But let me have you turn in your Bibles to 1 Timothy chapter 3. First Timothy chapter 3 for a time of study and the word, what we do here at Cornerstone is just take the Bible verse at a time. Just God, what do you want to say to us? And God speaks to us through the Bible, and we should be in His word every day letting God speak to us.
But when we gather here on the Lord's Day, we definitely want to give the bulk of our time to listening to God and we worship Him by listening. to him. And we're doing a verse by verse study through the book of First Timothy, and as we continue in our study of this book, we come this morning to 1 Timothy chapter 3 and the very end of verse 3. Paul is giving a list of qualifications for pastors, for elders in the church, and The last qualification that's in verse 3 we have not looked at yet.
So what we're going to do is we're going to pick up there, we're going to skip verses 4 and 5 because we looked at those verses last week and we'll come into verse 6 and we'll look at verses 6 and 7 this morning and ultimately we're going to look at 3 of the qualifications for pastors or elders in the church as we find them here and with that we're going to conclude our study of this section. Of First Timothy, if you want to give a title to the message, it would be Preventing Falling Pastors, Preventing Falling pastors. We're going to see that Paul very much, especially as he gives the qualifications we're going to be talking about today, he's burdened and he's concerned about this issue of falling pastors, and I'll demonstrate that to you in just a moment, but we all know. That this is a problem, is it not?
falling pastors, pastors that are falling morally and in other ways disqualifying themselves from, from the ministry. In fact, I was online this week at a particular website and They were giving these statistics that were put together by Focus on the Family and Barna. And what I read is that 1500 pastors leave the ministry each month due to moral failure, spiritual burnout, or contention in their churches. 50% of pastors' marriages will end in divorce....
