Healthy Leadership

Well amen and good morning to everyone. So glad to be able to be with you. It's been an adventure this morning. It's been an adventure for everyone. I want to add my voice to saying to our staff and our volunteers who are able to get here, to be able to serve you how grateful we are. There's people that are doing things that they don't normally do. And so I'm just really, really grateful for that. You know, one of the great privileges of being a pastor and one of the great privileges of pastoring here is that I get let into people's lives. So I have the opportunity to be able to talk with people and to hear about their dreams and their hopes and their work and their hobbies and all of the things that are associated with people's lives. But today, I wanna let you a little bit into mine. Now by that, I don't mean everything, letting you into everything in my life. You don't really care that I've got a collection of Cabbage Patch Kids from the 1980s. I'm kidding, I do not have a collection of Cabbage Patch Kids from the 1980s. All of you who are a little older get that joke. Those who are younger maybe not. And I won't let you in, maybe I will, I'll let you in on the fact that here in this room right now, we're doing this entire thing with no heat. There's just no heat in the room. And so I'm letting you in on that as well. Congratulations to us. If you see smoke coming out, it's not because of any other reason except for we're frigid in this room, but we're here for you. But really, here's what I wanted to let you in on. As a pastor, we've got some things that are facing us pastors, and if there's some problems that are facing pastors, that means that there's some problems facing churches. And let me explain what I mean when I say that. There's a researcher named Sam Raynor, and he helped us to determine that the median age of pastors in the United States right now is 60 years old. That's the median age. By the way, in the year 2000, the median age of pastors in the United States was 50 years old. And over that timeframe, actually the median age of pastors has grown more significantly than the median age of the population. What we also found out from George Barna is that there are more pastors over the age of 65 than there are under the age of 40. And if you're paying attention to these things, what you realize pretty quickly is that there is a problem. And you can figure that out when you start to put those things together. If the average age of pastors is 60 and there's more pastors over the age of 65 than there are under the age of 40, then what that says to us is that there is now an impending pastor shortage in the nation, significant spiritual leadership shortage. In fact, we know this to be true based just on how this is bearing out in real places and in the real world, in the state of North Carolina, there are 600 churches without a pastor right now. In fact, in the Southern Baptist Convention, which is the largest Protestant evangelical denomination in the country, they said that 30% of the churches that are in the state of Mississippi are without a pastor. It's almost 20% in the state of Louisiana where our own pastor Dan Davis comes from. He emptied them out apparently. And then you've got, like in Illinois, one out of every seven churches is without a pastor. This is happening all over the country. And you can see that this is a real problem. If we keep this trajectory where we have a lack of pastors and spiritual leaders in the context of churches. If we keep this trajectory, then over the next couple of decades, it looks bleak from a spiritual leadership perspective in our nation. And for a church to actually live beyond us, which is what we're talking about, it's gonna require healthy spiritual leadership and it's gonna require healthy models of spiritual leadership for that to occur. So what does that look like? Well I think that Paul's letter to Titus helps us with that. And I want us to dig into that. Now just a reminder, if you're sitting at home, which you are, because we're all at home basically at this juncture, if you're sitting at home, I hope that you'll open your Bible to the book of Titus. If you've got an actual Bible like I have right here, or if you've got a digital device, I want you to be able to see what we're talking about. We're gonna show it to you on the screen as well. But I want you to be able to look at that and be able to see it. Remember, Titus is kind of deep into the New Testament. If you have to look that up, feel free to do it. There's nobody looking at you making fun of you because you're just in your house. And if your kids are saying, "Hey, why don't you know this?" Just tell them, "Leave me alone. I'm just getting my Bible open right now and this is what I'm doing." All right. So find your place in the book of Titus. Now what I wanna remind you is that, with a little backstory is this, is that if you remember back in the book of Acts 2, at the time of Pentecost, when all of these people had gathered for the time of Passover, they had come from all different places. And Acts 2 lists a bunch of the places that they came from, and one of the places that they came from, the people that were named were Cretans. Now Cretans means people that came from the island of Crete. The island of Crete was, it's the kind of southern part of where Greece is. Greece has a bunch of islands. Crete is the largest of those islands. And these Cretan Jews came to celebrate in Jerusalem, the Passover festival during that time. Now when they were there, they were impacted by the preaching of the gospel and the power of the Holy Spirit. And then they came back to Crete. And presumably in some of the cities that were around in Crete, they started gathering together as like little churches, little communities of faith. Well sometime later, the apostle Paul and Titus made a trip to Crete. And they were there and they started setting some things in order. But then Paul left and Titus remained. And then Paul wrote this letter to Titus because he wanted to instruct him about what he needed to do, how he needed to complete what ultimately they started. Now what's interesting is that Paul leaves Titus there and writes to him, and I'm imagining Paul and Titus were doing some work together. Now there's probably about a hundred cities on the island of Crete. And if they were trying to establish churches in all of those places, that was gonna be a big task. And it was a task that was not yet completed. And that's why Paul writes this beginning in verse number five of Titus 1. It says this, "The reason I left you, Titus, in Crete was that you might put in order what was left unfinished and appoint elders in every town, as I directed you." Now, I want you to leave this right here, leave this verse up for just a moment. But here's what I'm reminded of, without spiritual leadership, the people of the island of Crete were gonna be left open to potential deception. They were gonna be left open to false teaching. They were gonna be left open to all of those things. And so what Paul wants Titus to do is he wants him to bring order by bringing healthy leadership into all of those contexts. Now here's something interesting that I noted when I read what Paul said to Titus right out of the gate. He said, "The reason that I left you in Crete was that you might put an order what was left unfinished," watch this, "And appoint elders in every town, as I directed you." Now there's two things about what this instruction says that he wants in terms of healthy spiritual leadership. First of all, that it's local. He says, "I want you to do this where? In every town." So he wants that to be local in every place. But secondly, he wants it to be multiple. I want you to appoint, what, elders, plural. He wants it to be local and he wants it to be multiple. I don't want us to miss that. We're gonna come back to it in just a little bit. But I think it's really important because it's consistent with what Paul always does in his ministry and what he did in his missionary travels. Wherever he would go in the cities and the towns that he would go into, there would always be an appointing of elders or overseers. That term is used synonymously even here in Titus, elders or overseers. And he would appoint these men to be governing, to be spiritual leadership in that place. But it would always be multiple, not singular. There might be singular leaders that are kind of leaders among equals that kind of have a little bit of a special direction, or they may be people called in to help lead, like Titus was being called into Crete, but he wanted this to be local and multiple in terms of what he did. This is the same kind of instruction by the way that he gave to Timothy when Timothy was in Ephesus. He was telling him the same thing, that this was to be local and to be multiple in terms of spiritual leadership. And when you read 1 Timothy, which I taught on last year, and when you read Titus, there's some similarities in how he tells them to think about how the church is supposed to be governed. There's also some differences, by the way, because in 1 Timothy, Paul tells Timothy, hey, no new converts. No new converts. He doesn't say that to Titus in terms of his list. And then he also in 1 Timothy talks about the appointment of deacons and deaconesses, but he doesn't say that in Titus. The reminder is this, is that Paul is giving instruction based on the need in the context that they're in. There are some hard and fast principles that we must embrace according to the scripture about spiritual leadership, but it can look slightly different in different places. And we kind of have to understand that based on what Paul does here in his teaching. So what does healthy leadership look like? He said that there needs to be an appointment of elders in every town. So what does healthy leadership look like? Well here's how I would summarize this, and it would simply be saying it this way. Healthy leadership projects the life of Jesus and protects the teachings of Jesus. Pretty simple, pretty straightforward, healthy leadership projects the life of Jesus, in other words, helps to demonstrate what it looks like to live the life of Jesus. And it protects the teaching of Jesus. We're gonna see that in our text here as we walk through it. So let's split those apart for just a second. Let's kind of begin with the first one, healthy leadership projects the life of Jesus. I want you to look with me in verse number six, in just the very beginning part of verse number six, it says this, 6A. An elder must be blameless. Now you may be reading that and thinking to yourself, woo, that is frightening. An elder must be blameless. Does that mean that the Lord is looking for perfect people to lead and to spiritually direct and to spiritually govern His church? No, the word blameless there in the Greek language is not indicating perfection. What it is indicating is that these are men who should be above reproach. And it also is talking about men who are free from accusations of ungodliness. That's what it's talking about when we hear the statement to be blameless that the elder or an elder must be blameless because what they're supposed to do is they're supposed to image the life of Jesus for the church. That's the whole point of what they're supposed to do. So what does that look like? Well, he starts to walk through what they're to be blameless in. Here's the first, blameless in family life. That's the first piece that we see. Now looking in verse number six, here's what it says. "An elder must be blameless, faithful to his wife, a man whose children believe and are not open to the charge of being wild and disobedient." Now John, if you'll just leave that up for just a moment, I would appreciate it. When he talks about this idea of what an elder is supposed to be when he says to be blameless, he's supposed to be blameless in his family life. And here's what that means. He's free from the accusations of ungodliness in how he helps to govern and lead his family. He's supposed to be faithful to his wife. That translation literally is a one woman man. Now I don't think that that's necessarily talking about life before Jesus. It's talking about what is right now a one woman man faithful to his wife. And what's important here is that also has a reminder to those in our cultural context, those who desire kind of to be an elder or ultimately desire to be an overseer or a pastor, that they've got to be faithful to their spouse if married, and if not, they better not be building kind of habits that are based on flirtatiousness, that are based on pornography. These are things that are inconsistent for being a one woman man. And that is one of the responsibilities of what it means to be blameless in family life in terms of our marriage, that we're imaging the faithfulness of Jesus to his church if we are people who are married and are helping to lead the church. But it also says, a man whose children believe and are not open to the charge of being wild and disobedient. Now this is an interesting statement here because it also talks about how the elder is supposed to govern in their family related to their kids. Now he uses the term believe here, and that's the word pistos in the Greek language. And certainly it can be translated believe, but it can also be translated trustworthy or faithful. Here's what I don't think Paul is telling Titus. I don't think that he's saying that every single person who is gonna be qualified to be an elder or an overseer has to have kids, all of whom are believers. I don't think that's what he's saying. And I'll tell you why I think that. The reason is because Paul wrote to Timothy about this as well, and Paul's not gonna say two different things. He's not gonna tell Titus, "Hey, this guy's kids, all of them have to be believers" because I don't think that here he's talking about the eternal salvation of the souls of the kids of the overseers. I think he's talking about how this man conducts himself in his family life for the sake of his kids. Because in 1 Timothy 3, it says this. "He must manage his own family well and see that his children obey him, and he must do so in a manner worthy of full respect. If anyone does not know how to manage his own family, how can he take care of God's church?" You see, that's what Paul's saying to Timothy, and I think the same heartbeat is the same heartbeat that he's trying to describe to Titus. You could imagine, right? A godly man who is helping to lead along with probably a godly wife who's helping to lead a family who's got five kids, four of which are wonderful believing saints, and one of which who maybe has not yet come to that place of believing, but is responsive, not wild, not disobedient, but is responsive to the leadership of the family and the leadership of the father in this instance. That person is not unqualified to lead because the same thing happens in the church. Sometimes there's good, healthy, godly leadership, and there are saints and saints aplenty who are being led well. And then there are also some who are not so much, right? So this is really talking about the manner in which the nature of the man and his responsibility to be leading like Jesus in the context of the family, blameless in family life. But secondly, there's another way that they're to be blameless. They project the life of Jesus by being blameless in character. This is what Paul goes on to tell Titus beginning in verse number seven. He says this. "Since an overseer manages God's household, he must be blameless." And then watch, he tells him a bunch of things that he's not to do, not overbearing. In other words, not domineering. Not quick tempered, they don't fly off the handle all the time. Not given to drunkenness. That's pretty self-explanatory. Not violent. Also self-explanatory. Not pursuing dishonest gain. You know what Paul's doing? He's actually talking about how many of the Cretans live, and he's saying that you should actually live opposite of that. You should live completely counter-cultural to the way that they live. And then he flips it on the positive side in verse number eight and says, "Rather, he must be hospitable, one who loves what is good, who is self-controlled, upright, holy, and disciplined." These are all character issues that are associated with what it means to be an elder or an overseer. If you noted in verse number seven, he used the term overseer, earlier he was using the term elder because they're synonymous in what he's talking about. Oftentimes those phrases, elder, overseer, pastor, bishop, are often used synonymously by Paul in how he talks. Now here's what I would wanna remind us as a church of, is that what can happen in the US, and I see it all over the place, unfortunately, is that people in churches fall in love more with charisma than they do godly character. And that is a mistake. It's a mistake. You see it too often because you see the crash and burn of all of these celebrity pastors. You just see the crash and burn. Because oftentimes what happens is we love to be around gifted people and we love their giftedness, but sometimes people's giftedness can take them to places that their character can't sustain them. And that is not what we want in the church of Jesus Christ, in the church of Jesus, the elders or the overseers are to be blameless in character. In other words, they are godly and they are mature. It doesn't mean that they're perfect. I mean, Lord knows, please put me at the front of that line. We know that we're not perfect, but need to be godly and blameless in character. And if we fall more in love with personalities than we do with godly character, we are making a grave mistake in the church of Jesus Christ. And it's happening too often in too many places. We need to value character, godly maturity, and character. So to project the life of Jesus, they're blameless in their family life. He's also to be blameless in his character. But thirdly, he's gotta be blameless in his commitment to the gospel, blameless in his commitment to the gospel. Listen to what verse number nine says. "He must hold firmly to the trustworthy message as it has been taught so that he can encourage others by sound doctrine and refute those who oppose it." Now what's interesting is this translation where in verse number nine, it says he must hold firmly to the trustworthy message. You could actually translate that because the definitive article in the Greek is right there before it, it would translate the teaching. As opposed to just trustworthy message, it would translate the teaching. In other words, the body of teaching that has been given to us by Jesus and that is about Jesus, we are to hold fast to this, and we sometimes generalize that by calling that the gospel, the good news of who Jesus is, what Jesus has done, and what Jesus has taught us in terms of how we live, that we have to hold fast to that. The elder must do that. The overseer must do that. We cannot afford to have anyone in spiritual leadership or governance that does not hold fast to the gospel of Jesus Christ. We cannot afford that. That's why I thank God that everybody who stands up to preach, whomever that may be in the context of the chapel, and we've got a number of campus pastors and others who are preaching from time to time here, I thank God that every single person we hold fast to the commitment that we have to the gospel of Jesus Christ. Because what we realize is this, is that it's not smooth talk or being funny or cool stories or anything that are gonna transform people's lives. Those are great because that's a part of communication, but it is the power of the gospel that transforms the life. That's what happens. It's the power of the gospel. I'm not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of salvation to everyone who hears and believes, first for the Jew and then for the Gentile. That's what Paul writes in the book of Romans. So we've gotta hold fast to that. So the first call of being blameless is that we're blameless in family life and then blameless in character and blameless in our commitment to the gospel. Because what this does is it projects the life of Jesus. And that's what has to happen. We have to project the life of Jesus into the context of the local church because here's what happens. If those who are leading don't hold fast to the gospel, don't develop a character that's saturated by the life of Jesus, so much so that it overflows even into the behind the scenes life and their family. If that doesn't happen, that leaks into the context of the church. It leaks and it toxifies in the context of the church. So we've got to be blameless, and we've got to be projecting the life of Jesus, because that's what healthy leadership does. It projects the life of Jesus. But it also does a second thing that I mentioned. Healthy leadership protects the teaching of Jesus. So it not only projects the life of Jesus, but healthy leadership protects the teaching of Jesus. And what does that entail to protect the teaching of Jesus? What does that entail? Well, here's the first thing that it entails. It entails a rebuke of false teaching. Paul says this very clearly to Titus, and here's what he says beginning in verse number 10. "For there are many rebellious people full of meaningless talk and deception, especially those of the circumcision group. They must be silenced, because they are disrupting whole households by teaching things that they ought not to teach, and that for the sake of dishonest gain" or monetary gain. "One of Crete's own prophets has said it. 'Cretans are always liars, evil brutes, lazy gluttons.' This saying is true." That's pretty stark. I don't know, that's pretty stark, if you're talking about a group of people like that, that's pretty stark, isn't it? What's interesting here is that Paul points out that false teachers are by nature unaccountable. You know why? Because they're rebellious. They're unaccountable because they're rebellious. They don't wanna be accountable because they want to govern themselves because what they're doing, he says here, those that are doing it here in Crete, they're doing it for dishonest gain. People that are doing things for dishonest gain do not want to be accountable for the teaching that they give. False teachers are by nature unaccountable. You know why? Because they're rebellious. They're unaccountable because they're rebellious. They don't want to be accountable because they want to govern themselves because what they're doing, he says here, those that are doing it here in Crete, they're doing it for dishonest gain. People that are doing things for dishonest gain do not want to be accountable for the teaching that they give. They want to be unaccountable. Why? Because they are rebellious basically in their heart. Now I don't know exactly what the nature of the false teaching was that was in Crete, but I'm guessing that it had something to do with adding to the gospel. And the reason that I think that is because Paul had dealt with this before in other places, many other places, by the way, in Galatia and in other places. And what he's talking about here is he's saying this is coming from a group of people who have some kind of Jewish background. He says it's coming from the circumcision group. He mentions that in verse 10. And by the way, if you were to read ahead a little bit in verse 14, he talks about the idea of paying no attention to Jewish myths. So he's actually referring to those who are of a Jewish background who are more than likely doing what some other Judaizers had done in other places. And that is trying to add to the gospel, and probably talking about outward kind of ritualistic types of things that had to be in addition to the faith that came by Jesus. You remember Paul talks about how there were some that were saying unless you are circumcised, you cannot be a part of the people of God. But Titus was like exhibit A that you didn't have to do that. He was a Greek, right? So it's probably something along that line of adding to the gospel that was corrupting the gospel. And he said, basically, Paul's writing to Titus, and he's saying the Cretans, they kinda have a reputation. And he quotes Epimenides, one of their own philosophers. And he quotes him by saying, "Cretans are always liars, evil brutes, and lazy gluttons." Paul does something brilliant here. He doesn't call them that. He actually uses one of their own prophets, one of their own philosophers named Epimenides. And he says, "This is what he said about his own people." And by the way, the Cretans had such a reputation that in the ancient Greek world, they actually created a word, cretize, to describe lying and dishonesty and deception. If you were doing that, you were cretizing, because that was what the reputation of the people of Crete were like. And here's what Paul's saying that needed to happen. Those that are doing these things, these Cretans who are doing these things trying to add or corrupt the gospel, they need to be rebuked sharply. They need to be silenced. And by silenced, he doesn't mean violently silencing them. He's talking about how you have to ultimately rebuke that false teaching. Now in the culture that we live in, friends, we are in a different world at a different time and dealing with different things. We're not dealing with the same types of corruptions of the gospel that were being dealt with here in Crete, but we're still dealing with corruptions of the gospel all over the place. And the responsibility of healthy leadership is that we've got to protect the teaching of Jesus and the beauty of the gospel as best we understand. And we've got to rebuke false teaching. And there's a number of perverted gospels. Let me name a few, and I'm not the first one to give these names or characterize them this way, but here's the first one, the prosperity gospel. The prosperity gospel. Everybody should be wealthy and healthy all the time. What? That's the gospel, that everybody should be wealthy and healthy? Are you kidding me? It's interesting that the prosperity gospel preachers happen to be really wealthy, and usually doing so on the backs of poor people. All I need you to do is send in this $10 seed and you're gonna be blessed a hundred fold. Those people may not be blessed any fold, but this guy is apparently able to buy a private jet or some such, right? The prosperity gospel is no good at all because it's basically people who are working for dishonest gain who are doing so on the backs of people that can't afford it. And here's what I would remind everybody of. If our gospel can't be preached everywhere, if it can't be preached in the slums of India, if it can't be preached in the huts in some places in Africa, if our gospel can't be preached everywhere, it shouldn't be preached anywhere because the gospel is for everyone. And the idea of a prosperity gospel rules out and really doesn't have room for a suffering savior who may actually call us to suffer and sacrifice for his namesake. It just doesn't have any room for that, which is why it's perverted and it's from hell. And so we have to rebuke that sharply for the people of God because it has no place and it's a corruption of the gospel itself. Or maybe the personal gospel. You know what I mean when I say that. These people may reject the prosperity gospel and go "No, that's not any good." But the personal gospel is one that basically just says, I want to center myself in the story because this is not, as we sang a few moments ago, all about you. It's actually all about me. It's about how I can use you to be able to do all the things that I want to do, and it centers ourselves instead of centers Jesus. And that is a mistake as well. And it's interesting because this personal gospel has like a lot of branches that kind of grow from it, for instance, like the good people gospel. We're all just good people just getting along, right? Everybody's pretty good, and you just have to be pretty good. And it's like, wait, what? Jesus came to die because we were pretty good? That seems ridiculous by the way. He didn't come to die because we were pretty good. He came to die because we were pretty dead and we needed to be risen to life. This is why he came. And so the pretty good gospel is no gospel at all, or this personal gospel that grows up as a root from that. It's kind of the self-esteem gospel, right? You should really never feel bad about anything. Everything's really okay. You should never feel guilty about anything. Listen, Jesus came because we were guilty. He took upon himself our guilt, taking upon himself the wrath of God because we were guilty. There are none that are righteous. No, not one, the scripture says. We have all sinned and come short of the glory of God. We stand condemned already, the Bible teaches us. Had it not been for the grace that God showed us in Jesus Christ standing in our place and taking upon himself the wrath of almighty God. This is a perversion of the gospel to think that we just need to think, well, we're not guilty, it's weird, stop. Or maybe the self-actualization gospel, that it's part of this personal gospel that centers us and basically says, look, the goal is for me to just find my authentic self and to manifest all my dreams. What? The goal is to know Jesus and to allow him to do with you what he wants to do in the world because everything is about him and his purposes, and you were created to know him and to glorify him. And sometimes we've got big dreams about all that we want to be to self-actualize ourselves as opposed to saying "No no, our lives are about surrender." If we want to try and keep our lives, we lose it. If we lose our lives for his sake, we find it. That's what the gospel teaches us. So the prosperity gospel, it's from hell, and the personal gospel, it's from hell. I'm just speaking pretty clearly to everybody today, but there's another gospel we have to be careful of too, that can be corrupting. That's the political gospel. Some of you're going, "He's not doing this, he is not going there." Listen. Here's what happens is that the good news for us when we get involved in the political gospel, the good news for us is when a temporary leader that we temporarily support wins temporary power to do temporary things that temporarily benefit us. That's now for us the good news. That's not the good news. The good news is about an everlasting king and an everlasting kingdom that far supersedes every ruler or throne or dominion, no matter who they are, no matter how good they are or how poor they are, we have a king that is over all of it. That's what we always have to come back to. And here's the thing, I think that good, godly, healthy leaders need to be in bed with no political party and need to make sure that they don't stand quivering in front of their people every time an election rolls around because somebody's gonna be all put out if they don't speak all of the teaching points and the talking points of their favorite political talking head, you can have that. Listen, here's the bottom line. I love you as a church. I love you, but I'm not scared of you. I'm scared of God, not of you. My job is not to be scared of you. It's to love you. And I do. My job is to have a healthy fear of God, which reminds us that sometimes when I wanna poke and I wanna prod come election times, it's because I wanna remind people to keep your eyes on a king and a kingdom and not on temporary leaders. We should engage, we should vote, we should do all of those things. And they're probably always at times better than other candidates and all of that stuff. I totally understand that, and I've got my own opinions. But my job is not my opinion. My job is the king and the kingdom. It's to be committed to the gospel and to rebuke when false teaching enters in. And when we begin to elevate leaders as messiahs, that's a mistake. That's a false gospel, and we need to avoid it. So when we protect the teaching of Jesus, we've gotta rebuke false teaching if we want to be healthy leaders. But we don't just rebuke false teaching, we also do something else. We recover the soundness of faith. Listen carefully to what Paul says beginning in verse number 13. This saying is true. He was talking about the Cretans there. He says, "Therefore rebuke them sharply so that they will be sound in the faith." Did you see that? "Rebuke them so that they will be sound in the faith and will pay no attention to Jewish myths or to the merely human commands of those who reject the truth. To the pure, all things are pure. But to those who are corrupted and do not believe, nothing is pure. In fact, both their minds and consciences are corrupted. They claim to know God, but by their actions, they deny Him. They're detestable, disobedient, and unfit for doing anything good. You, however, must teach what is appropriate to sound doctrine." You see, the goal is actually recovering people, not just their rebuke. Ah, I rebuke them. I feel much better. It's actually about rebuke that leads to people walking in the soundness of faith. And my guess is that when he's talking about human commands, and he's talking about to the pure, all things are pure, but to those who aren't, then nothing is, I think that he's actually calling to mind the teaching of Jesus about kind of the externals verse the heart. Because that's really what he's getting at here, because he's working against adding to the gospel or thinking about all these externals instead of what really goes on at the root in terms of what we truly believe about Jesus. You remember how Jesus taught the Pharisees in Mark 7? He said this, "Jesus called the crowd to him and he said, 'Listen to me, everyone, and understand this. Nothing outside a person can defile them by going into them. Rather, it's what comes out of a person that defiles them.' After he left the crowd and entered the house, his disciples asked him about this parable. 'Are you so dull?' He asked. 'Don't you see that nothing that enters a person from the outside can defile them? For it doesn't go into their heart, but into their stomach and then out of the body.' And in saying this, Jesus declared all foods clean. He went on. 'What comes out of a person is what defiles them. For it is from within, out of a person's heart, that evil thoughts come, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance, and folly. All these evils come from inside and defile a person.'" You see what the gospel of Jesus Christ does is it first works on the inside of who we are. And then that transforms the behavior on the outside. It's no good if we just do things on the exterior to make us look good when the heart is still defiled. We still need to recognize our sin, repent from our sin, and find the cleansing that we can only find in and through what Jesus has done on the cross through his shed blood and by the power of his resurrection. The gospel aims at the heart first and then transforms what comes on the outside. And we want to do that when we remind people that we're trying to recover them in the soundness of their faith. So for the church to live beyond us, we need healthy leadership, healthy, godly, spiritual leadership that projects the life of Jesus and protects the teachings of Jesus. So what about the problem that's facing our churches, like I talked about earlier, just a few moments ago? What about that, what about the shortage of spiritual leaders that's definitely forthcoming and is already showing itself all over the country? What do we do about that? Well I think that what Paul was doing when he told Titus, "I want you to appoint elders in every town," I think what he did there by saying this needs to be local and needs to be multiple, that's a part of the solution. I've been saying this to church leaders. I had a conversation just a couple of months ago with a church leader in another state, and they called and they said, man, could you help us look all over the place to find, not their next kind of lead pastor, but they needed another pastor in their context. And I said, "How large is your congregation?" "We're about 400 now." And I said, "That's where you find them." He's like, "What?" I said, "You don't have to do a national search. You'll find them there. Pay attention." I believe God will raise them up right where you are. Because if we all embrace this model of every time somebody who is a pastor at a church leaves that there has to be a national search, you're gonna be in a lot of trouble. Because if you've seen this gap that has begun to occur, it's gonna be a really difficult thing to be able to solve. The solve for local churches in seeing there not to be a shortage of elders and overseers is to raise them up in their own context. That's the solve. We've been working on that for years here at The Chapel. And basically, when you look around at all of these places, you look at campus pastors at each of our campuses, pastor Mark here at Niagara Falls campus came from within our context. Pastor Edwin at our Lockport campus came from within our context. Pastor Leroy at Cheektowaga came from within our context. Our whole board of overseers, all from within our church. This is what we're doing, virtually all of our staff, I'm an import, but virtually all of our staff is from within, right? Because that's what we've concentrated on, growing and developing from within. But here at The Chapel, we've actually got an additional responsibility. It's not only to continue raising up multiple leaders that will exist to serve our church, it's also about raising up multiple leaders that will exist to serve other churches as well. And we've done that as well. This is how we get to that solution, because it has to be local, but it also has to be multiple. Just as a heads up and just as a reminder, I am not the pastor of The Chapel. I am a pastor of The Chapel. Because there is a multiplicity of leaders that exists in this context. I have a responsibility. It is toward the whole, and it is at a higher level in terms of understanding what's going on. I get that, I have that responsibility. But we have to pull away from the idea of the singular and lean into the reality of the multiple, because that's what Paul teaches us multiple places, not the least of which is right here in the Book of Titus. And do you know why? Because with multiplicity, there is sustainability, there is accountability, and there is greater wisdom in multiple Godly leadership rather than singular. The idea of Moses on the mountain is an Old Testament paradigm. Moses going up, he hears what God says, he comes down, tells all the people what God says. In the New Testament, you don't have that paradigm, in the New Testament, you have multiple leaders all the time in the context of the local church. And while every leader has different responsibilities, and some may have more responsibilities than others, and some may have responsibilities for the whole, all of that is true, but multiple over singular. So I've said a lot. Here's what I want us to do. I want us to pray. You can do that. You're at home, and I want you to be able to take some time to pray with me about a handful of things. The first thing I want you to do is I want you to take some time to pray for those who are leading spiritually, who are helping to lead and to govern here at The Chapel. Father, we as your people, we're gathered through technology that we thank you for that even on a day like today, we can still be together. And in so many homes around Western New York and some who are joining us from other parts of the country and world, we've just been bringing our prayers to you. Because what we desire is we desire to honor what your word teaches us about healthy and godly spiritual leadership in your church, Jesus. And I pray that in all of these things, you would just hear our prayer and that you would respond with grace, and that you would give us your wisdom and your insight and your help in all things. How we thank you for your kindness. And I pray, God, not only for our congregation, but I pray for the congregations of Western New York and for our nation, that healthy and godly leadership that's local, that's multiple, not singular, would be raised up in the context of each of these places. And that God, you would solidify your work for your glory and that you would allow churches to raise up more and more leaders, pastors, overseers, elders. God, I pray that you would do that for your glory so that we might be able to project the life of Jesus to your people and protect the teaching of Jesus by rebuking false teaching and recovering people in the soundness of our faith. We trust you to do this now in Jesus' name. Amen.