Money, Sex, and Power

Today's Reading

Read 1 Timothy 3:1-13 — Paul's qualifications for overseers and deacons. Notice how few of the qualifications are about skills. Almost all are about character, and several touch directly on money ("not a lover of money"), sex ("the husband of one wife," "self-controlled"), and pride ("not a recent convert, or he may become puffed up with conceit").

Read 1 Timothy 6:9-10: "Those who desire to be rich fall into temptation, into a snare, into many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evils."

Read 1 Peter 5:1-4 — Peter's charge to elders: "shepherd the flock of God that is among you, exercising oversight, not under compulsion, but willingly, as God would have you; not for shameful gain, but eagerly; not domineering over those in your charge, but being examples to the flock."

Read Proverbs 6:23-29 for the wisdom literature's blunt warnings about the path of sexual sin.

Reflection

The men who walked with Jesus in the New Testament rarely failed because of bad theology. They failed because of money, sex, and power.

Judas — money. Demas — love of the present world. Diotrephes — love of preeminence (3 John 9). Simon Magus — power, dressed up as the Holy Spirit's gift. Ananias and Sapphira — money, with a touch of pride. The recurring sites of catastrophic failure in the New Testament are not chiefly intellectual. They are appetite.

This is why Paul's qualifications for elders in 1 Timothy 3 are so striking. He does not list preaching gifts. He does not list charisma. He lists character — and the character he names keeps circling money, sex, and pride.

Money: "not a lover of money" (3:3). The Greek is aphilarguros, "non-silver-loving." Five chapters later he will return to the theme with one of his most quoted sentences: "the love of money is a root of all kinds of evils" (6:10), and he will warn that "the desire to be rich" is itself a snare (6:9). The temptation, Paul suggests, is not chiefly the having of money but the loving of it — orienting one's ministry, one's decisions, one's identity around its accumulation.

Sex: "the husband of one wife" (3:2), which carries the connotation of a one-woman man — sexually faithful, not divided in his desire. "Self-controlled," "respectable" (3:2). The deacons must be "dignified, not double-tongued," and their wives "not slanderers but sober-minded, faithful in all things" (3:8, 11). The whole household, in other words, is part of the qualification.

Power: "not arrogant" (Titus 1:7), "not a recent convert, or he may become puffed up with conceit and fall into the condemnation of the devil" (3:6). Notice the verb: fall. Pride is the temptation by which the devil himself fell, and a young leader given great authority too quickly tends to fall by the same route.

These three — money, sex, and power — are the classical sites of Christian leader failure because they are the classical sites of fallen human desire. Disordered desire for security (money), disordered desire for intimacy (sex), and disordered desire for significance (power). The wolves Jesus warned about, the super-apostles Paul confronted, the false teachers Peter and Jude described — when their lives finally come into the light, the rot is almost always in one of these three rooms, and often in all three.

We do not need to name modern fallen leaders to make the point. The pattern is older than this generation. Augustine wrote about himself.

The Confessions, written near the turn of the fifth century, is one of the most candid spiritual autobiographies in Christian history. Augustine, by then the bishop of Hippo, traces the warring desires of his earlier life with disarming honesty — including, especially, his enslavement to sexual sin. Long before his conversion, he prayed what may be the most famous self-aware prayer in church history: Da mihi castitatem et continentiam, sed noli modo — "Give me chastity and continency, only not yet." He named the part of himself that wanted to be holy and the part that did not, and he refused to hide the latter beneath the former. Later, describing the moment of release, he wrote: "I was bound, not by an iron from another, but by my own iron will. The enemy held my will, and out of it had made a chain for me, and bound me. For of a forward will, was a lust made; and a lust served, became custom; and custom not resisted, became necessity." That is the anatomy of a private sin becoming a public ruin: a desire indulged becomes a habit; a habit unresisted becomes a chain; a chain not broken eventually becomes the public scandal that ends a ministry.

What protects against this?

Not, primarily, more sermons on temptation. The New Testament is more practical than that. It builds infrastructure.

Financial transparency. Paul, in 2 Corinthians 8:18-21, sends two brothers along with Titus to handle the offering for Jerusalem, "for we aim at what is honorable not only in the Lord's sight but also in the sight of man." The plural is the point: more than one set of eyes on the money. The most basic infrastructure of financial integrity in a ministry is that the leader does not control the money alone. He does not set his own salary. He does not personally hold the donor list. He does not approve his own expense reports. He does not have a discretionary fund unaccountable to peers. None of this is anti-trust; it is the Bible's normal expectation. Spurgeon noted, with characteristic bluntness, that the love of money has near relatives — the love of position and the love of admiration — and warned that pulpits are not exempt from any of them.

Sexual accountability. The traditional disciplines are old because they work. Public ministry conducted in pairs or groups, not alone. No closed-door pastoral counseling of the opposite sex without a window or a known third party. Travel arrangements that do not put a leader alone with a non-spouse staff member. Honest, peer-level relationships in which a man can speak about his actual temptations and not only the rehearsed ones. Marriages in which the spouse is not a hostage to the ministry but a partner with veto power over its pace. Counselors and elders to whom the leader has given honest accounts of where the dragons live in his own soul. None of this prevents sin in itself. But it makes the long, private slide that ends in public catastrophe much harder to sustain.

Shared authority. This is the deepest of the three. The New Testament never installs a single, unaccountable celebrity pastor. Acts 14:23 has Paul and Barnabas appointing "elders" — plural — "in every church." Titus 1:5 says the same: "appoint elders in every town." 1 Peter 5:1 addresses "the elders," again plural, in each congregation. The protection against the cult of personality is structural: more than one leader, with the authority to correct and, if necessary, to remove the others. Day 9 will press into this further. For now: a ministry organized around one man's gift, with no peers who can fire him, is a ministry one private failure away from public collapse — and the structure itself is the problem, not just the individual.

It is worth saying plainly that this kind of infrastructure is not a sign of distrust toward Christian leaders. It is a sign of trust toward the Bible. The Bible thinks it is normal that gifted people, including gifted Christian people, will be tempted in money, sex, and power. The infrastructure is for normal people in normal temptation, not only for suspect people in unusual danger. Leaders who resist accountability are not protecting their ministry; they are imperiling it.

What about the rest of us, who are not in formal ministry?

The same three rooms exist in our lives, scaled differently. Our money. Our sex. Our power, however small the radius of it — over our spouses, our children, our employees, our friends. The same disciplines, scaled, protect us. Honest financial conversation with a spouse or trusted friend. Real accountability about the things we look at and the lives we touch. Submission to peers and to a local church that has the standing to correct us. Augustine did not become bishop until after his sin was honestly named, repented of, and put under the slow oversight of the church. That is the order. Public usefulness is built on private fidelity, and private fidelity is built on uncomfortable honesty with at least a few other people.

This is why Packer can say that holiness in a leader is not a private decoration but the load-bearing wall of the ministry. Where it cracks, the building will fall. Sometimes the fall is sudden. More often it takes years to become visible. We have been told.

Going Deeper

Take the three rooms — money, sex, power — and ask honestly which one is most dangerous in your own life right now. (For most people one of the three is clearly louder than the others.) What is one specific piece of infrastructure — not just a feeling or resolution, but a structural change — that would make a difference in the next month? An automatic giving pattern. A web filter or device-level accountability. A weekly conversation with a peer. A confession to a spouse you have been avoiding. The leaders we admire who finished well almost all built infrastructure earlier in life. The ones who fell almost all believed they did not need it.