Our young men need public and private examples of godly men in generations past and present.  Our pastor would tell us that his personal pursuit of holiness was for the benefit of others—because his wife needed a godly husband and his children a godly father and the church a godly leader. He modeled meekness and godliness even in his later years of immense personal suffering.  He showed us how to die. The church needs more everyday heroes like him to prepare our young men to “pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, steadfastness, gentleness” and to “fight the good fight of the faith” until the Lord calls them home (1 Tim. 6:11-12).

A hero went Home this week.
It’s hard to put into words the measure of a man.  God gives many good men to His church.  As I mourn this beloved pastor, I can’t help but wonder how many of our young men are in the queue to lead the next generation.  I know not every man can or will be like him – but that was not his aim, nor his desire to be a standard for comparison.  His aim was to build men who follow after Christ (1 Cor. 11:1) and become more Christ-like (Rom. 8:29), from one degree to another (2 Cor. 3:18).  Christ is the only imitable way, truth and life (John 14:6).
Yet, the scriptures do command us to “consider your leaders and the outcome of their faith” (Hebrews 13:7) and to follow them, as they follow Christ (1 Cor. 11:1).  I’ve had ample opportunity to “consider…the outcome” of this pastor’s life as a sheep in his flock for 35 years.  And, at the risk of the criticism of romanticizing a fallible man, I offer these reflections of one man’s faithful life to encourage the Church to nurture our young men, so that it will flourish in their generation.
Set Christ apart in your heart by faith.
We must encourage our sons to live wholeheartedly for Christ.  There is no middle ground, no nuanced path. Indeed, the way is narrow and has only one gate. Our pastor would say to us, “Look to Christ” who is the “author and finisher of our faith” in all things (Heb. 12:2).  Our world holds many glittering distractions for a young man’s heart, but we must pray that our sons’ hearts esteem Christ above all else. When men learn to find their treasure in Christ alone, many worldly distractions fall away, scattered in dull comparison.  We must pray for our young men because this act of “setting apart” is a sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit alone, in His timing.  The Church must exercise patience, grace and grit to equip men to grow into “mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” (Eph. 4:13).
Have a vision to change the world.
We must encourage our young men to have a vision for their lives that extends beyond their personal gain, for the glory of God’s kingdom. Our pastor’s vision to change the world was not to have a world-renowned name for himself, but to lead, train and send men “into all the world” (Matt. 28:19) for Christ’s name.  As we foster interests and enable talents of our sons, we need to never stop encouraging them to think big and take risks for His glory and for the good of others.
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Under both the old and new covenants God has denied people office (and sometimes more) on account of things that are outside of their conscious control. Why? Because the offices in question belong to God and he may give them or forbid them to whomever he pleases for whatever reasons he pleases. That is inherent in his sovereignty…No one has any right or claim to any office or its honors, power, or remuneration in and of himself. Only if God has called him to it does he begin to have a claim, and he has it not for his own glory or temporal advantage but so that he might serve the church and benefit its other members.

Overture 15 (O15) has not received enough support from the presbyteries of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) to approve its intended change to the denomination’s Book of Church Order (BCO). With its failure the time is ripe to reconsider our conception of the nature of fitness for office, along with what terms have been used in the discussion and what internal constitutional arrangements should be pursued to prevent unfit men from holding office.
Prudence ought to govern all of our affairs, and Scripture testifies that prudence means that certain men are not candidates for the office of elder because they are new converts and are as such more likely to succumb to pride and fall away because of the office’s difficulties (1 Tim. 3:6). The temptation to pride is simply too likely and too destructive if it overcomes them to allow such men the office. Now sexual sin is conspicuous for its tendencies to wage war upon the soul (1 Pet. 2:11) and to undermine one’s sanctification (1 Thess. 4:3). It is an especially destructive sin (Prov. 5:1-13), and often in cases of apostasy it has a prominent part (Num. 25:1-2). Of sexual sins, that one with which O15 had to do (albeit in the stage of temptation, not active commission) is especially heinous in the sight of God (Lev. 18:22; 20:13), and destructive even of all civil decency and morality (Gen. 19:1-29; Jdgs. 19:22-30).
So far this accords with what O15 said in its ‘whereas’ statements. Where it went wrong was in its suggestion that self-description was the basis on which to disqualify men from office. The above facts about temptation and sexual sin being the case, prudence would seem to commend that men who experience the temptation to commit the sin in question ought to be deemed unfit for office so long as the temptation endures. At the least, such a thing ought to be deemed an open question. For if being a new convert (which is neither a sin nor a temptation) nonetheless unfits one for office because its circumstances will possibly lead to heavy temptation, then it is eminently conceivable that experiencing especially dangerous lusts – which unlike mere adverse circumstances is actually on the ‘temptations lead to actual transgressions lead to death’ sequence of Jas. 1:14-15 – ought to be similarly disqualifying, not least since it suggests the presence of very strong and well-developed original sin in one’s person, and tends to be accompanied by other grievous transgressions and internal desires.[1]
If it be objected that this is unfair to the men who experience the temptation in question because it would permanently bar them from office, and this in spite of otherwise showing personal gifts and godliness, then consider the following. It is not a sin to be devoid of a call to the ministry or to be providentially called to some other vocation (comp. 1 Cor. 7:17-24). It is not a sin to be a woman; indeed, it is a remarkably glorious thing. It was not a sin to accidentally acquire leprosy (Lev. 13:46) or have one’s private organs crushed (Deut. 23:1), or to be a Gentile or a member of one of the Israelite tribes that was not entrusted with the priestly office (Num. 16-17).
And yet under both the old and new covenants God has denied people office (and sometimes more) on account of things that are outside of their conscious control. Why? Because the offices in question belong to God and he may give them or forbid them to whomever he pleases for whatever reasons he pleases. That is inherent in his sovereignty (1 Sam. 2:7-8; Ps. 75:7; 115:3; 135:6; Dan. 2:21; 4:35). No one has any right or claim to any office or its honors, power, or remuneration in and of himself. Only if God has called him to it does he begin to have a claim (Heb. 5:4), and he has it not for his own glory or temporal advantage but so that he might serve the church and benefit its other members (Mk. 10:43-44; Eph. 4:11-13). And as God has seen fit, in his mysterious wisdom, to deny office to whole classes of people for things outside of their own doing (sex, familial descent, tribe, ethnicity, personal tragedy or physical ailments), it ought not to be thought a priori incredible that his church, acting under the guidance of his Spirit and in light of his word, may see fit to do likewise.
If it be rejoined that this is granted, but that the men in question show their fitness for office by being otherwise conspicuous for their piety, godliness, and spiritual gifts (what David Cassidy likes to call the “Sam Allberry Test”), then let it be rejoined that the church does not regard personal godliness, piety, or talent to be sufficient grounds for extending office to someone. All believers have spiritual gifts from God (Rom. 12:6-8; 1 Cor. 12:4-11; 1 Pet. 4:10-11),[2] as they are a household of priests (1 Pet. 2:5, 9; Rev. 1:6). If it be said that nonetheless not all have the teaching gift, then let it be remembered that false teachers also have that ability and are often skillful in exercising it (Matt. 24:11); i.e., that possession of the aptness to teach is not a certain mark of fitness for office.
In addition, all believers without exception are to be characterized by personal piety and godliness and moral excellence (Rom. 12:9-21; Gal. 5:22-23; 2 Pet. 1:5-10). Such things are necessary in officeholders, but they are not sufficient, even when combined with a subjective, personal sense of call to office and with an external sense of call on the part of other believers – for experience shows that the internal and external calls are often mistaken. And let it not be forgotten that the PCA routinely denies office to men who are godly and gifted, and does so for a variety of reasons, from differing from our standards to not having the formal education that the PCA believes is necessary to discharge the office of teaching elder. All of which is to say that the suggestion that the church would be engaged in some sort of senseless cruelty[3] if she were to deny or remove from office men who experience certain temptations is not well-founded either in Scripture or Presbyterian polity.
You will notice that I do not directly mention the sin and temptation in view by name. This is because the clear testimony of Scripture commends us not naming it except sparingly and in absolute need. “Sexual immorality and all impurity or covetousness must not even be named among you, as is proper among saints. Let there be no filthiness nor foolish talk nor crude joking, which are out of place” (Eph 5:3-4, emphases mine). “To others show mercy with fear, hating even the garment stained by the flesh” (Jude 23). “Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire” (Col. 3:5). “Flee from sexual immorality” (1 Cor. 6:18). “It is shameful even to speak of the things that they do in secret” (Eph. 5:12). “God has not called us for impurity, but in holiness” (1 Thess. 4:7). It needs but little comment that the sin in view is something that Scripture regards as filthy, impure, unholy, earthly, immoral, shameful, and prone to corrupt all that it touches, such that it is dangerous to our souls and displeasing to God to even talk or think about it. Rather, we are to flee from such things and instead set our minds on “whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable” (Phil. 4:8).
One will notice further that my position here puts me to the right of many of the prominent opponents of the temptation in view. That is intentional. In many cases even the opponents of this thing have erred by allowing the debate to occur along the wrong lines and by too much using the concepts and terms of its proponents and normalizers. It should be deemed sheer lunacy to give office to people who are so grievously tempted by a desire to do what is heinous. Instead, even many of the opponents have gone out of their way to say that it is only the self-description to which they object, not the temptation.
Lastly, if it be doubted that my position that such temptations disqualify one for office is correct, answer this question: if temptations do not qualify in such a case, when would they do so? Never? But if one says that then it would follow that it would be reasonable and safe to ordain youth pastors who are tempted to pedophilia. And if one says on the other hand that temptations are indeed sometimes disqualifying one admits my position is correct (in principle) and raises some rather difficult follow-up questions. Who decides what temptations are disqualifying, and on what grounds? I have an answer to that: temptations to do what is contrary to nature and to do what is so displeasing to God that he names the sin in question by euphemisms (Lev. 20:13), uses it as a temporal judgment (Rom. 1:24, 26), and only lists historical examples of it while also describing how he punished those that committed it (Gen. 19:5-13, 24; Jdgs. 19-20; 2 Pet. 2:6; Jude 7), ought to be deemed disqualifying. But I am interested to see if anyone will dare attempt to make the case that a) some temptations disqualify; but b) the temptation to break Lev. 18:22 is not one of them – for I do not think that such a thing can be done absent violating the scriptural witness as to the utter depravity of the thing in view.
Tom Hervey is a member, Woodruff Road Presbyterian Church, Simpsonville, SC. The statements made in this article are the personal opinions of the author alone, and do not necessarily reflect the views of his church or its leadership or other members.

[1] The sin in question does not occur in isolation, and is frequently mentioned in combination with other sins (Rom. 1:29-32; 1 Cor. 6:9-10; 1 Tim. 1:9-10).
[2] Even granting that some of the particular gifts listed in such passages (e.g. gifts of healing, 1 Cor. 12:9) have ceased, the point remains that God’s empowering grace is not limited to only a few, but is diffused throughout the church body.
[3]As was intimated by a ruling elder, Kyle Keating, in a speech at the 2021 General Assembly: https://byfaithonline.com/against-overtures-23-and-37/
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No matter how carefully we try to promote and protect our interests, we will not always succeed. Even when misfortune does not befall us, its possibility makes us anxious, and this keeps us from being perfectly happy. This is why the Scriptures tell us that it is only when our hearts are fixed upon that which cannot be shaken that we can face the prospect of bad news without fear (cf. Ps. 112:7; Heb. 12:26–29). 

In our relativistic age, happiness is seen as a matter of personal taste. If you come across someone whose happiness aesthetic differs from yours, you are expected to shrug and politely say, “Whatever makes you happy.” This makes sense to those who see human beings as more authentic when they act in accordance with their feelings. On the other hand, those who see all people as sharing the same human nature will conclude that some things are universally conducive, and others universally detrimental, to personal fulfillment. These differing perspectives correspond to two different paths to happiness, only one of which can lead to a happy end.
The Path of Deified Desire
It is widely assumed in our time that happiness consists in having positive feelings (or at least not having negative ones). Closely related to this is the notion that subjective preferences should be the determining factor for how objective reality is ordered. As C.S. Lewis once put it, modern man has rejected the approach to life that focuses on how to conform the soul to the natural moral order, replacing it with an approach that seeks to subdue everything to his desires.[1] This outlook is now in full bloom, and it is being implemented politically on the basis of various supposed “existential threats.” In the words of professor Russell Berman, the formidable “nexus of government, media, major corporations, and the education establishment . . . aspires to a permanent state of emergency to impose a new mode of governance by intimidation, censorship, and unilateral action.”[2] The powerful in our society claim to have the knowledge and expertise needed to fashion a new world that corresponds to their imaginations, all the while ignoring the constraints of the actual world. Psychologist Mattias Desmet explains this rise in coercive control as “the logical consequence of mechanistic thinking and the delusional belief in the omnipotence of human rationality.”[3] Theologically, it is a manifestation of what Martin Luther was talking about when he said that “man cannot of his nature desire that God should be God; on the contrary, he desires that he himself might be God and that God might not be God.”[4]
The same dynamic is evident at a personal level in the embrace of expressive individualism, which Carl Trueman defines as “a prioritization of the individual’s inner psychology—we might even say ‘feelings’ or ‘intuitions’—for our sense of who we are and what the purpose of our lives is.”[5] Note how expressive individualism undergirds the response of William “Lia” Thomas (winner of the 500 meter freestyle at the 2022 NCAA Women’s Swimming Championships) when he was asked about his biological advantage when competing against women:
There’s a lot of factors that go into a race and how well you do, and the biggest change for me is that I’m happy, and sophomore year, when I had my best times competing with the men, I was miserable. . . . Trans people don’t transition for athletics. We transition to be happy and authentic and our true selves.[6]
As anyone who followed Thomas’s story knows, the thing that made him happy brought unhappiness to female swimmers who were forced to share a locker room with and compete against a biological male. When one person’s pursuit of happiness gets in the way of someone else’s pursuit of happiness, the conflict has to be adjudicated by something beyond individual feelings. But in a relativistic and therapeutic society that makes feelings ultimate, it simply boils down to which side has more power. This is exactly what happened in Thomas’s case, as the cultural ascendancy of transgender ideology resulted in his teammates and competitors being bullied into silence.
Such things are to be expected when a society unmoors itself from any sense of objective moral order. Trueman shows how the modern West has done this by employing Philip Rieff’s taxonomy of “worlds” to describe the various types of culture that societies embody. In this taxonomy, first worlds are pagan, second worlds are epitomized by the Christian West, and third worlds describe modernity. Trueman explains,
First and second worlds thus have a moral, and therefore cultural, stability because their foundations lie in something beyond themselves. To put it another way, they do not have to justify themselves on the basis of themselves. Third worlds, by way of stark contrast to the first and second worlds, do not root their cultures, their social orders, their moral imperatives in anything sacred. They do have to justify themselves, but they cannot do so on the basis of something sacred or transcendent. Instead, they have to do so on the basis of themselves. The inherent instability of this approach should be obvious. . . . Morality will thus tend toward a matter of simple consequentialist pragmatism, with the notion of what are and are not desirable outcomes being shaped by the distinct cultural pathologies of the day.[7]
Lewis foresaw this when he wrote, “When all that says ‘it is good’ has been debunked, what says ‘I want’ remains.”[8] And as Desmet notes, this produces a level of destabilization and anxiety that causes people to long “for an authoritarian institution that provides direction to take the burden of freedom and the associated insecurity off their shoulders.”[9] This is why today’s West is simultaneously marked by libertinism and legalism. The rise of authoritarianism (or what Rod Dreher describes as “soft totalitarianism”)[10] is yet another manifestation of how fallen man slavishly looks to law for his deliverance. This is what the apostle Paul is talking about in Galatians 4 when he speaks of being enslaved to the “elementary principles of the world,” a phrase that describes the legalistic religious principle that was active for Jews under the law of Moses and for Gentiles under the law of nature. In the words of John Fesko, the phrase “elementary principles of the world” in Galatians 4 refers to “the creation law that appears in both the Adamic and Mosaic covenants.”[11] Because of fallen man’s enslavement under the law, when a society makes feelings and desires preeminent, the inevitable result is not happiness, but tyranny. This further demonstrates that the good order for which human nature was designed cannot be restored by human effort but only by receiving salvation as a free gift through faith in Jesus Christ, in whom we are accepted as righteous in God’s sight and renewed in the whole man after the image of God.[12]
The Path of Rightly Ordered Desire
Augustine of Hippo (AD 354–430) expounds on the other path to happiness in his dialogue On the Happy Life, written soon after his conversion to Christianity.[13] In this dialogue, Augustine discusses the connection between desire and happiness by saying, “If [a man] wants good things and has them, he is happy; but if he wants bad things, he is unhappy, even if he has them.”[14] In other words, happiness cannot be separated from goodness, which is defined not by individual desires but by the objective moral order that God has inscribed in his world. What matters is not desire itself, but whether what we desire is good or bad.
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