What led you to make this career decision?

What makes you a good teacher?

My senior year in college my inner circle of buddies tried to convince me I was making a wrong career choice: "You are not cut out to be a minister. You should go into teaching," they told me over and over again.

30 years later a retired couple in our church invited me over to their house and asked me to talk with their grandson and his fiancee who wanted to become missionaries

I looked at this attractive young couple so obviously in love. Then I said, "You have to be nearly crazy to want to be missionaries. And it is even worse if you want to be a teacher!" I continued talking with them; I finally told the couple, "There can be only one reason someone would ever do this. You have to have a calling from God."

That beautiful young lady eventually entered another career. She felt called by God to become a pediatric cardiologist. Jill is a very fine doctor in Carmel, California.

There Paul takes different approach to the gifts of the Spirit.

Listen to what Paul says is demanded in the office of teaching:

This calling and this warning applies to each gift, each office of the church, Paul says, and I notice in Ephesians 4 that teaching is the last gift mentioned in the list of 5:

Notice also that all of these offices taken together as a unity are given the specific responsibility of "speaking the truth in love" and growing up into Christ Jesus.

So our Lord must have regarded any teacher with very high deference, just like the Jewish and early Christian community did

Dr. Peter Rhea Jones, himself a seminary professor at Mercer University in Decatur, Georgia, observes that Jesus noticed that too often places at the head table, choice seats in the synagogue, even public greetings with titles were highly coveted by successful educators. It provided a powerful incentive to seek a role in education in the first century.

In the 10th chapter of Mark Jesus is solicited by a man as "‘Good Teacher,"

The bottom line, says Jesus, if you are going to be a teacher, you must not only talk the talk, but walk the walk. Not many of us can do it.

"you know that any one who teaches shall be judged with great strictness." a. "Shall be" –This is an absolute certainty:

Look at how the courts have thrown the book at any teacher who has abused, taken advantage of a student, cheated in state-mandated testing.

In the church, one of the first defrocked ministers in the US church was a seminary professor at Princeton Seminary in New Jersey back in the 1890's a distinguished scholar by the name of Charles A Briggs,

We Presbyterians at one time separated the office of elder in the church as ruling elders and "teaching elders."

We are able to master the universe, we walk on the moon, we tame wild animals, but the evil of the tongue infects every inch of life!

1, you are the bit in the horse’s mouth,

you are the tiny rudder of a great ship,

you are like the forest fire set off by a tiny spark,

It was a school manual for young males, particularly those from well-to-do families and from the royal court.

Proverbs, the book of Psalms, Ecclesiastes, Job, focus very intently on how we teach with our words, our language, and its effect on our ethics and bodily morality.

Wisdom Personified is the female teacher of young males, SOPHIA, as contrasted with the woman of the street with loose morals who with her seductive words and behavior entice young men to sample her wares.

The code red warning in James is this: we can never tame the tongue or the body, and it is especially true in our 21^st century world.

Thus, bridling the tongue–education-remains a precious gift to so few, those called to the office of teacher.

1. In the Old World, it was to learn and keep the Law –perfectly.

2. In the New Testament, and in the church, the office of teaching is to lead us to eternal life, to God-like qualities in every-day living.

6. "Loving God, serving others, sharing faith" - I wonder how James would fill out his VISION STATEMENT for our Pastor Nominating Committee.