1 Timothy 3:1–7

God doesn't always spell out things in stark, “thou shalt” terms. He did in the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:1–17; Deuteronomy 5:6–21), but most of God's Word is filled with stories, prophecies, proverbs, psalms, and biographies. When we get to the epistle of 1 Timothy, however, we discover virtually a whole chapter devoted to a black-and-white list requiring little interpretation but a lot of application. In 1 Timothy 3:1–7, Paul put his finger on the essential qualities God looks for in overseers—qualities as applicable for church leaders in the twenty-first century as they were in the first century. We'll look at the first two verses in this lesson and the last five in the next message.

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