ON THE VANGUARD

QUALIFICATIONS part 3
“He must manage his own family well and see that his children obey him with proper respect. (If anyone does not know how to manage his own family, how can he take care of God’s church?)”
I Timothy 3:4-5

This weekend will mark five years since my divorce was made official. The time has flown by in many instances over the years. I have had both ups and downs, both loss and gain, but in the end I consider who I am now and am pleased. I am not fond of the fact that divorce still stains my past, but I am pleased that even with this stain God continues to shape and form me into the man He desires. But thinking about my divorce brings to mind once more the words spoken by a pastor to me a few years back. In his understanding of the pastoral epistles I would never be able to be a minister. If I remarried, he understood it as me having more than one wife, thus being an error. But greater than that belief was his next comment. “Divorce stems from a man who cannot take care of his affairs in the home, and if you cannot keep your wife, you cannot keep a church.”
Now while I agree that order in the home is beneficial, I could argue and say that there are a great number of pastors whose family lives are not right. Straightaway I can name ministers whose family members are gay, are drug addicts, or who are living an ill-fated lifestyle. But who am I to judge? And who was he to judge me, not knowing my full circumstance and what caused divorce to be the outcome? Better yet, who was he to speak against the promise God gave me? It is then to clear up this understanding that we look at I Timothy 3:4-5 today.
Paul starts this qualification by stating that the ‘episkope’ must manage his own family well. You know me well enough to know that I am going to dive into the original languages, so in doing so I find the word ‘manage’ in the Greek as PROISTEMI. To translate this from the original language we would define it as protect, guard, or give attention to. In order for the person to be a minister, he or she must first protect the family well. But what defines ‘well’? This is the word KALOS, meaning to leave no room for blame. So the ‘episkope’ must protect and guard his family to the point that no blame of any sort can come on them. Taking this to the greater understanding of ‘episkope’ that we have been studying, the person who desires to be sought over by God must also protect him/herself to the extreme that they have no blame. Now I am not referring to shifting the blame, as we see with Adam and Eve, but in the aspects that there literally is nothing bad to say about the person. That is the extreme to which we all should be striving towards.
But this next piece in verse 4 speaks about the children obeying him with proper respect. Let’s break this down. The word ‘obey’ here is the word HUPOTAGE, meaning subjection and obedience. This word relates to the Greek word HUPOTASSO, which if you recall from other devotionals I have done, translates into the word ‘submission’, as found in Ephesians 5:21. The children are to submit and obey the ‘episkope’ with proper respect. Now I must be honest here in saying that when I looked up this word ‘respect’ I was convicted. The word is SEMNOTES, and the meaning is having the characteristic of a thing or person which is entitled to reverence and respect. I have to ask myself, in both the ministry definition and greater definition, do I hold this characteristic? Am I one who is entitled to the reverence of having my children obey me? Yes, they are commanded by God in Exodus 20 to honor and obey me, but do I hold the respect of this qualification outside of the command of God?
So then it all makes sense. If I am not able to protect and guard my family, or myself, in a way that leaves no room for blame, and in a way that my spouse or children obey me because of my character, then how can I be an ‘episkope’? To say that I never can be, like the minister told me, is still absurd. I say this because in his making this comment he in many ways is saying that God cannot change a person. But all I have to do is look at the life of the author of the letter to Timothy to know God can change a person. Saul became Paul, who came into a relationship with God and changed the world. Maybe in seeing this truth I too have now been knocked off my donkey, blinded by the light of His truth, and set to change the world. Whether big or small, I know more so now that I am called to be an ‘episkope’.