Sermon Tone Analysis

When I was in high school, I had a classmate that I’ll call George, since it’s possible you long-time Suffolkians might know him.

Now, George was a bit of a piece of work.

He and I had a few run-ins early in my time at NSA, until one day, when I made it quite clear to him that I wouldn’t be pushed around.

After that, we had a decent relationship — friendly if not exactly friends.

But George didn’t confine his trouble-making to me.

Let’s just say that he and the assistant headmaster at NSA were well acquainted with one another.

It’s possible some of y’all might have known Ray Carson, who was the assistant headmaster at NSA when I was there.

Sometime after I had graduated from that school, he and his wife went on to start Ray’s Dog House, which I always thought had the best hot dogs in Tidewater.

But when I was at NSA, Ray Carson was in charge of discipline, and in those days, discipline could extend to corporal punishment.

I remember delivering something to his office one day and seeing a big wooden paddle hanging on his wall and thinking that all the rumors I had heard about him must be true.

I don’t know if they were true or not.

Thankfully, I never had to find out.

But I suspect my classmate, George, knew quite well just what kind of discipline Mr. Carson could dispense.

Not that it really seemed to cause him to change his ways.

Now, we had a shared class, World Studies, in the ninth grade, and Mrs. Williams was our teacher.

This was a pretty intensive class in a pretty intensive school, and so it was pretty important that we all paid close attention and didn’t get ourselves up to trouble there.

That was a tall order for George.

He would do something silly, and then one of the girls near him would start giggling, and then everybody would be turned around, looking at them.

And then George would say something like, “Hey, what’s everybody looking at?”

And then the whole class would be laughing.

Everybody but Mrs. Williams.

To this day, I can remember what she would say to him and the tone she used, just as surely as if she were standing here and saying it right now.

“George, get yaself under control.”

Now, as I’ve thought about that through the years, I’ve been struck by something that I didn’t get back then.

Mrs. Williams loved George — at least in the sense that she wanted what was best for him and wanted to compassionately help him achieve it.

When I heard those words as a 13-year-old, I heard the command.

But as a 57-year-old, I now hear the compassion.

And as we begin this week to look at the Apostle Paul’s instruction manual for the church in the Book of Titus, I want you to notice the same things.

You might recall from last week’s message that the Cretans, to whom Paul’s protégé, Titus, was ministering, had something of a reputation for being the “Florida Man” of the Mediterranean.

Just as “Florida Man” has become a kind of shorthand for people caught in headline-grabbing debauchery today, Crete had a reputation for it in Paul’s time.

The Cretans were my classmate George, except all grown up and with no restraints.

It was into this environment that God had sent Paul and Titus to plant a church.

And I think that’s just wonderful.

What better way to show the world then and now the life-changing and people-changing power of the Holy Spirit than to have the Spirit at work sanctifying people who had been known far and wide for their debauchery?

That’s one of the things I love about overcomers ministries, where people whose lives have been shattered because of various addictions come to Christ and find healing.

When their friends and families see the change brought about by the Holy Spirit, they cannot help but wonder about the Savior who rescues us not just from addiction but also from our slavery to sin.

So, Paul had left Titus in this place, as he says in verse 5 of chapter 1, “to put what remained into order and appoint elders in every town.”

Now we’ll talk about elders and church organization in the coming weeks.

But today, I want us to look at what Paul has to say about church order — what’s expected of a church that is operating in an orderly fashion, in a way that makes it possible for people to hear the good news of the gospel, in a way that enables people to come to a knowledge of the truth.

We’re going to skip through this letter to Titus a bit today as we follow the thread that deals with church order, but let’s start in verse 1 of chapter 1.

And I’ll be preaching from the English Standard Version throughout this study, since that’s the version I memorized and recited for you last week.

Titus 1:1 (ESV)

1 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,

As God’s servant, Paul had brought the Cretans the message of a Savior who had died for their sins, and many of them had turned to Jesus in faith because of this message.

And as an Apostle of Jesus Christ, his job was to bring these new Christians the message of truth.

In other words, he had already shared with them the gospel, and now he was sharing with them the further truth of God’s word.

And one of the results that should come when Christians hear and understand God’s word is that they become more godly — more like Jesus and, hence, more like God.

We’ve talked about this many times before, but it bears repeating.

The purpose of salvation is to make believers more and more like Jesus.

This glorifies God, and glorifying God is the chief purpose for which we were all created.

That’s what makes sin so bad.

When we sin, we put ourselves above God.

We declare that we want to decide for ourselves what is right and what is wrong.

And in doing so, we conceal God’s glory, instead of revealing it in ourselves.

So, godliness is the aim of the knowledge of the truth.

And we see in verse 5 that godliness is characterized by order.

This shouldn’t surprise us, since in His very act of creation, God brought order out of chaos.

We see this in Genesis, chapter 1.

Genesis 1:1–3 (NASB95)

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters.

Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light.

The Hebrew word that’s translated as “formless” here can mean confusion or “a place of chaos.”

And the word that’s translated as “void” suggests a wasteland.

And the idea here is that when God began His six days of creating everything we can see or know, all that existed was chaos, wasteland, and darkness.

And then, He spoke, and there was light.

And through the rest of that week of creation, God brought order to the chaos.

Crete must have been a chaotic place during Paul’s time.

Already, there was a well-known saying by a Greek philosopher about that island, and Paul quotes it in this letter: “Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons.”

And so, it would have been necessary for the church he had planted in this chaotic place to be an ordered institution.

As such, it would reflect the character of God.

It would stand out from the lost and chaotic society in which it existed.

And it would be a place where the truth of God could actually be HEARD.

These are STILL the reasons for there to be order in the church.

And they are among the reasons that how the church is organized is important.

What sort of church polity promotes order and what sort promotes chaos?

Those questions are important to consider if we want to be a church that reflects the character of God, one that stands out from the lost world in which we minister, and one that proclaims the truth of the gospel for all to hear.

Now, beginning in verse 6 of chapter 1, Paul describes the qualifications and ministry of elders.

We’ll talk about elders in a couple of weeks, and when we do, we’ll look at these qualifications in more detail.

But today, I want to focus on the one that I think would have made Mrs. Williams glad to hear.

Look at verse 7.

Titus 1:7–8 (ESV)

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.

Do you see it?

An overseer (that’s another word for elder) must be self-controlled.

I can almost hear Paul’s voice here, and he sounds a lot like Mrs. Williams in my mind: “Get yaself under control, Cretans.”

Now, your translation may very well have a different word here.

The NASB reads “sensible.”

The New Living Translation says, “He must live wisely and be just.”

The King James Version uses the word “sober.”

All of these alternate translations are correct to a point.

The Greek word translates literally to “one of sound mind,” and each of the translations would suggest someone who is of sound mind.

But there is a passage that helps us get to the meat of this word’s meaning in one of the works of Josephus, who was a Jewish historian writing in Greek around the time of Jesus.

In Josephus’ history of the Jews, he wrote about the life of Joseph, Jacob’s son, who was sold into slavery and wound up in Egypt.

There, he eventually became a trusted servant in the home of Potiphar, who was a captain of the Pharaoh’s guard.

Now, you might recall the story of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife.

She wanted to sleep with him, but he refused over and over again.

Genesis 39:8–9 (NASB95)

8 But he refused and said to his master’s wife, “Behold, with me here, my master does not concern himself with anything in the house, and he has put all that he owns in my charge.