Sermon Tone Analysis

LIVING GODLY IN AN UNGODLY WORLD   TITUS 3:1-8

 

           

            I would like you to take your copy of God’s Word and open it to the book of Titus the third chapter.

We return, tonight, to look at a subject that we began to look at this morning.

How do we live godly in an ungodly world?

If we are going to win people to Christ, then we must do our best with the help of God’s Spirit to live a life that is attractive and brings glory to God.

We have to remember that we are the only Bible that some people will ever pick up and read.

This morning, we began to look into this great passage that Paul wrote to Titus, so that he could instruct the believers in Crete of how to live in the church, with others in the faith and those outside of the faith.

Our lives ought to be so different from the world that they want to know the difference in our lives.

And when they ask what is the hope that is in us, then we have a right to share with them the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Certainly Paul was consumed with this very singular mandate of evangelism when he wrote this letter to Titus.

And he is very concerned that the people living in the pagan culture of Crete which was utterly pagan, without any Christian influence at all, not get engaged in trying to moralize cultural behavior, that they not get involved in trying through the political avenues to create some kind of Christian culture.

What he was concerned about was that they be able to demonstrate to their society that God saves people from sin.

And that the primary way to do that was to demonstrate a saved life.

If I'm going to tell you that Dr. So-and-so cures people from cancer, you're going to say to me, "Oh, who did he cure, let me see him."

And if I'm going to say to you, "Dr.

So-and-so over here makes blind people see," you're going to say, "Oh, who did he give sight to?"

And if I'm going to say to you, "God is a saving God who delivers men from their sin and all that goes with it of hopelessness and helplessness and emptiness," you're going to say to me, "Show me what a saved person looks like then I'll know whether your God can do that."

Leading people to Christ is not a matter of gimmicks or techniques or marketing or through the political arena.

No, salvation is a work of God in the heart of an unbeliever.

The way we reach the world for Christ is to demonstrate what a child of God looks like.

It is a matter of living godly in an ungodly world.

So Paul reminds Titus to remind the believers to remember your part to the authorities and rulers as well as those who are ungodly.

In our passage, this evening, Paul says remember your plight because you once were what these unbelievers are now.

Folks, it is easy for us to forget that it is God’s goodness and loving kindness that brought us to eternal life.

If it wasn’t for God’s grace, then we would still be in the same boat as those friends and family and others out there in the world who does not know Christ.

REMEMBER YOUR PLIGHT – 3

            Paul here says that we were once like those who are now lost.

We were children of wrath headed for hell, except the grace of God saved us from this plight and pardoned us from our sin to give us eternal life.

Listen, before you get slanderous, before you get angry at those in authority in your country and those around you who are in sin and those who have an immoral agenda, before you get hostile and slanderous and angry and before you court those kinds of emotions that lead to venomous kinds of acts and thoughts of vengeance, before you become inconsiderate, before you fight for the cultural Christian agenda, before you attack the ungodly and attack the unsaved, Paul says remember once you were one of them.

Did you forget?

Did you forget?

Did you forget that you used to be like that and you couldn't do anything about it?

In this verse, Paul contrast the lives of those who believe and those who do not.

Yet, this is the plight of all humanity and not just a few.

The Bible says, “All have fall short of the glory of God, There is none righteous, no not one.”

In our human nature which is described as sinful, we are all under the wrath of God.

This is not the only list that Paul gives of an unbeliever to describe their condition.

You can read about it in Romans 1, 1 Corinthians 6, Galatians 5, Ephesians 2 and 4.

            What Paul does in this verse is not point a finger and says that the shoe does not fit me, but he includes himself, Titus and all believers.

We know that Paul was a blasphemer, persecutor, and insolent opponent of the things of God.

Titus is described as a Greek meaning that he was formerly a pagan.

And we must admit that all of us have had these same vices as a part of our lives.

Maybe no all to the same degree because some of us were saved as a child and others were saved as adults.

You look at the gay agenda and you watch the homosexual pride parade and you listen to all the lesbian advocacy and you see all of the Playboy mentality and the filth and the pornography of our time and you watch this agenda being pushed on the social institutions and taught to your children, everything from sex education to passing out birth control devices and all of the stuff going on and something in you becomes hostile to all of that and you've got to stop and realize that the people doing that are doing it in utter ignorance.

As we grow in the things of the Lord, it is difficult not to be enraged at the unbelievably rapid growth and acceptance of such things as homosexuality, pornography, gratuitous sex, New Age philosophy, abortion on demand, and school sex education that promotes almost everything but chastity.

Those and many other such beliefs and practices are unquestionably evil, corrupt, destructive, and ungodly.

They ravage individual lives and society as a whole and they dishonor our holy God.

But these things will continue until the Lord comes back to set things in order.

Let us examine these seven vices that Paul mentions in verse 3.

 

VICE # 1 – Foolishness

            First, Paul reminds us, *we also once were foolish ourselves, *ignorant and uninformed.

Anoētos (*foolish*) denotes complete lack of understanding, total ignorance in regard to a particular area of knowledge.

Paul’s point here is that, no matter how advanced a person’s education and intellectual accomplishments may be, if he does not recognize God and trust in Him for deliverance from sin, he is *foolish *concerning the most important truth regarding himself.

With God, even the wisdom of men is foolishness (cf. 1 Cor.

1:20, 25).

In his fascinating book /The Intellectuals, /Paul Johnson, one of the foremost contemporary historians of Western civilization, documents the morass of unspeakable moral filth and ungodliness that has characterized most of the leading intellectual architects of modern Western culture.

Their astounding mental capacities and their profound impact on modern society are incontestable.

Yet they are precisely those whom Paul described nearly two thousand years ago, whom, because “they did not see fit to acknowledge God any longer, God gave … over to a depraved mind” (Rom.

1:28).

Their biographies are studies in wretchedness.

A brilliant mind not only is capable of gross evil, but, because of that very brilliance, is capable of the most heinous evils.

The appalling atrocities of the Nazis, for example, were conceived and perpetrated by brilliant men in arguably the most intellectually, scientifically, and culturally advanced nation of modern times.

VICE # 2 – Disobedient

            Bryan Chapell explains that the word "carries a nuance of being "not persuaded" and thus culpably not compliant" [/PTW: 1 & 2 Timothy, Titus, /359].

To God?

Of course and consequently to all authority instituted by God.

There is in the heart of man rebellion.

It is bound up in his heart.

It's bound up in his fallenness.

That's why you spank your children, to knock the rebelliousness under some control.

But where God isn't there and the Spirit isn't there to restrain it, lawless resistance to truth and virtue will run amuck...and that is just depravity doing what depravity does.

And we haven't seen it fully in American in the past because we did have some residue of Christian constraint in the system.

That is all gone and now we're going to see depravity like it was seen in pagan Greek culture.

We will be more the kind of church the church used to be in its early beginnings.

They are disobedient.

They are disobedient to God and to authority.

They care not for the Bible.

They laugh and mock at the Scripture overtly or covertly.

They are resistant to truth and virtue.

Through Jeremiah the Lord revealed that “the heart is more deceitful than all else and is desperately sick; who can understand it?”

(Jer.

17:9).

Jesus declared that “out of the heart come evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, slanders,” and everything else that defiles a man (Matt.

15:19-20).

It is for that reason that, although human laws and powers are ordained by God to help restrain and punish evil behavior and maintain a certain amount of social order and safety, they have no power to change the human heart, from which every evil, every sin, every defilement, every debauchery emanates.

VICE # 3 – Led Astray

            Third, as unbelievers we were once, by our very nature, *deceived.*

Planaō/ /(*deceived*) has the basic idea of being purposely led astray.

Satan’s objective is to lead sinners into ever greater sin and ungodliness.

John refers to him as “the great dragon [who] was thrown down, the serpent of old who is called the devil and Satan, who deceives the whole world” (Rev.

12:9).

Whether they acknowledge it or not—and the vast majority do not—all unbelievers are children of their “father the devil, and … want to do the desires of [their] father,… [who] was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him.

Whenever he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own nature; for he is a liar, and the father of lies” (John 8:44).

Reflecting the nature and following the example of their spiritual father, “evil men and impostors will proceed from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived” (2 Tim.

3:13).

In the end times, “false Christs and false prophets will arise and will show great signs and wonders, so as to mislead, /if possible, /even the elect” (Matt.

24:24, emphasis added).

Lost people just want to live at a whim and whatever impulse that might come there way.

The idea is that of wandering or roaming.

In late September 1864 Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest was leading his troops north from Decatur, Alabama, toward Nashville.

But to make it to Nashville, Forrest would have to defeat the Union army at Athens, Alabama.

When the Union commander, Colonel Wallace Campbell, refused to surrender, Forrest asked for a personal meeting, and took Campbell on an inspection of his troops.

But each time they left a detachment, the Confederate soldiers simply packed up and moved to another position, artillery and all.

Forrest and Campbell would then arrive at the new encampment and continue to tally up the impressive number of Confederate soldiers and weaponry.

By the time they returned to the fort, Campbell was convinced he couldn’t win and surrendered unconditionally!

VICE # 4 – Slaves to Various Passions and Pleasures