A life of reverence is a life of increasing surrender to God’s will. Even our reverence comes to us on God’s terms, not ours. We do not instantaneously become creatures who “do nothing except to God’s glory.” He made us creatures who grow — slowly, with intentionality, over time.

Older women . . . are to be reverent in behavior. (Titus 2:3)
Though I wasn’t aware of it at the time, as a young girl I was always watching the older women in our small local church. I remember them — their faces, their names, their lives.
Without being overly serious, they were serious about their walk with God. They weren’t public speakers, but when they spoke, others listened. Though they didn’t draw attention to themselves, my attention was drawn to their grace and beauty, a beauty that transcended current fashion and hair trends. In many ways, they were just ordinary women, but there was something about them, a sense of depth and solidity that I remember to this day. In Titus 2:3, Paul calls this something reverence.
What is reverence? Would you be able to define it for a third grader — or for your neighbor or coworker? I’m guessing that you (like me) might falter, because reverence seems to have gone the way of the wall-mounted telephone. Reverence demands a fitting response to the true nature of things — whether persons, circumstances, or natural wonders. Someone who is reverent respects the respectful, laughs at the laughable, mourns over the mournful, and glorifies the glorious.
In Titus 2, Paul expects of the older women conduct that fits a holy person — conduct that corresponds to reality, to their redemption and sanctification in Christ. In a word, reverence.
Redeemed for Reverence
Such reverence may seem obsolete in our day, in part due to our society’s strong resistance to any sense of givenness — of reality — to which we must conform. Humans claim the right to determine their purpose, their gender, their identity, their authority, their morality. At the heart level, this is the creature’s rebellion against the Creator God, who alone determines reality.
Since the fall, humankind has bent toward irreverence: demanding self-rule and autonomy, “seeking to transcend creatureliness and become one’s own origin and one’s own end,” as John Webster puts it (Holiness, 84). Such rebellion is as unfitting to reality as a gold ring in a pig’s snout or a king drunk in the morning (Proverbs 11:22; Ecclesiastes 10:16–17). Restoration to reverent living as a creature in renewed fellowship with the Creator requires nothing less than a work of redemption.
And that is exactly the reason Paul gives for the reverent behavior of older women in Titus 2. Reverence is in accord with sound doctrine (2:1) — in other words, with the gospel. “The grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people” (2:11), and the right response is that we “renounce ungodliness” and “live . . . godly lives in the present age” (2:12). Reverence fits redemption like laughter fits a good joke, or lemonade fits a humid summer afternoon, or books fit a library. It is as beautiful as expensive ointment poured out on Jesus’s feet (Matthew 26:10).
What sets godly women apart, then, is that their lives correspond to the reality that Jesus reigns and that he is their saving Lord. They trust the Trustworthy One. They serve the Sovereign One.
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Praying
Recently, I began to read a book that I found interesting in its concept, purpose, and accomplishment. A woman named Berenice Aguilera discovered a copy of John Calvin’s commentaries and realized that the original transcriber of his sermons—more than four hundred years ago in St. Peters, Geneva—also transcribed and printed his closing prayers. These brief living intercessions are printed in most of Calvin’s books of sermons. Berenice was so moved in reading them that she proceeded to gather them together, and she seems to have published them herself in England—because there is no name of a publisher to be found anywhere in a 255-page book that she has titled Praying through the Prophets. Publishing the book herself would have required not only cash but a strong conviction that there was something very valuable in listening to John Calvin speaking to God after he had spoken to the people in his congregation. This one book contains more than three thousand prayers of the Genevan Reformer at the close of each of his sermons on the Major and Minor Prophets from Jeremiah to Malachi.
I initially dipped into these prayers and found them refreshing. In daily readings, I am in the latter chapters of the prophet Jeremiah and Lamentations, so I have begun, at the end of the verses apportioned for each day, to read the prayers of Calvin on that chapter. These latter chapters of Jeremiah contain both a relentless declaration of the forthcoming destruction of mighty Babylon and also words of encouragement to the Lord’s people in captivity there. Let me give an example of a portion of Jeremiah as he seeks to encourage the people of God in their long exile from Jerusalem, and then the prayer of John Calvin when he finished preaching on them:
You who have escaped from the sword, go, do not stand still! Remember the LORD from far away, and let Jerusalem come into your mind: ‘We are put to shame, for we have heard reproach; dishonor has covered our face, for foreigners have come into the holy places of the LORD’s house.’ Therefore, behold, the days are coming, declares the LORD, when I will execute judgment upon her images, and through all her land the wounded shall groan. Though Babylon should mount up to heaven, and though she should fortify her strong height, yet destroyers would come from me against her, declares the LORD (Jer. 51:50–53).
This is the prayer of John Calvin after he has preached on these verses:
Grant, Almighty God, that when you hide at this day your face from us, that the miserable despair that is ours may not overwhelm our faith, nor obscure our view of your goodness and grace, but that in the thickest darkness your power may ever appear to us, which can raise us above the world, so that we may courageously fight to the end and never doubt that you will at length be the defender of the church which now seems to be oppressed, until we shall enjoy our perfect happiness in heaven, through Christ our Lord. Amen.
What simplicity, theocentricity (God-centeredness), humility, and submissive yearning that expresses the oneness of the redeemed. That spirit is what we long to experience when we are hearing public prayer. Christians meet at the mercy seat. When we all bow there in the presence of our Lord in prayer, we are never closer together. There are Christians who will refuse to read anything that was written by John Calvin. They are missing so much. He was a man of prayer. You will never understand or appreciate the Genevan Reformer or realize his impact in the world until you grasp how there was a part of his life lived at the throne of grace. I often heard Ernest Reisinger say, “It is a sin to preach and not to pray.”
When one visits the Martyn Lloyd-Jones Trust website, one discovers that five examples of the congregational praying of Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones are recorded there. They are most moving, comprehensive, and deeply reverent as spoken by one addressing the almighty Creator of the cosmos through what His Son Jesus Christ has achieved. The first recorded prayer was prayed on the opening Sunday of a new year, and so it is the longest—fifteen minutes and thirty-eight seconds. The others average between ten and eleven minutes, but all are so gripping and relevant that the last thing one thinks of is their length. Little wonder people looking back sometimes said that when they went to Westminster Chapel for the first time, it was the praying of the Doctor that moved them more than the preaching. Only a man who knows the Scriptures, prays privately, and who walks in the Spirit could pray for that length, gripping and lifting a congregation of 1,400 into the presence of the Holy One. John Owen said, “If the word does not dwell with power in us then it will not pass with power from us.”

“Disqualified” means is that…conduct, traits, or sins come to light in the elder’s life that are not in keeping with the qualifications, and the elders realize that the person is no longer qualified…When that happens, the person is no longer a pastor or elder.

I’m always ultimately thankful when the Lord uncovers things that are hidden. God is light, which means he reveals. Sin exists in darkness, which means it hides. When God causes things to come to the light, he does so to expose, change, warn, judge, and transform. While having sin exposed is never pleasant, it does always lead to God’s glory being vindicated.
With that said, a few questions I was asked at church yesterday which I want to answer today and tomorrow here:

What does it mean that a pastor has disqualified himself?
How does that happen?
Why would God allow a pastor to fall morally?

I’ll cover the first two today, and the third tomorrow.
What does it mean that a pastor has disqualified himself?
The term “disqualified” comes from 1 Corinthians 9:27 where Paul says that as a pastor and preacher he takes care to maintain his self-discipline so that, after preaching to others, he does not himself become disqualified.
While 1 Corinthians was written before 1 Timothy, the concept of elder qualifications were already in Paul’s mind. He understood that the gospel is validated from the transformed lives of its ministers. The holiness of preachers is foundational to the equipping of the saints for the work of the ministry (Ephesians 4:12). In fact, the lack of holiness of some of the leaders in the church in Corinth was responsible for much of the turmoil in the church (1 Corinthians 5).
This is why Paul eventually lays out what “qualified” means for elders. In 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1, he lists qualifications of elders, preachers, and deacons. Some of them are general—“above reproach” and “blameless” are examples of these general qualifications (1 Timothy 3:2, 10). Then there are more specific qualifications—“one-woman man” or “not a drunkard” are examples of those.
Nowhere does the New Testament teach that everyone who meets the qualifications should be an elder, but the New Testament does clearly teach that everyone who is an elder needs to meet those qualifications.
The typical way a person becomes an elder is by expressing to the other elders their desire to be one (1 Timothy 3:1). Then over a period of time that person’s life is examined. As their leadership grows in the church, and as they shepherd God’s people, their ability is tested (1 Timothy 3:10; 5:22). Eventually the elders might get to a place where they affirm the person as a fellow elder. This act might look different in different congregations (congregational vote, public affirmation, laying on of hands, etc.). But the bottom line in every congregation is that the act proclaims that the church finds this person “elder qualified.” They are a one-woman man, their household is in order, they are gentle, they manage their money well, they are hospitable, and so forth.
What “disqualified” means is that sometime after that, conduct, traits, or sins come to light in the elder’s life that are not in keeping with the qualifications, and the elders realize that the person is no longer qualified. They have become “disqualified.” When that happens, the person is no longer a pastor or elder.
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