looking for in a man? Or what is it that... What is it about a new convert that disallows him from holding office? These are the questions we have to answer. And so to figure this out, I want to ask you, what is true of a new convert? What is it about new converts that disqualify them from being an elder? Well, you might be inclined to think age, right? If you're going to be an elder, age does have some role in it.

There is something to be said about if you had a 25-year-old man and you said he's an elder, the hat's a little big for his head. He doesn't quite fit yet because he's young. So does new convert mean young man? Well, maybe, perhaps, but what's young? I came to faith when I was 20. How old was I? Huh? 23? I'm in 2005. Yeah, 23, 24. Young man. Not long after that, within a couple of years, I was in the pastor's college. And one of the men down there, as I was being trained, one of the refrains that he would always say to me when he'd introduce me to perfect strangers is he'd say, Hi, this is Dave Abusar. I want you to meet him. He's a new Christian. And he still, to this day, says that about me. And I'm almost 40. And I've been a Christian for 15 years or so. And I still get the introduction. And he's a new Christian.

And you wonder, well, why did he say that? Why would he say that? Was it just some jab, just some poke? Was he just trying to get my goat? I don't think he was. I think he knew that I aspired to the office and was in pursuit of it for not long after I was, within a couple of years of becoming a Christian, I was in the pastor's college. And I think what he was doing was trying to make sure that I wasn't a new convert. And so he just poked at me, and he just said, What he was saying to me was, make sure you're not a new convert. Make sure you're not a new convert. Because if you are, you can't be an officer. You can't be an elder. And we would always laugh about it. But there was something in there that was helpful to me. So what's generally true of new converts? Well, positively, they tend to be very excited. This is something you love about a new convert, someone who's just come to faith. They've got zeal. But their zeal is akin to a charcoal fire that...

has lighter fluid all over it that you just threw a match into. Lots of fire, lots of heat, not very useful. You can't cook over that kind of a fire, right? What does that fire need to become? Well, you would much rather cook over white hot coals. You may not even see a flame, but now you know you can cook because this fire is no longer new, but it's gotten older. And so while new converts tend to be zealous, and there's something admirable about that, it's often like a booster shot to older, kind of curmudgeonly, stuck-in-our-way Christians when they're like, well, what about these people? Are you talking? It's an encouragement to us. It's a little bit of lighter fluid on our fire, if you will. But what's good about them is also, I think, what disqualifies them from holding office, and it's that they lack maturity.

They lack spiritual maturity. Young men and young converts will tend toward generally, and if you've been around young men, you'll know this to be true, they tend toward extremism in whatever they do, and they tend to be unstable or unreliable. They want to do everything. They think they've got the world by the tail and they're going to do everything, but they have a real hard time keeping their word, finishing what they start, and they lack some sort of Steadiness, yeah. And they lack a discretion when they're dealing with other people. They don't know how to deal with other people. Even though they're excited about Jesus, they don't know quite what to do with all that excitement. If we were to move outside of Christian faith and say, well, what are young men like with regard to politics? Well, they tend to be unreasonable, uninformed of history, and very, very sure that they're right.

And anyone who's older just kind of looks at them and goes, you know what you need? You need some weight on your back so that you can't think that you know everything under the world. You need some failures. You need some scars. It'll slow you down and it would be good. They tend to be bad at conflict resolution. Young men don't know how to get into conflicts. It sort of goes with the territory, but they don't know how to resolve it. So they end up with broken relationships. They end up with trouble with people. Do you guys see this is generally true of young men? If you have daughters and they want to get married, you think, I don't know that I want her to marry a man like that, like you're describing. And they say, I know, because you understand what young men are like. They lack discernment. They don't have a sense of proportion. Now, if all these things are true of young men, those same things are going to be true of men who are new converts. They don't tend to come to faith in Jesus and present themselves as,

perfectly reasonable and spiritually mature, especially if they're young. And so when Paul says that you don't want a new convert to be an elder, an officer, what he's saying is you don't want someone who's spiritually immature. So does that mean older men who come to faith are immediately ready for office? Nope. Nope. Because they may have some life experience and some maturity that way. but they lack spiritual maturity. They have their way of resolving conflict, but that doesn't mean it's godly. And it may well be that they don't know scripture very well, that they've come to love Jesus, but they don't know all of what the Bible says, and yet they formed all kinds of opinions and ways of doing things that are unbiblical. And you don't want that kind of man leading in the church, because he's not mature. Now, you remember I said that new converts tend to be pretty zealous. They tend to be pretty excited about about Jesus and they want to talk to people about it. They're not worried about what someone's going to think of them. If they say, you need to come to church, man, you need to stop living with your girlfriend, you need to get off your drugs, you need to whatever it is, they don't mind saying that. They're happy to say that because they go, there's life here. They have all kinds of desire. One of the things that they will also tend to do is be critical of church leadership pretty quickly, pretty straight away. They'll have opinions about why isn't everybody doing what they need to do. Not a good thing.

Not a good thing, because there's a certain breadth of understanding that they lack. They can be very myopic. I'm on this pastor's forum, this pastor's group on Facebook, and there's often discussions on there about leaders and elders. And they're usually pastors in these small Baptist churches, and they don't have any men fit to be officers. And so they ask questions about it, and they say, well, what are we supposed to do? Put a man in who doesn't really want to be an elder. Because we need an elder. An elder. Just one. We need one. And we've only got a dozen men, and this guy is the closest we've got. But he doesn't want to be an elder. He doesn't want to lead. That's different than a new convert. New converts want to lead. They think they understand everything. How everything should go.

They want to be leaders. And you know what the interesting thing is in this passage is that it says in verse 1 that if any man aspires to the office, it's a fine work he desires to do. It means that desire is good. And yet, desire has to be moderated by maturity. Desire is not sufficient. Just because you want to be a leader doesn't mean you get to be a leader. And that's often a very hard pill for young men to swallow. And until they learn to take that medicine, that they're young, in their faith and that there's things they don't understand and that they need to come to understand, I would call them a new convert. You say, well, how long is a man a new convert? And I say, well, it sort of depends on the discipleship he's undergoing. You could have a man go pretty quickly from being a new convert to being mature if he's got the will to do it and men around him to teach him. Or you could have a man who's very spiritually immature who's been a Christian for decades.

Who has the spiritual maturity of this new guy who's just come through the door. And so what you're looking for is spiritual maturity. And it can't give you an exact, well, it's two years. Well, it's five years. Well, it's ten years. Well, it's six months. What you're looking for is spiritual maturity. Is the man mature? Does he have some perspective? Will he work with people or is he just a blowhard? Does he do what he says he's going to do? Desire can't overcome that. His desire cannot overcome that. His desire can become a hindrance to it. Charisma also cannot overcome that. There are many men who are good leaders. People like to get behind them. They're engaging. They're exciting. You just like listening to them. You like following them. They just are those types of men. That doesn't mean that they're spiritually mature. And even if a man is a good leader in society, That doesn't mean he's spiritually mature and ought to be a leader in the church. Often what I find and have found is that the more successful men are in society, the harder time they have working with other people. Because they've worked hard, they've succeeded, they've done well. And I'm not talking about our elders. I'm talking about elders I've seen and other pastors I've talked to.

The men in their congregations who have demonstrated leadership in the world just presume that they can be leaders in the church. And it's dangerous for the church to just welcome them in if they're not spiritually mature. Because the church isn't a business. And it's not run like a business. And it has different priorities than a business does. In fact, the church ends up doing things that are bad for business. Like discipline. Discipline is bad for business. It can be anyway. Generally, if you discipline somebody, there's questions going to arise as to whether they're going to stay or not. And if they don't stay, then their money doesn't stay. And what you don't want is an elder who processes discipline like that, because that's a spiritually immature way to process it. It's a reality you should be aware of, but it's not the determining factor. So you want a man who's spiritually mature. His desire doesn't overcome spiritual immaturity. His personality.

He doesn't overcome spiritual immaturity. He has to be spiritually mature. So what does it mean to be spiritually mature? Well, I think generally it means that he has to be theologically mature. Now, I can say that, and some of you might think, oh, he has to know the Bible really, really, really, really well. And yes, that is sort of what I mean, but that's not really all I mean. There's a lot more to theological maturity than having all of your theological ducks in a row. There are many men who have all their theological ducks in a row and are not mature. In fact, all of their theological ducks in a row are what make them immature. They have no idea how to deal with other people or lead other people or what to do in conflict and they lack discernment. And yet, spiritual maturity is very closely related to theological maturity. A man has to have a good grasp of what the Bible actually teaches and he has to be able, at some level,

To communicate it to other people in a way that's understandable. Now, teaching men theology, elders learning theology, even to the point that they could explain it to somebody else. If I said, hey, Abram, can you explain the sovereignty of God to J.C.? Abram could do it. But suppose Abram couldn't do it. Suppose he said, no, I came up and... I never believed in the sovereignty of God. And this is just new on the horizon for Abram. And he's learning about the sovereignty of God. Teaching him about the sovereignty of God in such a way that he could communicate it to somebody else is the easy part. Which is to say, gaining theological knowledge only requires time and will. You've got to be willing to spend the time to learn it. And you have to have the desire to do it. You'll learn it. We can teach you how it fits together. So what's the hard part?

If getting a man to be able to teach, to understand in such a way that he can teach isn't the hard part, what's the hard part? Well, the hard part is how he teaches. What I find with young men is that they tend to be very bad teachers. You'd all agree? And it may be that they understand something and that they can explain it, but their manner and their affect is atrocious. And nobody wants to listen to them. There's just a bite to everything they say and the way they do. They're just aggressive. So how ought they to teach? How ought we to teach? What does Scripture teach us, show us, and call us to with regard to their manner of teaching? Well, it's this. It's persuasion. It's being persuasive. You can't be persuasive with a club. That's not a persuasive tool. I remember talking to Dan. He was changing the brakes on his truck.

week or two before you got your arm in a cast, two weeks ago about. And he says, I'm changing the brakes on my truck. He's got bolts on the back. They're stuck. He can't get them off. So as we're talking, I said, well, did you, you know, some of you understand this. I said, well, did you try a breaker bar? You know, you've got the normal wrench, socket head, and then there's a bigger one. And then there's a little bigger one. And then, for those of you who really know, there's the pipe that you put on the end. So you end up with this big lever. Now, what is the danger? You'll snap it, right? You decide that thing's stuck real good, and you just lean on it and lean on it and lean on it and push it. Well, Dan knows that there's danger to that. It's not that he's not capable of getting a pipe long enough to turn the bolt.

It's that Dan's probably, I would guess, learned the hard way that you don't really want a pipe much longer than two feet. Because if you do, you're going to have a bigger problem than a seized up bolt. You're going to have a broken off bolt. And that's a worse problem to resolve. So how's Dan supposed to get the bolt out? Well, a young man's going to say, get me a longer pipe. And what Dan's going to say is, get me the PB blaster or some sort of lubricant, some sort of penetrating oil. And he's going to spray it on there. And then what's he going to do? Wait.

He's going to walk away from it. He's going to go back every couple of hours and he's going to spray it some more and he's going to walk away from it. All the while his truck's out of commission and he can't use it. So what is he doing? He's persuading that bolt to come out. You understand? He's persuading it because he knows the danger. And so we're talking and there's only one other thing besides penetrating oil that you can use and it's heat. I said, you can get a torch. You know, he knows this. We're just talking through it. I said, well, have you tried heat? Have you tried getting a torch and warming everything up? Sometimes that'll break it loose. And he says, no, not yet. Did you get it out? Did you break it off? No. The hole. Okay. All right. So this is a good example. So he ends up having to buy. I didn't know that. But instead of busting it off, I'm sure you were frustrated.

Instead of just giving in to his frustration and snapping the thing, he just went, well, I can't get this bolt off, so I'll get the bolt that holds this bolt on there, and we'll just replace the whole thing. That's the mark of a man who knows what he's doing when it comes to working on a car. He's persuading. He's trying. He tried everything he could. In the end, it didn't work. And that's the danger with persuasion, is that it doesn't always work. And young men always want things that work. And the things that a young man is willing to sacrifice so that he can win.

and be right, ought not to be sacrificed. This is something I've had to learn. Before I came up here, I worked on a farm, and the man I worked for is still fond of telling people, he says, you know, if you ever want Dave to do something, you're laughing because you know what I'm going to say. He said, you know, if Dave's going to come work for you, this is how you can figure out how much the project's going to cost. You figure out whatever the agreed payment is for whatever it is you ask Dave to do, just multiply it times three, and that's how much it'll cost you.

And she said, the first third is what you're going to pay him in money. The second third is what you're going to pay to feed him. And the third third is what you're going to pay to replace the things he breaks. He'll get it done, but he's going to break stuff along the way. And so I've had to learn myself what persuasion is, how to teach in a way that's persuasive, that's welcoming, that says, here's a thing you should want and desire because it's good. In Acts 18.4, Speaking of Paul, it says that he was reasoning in the synagogue every Sabbath and trying to persuade the Jews and the Greeks. Now, you just have to think for a minute about what it would have been like to go into the synagogue and try to persuade. It often happened that Paul was run out of the city on a rail, so persuasion wasn't the safest way or the most convenient.

Acts 26, 28, Agrippa replied to Paul. Paul's giving a defense. He's been arrested and he gives his defense. And Agrippa says to Paul, in a short time, you will persuade me to become a Christian. Acts 18, 23, when they had set a day for Paul, they came to him at his lodging in large numbers. And he was explaining to them by solemnly testifying about the kingdom of God and trying to persuade them concerning Jesus from both the law of Moses and from the prophets from morning until evening. And then Paul describing his own ministry in 2 Corinthians 5.11, he says this, Therefore, knowing the fear of the Lord, we persuade men, but we are made manifest to God, and I hope that we are made manifest also in your consciences, which is a petition. I hope that we have been made manifest in your consciences, which is him saying, I hope that by our conduct and our manner among you, you've come to love us and trust us. Give heed to what we say. This is not something young men, new converts know how to do.

They don't know how to persuade. They know how to break bolts with people, but they don't know how to persuade. They have to learn it. And some young men, it's like they come online theologically, and the passage that they latch onto, there's this phrase that every young man gets excited about. They want to proclaim. They want to refute. They want to argue. They want to destroy. Every speculation. And every lofty thing that's raised up against the law of God, what they want is they want their theological battering ram and they just want to come in and just wreak havoc. Because that's what we're supposed to do. We're supposed to destroy. And they're wrong. Write that foolish speculations and every lofty thing actually do need to be destroyed. But how would you destroy a bomb if you had to be the one doing it?

Bet you wouldn't take a baseball bat to it. Because you realize in that example, you realize the collateral damage of doing it poorly. Right? But young men don't realize the collateral damage of doing that spiritually with people. The other thing I'll tell you is that persuasion is not opposed to destroying. But young men tend to think of destroying as being free license for them to behave however comes naturally to them. And yet scripture tells them that what comes naturally to them is not good. Urge the young men to be sensible, be kind, be gentle. And so if a young man, a young convert, is still in the stage where he's looking for an opportunity where he can take off his gloves and just get down in the muck and fight and push and lead people, he's not fit. And whether he's a young man or whether he's an old man, if that's his demeanor with people, he's immature spiritually. He's not the man you want leading you.

Just a few verses before, it says an overseer must not be pugnacious, but gentle and peaceable. This is spiritual maturity, a man being able to take a punch from somebody and not punch back. New converts don't know how to do it, but mature ones do. They know when to fight and where to fight. I shouldn't say they know without fail, because that's not true. We all fail in many ways, but they have some sense that not every opportunity to get in a fight is one that should be taken. And so theological maturity is much more than simple understanding of biblical truth. It's knowing how and when to address people's sins and temptations, knowing how to deal with them, how to help them. Now it is worth noting that some people will generally be better at this than others. If you were to look at our elders and me, you would be able to think, who's better at this than others? Which is not to be any sort of a degradation of the men who aren't more naturally gifted at this stuff.

They have other gifts that the men who might be good at this are bad at. But some people are better at this than others. And the requirement here that they not be a new convert, that they not be pugnacious and sort of thing, is not a one-size-fits-all sort of thing. You're looking for a man who knows himself, who knows what he's good at, who knows what he's bad at, who's working on it, who's humble and who's teachable. That's what you want. This is what new converts have to learn, discretion and propriety. Now why is all of this so important? Why do I spend all of this time talking about it? Well, you might think it's because it's dangerous for the people, for the congregation. And that's true enough. It is dangerous for the people. But actually the reason given here is that it's a danger to the man. Not a new convert. Why? So that he will not become conceited and fall into the condemnation incurred by the devil. There's actually a danger not only to the people being led, but to the man himself. If you put him into office when he shouldn't be. You'll be doing a bad thing for him.

One time I used to work for a tree company, climbing trees, cutting trees down up in Chicago. And we hired this guy, and he didn't belong working for a tree company. And we knew in the first few days that he didn't belong working for a tree company. And when I say he didn't belong working for a tree company, what I mean was he was going to kill himself. Literally, quite actually, he was going to kill himself. Because he did not understand how dangerous what we were doing was. And the reason, he had had a part-time job. I don't remember all of the details of this man. But I remember he had had a part-time job. And he was sort of a bump on a log of a man. And his girlfriend got pregnant. And he needed a real job. He has no marketable skills, so he came to work for the tree company. We hired him. Now he wants to take care of his baby coming.

Right? That's a good thing. That's admirable. He needed a full-time job. He needed to make more money. That's good. But tree work was not his thing. And so I did my level best to get him fired. I said, I kept record of everything he did wrong. I wrote the reports. I wrote him up. I was doing everything I could to get him fired as soon as possible. And it's true that I didn't like him. Right? You normally do these things when you don't like people. And I didn't like him because he was... making my job harder. But there was something more than that. I knew he had a baby coming. And there was a point at which I was up in a tree, probably 30 or 40 feet up, you know, 50, 70 feet away from this chipper. And a chipper would eat any one of us and not even blink. You just go right on through it. And he's, we've got procedures to not have that happen to you. Like stay away from it. Don't put your hands near the wheels type stuff. Use a branch. I'm up in a tree. He's

50 feet away from me, and I can't do anything about him. He's on his hands and knees, on the chipper, pushing with his hand brush into the wheels. And his hands are six inches away from these wheels that are just going to grab him and suck him through. And we're in a residential neighborhood, and the chipper is loud. And I yelled loud enough that being in the back of the chipper, he heard me yelling at him. And those things run, you know, for those of you who know decibels, about 160 to 180 decibels. And I yelled loud enough for him to hear me with ear protection on. And I was very angry at him. And that was the final straw. I finally got him fired. When I told my boss what he had done, they finally fired him. Now, why did I do that? Because I didn't want him to die. And he was too stupid to work for a tree company. That's it. He was not fit for the work. And if I had allowed him to stay in that work, he would have died. I worked with men who died doing tree work.

It's dangerous work. He wasn't fit. And I did everything I could to get him out. And you know what? I hope he found a job doing something that his life wouldn't be in danger for him taking care of his baby. And the same sort of thing can happen to a man who goes into office who's not fit. You put him in real danger. Danger of what? Danger of becoming conceited. Young men tend to think that they know everything. And if you put them in office too soon and you give them a platform, you'll confirm them in their foolishness. Shouldn't be done. What I've found with men coming into office with regard to spiritual maturity is that there's an inverse correlation. Meaning that as one thing goes up, the other thing goes down. That there's an inverse correlation between a man's opinion of his fitness for office, whether he thinks he's fit for office. There's an inverse correlation between his opinion of himself and his actual fitness. Most men who think that they're ready to

to just get out there and take the world by storm and they got it all figured out, they're the least prepared. I often ask men when they get married, say, so are you ready to get married? The man who's like, oh yeah, I'm ready. Yeah, no, we got this. I think, well, we'll see you in about six months, maybe 12, because you're going to have a mess at that point because you don't have the foggiest idea what you're getting into. And the problem is you think you do. And what would be best for you is to say, Uh, yeah, I'm scared. I don't know what that's going to look like. I want to do it, and I want to do it well, and I realize I need to learn and grow. But I'm scared of it. Then I think, he has a chance. He'll still be in my office in six months or a year with his problems. But he'll be there saying, I knew this day was going to come, and he'll be ready to listen. You know, the meat tenderizer of life will have done him good.

The same is true of men who come into office. Men who think, well, I aspire to be an officer and I just can't wait until the day you all realize that I'd be a good one. You'll never be an officer in this church if you think that. That's promise. I will not ever have you as an officer. Our elders will spit you out of our mouth if that's what you think of yourself. On the other hand, when we go to men and say, hey, we've been talking, we being the elders, and we've been talking about you being an elder or you being a deacon. If the man goes, what?

You, huh? We're headed the right direction. Honestly. And it's not because he's actually unfit. It's because he has some knowledge of himself and he knows that there's work ahead of him that he's not capable of in and of himself. Which means he's ready to grow. He has some maturity about him. Scripture says, let him who thinks he stands take heed lest he fall. If you think that the men who go into office are just chomping at the bit and saying, you need me as an elder. Let him who thinks he's ready to be an elder take heed that he not become conceited and fall into the condemnation incurred by the devil because those are the terms of him being an officer. Those are the dangers if he's unfit. And it's the job of the first of the...

current elders and then also of the congregation to make a judgment about whether that man's going to be able to handle it. Because one of the things I always tell men when they come into office, whether they're elders or deacons or whether they're going to be a pastor or they're going to go plant the churches, I say, if you think Satan's after you now, just wait until you start this work. It will get worse. And they're like, well, what do you mean? I don't know how to quantify that in my head. And I said, I don't either, but I can tell you the truth. It will be harder. It will be more intense.

Your temptations will be stronger than they were before, to sin and to despair and all of the rest. Whatever it is, it'll be harder. Not constantly necessarily every single day, but Satan will go after the leaders. And if you want to be a leader in the church, you're signing up for greater difficulty. You want an overseer who says the sort of thing that Isaiah said in chapter 6 when the Lord came to him. He says, woe is me for I am ruined. Because I'm a man of unclean lips and I live among a people of unclean lips, for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts. Isaiah knows who he is and he knows what he is. And he says, far away from me, Lord, for I see what kind of man I am. And I see your holiness. But that passage goes on. And it says, then one of the seraphim, one of the angels, flew to me. Isaiah is speaking. He flew to me with a burning coal in his hand. And he'd taken it from the altar with the tongs and he touched my mouth with it. And he said, behold.

This has touched your lips, and your iniquity is taken away, and your sins are forgiven. Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? And then I said, Here I am. Send me, Lord. That's the kind of man you want. That's spiritual maturity. That's not a new convert. Elders rule because of what God's done for them. They take up the work that he gives them by faith. This is the spiritual maturity you want, and it is the best defense that that man can have against the attacks that he's going to face. I can give you an example of what I think of when this has gone wrong. I think Joshua Harris is a perfect example of this going wrong. He was C.J. Mahaney's prodigy, coming up underneath him, wrote a book that's pretty good, pretty helpful. I kissed dating goodbye. He saw some problems, said, we need to stop this, all this fornication, all of this.

never getting married. This is not Christian. This is not good. So he writes a book and the whole Christian world's like, yes, we're all for it. It's good. But where is he now? He's renounced the faith. He's left his wife. Why? I think because he lacks spiritual maturity. And one of the dangers that you'll face with men is, remember I said earlier, I talked about charisma? The men that just people flock to and you think, well, that's the kind of leader we need. I just want you to think that that's what the Israelites said. We want a king like the nations. You want someone whose people love and they flock to him and he's handsome and he's well-spoken and all of the rest. Be careful that you don't confirm him in his conceit. Be careful that he's willing to be disciplined, that he's willing to be told no and to learn. Another way of saying is that men of great potential are often best served by being held in reserve until they prove that they're mature.

that they not be allowed into the limelight before they're able to withstand its pressures. And with regard to Joshua Harris, if it was two years ago, how many of us wouldn't have said, I hope my son turns out like him. But none of us would say it today. So not a new convert, not a spiritually immature man. Proven spiritual maturity is the benchmark for eldership. Not what you will do, what you already have done, what you've already demonstrated. Now, I want to move on to a man of good reputation. When you're looking for a man with good reputation with those outside of the work, what you're looking at is what this man's character and his work history is like before he's an elder. Every one of us has a reputation, right? If you knew a man who, over the course of, let's say, 10 years, his average tenure at a job is a year and a half, what would you think? There's probably something wrong.

I grant that there are fields where that may be normal. If he's a salesman, salesmen tend to move around a little more. But if you find out he worked at Starbucks, and then he worked at Walmart, and then he worked at Amazon, and there's all these different types of jobs, and he lasted about a year and a half wherever he went. You'd think, I probably wouldn't want to hire that guy. Would you want to hire that guy? No. Because there's something about him, his reputation. And you can imagine if you went and talked to his former employees and employers and coworkers, they'd be like, well, this was Bill's problem. And so when you're looking for a man with a good reputation outside of the work, you really are looking for a good reputation outside of the church. You're looking to see what people think of him. Is he a man who keeps his word? Is he a man who's been fair with others? Has he been generous and merciful? Is he honest?

Has he been all of those things already before people were watching him? Was he those things? My kids and I were playing Monopoly yesterday. And none of us like to pay with $1 bills. It's just a hassle. So we always pay with as many $1 bills as we can, right? And so there came a time where one of the boys overpaid by $1. And the other son had to decide if he was going to give the dollar back or not. And he says, well, he gave it to me. He thought he paid me the right amount. And I said, son, this is an old as the hills ethical question. And here's the really simple answer to it. Just put yourself in the other man's shoes and decide what he would like you to do. And then do that. That will gain you a good reputation. If someone overpays you, it would be good for you to say, you overpaid me. Here's the money that you overpaid me.

Because you'd be crawling up the walls if you accidentally overpaid somebody and they did the same thing to you. Oh, well, I mean, you should have caught that. You shouldn't have paid me that much. Mine now. That's a sure way to not have a good reputation, to be untrustworthy. So you're looking for a man who's kept his word. He's been fair. He's been generous. He's honest. The funny thing is we would do this. Maybe it's not funny. The true thing is that we do this before we hire companies to come into our homes. Who hires a company without getting a review first? You just don't do it. You go on Google and you look at their Google reviews. You go to the Better Business Bureau and you see what their rating is. You are looking around to see what their reputation is because they're about to come into your house and do work for you. You want to know that they have a good reputation, right? That's all that's being required here of your elders. Make sure they have a good reputation with those outside the church. Make sure they're not hypocrites.

If you don't have a good reputation already, you don't want them to be leaders in the church making their failures our failures. If their reputation is ignored or it's unknown, the church will end up paying the price for making that man an elder. Finally, the last thing you want is to put some man in office who, if the world found out that that man was an elder, would go, Huh? You got him? You trust him? You don't want that kind of man. Now, a word about reputations. Not every man that's an elder will have a good reputation with the world. And so you actually have to be discerning about if he has a bad reputation, why he has a bad reputation. Because if he has a bad reputation for Christ's sake, then he's a good man and you want him. Peter says in 1 Peter 3, 15 and 16, he says, keep a good conscience so that the thing in which you are slandered, those who revile your good behavior in Christ will be put to shame.

Right? They're reviling him. They hate him. They can't stand him. But keep a good conscience so that when they spit you out of their mouth, when the world says, about the man, they'll be put to shame. Because your good behavior is evident to everyone. For it is better, if God should will it so, that you suffer for doing what is right rather than for doing what is wrong. And so it is true that sometimes you're going to have men of bad reputation in the world's eyes. And that's their brand mark of Jesus. And we ought to honor it and not say, well, you didn't mind your P's and Q's in the world. You aren't going to come into leadership here. You don't want safe men as elders. You don't want men who are afraid of conflict to be the ones who keep watch over your soul because Satan's a roaring lion looking to devour you. And it would be good to have men who aren't afraid of that conflict. So he might have a bad reputation in the world because he's been doing that work already in the world.

If you put a man with a bad reputation into office, you will be confirming him and hardening him in his sin, whatever it is. You'll be putting a church stamp on it saying, yep, you're good just as you are. When what should be being said to him is, you can't even figure it out in the world. You can't be a leader in here. You remember at the very beginning of this, I said, you want the very best men to be the leaders in the church. You don't want every one of your elders to have a story of how they completely ruined everything in their life. And they've got nothing to say.

other than how terrible they are and how bad they've messed it up. It is true that that will be the case with them. But you want men who've demonstrated and proven that they love God and that they heed his word, that they know it and they keep it. And you can see that in their life outside of the church. So this is elders. Next week we'll move on, talk about deacons. A lot of overlap in terms of what's required of them. We're not going to go through all the same exact stuff again. but this is what you want in the leadership of the church. And here, if you have questions about any of these things, and you say, well, I think that Dave this or Dave that, you're welcome to ask. You don't want to ask me, you're welcome to ask one of the elders. We're not perfect about it, but we do have a principle of not covering over and hiding and lying. So if you have questions or you have concerns, don't hesitate to ask.

And to make them known. The work that the elders of this church set out to do is a hard work. But they do give themselves to it. And they're a delight to work with. And I know I'm not saying all that. I was thinking about this and I thought, should I say that? And I thought, well, if I say it, they're just going to feel like I'm patronizing them. And the truth is, I'm not. There are things about you guys that drive me nuts. And there are things about me that drive you nuts. And you guys can all know that all of your elders are just men who get irritated with each other just the same as you do. But they're faithful men who fear God. They're good men. And it's a good thing to aspire to be men like them. Let's pray.