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 21st 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.

1 Timothy 3:1-7

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