Christ's Provision and Preservation of His Church - Brandon Scalf

All right, well, grab your Bibles and turn with me to Ephesians chapter 4. Ephesians chapter 4, and we are going to be continuing on in our series through Paul's letter to the churches in Ephesus. Ephesians chapter 4, and today we will be primarily looking at verses 11 through 13.

And so if you would please stand with me for the honoring and reading of God's holy and fallible and all sufficient word. And we are going to read Ephesians chapter 4 verses 1 through 13 so that we can get kind of oriented or reoriented with Paul's entire argument.

And today we are going to be looking specifically at, and this is the title of today's message, Building Christ's Church. So again, look with me at verse 1. Therefore, I, the prisoner in the Lord, exhort you to walk worthy of the calling with which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, being diligent to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.

There is one body and one Spirit, just as also you were called in one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all who is over all and through all and in all. But to each one of us, grace was given according to the measure of Christ's gift.

Therefore it says, when he ascended on high, he led captive a host of captives and he gave gifts to men. Now this expression, he ascended, what does it mean except that he also descended into the lower parts of the earth.

He who descended is himself also he who ascended far above all the heavens so that he might fill all things. And he himself gave some as apostles and some as prophets and some as evangelists and some as pastors and teachers for the equipping of the saints for the work of service to the building up of the body of Christ until we all attain to the unity of faith and of the full knowledge of the Son of God to a mature man, to the measure of the stature which belongs to the fullness of Christ.

The grass withers and the flower fades, but the word of our God endures forever. Amen. Amen. Please have a seat and start fixing your eyes on our text. As we have journeyed through the book of Ephesians, Paul's letter to the church members in Ephesus, we have really been acquainted with how God is and has created his church.

If you remember in chapter 1, we were oriented to the reality that in order for a church to exist, Christians have to first exist. And so verses 3 through 14 of chapter 1, we saw this incredible testimony of what God has done behind the scenes to procure a Christian people for himself.

He has to take, and this is what chapter 2 gets into, dead people spiritually, and he has to revive them and cause them to be born again so that they might see and love Jesus because on their own, they would not do such a thing.

But as chapter 1 tells us, this didn't just happen in space and time. This was the plan of God in eternity past, and it's going to be fulfilled and is being filled now, and it will be consummated in glorification in future eternity.

Not only has he taken dead sinners and caused them to be born again, having chose them and hunted them down for salvation, but he has also taken two people groups, namely the Jewish people and everyone else, the Gentiles.

And though they were separated at one point in history, and though God showed his favor to a particular group, now in the church age, he deals with both of us, and he deals with both of us as one new man.

We have not become Jewish people, and Jewish people have not become essentially pagans or Gentiles.

No, no, no.

There is one new man underneath the headship of the Lord and our Savior, Jesus Christ the righteous, and that is called the church. And Paul has prayed for the church. He's taught about the church. But now, as we have gotten into chapter 4, he is telling us how we ought to function as the church and how we protect essentially what was purchased for us, namely unity, unity.

The Lord Jesus Christ absorbed the wrath of God on our behalf so that we would be individually saved, and in so doing has given us peace with one another and unified us around him and his truth. And it's because of this that Paul, the prisoner of the Lord, can tell us that we are to walk worthy of our calling, that we must be humble, that we must be gentle, that we must be patient, that we must bear with one another.

Why?

Because we're all sinners in need of the same cross and suffer from the same malady. And so to assert yourself as someone who has this all figured out, to assert yourself as someone who is superior than anyone else, would be to forfeit your understanding of what the cross even displays in the first place.

And so Paul lays out some basic beliefs that we must be unified around, and he did that in verses 4 through 6 by showing us this creedal statement of sorts, showing both the unity and diversity within the Godhead, that there is one God in three persons, and though they are completely unified in their mission, their operations are inseparable, yet they have different roles within the economy of redemption.

And then that helps him to move into the next part of Ephesians chapter 4, which is going to talk about, and what we did already talk about, the gifts that have been given to each of us in the body to serve one another, to minister to one another.

And what he's trying to get through to all of us is though we are unified under the one God and though we are one body in one spirit, we are yet diverse in the way that God has equipped us to love on, to minister to one another.

So the ground has been set, as it were. And now we are moving into how the church is built, so to speak, or how it moves forward and progresses to maturity, because here's the reality, friends. All of us need help in maturing, whether you think you do or not.

And God has put things in place, namely gifts, to help us to achieve that, help us to achieve that. He's given us, as it's going to tell us, not just individual members with gifts that serve one another, but men gifts, gifts of people who hold particular offices and gifts that are used to help the body achieve that purpose, to be matured in Christ.

And praise God for it. So as we look at our text, we are going to be reminded of a few things. But I think at the outset it bears somewhat, I think we should repeat it, and I think we should draw attention to it.

Because here's the deal. Churches all across Tulsa, Oklahoma, and really all over the nations are divided on what the church is and what it is to accomplish, and who is to do the leading, and who is to do the following, and who is to do anything, really.

And they misunderstand what should come from the pulpit, or what songs should be sung, or should we have smoke machines and light machines, or should we have, you know, a guy behind a piano sometimes, a guy standing behind a pulpit with a guitar or not?

What do we do? How do we do it?

And why does it matter? Well, it starts here. It starts with a basic understanding of who God has given, and why, and what the church's mission actually is. The church of the living God, friends, hear me on this first, is not a gathering of gifted individuals for the sake of entertainment, but it is an assembly of the saints for edification.

It's not for show. It's for service. It's not to increase, and this is relevant to everyone in this room to some degree because of what's been going on in the news. It's not to increase anyone's fame.

It's to be faithful, first and foremostly, to the word of God and what it says about how we are to actually govern and utilize the gifts that he has given us in the body of Christ. And so this passage that we're about to dig into reveals the divine design, as it were, for the church's leadership, its labor, and its maturation.

If you remember last week, we're just on a continuation of what that was about. Christ, who has ascended on high and given gifts to his people, now directs the course of the church, and in many ways, the course of history, through gifted leaders for the purpose of perfecting the saints and equipping them for gospel ministry.

What this means for us is, if we're paying attention, the church does not rise on human talent or clever programs. It rises on the word of God, faithfully preached, proclaimed, taught, and lived out.

That is it.

What Christ has entrusted to his church are you, with the gifts that he has given you, and the apostles, and the prophets, and evangelists, and pastor-teachers who are charged with leading the church into deeper truth, greater maturity, and fuller service.

But really, this is a text that's going to act, as it were, as a death blow to seeker-sensitive churches that desire to do things their own way. The pulpit shouldn't just be governed by the word of God, but the church ought to be governed by the word of God.

And this is why H .B. Charles had said over the weekend, at a conference that he was doing, that if you think it's appropriate to preach the Bible in the pulpit but reject it as it pertains to the church, you're a fraud, you're an imposter.

The word of God governs everything. And so as we look at our text, I want you to first note that Christ has made provision.

For his church.

I want you to see Christ's provision for his church. Look with me at verse 11. It says, and he himself gave, and then he, of course, continues on. Some as apostles, and some as prophets, and so on and so forth.

But he gave, and he gave some. The Lord Jesus is in the business of taking care of his church. He's in the business of making sure that it's going to work. There is not a chance of this thing failing, because it is upheld by the one who holds all things.

And he fills all things, and so when he gives, he gives for a reason, and that reason can never be thwarted, changed, or done away with. If he has sovereignly gifted, and he will sovereignly see to it that those gifts are utilized in ways that, as we will see, build up the church and equip everyone for the work of ministry.

So the first thing that we need to see here is that this is not just any gifting, it is a sovereign gifting. Now to be sure, every gifting is a sovereign gifting. But this should clue us in, especially to those of us who stand behind a pulpit, or respect the pulpit, or desire to be in ministry someday, and there are some people here.

But also for everybody sitting in the pew. It's like buckshot. It goes everywhere. People are not standing, or they should not be standing in this pulpit because they think it's fun. Because they want to be heard.

Because they want their voice to travel far and fast. People who are delighted to stand in front of people, and to be looked at, and admired. No, this is a gifting from God, it is a calling from God. And he is the one who places people here, and he is the one who places people in ministry.

And when you assume that on your own, well you do great damage to the church, and you do great damage to your own soul. God is the one who gives these things, and he gives them. Now, I want you to see something.

You'll notice it says, and he himself gave some as apostles. In many ways, this is a continuation from verse 7. If you go back to verse 7, you have, but to each one of us, grace was given according to the measure of Christ's gift.

Now I'm not going to go back and preach that whole sermon, you know I'm already long-winded. But I will say this, there is a parenthetical statement that separates that verse from the verse we now find ourselves in, verse 11.

And that parenthetical statement is found in verses 8 all the way through verse 11, to some degree. Although, definitely 9 through 10. And that's him explaining where these gifts came from. And then, he now zeros in on a few.

He now zeros in on a few because there's an argument he's trying to make about the church. He's not discounting any other gifts, he's simply pointing at some key ones that he wants to utilize to help us understand what's going on.

Every single believer is indwelt by the Spirit, with no distinction. Every believer is graced to serve the body without exception. But not everyone is given the same gift in the same measure. And in our present context, verse 11, what's being presented here is the reality that sometimes gifts are given to people in an official way as they hold offices.

So, there's offices of the church being talked about now, and that is being talked about as giftings. Now, I'll be upfront about this because some of you really like nuance. There is a lot of debate as to whether or not this is speaking about gifts or offices, meaning that some people could potentially hold the gifting of pastor and not be qualified to be one, right?

Or maybe he's qualified to be one, but he shouldn't be one because he can do that out in the body. He can care for the body, he can love the body, you see what I'm saying? But maybe he doesn't have the time to devote to full-time ministry.

So maybe there's some reasons. I think there's some truth to that, but I think this text here is tying them together for a multiplicity of different reasons. One, the Bible never separates them, first of all.

Secondarily, apostles and prophets are included in this list. The reality is that they exist in the same context. And so, there's never an instance where an apostle is an apostle but not actually an apostle.

Like an apostle is always an apostle, and a prophet is always a prophet. Now, he's not always prophesying, but a prophet's a prophet and an apostle is an apostle. So we need to see these as office gifts, men gifts given to the church who possess an office.

In particular, it's word offices. God has given the ministry of his word to his church in order to transform it, and he's given it to apostles, he's given it to prophets, he's given it to evangelists, and he's given.

It to who?

Pastors and teachers, or pastor-teachers. I think it's pastor-teachers, but we'll get into why I'm saying that here momentarily. The reality is churches need to be healed of its various spiritual sicknesses, it needs to be made whole, and it needs to restore it to a fit working order, and people need to be enabled and propelled into exercising their gifts for the work of ministry to build up Christ.

And it's only the ministry of the word and the power of the spirit that can produce churches of such spiritual depth and maturity that Paul is going to tell us about here. The word matters, the word is important, that word is imperative, it drives everything.

So in other words, when he starts bringing up these word offices, what he's doing is he's saying, if you're going to take the church seriously, you need to take the word seriously. And if you don't take the word seriously, you're no church at all.

You are no church at all.

Now he begins listing who those men gifts are, those word offices. He begins by saying, of course, look with me again at verse 11, that he gave himself, Jesus Christ, the one who ascended, the one that was divvying out the gifts because of the victory that he had won on the cross and by going to Sheol.

He has given then some, some of those people who had been gift, the gift of apostleship, the gift of prophecy, the gift of evangelism, and the gift of pastoring. Now there's a parallel passage to this, well there's a lot of them actually, but one in particular that I think needs to be brought up is 1 Corinthians chapter 12, verse 28.

The reason for that is because in 1 Corinthians chapter 12, verse 28, Paul says, God has appointed in the church, first apostles, second prophets, and third teachers. I want you to pay attention to that.

Did you catch that? Paul says, God has appointed in the church, first apostles, second prophets, and third.

Teachers.

What Paul helps us to key on in that passage that's not necessarily emphasized in this passage is that not only is this a weighty reality that God is the one who sovereignly causes this to be, but it shows a chronological significance.

When it says first, second, and third, it's showing us that there is an order to the way in which we should view these things. Not only historically, but also in significance. In significance. So how does God take a diverse people and help them to be unified?

To keep them on the track? He makes provision for them. He makes provision for them through his apostles, through his prophets, through his evangelists, and through his shepherd teachers, his pastor teachers.

So the first word here, apostles. His first word is apostles, which just comes from the Greek word apostolos, which means sent one. And many people argue that the office of the apostleship is still open today because it means sent out ones.

And so here in Ephesians 4, it's simply talking about that. Well, that is not right. That's not right on many, you know, levels. But one, it doesn't fit the context of what Paul is saying. If you remember, we already talked about apostles at great length.

If you go to Ephesians chapter 2, verse 20, it says that the church having been built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone and whom the whole building being joined together is growing into a holy sanctuary in the Lord and whom you also are being built together into a dwelling of God in the spirit.

So it is most certainly talking about apostles in the capital A sense. The ones who held an office that is no longer, the ones who served as, if you were paying attention to chapter 2, verse 20, as the foundation of the church.

And if you remember, we said that you can't or you shouldn't, it wouldn't make any sense to build a foundation on top of another foundation. In fact, Paul makes that exact argument elsewhere in scripture.

That everybody's just building on top of that foundation that has already been built by the apostles and the prophets, of course, Jesus being the chief cornerstone. So when it's talking about apostles here, is it talking about the official delegates of Jesus Christ who were commissioned sovereignly and forcefully, but of course, lovingly for the specific task of proclaiming authoritatively the message in both oral and written form and establishing the church itself and building up the church itself.

In order to be an apostle, as we discussed in that sermon, you needed to be taught personally by Christ, you needed to be chosen by Christ himself, and you needed to be an eyewitness of the resurrected Christ.

You had to see him. And not just spiritually. More than that, they needed to be able to work miracles that would validate the fact that they were in fact, capital A, apostles. 2 Corinthians 12, 12, the signs of a true apostle were worked out among you, Paul says, with all perseverance by signs and wonders and miracles.

So you see, apostles did things we could not do, possessed a closeness to Christ that we do not have, although we have a great closeness to Christ that in many ways surpasses that because we have the word of God.

As a matter of fact, that's Peter's argument when he's talking about seeing Jesus transfigured with Moses and Elijah, and he hears God speak from heaven, and he says, you know, we have the Bible, a more sure word than even our own experience, right?

Because our experience can deceive us, but the word of God is always true. It is a more sure word. And so that's why these word gifts matter all the more. So there are no more apostles today, but if that's super controversial to you, go back and please listen to that sermon where we dissected that claim to the teeth.

And so the apostleship here that's being spoken about is one that existed in the past that laid the foundation and gave us the word of God that we now have. It set the tone for everything that we would do.

They got to hear from God, and we get to preach about what he heard from God, right? That's how this works. We're just word people. They were inspired word people, and that makes all the difference in the world.

So Christ makes provision for his church by giving them apostles, but he also does it by giving him, and here's the next one, prophets. Now, in many ways, the prophets and the apostles have an overlapping ministry to some degree.

There are similar functions that they both did. They both involved revelation, but here's where the difference is, emphasis.

Emphasis.

Sometimes people can be doing very similar things and the same things to some degree. Even in the body of the church, you're not a prophet though, but we'll get to that in a second, where you can be doing something very similar to someone that you're serving with, but an emphasis be placed in a different place.

A prime example of this, if you've been around heritage for any length of amount of time, is like me and Pastor Corey. We're both elders of the church. We hold one another accountable. We're not rogues.

We're not an authority unto ourselves and we're also held accountable by the deacons and then of course the body because we're Baptists and that's the way you're supposed to do it, but Corey and I are not the same people, nor do we have the same giftings overall in specific areas.

We have different emphasis. I primarily am the one who gets up and yells at everybody and he does too. He has that gift. He wouldn't be able to be an elder if he did not and he does well when he does it, but he's got a lot more things going on in terms of like individual disciple, which I also do, but he does it differently and sometimes with more people and so there's like a public private kind of thing going on all of the time between both of us and sometimes those emphasis are placed in different areas and that's good.

That's good.

That's what we want. If we had all elders who all did the same thing all the time, then everybody would suffer. Everybody would suffer and there would be everybody trying to do the same thing. It's just, I mean, just think about how horrible that would be is if everybody at your job was trying to do what you were doing all day long, it would never work.

It would never work. Nothing would ever move forward. So the emphasis then for the apostle was more on the divine commission to a specific task of proclaiming authoritatively the message in oral and written form, as I said, and establishing and the building up of churches, whereas the prophet was given to communication of divine revelation.

They weren't building churches. They weren't setting up churches. They generally weren't the ones writing what they were saying down. They were actually sometimes very weird and, you know, we would probably say in today's world eccentric, right?

And so they would speak, you know, thus says the Lord. When they spoke, God spoke and that's good. The Holy Spirit would fill them and give them the gift of prophecy for the purpose of edifying the body, comfort the body, encourage the body, both in Old Testament Israel and also in the New Testament church.

First Corinthians 14 .3 says, but one who prophesies speaks to men for edification and for exhortation and encouragement. In many ways, he was the precision point of God. He was the arrow of God. He was the one who rained down that sort of thing.

But more than that, he also communicated the mysteries and revelation of God to the church that at one time weren't known, or he would paint a picture of what was to come in the future, right? God would tell him what is going to happen in the future, pointing to Christ, for example.

Isaiah was a prophet. Isaiah 53, famous. If you don't know that, this is your first day at church. He's talking about how Jesus was afflicted and crushed. The man of sorrows that if we looked upon him, we would not be impressed by any means.

It's the death of Christ that it speaks of. Well, that wouldn't have happened for centuries. And yet the prophet spoke of it. He was the mouthpiece of God. Now, if I don't get moving, we're never going to get out of this text.

So he was given, he has qualifications. He needed to be theologically precise. If he wasn't theologically precise, it would reveal he was not a prophet. So the idea of prophecy today where it's like, oh yeah, well, you know, it could kind of go either way.

Wayne Grudem, right, says, there's no such thing anymore as thus says the Lord, but there are prophets. But those who are prophets, they need to communicate it this way. Well, that might be what the Lord is saying, but no, when, when someone has spoken on behalf of God and they were wrong in the old Testament, they were killed.

They needed to have moral integrity. They needed to have predictive accuracy and they needed to make sure that any, anything that they did was not inaccurate in any way or else they were deemed a fraud.

So don't be deceived by that. This is another office that has in fact ceased. According to the Bible, there are two kinds of prophets, those who are right and those who are wrong. And now on this side of the cross, there are only one kind of prophets, dead ones, dead.

Ones.

That's it.

That's all we got.

Right.

And so here, here it is. Here, before we get into evangelists and pastors, you need to understand this is, this is phase.

One of church building.

Okay.

Phase one of church building. The, the, the apostles and the prophets, they laid the foundation in Christ Jesus being the cornerstone. He's the one who gave the gifts, but, but they set this thing up, they set it in motion.

They caused it to progress and without them, we would not be here today.

Okay.

Now, in saying that we do not have apostles and prophets, that is not to say that we are deprived of the benefits that they had first given us. The reason that Paul put it in here is not so that I could get up in a pulpit someday and explain it away.

He gave it to us to show the progression of how the church was built. These men were significant in ways we can't even quantify. They created the Christian community. They did so authoritatively, and they left us with the New Testament scriptures that would govern everything that we do.

In other words, one foundation has already been laid. There's nothing to build upon it. There's no more special or divine revelation being given. That ceased with the apostles and the prophets, and we no longer need to validate our ministry or the truth about who Jesus is because we have the cross.

We have the message of the gospel. Now you're saying, well, they did too.

That was the whole deal.

Yeah, but there was a transition period happening. They were transitioning from the Old Testament, Old Covenantal system to the New Testament era where the cross looms large. Jesus is enough. We don't need people to pretend to rise from the dead.

We don't need people to fall over when Benny Hinn hits them. We don't need people to do any of these things to hold to the beautiful reality that Christ is working in his people and that he is building his church and that he is saving miraculously people from every tongue, tribe, and nation.

Hebrews 1 makes this argument for us. In times past, God spoke to the fathers in many portions and in many ways, but in these last days, he has spoken to us by giving us miracles, no, by sending his son, by sending his son.

That's why all these churches in Tulsa that are charismatic in nature are abominations to God because they uphold the gifts over the giver, and they lie about what gifts are actually there. But the first one is more sinister because Jesus should be at the forefront of absolutely.

Everything.

Anyway, evangelists, let's do that one next. He's given us apostles and prophets and evangelists. Now this one existed in the time of the apostles and prophets, but it still exists today. Now the term here, evangelist, actually, interestingly enough, is only used two times in the New.

Testament.

It's only used two times in the New Testament, outside of this one, so that would be a total.

Of three.

The first one is in Acts 21, verse 8, when it speaks of Philip being an evangelist. And then in 2 Timothy, it is used in chapter 4, verse 5, when speaking of a kind of ministry that Paul ought to do in the context of his church ministry, his pastoral ministry.

Now these are similar but different meanings, but only as it pertains to application. They overlap in definition. But as far as this goes, evangelist here is pointed to the reality that there are men gifted to the church to proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Now, pastor-teachers, they need to be able to do the same thing, but God has, and church history proves this, gifted the church with men who don't care about, I don't know, for instance, divine simplicity, or inseparable operations, or any of these other topics that might, you know, get interesting and massage your ego as you know them.

There are men who are just dead set on preaching the cross, the blood atonement, penal substitutionary atonement, that God sent his son to be the propitiation of our sins. And it's that message that God uses to save a people for himself.

So in many ways, evangelists are ground zero for the gathering of the people whom God has elected to call. There's no people for the pastor-shepherds to help mature, which we'll get to in a second, if there's no one being converted and brought to that church, right?

The hope for heritage is not that we would just have tons of people coming from other churches, though if they're failing or they have, you know, gone off the rails and abandoned orthodoxy, welcome. But we want people to come to know Jesus who maybe have never heard his name, they've never stepped foot in a church, and we want new people who have been newly converted by the work of an evangelist to be here.

Now sometimes that evangelist is you, doing the work of evangelism as just a member of the church, but sometimes it's an office. If this is speaking of offices, then it would naturally imply that an evangelist is an office.

Now exactly how that works, I'm not entirely sure. I'm still working through that, okay? But there should be, at every church, someone who has given over to the work of evangelism. They might be a lay office holder.

They may not be getting paid by the church, especially if it's a new church plant. So if anybody's sitting around there thinking, oh, that could be me right now. There's no paycheck in it for you yet here, okay?

But there should be somebody that should be willing to do that sort of thing, to help train people to go out and to discuss Jesus with their co-workers and with their people in their homes and the place where they go to do their hobbies.

These people are literally dripping with the gospel, and they can't be bothered with quaint messages about high-level theology. Now, let me nuance that to death, because if I don't do that, then I'm going to get weird emails, and I don't want to have that happen, all right?

And I don't necessarily mean people from this church, but there's a lot of people on the interwebs that seem to like to argue with things that I say. I'm not saying those things are unimportant. I'm not saying that they shouldn't be given over to them.

As a matter of fact, if you look at people in the past who have been evangelists, say George Whitefield, for example, they weren't deficient in theology. As a matter of fact, most evangelists that existed in centuries past would just destroy most pastor-teachers and their understanding of theology these days.

But the idea here is, like I said, one of emphasis, right? They're not going on the street corners and being like, let me teach you about the inseparable operations of the triune God. It's not probable that someone's going to get saved hearing that message.

I'm not going to say it can't be done or it hasn't been done, but I'm saying there's no gospel there, unless you spend the next 300 years extrapolating that out. So these are gospel people, and they're the ones who bring people to the church.

Evangelists win converts to the faith, the faith, sound doctrine. The apostles would establish churches, right? So this is kind of the way it went. And then prophets would fill in needed revelation for the perfection of the saints into, honestly, more often than not, prophets existed to tell you why you're not that awesome, right?

We need prophets today in terms of people who speak prophetically, not actual prophets. Our world is in hurt. It thinks that it's awesome. And the best thing that a pastor-teacher can do sometimes is to stand up and remind everybody, I know the world tells you you're awesome, you're not that awesome.

Jesus is awesome, and he is working hard to make you awesome, but you're not going to be awesome until glorification, all right? So trust in him, lean on him, and don't think too highly of yourself. The second thing that I want you to see is Christ's preservation of his church.

So he makes provision for his church, but he also preserves it. And we're not going to be able to get to verse 13, but we will do 12. Christ's preservation of his church. This next office here is different in nature.

So apostles, prophets, and evangelists to some degree have an overlap. And then, of course, evangelists and pastor-teachers, they are continuing to this day. But specifically, this pastor-teacher role is one that God has put in place for his church to make sure that they are preserved in the faith and that they grow in maturity.

So the next thing he says in verse 11 is pastors and teachers. He's giving them some as pastors and teachers. Now, let me pause here to both say, one, I lied. We're definitely not getting even in 12. But secondly, not secondarily for those of you in the know, secondly, there is a little bit of a debate going on in the academic sphere and even in your Bible translations, if you're not using the one that I'm using, which is the Legacy Standard Bible.

And that is this. When he says pastors and teachers, is he talking about pastors and teachers, or is he talking about pastor-teachers or pastors and teachers in the sense of they also teach? Which one is it?