Elders (Part 1 of 3)

We've often heard that there's safety in numbers if we're walking at night or we're visiting unfamiliar territory. Today on Truth for Life, Alistair Begg explains why there's safety in numbers when it comes to church leadership as well. Our ongoing study of the book of Titus continues. Titus chapter 1 verse 5.

This is why I left you in Crete, so that you might put what remained into order and appoint elders in every town as I directed you. If anyone is above reproach, the husband of one wife and his children are believers and not open to the charge of debauchery or insubordination. For an overseer, as God's steward, must be above reproach.

He must not be arrogant or quick-tempered or a drunkard or violent or greedy for gain, but hospitable, a lover of good, self-controlled, upright, holy, and disciplined. He must hold firm to the trustworthy word as taught, so that he may be able to give instruction in sound doctrine and also to rebuke those who contradict it. For there are many who are insubordinate, empty talkers and deceivers, especially those of the circumcision party. They must be silent, since they are upsetting whole families by teaching for shameful gain what they ought not to teach. One of the Cretans, a prophet of their own, said, Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons. This testimony is true. Therefore rebuke them sharply, that they may be sound in the faith, not devoting themselves to Jewish myths and the commands of people who turn away from the truth. To the pure all things are pure, but to the defiled and unbelieving nothing is pure, but both their minds and their consciences are defiled. They profess to no God, but they deny him by their works. They're detestable, disobedient, unfit for any good work.

Amen. Paul has left Titus in position in the island of Crete in order that, as we saw last time, the churches there might be marked by tidiness and by healthiness and by attractiveness—the tidiness that is represented in putting things in order, a la verse 5, the healthiness which is identified by the doctrine that is then being understood and believed and proclaimed, and the attractiveness which then emerges from the lives of those who are living in the light of the aforementioned. And it is obvious from the text that leadership is the absolute priority in seeking to establish each of these things. Because if the leadership is wrong, then everything else will be wrong with it. This is true within the home, in terms of moms and dads who have jurisdiction over their children, despite the fact that our society suggests increasingly that that is not the case and ought not to be the case.

If we're going to accept what the Bible says, then we recognize that God, who has established the nuclear family, has not only put it in place but has also said how it works. And there is an order of leadership in that home which, when neglected, brings with it all kinds of sorry chaos. When it is overstated, it may bring with it all kinds of unhappy authoritarianism and autocracy.

When it is applied by the power of the Holy Spirit in concurrence with what the Scriptures teach, then it is a lovely thing to behold. There was an article—you may have seen it—about a lady who had taken her children on a trip, or one of them, and the child had run a mock in the airport, and it really was a sorry tale of woe. And I think, essentially, the lady was saying, So you see, that's what happens when you have children.

You know, they're just completely out of control. And in actual fact, what it was, it was a story about a mother who's completely out of control and actually has no idea what she ought to be doing with her little daughter. And it is representative increasingly of the world in which we live. And what happens, of course, is that as the New Testament argues from the family, the nuclear family, into the church family and vice versa, where it breaks down in a culture in the family, you find that it spills over very quickly into the church. So that the same resistance that you have to parental rule, to parental responsibility, to parental dictation of the events, you then find translates itself into the local church. When you consider leadership and eldership in particular, families are growing up saying, But I had to call my father by his first name. My mother is an equal to me.

I have no reason to submit to her authority. And so, when you reproduce that in a local congregation, then you realize just how vital it is that people understand that what we're doing is we're doing what the Bible actually says. Most unsolved problems in a local church can be traced to defective leadership—can be traced to defective leadership, almost without exception. So notice that this is a priority, and it is an absolute necessity that the elders would be appointed in every town as Paul had directed him. If you read through the Acts of the Apostles, you will see that very quickly elders were being put in place in the church. So at the end of Acts chapter 11, it is obvious to us that within fifteen years, from the time of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, there was already a leadership structure in place in the congregations in Jerusalem. And as you read through Paul on his missionary journeys, you find that he is not only going, first of all, to evangelize, but in many cases he is coming back in order to make sure that those who have now professed faith in Jesus, these fledgling groups of individuals, will then be galvanized and structured within the framework of leadership as God intends.

And you can read that for your benefit all the way through. Now, one of the questions that always emerges when you address the issue of eldership is in terms of its terminology. And our English translations of the Bible don't necessarily help us in this regard, because they translate words variously. And the word that is actually translated here, elder, in verse 5, is the Greek word presbuteros, which gives us our English word presbyter. And the word that is translated as an overseer in verse 7—the distinction is there in English between elder and overseer—that word there is actually the word episkopos, from which we get our English word episcopal. And you might add to that another noun and also a verb, which you find, for example, in 1 Peter 5, which addresses the function of these elders in terms of shepherding, so that the shepherd is the poi man and the responsibility of leadership is to ensure that in overseeing the congregation and in guiding the congregation that their expressions of care are directly tied to leading the congregation by the crook of God's Word. This is absolutely, foundationally crucial to realize that leadership in the local church is a leadership by this book. That is why a congregation should always be happy when those who are teaching the Bible say to them, You'd better take your Bible and see if what's being said is in there. That a congregation always ought to be happy when the person teaching them says, You're sensible people. You can read this for yourselves.

You can figure this out. As opposed to the person in the pulpit exercising some kind of magical capacity whereby he seeks to bamboozle the minds of those who are under his tutelage, who then simply come with a spoonful and seek to get a little spoonful of something that will bless them or encourage them or enrich them, and then try and get it as best they can out and into their car to go on with the week. Oh, you will notice that in verse 5, the elder, and in verse 7, the overseer, is the one who, in verse 9, is caring for the church by teaching the church.

By teaching the church. It's a long time since I've said this to you, but I said it some time ago. If you want to know that I have stopped loving you or caring for you, then you will know when it becomes apparent that I have stopped studying my Bible, when I have stopped teaching you from the Bible, when I have started simply to tell you stories or tried to allure you with tales and notions and humor and so on. And I said that in part because I think there was some question about whether I was just as lovable as my wife knows me to be, whether the expression of care from the eldership would be directly tied to hugs in the hallway. I'm not opposed to hugs in the hallway. I'm getting better as time goes on. Eventually, I'll be so doted it won't matter.

I wonder who I'm hugging in any case. But the fact is, I said then—and it struck me again this week as I studied it—that the ultimate expression of care on the part of the eldership is in being apt to teach the Bible so that the people might be fed the Word of God, so that they might be growing in the Word of God, so that they might be able to stand against the attacks of the evil one, and so that they in turn might be able to teach their children the things that they are learning as they go. The shepherd of the sheep, the Lord Jesus, is the one who leads his people into the pastures, into the paths of righteousness for his name's sake. And so it is that the essential qualifications directly related to the functioning of eldership within the local church is tied expressly to their ability—not exclusively, but nevertheless, expressly—to their ability to teach the truth and to rebuke those who contradict the truth. End of verse 9. So that you will be able to teach the truth, he says, and be able to refute those who deny the truth.

Now, clearly, this is a man's size task, and it is not entrusted to an individual, but it is entrusted to a plurality of individuals. And when we read the New Testament—not only here but elsewhere—we discover that there is safety in numbers. And the New Testament guards against the proclivity of an individual to seek to exercise a jurisdiction which is not theirs to exercise. The person who wields the most of the Bible faces the challenge of this the greatest, as we'll see in a moment or two.

And God is merciful to us at the moment, I think, in Parkside—although I never want to say too much in case it all blows up in my face—but I am aware of churches in our immediate environment here that are completely bedeviled by all kinds of stuff. And ultimately, it may be traced to failure at the level of pastoral leadership. The responsibility that is given is given in plurality.

The qualifications that are called for are called for in each of the individuals. And the distinction of giftedness and the distinction, the diversity of function, does not negate that at all. The thing that we need to be sure of before we go to the characteristics is that there is no hierarchy imagined in the New Testament. There very quickly became a hierarchy as people began to pay less attention to the Bible and more attention to their manmade notions of how it ought to be.

Nothing much has changed throughout the years. And so you can find that there are places all over the globe where they have all kinds of things that apparently have been built from secular models. So you have a large sort of population who've come out of the manufacturing industry, and these men become the leaders in the church, and they kind of break the church down into manufacturing units. They have the union leaders here, they have the presidents and the vice presidents there, and everyone looks in the Bible and says, How in the world did it get like this?

Well, actually, it got like this because people stopped looking in the Bible. And the worst of it is when the hierarchical notion leads to somebody in a position of almost unchallengeable authority. And of course, if a church is led by the Scriptures, then it's almost inevitable that the individual who has most access to the Scriptures and most responsibility of teaching the Scriptures is the one who faces the greatest challenge in this regard.

And that's true no matter where the congregation is. Because Paul makes it clear that there is a respect and there is an honor which attaches to this task. If anyone regards the task of an overseer, they desire a noble task. But the respect and honor is directly related to the work, not to the personality of the individual. Such individuals are to be respected for their work, not obeyed because of their zealousness or because of their coercive abilities at leadership. And that's why the plurality of leaders, that's why the safety is found in numbers. Because zealous leadership, persuasive leadership, is nevertheless leadership which remains subject to all the other leaders.

Makes sense, doesn't it? Because what we discover is that all of us are responsible to the leadership of Jesus. All of us are responsible to the leadership of Jesus. Brought into the family of God, we're brothers and sisters. How do brothers and sisters teach each other?

Well, they elbow one another in the ribs, they pull one another on, they cajole one another, they rebuke one another—they're brothers and sisters. All of us are subject to the leadership of Jesus, who is the chief shepherd. But the New Testament also makes clear that some of us are responsible for the leadership of others. That's eldership in the church. In the same way that as your children grow in the nuclear family, there are changes. Your leadership as parents is not the same as it was when they were in their infancy, when parameters had to be established and so on. The transitions that develop in life, where the car keys come, where their own passport is available to them, where they're now traveling out and beyond and so on, and where they are now actually correcting us, where they're calling us to account—that is all a necessary element of it, but it doesn't alter the fact that I'm still their dad, whether I want to be or not. You're still their mom.

You're still responsible for them, not to the degree that you once were. And when that breaks down, then the demise is significant. We don't want to overstate that, but it's important that we understand it. And that is why, at the end of Hebrews, the writer to the Hebrews says to the people, he says, now, I want you to obey your leadership.

Obey the leadership. They keep watch over you, he says, as men who must give an account. Not give an account to you—although, as we've already said, we're accountable to one another in Christ—but as those who will give an account to God, in the same way that moms and dads will give account for the way we raise our children. And, says the writer to the Hebrews, obey them as men who must give an account so that their work will be a joy and not a burden, because that would be no advantage to you. Isn't that what mothers say all the time? Oh, don't make this difficult for me, please. Would you just do as I asked you?

If I asked you to do something that was wrong, I'm not. Don't us make this hard. So it is a very happy thing when a church understands a biblical structure. But—and we'll move on from this—it is also vitally important that we recognize that structure alone is not the issue. You can have perfect structure in a dead body. And the vital thing is that it is the Spirit of God filling out the framework that God has determined is to be the framework as he gives it to us in his Word. Well, that's enough concerning the function itself.

You can come back to that on your own. Let's go immediately to the way in which he addresses the characteristics of these individuals. If anyone is above reproach—there you have it in verse 6, and then verse 7 again—"for an overseer as God's steward must be above reproach."

So we could use the word unimpeachable, blameless, above reproach, but we dare not use the word faultless or flawless. Because if that was what it meant, then there wouldn't be any elders at all. If the chief characteristic of the elder is that he is absolutely flawless, without fault in any shape or form, then, of course, we're only ever going to have had one elder, and that elder would be the Lord Jesus Christ himself.

No! We have to understand what the Bible is saying and why it's saying what it's saying. What I mean by that is this. If you bury down on, for example, this notion of the husband of one wife, and you approach that in a wooden way—you say, it categorically means the husband of one wife—now you have to say, well, no single person can ever be an elder, because he doesn't have one wife. No man whose wife has died leaving him a widower and who is remarried can ever possibly be an elder in a local church, because he has more than one wife. And when you start down that line, you very quickly say to yourself, I wonder if that is what Paul is on about here. Is that what he's actually guarding against? Is he simply addressing the issue of divorce and remarriage as being a double standard, and therefore it is reasonable for somebody not to be put in that position?

Possibly. But if you think about Crete for a moment, if you think about the contemporary world then, at the most basic level, what was he saying? No polygamists must serve as elders in the church. Polygamy was part and parcel of the social structure. And he says, now, when you put your leadership together, make sure that we get this absolutely clear in our minds that the person that is serving in this way must not be guilty of that. So if you stand far enough back from it, you say, well, what's he actually saying needs to be true of leadership in the church? In terms of marriage, he's to be a one-woman man. He's to be a man who, in the area of marriage and in sexuality, is unimpeachable. And to violate that obvious application brings with it all kinds of ramifications.

And I don't mean we have to stand back from it one iota. It's very challenging. It's supposed to be. You're listening to Truth for Life. That's Alistair Begg examining the essential qualifications for elders and explaining the priority of establishing a leadership team in every local church. Now, it may be that you're listening to this message from Alistair today on radio, or maybe you're listening on your smartphone or your tablet or on YouTube or your smart speaker. However you're listening, there's a vital group of fellow listeners who are making all of this possible for us. You often hear me talk about our truth partners. And today, I want to invite you to become a part of this essential team. Truth partners are people who give an amount they choose each month. It is their collective giving that helps cover the cost of distributing Alistair's teaching in all of these different ways. Whether you listen on the app or have downloaded sermons for free, if your day is brightened by listening to Truth for Life on radio, would you call us at 888-588-7884 and become a part of the Truth Partner team, making all of this possible?

Again, that's 888-588-7884. Or you can sign up online at truthforlife.org slash truth partner. One of the ways we say thank you to our truth partners each month is by inviting them to request not one, but two monthly book offers. And today, we're featuring a book titled Love Your Church. This is a book that will show you why being a part of a local church is exciting and worthy of your love and your commitment. You can request a copy of the book when you give a donation to support the teaching you hear on this program. Visit us online at truthforlife.org slash donate. I'm Bob Lapine. Thanks for listening. Hope you have a great weekend and are able to worship with your local church. Join us on Monday for part two of today's message when we'll learn about the essential requirement for elders. It's not giftedness or status or education or wealth. We'll find out what it is Monday. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.