WWUTT 606 The Husband of One Wife?

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When it comes to the list of qualifications for an overseer of the church, the one that is the most debated seems to be that he must be the husband of one wife.

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But even a person who is an unbeliever gets this when we understand the text. You are listening to When We Understand The Text, an online

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Bible ministry so that we may know all the riches freely given to us by God. For questions and comments, send us an email to whenweunderstandthetext at gmail .com.

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Here's your teacher, Pastor Gabe. Thank you, Becky, and greetings everyone. We continue with our study of 1

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Timothy chapter 3, considering the qualifications for overseers listed in these first seven verses.

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The Apostle Paul writes, The saying is trustworthy, if anyone aspires to the office of overseer, he desires a noble task.

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Therefore, an overseer must be, above reproach, the husband of one wife, sober -minded, self -controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, not a drunkard, not violent, but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money.

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He must manage his own household well, with all dignity, keeping his children submissive, for if someone does not know how to manage his own household, how will he care for God's church?

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He must not be a recent convert, or he may become puffed up with conceit and fall into the condemnation of the devil.

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Moreover, he must be well thought of by outsiders, so that he may not fall into disgrace, into a snare of the devil.

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So we've been going over this section the last couple of weeks, and we're only a verse and a half in. Today, we're going to be looking at the section of verse 2, where Paul says that he must be the husband of one wife.

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Verse 2 goes on from there, but that's the part we're going to focus on today. So first, to recap, Paul says, the saying is trustworthy, if anyone, any man aspires to the office of overseer, he desires to serve the

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Lord in this way, and the body of Christ, by being a shepherd of the flock of God, which is what that word pastor means.

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It means to be a shepherd. If this is what he desires to do, fill this role and fill this office, he desires a noble task.

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He desires to fill a role that requires a noble character, because he is going to be an example for the entire church congregation of what a mature

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Christian is supposed to look like. Mature in his understanding of doctrine and his ability to teach it, and also maturity in his character, that his adherence to the gospel of Jesus Christ and living out the gospel in his own life has turned into godly character.

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And people are able to look at the godliness by which this man lives and have a model for living godliness and pursuing holiness in their own lives.

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Now, James shares with us in James 3, verses 1 and 2, not many of you should become teachers, my brothers, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness, for we all stumble in many ways.

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And if anyone does not stumble in what he says, he is a perfect man, able also to bridle his own body.

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Can we do that? Is it possible for you to be a perfect man? No it is not. In fact, the person who says that he is not a sinner is a wicked man, and he makes

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God out to be a liar, based on what we read in 1 John 1. Proverbs 12, verse 1 says, whoever loves discipline loves knowledge, but he who hates reproof is stupid.

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So this is something that even an elder or a pastor in a church is going to display for his congregation, that he is correctable, and when he stumbles or even falters in his words, as James is pointing out there in James 3, verses 1 and 2, he is a man who is willing to admit that he has sinned or made a mistake and correct that, and thus receive correction and with humility and with graciousness, loving the law of God that would keep a bridle over his tongue or keep his steps straight.

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Loving as with David in Psalm 119, Lord, how I love your law. It is my meditation all the day.

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It is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path. Does this man of God display for his church congregation a love for Christ so much that he loves to be corrected by Christ so that he might continue in this pursuit of becoming more

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Christ -like, growing in holiness and in godliness? And so this is the responsibility that is placed on the overseer of the church.

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And as I mentioned on the Friday episode, this doesn't just apply to a person who is that full -time pastor, but maybe even a person who is part -time, who is bivocational, or a man who is a lay elder.

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He doesn't do this as a full -time job, but he is a mature man able to teach, and he fills one of those lay elder roles, still looking out for the members of the flock of God.

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He must meet this list of qualifications also. He may not be as out front as the person who's kind of the head elder, the one that is worthy of double honor, as Paul mentions in 1

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Timothy 5 .17, but he is nonetheless a teacher and an elder who must meet this list of qualifications and be impeccable in his character.

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So then, so anyway, further in that sense of him desiring a noble task, we have it mentioned in verse 2, therefore, so continuing from that thought, an overseer must be above reproach.

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That's what we talked about on Tuesday and Wednesday of last week, that this man is blameless in his character, that you would not be able to bring fault against him for the way that he lives his life.

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He is a model, not just to his own congregation, but to the entire community, because that's what we have toward the end of this section of instructions.

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He must be well thought of by outsiders. Do you have a man who is loving and friendly with his own congregation, but he is divisive with people outside the church?

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Like he attacks the mission field and puts people down who he should otherwise be sharing the gospel with and doing so with gentleness and respect, 1

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Peter 3 .15, 2 Timothy 2 .23. If he is making enemies of those who are outside the church, not because he preaches the gospel, but because he verbally attacks them and he's a quarrelsome man,

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I tell you that man is disqualified from the pastorate. He not only makes it impossible for him to share the gospel with those who are outside that church, but he makes it impossible for his own church to do that.

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You try to share the gospel with people in your community and tell them which church it is that you belong to, and they go, oh, yeah, yeah,

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I know people from that church. I know that pastor over there and what he's like to be. I would never go to that church.

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He brings a reproach to the entire church, to the witness of the gospel that should be there within the community.

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So this man must be above reproach, not only in his Christian character with members of his own congregation, but even within the world.

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People look at him as a moral man. Now we live in an incredibly depraved culture that is falling further and further into sexual promiscuity and debauchery.

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But nonetheless, our culture still recognizes that when a man is married to a woman and then he goes and has an affair with another woman, he's a jerk.

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And that woman has every right to leave that man if he's being unfaithful to her.

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Now, of course, you hear stories in the news about, you know, the rise of polyamory or open marriages in which both spouses would decide, hey, we can have relationships even outside this union that we have with one another, which

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I tell you, that's adultery. It doesn't matter if you're both agreeable to do it. It's still adultery.

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You must be faithful husbands to your wife, wives to your husbands. Even though we have this rise of polyamory happening within our culture, open marriages and open relationships, we still have a recognition.

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Even our secular culture has a recognition. If that has not been the agreement between those two people and that husband goes and sleeps with another woman who is not his wife, well, she has every right to want to leave him.

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And he can't fault her for that. The whole culture is going to be on her side. Remember when the whole

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Tiger Woods scandal exploded? Oh, this was almost 10 years ago now when it was discovered that he was a serial cheater.

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And it's like it was an avalanche of accusations that happened all at once. All this stuff opened like a floodgate.

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And then Woods was exposed as being a horrible husband. His wife had found out these things,

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I guess, because he kept another cell phone and it had all of the information with the women that he was with on that particular phone.

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And she discovered that she chases him out of the house, starts smashing the windows of his car with a golf club.

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Of course, what else is she going to smash Tiger Woods vehicle up with but a golf club?

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And this was at a time when Woods was on top of the world. He had the richest athletic empire on the planet, surpassing probably even

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Michael Jordan. He was the greatest golfer almost ever. He was on that trajectory to win more majors than any golfer ever has.

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And after that scandal broke, you notice something about that. Woods has never been on top ever since.

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He has always been struggling to get back to the place of esteem that he had before his world blew apart and he was exposed as being this serial adulterer.

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And no one thought his wife was unreasonable for chasing him down and breaking his windows.

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I mean, this woman had every right to be mad at Tiger Woods. As much as the sexual revolution has taken hold of our culture, yet we could all kind of stop and unanimously agree for a moment that Tiger Woods did wrong to his wife and that she had every right to leave him and take, you know, however much money she took from him in that in that divorce settlement.

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As Becky and I had talked about this past Friday, the one sin in which God would allow for a divorce is infidelity.

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If a husband has been unfaithful to a wife, she has biblical grounds to divorce her husband.

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If a wife has been unfaithful to her husband, that husband can divorce his wife and has biblical grounds for doing so.

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So this is so important as God created marriage, designed it to be between one man and one woman for life, that he would be a one woman man.

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This instruction is even put into qualifications for an overseer. And it's the first instruction that we have right after he is a man that must be above reproach.

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Remember that everything else that comes after that is kind of expounding upon that first obligation, that he is a man above reproach.

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And then the first thing we have after that is he's the husband of one wife. Now, much has been made of this phrase, but most accurately it is translated this way.

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He is a one woman man. He has no other women on the side, even in addition to his wife.

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He's carousing around with other women. This is not a man who is doing that. He is faithfully devoted to his wife.

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So of course you can interpret this as he must be a husband who is married to one wife and he must not have multiple wives.

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We can very clearly draw that conclusion. But even beyond that, more specifically, we're talking about a man who is devoted to his wife only and he doesn't have all these other women that he's even flirting with, let alone that he is trying to have relationships, extramarital relationships with.

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This is a man who is a one woman man. And even our culture recognizes that that is good behavior.

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That is a good man who is faithful to his wife in a monogamous relationship.

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Even people who hate marriage, they hate marriage and they hate the family and they don't think that it should exist, which, by the way, this is what the whole

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LGBTQ movement is trying to destroy. They're trying to destroy the family.

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The Gay Liberation Front back in 1969, they once stated, we expose the institution of marriage as one of the most insidious and basic sustainers of the system.

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The family is the microcosm of oppression. In other words, according to the Gay Liberation Front, every system of oppression that exists in a society is because of marriage.

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That's how much they hate marriage and want to get rid of it. But yet you sit down with a person who even has that kind of hatred for the institution of marriage, and they would agree with you that a man who cheats on his wife is a jerk and she has every right to leave him.

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A man who is faithful to his wife in a monogamous relationship is a good man.

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I firmly believe they would absolutely believe that even if that person hates the institution of marriage and the family.

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Andrew Sullivan, who is a liberal journalist, he is also gay and he is trying to advance the

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LGBTQ agenda. He has gone as far as saying things like that monogamous relationships could learn from same -sex relationships, which tend to be a little bit more open.

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But even if I were to sit down with Andrew Sullivan and have a conversation with him about family, I'm very sure that he would agree that a man who is faithful to his wife and his wife only for life is a good man.

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It is still admirable in our culture and in our society when we read stories about a husband and a wife who have been married together for 60 or 70 years, and they've been faithful to one another, it's those stories that makes

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America stop and go, oh, you know, it's still adorable to see a husband and a wife who have been so devoted to one another for so many decades.

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That is an admirable thing. And a pastor must be able to model that for his congregation.

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He must be a one woman, man, the husband of one wife.

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Now, however many ways we interpret that the husband of one wife, it's very clear that he doesn't have multiple wives.

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He is one man married to one woman for life, because that is the picture of marriage that God designed.

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Jesus affirms it in Matthew, chapter 19, that from the beginning, he created them male and female, and a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife.

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And the two shall become one flesh. So they are no longer two with their own sort of ways in the world and their own ways of doing things.

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They are one flesh. They are together. They are of one mind and spirit in a marriage.

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Therefore, what God has joined together, let man not separate, let man not sin and bring a brokenness to that covenant that he has made with his wife.

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Let not anyone else outside the marriage try to redefine it for them, for it is

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God who created marriage and he is the one who defines it. And so a pastor should be a model of a good marriage to his congregation, which, by the way,

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I think also means to suggest that a pastor, an elder, an overseer in a church should be married.

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Now, I know that there are people who say, no, no, no, that's not necessarily what that means is that if he is married, he should be the husband of one wife.

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I don't see that as being the qualification. And I and Dr. Albert Moeller, by the way, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, would agree with me on that because I've heard him teach it.

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When this instruction regarding qualifications for an overseer is given that he must be the husband of one wife, read that it is saying he must be a husband.

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This is a man who is married and has children because later on we get this qualification that if he does not know how to manage his own household, how will he care for God's church?

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The marriage and the family unit is the picture of the way that the entire church should be with one another because the whole church is the bride of Christ and that pastor is managing a family of God.

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And so he must be able to manage his own household well, keeping his children submissive.

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His family is dignified. He treats his wife in a proper way and she properly submits to her husband to display for the church congregation how we all are to be as the bride of Christ.

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This is one of the qualifications for an overseer. And I've heard that Dr. Moeller go on to expound upon that to say, especially in today's culture, in today's society, how else would you know that your pastor is being held accountable on these other qualifications?

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If he were not married, how would you know that your pastor is not having relationships with other women that you just don't know about outside the church, outside the congregation in the darkness of night, in places where maybe members of the church don't go and cannot see?

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How do you know that this man is being faithful to all these other things if he does not have a wife who, by that vow and by that covenant marriage, he is being faithful to her?

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How do you know that this man is not carousing around with other men? I and Dr.

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Moeller has gone on to say, I believe in today's culture and in today's society, how important it is that an elder or an overseer, a pastor, a bishop, etc.,

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etc., a reverend must actually be married. And that is one of the qualifications for an overseer.

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Now, when I first was interviewed for an associate pastor position at the time that I sat down for my first interview,

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I wasn't married, nor was I even engaged. I don't even think I was seeing anyone at the time.

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Becky and I hadn't started dating yet. And eventually, I actually turned that position down. But that was one of the questions that I raised with the pastors who were interviewing me.

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I said, now, I'm not married. How does that reflect upon this position? And what does the church consider that for me?

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And they said they didn't think it was a problem. Looking back on that, though, I think it was.

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That should have disqualified me for that position, though they were ready to hire me for it.

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And again, praise God, whatever it was that he laid on my heart at that particular time, I refuse the position. And it wasn't until later when

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Becky and I were engaged that I then interviewed for another position as pastor. So I believe that a man must be married.

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He must be the husband of one wife. He must have children and keep them submissive.

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Not that he has children in his own household. This could be a man who is an empty nester. His husband and his wife have had kids, but they don't live with him anymore.

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But what was what was that family experience like? Would we be able to testify to a man who was able to keep his children submissive and managed his own household?

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Well, for these are qualifications for an overseer of the church. Now, how about this?

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As we expound upon this instruction here, he must be the husband of one wife. What if this man is divorced?

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Well, I'd like to expound upon that question, but we're out of time. We're already at 20 minutes here, and I'm committed to keeping these programs about 20 minutes long.

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So I'll tell you what, we'll come back to that question tomorrow as we continue to talk about the overseer, the overseer being the husband of one wife.

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Remember the instruction that we have for husbands and wives in Ephesians chapter five

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Wives, be submissive to your own husbands as to the Lord, for the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church, his body and is himself its savior.

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Now, as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands.

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And then we have the instruction for husbands, Ephesians 5, 25. Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word so that he might present the church to himself in splendor without spot or wrinkle or any such thing that she might be holy and without blemish.

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This is what Christ does for the church. This is what a husband should do for his wife.

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So how important is it for a pastor to model that for his church congregation?

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A pastor must be devoted to his wife together in covenant marriage for life as God has designed marriage to be and as God has instructed for those of us who are married.

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So this man must be the model of that for his congregation as well. We'll come back to these instructions again tomorrow as we consider these qualifications for an overseer.

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And remember again, this is not just about that pastor, but it is a model of godliness that we all should aspire to as we mature in the faith.

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God help us. Amen. Pastor Gabe keeps a regular blog sharing personal thoughts, alerting readers to false teachers, and offering commentary on the church and social issues.

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You can find a link to the blog through our website, www .utt .com. Thank you for listening and join us again tomorrow as we continue our study in God's Word when we understand the text.