Last week I was officially affirmed as an elder in my church, and my responsibilities at the church call for me to be the primary teaching elder in the church.I was so grateful, then, to read this quote the other day in Mark Dever's The Deliberate Church:
As teachers, elders "will incur a stricter judgment" (James 3:1), which implies that God will, in some sense, hold teachers to a higher standard of holiness. If a man has great public teaching gifts, and yet is known to be characteristically argumentative, impure in speech, or unable to control his appetites, then it would be unwise to nominate him for eldership. Immature teachers make the most notable hypocrites. And if we allow those who are immature to teach and model a doctrine that does not conform to godliness, then we share the guilt of their failure to feed God's sheep in green pastures, which will bring on us His intense, fatherly displeasure.
It is no small thing to be affirmed as a church elder. While I would not claim to have "great public teaching gifts", the standard of holiness is high for me, and the other elders at JCF, by virtue of our affirmation as elders.
Who is sufficient for these things (2 Corinthians 2:16)? Mercifully, my adequacy is in Christ.
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