Dan: 0:00

Hi, everyone. And welcome to trainingforliferedeemed. I’m your host, Dan , and as always, I am joined by my father, David Jackson, and we are currently going through the book of one Timothy. We are about to start Timothy chapter three. And do chapter four as well together? And so I hope that you enjoy this looking at deacons and apostasy and all kinds of stuff so that when it comes to overseers and deacons or elders and deacons or whatever that, yeah , I think these days we have so many different words were used for an overseer. Can you tell us what the, just the basic differences are between the two of them? Originally in Acts, the story goes that , Peter didn’t want to wait on tables. He was thought that was a bit below him. And so he wanted to focus on , teaching people and praying. It’s interesting, actually I’ve realized the other day when I was chatting to my DNA group, that Peter doesn’t say that he devoted himself to preaching. He says he’s devoting himself to teaching, which we had a bit of a debate about in terms of whether he’s preaching and evangelizing still, or if he’s actually focusing a bit more on discipling at that point as well. But that’s, that’s a bit of a side aside thing. Let’s start with the differences between an overseer and a deacon. So

David: 1:14

I actually think that’s part of the, part of the, yeah, the , the DNA of what’s going on here. One of the elders at my church when we were looking at these studies on Timothy asked the question, what’s the difference between preaching and teaching. And so I did a quick word search, took me back to seminary days. The difference is whether you’re talking to outsiders or insiders. Yeah . So if you’re talking to outsiders, you’re preaching, you’re announcing, you’re giving them something they haven’t heard before. Whereas if you’re talking to insiders, hopefully you’re delivering the whole counsel of God. You’re teaching Genesis to Revelation and you’re training people and they’re disciples. So teaching is the main focus of people they call it overseers or elders. So it back in Acts six , Peter looks at this thing and he says, I can’t do this. You know, I’m doing everything. You know, you’ve got us organizing the money. You’ve got us handing out food to widows. You’ve got me trying to run a Bible study over here. I’m up in the temple. I’m down here in your homes. Give me a break. So out of that , it’s a division of labor and it’s funny. The language you use is this deacon word deacon means to serve or minister. And it’s the word for somebody who wa , who is a waiter in a restaurant. So Peter says , you go and wait on tables. You deacon the tables. I’ll deacon the word of God. So it’s like, I’ve got two plates here. One’s got bread on it. And one’s got a Bible on it. And the elders are going to do the Bible stuff and you guys go and organize the rest. Um , so it’s , it’s a brilliant division of labor. I know you’ve been thinking about all of that all or your teaching and , professional development stuff. Why don’t you talk a little bit about the division between, u h, the teacher’s role and the, the role of all of the other people that have all the other things

Dan: 3:10

Too . Yeah. So I’m just working on a book at the moment, which is what Dad’s talking about. It has to do with how you can teach more effectively as a teacher and save yourself some time. And one of the things I talk about in there is the idea of , you know, we , we take our teachers and we promote them into head teachers, into deputy roles. but what that tends to mean is that they just get lots and lots of admin stuff, and they don’t actually get to , action or be doing the stuff that you want them to be doing in terms of supervising teachers and helping them to progress and get really, and get better and making sure the curriculum is actually done well, a ll that kind of stuff. I don’t have as much time to devote to that. Cause I keep getting taken up with just extra admin duties, whether it be discipline or anything like that. And so , in this book, I talk a little bit about the idea of actually hiring people for the tasks and not for their roles and talking about how, if your head teacher, you should list their tasks, what you want them to do that should be supervising other teachers looking after things and all the admin stuff should actually go to an admin person or someone who’s trained in it. Who knows what they’re doing with admin, who can probably do it better in less time , and is then allowing the teacher to become more effective and impactful in what they’re doing. And so you see that a lot business too , you know, your big CEO’s and stuff. They all have executive assistants and personal assistants to help them to make sure that they are actually being as effective as they can be in their leadership or , and that kind of stuff. And they’ll actually delegate a lot of the management type stuff to another person.

David: 4:39

Yeah. And that’s, that’s what we’re looking at here with pastors and deacons. You’re looking at a pastor who’s job or elder or overseer. His job is to teach to disciple, to train, to rule, and they have to be exemplary people. You, you appoint the wrong person in that role , uh, and the whole church falls apart. and he says, you know, some wrong there you strike the shepherd, the sheep scatter. this is a really, really important job. And one Timothy three is the passage in the Bible that gives us the most information about appointing pastors and elders and deacons. But the deacon, I think, is the most undervalued job in the church. And I don’t think our churches have grasped the power of appointing deacons. and that, that would take us back to Acts six again, wouldn’t it. but this whole concept of , um, you know, why , how can you expect the person whose job is to rule the church and teach the church, the Bible and expect them to be the one that engages the wider community. It’s the deacons that engage the wider community. And because they’re the ones out there opening doors and getting into people’s homes with service and ministry and getting to know the neighbours and all the rest of it. And they are the ones who then bring the teams together of the believers in the church to go and do the work of ministry. the problem is we set up these what I would call welfare ministries out in the community, and then we hire non-Christians to do it. So we set up Christian school and you high non-Christian teachers, you set up a , a nursing home and you hire non Christians to work in there. And we’re discovering that if you go back to it , six, those deacons were articulate spokesman for the faith. And you end up stoning Stephen to death. Not because they didn’t like the bread he delivered,

Dan: 6:48

Cause he’s delivering a huge long sermon.

David: 6:50

He’s out there. People are getting healed, he’s explaining the gospel. They bring him up before the court. the deacon who does meals on wheels is smarter than the whole Sanhedrin when it comes to defending the other Bible. these are, these are not inferior roles they’re the legs on the whole machine. So we w ant t o d o this body of Christ concept. We talked about last week with husbands and wives, having separate functions, and the desperate need of a man for a wise woman. you know, I can have all the ideas in the world, but I don’t know how to make it work. Yeah. my wife could run the whole country as you well know. And sometimes I think she does, but you just look at the administrative gifts and ability that are there. And then you look at, if I tried to do that, it would just crash. I’ve got to do my job and let her do her job. And if we work together, the job gets done.

Dan: 7:54

Yeah . Oh yeah . It’s like, even just reflecting on what we’re doing at the moment. I feel like my role at the moment is very much more deacon . Like , and you’re very much my own like is you’re the one focusing on load . Do all of the teachers not doing that , the service of getting it out there ,

David: 8:08

Uh , at teaching dad how to do technology. This is generational shifts .

Dan: 8:13

Yeah . Okay. Dad, so , there is some debate in this passage about whether or not women can be deacons. So do you want to just clarify that there doesn’t seem to mention anything about women and elders and overseers?

David: 8:25

Okay. So deacons , it’s clear that a deacon has to be husband of one wife and not having a lot of polygamous people, but in the middle of that, between deacon and deacon, he talks about women and some people speculate, oh, that must be the deacon’s wives. There’s nothing in there about wives. This is about deacon deacon. And he just does one little verse in the middle about women in the, middle of that context of deacons . Yeah . So that makes sense that that’s not a female deacon. We’re talking about female deacons. If you’re male , male, deacon, you’ve got to be a one-woman man. If you’re a female deacon, there there’s issues that the women are going to encounter that are slightly different to the men. So we’ll just give that a little verse in the middle, but yeah, when you go through the Bible, there’s this beautiful case of Phoebe and he describes her as , a minister of the church. N ow, the way he’s phrased that indicates that that’s an official job. Y ep. U m, look it up. And Romans 16. So definitely we’ve got men and women deacons, and we’ve got a male headship as overseers elders. So that’s the pattern.

Dan: 9:44

Now , again , moving on to chapter four, chapter four is all about apostasy. And really, it talks a lot about sticking to the faith or the true faith or the deep faith. And I think true this of the faith. And so can you explain what , what is he referring to like people would that , does that just mean all the Bible? Does it mean just certain sections? Like what , what are these key truths that are being passed on? Because that’s kind of a recurring theme throughout Timothy, this, this aspect.

David: 10:15

Yeah. A re you when, when you get these false teachers, I mean, Jesus said in the last days you’re going to get false prophets and false teachers. Well, you know, we’re full of them. Yeah. they’re, they’re all around the place. And if you get on the internet t hat they’re almost impossible to avoid. So it’s out there. One of the things these guys do is they claim to have a deeper knowledge of God, of the text of everything. Now, if you’re going to deal with them, you can’t just do it off John three 16. Yeah. You’ve got to have some depth to your knowledge of the word of God. And what Paul, if you look at what  Paul is telling Timothy to do, he’s got a focus on, teaching at greater depth than has been happening in Ephesus. He’s got, t o fix his eye on the hope of the living. God, who’s the saviour of all men. So keep Jesus central to your teaching. You know, you don’t go off and do the whole Bible as a Aesop’s fables or a mother goose. You know, that’s not the moral of the story. It’s about Jesus. And then he does this little thing , which I really like give attention to the public reading of scripture, to exhorting and teaching. So it’s something I’ve an , I’m not a great fan of prayerbook liturgies, but the sanhedrin, the synagogues in that day and the church all through the middle ages, organized that as part of their morning and evening worship, they and in their gatherings. They would read the whole Bible through once, well, over a year, you know , they’ve got a calendar of Bible readings and you know, you’re going to look at the back of an old Anglican prayer book, and you’ve got your Bible readings for the year. if you get on to , you, was it , you version now they’ve got all these different Bible reading plans. The idea was when you get up in church, if you just turn up a church on a Sunday morning, over every a cycle of every 1, 2, 3, 5 years, you should have heard the Bible read over and over all through your life. Yeah. And your minister should be preaching his way through the whole text. so Paul does this boast. I have not failed to deliver to you the whole counsel of God, you know, and we, we set out at the beginning of any man’s ministry, he should set out to say, I’m going to deliver to you over the next 40 years o f my career. I will have preached the whole Bible, not just the popular books when we sat down and planned the children’s program. yeah,

Dan: 13:01

I just did one . I t just goes t o the, through the, through what’s

David: 13:04

Your guiding principles ,

Dan: 13:06

cover Everything in the text, the texts from Genesis to Revelation. And I basically cover a lot of narrative with my younger kids. Yeah . Because it’s easier for them to understand the narratives and you can link that to Jesus quite easily. And then you move your way into the more direct teaching. And then your last thing is you kind of bringing in the passages that I don’t have to struggle with all the time. So you do,

David: 13:29

You do narrative before abstract. Yeah . and you’re blending, you know, the , the wisdom literature, the history literature that the epistles are , you’re sort of the coach of the team getting in there and telling you how to make it work. It’s training for godliness. and you’ve, if you don’t go through the whole text, you know, you’ve only trained your left leg, you know, the other, one’s looking a bit lame. It takes real. We talked about earlier self-discipline to do this.

Dan: 13:57

Yeah. Yeah. I was going to ask, say this passage talks, last verse that really relates well to that whole name, really training for life redeemed . It talks about the higher priority of training for godliness in this passage. And I think , studying y our text helps with that. But what else goes into training for godliness

David: 14:18

Practice, practice, practice, practice , get some feedback, getting feedback, getting coaching, going and finding people to d o it really, really well. And yo u k n ow, if you’re going to, somebody said to me a long time ago, David, if you’re going to go to theological college and spend four years of your life, it’s not for the ticket it’s for what you’re going to learn. So don’t waste four years just at the whatever Bible college is cheapest go and find the best to spend your four years at go, go and get the best teachers. And if you can get into their homes. So one of the things I did as a young man is I’ve, I finagled my way into getting invited back for Sunday lunch. And it was some of the best experiences of my life. cause we got, you know, w e got to sit at Sunday lunch with men. Who’d worked at teachers with their families and see what this looks like on the ground. And it was from that, that I came back, you know , when I got married, Pat and I used to go around to some of these homes too . We had them come into our home and we’d look at what does godliness look like when it’s mature? And when it’s been done by somebody who really has worked at it, that’s what I want for my life. and that’s what, that’s the whole reason Paul’s writing to Timothy. Yeah. Yeah. U m, you know, you and I, b oth you and I both know, there was a time when I had heart surgery. and at time before that, when I wasn’t feeling real great and you finagled us into go ing t o t he gym, Hey dad, I got this cheap deal at the gym. You want to join us? And we went and lifted weights and did all that stuff. But getting up in the morning to go to the gym is not an exciting thought I have to say. and that’s why people are going to spend a fortune and then drop out three months later. They haven’t got the self-discipline to keep going. And I think in , I struggled with the discipline of getting out of bed in the morning. Cause I’m I’m , I don’t sleep well, but I want to spend that time every day in the word of God. and you know, life gets busy, but if you don’t fence it off and say nothing disturbs this, it will. Yeah.

Dan: 16:35

I was going to say , I actually was challenged at one point in my life too , when I was going to the gym, you know twice a day for at least half an hour to an hour each day. But I wasn’t reading my Bible every day. And it was like, how can I manage to prioritize this training and neglect this other one? And so if you are Jim junkie in any kind of sense, if you’re not reading your Bible, don’t go to the gym. Unless you read your Bible first, it’s a little help. Make sure you read your Bible because you probably want to get to the gym and keep working out. But , this training is more important, but guys, if you enjoyed this episode, I would love for you to leave us a review. Make sure you subscribe so that you can come back and listen to us again. Next week when we hit the last two chapters of Timothy. And if you would like to get the show notes, just head over to trainingforliferedeemed.com/35 t o get a transcript there. Watch the video and join us. Leave us a comment. We again have videoed this one for you. So come and have a look. We’ve changed video angles and stuff. Change our lighting a little bit. Hopefully it looks a bit better. Uh, l et u s know if you liked the videos and yeah. Make sure you join us next week. Thank you very much.