Titus 1
Titus • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
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1 Paul, a servant of God and an apostle of Jesus Christ, for the faith of God’s elect and their knowledge of the truth that leads to godliness, 2 in the hope of eternal life that God, who cannot lie, promised before time began. 3 In his own time he has revealed his word in the preaching with which I was entrusted by the command of God our Savior: 4 To Titus, my true son in our common faith. Grace and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Savior. 5 The reason I left you in Crete was to set right what was left undone and, as I directed you, to appoint elders in every town. 6 An elder must be blameless, the husband of one wife, with faithful children who are not accused of wildness or rebellion. 7 As an overseer of God’s household, he must be blameless, not arrogant, not hot-tempered, not an excessive drinker, not a bully, not greedy for money, 8 but hospitable, loving what is good, sensible, righteous, holy, self-controlled, 9 holding to the faithful message as taught, so that he will be able both to encourage with sound teaching and to refute those who contradict it. 10 For there are many rebellious people, full of empty talk and deception, especially those from the circumcision party. 11 It is necessary to silence them; they are ruining entire households by teaching what they shouldn’t in order to get money dishonestly. 12 One of their very own prophets said, “Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons.” 13 This testimony is true. For this reason, rebuke them sharply, so that they may be sound in the faith 14 and may not pay attention to Jewish myths and the commands of people who reject the truth. 15 To the pure, everything is pure, but to those who are defiled and unbelieving nothing is pure; in fact, both their mind and conscience are defiled. 16 They claim to know God, but they deny him by their works. They are detestable, disobedient, and unfit for any good work.
Main idea: Christ’s church flourishes best and remains purest when his people know and love his voice and are zealous to carry out his will in the midst of a treacherous society.
Background:
Paul had left Titus on Crete to establish a foothold for the Christian faith. Crete was an island known for immorality, its men were known as mercenaries who would fight for anybody who paid enough, and its ports on the northern coast of the island served the entire Mediterranean Sea, sometimes through legitimate trade, but often through piracy.
Religiously, Cretans claimed that many Greek gods were in fact Cretans who had been deified, including Zeus, whose tomb they said was on the island. Their reverence for Zeus extended especially to his often-strained relationship with the truth and honesty.
To give you an idea of how bad Crete’s reputation was, I’m going to teach you a Greek word — κρήτιζω (krētizō), which literally means “to Cret-ize” but was often used as a way of saying “to lie”.
Paul wrote this letter around 64-67 AD, sometime before his Roman imprisonment while he’s still in Nicopolis — just about the same time as 1 Timothy, a letter with which Titus shares a lot of vocabulary and thought. In fact, it’s not clear if Paul wrote 1 Timothy or Titus first, and the reason Titus is last in our current canonical order is simply that it’s the shortest of the three letters.
Today, I’m tasked with both introducing the letter as a whole and preaching the first chapter, so we’re not going to have time to make those comparisons in depth, but hopefully a lot of what Paul says to Titus will be very familiar to us already, and there may be times where the differences moreso than the similarities give us some insight we wouldn’t have gained without having already studied 1 Timothy in the recent past.
With that said, I want to highlight the two most theologically significant passages that serve as the grounds for Paul’s instructions to Titus in this letter, and this will serve as our overview for today — I’m fully trusting that Caleb and Hayden will be able to fill in any significant gaps and simply wetting our appetites for more.
Titus 2:11-14
11 For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, 12 instructing us to deny godlessness and worldly lusts and to live in a sensible, righteous, and godly way in the present age, 13 while we wait for the blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ. 14 He gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to cleanse for himself a people for his own possession, eager to do good works.
and Titus 3:4-8
4 But when the kindness of God our Savior and his love for mankind appeared, 5 he saved us—not by works of righteousness that we had done, but according to his mercy—through the washing of regeneration and renewal by the Holy Spirit. 6 He poured out his Spirit on us abundantly through Jesus Christ our Savior 7 so that, having been justified by his grace, we may become heirs with the hope of eternal life. 8 This saying is trustworthy. I want you to insist on these things, so that those who have believed God might be careful to devote themselves to good works. These are good and profitable for everyone.
It’s from these two passages, especially ch. 2:11-14, that we’ve gotten our series title, Titus — Working While Waiting: Purified Faith in a Polluted World.
God’s church is to be devoted to good works while we wait for Jesus to appear again, and those good works are a direct result of our having been cleansed from sin and ungodliness by God’s grace in Christ as he has brought us from death to life and made us into new creations, even while we live and carry out these good works in the midst of a sinful, godly world. Or, as I’ve put it in today’s main idea:
Main idea: Christ’s church flourishes best and remains purest when his people know and love his voice and are zealous to carry out his will in the midst of a treacherous society.
Let’s dive in to chapter 1, which divides into three sections.
vv. 1-4: The Unlying God
vv. 5-9: God’s Unlying Servants
vv. 10-16: An Unlying Liar
1 Paul, a servant of God and an apostle of Jesus Christ, for the faith of God’s elect and their knowledge of the truth that leads to godliness, 2 in the hope of eternal life that God, who cannot lie, promised before time began. 3 In his own time he has revealed his word in the preaching with which I was entrusted by the command of God our Savior: 4 To Titus, my true son in our common faith. Grace and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Savior.
In this section, we see three things:
Paul’s identity and purpose
God’s identity and purpose
Titus’s identity and needs
Regarding Paul, he calls himself a servant — or, better, a slave — of God, an apostle of Jesus Christ, and one who is entrusted with a preaching ministry by command of the God who saves.
In using the language of slave, which is actually his favorite self-descriptor in the introductions of his letters, Paul is reminding his readers that everything he says and does is from God — he is not free to speak, think, or act for himself beyond what God permits and commands, and that is entirely proper. He has taught elsewhere, after all, that human beings are either slaves to sin and their own lusts or they are slaves to Christ, who is a gracious and kind master, eager to reward those who belong to him.
He also reminds his readers of his position of authority, as an apostle of Jesus, lest his readers forget who’s talking. This isn’t a matter of authoritarian boasting on Paul’s part, simply a statement of fact that serves to set everything into context. Paul says what he says as God’s ordained messenger to the Gentiles, in contrast with his opponents, who have ordained themselves to proclaim falsehoods that harm their hearers as they line their pockets with their lying tongues.
Paul carries out his slave-hood and apostleship for three purposes in Titus: faith, knowledge, and hope. He’s working so that God’s chosen people, his elect, will grow in their faith, or trust and allegiance, to the true God, so that they will know God’s truth in the gospel more clearly and live lives of deeper godliness as a result, and so that they will be more and more convinced and live more and more in light of the eternal life to come in the new heavens and new earth rather than focusing on their current situation.
Speaking of that eternal life, let’s look at God’s identity and purposes in these verses.
In verses 1-4, we see that God is sovereign in salvation, that he is literally “the unlying God”, he transcends time, and he is deeply interested in bringing people from death to life.
When we say God is sovereign in salvation, we mean that God saves people according to his good pleasure, deciding entirely of his own volition the people on whom he will pour out his covenantal love. How exactly this works out in the finer details and how exactly this relates to human responsibility and genuine autonomy is ultimately a mystery, but it’s simply undeniable that God’s plan of salvation both for humanity and for you specifically if you are in Christ began long, long, long ago — before time began, in fact, as Paul says. It is in God’s eternal, inscrutable counsels that he decided to set his love on you if you are in Christ today, and we’ll hear more about that in chapters 2 and 3.
Our English translations do Paul a bit of a disservice when they add in “cannot lie” or “does not lie” in a phrase set off by commas modifying God because in the Greek, he literally says, “the unlying God” — and I bring out this distinction because it’s at this point that Paul is taping up his hands and putting on the boxing gloves to enter the ring pretty violently against Cretan culture and its products, the rebellious people from the circumcision party who are threatening to ruin the church.
In our introduction, we learned that Cretans loved the god Zeus and emulated his “virtues”, if they can be called such — and this is an oblique reference to the fact that every God other than the Father of Jesus Christ simply does not pass the sniff test when it comes to a god worth worshipping and following. In contrast to Zeus, or any other made-up god who’s ultimately just a reflection of the human beings who think him up, the true God possesses, exhibits, and defines true virtue, and in this case, he is utterly honest, trustworthy, and faithful, and has been before creation even started, and will be once he brings all creation to its consummation at the return of his son Jesus Christ.
This unlying God is also completely sovereign over time, promising to bring about his salvation before time began, and now bringing it about in a new way in his own time. He sent Jesus in to the world precisely when he wanted to, not a moment too soon nor too late, he called Paul to ministry at precisely the right time, and he is executing his salvation plan in exactly his own timing and in his own way, no matter how good or bad things may seem. And speaking of doing things his own way, this utterly truthful, sovereign God, has humbled himself by entrusting the message of his glory and salvation to mere human beings. They are human beings brought to life by his Spirit, to be sure, and everything they do comes from Him, but God has delighted to use the means of human preaching and, in our case, human letter-writing to ensure that his salvation plan gets carried out.
Finally, in this section, we learn about Titus and his needs.
Like Timothy, Paul considered Titus a true son in the faith — Titus would have been absolutely correct in calling Paul “father” without any sort of pretense or hesitation because of the way in which Paul took his disciples under his wings and modeled the Christian life for them. This is especially striking when we remember that Paul was basically the most Jewish Jew who ever lived, and Titus was an unclean Gentile.
We know from Galatians that Titus went with Paul to the Jerusalem council where the church discerned whether or not Gentile converts needed to be circumcised and keep Jewish laws in order to be genuinely Christian, and Titus also served as Paul’s emissary to the Corinthian church at least two times, if not more, throughout Paul’s long letter-writing ministry to them. He was a very capable minister of the gospel and would likely have felt pretty good about the work he’d been called to do in Crete, given the similarities between the Corinthian and Cretan cultures.
For all his past success, though, Titus was still as needy as any believer — he would have no hope of completing the task at hand without the grace and peace that come from God the Father and Christ Jesus the savior.
In these four verses, Paul has sown seeds for major themes he’s going to develop further, and I’m again going to lean on Caleb and Hayden to point out those themes when they arise again — but I just want to take a moment and point out that even in the introductions to Paul’s letters, he’s already getting to the task at hand, and they are just as worth reading and studying deeply as any other paragraph of his letters.
vv. 1-4: The Unlying God
vv. 5-9: God’s Unlying Servants
vv. 10-16: An Unlying Liar
5 The reason I left you in Crete was to set right what was left undone and, as I directed you, to appoint elders in every town. 6 An elder must be blameless, the husband of one wife, with faithful children who are not accused of wildness or rebellion. 7 As an overseer of God’s household, he must be blameless, not arrogant, not hot-tempered, not an excessive drinker, not a bully, not greedy for money, 8 but hospitable, loving what is good, sensible, righteous, holy, self-controlled, 9 holding to the faithful message as taught, so that he will be able both to encourage with sound teaching and to refute those who contradict it.
Just as in 1 Timothy, Paul gets straight to business, skipping over his usual thanksgiving, but, unlike 1 Timothy, he also skips the encouragement or anything particularly personal, perhaps indicating Titus was better prepared for the task than Timothy was, which is a lovely reminder that in God’s plan of salvation, he uses all sorts. I don’t want to get too autobiographical, but for my part I’m quite glad we studied 1 Timothy first and saw that there’s room for timid and anxious church leaders rather than just getting straight to business with Titus and learning that later on. To put it mildly, your encouragement last week for Pastor Appreciation Month was timely and deeply meaningful, and I hope that you weren’t too embarrassed by my open weeping on the front row up here. But I digress.
The business at hand is really, really interesting — the first thing the Cretan Christians need is pastors. Paul uses the terms elder and overseer here, but all three of those terms refer to the same office, and I say that it’s really interesting that this is the first order of business because we’re getting an insight into what actually constitutes a church community.
As much as the church is an organic household united in a common faith in Christ, with no distinction between its members at the foot of the cross, nonetheless God has ordained that there be a degree of hierarchy, with qualified men occupying an office of leadership and responsibility in the church that not everybody is called to. That is to say, the household of God is not merely a family, but also a structured institution with a mission and purpose that goes beyond living together in community.
Note also that Titus is commanded to appoint plural “elders” in every town, not just “an elder” in every town. The evidence for a plurality of pastors in God’s churches is incredibly strong, and this is one of those places this notion shows up.
But, there are non-negotiables for those who are going to be pastors. A church with no pastor would be an aberration, to be sure, but a church with unqualified pastors is an abomination that will end up causing far more damage to everybody involved as well as the witness of the gospel in the community that “church” is located in.
Let’s compare this list of qualifications to the list in 1 Timothy.
2 An overseer, therefore, must be above reproach, the husband of one wife, self-controlled, sensible, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, 3 not an excessive drinker, not a bully but gentle, not quarrelsome, not greedy. 4 He must manage his own household competently and have his children under control with all dignity. 5 (If anyone does not know how to manage his own household, how will he take care of God’s church?) 6 He must not be a new convert, or he might become conceited and incur the same condemnation as the devil. 7 Furthermore, he must have a good reputation among outsiders, so that he does not fall into disgrace and the devil’s trap.
In Titus, we see all of these with a couple differences. First, in Titus, Paul adds “not arrogant”, “not hot-tempered”, “loving what is good”, “righteous”, “holy”, and “holding to the faithful message as taught”, and removes the phrase “must not be a new convert”. Regarding this last phrase, it’s not unlikely that the Cretan church was considerably younger than the Ephesian church. Whereas the Ephesian church already had elders who were unqualified and needed to be removed, the Cretan church didn’t seem to have any formal leadership beyond the Jewish teachers going around and causing trouble, meaning that simple faithfulness to the gospel message and an ability to teach would be enough for them, even if it’s not necessarily ideal.
But regarding the extra character qualifications, it doesn’t seem there’s too much difference between the two lists.
We don’t have time to go into detail on each of these adjectives, but I do want to explain a couple that may cause some confusion.
First, we must understand that “blameless” does not mean “sinless” — otherwise, no church would have qualified pastors! Rather, a pastor must live his life in such a way that no accusation of serious sin would be immediately credible. In other words, I ought to live my life in such a way that there should be some sins that even the most shrewd and experienced of saints ought to be able to say, “I just can’t imagine Pastor Tyler doing something like that.”
Second, the husband of one wife has been much debated, but we argued in 1 Timothy that the best understanding is related to present marital fidelity. This is a character qualification, not so much a status qualification; otherwise, unmarried, divorced, or divorced and remarried men would be automatically disqualified. That is a legitimate position that’s been held in church history, but we don’t think it’s the best one.
Third, “faithful” children could refer to believing children, that is, children who are Christians, or it could refer to children who are generally obedient and submissive to their father’s proper authority properly wielded. In the case of the Cretan church, the case for “believing” is actually pretty strong; after all, a believing pastor with unbelieving children would be a household divided, and in a culture that works based on honor-shame relationships and places an extremely high value on familial loyalty, an unbelieving child could certainly be seen as an indicator that the father has failed to manage his household adequately. But in applying this today, I’m not so sure that we can make a one-to-one correspondence, especially given that Paul explains this further by saying they can’t be accused of wildness or rebellion — that is, they’re not known for hanging out with the wrong crowd in the wrong places causing trouble, but they’re basically “good” kids.
Just as in 1 Timothy, Paul places pastoral ministry squarely within the understanding of God’s church as a household — the elders oversee God’s household as stewards of what God has given them, caring for God’s people by teaching them truth and refuting error as it crops up, and leading them to health, maturity in Christ, and deeper godliness through both their example and their teaching.
Essentially, God’s plan of salvation for the entire world hinges on little kingdom outposts sharing life together, with the leaders of those outposts modeling Christ and teaching his gospel within the household and in the community. How mundane, yet how glorious!
But let’s move to our final section and recall our main idea one more time.
Main idea: Christ’s church flourishes best and remains purest when his people know and love his voice and are zealous to carry out his will in the midst of a treacherous society.
vv. 1-4: The Unlying God
vv. 5-9: God’s Unlying Servants
vv. 10-16: An Unlying Liar
10 For there are many rebellious people, full of empty talk and deception, especially those from the circumcision party. 11 It is necessary to silence them; they are ruining entire households by teaching what they shouldn’t in order to get money dishonestly. 12 One of their very own prophets said, “Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons.” 13 This testimony is true. For this reason, rebuke them sharply, so that they may be sound in the faith 14 and may not pay attention to Jewish myths and the commands of people who reject the truth. 15 To the pure, everything is pure, but to those who are defiled and unbelieving nothing is pure; in fact, both their mind and conscience are defiled. 16 They claim to know God, but they deny him by their works. They are detestable, disobedient, and unfit for any good work.
We see in this section why having qualified pastors in every church is such a high priority — the churches are in danger of being destroyed by rebellious people spewing venomous words and ruining entire households for their own financial gain, just as would be expected of Cretans.
If the “unlying God” quip was a jab to test the Cretans defences, here Paul goes for a real haymaker with his description of the opponents. Rather than being in the ring with a worthy opponent, Paul is essentially playing animal control officer. In verse 11, where the CSB has “silence”, he literally says they should be “muzzled” like the evil beasts they are according to verse 12.
This is horribly ironic because although, the island of Crete was known to have no wild animals, ancient writers said there was no need for them because the people were beastly enough on their own — a truth so painfully obvious that Paul calls a famous Cretan liar’s testimony true.
Just as in Ephesus, whatever myths the opponents were teaching were Jewish in nature, misusing the law in such a way that set impossible and ridiculous standards for their followers and spouting myths and detailed histories and interpretations of Scripture that sounded plausible but at the end of the day were not merely a waste of time, but an active source of harm to the people listening to them. And the solution is the same as in Ephesus: sharp rebuke and firm commands to stop while teaching the true way of Christ so that people will instead be healthy, holy, and pure.
Verses 15 and 16 remind us of one of the most critical principles of all Scripture that we find in Matthew 15:8-11
8 This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me. 9 They worship me in vain, teaching as doctrines human commands.” 10 Summoning the crowd, he told them, “Listen and understand: 11 It’s not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but what comes out of the mouth—this defiles a person.”
Whereas the teachers taught rules and behaviors and guaranteed salvation to their followers by personal loyalty, Jesus taught that it is the heart that truly matters.
Someone with a pure heart that has been cleansed from sin has complete freedom with regard to ritual purity in God’s eyes — that is to say, someone who has been morally purified and lives a morally pure life has no reason to fear that he or she is somehow displeasing God by failing to keep some rule, and God’s just waiting to hit them with Matthew 7:23
23 Then I will announce to them, ‘I never knew you. Depart from me, you lawbreakers!’
but for someone who is not morally pure, even their best acts of lawkeeping do them no good whatsoever. No amount of fasting, dressing right, giving, worshipping in the right key with tears at the right time, or any other form of good does a lick to earn God’s favor. As the prophet says in Isaiah 64:6
6 All of us have become like something unclean, and all our righteous acts are like a polluted garment; all of us wither like a leaf, and our iniquities carry us away like the wind.
It’s the people who have felt the pollution of their most righteous acts, who have smelled the stench of their own mess when they had their life together, and who have been utterly disgusted, who are most welcome in God’s household, not those who are able to keep all the rules and keep their noses clean.
This brings up an important distinction that we discussed as we were coming up with our sermon series title. You’ll notice that the series is called “Purified Faith in a Polluted World”, not “Pure Faith in a Polluted World”, as I had originally suggested. As we talked about it, we wanted to avoid the implication that we, as followers of Jesus, are, in and of ourselves pure, and it’s our responsibility to keep ourselves clean from the pollution of the world around us. We wanted to make it abundantly clear that we are pure because Jesus has purified us, and it is Jesus who keeps us pure by the power of his Holy Spirit who empowers everything we do. Apart from that Spirit, we would be no better than the average Cretan, evil beasts who love only themselves and devour others for our own personal gain, even within the church.
We also want to make it abundantly clear that the purification that has taken place in our hearts makes us agents of cleansing in the community around us. We can be far less concerned with keeping ourselves pure and far more concerned with inviting others into that purity — after all, what’s outside of us can’t make us unclean, only what comes from inside of us. We don’t sin by osmosis, and we don’t have to be afraid that going into a bad or uncomfortable situation might make us sin by accident anymore than we have to be afraid that Jesus may somehow become unclean by being in proximity to sin.
As we conclude, I want to offer a couple thoughts of application and remind us of our main idea.
Main idea: Christ’s church flourishes best and remains purest when his people know and love his voice and are zealous to carry out his will in the midst of a treacherous society.
Our first major application: salvation, from start to finish, is by grace alone through faith alone to the glory of God alone. We’re going to see a lot of commands in this letter, and we could very easily fall into two equal but opposite errors. First, we could become horribly discouraged when we look at the state of things around us and the task we have been given to do and what’s required of us. We could be crushed under the weight of responsibility and, when we fail, could be tempted to throw in the towel and just say we’re not cut out for it. It’s entirely true that the ministry we’ve been given as a church is beyond our capacity, but that’s the point. God has called us to participate in his gospel ministry so that he gets even more glory as his power is displayed through our imperfections, not in spite of our imperfections. He uses clay vessels so he gets all the glory, and that’s a beautiful thing.
On the other hand, we could become horribly prideful when we look at the state of things, our responsibilities, and are able to say, “Hey, things are actually going pretty well. I must be all right after all.” Forgetting that our own righteousness apart from Christ, our own efforts from our own strength, are filthy rags in God’s sight, is a danger that’s far too easy for us to be trapped in.
If I were to Americanize the Cretan saying, I might say, “Americans are always proud, hungry for success, rugged, go-getting individuals” — and these characteristics are just as dangerous, if not moreso, and counter to the ways of Christ as lying, evil, and gluttony. We become like the gods we worship, and just as the Cretans offered their sacrifices on the altar of Zeus and idolized his cunning, strength, and spontaneity, in our context, we happily sacrifice ourselves, our hearts, our minds, our families, and our friends on the altars of success in the eyes of the world, self-sufficiency, and pride rather than admitting our utter need for grace, mercy, and peace from God and from one another. If your response when someone asks you, “Hey, do you need anything?” is always, “Nah, I’m good”, please be careful that it’s out of contentment in Christ that you’re saying your no, and not out of a pride that is reluctant to ask for help out of fear of being considered a burden. I can’t tell you how exhausting it is when I hear people talking of “not wanting to be a burden”. Friends, if we don’t want to be burdens, we’re saying we don’t want to bless our brothers and sisters in Christ with the opportunity to meet our needs and give us our of their own abundance. We would rather live on in lack when we’re sitting right next to someone who would be delighted to meet that need if we’d only ask.
Our second major application: we must grab tightly to the God who is true, faithful, unlying, and utterly sovereign, and who does his will in his timing and in his way. Our world is full of tumult, and our own personal lives can be so discouraging, yet we have God’s promise that he will never leave us nor forsake us, and he will be with us every day as we carry out the mission he’s given us until Jesus appears again. In his own time, he will wipe away every tear, redeem every second of suffering, and reward his servants far beyond their wildest hopes or dreams for the deeds they’ve done in the flesh. The work we’re doing is worth it and has eternal value. Just as Jesus rose from the dead and now is seated on his throne, we have the down payment of the promise of eternal life to come, and we must live in light of that fact. Biblical hope is not “I hope it doesn’t rain tomorrow”; it’s the confident assurance of things that are yet to come, and we have every reason to be confident that the God who chose us before the ages began will see us until this evil present age ends and our faith becomes sight.
In that vein, let’s partake of one of the means he has given us to proclaim and anticipate his coming, the Lord’s Supper.