God wants men to live out a healthy masculinity by embodying good judgment, respectability, and restraint while modeling robust faith, love, and endurance.
To Know Him and Make Him Known
Sermons on Faith (Page 4)
To prove that you are “above reproach” and ready to become a pastor, you need to first lead your family well, avoid destructive vices, and embody godly virtues in your real life.
The defining mark of a man who can be trusted with the authority to serve as a bishop is that he is above reproach, a genuinely good man who has developed a solidly good reputation.
Whenever God’s people are attacked by false teaching, God strikes back by giving us healthy teaching AND healthy teachers, overseers who have the responsibility to both share God’s message with people and then show them how to live out that message.
Our only hope for engaging our culture with a healthy faith is the grace of God, which has appeared in Jesus to give us the free gifts of salvation, empowerment, and “on the job” training.
God wants us to engage our hurting society and address its problems, but He wants us to do so on His terms. Those terms begin with working within the system to seek justice. We do this by obeying the rules ourselves, and then holding the system accountable to follow its own rules and improve itself.
If we want to be spiritually healthy, we must accept Paul’s “healthy” teaching about salvation – namely, that everyone needs saving, we can’t save ourselves, and only Jesus can save us. All spiritual health is built on this foundation.