The Call to Serve the Church

1 Timothy 3:8-13 · 2025-08-31 · Jason Wolin · 1 Timothy | God’s Blueprint for a Strong Church

1 Timothy 3:8-13 · Church Leadership. The Call to Serve the Church — sermon from Cypress Bible Church on BibleSlides.

The Call to Serve the Church Slideshow for this message PDF Message Download Well we are in the book of 1 Timothy and Paul is giving us God’s blueprint for healthy churches. And so far, that blueprint has called for three things. First, he’s calling for pure doctrine. Paul warned about the danger of false teachers. Trying to build a healthy church without an understanding of good theology would be like trying to build a bridge without an understanding of physics. You might have really good intentions, you might be a really nice person, but physics doesn’t care about that. If you ignore physics, the bridge is going to collapse. And the same is true in the church. You might be the nicest person in the world, you might really be passionate about what you think is true, you might have the greatest of intentions But if you aren’t operating according to the moral and theological laws of the universe as laid out by the creator himself IN HIS WORD, the church will collapse. We must always guard the fundamentals of the Christian faith and protect against false teaching. So that was chapter 1 and the first thing Paul addressed. Secondly Paul calls for living into our God-given gender roles. God designed men and women as fellow heirs of the grace of Christ, equal in value but different in roles. Embracing those roles is essential for the church to be healthy. As we saw, certain qualified men are to lead and teach in the church while women are to support that leadership with their God given gifts and abilities. Now thirdly, Paul is going to drill into the qualification for those male leaders. Here in chapter three he turns his attention to the specifics of how servant leadership should look. And he calls out two specific offices in the church in which God has vested authority: the office of elder and the office of deacon. Concept of Authority Now before we talk about today’s text, it’s very important to understand that ALL human authority is DERIVED authority. In other words, no elder or deacon would have a lick of authority if God did not create the offices and THEN charge the men in those offices to do certain things. Let me give you an example. I grew up in a family of all boys and I was the oldest of my younger brothers. When I was around 10 or 12 there would be times when we were out in the yard and we’d get into an argument about something and I would say to them, “You have to listen to me. I’m the boss of you because I’m the oldest.” Now my brothers knew that was a bunch of hogwash and they had no fear of completely ignoring me. But there would be other times when my mom would leave the home to run to the store for 20 minutes and she would say, “Okay, I’m leaving but I’m putting Jason in charge. You have to listen to what he says.” Now in that case, I act…

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