Titus
Amen. Turn in your copy of the
scriptures to the book of Titus. We’ll pick up next week, Lord
willing, in Isaiah chapter 42. But for tonight, we’ll look at
Titus. I believe it’s about 45 or 46
verses. So it’s like reading a psalm.
And it’s a wonderful piece of scripture that shows us, gives
us insight into the apostolic times, what would happen when
a new church would be formed, or in this case, several churches
on the island of Crete would be formed, but they would need
to be firmed up or shored up. And so Paul left Titus there. Paul would go on and winter near
Ephesus, but would leave Titus behind to do a specific ministry
until someone else could come and give him a spell. So Titus
chapter one, beginning at verse one, Paul, a servant of God and
an apostle of Jesus Christ, for the sake of the faith of God’s
elect and their knowledge of the truth, which accords with
godliness in hope of eternal life, which God, who never lies,
promised before the ages began and at the proper time manifested
in his word through the preaching with which I have been entrusted
by the command of God our Savior. to Titus, my true child in a
common faith, grace and peace from God the Father and Christ
Jesus our Savior. This is why I left you in Crete,
so that you might put what remained into order and appoint elders
in every town as I directed you. If anyone is above reproach,
the husband of one wife and his children are believers and not
open to the charge of debauchery or insubordination. For an overseer,
as God’s steward, must be above reproach. He must not be arrogant
or quick-tempered or a drunkard or violent or greedy for gain,
but hospitable, a lover of good, self-controlled, upright, holy,
and disciplined. He must hold firm to the trustworthy
word as taught so that he may be able to give instruction in
sound doctrine and also to rebuke those who contradict it. For
there are many who are insubordinate, empty talkers and deceivers,
especially those of the circumcision party. They must be silenced,
because they are upsetting whole families by teaching for shameful
gain what they ought not to teach. One of the Cretans, a prophet
of their own, said, Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy
gluttons. This testimony is true. Therefore,
rebuke them sharply that they may be sound in the faith, not
devoting themselves to Jewish myths and to the commands of
people who turn away from the truth. To the pure, all things
are pure, but to the defiled and unbelieving, nothing is pure.
But both their minds and their consciences are defiled. They
profess to know God, but they deny him by their works. They
are detestable, disobedient, unfit for any good work. But
as for you, teach what accords with sound doctrine. Older men
are to be sober-minded, dignified, self-controlled, sound in faith,
in love, and in steadfastness. Older women, likewise, are to
be reverent in behavior, not slanderers or slaves to much
wine. They are to teach what is good
and so train the young women to love their husbands and children,
to be self-controlled, pure, working at home. kind and submissive
to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be reviled.
Likewise, urge the younger men to be self-controlled. Show yourself
in all respects to be a model of good works, and in your teaching,
show integrity, dignity, and sound speech that cannot be condemned,
so that an opponent may be put to shame, having nothing evil
to say about us. Slaves are to be submissive to
their own masters in everything. They are to be well-pleasing,
not argumentative, not pilfering, but showing all good faith so
that in everything they may adorn the doctrine of God our Savior.
For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people,
training us, to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to
live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present
age, waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory
of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ, who gave himself
for us, to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for
himself a people for his own possession, who are zealous for
good works. Declare these things. Exhort
and rebuke with all authority. Let no one disregard you. Remind
them to be submissive to rulers and authorities, to be obedient,
to be ready for every good work, to speak evil of no one, to avoid
quarreling and to be gentle, and to show perfect courtesy
toward all people. For we ourselves were once foolish,
disobedient, led astray. Slaves to various passions and
pleasures, passing our days in malice, and envy, hated by others
and hating one another. But when the goodness and loving
kindness of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of works
done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy
by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit,
whom he poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior.
So that being justified by his grace, we might become heirs
according to the hope of eternal life. The saying is trustworthy,
and I want you to insist on these things, that those who have believed
in God may be careful to devote themselves to good works. These
things are excellent and profitable for people, but avoid foolish
controversies, genealogies, dissensions, and quarrels about the law, for
they are unprofitable and worthless. As for a person who stirs up
division after warning him once, and then twice, have nothing
more to do with him, knowing that such a person is warped
and sinful, he is self-condemned. When I send Artemis or Tychicus
to you, do your best to come to me at Nicopolis, for I have
decided to spend the winter there. Do your best to speed Zenos the
lawyer and Apollos on their way. See that they lack nothing and
let our people learn to devote themselves to good works so as
to help cases of urgent need and not be unfruitful. All who
are with me send greetings to you. Greet those who love us
in the faith. Grace be with you all. Amen. Excuse me. Well, if you think about church
life, and maybe you’ve been in the church long enough, you’ve
realized a couple things. One is church life is not for
the faint of heart, right? Perhaps you’ve also realized
church life can be the best of times and the worst of times. I’ve seen a little as a minister
over the years. I’ve seen a lot as a preacher’s
kid. Church life can be very wearying. It can be rough, but
it can also be great and joyous. I think of weddings and births
and baptisms and fellowship and all the sweet things about church.
But there’s the old saying, there’s no hurt like church hurt. I hadn’t heard that in a while
and heard somebody just overheard him out in public say it this
past week. And it’s a definite true thing. It’s the one universal thing.
If churches across the board don’t agree on certain doctrines,
many will agree that there is no hurt like church hurt. And it ought to be the safe place.
It ought to be the place where we don’t hurt each other. We
don’t injure each other. We don’t act like the pagans,
but Very often that’s the case. And you can see very quickly
how on the island of Crete, the church formed by the apostle,
by the command and call of Jesus Christ, has now fallen a little
bit on hard times. It has deformed and it needs
Titus to go and reform it, to put things back. And what’s the
recipe for putting the church back together. Well, it’s to
put elders into place and then to let the elders teach and rebuke
and silence and do all the necessary work to make sure the people
of God are in good shape. So just a couple of things to
think about from this passage. They all begin with the word
sound. We’ve got a sound church, sound
elders, sound doctrine, and then a sound witness, you know, we
think about church and it gets really complicated sometimes,
a lot of moving parts, but church is actually pretty simple. It
revolves around a few basic things and in Titus, not everything
that we say should be connected to the church is there, but a
lot of it is. And so in these four things, you’ll, you’ll hear
some of the important critical key things. So a sound church,
a sound church is an outpost of heaven. a sound church makes
the invisible realities of heaven visible. And so when a person
comes into church in a small way, in a finite way, in a very
limited way, and in a very imperfect way, when we come into the church
to be with the people of God, there should be a sense of it
being a taste of heaven. It should be other worldly. So
a question to ask, are we giving an accurate picture of heaven
in some small way when we gather for church? Well, that’s definitely
not the case if there’s dissensions. That’s definitely not the case
if there are factions and false teaching and some of the things
listed that Paul tells Titus, you better go fix. Those things
would take away from the realities of heaven. They would diminish
heaven being made manifest on the face of the earth in the
life and ministry of the church. But when people come in, what
do they see? I think it’s been encouraging for us over the last
little while with visitors, new members to say they were greeted,
they were encouraged, they were called by name, they were enfolded
into the fellowship and on and on we could go. And is that a
taste of what heaven will be like? Fellowship, joy, excitement,
seeing other people. When they come in, it should
be other worldly. Now I know we’re kind of stuck
in the fellowship hall You know, especially Sunday mornings, it’s
like flying coach. You know, it’s a little tight.
We’re a little, you know, we touch each other with elbows.
There’s no leg room and no, you know, we got to stuff our purse
under the seats and all the rest. But when we get back in the sanctuary,
because of the beauty, the natural beauty, I think we’ll have maybe
a little better sense of what heaven is like, you know, open
space, the presence of God far off, but the presence of God
near. We’ll have a room where the singing is more, I don’t
know, acoustically pleasing and those sorts of things. And so
in a sense, in our little outpost of heaven, we do the things we
can do spiritually and even physically to make this an otherworldly
experience. I was driving my dad around,
I guess I can’t say driving Miss Daisy, But he and I were riding
around somewhere the other day and we passed by one of the new
mega church campuses. A couple miles up the road and
he says, oh, look, there it is. There’s the building they’ve
been talking about building. And he goes, humph. It looks
like a Barnes and Noble. Well, that’s coming from somebody
who’s been through Europe and through all the major cathedrals.
He enjoys those sorts of things. But I got what he was saying.
He says, look at all those doors. It looks like a storefront. They
could have a coffee shop there and a yoga studio there. And
we were chatting about how not otherworldly church buildings
have become and what a privilege it is for us to have a neat place
that God has blessed us with it has a lot of natural beauty
around it and a lot of natural beauty in it And so when when
people come in they say this is not like Starbucks This is
not like Barnes & Noble. This is not like a school building
This is not like, and then you begin to think, what is it like?
Well, it’s not like any other place that I go. But the most
important thing about being a solid church is not necessarily our
architecture or the beauty or lack thereof. It’s what goes
on inside it. It’s the faith, what is believed.
It’s the practice, what is done. And so we might ask ourselves,
are we a sound church? Are we preaching the, Biblical
faith once and for all handed down to the saints is our practice
As a church the way we worship why we do what we do the way
we do it. Is it biblical? Does it proclaim
the gospel? I don’t know how much you remember
back in October when our guest minister preached to us by the
Great Commission, led us through a Sunday School series on sharing
the gospel. But in the morning service, he
very skillfully led us through how the worship service leads
us to God. It leads us to confession of
sin. It leads us to respond to God in praise and confession,
adoration. We hear his word, the marching
orders, and we leave with the benediction, and we go in the
world to serve the living and true God. But everything we do,
from the worship service, to the way we train our people,
to how we do this, that, and the other, ought to be centered
on the gospel and reflect the values of the scripture. So we
want to be a sound church. Titus was left behind, drew the
short straw, I guess. He didn’t get to go to Necapolis.
for the winter and sit in the sauna. He had to stay behind
on Crete and fix up the broken churches. That was his task,
that was his call. And so you’re gonna make sound
churches, there need to be certain things there. Well, the number
one fix Paul gives them is to make sure there are sound elders.
He says, I left you on Crete to put the church in order, make
the church whole, make the church sound. And the way he explains
that needs to be done is by appointing Elders. Churches without elders
are leaderless, shepherdless, guideless. The monkeys running
the zoo, we might say. Everyone doing what is right
in their own eyes, like the book of Judges. And so sound elders,
or in the case of Titus, we get the dual elder word. We get the elder word, episkopos,
but we also get the overseer or bishop. Maybe you’ve got some
Episcopal friends and they’re rambling on about bishops and
friars and deacons and fathers and all these little names. You
don’t know what they are. And you say, I only know elder,
deacon, pastor. Well, if you know the word elder,
you also know the word bishop because bishop or overseer and
elder, episkopos, are interchangeable in their use in the New Testament.
And so elders are overseers. Elders are, according to Paul
and Titus, are stewards. And it’s their job to hold firm
to the truth. It’s their job to instruct the
truth. It’s their job to rebuke. When
you get factions about Jewish myths and genealogies and teachings
of man and little factions in the church, you know, sometimes
somebody will come up to me in the church and they’ll say, you
know, I’ve been reading about this. And I say, why? And I’ll say, tell me why you’re
interested. And they’ll explain it, all the
ins and outs. And the question I want to ask them, and I’m kind
of nice and don’t do it, but I want to say, how does that
edify your soul? Is it because you can go online and say, oh,
I know about this? Is it because, you know, it’s
the cool thing, buzzword to be talked about? If it doesn’t edify
you, what good is it? Remember Paul in 1 Corinthians
13? It’s the love chapter, right?
And he says, you know, we can know this stuff. We can explain
all this stuff. We can be what I call seminary
smart, as it were. But what if we don’t have love?
We’re a noisy gong, a clanging cymbal. And so sound elders guide
the church in truth. And I think guide the church
in the necessary truth. You know, there’s some bunny
trails, rabbit trails, some side trails that we can get off into,
especially in Reformed theology. You know, Reformed theology is
dancing around with a lot of side subjects. But I can tell
you when you go to General Assembly in the Presbyterian churches,
they’re putting a squash to that stuff because it doesn’t build
up, it divides. It doesn’t edify, it tears down. And so the job of the elders,
in the local church and in the Presbytery, but also in the General
Synod is to oversee the souls of people, to oversee the doctrine
of the church, to oversee the main things and to maybe keep
an eye on the side things. Some of you wouldn’t know it
today, but our morning guest preacher has written on one of
the pet projects of the Reformed Church over the last, I don’t
know, 25, 30 years called the New Perspectives on Paul. We
dealt with a little bit of it. Some of you probably aren’t aware,
but we dealt with a little of it four or five years ago when
we had some people saying children of believing parents should have
the communion elements stuck in their mouth as babies. That
raised a little stink in our church. And we had to say, no,
that’s not the case. That’s not going to happen here.
And we even had several, not several, but a family or two
say, if y’all would do that, we would join. Well, we didn’t
do that and they didn’t join, but that’s been a big little
pet project. But our morning preacher has
written a good bit on that. And sometimes it takes gifted
folks like that to clear the deck and say, you know, no, that’s
not going to happen. and the church affirm it, but
we need sound elders, stewards that keep us holding firm to
the faith, keep us instructed in the faith, rebuke those that
need rebuking and silence those who are speaking false things.
Well, that leads us to sound doctrine. If you want to be a
sound church, you need sound elders, but you also need, excuse
me, need sound doctrine. Now doctrine we could say is
a simpler word than you think. Oh, We all got to learn theology.
Well, yes, you do. You should. But doctrine really
means teaching. And I break up teaching three
ways. We need to know gospel. We need
to know theology. And we need to know practice.
So if you go backwards, what is practice? or practical. Well, in seminary education,
it’s often called practical theology, like preaching or pastoring or
church administration. But you don’t do it unrooted
to your theology. You do it based on your theology.
And I think if you read through Titus, you see very clearly all
the things Paul tells Timothy to do are rooted in who God is
and that he has revealed Christ to us and what he’s doing in
our lives and the purpose and plan for the church. But our
practice could be the way we worship. Our practice could be
the way we do Christian education. It could be that we meet at 11
a.m. and 6 p.m. on Sundays. It could
be that we do pastoral counseling this way or Maybe the Reformed
faith has emphasized this about having a family and leading your
family, or the doctrine of vocation, or maybe our view of politics. Those are very practice-y or
practical things. They’re rooted in the Bible.
They’re rooted in our theology, but they matter because they
matter to God. And so they should matter to
us that we get them right. So we should teach practice.
So from time to time, we might say, Here’s how you share the
gospel. We did that back in October with
Paul Murphy. Or we might, as we did a couple
years ago with the young adults, we might do a parenting class.
Or we might do elder training or deacon training or something
of the sort, but you get the idea. So there’s practice. Then
there’s theology. Most of you have participated
in one of our Westminster Confession of Faith classes, the men’s group,
the ladies’ group. And I will tell you single-handedly,
In all three churches I’ve served, teaching the confession of faith
both to men and women, but I want to say especially to the women,
and especially in this congregation, has changed our church. I can
bring up terrible memories that we have of the early days of
some of the plans that women’s ministry back in those days had
for our church. It was very disruptive, very
divisive. But since we have, I think, made
our way through the confession of faith three times with our
group of ladies. I think Fran may win the award for having
been in all three rotations of it. But it has changed our church
for the better. And so theology, I love how R.C. Sproul says,
everyone’s a theologian. The question is, are you a good
one? or a bad one, and maybe you don’t know a lot, maybe you
know a little. We all should strive to know.
I think this morning y’all had Westminster Confession of Faith,
8 point something, 8.6 maybe, and it was on Jesus Christ the
mediator. And how did that confession,
which y’all professed with exuberance, is that how it was? You see where I get a little
of that, don’t you? Jesus Christ is the same yesterday,
today, forever. That little nugget of theology
is good to hear, isn’t it? Bet you never thought of it that
way, but now you have, and aren’t you better for it? Well, multiply
that by 52 Sundays or by 104 if it’s morning and evening. And all of a sudden you begin
to put together a picture of theology. Remember Sinclair Ferguson,
if you’ve been listening for the last two years to his Things
Unseen podcast, which I think you can now buy in a daily devotional
book. But what does he say about theology? It’s the Velcro to
which Bible teaching sticks. And I think some of y’all have
experienced that. So practice, yes, good. Theology, yes, good. But also Bible. We’ve got to
teach the Bible, the content of the Bible, the building blocks
of the Bible, the gospel. And so in the life of the church,
if we get gospel or Bible and doctrine or, well, theology,
and we get practice, that’s the sound doctrine of the church.
And over time, it makes a very big difference. In May, I’ve been here 10 years,
and it’s amazing what can be done. in 10 years of preaching
and teaching the scripture and doctrine and practice. It’s amazing
how it changes things. You think of Martin Luther, who
was asked a little into the Reformation, how did you do it? And he said,
I unleashed the word. And the word did its work. Maybe
some of you listen to John MacArthur and you hear his little radio,
whatever the music is, and it says, unleashing the Bible, one
verse at a time. That’s the idea. One verse at
a time, Sunday after Sunday, morning after morning, evening
after evening, Sunday school after Sunday school, Wednesday,
and whatever. It does its work. And so sound
churches have sound elders, sound doctrine, but also a sound witness.
This is the fruit. This is the fruit of a church
that is whole and is sound. The world looks in and doesn’t
understand. The world listens and doesn’t
know what in the world we’re talking about. But if they see
gospel change lives, they see new creations in Christ, with
a better and better understanding of the Bible over time, a better
and better understanding of theology over time, a better and better
understanding of how to live life, work in the world, doctrine
of vocation, manage money, live in a neighborhood, work in the
marketplace. You add all that together, and all of a sudden,
your neighbors, they don’t know how to interpret it, but they
know there’s something special. And think about Abraham. leaving
Ur of the Chaldeans, leaving paganism behind, leaving his
family behind, moving to Canaan, moving to the promised land,
building an altar, worshiping God, goes off to Egypt a time
or two, you know, has some foibles, lies about his wife, ends up
coming back to the promised land. God keeps blessing him and blessing
and blessing him. He says, Lot, you go that way
and I’ll go this way, or you go that way, this way, and I’ll
go that way. So Lot goes towards Sodom and Abraham goes towards
Canaan. And about the time he settles,
builds an altar, Abimelech, who’s a rank Canaanite pagan, comes
to Abraham and says, I want what you’re having. What is the secret
sauce to your life? Well, the secret sauce is Yahweh.
The secret sauce is devotion to God. The secret sauce is the
gospel of grace. And Abimelech is not a man of
faith. And so the next best thing he can do is say, I’m going to
love my Christian neighbor. So he makes a treaty with Abraham.
You be good to me and I’ll be good to you. And perhaps in his
mind, he’s thinking a bit selfishly. Whatever that Yahweh God is doing
to him is going to spill over. Last week, we talked about the
covenant with Noah and how it’s a covenant of grace. that extends
to the whole earth. The rain still falls on the just
and the unjust. You know, it doesn’t just rain
on our houses. That would make evangelism easy, wouldn’t it?
Hey, it didn’t rain there. I should go knock, take him a
leaflet, a pamphlet, a tract. But no, it rains. The sun shines.
The storms come on the unrighteous just as they do the righteous.
God’s common grace is here for all. But his special grace, his
saving grace, his blessing grace is on the righteous. And so think
of that, how a sound church with sound elders, sound doctrine
or teaching leads to a sound witness and to quote, is it George
W. Bush? It’s not rocket engineering,
right? It’s not rocket science. It is
that simple, isn’t it? It is that simple. We believe
the Bible, we live the Bible, and the Bible is on display.
So when people See us maybe in our homes as individuals out
in the world, or they come to our church. Is it a taste of
heaven? Is it an outpost of heaven? Are the invisible realities of
heaven and eternity made manifest and visible? You know, we are
going into the space age, aren’t we, Nicks? Well, this week, 2025,
right? Doesn’t that sound space agey? I mean, that’s just like
otherworldly, isn’t it, to be at 2025. But look at where we
are. This is the most post-Christian
America has ever been. And I’m really afraid that because
the election turned out like it did, everybody says, we made
it. It’s not going to be so bad. Well, no, it’s still a very pagan,
dark, culture and politics is not what saves us. It’s the gospel.
And I believe, I see, I observe, we need to double down on what
we believe, how we practice it, and what the world sees and hears
from us. Because it is a going to hell
in a handbasket culture. And we shouldn’t rest on our
laurels and say, oh boy, the economy is going to get better.
It may not. We shouldn’t say, well, culture is going to get
better because we got the president that we wanted or whatever that
is. Okay. Maybe there’ll be a few
bright spots. The gospel needs to be believed and lived and
preached and transmitted to another generation. And I don’t know
if you saw this this week, church attendance is down 50% in America.
And I saw something like it or something about it. And I believe
it’s true based on the trends I’ve been watching. Increasingly,
even believers don’t go to church around Christmas. What do they
do? Oh, they travel. They got to be somewhere. Oh,
the family came in. We can’t make them go to church.
And so increasingly we are even post-Christian Christians because
we’re uncommitted to the things of the Lord. And so my encouragement
to you is don’t quit. But also my encouragement to
you is in 2025, especially as we ease back into the sanctuary
and perhaps have our fellowship hall, maybe open for more meals,
those kinds of things, we ought to reset the culture of our church
to be a worshiping community, a learning community, a fellowshipping
community, but also a reaching out community. so that in the
darkness of the world, the realities of heaven are made a bit more
manifest than perhaps have been in the past. We don’t live in
the Christ-haunted South anymore. We live in a post-Christian South,
I do believe. And so my encouragement is to,
well, to step up our game in the new year. And as we do, think
on Titus. Think on the encouragements that
Paul has given to Titus, and therefore to us. Let’s do pray.
Lord, encourage us with the things that would make for a sound witness,
and may we not look in the mirror and say, okay, and then leave
and forget. But may we remember these things
and ponder them and put them into practice. We pray by the
grace of God in Christ. Amen.