1 Timothy 3 Commentary

1 Timothy 3 Commentary

Going by these qualifications for church leadership, countless congregations will be leaderless!

Above reproach. Faithful to his wife. Temperate. Self-controlled. Respectable. Not given to drunkenness. Not violent. Gentle. Not quarrelsome. Not a lover of Money. Must manage his own family well and see that his children obey him.

The scripture has countless ways to say the same thing. A leader’s tool kit is simple: The fruit of the Spirit! Galatians 5 verse 22.  Faithfulness, gentleness, self-control… In the Book of Acts, the apostles summarized this list of qualifications to one simple statement: “Men from among you who are known to be full of the Spirit and wisdom.”

The key is the demonstration of the fruit of the Spirit. Wisdom is one of the gifts of the Spirit. It is not given to every saint. Gifts are distributed to saints at the sole discretion of the Spirit.

The equation in the Book of Acts (when the seven were chosen) would be as follows: Fruit + Wisdom = Leadership. The fruit would be the fruit of the Spirit as expanded in Galatians 5 verse 22 and elsewhere. Wisdom would be the gift of the Spirit as clearly indicated in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians – Chapter 12 verse 8.

Wisdom can only be seen when it is dispensed by the host. Then the host gains respect for the dispensed gift. Paul underlines respectability and the ability to dispense this special gift – the ability to teach. If the potential leader manages his family well, you have every chance under heaven that he can duplicate the same energy in the church.

Paul references experience as a qualification in the statement that the potential leader shouldn’t be a recent convert. Of course, there is more to this argument and Paul has given us more meat.

Verse 11 may help us resolve the puzzle supposedly created by Paul’s instruction in Chapter 2. The women of verse 11 may be deacons’ wives or the deaconesses themselves. Check the footnotes in your Bible. They were leaders who needed to be “temperate and trustworthy in everything.”

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