June 4, 2026 Show with Jacob Tanner on “A Qualified Man: Cultivating the Character of a Godly Leader”

Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister George Norcross, and sports legend Jim Thorpe.

It's Iron Sharpens Iron. This is a radio platform in which pastors, Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today. Proverbs, chapter 27, verse 17, tells us, iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better. It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

And now, here's your host, Chris Arnzen.

Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Thursday on this fourth day of June 2026.

And I'm absolutely thrilled to have a returning guest today named Jacob Tanner. He is an author, pastor of Christ Keystone Church in Mifflinburg, Pennsylvania, and teaching fellow with the Ezra Institute.

And today, he's going to be addressing the theme of his recently published book, A Qualified Man Cultivating the Character of a Godly Leader. And it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Pastor Jacob Tanner.

Yeah, thank you so much, Chris, for having me back on the show. I didn't scare you away.

No, it takes a lot to do that. If you scared me, I'd just have you back on to debate somebody that is qualified and that would take care of that. But tell our listeners something about Christ Keystone Church.

Sure. So, we're a Reformed church in central Pennsylvania here in the small town of Mifflinburg. Actually, some of your listeners might be familiar with each year in Mifflinburg, there's a Chris Kindle market, and a lot of people come from all over the place.

I think, if I remember right, this past year we did kind of like an evangelism event. We handed out gospel tracts and some other things, and I think we encountered close to a thousand people in just two hours.

Somebody was counting, and I was like, that is a lot of people very, very quickly for a small town. And that's just an hour, so a lot of people I know.

Who is this individual that this event is named after?

Chris Kindle? Yeah. Well, it's technically named after Christ, however, there's several different things going on there. I forget what the exact sort of impetus was for it. It was before my time, but they started this as a German Christmas market.

But technically, it's named after Christ, but it's also named after another gentleman because I think there's another name for it. It's a whole big thing.

Okay. And for anybody desiring more information on Christ Keystone Church of Mifflinburg, Pennsylvania, go to ChristKeystoneChurch .org, ChristKeystoneChurch .org. Now tell us something about the Ezra Institute, where you serve as a teaching fellow.

Yeah. So I serve there as a fellow of Puritan thought. And the basic idea behind the Ezra Institute is a desire to bring about a change within the culture that is very much Christ-centered and gospel-orbited.

So we want to make sure that people are thinking Christianly about everything. So whether you're a pastor, whether you are a concrete layer, whether you are somebody who works on oil burners, whether you are a stay-at-home mom, whether you're a school teacher, it doesn't matter what you do or where you are.

We want to see the gospel of Jesus Christ impacting people in such a way that they live as Christians should live in every area and every sphere of life. And so part of my work there with the Puritan aspect of things is really recovering what I would call a full, orbited view of the gospel and of Christ that the Puritans held to.

There's a lot that the Puritans did incredibly well that I think we can learn from today. Now, of course, there's things they did wrong, just as all people of all ages do. But it's very helpful to be able to look back upon the saints of the past and really be challenged in our own faith.

And so that's some of the work that we're doing there. And there's also conferences and some other things that Ezra Institute puts on, different books that are being published, different articles, different podcasts.

So there's a lot of different work going out there, especially through the teaching and preaching ministry of Dr. Joe Boot.

Yes, and I've had the privilege of having Dr. Boot speak at one of my free biannual Iron Trip and Zion Radio Pastors Luncheons. And to this day, I keep hearing back wonderful reports from men of God who were present at that speaking engagement by Dr. Boot, and they are just raving about how blessed they were.

And when you mentioned that your role at the Ezra Institute primarily involves Puritan thought, it immediately jogged my memory about somebody that I am hoping to introduce you to. Perhaps you can get him involved in some fashion in the Ezra Institute or one of their events.

He's somebody that I've interviewed three times now. I think I may have been the first talk show host to discover this brother. His name is Dr. Keith A. Evans, and he is a professor of biblical counseling at Reformed Theological Seminary in Charlotte, North Carolina.

And he has the rare distinction of having his doctorate in demonology. He is one of the very few Reformed scholars that I am aware of at all that openly discusses and teaches on and lectures on the demonic realm and believes that very often, more often than we may realize, problems that people are encountering have been the subjects of demonic oppression.

And he specifies his thought and writing a lot, not only, of course, first and foremost on the scriptures, but what the Puritans believed and how they dealt with this very issue.

So that's exactly what you were talking about, exactly what I was thinking about. One of my, I can't go into a lot of detail about it, it's a future project, some stuff's happening, but I'm working on something related to the New England Puritans and the Salem Witch Trials, which I can't go into great detail at this point, but there's a lot of overlap there, and I would love to talk to him sometime if that sounds like we have some shared interests.

Is that what you were telling me before the show that you wanted to talk to me about? No, that's something else. Oh, OK. I might as well, since you brought that up, since you no doubt piqued the interest of many of our listeners, I highly recommend an interview that I conducted.

In addition to looking up the interviews I have conducted with Dr. Keith Evans, I highly recommend an interview that I conducted with Paul Jehle, and interviewed him on a critique of Bill O 'Reilly's book, Killing the Witches, which is about the Salem Witch Trial.

I actually listened to that show. Oh, cool. And he is a historian and expert on the Salem Witch Trials and senior pastor of the New Testament Church of Cedarville in Plymouth, Massachusetts, and founding principal of the New Testament Christian School and the executive director of the Plymouth Rock Foundation.

So he was thoroughly knowledgeable about that event and revealed how grossly Bill O 'Reilly and his co-author, who probably did most of the writing of the book, have slandered the Puritans as a group, as a people, and highly exaggerated their involvement in the trials, completely left out that there were Puritans vociferously and loudly protesting against the trials and things such as that.

Oh, yeah. If we're talking about books that we don't recommend, Bill O 'Reilly's book on Killing the Witches is one that I highly don't. There's very few books that I've ever wanted to toss across the room while I'm reading them, but that was one of them.

Wouldn't mind tossing Bill O 'Reilly across the room. No, Christians aren't supposed to talk like that. Well, we are going to be entering into a discussion on a very important issue, which is the theme of your book, A Qualified Man Cultivating the Character of a Godly Leader.

The one thing off the bat that I'm extremely disappointed and saddened about is that you didn't take me up on my idea to have my photograph on the cover of the book.

Oh, you know, unfortunately, I don't get to pick the cover.

Well, I'm sure you wouldn't have picked my photo anyway, even if you had that authority.

I'm not paying you for that one, I guess.

The Motivation for Writing A Qualified Man

But there have been other books, as you are fully aware, and perhaps you've made use of many of them in the writing of your own, but there have been over the centuries, a wonderful, very biblical books on Christian manhood and the kind of man that is biblically qualified to be a leader in Christ's church and so on.

What was the compelling factor that led you to write your own book on this, where you said to yourself, you know, there's a lot of great stuff out there, but there are certain things that I think perhaps were not adequately addressed over the centuries.

And I want to add my own contribution to the literature on that. So tell us about that.

So this is kind of this is going to be a somewhat long answer, but I didn't actually start out writing the book. That was not my intention to write a book on this topic. I wasn't planning to publish anything on this topic because, as you said, there's been several other books written and published that have been very beneficial, both to me and I'm sure to many others over the ages.

But what had happened was at Christ Keystone Church, where a relatively new reformed church plants. And so one of the things that we've really been emphasizing is the raising up of other elders within the congregation.

So I would be considered the senior pastor, depending on who your listeners are. I would either be the equivalent of a senior pastor or a teaching elder or just a pastor, whatever term you want to use.

I'm I'm the guy that preaches every Sunday, Sunday, right? I'm the one going out doing pastoral visitation. But we also believe that we should be raising up other qualified men within the congregation to serve within the position of elder.

Along with that, because we're a relatively new church, a reformed church in a non reformed area, I not only am interested in raising up qualified men within the congregation, I'm interested in bringing about reformation within our church and within the community.

And that means that a lot of people in our area have an idea about church that is not necessarily a biblical idea about what a church is or what a church is supposed to be or even what a pastor is supposed to be.

And so it was actually last year I was preaching through the book of Titus, verse by verse, and this was this is how on plan this entire thing was. Preaching through the book of Titus, and of course, Titus chapter one has the qualifications for an elder listed, sort of a more condensed version of what Timothy lists in first Timothy chapter three.

And I fully intended to preach all of the qualifications in one sermon. So I was going to do all of it in one shot, because it's only just a few verses, it's about five verses. So I said, I got this, I can do this.

And this is something that doesn't typically happen to me much, but I had my sermon prepared, I always manuscript, so I had it all written out. That doesn't mean I'll always read the manuscript. In fact, I preach more in extemporaneous style without notes, but I have it written just for future reference before I enter the pulpit.

And I had this whole thing written out, ready to go, and I started preaching and I realized that I had already preached for 45 minutes and I hadn't even made it through the first verse that I had intended to preach the first of five of.

So I said, all right, guys, Christ Keystone, I'm going to do something very unusual here. I'm going to actually stop the sermon right now and you'll have to come back next week to hear it all. Well, they came back next week.

Thankfully they came back. And I still didn't make it through that entire verse. I only made it through one more word in 45 minutes. And so I said, okay, you got to really think about how I'm preaching this.

Am I actually doing this? Am I preaching each of these qualifications individually? And I talked to some of the elders at the church and I talked to the congregation and the sort of response that I was receiving was, this is fantastic.

We need this. We need to hear this. We need to hear more of this. Take your time, you know, work your way verse by verse through this. If you have to work your way word by word through this, do so until you get to the end of it.

So it ended up turning into something like nine sermons preached on just those few qualifications that are listed there in the book of Titus. And when I was done, I still didn't intend to publish anything.

But one of our deacons, who's also an elder in training, was talking to me and he said, that was one of the most helpful series I think I've ever heard preached, I would love if you could somehow print that for me and just get that to me so that I can look over it again and again, in fact, you should really submit that to a publisher.

And I was like, but I don't really do things like that. You know, if I'm going to write something, I'm going to actually intentionally try to write something. Now I say that, but pretty much every book I've ever written has started this way.

It starts in the church. It's beneficial for the local church, but somewhere along the line, I have the idea I'm going to publish it. Not with this. This was not really my intention at all, but by the request of this man within our congregation, I said, all right, I have some other projects going on, I can spend a ton of time on this, but let me just submit the idea to somebody.

So I submitted it to G3 and I think it was that same day they agreed to take the book on. And that was when I was like, okay, clearly God has a reason for this. Now you asked one other question. Why did I think it was then necessary?

It wasn't just the request of our church. That was the primary reason. The church seemed to benefit from it, enjoy it, and they wanted it in print. That was the primary reason. But a secondary reason for it is because as I was thinking about it, last year, we lost a lot of faithful men in ministry.

John MacArthur passed away. Vodie Bachum passed away.

We had, of course, Charlie Kirk. I didn't know that. Oh, I thought you were going to mention, I thought you were going to say that you had Charlie Kirk preach for you. I'm sorry.

Oh, no, no, no. I mean, I actually never met Charlie. I know some of the people involved with Turning Point, but anyway, you know, we lost some faithful men who were engaged in evangelism, apologetics, some faithful pastors, and then, of course, we had a lot of men, without naming names, that were disqualified from ministry over the past few years that were, from our perspective, qualified and then suddenly disqualified, and as I was thinking about that, I realized there actually is a need to once more remind the church that the office of pastor, first of all, is of the utmost, highest calling that a man can receive.

It's not to be entered into haphazardly. It's not, you should have a desire to pastor if you're going to be one, but also, it's not that you just go by your heart, because the heart is not the compass that we sail by.

We go according to what the Word of God says, and we test all things according to Scripture. And as it turns out, God in his Word is very adamant that there are qualifications that a man must meet if he is going to serve within the capacity of an elder or a pastor or even a preacher.

So with that in mind, I realized, okay, we could benefit from a book like that, I think, as the church at large, but there's one other aspect of this that I thought would be helpful, and that was in seminary, I remember reading different books about the qualifications of a pastor, never something that was really all that straightforward, though, never something that really dealt and dwelled into the biblical text, so that's something I tried to do.

But the other thing that I really tried to do is I thought, not every man that reads this is going to aspire to the office of elder, or he's not going to be a pastor, but he might be interested in reading it.

And so I thought, you know, these qualifications for an elder are actually not as extreme as you might first think they are. Instead, they are the sort of things that each single man should strive to be, whether he be a father, a husband, whether he be a pastor, an elder, or a whether he just be a member of a church, maybe he's a politician, maybe he's running his own business, maybe he's just a greeter at Walmart, but no matter what, these are the qualities that a man, a Christian man, should strive towards.

And so I think what makes this book a little bit different maybe than some others is that it is very much in the biblical text, Titus 1, it's going through it verse by verse, sometimes word by word, so it's a very expositional look at the text.

But at the same time, it's not just for pastors, it's for men in general. You want to be a godly man within your home, within the church and within society, then I'm hoping and praying that you can pick up this book and that God will use it to bring about that cultural reformation that I was talking about earlier.

Biblical Qualifications and Leadership Standards in Society

Yes, you bring up an interesting point, an important point, because I remember being sternly rebuked in social media during the primary elections over the past 8 to 12 years because I was saying that especially in the primaries, we should be looking for men, praying for men, and voting for men who meet the biblical standard of leadership in the Scriptures.

And even Christians who share my theological convictions were rebuking me and mocking me, saying, we're not electing a pastor, we're not electing a Sunday school teacher, we're electing president. And my response would often be, the way that that is said, it even conjures up this idea that a man who is godly and has self-control, who is restrained in his anger and his appetites and lusts, who is humble and things such as that are going to be weak, ineffective, impotent presidents.

And if you're a Christian, how dare you for thinking that way? Am I making sense?

No, no, not only does that make sense, we can apply it to several different places, but let's think about it in the home for a second. Imagine a Christian coming along and saying, you know, I really don't care about the men within our church, how they're leading their home.

They can be whatever they want to be. Let their appetite, their lusts go unchecked. You know, they're not supposed to be pastors, so they don't need to keep these rules. That would be crazy. Nobody in their right mind is going to say that about a man within his home.

Everybody acknowledges, or at least I should say, biblical Christians acknowledge that men within their homes are to be representatives of Christ within that home. You know, they have the duty of what we call federal headship.

They are the heads of their home. They're representing their family before God. They're also representing God before their family. So there's a duty, there's an obligation to be holy as the Lord is holy.

And that's really all these qualifications are. It's showing you, you want to be a leader within your home, you want to be a leader within your church, or you want to be a leader within your workplace or within society or politically, then yeah, these are absolutely the qualities that we ought to strive for.

As a side note, Chris, that's something that I was dealing with too during the last big election season. Now, I was one of those guys who was like, well, we're going to vote for Trump because there's not really a better option at this point.

But we really got to start praying that there would be some sort of Christian party that would come along with politicians who are Christians through and through. And maybe that happens within the conservative party.

Maybe the GOP actually does start producing some genuinely full-blown Christian leaders who aren't ashamed to be as such. I've seen some really great guys recently, so I'm not putting down political parties.

But absolutely, we should be praying that God would raise up Christian men who aren't afraid to be Christian men and who meet these qualifications.

Well, Christian men who are not cowards, who are not pragmatists, who really live out their convictions. There are a number of professing conservative Christians in political leadership that soften their views against the murder of unborn children as soon as they are placed in these positions of political authority and soften their views against things like same-sex marriage.

And we could go on and on and on. And the pragmatist will tell you that they've got to do this because otherwise the Democrats will win, the leftists will win. And as if there is no God in control over the universe.

I have, on occasion, been at Bible studies where brothers in Christ are angry at certain candidates that were running for governor and running for Senate and so on because they were too radically against abortion.

You can't do that. You're not going to win the election if you do that. You know, I'm like, are you kidding me?

I've heard people make that same exact comment. And it seems to me, again, to be, it's a very pragmatic point of view where they're saying we've got to be more like the world so that we receive the votes of the world so that things work out for us.

The ends justify the means, theology.

Yeah. But we don't do that anyplace else. We don't do it within our homes. We don't do it within our churches. I would argue we shouldn't do it within our workplaces. So why in the world would we do it within government?

And yet that's the exact argument that many Christians have. Or like you were saying, you'll have these guys that are abolitionists. They want to abolish abortion. They speak incredibly passionately and strongly on it.

They go and they help women who are in need of help, who are choosing to keep their babies. And then they're in office and suddenly you don't hear a peep out of them about the murder of the unborn. You're like, well, what in the world happened here?

And is it cowardice? Is it complacency? I don't know. But what I do know is we need to be praying for Christian men to occupy these positions who won't be fearful or afraid of what the general public is going to think.

Because ultimately, if you're a Christian, you answer to God. The word of God is our law. The word of Christ is our law. And if Christ is truly our king, then we need to act like it.

And we're going to go to our first commercial break. And when we come back, I'd like you to start to go through some of the primary qualifications of men to be fit for leadership in the church and also how to cultivate this.

So I'm looking forward to hearing this. And if anybody listening would like to join the conversation with a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnzen, A-R-N-Z-E-N, at gmail .com. As always, give us your first name, at least, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence, if you live outside the USA.

Only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter, such as you're in a church where you think the leaders of this church, or at least a number of them, are not qualified to be in those positions.

It could be a whole host of reasons you want to remain anonymous, and we will obviously respect your wishes and grant them. So you may remain anonymous for those kinds of personal and private questions.

But please, if it's just a general question on the scriptures teaching on this subject, on even historical evidence of how men of God have responded to this issue in the past, we will ask you for, please, your first name, at least, your city and state, and your country of residence.

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So please continue to pray for Joseph C. Moorcraft III. And we are now back to have a discussion with Jacob Tanner. And if you just tuned us in, we are going to be addressing Jacob Tanner's new book, A Qualified Man, Cultivating the Character of a Godly Leader.

If you have questions of your own, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com. Give us your first name at least, city and state, and country of residence. Well, there may be, if not live, but eventually getting into the hands of young men aspiring to be ministers or even pastors to keep on the lookout for such men in their midst that they may want to raise up to the position of leadership.

The Desire to Be an Elder and Who Should Pursue Leadership

Tell us about what you have discovered through your study, what man is even thinking of such an idea, the desire to be an elder is a good thing, as we are told in the Scriptures. And there are good, godly men who shouldn't be elders and deacons.

So tell us about those who should pursue this idea that they have, either because it has just risen up in their own hearts and minds, or because they've been told by others, you know, you should really pursue being a deacon and even an elder in God's church.

So tell us about who these people should be.

Yeah, so that's actually a great question. I think what's helpful here is to kind of define what the office of pastor is, and maybe even to define what exactly preaching really is. So preaching, kind of a working definition for it that I've used over the years, is that preaching is a fundamentally masculine task that is fueled by the Holy Spirit.

Now, what that ultimately means for us, then, is that you could be a great public speaker, but not be a preacher. Dr. Martin Lloyd-Jones has a fantastic book on this very subject, and in that book, Pastors in Preaching, he talks about how there are men who can teach, but they can't preach.

There are men who can speak, but they can't preach. That doesn't mean that they're lesser than other men, right? We're not saying that, you know, if you're a pastor, you're automatically better than everyone else.