Please open up your Bibles to Acts 6, if you have a copy. Acts 6. And this is just a reminder, as it was said in the announcements, that we're taking a three-week hiatus from the book of Exodus to talk about church government because our dear brother, Mike George, has been nominated to be a deacon, so the elders thought it would be a good idea. to give a biblical presentation and a biblical case for basically why we do the things that we do and the way that we do them. And so we took one week last week to look at the biblical office of elder. This week we're going to look at the biblical office of deacon. And then next week, we're going to look at the biblical qualifications for both of those offices. We're going to be in Acts chapter 6 and 1 through 7 this morning to look at the office of deacon. So hear the word of the Lord from Exodus, Exodus, from Acts chapter 6, beginning in verse 1. Now in those days when the number of the disciples was multiplying, there arose a complaint against the Hebrews by the Hellenists, because their widows were neglected in the daily distribution. Then the twelve summoned the multitude of the disciples and said, It is not desirable that we should leave the word of God and serve tables. Therefore, brethren, seek out from among you seven men of good reputation, full of the Holy Spirit and wisdom, whom we may appoint over this business, but we will give ourselves continually to prayer and to the ministry of the word. And the saying pleased the whole multitude. And they chose Stephen, a man full of faith in the Holy Spirit, and Philip, Prochorus, Nicanor, Timon, Parmenas, and Nicholas, a proselyte from Antioch, whom they set before the apostles. And when they had prayed, they laid hands on them. Then the word of God spread, and the number of the disciples multiplied greatly in Jerusalem. and a great many of the priests were obedient to the faith. The grass withers and the flower fades, but the word of our God stands forever. It's common for us to talk about Christ as being the chief shepherd or the chief pastor of the church. And that's what 1 Peter 5 says. That's what we talked about last week. And that's true. Christ is the chief shepherd and all of the shepherds or pastors of the church are to look to him as their example. But Christ is also the chief deacon of the church. We see him in his earthly ministry, helping the sick, and ministering not just to spiritual needs, but to temporal and physical needs. It was Jesus who said, the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve. And that word serve there is the same word that we have here, a verb meaning to deacon or diakoneo from which we get our word deacon in verb form there. He came to serve. It was Jesus who set an example for leadership by washing his disciples' feet. And it was Jesus who said, whoever desires to be great among you, let him be your servant, or your diakonos, or your deacon. And so we're gonna look at the office of deacon this morning, but just by way of review, last week we talked about the office of elder. And a couple of things I wanna remind you, and by the way, if you were not here last week, please, I beseech ye therefore brethren, get on the church's website and please listen to the audio from last week's sermon sometime this week. A couple of the things that I'm going to say here require careful biblical explanation, which I can't repeat all of that this week. But by way of reminder, what we covered last week is that the New Testament word for pastor or shepherd is also the word overseer or bishop, or the word elder, and that all three of those words in the New Testament refer to the same office. and that all of the elders or bishops or pastors in the church do have rule or authority in the church, and that, I know we don't always like that word, but that is the word that the New Testament uses. While all of them have authority in the church, not all of them have the work of laboring in the word and doctrine. And we saw that in the New Testament that each church had a plurality of elders. That this is not something that is a tradition, something that we came up with because we thought it was a good idea. It is a divine mandate that each New Testament church have a plurality of elders and that these elders are to rule together in what is called in Greek a presbyterion, or a presbytery, or a board of elders. That the elders do not have individual authority on their own, that as they are seated together, or functioning together, they are to provide instructions and leadership for the church. But, probably the most important thing that we need to remember is that the authority of the elders is not legislative. That is to say that elders in the church, pastors in the church, can't make up rules for you to follow, they can't make up doctrines for you to believe, that their authority is strictly ministerial. That is that they can only administer the doctrines and the laws that are prescribed for us in the scriptures. Everything goes back to the scriptures because the scriptures are the word of Christ the King and the head of the church. And so this week we turn our attention to the office of deacon, and in Acts chapter 6 we see the institution of the office, we see the election of these officers in this text, and their ordination. And we're going to look at this text really under three headings. The first is the problem that arises at the church in Jerusalem, the second is the solution, and then thirdly we're going to look at the result. Problem, solution, result. Let's talk about the problem that we see in verse 1. You know, it's funny, a lot of times if you're a pastor, you'll hear people say that, well, if we just get back to the Bible, there wouldn't be any problems in the church. Well, I want to remind you that this is, you know, Acts 2 is the outpouring of Pentecost, and in Acts chapters 2 through 5, you see the great outpouring of the Spirit of God, and Christians are very generous, Christians are very loving, the gospel is going forth in Power and many people are coming to be saved, and wouldn't you know it, there are still problems in the church. And wouldn't you know it, there are cultural problems within the church, between different people groups. The Hellenists, as our text said, were being neglected. The widows that were Hellenists were being neglected. The Hellenists were the Greeks speaking. members of the church, and these, remember this is in Jerusalem, so the majority of the people at this church are going to be Hebrew, of Hebrew lineage, and yet there are Greek-speaking people at this church, and there is a cultural problem between these people. We don't know why, we don't know how the widows were being neglected, but we do know that it was happening, and wouldn't you know it, there was complaining in the church. If you look at verse 1, it says that there arose a complaint against the Hebrews by the Hellenists. Now, we might be tempted to think, well, this is some kind of formal complaint that they approach the leadership of the church and say, hey, there's a problem and we need to deal with this. That's not what the word complaint means. The word complaint is the word for murmuring or grumbling. It means that there was some whining and complaining and grumbling going on in the church because of this issue. So even though This is a time of the great outpouring of the spirit of God and great things are being done. And this church is a biblical, what we would call a healthy church. There are still problems. And there, guess what? There are always going to be problems. There's probably always going to be some measure of complaint within the church. And so the question is, how are we going to deal with the problems that arise in the church? And the answer is clearly we deal with them biblically. There was a man by the name of Charles E. Hummel that published, he wrote a really, really short couple of page essay, or pamphlet we might say, called The Tyranny of the Urgent. And in this little pamphlet, I see heads nodding, I guess some of you have read this little pamphlet. Mr. Hummel talks about the difference between the urgent and the important. Now, urgent is something that's important, but it might not be as important as something else, but something that is urgent is time-sensitive. And oftentimes what happens in the church is that the time-sensitive issue kind of crushes the more important, bigger issue that is not so time-sensitive, but it is more important. And this is kind of a situation that we see here. There is an urgent need, and it is important. I mean, who wouldn't say, that if widows aren't getting what they need to survive, that this isn't important. Nobody would say that. Obviously, this is a measure of importance. However, for the apostles to leave their labor of prayer and the ministry of the Word would be to neglect the spiritual needs of the church, which are, believe it or not, more important than the temporal needs of the church. And so really we see wisdom here from the apostles. Of course, they're guided by the Holy Spirit in this decision. But we see wisdom not to let the more urgent matter swallow up the most important matter, which is the spiritual needs of the church. So this is the problem. The widows are being neglected. And how are they going to solve it? What is the solution? Well, look at verse 2. Then the twelve summoned the multitude of the disciples and said, It is not desirable that we should leave the word of God and serve tables." We'll come back to that phrase there, those last two words in a minute, serve tables. Verse three, Therefore brethren, seek out from among you seven men of good reputation, full of the Holy Spirit and wisdom, whom we may appoint over this business. So they say, here's what we're gonna do. We want you to elect seven men for this task. Now, we need to talk about election, and we're not talking about the doctrine of election. We're talking about election of officers within the church. They say here in verse three, you are, the congregation is to seek out, And then in verse 5, look down at verse 5 and the saying, please the whole multitude, and they chose. So this is, again, don't have time to go over everything that we talked about last week, but each church is to elect its own officers. And we saw this last week from Acts chapter 14 and verse 23, where it says that Paul and Barnabas had appointed elders, plural, in every church. And this word for appointed is a Greek word that means to elect by show of hands. The word is really a compound word that means to stretch out the hand, and it was used with reference to elections. And so each individual congregation was to elect their own officers, including the elders, and we see the same thing here with the deacons, that they are to elect biblically qualified, and here's the word, men. One of the requirements of Deacons in verse 3 that we see is that they were to be men. This is the word anēr, which is a gender-specific word in Greek. It only includes males. Now, one of the things that I want to point out is that this is an apostolic institution, that the apostles are the one under the authority of Christ instituting this office, which means that it is Christ himself who is coming up with this office, not just a man-made thing, and that this is something that is assumed to be true of every church in the New Testament. Later on in Philippians 1.1, Paul and Timothy address their letter to the saints in Christ Jesus who are in Philippi with the bishops or overseers and deacons. Timothy is in Ephesus, and when Paul writes the epistles of Timothy, He gives him the qualifications for deacons in Ephesus. So it was assumed that every church, every biblical church is going to have the office of deacon and that they're going to choose men who meet these qualifications. Now we'll talk a little bit more or a lot more about the qualifications next week. But for now, there are a couple mentioned here in verse three that I just want to give a brief overview of. The first thing that it says is they be men of good reputation. Meaning that both inside and outside the church, these men are engaged in some business or at some point in the past have been engaged in some business. And so they don't need to be known as those who are crooked, who have evil business dealings, who are not honest men. That they are men both inside and outside the church of honest or good reputation. The second thing that it says is that they be full of the Holy Spirit. And full of the Holy Spirit in the New Testament is a way of saying that someone is growing in the work of the Holy Spirit. We see the work of the Holy Spirit outlined in Galatians 5. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, and so on and so forth. So to describe a man as being full of the Holy Spirit is a way of saying that this is a man who exhibits Christian character, and not only that, but he's growing in Christian character. That this is someone who cares about love and is growing in love and in joy and in peace. So he has a good reputation, full of the Holy Spirit, and then also full of wisdom. Now think about the situation that's going on here. Here are widows that have a real serious need, but then there's a cultural problem as well going on with this, and the deacons are going to be the ones that are going to be put over this task, and that is something that is going to require wisdom when problems arise in the church. When we're talking about wisdom, we're not just talking about knowledge. You can have lots and lots and gobs and gobs of knowledge and have no wisdom whatsoever. You can know a lot of things, but not be able to apply that knowledge rightly in situations. And so wisdom is the ability to apply God's Word to situations that happen in life rightly. And so this is really one of the main characteristics that we ought to be looking for when we're talking about leadership in the church. Yes, knowledge is included in that. Do they know the Word of God? Do they know what God's Word says? And do they know how to apply it in this situation? If a situation arises, is this the kind of man that you can go to and say, hey, what does God's Word say? What are the biblical principles that would apply in this situation? men of good reputation, full of the Holy Spirit, and full of wisdom." Well, at the end of verse 2, we have this saying where the apostles say, you know, we shouldn't leave the Word of God to serve tables. And this almost sounds just a little bit derogatory, doesn't it? Well, if it sounds derogatory, it's only because we don't understand what this phrase means. They're not talking about being waiters at somebody's table, putting food on the table. That's not what they're talking about. The word table can have reference to that, you know, food where table is placed. But this word for table, oftentimes in the New Testament, is the word for a money-changing table. Now I have to stop right there and say, I know that when we think of money changing tables, we want to pick up the tables and throw them over or start whipping people because that's what Jesus did. But remember that in that context, they were stealing from people and Jesus was upset not with the idea of a table, or that there was a particular table where money was being exchanged. That was not the issue there. So, what the apostles are saying here is that it's not right for us, as the functional elders of the church, the ones providing leadership, to neglect prayer, to neglect preaching, to neglect teaching, and neglect evangelism, to be consumed with the financial issues that are arising in the church. You see, in the early church, there was no finance committee. In the early church, the deacons were responsible for bearing the burden of the work of ensuring that the finances of the church were spent in ways consistent with the Word of God. And of course, this focuses here primarily on their ministry to the widows, or we might say the poor and the needy. Now, a couple things I want to point out here. One is the purpose that this arises is to relieve what we might call the functional elders of the church. Now, let me be clear here. Elders do not have the same authority that the apostles do. However, the apostles were functioning as elders in the church, and we saw this, again, last week from 1 Peter 5, where Peter calls himself a fellow elder in the church, because even though he had apostolic authority, he functioned as an elder in the church to provide leadership on normal occasions. But deacons, we ought to not think about deacons in the way, well, we shouldn't think, you know, this guy, He meets some of these qualifications. So maybe if we nominate him to be a deacon, then we can train him how to be kind of a servant in the church. That's not what you should think about when you're thinking about nominating someone to be a deacon. When you're talking about a deacon, this needs to be a man who already exhibits that way too often used phrase, a servant's heart. This is somebody that already is the kind of man who sees needs and meets them, or at least organizes a way to solve these problems within the church. These are the kind of men that see people hurting, see people in need, see the fatherless, see the widows, see help that needs doing, and they find a way to do it. These are the kind of men that we ought to be looking for when we're talking about deacons in the church. Now this is an office in the church, but as we've already mentioned, it's not necessarily an office of rule. The deacons are different than elders and they do not have the final say over the finances or the ministry in the church. However, it is the, again, the functional elders of the church that set the deacons over this particular task having to do with the church's finances and the temporal needs of the church, but the elders would have the final say over what happens. Now notice that the focus here, I know you can't not talk about money, this was part of the issue, but the focus here is not so much on property or on money as much as it was people and ministry. James 127, when James describes the Christian faith, he says, pure and undefiled religion before God and the Father is this, to visit widows and in their trouble, excuse me, to visit orphans and widows in their trouble, and to keep oneself unspotted from the world. And visit, by the way, has to do with visiting for help. And this really has a lot to do with the office of deacon, those who are helping widows, those who are helping the poor and the needy, that when situations arise in the church where there are temporal needs, that the deacons are overseeing the ministry in this case. And this allowed the Apostles to devote themselves, as they say, to ministry and to the word. So if we would sum up the offices in one summary statement, we would say that the elders focus on the spiritual needs of the church and that the deacons focus on the temporal or the physical needs of the church. That's not to say that pastors don't care. Pastor Mike's not going to say, you know what, I don't care if you're sick. I don't care if you have cancer. I'm not coming to see you in the hospital. You heard it here. The pastors care if you're sick, we care if there are physical needs in the church, and the deacons are going to care about the spiritual needs in the church. But their focus is different. That the elders of the church are to focus on the spiritual needs, and the deacons are to focus on the temporal needs of the church. Now in verse 5, they give the seven men And two that I want to draw your attention to are Stephen and Phillip. Now the reason I want to draw your attention to these men is because both Philip is explicitly later on called an evangelist. And apparently he no longer is a deacon, he transitions into being an evangelist, which was kind of like a church planting elder in the New Testament church. But Stephen as well, in the next chapter, chapter 7 of Acts, we see him being martyred for the faith and preaching the gospel. And so when you think of deacons, you don't need to think of just some unimportant people in the church. That the New Testament deacon was a man who may be martyred for the faith. Later on, I think it's because next week we'll see the qualifications are basically the same, one main one being different, but because the qualifications are virtually the same to be an elder or a pastor as they are to be a deacon, that these are the kind of men who stand firm in the faith and are courageous for the Lord. Now they are ordained to office in verse 6. They set these men before the apostles, they pray over them, and then they lay hands on them. This is a common practice in the Bible to set apart for a particular function or office in the church. This is the same thing that we saw last week. 1 Timothy 4.14, Paul tells Timothy, Do not neglect the gift that is in you, which was given to you with prophecy by the laying on of the hands of the presbytery. That's the duty of the Presbytery or the responsibility of the Presbytery to ordain to office and that is why the Apostles are the ones who lay hands because they are functioning as the elders of the church on the deacons. So, they have this problem, they have a solution, what is the result? Look at verse 7. then the word of God spread, and the number of the disciples multiplied greatly in Jerusalem." So don't skip over this. This is very important. He says that the word of God is spreading because of what's happening. This is the result of the solution that is put forth. So the deacons, because this office is instituted, and because they're qualified men, and because they're functioning how they should be, and because they're managing this task well, the elders are able to spread the word abroad. The pastors and preachers of the church are able to evangelize. They're able to preach. They're able to teach. They're able to pray and spend time in prayer and minister the Word of God to the congregation. But, think about what the New Testament says so often about, I think, probably the greatest apologetic to the Christian faith is not something intellectual. Usually, usually the greatest apologetic for the church is the transforming power of the gospel on display. So if you go and try to share the gospel with someone, but your life doesn't look anything like what the Christian life should be, and you live in complete hypocrisy, that will be a great hindrance to the gospel. That's true on an individual level. Well, it's also true on a corporate level. So if our church is seeking to faithfully proclaim the gospel, but we don't live like it, but we're not loving others that are in need or helping those in need, or we're neglecting the widows or neglecting the poor among us that have real and serious needs, well then, do we really even have the gospel? I mean, are we really showing the transforming power of the gospel in the New Testament church? It was Jesus who said, by this all will know that you are my disciples if you have love for one another. In Matthew 5 16, Jesus said, let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven. I'm sure most of you in this room can quote those. But remember, this is not a cursory issue. In Revelation, the seven churches that are addressed in chapters 2 and 3, I think, one of them is the church at Ephesus. And the rebuke to the church of Ephesus is, they were preaching the truth. They were confronting false teaching and false doctrine, but he says, Christ says to them, I have this against you. You have left your first love or the love that you had at first. In other words, the church was faithful in confronting false doctrine and in preaching the truth, but they were no longer being faithful in deeds of love and in sacrifice and in generosity. And Christ threatens to remove their lampstand from them to come to them in judgment because they had neglected loving one another, caring for one another, and we might include in this ministering to widows, orphans, and poor. And so we see here it's not just that the Word of God is going forth, that preaching is happening, it is that. But it's also that they saw the great deeds of sacrifice among the Christians. And by the way, you can read pagan emperors and pagan writers in the early church who wrote about how sacrificial the Christians were. Particularly, if a plague came through, the pagans would throw their sick out in the street for their bodies to be burned so that they didn't get sick, and it was the Christians who risked their lives to minister to their own sick until they died, to do their best to minister to them, risking their own lives for other Christians. You see, it's a great testimony what the deacons are over, ensuring that the temporal needs are met in the church. The church is not just about truth. The church is about truth. But love and truth go together in the New Testament. And the last phrase in verse 7 is that a great many of the priests were obedient to the faith. Now what's the connection here? Why would he mention the priests? He's already said that there were many people coming to Christ. Why the priests? Well, it was the priests in the Old Testament who were primarily responsible for the diaconal ministries under the Old Covenant system. And so the priests look at the Christians and they say, these are the ones who are actually walking in the law of the Lord. The deacons are the ones who are actually fulfilling the responsibilities that the priests are supposed to be doing, ensuring that the orphans are taken care of, ensuring that the widows and the poor and the needy are taken care of. These are the ones who actually have the true God with them. We're the ones who've turned away from the faith. These are the ones who are actually doing what the Bible says. And that was a great testimony to the priests the early church. So what does all this have to do with us? Well, very quickly I'm going to give you three commitments that I think matter to you. So we're not just talking about the deacons, our deacons, or deacons of the church. This matters to you, and let me give you three things. Number one, you need to commit to faithful membership in Christ's Church. Now, I said this last week, And I'm gonna say it again, I'm not talking about if you're fairly new here and if you're getting your feet wet and you're trying to decide if this is the place for you to come, I'm not telling you jump in and take a vow that you don't take seriously. That's not what I mean, okay? What I mean is that if you have been here a while and you're not a member of a church, you need to commit to faithful membership because if you don't, you can't participate in the election of officers. You can't be a faithful church member. You can't participate in your responsibility in the church to help elect officers in the church. And so part of your responsibility as a member of the congregation is to help maintain purity in the church, by electing biblical officers and to see the godly men get elected to be deacons so that deeds of love and people are taken care of in the church as well. That's one of your responsibilities to be a faithful member in Christ's church. Secondly, commit to praying for our diaconate. Now, I said this last week, that you need to be praying for the elders of the church. You also need to be praying for the deacons of the church. You need to be, Chester, we only have one deacon right now, and you say, well, that's deficient. That sounds weak. It is weak, and it is deficient, and that's why we're seeking another one right now. But pray for Mr. Chester. Pray that the Lord would use him greatly, that God would give him an ability to serve and to see the needs in the church and to handle those rightly, to handle those biblically. Pray for Mike George as he is going through the process of training, having been nominated. All of these things are difficult. All of them require great commitment. I mean, this is an office in the church. These are vows that have to be taken being set apart to a particular office in the church. And, you know, pray that we would be a church that would have a great diaconal ministry. I do not want us to just be known for truth. I want us to be faithful to the truth. I want us to be a church that is faithful in proclaiming the Scriptures, that is unashamed of the Gospel, unashamed of everything in the Bible. But we also need to be a church that is not ashamed of our diaconal work. That is not ashamed of our deeds of love. When people say, well, what are you guys doing to help the widows and the orphans and the poor, that we don't just scratch our heads and say, well, I'm not really sure. So we need to be praying that we would be faithful in our diaconal ministries and deeds of love. And thirdly, Commit to living generously. I've already told you that this was, you know, really the greatest apologetic in the early church, and I would say, in our day, where truth is virtually denied, where we don't really, we live in a postmodern society that doesn't really affirm real truth, that things like deeds of love, and sacrifice, and giving of oneself, and generosity, those types of things matter a lot more to the outside world, and while they might deny truth, they look at those things, and they see good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven when they see those things. So just as it was in Jesus's day, just as it was in the early centuries of the church, so it is today. We need to commit to living lives of generosity. And don't hear me saying, give us your money. That's not what I mean. Yes, that's included in generosity. But I mean, how much time are you willing to give to help others? How much of your home, are you willing to open your home to bring others in to help them? Are you willing to give your abilities to be used to help others? So commit to living generously as a Christian. Amen? Amen. Let's pray. God, you are wonderful and great. What a reality, what a glorious and powerful reality to think that the Lord of glory came to earth to do the work of a servant for a bunch of rebellious sinners to die on the cross for our sins. What a glorious God you are and what a glorious Savior we serve. Father, we want to be known not just by the truth, but by truth and love. I pray that these would be the two wings by which our church would fly. We ask these things in Christ's name. Amen.