WWUTT 603 A Pastor Must Be Above Reproach?

The Overseer Must Be Above Reproach

When the Apostle Paul presents to Timothy a list of qualifications for an overseer of the church, the first thing he says is that an overseer must be above reproach. He must be blameless in his ministry when we understand the text.

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Here's your teacher, Pastor Gabe.

Thank you, Becky. We continue with our study of 1 Timothy chapter 3 verses 1 -7 where the Apostle Paul gives Timothy a list of qualifications for a pastor in a church. He says the saying is trustworthy.

If anyone aspires to the office of overseer, he desires a noble task. 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.

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

Moreover, he must be well thought of by outsiders so that he may not fall into disgrace, into a snare of the devil. So as Paul introduces this list of qualifications, the first thing he says, if a man is going to be an overseer, a pastor, an elder, bishop, reverend, you know, whatever other word that we would substitute in there for overseer, most commonly we use the word pastor.

So if a man is going to be a pastor, first thing Paul says is that he must have the desire to want to do that. The Lord has actually placed on his heart an ambition to serve God and the people of God in this way.

Peter points out in 1 Peter 5 that he must do this willingly and not under compulsion. Nobody's forcing him to do it. He's not stepping into it because there's no one else that can do it, but he actually has an internal calling that God has put on his heart to want to be a pastor, to shepherd the people of God, to teach God's word and teach God's people how to apply that word so that it produces godliness in their lives.

And so this is the way he opens up this list. Well, the guy, first of all, has to want to do this. And if he does, if he so desires to serve in the office of overseer or pastor or elder, even a lay elder must meet the qualifications that are on this list.

Well, if he wants to do this, he desires a noble task. It is a job that is worthy of honor for those who do the job well. And it's also something that requires nobility. So there is a high standard just of moral character that this man is expected to meet.

And so once Paul says that, then he gets to the actual list of the qualifications. And the first thing he says is that an overseer must be above reproach. That's the first thing he says. And then basically everything else that comes after that through the next six verses, five, six verses, is expounding upon what it means to be above reproach.

So first of all, this man has a desire, an internal calling to serve as a pastor. And then there are external qualifications that he must meet. From the outside, you must be able to test that this man is qualified for this role.

First of all, he must be above reproach. So as we desire to understand what this means, let's first look at the word reproach. What does reproach mean? Well, it can be used as either a verb or a noun.

As a verb, it means to find fault with someone or to blame them for something, something that they have done, some sort of sin or transgression. As a noun, it can mean disapproval or it can be a blame or it can be a reproof that is brought against somebody, a disgrace or a discredit to themselves.

So because of the sins that they have done, they have brought reproach upon what is otherwise supposed to be impeccable character. And when it comes down to it, all of us are guilty of this. All of us are under reproach.

When compared with a holy God, we have sinned against God. His name is worthy and deserving of praise. And yet we blaspheme that name and attempted to glorify our own. We have rebelled against the throne of the high king of the universe who created everything by the word of his power and upholds everything by his word.

Yet what have you done? What can you do? Can you create something out of nothing? No, of course you can. And that's exactly the way that God created everything, the whole universe, time and space and all of it.

And so because we think so great of ourselves when we are nothing and he is the creator of all things, we deserve to be wiped out, separated from him forever, obliterated. And he does not even, he doesn't even owe us an explanation for that.

That's what we deserve. This is the reproach that we are under before a holy God. But praise God, he did not leave us under that oh so deserving sentence, but he sent his son Jesus into this world to become a man.

God did not have to do this, but he chose to show his love for us through his son, Jesus Christ, who lived the perfect life that we could not have pulled off on our best day, in our best minutes multiplied.

We could not have lived the life that Jesus lived, perfectly keeping the law, fulfilling all of the law, becoming the perfect spotless sacrifice for the sins of man. And he died such a shameful death, hanging naked on a tree on the side of a road where, according to the gospel of Mark, people would pass by and see him there.

And he took our reproach upon himself. All of that disgrace, all of that blame, all of that head shaking that people would have been doing as they saw him hanging there as a criminal. He took all of that upon himself.

The all of God's wrath that we deserve for our sin was poured out upon him on the cross. It was more than just a man hanging there bleeding out until he died. But the the wrath of God that should be poured out on us for our sin was being poured out on Christ.

And it says in the scriptures that he drank every last drop of God's wrath so that all who believe in him, all who believe in the person and work of Jesus Christ and what he did there on the cross for our sins will not perish under the deserving wrath of God, but will instead have eternal life.

Your sins will be forgiven. Your reproach will be taken away. And then you're able to stand before God blameless, not because of anything that you did, because you can't do it, but because of what Christ has done for you.

And now you stand before God justified by his grace. You have been forgiven in Jesus Christ, our Lord. The Bible tells us that sin is a reproach. Anything that you have done that is against the perfect holy nature of God brings reproach upon you.

Proverbs 14, 34, sin is a reproach. But we have this beautiful passage in Isaiah 25, 8, that he will swallow up death forever. That's what Jesus did on the cross, died, rose again from the grave, conquered death.

He will swallow up death forever. And the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces. And the reproach of his people, he will take away for the Lord has spoken. Amen, hallelujah, praise be his glorious, holy, merciful, gracious name.

This is what the Lord has done for us through Jesus Christ, our Lord. So all of us are under reproach. All of us before God stand condemned as sinners. We are worthy of the blame that he could hurl at us.

We have been discredited. We cannot claim anything noble about ourselves when standing before God in his holiness and his righteousness. But he loved us so much that he sent his son Jesus. And in Jesus' righteous perfection, he did everything that we could not do.

He died the death we were supposed to die. And the reproach that fell upon us instead fell upon him there on the cross. He took all of that upon himself, and then we were imparted his righteousness. This is that doctrine called double imputation.

Upon him was imputed our sin, and upon us was imputed his righteousness by the grace of God. And so we are under reproach because of our sin. We are now under grace because of God's mercy. When it comes down to it, none of us are qualified to even speak the name of God.

Every breath that we take, we would be blaspheming his name, which is essentially what we're doing before we come to Christ. Everything that you do is a blasphemy against God because you've been made in his image, and yet you exalt yourself instead of the Lord.

So everything that a person does apart from Christ is blasphemy. But Jesus takes away that reproach, and he forgives us our sin. The Holy Spirit convicts our hearts. We confess our sin before him. He forgives us and then presents us to the Father as worthy.

So a person who comes to Christ has been justified. And then they begin that process of sanctification, growing in holiness and righteousness, being shaped in the image of Christ. A pastor or an overseer is a model to the entire church body as to what a mature Christian should look like.

When you're talking about a person who is growing in the knowledge of God, who is applying that knowledge into godly living, the pastor should be an example of what that looks like. And we need examples.

We need those examples. Paul set himself up as an example. When to the Corinthians he said, imitate me, be imitators of me as I am of Christ. And he said in Philippians 3 .17, brothers, join in imitating me and keep your eyes on those who walk according to the example that you have in us.

We have a similar instruction in Hebrews chapter 13 as well. Remember your leaders, those who spoke to you the word of God. Consider the outcome of their way of life and imitate their faith. So a person who is a pastor must be worthy of imitation.

Now some of you are aware of the of the controversies that that are going on concerning sexual abuse in Hollywood and the men that are getting called out for that and being exposed before all of the public and then stepping down from their roles or being fired from movies and so on and so forth.

Actor Matt Damon with enough men that had been exposed as sexual deviants in Hollywood. Actor Matt Damon came out and said that instead of just calling all of these guys out, we also need to be raising up examples of what good guys look like that treat women with dignity and respect.

And that sounds like a pretty noble request. But the feminists hated it. There were so many feminists that came out lambasting Matt Damon because they that he even suggested such a thing. They said, no, it's this should be the natural inclination of men to treat women with dignity and respect.

So we're not going to praise them for something that they should be doing anyway. But when it comes down to it, we're all jerks to each other. We all try to kind of advance ourselves instead of consider others needs ahead of our own.

That's our nature to be selfish, to think of our needs first. When Jesus said, love your neighbor as yourself, he was saying, as you are so inclined to love yourself instead, love your neighbor. And so we are.

It is not our natural disposition to be respectful of one another. It's actually our natural disposition to be jerks to each other. So Damon had a good idea. Give us examples of of what it means to treat a woman with dignity and respect.

I think one of the reasons why Hollywood hates that idea so much is because they know what a respectable man should look like. It's a man who loves his wife and is faithful to his family. And there's not a lot of examples of that in Hollywood.

It would expose Hollywood sin even more than it's already been exposed if they were to raise up those kinds of examples. So I think why I think that's why the feminists were so against that. But we do need good examples.

And that pastor is supposed to be a good example. So if he is blameworthy, if he has done something that has diminished his character or affected his witness, then he is reproachable. He is not above reproach.

He is under reproach. And so it may be over the testing process as to whether or not a man who wants to be a pastor is qualified for that role. It may be as you are evaluating his character, you come to find out that, you know, he's not very self-controlled.

He gets tempted and he gives into that temptation. He's kind of a quarrelsome person. He likes to pick fights with people. And he's also not very gentle. He puts them down and calls them names. And so then in the course of that testing process, you realize this is just not a man who presents that good, mature Christian character that is worthy of an overseer of the church, somebody who is caring for somebody else's spiritual needs when he is going to confront somebody else about quarrelsome behavior.

And yet he's a quarrelsome person himself. Well, that's hypocritical. He can't actually correct a person in love and in holiness when he's got a log in his own eye. Right. You know, the whole thing that Jesus said in Matthew 7, why you try to remove the speck from your brother's eye when there's a log in your own eye.

So if you've got this guy who's a hypocrite and some of the things that he's supposed to be doing in his role as a pastor, well, he's disqualified himself. He is under reproach. And yet this needs to be a person who displays such a nobility in character that he would be a good example to the congregation and also to people outside the church.

Because remember, that's pointed out in here as well. Verse seven, he must be well thought of by outsiders so that he may not fall into disgrace into a snare of the devil. So what we're talking about here in this list of qualifications, we're talking about a man's present character.

We're not saying that this man's been squeaky clean his whole life because he can't be. All of us have been under reproach. But in his present character as a follower of Christ, as somebody who stands justified before God, as somebody who is knowledgeable in the word of God and can administer that to the people of God and encourage them to grow in godliness, are we talking about a man who in his present character is above reproach?

Now, let's say over the course of his ministry, he does something that compromises his witness. So it goes against this list of qualifications. Maybe at the time of testing, he was a sober minded individual.

But then somewhere down the road, years later, he becomes a drunk. He starts drinking and people know about it. It is affecting his family. It is affecting his witness in the community. People can smell it on him, you know, stuff like this.

He gets caught in that sin. The church should confront him. He's got some brothers in the Lord that confront him about this and say, you are sinning. And while you are in this place, you can't be a pastor.

You're disqualified. You're no longer above reproach. And hopefully he would be convicted of that sin. He would step out of the pulpit. He would undergo church discipline. And perhaps after a period of time when he's repented of that sin and he's showing that he's walking in righteousness again, he may be restored back to that position again.

And then the grace of God is shown in the way that he was called out in sin. He repented of sin and then even was able to assume his position as a minister of the word again. Now, should we always restore a pastor back to the pulpit?

As long as he's repentant, as long as he's asked for forgiveness, yeah, we've forgiven him. So if he's forgiven, he gets to be a pastor again, right? Not always. Yes, there are sins that a pastor can have committed in which he probably needs to step away, needs to handle those things, and then he can be restored back to that position of ministry.

But there are also things in which he can bring such a reproach upon himself that he is no longer qualified for that spot. And I'm not saying that he can't be forgiven. Please don't hear me say that. It's not.

He's he's sinned so bad that God's not even going to forgive him anymore. Not what I am saying. But forgiveness does not mean that everything can go back to the way it was before that person sinned. God forgave Adam and Eve and made skins for them to cover their nakedness.

But that doesn't mean he was just going to give him the Garden of Eden back again and everything was going to be as it was. There's consequences for behavior. And so a pastor can bring such a reproach upon himself that he is no longer qualified for the ministry.

Not that he can't do ministry at all. All of us as Christians are called to the ministry. We're supposed to share the gospel. But he cannot serve as an overseer caring for the church of God because he is no longer above reproach.

Perhaps you're familiar with a story that's made international headlines now involving a pastor at a church in Memphis, Tennessee. Andy Savage is his name. Twenty years ago, he was serving as a youth minister at a church in Texas.

And it is there that he had sex with one of his students in that youth group, which is a crime. Not just that he committed adultery, but he had sex with a minor. He left the ministry for a time, moved back to his home in Memphis.

And since then, he has co-founded this church. It's called High Point Church. He is a podcaster. He has written a book. As a matter of fact, it was a book about marriage that was going to be coming out.

But the publisher, Bethany House, has since said that they're not going to release the book. Just this past Sunday, Andy came before his church and told them everything that happened. Not the gruesome details or anything.

But he said that he had sinned and he asked for the church's forgiveness. And the church stood and applauded him. But I tell you that this man is permanently disqualified from the position of pastor. He cannot hold that spot anymore.

He is not above reproach. His witness is forever tainted. And especially because this has become an international story, he is not thought of well by outsiders. He brings a reproach upon the gospel of Jesus Christ when he teaches it.

Because he has done sin that is even shameful to pagans, which is what Paul points out in 1 Corinthians 5 .1. They know this is bad. People who are unbelievers know that what he has done is bad. And yet he would continue to assume this particular role that he is no longer qualified for.

The church itself is bringing reproach upon themselves because he is still serving in that particular position. And it is also not loving against the person that Mr. Savage had sinned. He should be removed from that spot.

That would be the loving thing to do. That would be loving Mr. Savage. It would be loving his family. It would be loving the church of God. It would be cherishing the gospel that that church is supposed to be presenting.

And it would also display love for the person against whom Mr. Savage had sinned, who is wounded in her heart, still carrying that burden to this day, according to the confession that she has made and is still in need of healing.

It doesn't matter whether she's doing this to get revenge. It doesn't even matter the quality of the apology that Mr. Savage made to his church. What he has done has disqualified him as a pastor. We read a little bit later on, and we're going to get to this later in 1 Timothy 5.

It says, do not admit a charge against an elder except on the evidence of two or three witnesses. In this case, Mr. Savage has come out and confessed what it is that he has done. And it says, as for those who persist in sin, rebuke them in the presence of all so that the rest may stand in fear.

Now again, Mr. Savage's confession may be truly genuine, and he really feels guilt for what it is that he has done. Everything that he has said about the men's that he's tried to make are truthful. And so I pray that his heart is genuine when he says that he has sinned and he has asked forgiveness for that sin.

But that doesn't mean that he can remain in the position that he is in. And based on this instruction in 1 Timothy 5, he should be removed in the presence of all. They know exactly what he has done and why he is being called to step down as a pastor so that the rest may stand in fear.

This becomes a testament to all believers. Be careful because any one of us are capable of falling into sins and temptations of the flesh. You are not so strong as to resist temptation by your own power, but cling to God and the devil will flee from you.

Titus chapter two, verse 11, for the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions and to live self-controlled, upright and godly lives in the present age, waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works.

Dear God, I pray for Mr. Savage that in his heart he is truly repentant, but I pray that he's convicted over this even more than he has been, to the point that he would step down from that position and realize that he has compromised his witness as a teacher of the word of God, as an example to the flock of a person who should be above reproach.

I pray that his church would be convicted in this also, lest they compromise the witness that they're supposed to have there in Memphis, Tennessee. And it's going to have a huge detrimental impact upon that church.

May not be seen in the immediate future, but it certainly will be down the road. I also pray for the woman that Mr. Savage has wounded, and I pray that she would seek the Lord Christ for healing, for it is only he that can bring us true peace, peace with God and peace with one another.

Lord, I pray that none of us think so highly of ourselves that we think we're invincible to the temptations of the flesh, but while we still inhabit this flesh, we're going to be warring against temptations.

So let us help us to entrust ourselves to you and cling so much to you that we're not even tiptoeing the line around the sins, but we're pursuing the holiness and the righteousness of God and our Savior, Jesus Christ.

In his name we pray, amen.

Ministry Schedule

You've been listening to When We Understand the Text with Pastor Gabe Hughes. Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, Gabe will be going through a New Testament study. Then on Thursday, we look at an Old Testament book.

On Friday, we take questions from the listeners and viewers. Tomorrow, we'll pick up on an Old Testament study, When We Understand the Text.