I.     Opening Illustration on the subject of Church officers or leaders.

A.  Last week we saw the formation of deacons. This week we want to glean some characteristics of effective church officers or leaders.

B.  The church of Jesus Christ desperately needs good leaders.

C.  JOKE:  What many Baptist churches are finding out today is that there is no shortage of leaders, there is only a shortage of those willing to follow them.

1.    Well, what makes a good leader?

2.     

D.  Begin reading at Acts 6:8

II.   “The God of glory” (Acts 7:2b)

A.  Definition of glory

1.    magnificence; great beauty : the train has been restored to all its former glory.

a)    (often glories) a thing that is beautiful or distinctive; a special cause for pride, respect, or delight : the glories of Paris.

b)    the splendor and bliss of heaven : with the saints in glory.

2.    a luminous ring or halo, esp. as depicted around the head of Jesus Christ or a saint.

B.  WCF 2:2 – God hath all life, glory, goodness, blessedness, in and of Himself; and is alone in and unto Himself all-sufficient, not standing in need of any creatures which He hath made (Job 22:2-3), nor deriving any glory from them, but only manifesting His own glory in , by, unto, and upon them.

1.    In this section we see the richness and precision of the confession (“God hath all life, glory, goodness, blessedness, in and of Himself.”)

a)    This is what makes God utterly transcendent, beyond our comprehension, unparalleled in all of creation.

b)    LIFE is something that God possesses in and of himself. Our own lives are very important to us and we are very aware of our own mortality, we know we born (given life) and someday we know these bodies will die.

c)     Scripture teaches us that life is like the grass; it withers and then it dies. We are always dependent on support systems—food, oxygen, water, and human fellowship—to continue living, because we do not have life in ourselves.

d)    At Mars Hill, Paul said, “In Him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28).

e)     God has all life in and of himself. As we study our existence we find that few things are more mysterious than life itself.

f)      The Velveteen Rabbit asked the stuffed bear, “What is real?”

g)    We find reality ultimately in God; without him there is no plant life, animal life, or human life because all power of existence comes from him, who alone has all life in and of himself.

2.    In the same way, God also has GLORY in and of himself.

a)    A burning issue of our day is that of self-worth, self-esteem, human dignity.

b)    From a biblical perspective, we see these things are a gift. We prefer to think that dignity and worth is intrinsic or tied to our humanity, but dirt has little inherent dignity. We were created out of dust and we return to dust.

c)     Our worth, our dignity is not intrinsic, it is extrinsic that is it is assigned to us by Someone who is beyond our comprehension and quite out of our control.

d)    I have value, I have worth and you have worth because God says so, because he assigns value and importance to human beings, and because he has made us in his image.

e)     As R.C. Sproul put it, “God puts a premium on the sanctity of human life.”[i]

3.    One of the most provocative statements in the New Testament is found in Hebrews 1:2-3, where Christ is introduced in all his magnificence.

a)    The writer calls Christ “the brightness of His glory.”

b)    The Bible usually expresses God’s glory in terms of a blinding, dazzling light.

c)     Yet the inspired writer here asserts that the very brilliance of divine glory is found in Jesus Christ, himself.

C.  Well, this is how we see God addressed here as Stephen is giving a defense of the gospel.

1.    Good leadership starts with a proper theology—understanding who God is and who the leader, himself, is in relation to his/her Creator.

2.    Understanding that his call to leadership comes from God and in a very real sense, we are all called to some sort of leadership through our sanctification experience.

D.  In our culture, we have become very skeptical of leaders.

1.    You remember the book, Animal Farm, by George Orwell. The tale concluded with the line, “All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.” With that line, Orwell delivered his summary critique of Karl Marx and the Soviet Russian government.

a)    The story is a well-known one: animals rise up, organize, displace the Joneses (the human owners of the farm) and begin to run the farm for their own benefit—thus the name “Animal Farm”—run by animals for animals, so the story goes.

b)    Of course, this Utopian experiment is bound to fail, and it does. In the end, a new ruling class emerges—the pigs—and by the book’s conclusion, they’re putting up those signs: “All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.”

c)     Marx thought that communism would solve the problem of abuse authority, Orwell said that the problem ran deeper than that—the problem was in human nature, the human heart.

d)    Orwell’s critique of authority seemed penetrating and cynical when it first appeared in the last century but today people have become accustomed to thinking about “abuse” and “power” in the same sentence. Whatever the reason, there is a real suspicion of authority in our society.

2.    In the book of Acts we see a defined structure of leadership and the important role it plays in the development of the church. If our church is going to develop we are going to need good leaders….

III. Characteristics of a Church Leader

A.  Knowledgeable

1.    Humble knowledge.

2.    Study to show thyself approved…

3.    I know whom I have believed and am persuaded…

B.  Boldness

C.  Love

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[i] R.C. Sproul, Truths We Confess: Volume One. P&R, 2006, p.58.