Titus 1:1-9 Why Leadership?

Leadership as a Biblical Good

Welcome to the podcast of Recast Church in Mattawan, Michigan. This week, Pastor Don Filsak preaches from his series, To the Next Generation, learning from Paul's words to Titus. Let's listen in.

Well, good morning and welcome to Recast Church. As Linda said, I'm Don Filsak. I am the lead pastor here, and I'm really glad for this gathering, glad for the opportunity to be together this morning.

God has drawn us all together into this place, hopefully for our encouragement, for our correction, for worship, for community, and for service. I hope that's a fundamental reason why you come to this place on Sunday mornings is for the community and for hearing from his word.

It's been so awesome to see what God has done in these past 15 years as a church, and I'm really grateful to be called to lead this church for all of these years. Yet, to be completely honest, I kind of segue into starting off the book of Titus here.

The reality is it's a blessing to lead, but it also is something that has been borderline terrifying to me over the years, the idea of leading anyone, leading God's people. Part of that is because my life started when I was very young.

Anybody with me on that? I've just kept growing from there, and I learned a lot about leadership from bad examples. Any of you in the room would raise your hand and say, you've seen some bad examples of leadership?

Maybe we've seen some corporately. Maybe we've seen some politically. I don't know. There's all different kinds of bad leaders, and I've learned a lot from that. I watch people and have actually been in the front row seat to watch people destroy church through gossip and slander.

I've served under leaders plagued with apathy and laziness and cynicism. Well, you would do the same if you were me, and you wait until you're older. You will also plagiarize. You will also do this. I've heard all kinds of quotes.

I grew to see within my own heart as well, not just others, but I've grown to see within my own heart sinfulness that left unchecked would render me unqualified. It would leave me unqualified, right? All that I take very seriously, and so then now I'm a pastor.

As we dive into the book of Titus, we're seeing a baton being passed. The two Timothys in Titus are letters written by Paul to younger men he has mentored and is mentoring in leadership. And as we walk through Titus, we're seeing the kind of things that God wants to pass along from one generation of the church to the next generation of the church.

And really, he's focused on that leadership aspect, and we'll see that here this morning on the next generation of church leaders. And we start off right out of the gate considering leadership in the church.

In this passage, we're going to see two kind of primary movements. Before I read it here, just to get our minds wrapped around what we're going to be looking at, we're going to see the purpose of leadership in the first four verses and then the character of qualified leaders for the remainder of the text.

And it's really a timely message for us. I think Scripture is always timely. It always meets us where we're at. It always speaks into our situation, but it's timely because we live in a day and an age that's just about ready to throw in the towel on the concept of authority and leadership.

At all.

We all know some story of failed leadership. Many of us, as I've testified, have lived it. And it's a reasonable question that we are asking in our culture and society at large, why do we even need leaders?

And have you ever thought that question? Why do we even need leaders? Nobody is better than anybody else, so why elevate someone to be in charge? Why not pure democracy and everybody just votes? And why not flatten everything to just live and let live, right?

Why not just a little, little dose, our culture just desires a little dose of anarchy? Because we have this false notion in our minds that maybe things would run better if people were just allowed to do their own thing.

That's silly. But when we are, and we do, when we place and we elect and we nominate or otherwise install leaders over us, we are doing a biblically revealed thing. The Bible tells us of leadership. It tells us of governance.

It talks about kings and elders and judges and rulers and shepherds and pastors, and most importantly, the God who is the supreme authority over all.

Amen?

It tells us of Him. And it is a very part of the created order that there is hierarchy, that there is leadership. But rather than throw out, so then what we're called to do as a church is rather than throw out leadership as an outmoded, hopeless institution, we are instead being called within the church to consider the purpose of leadership and the character qualities required for that leadership within the church.

And I think it's interesting that when Paul is seeking to pass along wisdom to a young man in ministry, Titus, he starts by talking about leadership. Because as many of us have experienced, the quality of the appointed leadership in a church is defining to the health of the body.

Would you agree with me on that? The quality of the leadership is partly defining of the health of the body. And some of you who have lived through difficult and bad leadership, you know what I'm talking about because things get unhealthy quite quickly from the top down.

Titus as Paul’s Model of Church Leadership

So let's open our Bibles. Let's open your Scripture journals or your devices to Titus, starting in the book of Titus, starting in verse 1 through verse 9. And recast as I love to tell you every week, this is God's holy word.

I get the privilege of reading it and explaining it later, but this is the word of God. So we have the, it's just an awesome thing that we have the opportunity here in writing to hear what God has to say to us this morning.

Paul, a servant of God and an apostle of Jesus Christ, for the sake of the faith of God's elect and their knowledge of the truth, which accords with godliness in hope of eternal life, which God, who never lies, promised before the ages began and at the proper time manifested in His word through the preaching with which I have been entrusted by the command of God our Savior to Titus, my true child in a common faith.

Grace and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Savior. This is why I left you in Crete, so that you might put what remained into order and appoint elders in every town as I directed you. If anyone is above reproach, the husband of one wife and his children are believers and not open to the charge of debauchery or insubordination.

For an overseer as God's steward must be above reproach. He must not be arrogant or quick-tempered or a drunkard or violent or greedy for gain, but hospitable, a lover of good, self-controlled, upright, holy, and disciplined.

He must hold firm to the trustworthy word as taught, so that he may be able to give instruction and sound doctrine and also to rebuke those who contradict it.

Let's pray.

Father, You are our shepherd. Jesus Christ is the head of our church. It would be awesome if all of us could just follow Him, if He would get up and preach to us. I know that He's able to speak to us through the Word and convict us and guide us and direct us, but You have seen fit, as clearly revealed in Your Word, to guide us through leadership, through fallen and broken people like me.

And so, Father, I pray that You would make this message, make this passage come alive to us in a way that demonstrates to each one here the value of accountability, the value of relationship, and the value within the church that everyone would take on this message.

That it's not just for leaders, for their conviction, that they would be less angry and a little less quick-tempered and love their wives a little bit more and everybody else gets to sit this one out.

But, Father, that You are speaking to all of us the way that You desire Your church to go and that churches would be healthier if all of the people within the church knew the standard. Father, I pray for the leaders in our community.

I pray for the church leaders. I pray for hearts that desire You, that are hungry for You, that are holding fast to Your Word, that they would be moved to love You more.

I pray that for me.

I pray that for our elders. I pray that for all who lead in any capacity here, even including those who head up households.

Here.

Father, I pray that You would be moving all of us to understand what it means to live a life that is of faith, in the knowledge of the truth, leading us toward increased godliness. Father, I thank You for Jesus Christ and what He's done for us.

That is my hope. That is the place where my firm hope as a leader stands. That is the place where praise begins. That is the place where I can lift my eyes up from competing with everybody else in this room to try to be better than them, to recognize that, no, I am worse than them, but by Your grace, You have rescued me.

You've rescued us. So I pray that this act of praise, this act of singing praises to You now would be an opportunity for us to be leveled. An opportunity for us to all lift our eyes up to our King, to the one who has the right rule and demonstrates for us perfect leadership.

And it's in Jesus' name that I pray.

Amen. Amen.

Yeah, you can go to be seated and then get comfortable and re-find your way to Titus chapter 1, verses 1 through 9. Again, just as much as possible to keep our focus on God's Word during our time together.

And if at any time you need to get up and use the restrooms or get more coffee or juice or donut holes, that's not going to distract me. So feel free. But whatever it takes to keep our focus on God's Word, that's our goal.

Now, I could technically take all of Titus 1 as one message, but then we'd be here a.

Little bit longer.

But it all highlights the need for leadership. So that's all of chapter 1 in verses 1 through 4. Paul's greeting serves a dual purpose of both greeting Titus and identifying the purpose for which he, Paul, has been called into leadership.

And then the bulk of our text this morning is verses 5 through 9, a fairly, maybe potentially familiar passage to many of us that identifies the character qualities that God gives to a man who is called to lead in His church.

And then next week, we're going to look at the dangers that face a church that highlight the need for qualified leadership. And so some of you might be tempted to like kind of tune this one out. Think, oh, this sermon isn't for me because this is just for church leaders, right?

Like this is one about leadership, and the elders really need to hear this one, and the pastors of churches need to really hear this one. But you are here, you are all here in a church, and understanding what you're looking for in leadership is vital to the health of this church.

The more of us that understand, this is just fact, the more that people within a church understand this passage and apply it, the more healthy that church will be. And I would dare say that there's an easy slide into laziness when it comes to things like this, and just we'll leave that to the experts, we'll leave that to others.

And then a church finds themselves in a pickle with really poor leadership and not knowing what to do about it. So it's never enough for the leadership to know what they are to be, it is very important for all of us, the church, to understand who is it that God declares to be qualified to lead among us.

Everything in these opening nine verses can easily be tied to leadership, and I think they're intended to be. The first four verses are one large tangled run-on sentence of introduction. Greek, the Greek language itself is notorious for run-on sentences, and then Paul seems to perfect the art of the run-on sentence.

So all verses one through four, look at it in the text as we kind of walk through it, it's all one sentence. So it can be a little hard to diagram a sentence like that. There's a lot of subordinate clauses in there, and those of you, some of your eyes just rolled back in your head when I said that because English isn't you.

You speak it, but you're like, I don't dissect sentences very often. That's fine, because I do, so we'll work through this together. But we find, so that what I'm saying is, this is a tangled sentence, and therefore it might lose you, but I'll simplify it by the end.

So in the process here, we might have a little bit of a tangled way to the main point. But we find within this passage the very purpose of church leadership. Why, in these first four verses, why does God do this?

Why does He raise up people? Why do we want someone over us? Why isn't a church a leaderless organization where decisions are just merely made by consensus? Everyone has parallel roles and parallel functions.

And the short answer to that is God told us to appoint leaders. So how many of you know that if He tells us in Scripture to appoint leaders, we should appoint leaders? Okay, so that's good for many of us, but He's also gracious to declare to us why He did so.

Why has He set it up this way? First, we see that Paul is an example of a church leader, and we see this from the beginning. There's a couple of titles that he takes for… or takes for granted for a church leader.

They are a… he will say… throughout this passage, he will use the word elder, he will use the word slave, he will use the phrase apostle for himself, and he will use the word steward. And those are all passages that help to define this.

But starting off in verse 1, he identifies himself as an example of a church leader, as a slave of God and one apostle sent by God. The root of the word apostle is a sent one. He is owned by God. That's the idea of being a slave to Him.

Owned by God and authoritatively called by God is what he's getting at here in verse 1. And I think it's appropriate to take Paul as a model in this while being careful to not overextend the metaphor, the example.

Because here's what I want to say at the outset. Paul is a slave of God and so am I. Paul is a slave of God and so is to be any leader of the church, meaning that we are owned by Him and recognize His authority over us.

That's very key to leadership. That's not oppressive, not meant to be oppressive in the least, despite the fact that slave is a really strong word and even softened in many of our translations to bondservant or servant or something like that.

But it is just straight up the Greek word for slave in the Roman Empire. And it's not meant to be oppressive. He is a good, kind, benevolent, and gracious Lord and master. He is one that I desire to be owned by.

He is one that I desire to follow. And I desire for Him to be the one to call the shots. But Paul was an apostle in a way that I'm not. So I'm called to be a slave like he was a slave to Christ, to God.

But he was an apostle in a way that I am not and that our church leadership is not. He saw the risen Lord with his own eyes. He was called in that first apostolic generation to establish the church throughout the known world.

He observed and saw the ministry of Jesus and then saw Him raised. And those were requirements for apostleship. And that's pretty well attested, especially in passages like Acts, where they appoint a new apostle because Judas is no longer in their ranks.

And so, and the way that they do so is highlighted there. But I am called by Jesus too. I'm not called to be an apostle, but I still am called. And so is everyone who finds themselves in church ministry.

They are called by the standard of God. And I don't think of the calling as as much a beforehand thing, as much as a responsibility in the ministry. When I was in my youth, I considered pre-med as a serious option.

And engineering was up there. And I went and toured MSU. I went to Adrian College. I went to various colleges before my junior and senior year and checked them out. And I was very, very, very, very, very close to going to Adrian College to study pre-med and play soccer there.

And I truly believe that God could have been honored by that. I don't think that would have been a secondary calling, or that would have been less than being a pastor or something like that. If God had called me to be a doctor, I would have done that for his glory and for his honor.

But I ended up going to Bible College in South Carolina. And through the twists and turns, all guided by the hand of God, I landed in a place of leadership 15 years ago. I mean, well, 20 years ago now at Berean Baptist Church in Portage, who then 15 years ago sent me out to be the lead pastor of Recast Church.

And you say, Don, when were you called to be a pastor? When were you called to be a pastor? And Linda chuckles because she's like, I don't know. I don't remember that. I was terrified of the thought of being a pastor.

And then I woke up one day and I was. And the time when the calling matters the most, the time when the sense of what God is calling me to do, in the day in and day out, the calling matters the most the day I woke up as a pastor.

Do you know what I'm saying? That's the day that it mattered the most. That's when the remainder of verses 1 through 3 came into effect in my life. Because when God takes one of his servants and sends them into a leadership position within his church, he does so with three purposes in mind that are spelled out in these verses.

Look at verse 1. Paul was sent to the church. That is, that's the root word apostle, sent one. He was sent to the church for the sake of the faith of God's elect. Every leader is called to leadership and placed to grow the faith of God's holy chosen people.

Why have I been sent here in our midst? Why am I here in Matawan? For our faith. For our faith. That you would trust and believe God more and more. That you would lean on him more and more because of my ministry here with us.

And that defines a significant portion of my calling. Every leader in a church context must come to this conclusion in order to fulfill what God desires of a leader in a church. That they exist and have been placed in leadership for the furtherance and the growth of the faith of their congregation or those who follow them.

And this removes so many competing narratives about what a pastor's job is. Is he the CEO of a church? Is he primarily the PR guy for the church? There's all different kinds of things that we're being told a pastor is to be.

But in truth, I am the CFO of the church. Not chief financial officer, the chief faith officer. A bit cheesy, I know. But yeah, the CFO, the chief faith officer. God has chosen us, he says in the text.

My ministry is to the faith of the elect. He has chosen us by his divine election. And then he grows our faith through men who have been given more time than the average person to mine into the depths of God, to mine into the depths of a relationship with God, and to mine into the depths of his word to bring it to light for us that our faith might grow.

And that's the second purpose of leadership. I am also sent here for the sake of your knowledge of the truth. You see that in the text. I'm sent for the sake of your knowledge of the truth. Faith grows in the soil of knowledge.

It's not a check your... The church is not a check your brain at the door and just feel feelings about God together. It is about knowledge. That's why we dissect and dig into God's word together. Now, we know that knowledge is not enough.

Knowledge is never enough. Without faith, knowledge, it just puffs up. It just makes us arrogant and proud. But that doesn't mean that knowledge is worthless. Many people know a lot of things about God without faith.

But once faith has been established in a human heart, and I believe that the vast majority of people in this room have faith already established in your heart, therefore, I don't mind going to knowledge.

Because now, once faith is established in your heart, knowledge of the truth grows us. Do you know what I'm talking about?

It grows us.

When we come to understand in our brains God's word and know what he desires of us, coupled and hitched to faith, that's the engine of the Christian life. That's where power comes into a life. When you trust him, you believe him, and you hear from him, oh, that can light us, right?

That can really ignite within us a passion for the lost, a passion for our coworkers, a passion for living well, a passion for modeling parenthood, being a good husband, being a good wife, whatever God has called you to be, that's where that fuel comes from.

Faith and knowledge coupled together are powerful. So the idea, let's go back to the Psalms for a second, like a tree firmly planted by streams of water is a person with faith attached to the knowledge of the truth, soaking up truth by the roots.

A pastor is not called, by the way, I'm not a content creator. A pastor is called to be a herald of God's truth. I'm not here to orchestrate and to create content for you. I am here to disseminate the content that's already been given to us.

My goal is that you who already trust in my faith are given the fuel of truth. That's my goal. And yet being planted in faith with roots down into the truth is still not the end purpose of God's leader.

It's still not the sum total. So just as long as you have faith and as long as I give you the truth, well, that's it. No, it goes on to say faith and knowledge must accord with godliness. It's a strange verb here in Greek, accord with, and that's why they translate it in a way that we don't really speak a lot in English, that it accords with godliness.

Well, which comes first and which is leading which, and the idea is that it converges with or comes in line with godliness, that your faith and your truth eventually join the pathway of godliness. There's a pathway, there's already a road, and through faith and knowledge, you join the road that already exists.

Are you getting what I'm saying? There is a standard of godliness by which our lives are slowly conforming and we begin going down that pathway, not the pathway of the world, amen? That's the image here that the pastor is supposed to be bringing, that the leader, the church elder, that Paul demonstrates and says, I was called into leadership for this purpose, and he's using himself as an example.

Knowledge doesn't always produce godliness, you guys know that, but faith when coupled with truth ought to, ought to come in line with godliness so then a tree planted by faith near the life-giving stream sends down its roots into the truth, and it must then produce the good fruit of godliness.

It is not enough for it to get in your head, it is not enough for you to feel feelings about it, it is that you would go from here to put it into practice in your life in godliness. So these are the purposes for which God sends leaders into his church.

I hope that's refreshing to you to understand that a good leader in the church is growing the church in faith, is growing in knowledge, and growing the church in godliness, and that godliness looks like, according to the text, like a hope and trust in the eternal life promised by the unlying that is faithful to keep his promises, God.

So our hope, our lives are fueled into that godliness by the knowledge of the truth, and the truth is that this world's not all there is. By the God who has promised to us that this isn't all there is.

So that helps us to not strive after our lives, to clamor for the things of this world, to, like the world around us is just raging in hope that this day can be the best day of their lives. We don't have to claim that because we know that this is never the best day of our lives.

The future, when Christ returns for us, that's the best day. And on into eternity, every day better than the one before. I can't even conceive of that. And the means by which the leader helps the church to grow in faith and grow in knowledge of the truth and grow in godliness is his word that Paul says, according to verse three, arrived at just the right time.

It's through the proclamation of the word accurately preached that the pastor or leader finds his greatest purpose in his most central marching orders. Paul declares himself to have been entrusted by the command of God our Savior to preach the word.

In the book of Acts, Jesus met with Paul and called him to preach the gospel to the Gentiles, and he spent his entire life doing so. By the way, interestingly, Titus is a Gentile. He wasn't of Jewish background, and so that idea that he was called to the Gentiles,.

Well, here's a guy,.

A fulfillment of Jesus' call into Paul's life to go proclaim the truth to the Gentiles. Here's Titus, a young man who believes in Jesus and follows him as his messiah. Growing up, what's a messiah, right, Titus?

What's a messiah? What does that even mean? Now he follows King Jesus.

It's glorious.

So I realize that some of you may be tempted to think that Paul is merely telling us here about his calling in these first four, just kind of like this is just introductory material, but Titus was Paul's protege.

They spent a lot of time together. There is no way that he is just now for the first time in his ministry, in a letter sending a little get-to-know-Paul's-history section here. He is writing these first four verses with intention.

He is sending Titus instructions on how to set up a fledgling church in Crete, and he is using himself in the first four verses as an example of the things that God desires to do through the appointment of leaders within his church.

Now it'd be valuable for us to keep these things in mind when it comes to church leadership. A leader is called to grow the faith of the congregation. A leader is called to grow the church in the knowledge of the truth, and a leader is called to grow the church in godliness, and that's a good test.

Those three things alone are a good test for whether or not you're at, or when you're in the future looking for a church, God moves you away, your job shifts or something, and you're at a different location, and what are you looking for?

You're looking for a guy who's gonna bring this. You're looking for a guy who's gonna talk about the word, and is gonna use that as fuel for your faith, and use that as fuel for your knowledge of the truth.

You're gonna walk away from a message understanding the truth better, and then godliness, all of it pointing towards application and pushing you closer to Christ. Leaders are called to grow the church in faith, in the knowledge of truth, and in godliness, and with those three purposes of leadership in a church out of the way, Paul greets Titus.

So again, this is a dual purpose. It's a greeting where he's using himself as an example, and he offers the wish prayer of grace and peace from God the Father and Jesus Christ our Savior. A wish prayer is like saying grace and peace to you from God.

It combines a desire for goodwill into the form of a prayer. I will often sign off on an email blessings to you. Well, maybe, maybe not. Like you could even read into that like, well, I don't feel very blessed right now, Don.

It's a wish, it's a desire. It lets you know that I desire goodwill for you, and that I'm hoping that God gives you something good. Well, verse five makes it clear explicitly that Paul is writing Titus with leadership in mind.

If you think my take on the opening's a bit of a stretch, and well, it's just introduction, I hope you can see from the context that Paul is eager to tackle the topic of leadership in the church right out of the gate in this letter.

We're gonna learn in a few verses that Cretans, Cretans, the people from the island of Crete in the Mediterranean Sea where Paul has left Titus to help put things in order, they have a bit of a rough reputation in general.

Gluttons and liars and evil beasts, says Paul. Talk about stereotype, right? And he says, they're just not good people. And it was likely gonna be an uphill battle to find qualified, godly men to lead in a context like that.

But leadership is so important that Paul has left Titus there in Crete in order to finish what Paul wasn't able to finish himself when he was there. We don't know exactly the context or the history, so I'm not giving you a ton of historical context about when Paul was in Crete.

It's not recorded for us in the book of Acts, which is to take for granted that Scripture says that he was there. And then he left Titus to finish up. He obviously got moved on for some reason elsewhere.

And so he says, finish putting things in order. There's some good bones there in the church, but they need some order, they need some organization, and most importantly, they need good godly leadership.

So Titus, please appoint throughout the cities in Crete, at the churches, please appoint leadership there. And it gives them explicit instructions in verse five to do so. And so in this context, we get one of the two lists of qualifications for church elders, for those who lead within the church.

And when we give feedback as a congregation on a potential elder, these qualifications are all there. They're on that document. We don't have a ballot with just a yes or no tick box, but we line out those qualifications and then give you blank space.

That's an example from the website that when we send out that document, this is what you would see. And there's the qualifications, and there's a blank space to just give feedback to those nominees, because we want to know if the men who are nominated to lead us actually meet the qualifications.

And that's where it's so good to have so many eyes on these men's lives to say, are they this way?

Are they this way? Are they this way?

And you get a chance to, on a positive note, most of the feedback that we get is positive. And it's like, this person has been hospitable to me. This person has demonstrated the love of Christ to me. They've spoken the word into my life.

And sometimes that's a boost and that's good. But before we cruise through this list in an academic sense, which we could easily do, and I could define the terms, and we could walk away from here going like, oh, that was a nice academic exercise.

I want to point out two semi-opposite observations about this list in general. First of all is one side of the coin. This list isn't that impressive. It's not that impressive when it comes to Christian virtue.

These are things that all of us are called to aspire to. I hope you can see that. These are pretty standard instructions for just being a good person. I mean, this is a guy like good and godly rolled up together, but by and large, the majority of them are like, man, I want a neighbor like this.

I want to be this, I ought to be this kind of neighbor, right? So it's not as though drunkenness and violence are acceptable as long as you're not an elder at the church. Do you know what I'm saying?

I mean, it's not like,.

Go do what you want because you're not an elder. In this sense, the bar is set. What I'm pointing out in this first observation is that the bar is set in a pretty common place. Do you guys get what I'm saying on that?

Pretty common, pretty average, pretty straightforward. But the second is equally true and kind of funny when you think about it from the other side. Being held to the standard gives me a cold sweat. So yeah, this is common.

This is every day. This is like being a good person kind of stuff. And it's like, I still sweat it when I read it. And I think probably the rest of the elders in the room could testify that they've sweat over this list many times as well.

It calls me upward in conviction to better living. Despite the fact that this list is a fairly common bar for good Christian living, the list encourages those of us in eldership to routine checkups on our own souls.

How are we doing here? And we do that regularly. So who is the type of person that Titus is to be looking for in the church, in each city, through Crete, throughout Crete? They are to be above reproach.

I want you to get the idea in your mind of just a good guy. How many of you would just raise your hand and say, I know a good guy. I know somebody who's just a good guy. They're just a good person. Like that really is a part of this standard.

That really is the idea behind it. Though there are specifics in what filling that out looks like, we are looking for a good guy. We're looking for a good person. Thought well of. Above reproach is repeated twice in this text.

Once in verse six and once in verse seven to emphasize the value of this overarching statement about the life of one called to lead within the church. Above reproach is a little hard for us to explain, but it is that overarching phrase that describes and is described by the other qualifications.