Your congregation, I greet you in the name of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ this morning and invite you to take your Bibles as we come to our time in worship that we call the ministry of the word. And before we open our Bibles this morning, I would ask you to bow with me and pray for extra help from the spirit this morning as we unpack his word. Would you bow with me? Father, all this week you have reminded us of your divine power, even as we have sensed within the climate this week that the seasons are changing, Father. That is set up against the backdrop of your unchanging character. You, the creator God of the universe, do not change. And Father, we find great comfort in that. We find great comfort that amidst changing climate, Amidst changing cultural ideologies, we have an anchor in you. And Father, it's so helpful because there's so many issues in each and every one of our lives in which our heads go spinning as we try to put our finger on what is right, what is helpful, what is beautiful, what is appropriate. And we have dissenting voices on either side telling us which direction to go. But Father, your word is a lamp into our feet and a light into our path. And we pray that it would be exactly that this morning. Father, I pray that as we come before your word this morning that you would help us to be Bereans, those noble-minded men and women who did not simply take what the Apostles said as gospel truth without expecting and demanding scriptural attestation to the law and to the testimony. So, Father, take us to the law and to the testimony this morning. Help your servant this morning to be judicious and pastoral, and compassionate in the exposition of your Word. We ask these things in your Son's name. Amen. I ask you to turn in your Bibles to 1 Timothy 3. We're going to start this morning in verse 11. But as you're turning there, and I just want to let you know it's going to be a little bit before we get there because I need to do the proverbial brush clearing that is necessary in topics like this. As you know, and for those of you visitors who this is your first time here or you're just not up to date on what we're doing here in the Ministry of the Word, September has been what I've called the month of service because we're focusing on the category of deacons. We're focusing on that office in the church that has to do with serving the needs of the saints. And part of the reason for that is because in our October business meeting, which is right around the corner, by the way, we have the immense privilege and obligation of voting in three new deacons. And if you're tired of hearing this, I don't care. We're excited about that. We're excited about adding three more deacons. If you think that the elders are excited, you should see the giddiness of the present deacons in deacons meetings. They are exceedingly grateful to have three more men, competent men, to join them in the undertaking of serving Grace Covenant Church. So last week, what I did is I laid out very simply the qualifications for deacons in 1 Timothy 3, and I laid out eight of them, and you'll remember that when we got to verse 11, I skipped over it, not because I'm afraid of it, but precisely because I wanted to give some extended time to what it was saying. Verse 11 reads in your English Standard Versions this way, Now this text is a handful of texts which has caused disagreement within like-minded churches about the question about whether or not the church is from scripture to ordain female deacons. And so what I'd like to do over the course of this Sunday and next Sunday is just spend a little time thinking through that. And this probably goes without saying, but I want to make it as absolutely clear as I can. When I say think through it, I'm not saying have you listened to Pastor Josh's thoughts on this or have Josh put his finger in the air and get a sense of where the cultural winds are blowing, not only outside the church, but within evangelicalism or Reformed tradition and try to give you what the best sense that I have of that is. No. We want to look at and wrestle with the texts of scripture that do speak or seem to speak to this issue and try to harmonize them in the way that the reformers taught us, which is that scripture interprets scripture. Now, why am I taking two weeks out to do this? Well, there's a number of reasons that I'm going to unpack in just a moment. But as I was sitting there and preparing my mind and heart to come up to the ministry of the word, I thought of another one, and it's this. I think that it probably goes without saying that oftentimes in churches, even like-minded churches like ours, women get short shrifted. Women who have gifts, women who have talents, women who have something to say, women who have something to contribute, in some sense or another get shut down. Now, in every case which needs to be deemed a judge on its own merit, you know, there may or may not be reasons for that. But by and large, I think that sometimes women get short shrifted. And the last thing that I and the elders in this church want to do is give short shrift to women. And as I was thinking through this series on deacons, it occurred to me, well, I'll just do the standard. Let's talk about service in one sermon, qualifications for deacon in another sermon, and then maybe talk about Stephen as the deacon exemplar in the book of Acts, and then just be done with it. But as I was praying and meditating this week, and actually the prior weeks running up to this week, there was this nagging voice in the back of my head that was basically saying something like, what about female deacons? And the reason for that, that you may or may not know, is there is much discussion and has been much discussion, even in the last 30 years, amongst Reformed churches and amongst Evangelical churches about the question of female deacons. And to be honest with you, I felt like I would be doing a disservice to our women if I were not, if I did not give in the public ministry of the word, a public wrestling with these texts, and an attempt at the leadership level to give a fair and balanced and judicious estimation and summary of what these things are saying. Do you know that the gospel writers in the first century were posed with a very huge challenge in their day? You know what their challenge was? On the one hand, in putting together these gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, they were trying to convince everyone who would read it, the whole world, that Jesus was the resurrected Son of God. And for that reason, they included resurrection accounts in their gospels. But on the other hand, They also were very aware that women in the first century didn't have much of a place. They were aware that in the context of the courts, a woman's testimony was not equal to a man's testimony. And yet at the same time, the fact of the matter is that the first people who were witnesses of the resurrection of Jesus were women. And you would think that if the gospel writers were male, misogynist, chauvinist, they would just say, well, we certainly can't include that in the gospel because nobody's going to take it seriously. But they didn't think twice about it. You want to know why? Because the main thought that was coursing through their minds and hearts when they put pen to parchment was this, Galatians 3.28, in Christ there is neither male nor female. and they wanted to convey to a watching and listening world, we have no embarrassment and no shame whatsoever to report to you that the first witnesses of the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ were our sisters in Christ. And I say amen and hallelujah to that. So I want to give time to this issue, and I tried to fit it all into one sermon, I'm just like, it's impossible, I can't do that. So we're gonna spend two weeks doing this, just thinking through this. But before we get into the actual text, I wanna give you five things to remember when working through the question of female deacons. So consider first, five things to remember when thinking through the question of female deacons, okay? Number one. The decision to ordain female deacons is not necessarily a liberal tendency. One of the biggest debates in church courts in the last hundred years has been the question of ordination, mainly the question of ordination of women to the office of elder, but it has also included the question of ordination of women to the office of deacons. And it is true that many of the mainline liberal denominations have decided to ordain women, which runs counter to the clear testimony of Scripture from Paul and other authors. But here's the thing. We need to be very careful, and please listen to me very carefully. We need to be very careful about using poorly constructed and wrong-headed arguments when we come to the discussion of women deacons. What kind of wrong-headed arguments am I talking about? Well, there's one argument that we typically call the genetic fallacy, which basically says something like this. Well, you know that liberal Presbyterians ordained deacons, So therefore, we can't ordain deacons because if we did that, we would be liberal. That's called the genetic fallacy. It doesn't follow that just because the liberals believe or do something, that means that we ipso facto can't do the same. The liberals also believe in the Trinity. Should we get rid of the doctrine of the Trinity as well? Absolutely not. So we need to be very careful about this genetic fallacy that says if the bad guys do it, then the good guys can't. Another fallacy, which if you don't understand what fallacy means, it means bad reasoning, fallacious reasoning. Another bad argument is the slippery slope argument, which basically says, well, if you ordain deacons today, female deacons today, then in a generation you're going to end up ordaining female elders. Now, that may or may not be true, and that may be a good auxiliary argument after you've already looked at the text, but that argument in and of itself is not a sufficient or I would even maintain efficient argument to not ordain female deacons. So, we need to be very careful about this. There are actually like-minded churches in our tradition that believe very much of the same things that we do in the Southern Baptist Convention, and even some Reformed Baptist churches, and even churches in the Presbyterian Church of America who do ordain deacons. Okay, so the first thing I want to say is we need to be very careful about starting the discussion out with, we can't ordain female deacons simply because the liberals do it. The second thing I'd like to say is this. The church must hold the line against any and every cultural ideology that would contradict the scripture. There are a flood of different ideologies, worldviews, philosophies that are out there that the church must hold the line against. And as you know, a war is almost never fought on one front. A war is almost always fought on multiple fronts. And it's the same with the church as well. We are never fighting one enemy or pushing back against one enemy. There are always many different enemies and ideologies that are coming at us. And what we as a church must do is judiciously and with a sound mind examine whatever claims are being made in the culture and run them through the grid of scripture as best as we possibly can. Well, what are some of the cultural ideologies that might push us toward one side or the other. Well, one of them is feminism. And feminism, which in a nutshell either says something to the effect of men and women are completely equal, there's no distinction whatsoever, or in the worst cases of feminism says women are superior to men. Now, here's the thing. Paul actually has a lot to say about women in his epistles. And honestly, if we were to look at Paul's statements on women in his epistles through the lens of feminism, we would walk away saying, well, Paul was clearly a misogynist. Paul was clearly a male chauvinist, and so obviously we don't have to listen to anything that he says. We know better, we're enlightened, we've evolved in our thinking, and so we're going to move beyond that, and yet we're still going to call the conclusions that we draw Christianity. Beloved, the church doesn't have that option. Jay Gresham Machen wrote a book many, many years ago called Christianity and Liberalism, and one of the most ingenious things that he did in that book as he was pushing back against liberal Presbyterianism is he said, look, these departures from scripture that you're taking, whether it has to do with Jesus not being God or whether it has to do with you taking all the miracles out of the Bible or whatever the case may be, you may or may not be right about them, but here's one thing you can't say. You can't say that those things are Christianity. You just can't say that. So what you should do is put a different label on whatever religion it is that you're peddling and call it something else. But this is not historic Orthodox Christianity. And he was absolutely right. Too often people come to the text, feminists or otherwise, and they try to clear out what Paul has clearly said and inject into it something that Paul has not said based on their enlightenment and push it as Christianity. Well, beloved, we only have one text, one foundation, one blueprint, if you will, of what God has said, and it is the Word of God. But see, that's one front. Feminism's one front. I think it would be important to register at this point that there's also another front that we fight, and that is male chauvinism. or what I like to call patriarchy on steroids. You see, the Bible does teach some form of patriarchy, and I'm still going to get to it in a little bit, but there are some, even in Reformed circles, who have taken patriarchy to such a level that it has, in a very unhealthy way, denigrated the place of a woman. And I very robustly want to push back on that, and I want to recognize, and I think we all should confess this, everybody, I repeat, everybody comes to the Bible with cultural lenses. Okay? Can I say that again? Everybody comes to the Bible with cultural lenses. The question is not, do I have cultural lenses and do I have presuppositions that I bring to the table of the Bible? That's not the question. The question is, can you identify those lenses and can you run them through the presuppositions of Scripture and make sure that you have the right presuppositions? That's the question that we should be asking. And as a male that gets up to the ministry of the word, which I believe is what the Lord has ordained, I want to be very careful that I am not reading these texts through male chauvinistic, misogynistic lenses and trying to pass them off as Paul. So we need to push back against feminism. We need to push back against chauvinism and misogyny and anything that would corrupt our reading of the scriptures. But thirdly, third thing to remember as we consider this issue of female deacons, and this is very, very important. There are three hermeneutical principles that must ground a discussion of female deacons. Three hermeneutical principles that must ground the discussion of female deacons. Now, if you heard that word hermeneutical and you're like, I don't know what that means, it's a big 50 cent college boy word. It simply means the art and interpretation, excuse me, the art and science of interpretation. Okay, hermeneutics is your view on how to interpret the Bible. And by the way, all of you have a hermeneutic. All of you interpret the Bible in a particular way. The question is not, do I interpret the Bible? The question is, is my interpretation of the Bible what the Bible tells me it should be? And the first hermeneutical principle that I think goes without saying is that we believe in sola scriptura. Now, this gets to a previous point that I just made, but what is the implication of that? Sola scriptura means with respect to the final authority of God, we believe that scripture alone holds that position. Now, the principle of sola scriptura was pounded out in the Protestant Reformation against the backdrop of the Roman Catholic Church that wanted to say something like this. Oh, we believe in the scripture. Scripture is authority, absolutely. But tradition is also authority. And in fact, they're equal in their authoritative position. And the reformers came in and said, no, no, no, no, no. We do not elevate tradition to the same level of scripture. Scripture is above tradition. Now, that being said, and please listen to me, especially some of you, okay? Sola scriptura is not nuda scriptura. You know what nuda scriptura means? Naked scripture. Okay, this is where Biblicists come in and say, I just read my Bible by myself without church history, without church tradition, without the creeds and the ecumenical councils and the confessions and the catechism because I'm clearly smarter than the rest of the church. No, the reformers never believed in knew the scriptura. You know why? Do you know that John Calvin, amongst others, was always going back to the church fathers? Not as if to say the church fathers got it all right, but as if to say, I am not going to presume that I am wiser or smarter than the spiritual giants that have gone before me. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to stand on the shoulders of these spiritual giants and the shoulders of these councils and assemblies that have gotten together and pounded out doctrine for the church, and I'm going to depend on them as a guiding light. Now, where they differ from scripture, I'm going to differ from them. The Reformers never meant to discard tradition and church history, but they saw tradition and church history and the councils and the confessions and the catechisms as a helpmate to the interpretation of scripture, okay? So we're gonna, our hermeneutical principle is sola scriptura, but we're also going to chime in with how the churches understand this issue to get some light. Secondly, a second hermeneutical principle is this. The analogy of faith. Another way to say that? The analogy of scripture. What does that mean? It very simply means this. Listen to me very carefully. Scripture interprets scripture. The clearer texts of Scripture govern our interpretation of the less clear texts of Scripture, okay? This is what the Reformers meant by the analogy of faith, the analogy of Scripture, and Scripture interprets Scripture. Have you ever been studying a particular issue in the Bible, and every text you go to, you could see it going either way? You're like, yeah, I see the arguments for this side, and I see the arguments for this side, and you need something or someone to kind of break the tie. That's what this hermeneutical principle is. It says when there is ambiguity or unclearness in what a scripture is teaching, you go to another passage of scripture that sheds light on it by virtue of its clarity, and you let that that light of clarity help you distinguish what that text means. That's what we're gonna do in this debate. We're going to come to some texts that in and of themselves could go either way. It could be the ordination of female deacons, it could be not the ordination of female deacons, but we're going to land upon a text that I think is going to break the tie. But then finally, the third hermeneutical principle that must ground our discussion of female deacons is what we refer to as the regulative principle. Now, some of you are familiar with the regulative principle. We typically talk about the regulative principle in the discussion of worship. The regulative principle basically says we are only allowed to do in worship what God has explicitly commanded, either by clear command or by paradigm-setting example, okay? We are not allowed to do whatever we want unless God prohibits it, okay? We could take that same principle and apply it to church government, and that's what we're doing here. We're taking the regulative principle of worship which says we must have clear command in scripture or prohibition of what God expects of deacons in order to come to a firm conclusion. We do not have the liberty to just say, we're going to do whatever we want unless we find a book, chapter, and verse that says, I do not allow women to be deacons. No, it's not that simple. There are other factors that we must take into consideration. So the fourth thing I'd say is this. The question of female deacons is not a primary doctrinal matter over which we should create disunity in the church. I have a fellow pastor that I oftentimes get lunch with, and he pastors a church just north of us in Hampton. He's a Reformed Baptist minister in a Reformed Baptist church, and guess what? They have female deacons. There is difference of opinion on this matter. Why? Mainly because it's a very difficult matter. But I would be perfectly fine in my conscience worshiping in a church that had female deacons. I may disagree with it, but it's not a jugular doctrinal issue over which I'm going to stand up like a Martin Luther and say, here I stand and I can do no other. And unless you get those female deacons out, I'm not coming. That's ridiculous. This is a secondary or maybe even tertiary doctrinal matter over which we can have disagreement. But of course, that brings me to my fifth consideration this morning, and that's this. Local churches have to take a line on this debate. You remember in college or high school where you were in a class and the professor basically said, OK, here's a topic. And I'm going to give you this side of the debate and this side of the debate. And I'm going to give you all their different reasons for why they believe for or against. But then I'm not going to give you the answer. I'm just going to let you go home and figure it out for yourself. I think that's actually good teaching in the context of the university. You don't want the professor to necessarily influence your opinion in one way or the other without a reasonable argument. But you see, in the church, and especially on the question of female deacons, we don't have that option. We don't have the option to say, here's both sides, you choose for yourself. Because at the end of the day, the leaders have to decide either we are going to ordain deacons, female deacons, or we're not. And that's going to affect the women in this church and what they can and cannot expect in their service to the church. So churches must take a line on this issue, and that's precisely what I aim to do this morning. So with those prefatorial marks aside, I'd like to consider, secondly, 1 Timothy 3.11. So turn in your Bibles to 1 Timothy 3.11, and I just want to ask this question. What does 1 Timothy 3.11 say about female servants in the church? 1 Timothy 3.11, I will remind you, this is within the context of Paul's qualifications for deacons. And when he gets to verse 11, he says this, their wives likewise must be dignified, not slanderers, but sober-minded, faithful in all things. Now, I want you to notice two things in this text. Number one, in your English Standard Version, the word wives, it comes from a Greek word that's gounikos, and the only reason I mention that is because if you listen to that word and put letters to it, G-Y-N, you can extrapolate from that. That's where we get words like gynecology, okay? The word can mean one of three things. It can mean wife, it can be a newly married bride, or it can mean just woman. So how do you decide when you have varied meanings of what a word can be? And by the way, this is just typical, whether it's Greek, Hebrew, English, whatever. Well, context must decide, okay? Now, the second thing, now before I move on, I want you to notice the English standard version translators have made a decision to translate it as wives rather than woman. Now, the second thing I'd have you note is that personal pronoun, that possessive pronoun right before wives, their, T-H-E-I-R, not to be confused with their, T-H-E-Y, possibly R-E, or T-H-E-R-E. Now, what I would have you know is that in the Greek text, that possessive pronoun is not there. It's missing. You say, well, why in the world in my English translation do I have it there? Well, this happens a lot in English translation, Bible translation. The translators have made what is called an interpretive translation. What do I mean by that? Well, they are trying to figure out just as much as we are what Paul's getting at. And in the absence of the pronoun there, they just see a word, gunikos, which could mean woman or wife or maybe bride. And they say, from the context, we conclude that what Paul is talking about is the wives of deacons. So they've made a call. They've taken a line in the debate. And that's how they translate it. Okay. Well, here's the thing. I think it's very significant that the English possessive pronoun there is not in the text. My question is, if this is talking about wives of deacons, here's my main problem with that interpretation. My main problem is that why in the qualifications for elders does Paul not bring up qualifications for elders' wives? And yet, in the qualifications for deacons on this translation, he's bringing up qualifications for deacons' wives. Now, some have said, well, that's because deacons' wives are more capable and able, if you will, to serve in the same capacity as deacons do, because it's not preaching or teaching or exercising spiritual authority. Whereas elders' wives, they don't preach, they don't administer the sacraments, and they don't shepherd, basically. So Paul didn't feel the need to say anything about elders' wives. I find that argument very weak. In fact, I would submit to you that the qualifications for elders' wives are just as important, if not more important, than the qualifications for deacons' wives. And why is that? Well, number one, you may have a man who is suited in and of himself, in his gifts, in his calling, and so on and so forth, to be a minister. But if his wife is not a mature Christian, or even worse, his wife is an unbeliever, that disqualifies that man. He cannot serve in ministry with a wife who is an unbeliever. And furthermore, I believe that the elders' wives should be mature enough, spiritually mature enough, to minister with their husbands. I know personally, not only from the case of my own wife, but the cases that I have seen of elders' wives in other churches, that elders' wives actually do a whole lot of ministry. They do it primarily with women. They counsel, they disciple, they shepherd other women in that sense. And so I think that the elders, the qualifications for elders' wives are very important. So I think it's very difficult to say right off the cuff that these are the deacon's wives, but then another possibility is to say Well, what Paul's doing here is he's giving qualifications for both elders' wives and deacons' wives, okay? And that's why he doesn't include the personal pronoun, the possessive pronoun, there. Now, is that possible? Yeah, it's possible. It's possible. I would say this. It seems like Paul is jerking around quite a bit, jerking his readers around quite a bit. He's talking about elders. Why doesn't he include qualifications for elders' wives there? It's not uncommon for Paul to kind of lose track of his thought and go off on a tangent. He does this all the time in Romans. So this is certainly possible, but I don't think that's what he's getting at. I think as a provisional conclusion, it's best at this point to conclude that Paul is, in some sense, speaking of women who serve in the church. However, I don't know that it's clear from this text alone, I don't know that it's clear from this text alone whether Paul intends that these women are to be understood as officially ordained deacons. In the same way that males are deacons, I think that we need light from other scripture to be able to adjudicate that. So we'll consider a few more texts before drawing that conclusion. And just as a side note, it's interesting to note that B.B. Warfield, who is the Lion of Princeton and the hero of many of you in this place, he was actually an advocate for female deacons. But according to B.B. Warfield, he didn't think that 1st Sympathy 311 said anything about female deacons. He believed that the only text in all the Bible that was somewhat decisive was the one we're gonna look at next. So let's look at that one, Romans 16.2. Turn in your Bibles to Romans 16.1 and 2. And let me ask the question, what does Romans 16.1 and 2 say about female deacons? Romans 16, 1 and 2. Paul says, I commend to you our sister Phoebe, a servant of the church at Centria, that you may welcome her in the Lord in a way worthy of the saints and help her in whatever she may need from you, for she has been a patron, I think a better translation would be benefactor, of the church at Centria. You'll notice in your English text in verse 1 that Phoebe is referred to as a servant of this church at Centuria. That word servant is diakonon, okay? It's in the accusative form of diakonos, the Greek word. And what's interesting is it's not a female, excuse me, it's not a feminine form of diakonos, it's just a masculine form. Why? There's nowhere in the whole Bible where a feminine form of diakonos is used. So Phoebe is referred to as a servant of the church at Centuria. Now, here's the question we have to ask. The question is, is this just a generic functional title that he's using of Phoebe, just like we would say to any particular woman in this church who gives herself over to great service that she is a great servant of the church, or is this an official title of an ordained officer? Now, those who argue for female deacons will admit, the better of them, they will admit at the outset it could go either way. But then they make a case which says, we think it's talking about the technical ordained office of deacon. Now, the one detail that they have going in their favor, in my opinion, is that this is the only place in the New Testament where a servant is referred to as a servant of a church. Everywhere else in scripture where servant is used, it's used in something of a more generic way. At the same time, we could even say in this place that a particular woman is a servant of Grace Covenant Church without necessarily implying that she is ordained. But I think that there's a bigger issue with taking this as the formal, ordained office of deacon. I showed you two weeks ago the various ways in which deacon is used in the New Testament. And I've given some text in your notes of all the different ways it's used. I'm not going to go over all of them. But I just want to remind you, it's used in a very broad way, in a very generic way. It's used of general servants of Jesus Christ. It's used of the civil magistrates in Romans 13. It's used of Christ himself. Christ is called a deacon. Paul is called a deacon. Paul as an apostle is called a deacon. Timothy as an elder is called or referred to as a deacon. Apollos is referred to as a deacon. Even Satan's servants, the demons are referred to as deacons or servants. It's used of false apostles, it's used of ticius, and it's used of epaphras. And so here's the hermeneutical principle that we need to take into consideration when we come to a text like Phoebe in Romans 16. Is there enough evidence in the text itself that would force us beyond a shadow of a doubt or even close to beyond a shadow of a doubt to say, this is clearly a technical use of the ordained position of deacon. And I would conclude that I don't think that there is. I think that it could go either way, but just like 1 Timothy 3.11, we need some clarity from Scripture to adjudicate which direction to go. So that brings us, finally, well, penultimately, to number four. Turn in your Bibles to 1 Timothy 2.12. And let me ask this question, what does 1 Timothy 2.12 tell us about female deacons? 1 Timothy 2.12. Now, before I read the text, it's very important that you understand something. And for some of you, you're gonna be like, Josh, you tell us this all the time. That's fine. We're good forgetters, okay? So let me remind you, all right? The book, the thesis of 1 Timothy is found in 1 Timothy 3, 14 and 15. You don't need to turn there, you can, it's probably right there on the next page. Paul tells Timothy that the purpose of his letter is to write to Timothy and the church so that they may know how they ought to behave themselves in the household of God, which is the church of the living God, a pillar and buttress of the truth." What does this tell us about virtually everything that Paul says in this letter? It is with the narrow purpose and intention of telling Timothy, an elder, an office bearer in the church, how things are to be done in the church. Now, why do I emphasize that? For two reasons. Number one, before I read 1 Timothy 2, 12, I want to issue a warning not to take what that says and apply it to all of life, okay? Paul is specifically talking about the church. That's never happened before. Secondly, because we believe that Paul is inspired by the Holy Spirit to write what God wants for the church, we would do well to listen. Now, coming to 1 Timothy 2.12, All I'll say about the context is that Paul is talking about a number of things in 1 Timothy 2, but he's mainly talking about prayer, how it is to be given in the context of the church. We're not talking about personal prayer in your prayer closet by yourself. We're talking about corporate prayer in the context of the church. And in that context, he says this in 1 Timothy 2, 12, I do not permit a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man. Now, I recognize and feel the weight of what it means to stand up here in the 21st century and read this text as a man and inform the congregation that this is a rule, an infallible rule by which the church is to be governed. But I also want to say this. I'm not ashamed of what Paul says, and I'm not embarrassed by what Paul says. You want to know why? Because Paul was not a misogynist. Paul is not getting at the ontos, or being of a woman versus a man, so as to say a man is superior to a woman. He's not getting at that. He's already said in Galatians 3, 28, in Christ there's neither male nor female. He's not talking about our acceptance by God in Jesus Christ. What he's talking about is roles in the church. That's what he's talking about. And so, any interpreter who would seek to make Paul a misogynist or a male chauvinist, I would submit to you are imposing their own cultural lenses upon Paul. I'm not embarrassed by what Paul says because I understand what Paul is saying. I tell you what I am embarrassed by. I'm embarrassed by evangelical interpreters who are embarrassed of Paul and feel like they need to make Paul sound better in the context of the church. I am embarrassed by that. You see, beloved, when we get up here and we preach to you the Word of God, we are not preaching our own ideas. And trust me, in my flesh and in my weakness and in my jelly-spinedness, there are inhibitions within my own heart about getting up and preaching this text, but you see, Grace Covenant Church is not about Josh's ideas. Grace Covenant Church is about the Word of God. And if we start with the presupposition that the Word of God is inspired and inerrant, without air and infallible, we receive it as the Word of God without so much as blushing. And that's what I believe that we should do here. So I would submit to you that when Paul says this, it's not circumstantial. He's not just saying the church in Ephesus was dealing with some Amazonian liberal feminists and the rest of the church is not going to deal with that. So this is just for Ephesus. He's not saying that. There is a sense in which what he's dealing with is cultural, but not in the sense that it was confined to that age. Okay? It's not cultural in that sense, but what he is saying is normative. Now, here's the thing. He says two things. I do not allow a woman to teach or exercise authority. Now, when he says teach, everybody knows what he's talking about. Everybody knows that he's talking about the office of elder. Deacons are not called to preach. They can preach. We have a category for this in our confession that speaks about the gifted brethren, and a deacon can be a gifted brethren in his preaching and teaching if the congregation finds approval. But what he's talking about, by and large, is the office of elder. But when we get to this next phrase, I do not allow her to exercise authority, notice that it doesn't say period. It says, I do not allow her to exercise authority over a man. So here's the $64,000 question. We know that elders exercise authority. There's no doubt in anybody's mind. The $64,000 question is, do deacons exercise authority? And my answer to that with scripture is yes, but I need to qualify. And the first thing I'd say is all authority in the church is a derived authority. What do I mean by that? No one in this church exercises authority on their own merit. Everybody in this church exercises authority as received from Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ, the risen Lord, confers authority to the church. And to whom does he confer it? To his office bearers. elder, and deacon. But the second thing I would say is this. Elders have a particular authority in a particular sphere, and that sphere is the general spiritual oversight of the people of God. Doesn't mean they can't do deacon things. Doesn't mean they can't get involved in what deacons do, but by and large, they are be given over to the spiritual needs of the saints, and the deacons have authority over the physical needs of the saints. And listen, that includes things like the maintenance of the church building, the budget, projects that we do, whether that is inside or outside the church. And I think it is very, very difficult to maintain that in that sphere of authority in which they operate, they do not exercise authority. I find that very, very difficult to believe. But instead of going with my prognostications about whether or not that's true, let me just have you turn to Acts 6 very briefly, and let me show you from Scripture how, at least from the perspective of Peter, he believed that deacons do exercise authority. Acts 6. We're going to look at the first five verses. I'm not going to read them all, but that's where we're going to be. Acts 6. We talked about this last week, but remember, there was the incident with the Hellenist widows, and they were not getting the daily distribution of the bread, so what do the apostles do? They tell the congregation to pick out deacons, and then I want you to notice verse 2, Acts 6, verse 2. And the twelve summoned the full number of the disciples and said, it is not right that we should give up preaching the word of God to serve tables. Therefore, verse three, brothers, pick out from among you seven men of good repute, full of the spirit and of wisdom, whom we will appoint to this duty. Now here's what I want you to note, that word appoint in the Greek, what does it mean? It literally means to assign someone with a position of authority. That's literally what the Greek word means. What's also interesting is it is this exact same word that Paul uses in Titus 1, verse 5, when he tells Titus to shore up the things that remain and appoint elders in every city. So we have appointment of deacons in Acts 6. We have appointment of elders in Titus 1, 5. What is this? This is ordination. That's what they're talking about. And can I just bring you back to Acts chapter 6? After noticing that appoint means to give somebody a position of authority, the congregation picks the men, and then I want you to notice verse 6. These they set before the apostles, and they, that is the apostles, prayed and laid their hands on them. This is the exact same language used in 1 Timothy 4 when Paul tells Timothy not to neglect the charismata, the gift that was conferred upon him when the presbyteroi, the elders, laid their hands on him and prayed on him. What are we talking about? We're talking about ordination. And I think at the end of the day, that's really what this discussion is about. This discussion is not about, and I'm going to get to this in a minute, whether women can serve in the church. That is not the issue. The issue is, and the question is, does the Bible permit women to be ordained as office bearers? That is the question. And if that's the case, then we would have to say that women would have the authority to rule over men, whether that is in the sphere of elder or whether it's in the sphere of deacon, but they do have some semblance of authority. Now, just to give you a practical aside here, I know of one pastor who actually wrote an article, and he said, yes, I think women should be female deacons, but only in some instances. And the whole burden of his article was to say, yes, there's some things that they can do, which deacons do, but there's other things that deacons do that they can't do, and it has to do with authority. And what that pointed up to me is that he feels this tension that I feel as well, which is this, deacons do exercise authority and he can't get around that. So if you say females can be deacons, what you end up doing, if you want to be true to 1 Timothy 2.12, is you have to say there's some things they can't do. Where in the Bible does it say that some elders or some deacons can only do certain things but are not permitted to do other things? You see, the office is theirs. The office is theirs to do everything that the Lord has called them to do through the qualifications that He has given them. So, I do believe that deacons exercise authority, and so when we take 1 Timothy 2.12, and we use it as the clarity and illumination, and shine it on 1 Timothy 3.11, and shine it on Romans 16.1 and 2, I think here's the conclusions we can come to. In 1 Timothy 3, 11, I do think he's talking about women, but I think Paul is talking about something perhaps in their service, more than general service, but less than ordained service. And next week I'm going to tell you what I think that is. In Romans 16, 1 and 2, I think it's very possible that Phoebe was a servant. If you want to call her deaconess, that's fine, but not an ordained servant. And again, next week I'll tell you what I think that that was. So let me draw a few conclusions here as we close out this morning. And I'm repeating myself here, but it bears repetition. The question is not, may women serve in the church? The answer to that from scripture is absolutely they can and they must. We need women to serve in the church. And next week, I'm gonna give you some samplings from church history where oftentimes women were referred to as the mothers of the church in their serving. We need women in the church to serve. We want women in the church to serve. And the platform, the theological platform upon which they serve is this, the priesthood of all believers. We're all one in Christ and we charge all of them to serve. But then secondly, to conclude, the question is, may women serve as ordained office bearers in the church? And I do not believe that with 1 Timothy 2, 12, we can. Let me just draw one more parallel here that I hope and think will be helpful. God works through headship. God works through headship. God works through headship in saving you in the covenant of grace. God works through headship in the family, and God works through headship in the church. Isn't it interesting that in the qualifications to elders, Paul says a man must manage his household well. Why? Because if he can't manage his household well, what business does he have? Managing the household of God. Paul seems to think that the structure in the family, with the man as head, the wife as helpmate, and children as their children, is the model for the church. Men rule in the church. And he doesn't blush at that. But what's interesting is, in the qualifications for deacons, Paul says the same thing. A man must manage his household well. Now, he doesn't follow up with, if he doesn't do so, how can he expect to manage the household of God? But the implication is clearly there. As a deacon, he is going to rule in his sphere of sovereignty, and he must be able to manage his own household well. So I think that the fact that Paul brings up headship in both the elder and the deacon qualifications brings us to the conclusion that the headship analogy is important not only in the family, but also in the church. And let me give you this last thought. Isn't it interesting? that sin did not enter the world through Eve, and yet Eve was the first one who ate of the fruit. Don't you find that fascinating? How did sin enter the world? Through Adam, through the head in the covenant relationship, because that is how God deals with his people, through headship. So it was no less the case in the covenant of works as it is in the case of the family, and it's no less the case of the family as it is in the case of the church. So I've tried to unpack for you these troublesome texts, and I've come to the conclusion that 1 Timothy 2.12 does not permit us to officially make women female deacons, but next week what I will endeavor to do is we will look at 1 Timothy 5 and try to unpack a little bit more what place women do have, and not just in general in their service to the church, but also in something of a quasi-official capacity. Let's pray. Father God, we thank you for your word. We pray, Father, that clarity has been brought to this issue. I hope, Father, that as we discuss this matter around the lunch table today, that we can have a robust conversation, but that ultimately, Father, we would bring all of our allegiances under the word of God. We pray that you would do this for your honor and your glory. In Christ's name, amen. Let's stand.