Book of Titus - Ch. 1, v. 15-Ch. 2, v. 1

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All righty, good morning, everybody. We all want to turn to Titus. We will finish chapter 1 this morning.

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And y 'all could go to verse 15. We'll just pick up right where we left off last week and segue into the very beginning of chapter 2.

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Let's see here. Hold on a minute. Okay, so we've covered verses 12 through 14 pretty well at this point, or actually 11 through 14, where Paul shifts his focus pretty straight on with regard to these false teachers that he alluded to earlier in the chapter.

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And he starts spelling out for us exactly what these guys are like. He doesn't spell out the heresies necessarily, at least in full detail, but he does spell out how bad these guys are.

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And so you get to verse 14, and all of the sudden, if we, let me go back a little bit further in verse 10, he's telling us about how, you know, there are many unruly vain talkers, deceivers, especially they of the circumcision.

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And so there's the first reference we get to these false teachers being of a particular

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Jewish sect that were doing their best to subvert whole houses and all that kind of stuff.

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And then you get to verse 14 here, and he expounds a little bit on this idea of who these guys are in some of the things they were bringing forth.

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He says in verse 14, not giving heed, he's telling Titus not to give heed to Jewish fables.

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So there's another reference to the fact that these are Jews that he is dealing with, not

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Jewish fables and commandments of men. We talked about last week how that is of particular interest because these aren't just commandments.

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This isn't just law. These are specifically invented commandments of men. This has nothing to do with God's laws, nothing to do with the

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Mosaic law. He says, don't give heed to that. He tells Titus, don't heed those things.

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And why can't we? It's because he says at the end of verse 14, they turn from the truth. And so these individuals themselves have turned from the truth already.

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These false teachers, and now they are trying to turn others from the truth through these fables, through these commandments that they invented and so on and so forth.

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So then we get to verse 15, which is where we left off last week, kind of right in the middle of it.

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Paul says in verse 15, unto the pure, all things are pure, but unto them that are defiled and unbelieving is nothing pure, but even their mind and conscience is defiled.

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Now, just for a little bit of recap, just a few thoughts we shared last week.

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What Paul is doing here in this verse is, this is so funny.

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I had to put my Sunday school lesson on Gemma's little Kindle because I ran out of printer ink. The reason I print is because I don't like relying on tech.

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Sometimes it fails and her Kindle keeps turning itself on and off. He's never done this before, isn't that weird? So if y 'all see me fiddling with this over here, that's why.

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But what Paul is doing here is he's taking the idea of trying to create your own rule book and sanctifying the inside of yourself, sanctifying your soul and your spirit from the outside in.

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He's taking that idea head on and he's explaining that actually the exact opposite is true.

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The exact opposite of what these false teachers are wanting to do. And really any sort of parasaical teaching does is it tries to make the outside, the things that the person does externally, the thing that purifies their insides.

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And he's saying it's the exact opposite. He points out the opposite truth, he points out the opposite, which is the truth, of course.

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And he echoes something that Jesus himself talked about during his ministry.

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And what he's saying in verse 15, when he says under the pure all things are pure and then he gives the flip side of that same coin, he's saying that if you are pure on the inside, you're pure on the inside, then everything that works out from that is pure, not vice versa.

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Now, again, we talked about this last week, it kind of goes without saying, in order for a person, a human being, a sinful human being, a fallen human being to be pure on the inside at all, that is an act of God.

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Well, what is that particular act? Interestingly enough, it's later on in this letter, we'll get to it eventually, but it is the washing of the regeneration of the

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Holy Spirit. That is what makes a person pure on the inside, it's an act of God. But when that happens, then everything that comes out from there will be pure.

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If you are pure on the inside and you are right with God, everything you do is pure, everything that you touch is purified.

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In the Bible, we mentioned this last week, Christians are referred to as saints over and over and over again.

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And the Greek term behind where we get the word saints literally means holy ones.

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And so God's people are intended to be holy ones and we are called saints. It means we are holy ones, we are set apart, we are being sanctified, we are a people being sanctified or consecrated, that's a synonym of that word.

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And as that happens, as we are being sanctified in our lives, it shows people around us can see it.

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People around us can see that we are living our lives differently than the majority of the world. And they take note of it, they notice it, they either mock it or they perhaps want it, perhaps it's something that they want, but regardless of how they view your sanctification, it's something that can't be hid.

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A Christian can't, there's no such thing as a Christian that totally blends in to the point where no one would ever know about it.

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Because the Christian himself can't let that happen, his conscience wouldn't let that happen.

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He talks about the Lord, he will take every opportunity the spirit leads him to evangelize, he will be, as he's being sanctified, he will be in the word more and more, he will be in prayer more and more, he will talk differently, his vocabulary will be different because he doesn't want guile to be found in his mouth, just like there was none in the mouth of the

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Lord Jesus, and so on and so forth. And so when Paul says, into the pure all things are pure, this is what he's talking about.

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He's talking about the fact that when a person is regenerated, when they are purified on the inside, their works on the outside magnify that.

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It's not, it doesn't have anything to do with Pharisees, it's similar to the guys that he is dealing with here, inventing the rule book, living by the rule book, and adding rules to it each and every year so that that way it's harder and harder for the common folk to keep their holiness code.

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There's the legitimate holiness code found in Leviticus, and then there's an invented holiness code that the

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Pharisees came up with. And they make it harder and harder for the normal people to keep their rules so that that way they can be holier than thou.

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And all of these types of things. They believe that doing that is what purifies their insides, and of course that's not the case.

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And one last thing, we mentioned this last week, it's worth repeating, it's important to point out here that when

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Paul says that all things are pure, that's a pretty exhaustive statement there, the way he words it.

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In the context that he is talking about, he's not referring to every little last thing a

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Christian does is pure. Obviously, when a Christian sins, that is not a pure thing.

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He's in the old man, he's not in the new man. Any kind of sin, any sort of disobedience toward the

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Lord, anything that goes contrary to biblical methodology, none of that is pure. So when

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Paul says all things are pure, what is he talking about? Well, in context, he is creating a contrast between the things these legalists would consider pure or unpure, and what

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God considers pure or unpure. And so the guys like what Titus is dealing with here are the kinds of guys that says you can't eat that, you can't eat this, you can only eat this, you can only observe these festivals, you can't observe these particular days, and you can go on and on and on.

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And Paul is saying no, what God says is clean is clean, regardless of what they say.

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And we mentioned the interesting story in Acts when the sheep is coming out of heaven with all of the unclean animals on it, and Peter is kind of freaked out by it, and God is saying, no,

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I say these are clean now, you can partake. And so that is what

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Paul is talking about in context here. But, and that's kind of where we left off last week.

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So now let's consider that phrase, under the pure all things are pure, in contrast with what comes after it.

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He says, but unto them that are defiled and unbelieving is nothing pure.

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So if the person's insides are rotten, they'll make everything that they touch rotten, all of their works will be defiled, all of their works will be a defilement in the eyes of the

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Lord, an abomination in the eyes of the Lord, which we'll talk about more in just a second. The mind of these particular people is defiled, their consciences are seared, and this is the making of the type of heretic that wants to go around subverting whole houses as we learned in verse 11.

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These are the kind of guys that wanna go around turning things upside down, which is what that means, to subvert a whole house.

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To the defiled and unbelieving ones, everything is corrupted, nothing they do is pure in the eyes of God.

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They are quick to declare anything else to be unclean because they themselves are unclean and they know it.

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That's why they create the rule book. The Lord put the conscience in human beings,

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He put His creation out there. People know that there's a God, whether or not they can know

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Him is on an intimate level, of course, is a totally another question because that's where the word and the spirit come into play.

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But every human being that's ever been born knows there is a creator. And these guys are no different, but these particular false teachers take it another step because it's at least implied that because of what

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Paul tells us with regard to their desire for filthy lucre and wanting to gain from the false teachings they're doing, that implies that they are aware of the true teachings.

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That implies they're aware of the types of things Paul would have been preaching when he was on the island of Crete some years prior to this letter being written.

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And they know it's in contrast with what Titus is gonna be preaching and probably has been preaching already. And so these are guys that are in absolute opposition to God's word.

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They know that they're doing it. And because of that, I believe that they are aware that they are unclean.

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I believe that they're, again, when Paul talks about consciences being seared in Romans, it implies that their conscience was working for a while and that it was trying to get them to stop defiling themselves in whatever way or manner they were.

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And so these guys knew at some point that they were unclean and that they were defiling everything that they were doing.

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And so because they have this feeling built into them by God as a mercy to restrain them until they reach the point of no return, because they have that in them and they don't want to turn, they invent the rule book and they try to declare things unclean so that they can feel clean when they know that they are unclean on the inside.

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Does that make sense? They're unclean and they know it. So what do they do about it?

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Rather than repenting and turning away from those things, turning their eyes to the Lord that is now risen and in heaven, and they know that testimony as well, rather than doing that, they want to deem other things unclean so that they can feel better about their unclean actions.

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So now let's take a look at verse 16, final verse of chapter one. It just gets better and better for these guys, sarcastically speaking.

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It says, they profess that they know God, but in works they deny him, being abominable and disobedient and unto every good work reprobate.

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And so Paul in verse 15, just in case these guys that would be hearing this letter inevitably didn't quite pick up what he was putting down as brother

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Myron would say, when he tells them unto the defiled and unbelieving is nothing pure.

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Verse 16, he just really, you know, really, really slaps them across the face.

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He says, they profess to know God, but in actuality, they're abominable, they're disobedient.

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Everything they do is reprobate. It does, you know, they are the bottom of the barrel. So it's interesting.

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Let's start with the phrase, they profess to know God. It's kind of interesting, given the people that we're working with here, given the people that Paul is talking about, they profess to know

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God. Why would anyone do that? There's gonna be some societal gain for many people in outwardly professing a belief in God.

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That is all over the place in the Bible belt. And really throughout the entire country, if you live in the

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West, maybe not in Europe anymore, sadly, but in the United States, in many places, there is still some societal gain to be had for professing faith in the

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Lord, even when you don't mean it. And in this particular instance, these false teachers knew that they would be having some sway with this populace of Crete because they're new believers.

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There's a lot of new believers. There's churches in every city. This is the island of a hundred cities, could have been even more than that.

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And there's a church in all of them, which we learn at the beginning of this letter. So there are Christians, there are new

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Christians everywhere. And so these false teachers are aware that if they outwardly profess faith in God, that they can have some sway with these people.

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The problem though is that our Lord himself gave a particularly damning discourse about these types of people, people that would do this kind of thing, that would profess knowledge and profess faith in God, but actually it was all for their own gain.

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Take a look at Matthew chapter seven for a second. Turn with me to Matthew seven. And let's take a look at what

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Jesus thinks about these kinds of guys that would do this, that would profess to know

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God and then be in direct opposition to his word knowingly, trying to disrupt the growth of his sheep, his legitimate saved people that are new in the faith.

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And so they don't know anything yet is little lambs. And then these wolves are coming in and attempting to subvert them.

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What does he think about these types of people? And it's all while they profess to know God, as Paul says here, look at verse 15 of chapter seven in Matthew.

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Jesus says, beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.

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Ye shall know them by their fruits. And that is a particularly important phrase there.

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You shall know them by their fruits. How do you know what's good fruit and bad fruit? Let's say that you're the young people, the young Christians, they weren't necessarily young in age, but they were all young in faith.

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How are they to get to the point where they know what's good fruit and bad fruit? Well, same reason, the same way that we do it 2000 years later, and that is abiding in God's word.

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So we know what bad fruit looks like. You know them by their fruit. So first, just quick note, for those of us in the room, we want to get to the point where we can recognize bad fruit as well.

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Dave brought this up kind of at the end of the lesson last week, in that the stronger churches, the more doctrinally solid of churches, all of these types of things, the members themselves can start to pick up on when there may be, picture your little perfect grove, your little pasture with the sheep in it, and you have a shepherd, and that shepherd is kind of walking around, checking things out, and on the opposite side of the field, all of a sudden there's some wolves lurking.

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Well, you can get to the point in this analogy where the sheep, they're not necessarily gonna be able to go fight the wolf because they're the sheep, but they can recognize there's an enemy out there and start making the noise and rumblings and sounds and letting the shepherd know, you need to come check this out.

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Well, this plays into that same idea we ended last week's lesson with. If you know them by their fruit, if all of us continue to abide in God's word, we can recognize bad fruit when we see it, and then we can go on from there.

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So Jesus says, you shall know them by their fruit. Very important. Do men gather grapes of thorns or figs of thistles?

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Even so, every good tree bringeth forth good fruit, but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit.

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A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit. Neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit.

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It's like the analogy that dad has mentioned many times in agriculture. This is the echo principle here.

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So this natural truth that Jesus is using is also true in the spiritual parallel. And so as dad has said, goats can't morph into sheep and sheep can't morph into goats.

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Jesus is saying a good tree can't produce bad fruit and a bad tree can't produce good fruit. It's true in agriculture.

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It's true spiritually speaking. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit. Neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit.

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That's verse 18. Verse 19 says, every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down and cast into the fire.

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Wherefore, by their fruits, ye shall know them. That last verse there,

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Jesus is giving us one more reminder of how important it is. Be on the lookout. What kind of fruit is being produced?

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And this is one of the ways that we're not carried around by every wind of doctrine. If you can recognize bad fruit, which you can only do when you spend time in God's word and know what bad fruit looks like.

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When you see that, you know to avoid it. But just prior to giving us that last reminder there in verse 20, he tells us what ultimately happens to these bad trees.

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They're hewn down, they're cast into the fire. These particular guys, and it's so interesting going back to Titus now.

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It's so interesting because remember what Paul tells Titus. He tells

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Titus something that to me is probably the most interesting little part of all of Paul's words in this first chapter.

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And it is in verse 13. We're back in Titus, where he says this witness is true.

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He confirms everything that their prophet says about them being liars, evil beasts, slow bellies.

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He says, all of that is true. Wherefore, because of all that rebuke them sharply. Okay, that all sounds right in line with everything

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Paul set up at this point. But then he throws in this little interesting phrase that they might be sound in the faith.

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So here's what it comes down to. We don't know, we can know bad fruit when we see it, we can avoid it.

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That's totally fine. That doesn't mean that God doesn't know this is actually just a tree that needs to be pruned a little bit, maybe, or something, just trying to keep in keeping with the analogy.

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We don't know, it's like Spurgeon said, we don't, the elect don't walk around with a big yellow E on their back.

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And so Paul is equipping Titus to do something spectacular. Something that is, would only work if there is a true living

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God behind the mission. And that is rebuke them, refute them, point out their error, point out where they're wrong and where they are in direct opposition with God's word, that they might be sound in the faith.

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Which means that there is a gospel message behind the refutation. There is gospel behind the rebuking.

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Sharp rebuking, I might add, or remind you all. And when that is done correctly, there is a chance that one is pulled out from that.

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We often talk about the wolves in sheep's clothing. We don't always think about the fact that sometimes there's a sheep in wolf's clothing that's out there trying to, thinking that they're on the right path or whatever it is.

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And really they just, they need to be slapped around a little bit with the stick and reminded of who they are. And then they come back into the fold.

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I often think about Doreen Irvine. This is a great example of this. And so she was the queen of the

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Black Witch Coven in London. And every one of us, when we had seen the evil work she did, she used to be, she had legitimate, dark, supernatural powers.

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She could point to a bird flying through the air and tell it to die and it would fall over. She had the legitimate powers of the devil behind her because she had submitted to his will.

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And once she goes into a church service to disrupt the church service, and in hearing the gospel, she is saved.

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How weird is that? And so there are gonna be times when we see someone, and let me say this, this is important.

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I'm not saying that we need to go fellowship with the witches because some of them might be sheep.

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I'm not saying that. So if you see a Doreen Irvine out there doing witchcraft, that's bad fruit and we should avoid that.

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So get away from it. The point is, it doesn't mean that the Lord is totally done with them from the human viewpoint.

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And there may be a chance that they are pulled out of that by some means out in the future. It may take a bold preacher like Titus, rebuking sharply, rebuking the witchcraft sharply, that they might be sent to the faith, but there's also a pretty good chance from the human viewpoint that that won't happen and they end up being a tree that has to be hewn down and cast in the fire.

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So if you want to reduce all of this into one moral of the story, it is don't mess with God's word and don't mess with God's people.

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You don't wanna be in that crowd because you might be a tree that will be hewn down and cast into the fire.

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The Lord is a merciful God, He's a gracious God, and so He does save the Doreen Irvines every now and then by His goodwill and pleasure.

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But more than likely from the human viewpoint, it will be a tree that's hewn down. So that was a little bit of a rabbit trail.

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In spite of these guys' profession of faith, because in verse 16, they profess that they know

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God, in spite of that, they are actually abominable, disobedient, and under every good work, reprobate.

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Now, why would they profess to know God that they are willfully denying in practice?

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We kind of already answered this, societal gain and things like that. Well, again, there's one other reason of this and it's also important to keep in mind because think about the victims in this context.

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Who are the victims? They're the young Christians around Crete, right? So why would they profess to know

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God? Well, it's because their victims are Christians. They are Christians trying to go to church and these false teachers know that.

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So they have to profess to know God because it's the first act in their deceptive ploy to pull these people away from God's word and then to teach them things like, well, you need circumcision to be saved or something.

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But what's interesting about it is in their attempted deception of God's people, in the process of doing that, they become something horrific, something really scary.

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They become abominable. And this is the Greek word, bedel euktos, and it means detestable.

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And what's interesting about it is it's the word that's used in talking about detestable idols.

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So in the way that an idol is detestable or abominable to God, these men, these people are abominable to God.

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But notice also that while Paul uses the same term that will be used to describe an abominable idol, he now uses it toward these people.

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In other words, these people are abominable to God, not just their actions, not just the effects of their teaching or works.

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They themselves are abominable. The person is abominable. Look at Isaiah 41 for a second. This is fascinating.

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Isaiah 41. And this isn't the only passage in the Old Testament that fleshes out this idea, but this is a pretty potent example of it.

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Isaiah, turn to chapter 41. And this is right in the middle of one of my favorite large passages of scripture where it's

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God talking in the first person and he is acting as if he is talking to a crowd of gods.

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He's acting like he has a courtroom filled with gods and he's asking them some questions to test their deity.

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That's what he's doing throughout this whole passage. And let's start in verse 21. The whole chapter is amazing, but we don't have time to read the whole thing.

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So just look at verse 21, and we're gonna see some of the rhetorical things that God is saying to these gods so -called.

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He says in verse 21, produce your cause, sayeth the Lord, bring forth your strong reasons, bring forth your case.

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Show me, show me how you're your God. Show me how you're a God, how you're a deity. You have all these people worshiping you.

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So show me what you got, is what God is saying. Bring forth your strong reasons, sayeth the King of Jacob.

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Let them bring them forth and show us what shall happen. Let them show the former things, what they may be, that we may consider them and know the latter end of them or declare to us things to come.

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Verse 22 is really amazing. What God just said is he says, show us the past.

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And at first we might think, okay, well, what's the big deal there? Because I mean, any of us could pop open a history book and can take a look at some things and talk about what happened in the past.

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What he's saying is show us the past. But then what he says after that is tell us why it happened.

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Now, that's a totally different ballpark. That's something none of us can do. None of us can look at the past and give a clean sweep of exactly why each and everything has happened the way that it happened.

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Only God can do that. And he knows, and God knows that. So he's saying, show us what you got.

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Tell us what happened in the past, but more importantly, tell us why everything that happened happened.

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And then of course he ends the verse by saying, or declare to us what will happen. So tell us the future. So both sides of that amazing historical timeline.

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And he says in verse 23, show the things that are to come hereafter, that we may know that you are gods.

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Let's confirm it. Yea, do good or do evil, that we may be dismayed and behold it together.

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Do something. Even if it's evil, maybe then we'll at least be able to deliberate and figure something out.

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But he knows these are all rhetorical statements. These are dumb, dead idols that were invented by men's hands.

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It's all to prove the point, obviously. Let us be dismayed and behold it together. But look at verse 24.

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This is the whole reason we came to this passage. Look at verse 24. Behold, you, talking to the gods, are of nothing, and your work is of nothing.

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But look at this. An abomination is he that chooses you.

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So obviously the idols are abomination too. There are plenty of passages where we see that the gods are referred to, the false gods are referred to as an abomination.

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But here, Jehovah makes a specific point to say those that worship you are an abomination.

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The people, not just the gods, but the people that accept you are an abomination.

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God has never taken idolatry lightly, not even a little bit, because what it is, what idolatry is, and it sounds so trivial to us because we don't walk around anymore seeing people worshiping trees on the side of the road.

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If we saw that, it may hit us a little bit harder like it should. All idolatry today, well, not all, the

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Roman Catholics venerating icons and things, this is a pretty good example, actually, but most of the time, idolatry in the 21st century involves worship of the self.

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We've talked about this a lot in this study. And so sometimes idolatry seems trivial just because we don't see it as vividly as the people did in the

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Bible days. But the reason it's such an abomination is because it is tantamount to a wife having the perfect husband who treats her perfectly all the time and yet commits adultery against him continuously.

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That's what idolatry is. She is committing adultery against her husband in spite of him being perfect.

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So in both of these passages, in Titus and in Isaiah, the strongest language is being used to describe these spiritual adulterers.

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In the case of Isaiah, the Lord is saying that the worshipers of the idols are abominable.

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In Titus, Paul is saying that these false teachers are as abominable or as detestable as those that commit adultery against the

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Lord. That's what Paul is saying. That's how bad these guys are. Now, let's take a look really quick at the first verse of chapter two in Titus, and then we'll end for today.

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So that's chapter one. We are done with chapter one of Titus now. We'll look at chapter two, verse one, and we have the perfect follow -up to the whole chapter, naturally.

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Paul exhorts Titus to be the kind of man after laying out the abominable character traits, acts, teachings, all of it, of these particular false teachers for verses, you know, several verses in succession.

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And Paul exhorts Titus now to be the kind of man that is opposite or antithetical to these false teachers.

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And how does he do this? How does Paul exhort Titus to all of this? Look at verse one of chapter two.

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But, so there's the contrast, but speak thou the things which become sound doctrine.

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Now, consider this first thought of chapter two as a primary duty of the pastor.

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So we're talking about elders again just for a second, but chapter two is about to totally switch it onto the members of local churches.

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But he's still talking about the pastor a little bit here. And consider this statement or this idea to be, again, a primary duty.

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Paul has already emphasized the need for soundness in doctrine, in faith, in study.

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He did this twice already in the first chapter. In verse nine of the first chapter, if you recall, he says, holding fast the faithful word as has been taught, that he may be able by sound doctrine, both to exhort and to convince the gainsayers.

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And then in verse 13, he says it again, wherefore rebuke them sharply that they may be sound in the faith.

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So he's already addressed this a couple of times. This idea of soundness. Now, this is the third time in a very short span of verses that this idea has come forth.

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And it won't be the last time either. He's gonna bring it up again here in just a couple of verses. We'll get to it eventually. And what it means to be sound in something in the way that Paul is talking here, it simply means to be in good health.

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So healthy doctrine, healthy faith, healthy doctrine so that you can exhort, and so on and so forth.

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So just the straight up literal meaning of the Greek term Paul is using is to be in good health when he says sound.

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But obviously, Paul is applying this term into the spiritual. So in this context, he's talking about good spiritual health.

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In order to have good spiritual health, speak the things which become spiritually healthy.

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He tells him, speak thou the things which are spiritually healthy. Okay, he says one more, just the first phrase at the beginning of the verse there when he says, but speak thou, and then he goes on to tell him what to speak.

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If you look at the Greek, it just means literally he's looking at Titus, and he just gave him this long discourse on the type of enemy he's about to face.

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And then he looks at Titus in the face, and he says, but you, and then he goes on to tell him what to do.

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He's setting Titus straight, he's giving him the foundation. He's telling him exactly what to do.

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He's giving him the exact instructions on how not to ever be like those other men. He looks at him, and he says, but you, in other words, in contrast to these detestable acts of the false teachers, you,

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Titus, do this. You, Titus, speak the things fitting for sound doctrine.

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So Titus is commanded here as an exemplary pastor for all pastors that are to come for 2 ,000 years after him.

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Titus is commanded here to be committed to the health of the church. That is, again, one of the primary duties of the pastor.

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Does anyone have any thoughts or anything like that before I continue? We still have about five minutes, but I want to give y 'all some time.

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Yes, sir. Okay. Okay. Okay.

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Right. Oh, sure.

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And probably, I mean, it sounds like he's saying it's impossible for a

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Christian to bear that fruit, but I think that's in the new man. Right, sure.

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Okay, so a couple of things is there's really only one thing to tell, if you were to want to avoid the endless debates with, and I know the person you're talking about.

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You're talking about Bryson, right? Yeah. Okay. If you're, so if you're talking to a person like that and you don't, if you don't have the time for the long debate, and they're always just nagging you about, oh, see, salvation is works -based because Jesus just said you will bear good fruit, et cetera, is you have to tell them, and you have to be honest about it, the only way you can be honest about it is if you are reading your

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Bible. But you have to tell them, look, I take the whole Bible for what it says, the whole

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Bible, not just parts of it. So if you take just a few verses out of the book of James, for example, you could build whole denominations and doctrines on works -based salvation.

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If you took only Jesus's few words in these few verses, you could build, sure, a whole idea, a whole doctrinal platform on works -based salvation.

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But when you take it, the whole Bible, and you let the Bible interpret itself, what you find is that initial salvation is a work of God because it would be an impossibility for a spiritually dead being to raise himself from the grave.

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So when Jesus tells Lazarus to come forth out of the grave, Lazarus couldn't have done anything prior to that.

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Lazarus didn't do a good work to come out of the grave. And so Jesus says, come forth, and he obeys, and he's just alive again all of a sudden.

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But then what happens? Lazarus then has a life to live. When we as Christians are regenerated, that is a work of the

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Holy Spirit, which interestingly enough, again, is in this book of Titus that we're studying. It is a work of God, but then we have a life to live, and that's why we do have passages that exhort us to live according to, live a godly lifestyle.

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That's why we have the book of James to tell us what it looks like to live after regeneration occurs and things like that.

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But then, of course, it comes back to the question of security of salvation. And again, to that, you have passages upon passages,

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Old and New Testament, that talk about, it always comes back to the analogy of the shepherd and his sheep.

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And of course, Jesus' prayer in John 17 sums it all up, that the shepherd cannot lose his own.

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And so they can't, yes, I see that people can take certain passages out of context, build a doctrine on having to live by works in order to stay saved.

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But if you take those passages along with eternal security passages and salvation being the work of God, together, what you find is that God is simply working with us and through us as we live these lives and become sanctified and so forth.

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Which then separates us from every sub. Well, it's what makes us holy, which means separate.

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Dad, did you have a thought? Yeah, I was going to say, the name of God is that which brings us back.

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Right. So it has the idea of continual sin.

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So when a Christian passes out, there's that proof that you, Christian, are going to be saved later in life, like me.

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Something happens in the PST, and you've sinned and cursed for it. Does that mean you've now lost the salvation because of that bad proof?

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Well, not unless he does that continually. Good doubt, huh? No, you're right.

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I just had a big thought. I'm talking about the children of the conserved, the kings of the land. Right, I'm just saying.

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No, you see them doing sinful lifestyle continually. Right. That's different than someone messing up once.

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You've already lost it a lot. Of course. That's the argument we have with that guy because he's trying to discern that as in, if you make a mistake, then you've got to be saved again.

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It doesn't teach that. What it teaches is, if you see a human being that you're around for, you know, good watchers, it takes time to watch people.

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If you watch them continually do these sins, that is not the same thing.

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And let me throw in one other thought too, which is important. The specific context of this little five verses of Jesus that's in question here is in the context of false prophets.

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And so he's not even talking about every person, but he's talking about men that are going to great lengths to contradict the written word, including the

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Old Testament, because that's what they had at the time, in contradiction with God's word, in order to, back to Titus, subvert people and to trip them up.

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And so these false prophets, you will know them by their fruit. And if they remain in that place in their lives, they will be hewn down.

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It casts the fire. That's a weird. Go ahead, Ash. You're arguing that because he's taking it out of context.

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But I think what dad mentioned is very important because let's go ahead and just apply it.

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Let's say for argument's sake, we apply it. It's talking about habitual sin where there's no confession of it.

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There's no belief that they're actually doing anything wrong. And that's the huge difference between a believer and a non -believer, is the believer, as dad has said hundreds of times, is they're terribly hurt by their transgressions against God.

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I guess, real quick, sometimes the reason that you will be confused is

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I think it's clear that a bad tree can't produce good fruit. But it seems that by our understanding, it seems like good trees can produce bad fruit because we do.

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So this comes back to when we say things like it seems, and I know what you're talking about because I feel the same way.

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It comes back to by what standard does it seem? So by man's standards, yes, the worst rupper bed out there can seem like the holiest guy in town in the sense that he's a good guy, he's helping people out, and buying people groceries, funding non -profits.

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It's not that there's absolutely no truth in him. He can acknowledge truth and he can say things that are true.

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But if he believes that he can be regenerated through knowledge without the spirit, then he is basically, he doesn't have the spirit.

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You have a thought, Mimi? Yeah, it goes back to, I think, I always think of the scribes and pharisees who were presented as white sepulchers but full of dead man's bones.

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You can take an apple that's beautiful on a tree, cut it open and it'd be rotten on the core. It's a bad fruit.

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Just because a fruit looks good doesn't mean you didn't put a fruit. Well, and sometimes some people discover that it's bad by taking a bite out of the apple, right?

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And so sometimes, it's not like we can just sit back and be prescient, however you say that word, in the sense that it's like, oh, that sector of Navarro County over there has bad fruits,

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I'm not even gonna go over there. Sometimes, we will step into it. They have a form of godliness, which could be deceiving.

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You can pull even good people in. Then you take a bite out of the apple and then that's when you separate from there.

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And so it all comes back to we're living our lives, we are being sanctified, and the

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Lord will use trials like that, like perhaps being under a false teacher for a little bit for you to learn some things to never do again.

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Dad experienced this in his own life. Maybe not to the level of these guys, but he taught some false things that weren't very good, but what did the

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Lord do with that? He used it to sharpen Dad and Mom and some others that were under that particular teaching.

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Always remember, this is an allegory. Allegory is a never perfect model of how stuff really works.

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There could be things to be taken in general. That's right. I was gonna say this earlier, too.

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It's a generalization. To take specifically for, that's what that is for you.

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Right. Because we see good people who aren't saved, and we've seen good. And we've seen saved people, we've seen saved people who do terrible things that hurts the whole church.

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Yeah. But they're really saved. Right. If they were dead. That's interesting,

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I think. Well, what? Just in general, and here you're planting your thing out here.

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It is a false teacher, by the way. He won't take that generality of that and make it too specific.

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So he's not using proper Bible interpretation methods. But you've got at least three different points you can attack him on.

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That's one, one, two, one, how to do that. Three is another one. Well, I haven't reached out to him in weeks and he's not responding to that.

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Just to piggyback off of what dad was just saying there, and this is helpful to just remember, is in the

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Gospels, many times Jesus is talking to thousands of people. In fact, the context of this little thing in chapter seven is the

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Sermon on the Mount. So he's got thousands of people he's preaching to. And when any preacher, when any prophet is talking to multitudes of people, generalization is a necessary rhetorical tool.

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You have to generalize. When you get into the epistles, you have Paul and Peter and John and James starting to write to specific people or at most a local church.

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And so it's a little bit more refined. You start to have, in fact, in Titus chapter two that we're about to get into, it is very specific standards down to the individual level, standards of living to the individual level.

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So that can be helpful to remember sometimes is remember the audience as well, because depending on the audience, it may be a generalization or it may be very specific pointed thing.

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Yes, Ash? Oh, sorry. No, no. I had a thought at the beginning of your lesson about the term.

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I've been reading a book that is helping me pick homeschool curriculum and it's relevant.

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But one of the things he's addressing, can you make a pinpoint, a presupposition in an English lesson?

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And one of the prevalent ones is not from personal praise through a belief that men are neutral and can be good as long as you educate them.

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So they come to goodness through education. Well, in this situation in Titus, these men are using the authority of God.

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They're claiming God for the sake of authority. And then teaching people they can come to them through knowing what they have to give.

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So they're really taking these people captive by offering them, and some of these may be regenerate people, people that are genuinely safe, but they're children and then they recognize that they're shepherds.

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But they can't point out where necessarily these very educated teachers, where their presuppositions are.

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And so the sheep are being attacked in a way that it's like, follow me,

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I have the food. Because I'm saying all of these true things about God. I'm agreeing with Paul here.

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And you know, an atheist can teach two plus two to a full score, but they don't know why.

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And they can't relate it to the world around them at all. Because the fundamental theology is broken.

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Yeah. Right. They don't even know what to do about it. So there's lots of truth that can be taught because it's stolen or borrowed.

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And it looks like good proof. But if the end goal is this is what, if your regeneration is dependent on you knowing what

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I am, being a follower of me, then you know, Satan is very settled in that.

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It's not really good proof. Good proof comes from the spirit which is in us that is a self -sacrificing love which most people don't have.

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These false teachers don't have a self -sacrificial love that comes from Jesus' invulnerableness.

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The first John is great because it breaks it down to like the simplest, like this is the spirit that is in you because this is the spirit that was in Jesus when he died for our world.

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And he addresses children in the faith, he addresses young men in the faith, and he addresses old men in the faith.

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All in first John. And I always go back to it when questions like this pop up because there's such sophistication and such knowledge in false teachers that it really, you have to go way back to the fundamentals and think about what, like follow people's logic back.

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What do they think about men? Do men need a savior at all? Can men really save themselves without any good proof?

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No, that's not how it works. It will be here now. You can have the pre -example and that's all you can have.

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Jesus is the spirit, that's where it is. Right, well let me, let me end with this thought and then we'll pray.

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Jesus, the apostles, the writers of the New Testament, when they are talking to their fellow believers, their brothers and sisters, the large majority of the time they are assuming the new man.

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So when they talk to us, they are talking to the real us. The real us is the new man that's been regenerated and the new man can only bear good fruit.

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So that can be helpful to remember sometimes too. Oh, yes sir. Also, Matt, when we got all those false people, just asking them to keep reading the text, look at the context, because right after that verse,

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Jesus said, not everybody who comes to me says the Lord orders. Ha ha. Yes.

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They prophesy, they speak in tongues. Even if you don't remember it, it's still gonna help you in the argument.

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Yeah. Yeah, pop up. That is some irony there.

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Yeah. Right. The devil used the words of God in a bad way.

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Right. That's right. And we'll pick up on that thought.

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Right. It all just comes together. Well, let me pray, because I got a bunch of people back there waiting.

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Heavenly Father, thank you for this wonderful day and for these wonderful people in this room as we all gather as brothers and sisters to talk about your word and to refine our thinking, to renew our minds, to use our minds the way that you intended us to.

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And that being, of course, to look at your word and to see how whole and complete and consistent it is.

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And Lord, though we may face some uncomfortable battles, battles that you bring before us by your own will to strengthen us and to get us ready for even bigger battles later, we ask,

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Lord, that we remain strong, faithful, and just like these men that are being talked about in Titus here, getting ready for the battles that they will face.