Sermon Tone Analysis

Welcome

Good morning,

Assignment

Read Mark 1:21-45.

Jesus - A Man of Service

Our elders asked me to teach on the church’s ministry of service as we prepare to appoint new deacons.

And this request came at a really good point in our series on Mark because next week’s lesson will be “Jesus - A Man of Power”, so it’s appropriate for this week’s lesson to be drawn from Jesus’ example as a man of service.

And this provides our first lesson on the day: all ministry in the body of Christ is modeled after the person of Jesus Christ, which means that deacons emulate Jesus’ servanthood.

So we begin with Jesus:

The mission of deacons is to be the physical embodiment of Christ’s servanthood: they are the servants of the church who lead the church’s ministry of service in serving the physical needs of their local church body.

Repeat twice > > >

And so, in a very real sense, the deacon’s ministry of service is the tangible expression of God’s love in the Church!

The Body of Christ - Sent to Serve

Jesus came to show humanity the way of life.

We see in Jesus what it means to really be human.

One of the things I love about Mark’s gospel is that the lessons we learn are drawn directly from how Jesus lived.

But Jesus’ life was bigger than any one individual, so we understand the identity of the Church as being the body of Christ.

We carry out together the life that Jesus lived on earth!

We can see this vision for the Church’s ministry of service at the very beginnings of the Church:

As more and more people began to follow Jesus and learn his way of life, the need for the kind of love by which Jesus served his disciples became too much for the apostles to handle on their own.

CHALLENGE: Do we recognize our need and the need of our community for this kind of love?

The first point we need to see here is that the Church’s ministry of service was born out of her growth; healthy, growing churches respond to serve real, felt needs, both within their fellowship and to their community.

Churches that grow rapidly SERVE.

Simply put: deacons lead this service in the church.

So, as the need for Christian service grew, the body’s needs for Christian service eventually grew beyond what the apostles could manage.

For them to give the time and attention that was needed to this ministry would have been unfaithful to the ministry of the word to which they were appointed.

The apostles weren’t saying that they wouldn’t serve, or that they were too good to serve others, but that the demand was too great for them to lead without compromising on their ministry of the word.

Continuing:

We see the multiplication of the body.

Like a new baby, conceived in the womb, slowly limbs begin to appear, and the body takes shape into new human life.

So here, as the Church grows, the body begins to take shape into new spiritual life.

Deacons were appointed to be like the hands of the body serving as the physical expression of Jesus’ love on earth.

We are able to see the spiritual nature of this ministry by the attributes that mattered most: if someone put me in charge of selecting qualified men to serve tables, I would probably look for specific skills, like being quick on their feet, personable, and so on, but the qualities that matter most to the kind of service these deacons were to provide were all about being “full of the Spirit and wisdom”.

And this is because deacons are not asked simply to serve, but to serve as the tangible expression of God’s love in the Church!

I will make the case in this lesson that the qualifications Paul gives Timothy for the deacons simply elaborate on what it means to be “full of the Spirit and wisdom”.

And this matters so much because deacons are positioned as the examples of Jesus’ servanthood that the whole Christian body is meant to emulate!

What we see in our deacons is what we are all meant to practice in our lives, in our families, in our fellowship, and in our community.

And this “lead by example” model is, by the way, how all Christian leadership works.

Reading on:

We see how this wisdom met the needs of the moment in the life of their young Church.

So they chose these seven men, who were known to be full of the Spirit and wisdom, and entrusted to them the church’s ministry of service by praying over them and laying their hands on them.

We shouldn’t miss how this specialization of ministry is associated with an explosion of growth in the Church that even resulted in the conversion of many priests to the Christian faith.

When those God has called to one ministry are free to excel in the ministries to which they were called and appointed, so much can be accomplished in the Church!

But when those God calls into ministry are divided in their attention, the whole body suffers, and often the result is the spiritual stagnation of the whole Church.

So now let’s look at the deacons themselves:

Deacons - Men of Service Full of the Spirit and Wisdom

Being “full of the Spirit and wisdom” is the perfect description of those who are called to represent Jesus’ loving service to the Church, but what does all this mean in practical terms?

One person might think being “full of the Spirit” refers to someone’s personal charisma, or another might think it refers to some powerful giftings; you might look at Stephen’s martyrdom and think that’s what it means.

Paul takes the time to work out for Timothy what it means for deacons to be “full of the Spirit and wisdom”:

Sometimes we read these qualifications like a checklist of job-prerequisites.

And, while I guess that’s not altogether wrong, I think it rather misses the point: because deacons are called to tangibly express Jesus’ love, they must express his love with the same Spirit, and the same wisdom that Jesus used to express his love.

So as leading representatives of Christ’s servanthood and love in the Church, deacons must be a certain kind of person.

They must be:

Worthy of respect

Not hypocritical

Not an excessive drinker

Not greedy for money

Holding the mystery of the faith with a clear conscience

Taken together, deacons must be honorable, sincere, temperate, moderate, and faithful.

Continuing on:

Only a cursory review of Paul’s first letter to Timothy is necessary to recognize that the church in Ephesus was suffering from poor leadership.

Leaders were arising who were misusing the law, causing strife over matters of opinion, and inflicting all kinds of trouble on the church.

This qualification addresses that problem: poor, untested leadership is destructive to the Church.

Both the character and faith of those who serve as deacons must be proved since both are necessary for being “full of the Spirit and wisdom”.

And this “proving” carries the sense of “testing to see if something is true or genuine,” and is the same kind of language used for testing of metals; it refers to the kind of test that is passed in life, not the classroom.

These are men whose spirit and wisdom for service have been proven in life.

Such men should “prove blameless” in these things.

Now this word can be terrifying because we often associate it with sinlessness.

We think to be blameless means being without error.

But, how one handles personal deficiencies and failures says as much about one’s spirit and wisdom as anything else.

Instead, deacons are men characterized by these qualities.

They're men who aspire and pursue these attributes the way athletes train for their sports; they practice the attributes of the love Jesus displayed in his life.

And I think this is why an emphasis is placed on their home, both for elders and deacons, because nothing proves the genuineness of love and wisdom like the home!

Reading on:

Pause & Reset > > >

Whenever we come to God’s word, we inevitably face various questions that we have to interpret as we all seek to please God.

And we’re all ultimately seeking to please God.

So we approach God’s word with respect for him alone, being sensitive to the world in which we live, while also ensuring that we don’t try to bring our own - or our culture’s - agenda into God’s Kingdom.

“Wives” (γυναῖκας): When we approach this verse we have to make an interpretation; does this word refer to the wives of the deacons, or to women who serve as deaconesses?

Sometimes we don’t even realize that we are even making an interpretation.

My goals in teaching this verse are twofold: I want everyone to come away feeling honored, respected, and heard in their views, and I want everyone to understand the view that guides how this church body fulfills its Kingdom mission.

Now, some of you have already spotted the challenge this verse presents by the choices different translations make: versions like the ESV, NKJV, CSB, and NET use “wives”, presenting these verses as qualifications for the wives of the men who serve as deacons, while versions like the NASB, NRSV, NIV, and the CEB use “women”, presenting these verses as qualifications for women who serve as deaconesses.

So let’s treat both views and then we’ll apply this verse for our church:

On the one hand, “women” is more consistent with the discourse beginning from 1 Timothy 2:9-15, where “γυναῖκας” means “women”.

There appears to be a clear parallel construction between 2:9 and 3:11, where Paul begins with "Likewise women", suggesting that he's following the pattern "Adam was formed first, then Eve” (from 2:13).

This view is also appealing because the kind of possessive language one would normally expect to be present if “γυναῖκας” were to mean “wives” is absent from this sentence.

In other words, we don’t see possessive words like “their” as we would normally expect to see.

So this view concludes that, since no qualifications for the wives of the elders was presented for them, this verse is presenting qualifications for women who serve as deaconesses.

On the other hand, “wives” is more consistent with the flow of the discourse from 1 Timothy 3:8-13, where both the preceding and following verses seem to address qualifications for male deacons.

One would not expect Paul to use such a disorganized structure in giving qualifications for deaconesses right in the middle of qualifications for deacons.

Considering that the deacons eventually emerged as leaders of the general assembly (as we see in Philippians 1:1), this view concludes that, since it would seem that women serving as deacons could undermine the instructions Paul gave about authority in 2:12, this verse is presenting qualifications for the wives of the men who serve as deacons.

From this treatment I hope you can see and appreciate the challenges represented in this verse, and I hope seeing this helps you respect, appreciate, and love those who draw different conclusions than you.

What unifies us in our Kingdom mission is not that we always agree on individual points, but that we are all wholeheartedly pursuing Christ together.

And in that pursuit, we serve our Lord in this body with the understanding that this verse is speaking to the wives of the men who serve as deacons.

First Application: What this view means for the life of this church is that we gain an important insight into the nature of Christian leadership: unlike in the world, where individuals stand above those they lead, Christian leaders never stand above others by themselves.

These men we're preparing to appoint as deacons in the church do not serve the church simply by their own merits, but as part of their families.

And this principle is often recognized to be true for all Christian leadership, not just for deacons.

I could not stand here before you to preach and minister the word of God the way that I do without my wife.

She is the sounding board against which many of my thoughts are measured.

She is the strength that keeps this family moving while I am in prayer and study.