First Timothy lesson 15 cont.

Okay, we are in 1 Timothy, and this is lesson 15, which covers the beginning of chapter, is it chapter 2 or 3? It's chapter 3. It's 3, yeah. 3. We're set in cell on verse three of chapter three, I believe. So this class is going to go through the first three verses, and it seems like we're going slow, but there's so much information here for us and for the body of believers to get an arms around so we understand how you decide or how you pick overseers and what their qualifications need to be. So I'll read the verses and then we'll get going.

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, and free from the love of money." So, interesting qualifications. I think those qualifications would fit for most mature believers because it's the life of the Lord Jesus that's really being manifested in these leaders. So, I think the one thing we did, we did verse one, we're now in verse two, an overseer then must be above reproach, the husband of one wife, I take that back, we're past that.

One thing I wanted to mention from last week, when it says able to teach, does that mean that just you're able to stand up in front of somebody and read the scriptures and say that's what it means? Is it more than that? Do you have to be skilled at the job of teaching? What do you think? Because all of us, to some degree, are teachers. We all answer questions. We all find ourselves in conversations where people need to be educated about the things of God's Word, which puts us all in a position to be in a teacher.

But when you're talking about an overseer, how skilled does he have to be? And the second part of that question is, if someone shows up at your church and they're a high school teacher, does that qualify them to teach God's Word? No, it doesn't. They can be a professional teacher, but there's a skill required, I think, in teaching God's Word.

And you learn that. It's a learned behavior. One of the things I'm so thankful for over the last 30 years are the guys that were here ahead of me that taught me how to do this. gave me the resources on how to look things up. I'm not a Greek scholar, but I can look up. I know enough Greek to look it up. I can diagram a sentence. I can see where the words go. I know what the verb endings are. I can conjugate the nouns.

It takes me a while to do it, but I have that skill only because I've done it a hundred times or a thousand times or whatever. Yeah, it does. It does. And you develop a methodology by which your goal is to be as clear and precise, and you find out pretty quickly that your opinion is not what is needed. because a lot of times you have opinions about what you think God's word says, and when you dig into it and you find out, oh, whoops, it didn't say what I thought it said, or it said a lot more than I thought it said.

A really good example is the word if. In Greek, it's a really interesting word, because it can either mean if, from the standpoint that if A happens, then B will happen, or it can mean since. Since A happened, B will happen. And you have to be able to figure out what if is it. Is it the if of certainty? Is it the if of uncertainty?

Little things like that that you learn, and that's the skill I'm talking about. And you'll find that most of the teachers here are actually learning as they go along. That's why you find very little topical teaching here. Mostly it's scripture-based. Because that's really what we're about, is to find out what God has to say.

So, the word is didakithon, not merely to give teaching, but be able and skilled in it, All my teach to whom the Spirit imparted the gift but still skill in teaching was the especial office of the minister of whom would fall the ordinary duty of instructing of believers and refutation of gainsayers.

That's gainsayers are people that challenge you who don't have their act together, it's all their opinion. One who contradicts or denies what is alleged, an opposer. That's what a gainsayer is. You all have those in your life. If you say it's white, they're going to say it's black. Or maybe it's gray. But it isn't going to be what you said it is. So, um...

That's what the skilled teacher is about. This word means that he's, it's really, one of the guys I read said, it's really a moral quality. And that person has a willingness to teach. Every opportunity that he has to teach, he teaches. You don't ever have to think, I wonder if he will or not. He will.

You know? So that's part of, and in a lot of cases, the deacons ought to be able to teach, too. They may not have as much a willingness as an overseer does, but they should be skilled in God's Word, okay? Any questions about that? Yeah, Philip is a deacon. We saw him teaching the Word. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I just kind of came to mind here.

I mean, you talk about the fact that we all are teachers, and I think we see it. I mean, anyone who's had kids, I mean, we homeschool, and sometimes people say, oh, I could never teach my kids. And we always say, oh, you know, you taught them 99% of the most important things they'll ever know by the time before they even went to school. But they're five years old. That's right. No, that's exactly right. Yeah, I think we all teach. when we care about someone and we have something that they need to know, it's very natural to teach.

You know, Miles Stanford used to have a great saying. He would say, if you asked him, you know, why, and I did, I called him one day and said, Miles, I need to, why am I not progressing faster? in this Christian life. And his answer was, it takes the Lord a long time to teach one the truth. And then it takes him twice as long to teach you how and when to give it to somebody else.

But then the last thing he said, when you're ready, the woods will be full of them, meaning they'll come to you. Because they'll know. Because you'll be ready, and so will they. Well, I love that because it puts all of the onus on the Holy Spirit himself. He's the one that makes you ready, makes you skilled, gets you qualified. He's also working with the person who's gonna come out of the woodwork next month and ask you a question.

And as you grow spiritually as a teacher, you begin, sometimes you don't answer the questions because you know it's not, The right question, maybe, to put it that way. Does that make sense? Okay. Yeah, the way that I've thought about it is, you've got to be willing, you've got to be ready, you've got to know the Lord intimately and personally on the matter, and when those hungry hearts show up, that's where the Holy Spirit utilize as a teacher the most. Otherwise, I remember getting up in front of my college Baptist church and doing the very best I could, and I had no idea of really what I was saying. I just wanted to do it.

And that's a different thing than what the Lord is talking about here. And it takes a person a long time to find the end of themselves in terms of, because pride can get in the way and teaching can become a very It could be very scholarly, it could be very overly studied, but not appropriate to the person or persons that are hungry in that particular case. And that takes the work of the Lord. That's not something that... Yeah. And you understand, I think we see it around here. in a small body like this, look how many teachers God has developed here and continues to develop them as time goes on.

Who knows what he's got in mind for them. It may just be for a conversation that that person is gonna have in the future with one other soul. You don't know. Or maybe you're gonna be speaking to thousands, who knows? But God is getting you ready, you know, for the next event. So that, you know, when you stop and think about how your life goes, everything you do, if you understand that your whole existence is based on glorifying God in your life, then you'll pay attention, not because you have to, you just will.

Well, am I doing this or am I doing that? Does that glorify God? Am I standing up in front of these people? Does it glorify God or does it glorify Mike? And you can tell. You can tell a guy who stands up in front of a crowd and it's all about his own glory.

It's not about the Lord at all. All right, let's get to the real serious problem then. Okay verse 3 not addicted to wine or Pugnacious, but general peaceable free from the love of money now My question was does this mean that an elder should be a teetotaler?

What do you think Again, the answer is based on the definition of the words free from wine Or not addicted to wine And here's what I mean. Not given to much wine is me paronion. The noun is made up of para, which means besides, beside, and onion, which means wine. In compound, it means one who sits long at his wine. So, nature is addictive by principle and practice. I think sin nature is addictive in practice and principle. The old saying, a man takes a drink, a drink takes a drink, a drink takes a man.

You can use that with anything, money, or whatever. Yeah. So, no one's willing to say yes or no, whether an elder should not drink any alcohol at any time. I can say it. I don't think that this verse prohibits wine in substance, it talks about the freely partaking, the word pugnacious, but gentle, peaceable.

Alcohol makes you angry at some point, quarrelsome. It creates problems, especially with the marriage, and in this case, as an elder, if you become quarrelsome over your wine, you sit too long with it, you get a little arrogant, and you start talking things that are not driven by the spirit, but driven by, I think what Mike said, more by the sin nature. There's a real warning here, right? To be careful, because it can produce whirls.

It can create a problem for an overseer in that case. In the ancient world, there wasn't water filtration systems, and you couldn't go to 7-Eleven and get a Coke. There was no such thing, so wine was something that people drank sometimes. It wasn't even grape juice, it wasn't even fermented, but most of the time we're talking about fermented.

And so, I'll give you a personal example. When I was over the first four or five years of my Christian life, I never thought about, I drank a little bit, but I never thought about that it was an obstacle. And it's always been my habit at night when I get in bed, I like to read. And I'm always reading. what's coming up next, like read First Timothy or Ephesians or whatever I'm working on. So one night, I think we'd gone to a Christmas party for your office, I think, or somewhere, and I think I had two beers, and I had no idea it was affecting me, but I got in bed to read that night, and I just couldn't understand what I was reading. And it dawned on me, this is what I had done.

And if I wanted to spend time with the Lord, it couldn't be after I'd had a beer or two. So that took care of it. Because I didn't ever want to do, I want, the time spending with the Lord was so precious to me, I didn't want to ruin it because I had to have a beer. You see that? That doesn't mean I can't drink a glass of wine with my dinner. I come from an alcoholic family, so I know about how alcohol affects people and the addiction of it. It's not alcohol. It's the sin nature. You know? The same applies to anything else you have in your life, that you just can't set it down and walk away from it. Does it master me? Yeah. Something as simple as gardening, does it master me? You know?

If it does, you know, if you look at 1 Corinthians 10.31 says, whether then we eat or drink, Whatever we do, we do it all to glorify God as a guide in the case of a present-day indulgence in intoxicating liquors. Whatever you're doing, are you doing it to glorify God? Are you, if you're a businessman, are you doing what you do to glorify God? If you're, you know, working in a non-profit, why do you do what you do? Do I live my life to glorify God?

And I'm not saying that I have the rules and the principles of how that all goes together, but that's the motivation. Am I doing something so that God will look at me better than he does yesterday? Or am I living because he already has looked at me favorably? You know? A simple thing like, do I love you? I do, because he loved me. It's one of those things that some people will make a huge deal out of and it depends on the person. Do you agree? Maybe. It depends on the person.

Well, I know guys that have been smoking pot their whole life, their whole adult life. And I can see the change that's made in their personality and temperament over the years. They can't see it, but I can sure see it. you know and uh... and guys i knew that were heavy drinker sometimes and stop drinking and start smoking they had had something addictive going on all the time anymore discussion about that They're not free. They're not free.

Yeah. Do I have to do all that stuff, you know? When I signed up for the 5K, do I have to win? So, it's whatever controls you. You know, like Chester McCauley says, we already have a master. And that's a good way to look at it, I think. But in terms of an elder or an overseer, Wine or anything, a behavior like wine or anything like that, let's say you're, it's like, I think he's dead. Remember the guy that was the head of Campus Crusade? What was his name? Oh, okay. He was a famous Christian guy. Bill Bright. Bill Bright one time wrote a book on food addiction. You know how much Bill Bright weighed?

380. 380. And he's telling me how I should not eat so much food. It doesn't fit, you know. Yeah, right sure it could be and all you got to do is go talk to doc echo about Obesity if there's anybody that knows anything about obesity is that guy? You know He told me one time there's there are people in the world that you pass a doughnut under their nose and they gain five pounds and the next guy eats the whole dozen doughnuts and never gains an ounce and He said, trust me, the guys that you're passing under, there aren't very many of those. I think it's actually a two-pronged attack from the Holy Spirit. One is to free us.

But every one of those kinds of things you go through, it gets you qualified to deal with somebody else. If I have had a struggle with addiction and the Lord has freed me, I'm more qualified to sit with somebody who does have an addiction and to deal with them in the right way. Yeah, I call somebody else I call my buddy I'm not gonna tell him your name So anyway, I mean, the more we talk about this, think about the qualifications that someone who aspires to be an overseer has to have.

And by has to have means that the Spirit of God works it in him. Because it is all of these characteristics, whether positive or negative, Word of the if I am pugnacious and I'm not gentle and I'm not a peaceable guy and I really do like money a lot Yet I want to I want to serve the Lord how is the Lord gonna fix that Mm-hmm my you might very well do that Right Think about it this way. If I recognize in any of these things that I have a problem personally with that, that's something about me that the Lord, if I aspire to be an overseer, it's something the Lord's going to have to come and take care of. How does he do it? That's true.

I can't hear anybody in the classroom. Sorry, Mike. You hear anybody? Did you hear Donna that time? No, I couldn't hear. No, we're not getting any audio from the class. How about that? Can you hear Donna now? What I said is that you can't. You can't. Where's Nick when I need him? Only when it comes loud enough through your own mic. Can we hear it, Mike? Yeah. How about now? Yeah, I can hear you now. Through the speaker? it's not it's sounds like it's through my speaker still i mean i can make your voice out okay anyway it may be just after a few little bit and give us a little context to some of the feedback from class uh... i'm i'm i'm asking the question at this point if you recognize you you have a a desire to be an overseer but you have some certain things uh... in your personality, I say, that really don't fit.

And, you know, you've prayed about it, and you would love that part of you, or that characteristic not to be part of your personality anymore. Will God change that? Would He do something about that? And if He would, how does He do it? What's the, what's the, what's, how does he accomplish this kind of a life coming through you?

By any method. Now, Courtney says by any method. I think it's specific though, more than any. I think trial. I think it's more specific than that. What do you think Romans 6 is about? I have been crucified. Galatians 2.20. I've been crucified with Christ. That means everything I was and are in Adam was crucified. All of it. All of it.

So really, you can go to the Lord and say, look, the way I live now, I live by faith. in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me. I have, and you have, an entirely new, resurrected life in Christ. So what's Timothy, what's Paul trying to tell Timothy? What you see in a man's life with these characteristics is actually the Spirit of God manifesting the Lord Jesus in them.

That's what qualifies him. So you can say to the Lord, oh, I gotta change that. Well, good luck in changing it. Every time a $100 bill drops on the floor, do you dive over everybody to get it? And then one day you let it go. It doesn't matter. Alcohol doesn't matter. Or the other personal aggrandizement doesn't matter anymore. because you have something else or someone else who is way more valuable to you than you.

And that's the Lord Jesus. And that's why knowing Him more and more all the time is really the key to the transformation of every believer to have the characteristics of who the Lord Jesus is. He didn't, Christ, I used to say to a guy all the time who was drinking, I said, you think the Lord Jesus is an alcoholic? He said, well, he's human, isn't he? I said, yeah, you don't, so we go through identification.

I said, when Christ rose from the dead, he left all that behind. He does not have self-aggrandizing problems. He took care of all that. All of it. And he's given you a whole new life that's love, joy, peace, patience, long-suffering, kindness, meekness, and self-control. He gave you that life. See that? So it's not, I agree with it, here comes the trial, here comes the circumstances, here comes the embarrassment, here comes the whatever, but the real answer is not to fix that thing, The answer is more of Christ. If I don't have patience, I don't pray for patience, I pray for more of him. Because he's the one that's patient. And he doesn't dole out characteristics, you understand what I mean? He gives you his life.

I think motivation is not to cause others to stumble. Not being bondaged. Yeah, it's a different motivation. And that's what Paul is telling Timothy. That's exactly what he's telling him. You know, don't be in bondage to these. You can't have a guy who's in bondage to any of these kinds of things. In other words, he's got to have some semblance of the resurrected life of Christ going on in his everyday behavior. You know, he's not perfect.

None of us are. But he understands. So when you go to him and say, look, I've got a problem with A, B, and C, he can say, oh, I know what you mean. Sit down, let's talk. He doesn't say, oh, let me show you how I fixed that. No, that's not an answer. So, magnesis means a bruiser. What's this word?

He's ready to fight. Contentious, quarrelsome person. I had a roommate like this one time. He was always fighting. Always fighting. And oh, by the way, in most cases it's because he had too much to drink. Peaceable or patient. So, this noun expresses exactly the moderation which recognizes the impossibility of cleaving to all formal law. Let's talk about that for a minute.

If your answer to any of these problems, or you look at a man who has an aspiration to become an overseer, If any part of it, the solution, to fix whatever's wrong in his personality, if in any sense it's legal, isn't gonna work. Why not? In other words, simple, you shouldn't do that. Why won't that work?

Yeah, because what you're trying to fix is the thing that's unfixable. So, the fix is always gracious. Always gracious. You can't dress up the old man. No. Yeah. I think you guys in Texas call it lipstick on a pig. Yeah, you can't put lipstick on a pig. That's why it sinks in salt. It really is.

And then Romans 6 frees us from the old man. What does Romans 7 free us from? The law to try to fix the old man. So both of those things are out the window in terms of, so when I say this, look at the work that has to happen. I would say, Mike, anything that I've ever been. What did he say? He was going to say, I'll read his mind, because he just went off. Oh, oh. And any time I've been told to do something, I think is where he was trying to go. Sorry, were you? Yeah. There you are. I'm having trouble knowing if I'm talking over the class right now, because I can't hear the class.

But I was just going to say, any time that I've ever been enslaved to something, it didn't matter how badly I wanted to be free of it. That never gave me freedom. That wasn't the requirement. It wasn't necessary to feel bad about it. It wasn't necessary to want to get out of it. It was necessary to recognize the freedom that I have already. Yeah, that's right. That's exactly right. I just looked at the clock. The singers have to go.

So let's pray. Father, thank you for this opportunity we've had to take a look at these different things. We trust that your Spirit's at work in each one of us to manifest the life of the Lord Jesus in and through us more and more every day, which requires that we come to know your Son more and more every day. We thank you. We pray in his name. Amen.