, anyway, let me have you guys turn in your Bibles to 1 Timothy chapter 5. 1 Timothy chapter 5 for our time of study and the word 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 5, verse 17. And my goal this morning is to try to cover verses 17 through 20, but I'm going to warn you ahead of time that in the last couple of verses 19 and 20, we're gonna no doubt leave some loose ends that we will be coming back and sweeping through and trying to, take care of in, in the weeks to, to come. So I don't think today we're going to answer every imaginable practical question that verses 19 and 20 might raise, but we're going to do the best that we can with the time that we have.
As for the title of the message, I I'm getting some help from Dr. Laura Schlesinger. Her book, The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands, the title of this message is the Proper Care and Feeding of Elders. literally, this passage, teaches you, the people of God, the congregation, how to take proper care of the elders that God has blessed your life with.
And as we begin this morning, I just want to take a minute to say that passages like this, when I come to them, make me extremely grateful for the blessing that is mine to be here at Cornerstone amongst this congregation. We all know that there are good pastors and there are bad pastors, right? do we not all also know that there are good congregations and bad congregations, right? and, in all honesty, I personally know men, who graduated around the same time that I did, good men, better men than I, who have had the misfortune of going to churches where the congregations literally chewed them up and spit them out before they even knew what happened.
And there are bad congregations out there, and I could have landed in one, but by the grace of God, I am here. in fact, 18.5 years ago, the elders of Cornerstone were doing a pastoral search, looking for someone to pastor this church, Cornerstone, and they sent out word that they're receiving applications for the position, and a number of people applied, and one of the guys that applied, I have his folder here because I know him personally. I got to know him afterwards, he applied, filled out the questionnaire and everything, and There's even some correspondence back and forth. The elders actually considered this guy....
