The Overseer Husband

Good morning people of God, I thank God specially for counting us among the living today. That we are awake and alive today is as a result of God’s grace and His grace alone. So I am waking up praising God, and I hope you do the same.

1 Timothy 3:1-5

Here is a trustworthy saying: If anyone sets his heart on being an overseer, he desires a noble task. Now the overseer must be above reproach, the husband of but one wife, temperate, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, not given to drunkenness, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money. He must manage his own family well and see that his children obey him with proper respect. (If anyone does not mange his own family, how can he take care of God’s church?)   

In today’s post, I wish to just drop a few food for thoughts for the men who are husbands and I will be tagging this post the “Overseer Husband.”

In the passage above is the criteria Paul gave for a man who seeks to be a church overseer, I want to believe that is what we call Pastors in today’s generation. Quite a lot of us have attributed this overseer role to come with God’s calling you audibly to his service, but in my own interpretation I will say that as long as you are a husband and God has established a family for you, you are an overseer over that small unit of your family. That is where the work begins. If you do not qualify in this small unit, you can’t make it for the big one. So in a nutshell I will say that every married man is an overseer.

1 Timothy 3 gave us the requirements of an overseer, which are the requirements for all husband overseers and those requirements are what we will be looking at one after the other in this post. So we begin with the first one.

He Must Be Above Reproach: This is the first requirement of a husband overseer and so we will first try to know what reproach means. From the dictionary, the word reproach means “to find fault with (a person or group etc); blame; censure; and another says, to be a cause of blame or discredit to; yet another says, disgrace, discredit, or blame incurred.” So we understand that God expects that a husband overseer must be above disgrace or any act that can result in blame or discrediting his person.

So he should not be found in acts such as adultery, lies, wife beating of wife or any form of domestic violence, then in the bigger picture he should be a man of high integrity both within and outside of his home. And least I forget, he should be a loving husband.

No wonder God warned the husband in Malachi 2:16 to guard themselves in the spirit and not break faith.

It always appears that the stakes are high for the Godly wife in marriage, but I am beginning to realize that they are higher for the overseer husband. Some men may want to say that since they do not seek the office of church overseer this is not a standard for them, remember that as long as you are head over your family, you are already an overseer of that family and the same standard applies to you.

The Husband of But One Wife: This is the second requirement of a husband overseer. He should be a man not entangled in polygamy. In as much as God still forgives and walks with a man who puts himself into trouble by taking more than one wife, God does not approve of it still. There is no polygamous marriage whether in the Bible days or in our present day generation that is not smeared with strife, malice, jealousy, anger, hatred and all the ills that can go with it. A man who sought the face of God before taking a wife will not have any reason to find himself in a polygamous marriage. And the task of managing his family well will be less tedious.

Temperate: The dictionary defines temperate as, “moderate or self-restrained; not extreme in opinion, statement; another says moderate as regards indulgence of appetite or passion.” So basically the Lord expects that the overseer husband is not an extremist of any king and in any way. Even in opinion, he is expected not be an extremist. If I understand this well, an overseer husband is one who is opened to the opinions of others. So to say that he should be a good listener. This is quite revealing if I must say. So I can actually infer from this that the overseer husband should be able to give ear to his wife’s opinions; listen to her and hear her out. That does not make him less than a man as some men have conditioned their minds to, but that he is taping into the wisdom of his wife and taking out of her all that God has deposited in her for him. This is really interesting.

So that this post will not be too lengthy, I will halt at this point and we will continue our discoveries in tomorrow’s post. I just hope this is going down well with the men, but the basis of these is found in the Bible. May the Lord strengthen the men to be all that He has called them to be in Jesus name.