God doesn’t always spell things out in such stark “thou shalt” terms. He did in the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:1-17; Deuteronomy 5:6-21), but on the whole God’s Word is filled with stories, prophecy, proverbs, psalms, and biography. When we get to the epistle of 1 Timothy, however, we discover virtually a whole chapter devoted to a black-and-white list requiring little interpretation but a lot of application. In 1 Timothy 3:1-7 Paul puts his finger on the essential qualities God is looking for in pastors and elders. Qualities applicable for church leaders in the 21st century as they were in the first century. We’ll look at only the first two verses in this message, and the last five in the next message.