We were deaf to his words of warning and affection; now we hear his voice and we want to follow him (John 10:16). God’s work of regeneration transforms elect sinners. It isn’t a complete renewal—that happens at glorification. But it is a real start. And what God starts he always finished (Phil. 1:6).

Salvation is like a treasure that becomes more precious to us the better we understand it. One way of better understanding our salvation is to study what theologians call the ordo salutis, or the order of salvation, the “process by which the work of salvation … is subjectively realized in the hearts and lives of sinners.”[i] Romans 8:30 is the classic text on how God saves: “And those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified.” Embedded in those terms are additional concepts that fill out our understanding of salvation, but this verse provides biblical warrant for itemizing the motions of divine grace. Ultimately, salvation is like a single golden chain, one unified work of God. Still, to get to know our great salvation we can study each of the links in turn.
The first link is election, God’s eternal and gracious choice to save some sinners. But to understand how the elect actually become Christians we turn to effectual calling. The word “calling” rightly suggests that God offers grace to sinners; through “the ministry of the Word” he calls wayward children to come home. But the calling of God is more than an invitation. It is effectual, it actually produces the desired effect. The effectual call is also known as regeneration, God’s one-sided action whereby he brings dead sinners to life in Christ.
Who Are the Called?
Put simply, those who are called are spiritually dead but elect sinners.
God Effectually Calls the Elect
The effectual call is different from the general call of the gospel. The call to repent and believe goes out to everyone who hears it. God is constantly calling sinners to turn from their sins and find life in him. God’s kind providence should stimulate us to repent (Rom. 2:4). The loveliness of nature is an invitation to find the author of this beauty. Our troubled consciences warn us to flee sin and seek righteousness. And, mostly clearly of all Scripture tells the story of God’s redemption so that we might ourselves be redeemed. But all this knowledge of God people naturally twist, exchanging his truth for a lie (Rom. 1:18–25). Only to the elect does God make this call effective for salvation. It is in this sense that Jesus interprets his parable of the wedding feast: “For many are called, but few are chosen” (Matt. 22:14).
Those who are chosen are not elected for any personal qualifications. As God’s eternal predestination is “without any foresight of faith … or any other thing in the creature, as conditions” affecting his choice (ch. 3), so is the effectual calling “of God’s free and special grace alone, not from anything at all foreseen in man.”
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Having corrupted natures we can’t reform ourselves. We can’t even choose Christ as our Savior unless the Father makes “us alive together with Christ” (Ephesians 2:5). By God’s grace sinfulness can be pardoned and weakened but not destroyed in this life. Even born-again people sin because they are still sinners till the day they are fully redeemed in glory.

One of the first questions friends ask parents of newborns is, “Does she look like mom or dad?” Often it’s hard to say; kids inherit traits from both their parents.
Children share more than their parents’ looks. They also acquire their nature. “When Adam had lived 130 years, he fathered a son in his own likeness, after his image, and named him Seth” (Gen. 5:3). That sentence is both happy and sad. Seth was a gift from God, a new start. But Seth was born to sinners; the likeness he now shared with his father and mother was marred. And so the human story has continued.
To know ourselves we need to understand what happened to our first parents when they tried to make their own way in the world contrary to God’s truth.
The First Sin (6.1–3)
The event of the first sin is narrated in Genesis three. Satan, taking the form of a serpent, seduced and deceived Eve (1 Tim. 2:14). Eve disobeyed God and ate fruit from a forbidden tree, as did Adam, following his wife.
The Bible doesn’t explain how it was possible for Adam and Eve to sin. But we know they had a truly free will; they were not forced into disobedience. The serpent was “more crafty than any other beast of the field” (Gen. 3:1). But the father of lies (John 8:44) still has creaturely limitations. Today too if we resist Satan he will flee from us (James 4:7; Matt. 4:11). Even fallen humans can rule over sin (Gen. 4:7). Moreover Adam and Eve had one rule to respect. They clearly understood God’s word and could have lived by it (Matt. 4:4). Finally, Eve had a partner. She should have asked Adam, the master of the garden, to help her withstand the devil. She didn’t have to stand alone (see Eccl. 4:12). Despite every advantage to obey God and retain their innocence, our first parents disobeyed.
Even this catastrophic first sin, “God was pleased, according to his wise and holy counsel, to permit, having purposed to order it to his own glory.” Just how sin is part of God’s plan doesn’t have to make sense to us.
Our first parent’s sin had immediate tragic consequences. From a plain read of Scripture clearly something happened to the relationship between God and his first people after their sin. Hiding from God was something entirely new and totally unexplainable apart from disobedience. God had warned that death would come to earth if they ever transgressed; and it had. Humans had become “dead in sin.” Evil now defined them (see Gen. 6:5). So it was no longer natural for man to commune with God. As further evidence of their fallenness their eyes were truly opened (Gen. 3:7); they now knew shame, fear, and conflict.
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It might seem strange that the confession’s teaching on providence deals mainly with its darker side. Of course, everything the confession says about God’s redemption of humanity could also be considered under the heading of providence. But providence does often rattle our faith. Yes, our heavenly Father providentially cares for his children (Matt. 6:25–34). But sometimes his care feels lacking. How can we make sense of providence when God leaves “his own children to manifold temptations, and the corruption of their own hearts”? 

God “works all things according to the counsel of his will” (Eph. 1:11). We study God’s decree—his eternal plan—to grapple with his sovereign foreknowledge. We reflect on God’s providence—his working all things—to appreciate his present involvement in our world. God has not left us to fend for ourselves.
Still, the relation of God’s decree and his ongoing work in this world raises challenging questions. We wonder how providence affects human choices. We struggle to relate providence to human sin. And, if God works all things for the good of the church, why does providence sometimes seem hard even for Christians? We can’t answer all these questions to the satisfaction of our curiosity. We can’t perfectly harmonize Scripture’s teaching on how a good God can be totally in charge of a broken world. But trying to understand God’s work in our world can help us develop more mature trust in him.
How Does God’s Providence Work? (5.1–3, 7)
“God, the great Creator of all things doth uphold, direct, dispose, and govern all creatures, actions, and things.” The living Word who created everything still “upholds the universe by the word of his power” (Heb. 1:3). Nothing is outside of God’s control. King Nebuchadnezzar learned the hard way that God “Does according to his will among the host of heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth; and none can stay his hand or say to him, ‘What have you done?’” (Dan. 4:35). The king discovered that “the Most High rules the kingdom of men and gives it to whom he will” (32). Truly God is “the blessed and only Sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords.” To him belongs “eternal dominion” (1 Tim. 6:15–16).
Because God is the “First Cause” of everything, even “second causes” are under his control. God is involved even when his hand is invisible. Nothing can evolve independently or be emancipated from the Creator. God commonly uses means to work his will. Skilled doctors are merely instruments in the great Physician’s hands. But God isn’t bound to means. God can work without means, as when Jesus raised Lazarus with his mere voice (John 11:43–44). God can work above means, as when he provided a son for aged Abraham and barren Sarah. God can work against means, as when he preserved his servants in a fiery furnace (Dan. 3:27).
And God’s providence is not only sovereign, it is also good. He governs according to his perfect “wisdom, power, justice, goodness, and mercy.” No one else has a fraction of the qualifications to unfold world history. And God’s goal is perfect. God’s providence brings him glory and promotes the good of the church. We can’t always see how. But we believe that he will glorify himself (Lev. 10:3) and that, because of his rich love for the church, he will, at the close of history, present her to himself perfect (Eph. 5:25–27).
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In contrast to natural man, converted people, said Augustine, are able not to sin. Why? God repairs our will. He doesn’t violate our desires. Rather, he “infuses new qualities into the will, making the dead will alive, the evil will good…; he activates and strengthens the will” so that we can desire and live well.[i] In due time God frees the elect from their “natural bondage under sin.” “While we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly” (Rom. 5:6). Still, a war rages in the believer’s inner life. Sometimes we don’t even understand what we do (Rom. 7:15). We don’t will wholeheartedly.

It’s a common objection to the doctrine of particular redeeming grace: What about free will? With a free will can’t we desire God, and decide to follow him on our own initiative? But that argument begs the question; what needs to be proven is merely assumed. We need to know what Scripture teaches about the human will.
Our will is what we desire or determine to do, our inclinations. If in some way our wills are impaired—or as Luther put it, if our wills are in bondage—we are dependent on God “both to will and to work for his good pleasure” (Phil. 2:13). Following Saint Augustine we can speak of human nature in its four-fold state. Nuancing humanity’s condition as created, fallen, redeemed, and glorified will help us more accurately understand free will and its implications.
Man’s Will in a State of Innocence (9.1–2)
God created our wills upright and free (Eccl. 7:29). Before sin entered the world the human will was neither “forced, nor … determined to do good or evil.” And this is always true—the freedom to will is fundamental to humanity. But our ability to express that freedom can change. Free will means that no outside force wills for us. We always have the freedom to want what we want even if we lack the freedom to do what we want.
As Augustine put it, in the state of innocence man was both truly able to sin and able not to sin. God genuinely warned our first parents not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Gen. 2:17). And they could have obeyed. They could have chosen life. But because they were free people God didn’t force them to serve him. Nor did he force them to sin.
The assertion that humans have a free will today is true to a point. The first sin was a free choice. So is every subsequent sin. But after the first sin the human will—through our own choice—has become inclined to sin. Our wills are still free in the sense that no one is pulling the strings of our desires. Even when circumstances affect our choices, our wills—our authentic wants—are still our own. But no longer are we who will in the state of innocence. Our state of being has changed. So we now freely will differently.
Man’s Will in a State of Sin (9.3)
The fall radically tainted every part of us including our desires. Apart from God’s restoring grace we are dead in sin (Eph. 2:1); we have lost the vitality of true desires. “The mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God’s law; indeed, it cannot. Those who are in the flesh cannot please God” (Rom. 8:7–8; cf. Heb. 11:6). Ordinary sinners constantly twist God’s blessed design for our lives (Gen. 6:5).
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The covenant of works was a completely generous arrangement. But our first parents violated that covenant (cf. Heb. 8:9). Having broken it they could not regain life through the principle of works. And God was in no way bound to offer another arrangement for salvation. But he did. The covenant of grace is an entirely different agreement. It is still based on works, but not on the works of creatures.

Every relationship needs definition. Without clear terms we are unsure how to interact with each other. Marriage is a good example of how definitions aid relationships. Upon marriage an otherwise unrelated man and a woman become united by covenant. In the presence of witnesses each partner promises to fulfil responsibilities. Signed records formalize the covenant.
So it is with God’s relationship to people. Imagine if God had created humans but never introduced himself or articulated what he expected of them or what they could expect of him. Our debt of obedience and the penalty for non-compliance would still have existed but we wouldn’t have known it. And how could we enjoy God ignorant of how the sovereign Creator would treat us from one moment to the next? From the beginning God has defined his relationship with his people through covenants.
The Covenant of Works (5.1, 2)
Scripture doesn’t explicitly identify a pre-fall covenant of works. And we don’t need to commit to that name; the assembly also called it a “covenant of life.”[i] But Scripture does give us reasons to hold to a pre-fall covenant. First, the initial relationship between God and Adam has all the marks of a covenant, or a binding agreement. It has contracting parties, promises, conditions, penalties and, in the tree of life, a sacrament.[ii] Second, the New Testament explicitly contrasts the actions of Adam and Christ as covenant mediators. Here’s how Paul put it: “For if, by one man’s trespass, death reigned through that one man, much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man Jesus Christ” (Rom. 5:17; cf. 1 Cor. 15:44–49).
In the first covenant Adam did not need grace, which we might define as unmerited salvation. Instead the covenant was based on a law principle: “the person who does the commandments shall live by them” (Rom. 10:5; cf. Gal. 3:12; Lev. 18:5). In Genesis one and two God stipulated positive and negative commands. The King required Adam to steward his world, “to work it and keep it” (Gen. 2:15; cf. 2:5). He spelled out the positive command like this: “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over …every living thing that moves on the earth” (Gen. 1:28). God provided freedom in this first covenant, for example, in the naming of the animals (Gen. 2:19). His people weren’t slaves. And God enforced only one restriction: “of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat” (2:17).
For his part God provided everything his people would need to thrive. They shared his image so they possessed the competencies required for their task. God also provided food to eat (1:29–30). He made not one person but two so that the man and woman might “have a good reward for their labor” (Eccl. 4:9 NKJ).
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After Genesis one briefly records six days of creation, chapter two backs up to emphasize the significance of God’s creation of humans. What essential truths can we learn about ourselves from the creation of the first two people?

Have you ever told someone, “I must have missed the first part of your story. I don’t understand”? Without a context most stories lose meaning. So it is with the story of humanity. Ignorance of our beginning breeds confusion and purposelessness. Even the drama of salvation by grace makes sense only in light of history’s opening act.
Mainstream science tells a different origins story. But at least one leading biochemist admits that, “At present all discussions on principle theories and experiments in the field” concerning the problem of the origin of life, “either end in a stalemate or in a confession of ignorance.”[i] In reality, Scripture and nature say the same thing. We don’t always see how they harmonize. We might misinterpret scientific data or misunderstand Scripture. But our first allegiance is to the Bible through which God communicates “more openly.”[ii]
The biblical story of the world opens with the eternal, triune God creating all things. He truly created; by his mere word he made everything from nothing (Heb. 11:3). He didn’t need to; he is perfectly sufficient. But he made a world to witness and proclaim “the glory of his eternal power, wisdom, and goodness.” Everything owes its allegiance to the loving and just Creator. Every Christian must believe that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit made the heavens and the earth.
After Genesis one briefly records six days of creation, chapter two backs up to emphasize the significance of God’s creation of humans. What essential truths can we learn about ourselves from the creation of the first two people?
Humans Are Male and Female
In our post-Christian age amid the emergence of a new paganism gender has become ground-zero in worldview battles. “Today’s revolution in theology is not over the doctrine of justification by faith alone, but over sexual identity.”[iii] Why is sexuality so contested today? Because maleness and femaleness, as both biological and biblical reality, tell us who we are and how we should live. We want to define ourselves. But God already has.
Gender is basic to who we are. When asked about divorce Jesus could have simply quoted Genesis 2:24, “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.” But he backed up further: “He who created them from the beginning made them male and female” (Matt. 19:4; cf. Gen. 1:27). Marriage is not simply the commitment of two people, but the exclusive union of the two complementary parts of God’s image. In Scripture’s first seven chapters “male and female” occurs six times; gender is binary by design. The animals brought onto the ark had to “be male and female” (Gen. 6:19) or they would go extinct.
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How should we respond to God’s decree, not just his decision to pass over some, but to ordain all things? Embrace it! Believe that God’s eternal decree has established the meaning of your choices. God’s working in you “to will and to work for his good pleasure” is why you can and must “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling” (Phil. 2:12–13). As your will and works harmonize with God’s good intentions you will joyfully praise, revere, admire, and obey God. God’s sovereign decree can become your comfort. 

When studying God one quickly has to answer challenging questions. How far does God’s authority extend? How much of what happens in this world is God responsible for? For those who take Scripture seriously God’s eternal decree cannot be avoided. Paul sums up what the entire Bible reveals: God “works all things according to the counsel of his will” (Eph. 1:11). He wills and does all things. You must believe that. And in the abstract, for God to be sovereign is just what anyone might expect.
But the teaching gets hard when we apply it to specifics. How does God’s sovereignty relate to evil in this world? Does God’s decree undermine human responsibility? Is the eternal punishment of the wicked really God’s will? Clearly “this high mystery … must be handled with special prudence and care.” We must “deal with this teaching in a godly and reverent manner … with a view to the glory of God’s name, holiness of life, and the comfort of anxious souls.”[i]
God Sovereignly “ordain[s] whatsoever comes to pass” (3.1–4)
The biblical God is not local and limited. Either God predetermines everything that comes to pass or he is not God. If God is, then his decree is free, eternal and unchanging, holy, and comprehensive. God cannot be pressured to act. He never changes course. He never makes a mistake. And he decides all things down to common events, like sparrows falling to the ground (Matt. 10:29).
More personally, God’s decree extends to the predestination of some creatures for salvation and others for destruction. Like a potter, Paul explains, God has the right to make out of the same lump of clay “one vessel for honorable use and another for dishonorable use” (Rom. 9:21). Just as the number of creatures God will make is unchangeably set, so is their character and eternal destiny.
Don’t misunderstand God’s decree.

God’s decree does not make him sinful. God is essentially holy; he cannot sin. But he can create humans who freely sin against his holy design while acting according to his “definite plan and foreknowledge (Acts 2:23).
God’s decree does not violate the will of his creatures. God’s hardening of Pharaoh (Ex. 4:21) was so in-line with Pharaoh’s will that Samuel can say Pharaoh hardened his own heart (1 Sam. 6:6).
God’s decree does not cancel the reality of secondary causes. “God has decided the end from the beginning, but the middle still matters.”[ii] In fact, our choices matter only because of the existence and actions of an eternally decreeing God.
God’s decree is not based on foresight or deduction. God knows what will happen because he has decreed it to happen, not merely because he has seen that it will happen.

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The Bible alone can give us a right view of God. And it is impossible to overstate God’s greatness. Wrong views of God are always low views of him. We can’t extol God enough! “Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable are his ways!”

Most theological and moral failures can be traced back to a wrong view of God. We charge God with being unfair only if we think he must submit to our concept of fairness. We will contentedly live one way in public and another in private only if we believe him to be local and limited like us. We can only believe in universal salvation if deny God’s fierce hatred of sin. To think and live well we need to know God as he truly is.
This is why God gave us his word. Some truths about God are obvious from nature—he exists and is unparalleled in power (Rom. 1:19–20). But to more intimately know his character, his unity and diversity, and how he relates to his creatures, we need the Bible. Scripture is God’s revelation, his self-disclosure. From cover to cover Scripture tells us essential truths about God, and of the Holy Trinity.
God Is Perfect in All His Attributes (2.1)
We may think about God as he is in himself, without relation to creation. We can’t define God; definitions state exactly the nature, scope, or meaning of a thing. Finite creatures can’t define the infinite. But we can summarize what God has revealed to us. We know that there is one God, not many (Deut. 6:4). This one God is alive and true; neither past being nor a figment of our imagination (1 Thess. 1:9). And he is without fault (Job 11:7–9).
Beyond this, much of what we can say about God is a denial of what he is not, or a distinction from what we are. We are visible bodies, made up of parts and passions, subject to measurement and change. We have a beginning and end. We can be studied by dissection according to ordinary laws of investigation. By contrast God is “a pure spirit, invisible, without body, parts, or passions, immutable, immense, eternal” and “incomprehensible.”  And of every positive quality God sets the standard. He is “almighty, most wise, most holy, most free, most absolute.”
We can also think about God in terms of what he does. He “[works] all things according to the counsel of his own immutable and most righteous will, for his own glory.” If something has happened God’s hand was in it. He had always meant to do it. It was good. And it brought him glory. More specifically, we can know God from his actions toward people. To the penitent God shows himself to be “most loving, gracious, merciful, long-suffering, abundant in goodness and truth, forgiving iniquity, transgression and sin.” Notwithstanding God’s sovereignty our response to who he is matters. He rewards those who seek him (Heb. 11:6). Not everyone seeks him. In his judgement against the impenitent God reveals his holiness and terrifying justice.
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Scripture isn’t like a mystery novel or a complex code only solvable by the most cunning. The Bible is a revelation, an unveiling. Anyone who reads the Bible from start to finish will understand its basic message.

If you were going to introduce Christianity to someone where would you begin? You might start with God and his holiness. The first fact is that “there is one simple spiritual being, whom we call God.”[i] Or you might lead with our need for God to deliver us from Satan’s tyranny.[ii] Both approaches are valid.
Here is another idea. Start with the basic notion of revelation. How can we move beyond nature’s evidence for God and truly know him? This is how the Westminster Confession of Faith begins its magisterial summary of Christianity. What we believe about Scripture shapes how we think, not just about faith but about all of life. The ten sections of this first chapter—aptly, the confession’s longest—beautifully articulate four attributes of Scripture as God’s written revelation.
Scripture Is Necessary (1.1–1.2, 1.10)
God has always been revealing himself. From both the evidence in nature and our divine image-bearing God’s deity is obvious (Rom. 1:19–20). But because of sin general revelation asks a question it cannot answer: how can sinners be saved? The frustration of fallen creation tells us that we need redemption, but not how to be redeemed. We need God to tell us how we can be cured of the disease of original sin. From the beginning of this broken world, God has been seeking out his people, telling a simple message: your sins have made you dirty. But if you trust me I will wash you (Is. 1:18). His prophets constantly told this message both inside and outside of Israel. His holy law and its ceremonies stressed his purity and his willingness to purify.
But, so that his truth could be shared with all people without corruption God caused his word to be written in sixty-six books. Our Bibles are “a more sure word of prophecy” (2 Peter 1:19 KJV). Only these writings are the very breath of God and must inform everything we believe and all that we do. Scripture is God’s final way of speaking to us in this present age (Heb. 1:1–2). It records the final redemptive work of God in the ministry of Jesus.
Scripture Is Authoritative (1.3–1.5)
There is no agency above Scripture that grants it authority. The Bible is authoritative because God breathed it; it is his actual word.
But we come to know it as God’s authoritative word in several different ways. The church urges believers to a “high and reverent esteem of the Holy Scriptures.” The church has always heard God’s voice in his word. The true church directs people not to human leaders but to the Bible.
Scripture’s uniqueness also proves its authority. The Bible is not the kind of book humans could or would write. Authors from a variety of cultures over many centuries wrote a fully harmonious record of human fallenness and divine redemption. Its remedy for sin is beyond comprehension—what is a God-man? Moreover, the doctrine of Scripture is efficacious; it does what it wants regardless of human willingness (Heb. 4:12–13).
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The duties we have to the deacons are greatly outweighed by the benefits of their ministry. Through the deacons Christ continues his priestly work. The deacons are perpetual illustrations of God’s love for our bodies and our souls. They remind us that God cares for our cares. He overflows with compassion for us.

How do church deacons help establish God’s kingdom? Many of us might struggle to answer that question. For a number of reasons, the diaconate is often viewed as a non-spiritual administrative committee. Because deacons oversee church money and property we might mistake them simply for parochial accountants and custodians. But, according to Scripture, if we minimize the biblical office of deacon we miss a huge part of God’s plan for vibrant Christianity.
Healthy churches and healthy believers treasure deacons as invaluable servants of God, Christ’s official ministers of mercy. They help exposit the kindness of God, strengthen the communion of the saints, and preserve the fiscal integrity of the church. It is important for us to retain or, if need be, recover a biblical view of the office of deacon.
The Conditions for Serving as a Deacon
If we want the church to value the diaconate we need to preserve the high biblical standard for becoming a deacon (1 Tim. 3:8-13).
Deacons Must Be Spiritually Minded
The first deacons were men “full of faith and of the Holy Spirit (Acts 6:3–4). “Likewise deacons must be reverent…holding the mystery of the faith with a pure conscience. But let these also first be tested; then let them serve as deacons, being found blameless” (1 Tim. 3:8–10). Of course, deacons must be financially and administratively competent. But they must also demonstrate a God–like sympathy for the hurting and a heart given to service. The idea that unqualified men should be put up for deacon as a way of urging spiritual maturity is totally contrary to God’s will for the office. Deacons must be spiritual pacesetters.
Deacons Must Be Self-controlled (v. 8)
Deacons must not be double-tongued. A double-tongued man says whatever he can to please his current conversation partner. A deacon must be able to speak the truth to all people lovingly and tactfully.
Deacons must not be given to much wine. A deacon may drink wine; Paul urged Timothy to take up the habit (1 Tim. 5:23). But a deacon must show that he can enjoy God’s good gift of alcohol without abusing it.
Deacons must not be greedy for money. Without financial self-control no man can steward the church’s resources or set a positive example to the congregation. A deacon who is content with what he has will serve well and bolster the confidence of others.
Deacons Must Be Successful at Home
“Likewise their wives must be reverent, not slanderers, temperate, faithful in all things. Let deacons be the husbands of one wife, ruling their children and their own houses well” (vv. 11-12). Deacons need not be a husband or father. But those who are must have a history of capable leadership. A deacon without wife or children must be sufficiently established so as to have some domain over which he exercises godly rule.
The Charge of a Deacon
Deacons are Intercessors
Since deacons exercise Christ’s priestly office they must reflect his ministry of mercy.
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