Sunday, March 9, 2025 PM

So we'll go ahead and start with prayer. Father, we thank you for this day that you've given us, the sun, the warmth, the coming of spring, the animals feeling their places and times, giving us their notes, letting us know that they're there, and that they are sustained by your hand, that you have provided all that they need, and how much more have you provided for us?

Lord, you are constantly watching over your people. You are constantly loving your people in ways that they should always appreciate, but don't always. So we ask, Lord, that as we come to your word, we appreciate your provision.

We are warm to all the things in the text that we find, and we are thankful and finding ourselves praising your name for each word that has been handed to us as an inheritance, as instruction, as our songbook, but most of all, the word of our Lord and Savior, your son, Jesus Christ.

And we ask, Lord, that you give us wisdom now to understand, keep, and hold, and treasure all that you have for us in your word. In Christ's name, amen. As Michael has been going through Titus 1, we in the Timothy School group have had this text broken up into parts.

Titus 2:1-3 in Contrast With Titus 1:10-16

My section is Titus 2, verses 1 through 10. Tonight, I will attempt to deal with verses 1 through 3, and we'll do a lot of calling back to a lot of the texts in chapter one, verses 10 through 16, just because what we have here in the text is a contrast of what the elder's task is, what he's up against being taught around Crete by others, and what he is to teach to the new churchmen there on the Isle of Crete out there in the middle of the Mediterranean.

So what I'd like to do first is go ahead and read the text, and we'll get into what we see in this contrast from chapter one into chapter two. So starting in verse two, and I'll go ahead and just read the first three verses because that's what I plan on dealing with tonight.

But as for you, speak the things which are proper for sound doctrine. Let the older men be sober, reverent, temperate, sound in faith, in love, and patience. The older women, likewise, that they be reverent in behavior, not slanderers, not given to much wine, teachers of good things.

So right away when we come to verse one, we are encountered by the phrase, but as for you, and I can make quite a meal out of that phrase on its own, just because it is a transitional phrase, and it's to show you that it is opposed to what has come before, but as for you.

So Paul is telling Titus that his task, his teaching should look different, completely and utterly different than what is being taught by those who are upsetting whole households, by those who are telling Jewish myths to the people on Crete and to send them after other things rather than the basic principles and teachings that they are to live by that is all governed by sound doctrine, which is there in the first verse of the text.

So what we see is this is personal, and going off of what Michael had about the church, he was, all of his points started with a P, so everything's gonna start with a P tonight, you're welcome, to make it easy to not just follow along, but drill it into your head.

This transition is personal. This is Titus's task. It's been given from the Apostle Paul to Titus to work these things out and set these things in order by the Spirit of the Lord and give this as a free gift to those Christians on Crete.

And he's laid out problems to fix at the end of chapter one. So we see all these things like defilement, works that deny Christ disobedience, disqualifications for every good work, and then we have an antidote that comes right behind it, right on the tail end of it.

And it's to be administered by Titus himself by appointing qualified elders in every city on the Isle of Crete. But how does he make this solution quite simple for Titus? He doesn't go into a bunch of minutiae of every single problem that we see in every single city on Crete.

He gives it to him laid out in contrast of principles. He gives it to him that older men have principles to follow, older women have principles to follow, and that there's a hierarchy that we see in this text here in verses one through 10, and how these things are supposed to be passed down from elders to older men, older men to young men, elders to older women, older women to younger women.

Very simple hierarchy and contrast when we are looking at, and we'll deal with this too, where you know what to teach sometimes by looking at what your enemies do. Well, don't do that, right? And that's kind of what you get, right?

We see some are teaching and leading people astray by taking them into drunkenness or being drunk all the time, as an example. Well, what's the antidote to that? For Paul to Titus, be sober, right? Be sober-minded, it's quite simple.

And it's great that we actually have a simple antidote in principles rather than dealing with minutiae all the time, because we're getting at root causes, and we'll talk about that later as well. We wanna get to the root causes.

He even gives Titus, and it really is a working syllabus, right, of principles to follow, because sometimes over the church's lifespan on Crete, might they need to add principles to what they are to be, what's being taught?

There may be new problems that crop up that need to be dealt with by adding a new principle, but not always trying to add new rules or new laws to always follow. But we have, what's the principle overriding that the entire text here, especially when you look at Titus, if you read it multiple times from beginning to end, sound doctrine, sound doctrine, sound doctrine.

So the thing that overrides all of it, and we can add principles underneath all the time and know that we are within the Lord's will is by looking to sound doctrine first, and if a principle needs to be added in the life of this church, and we'll talk about the life of the church on Crete as well, how long is it according to the text, or is there an end to it?

So if we're seeing growth as a church on the Isle of Crete, growth anywhere in a church, we are always looking to add and reform according to the scriptures, according to the text that we have in front of us.

So this working syllabus that we have, it gives Titus a structure to focus on rather than details, like we said before, and it's a comfort that we don't have to run off into minutia all the time. It's a great comfort to us that we don't have to, say, qualify everything with every single problem that could crop up.

We can say to the young men, we can say to the older men, be sober, be temperate, be reverent, and we do this all in being governed by what the text says about these varying principles. So we don't have all of these laws or rules to distinguish ourselves, but we do have a distinction that is being made between the teaching that Titus ought partake in and the teaching which we see immediately before the instruction that he's given.

The Cretan False Teachers and Their Fruit

Let's go back to Titus 1, and let's go, we can read, we can start at verse 10 and see what we have being taught. For there are many insubordinate, both idle talkers and deceivers, especially those of the circumcision whose mouths must be stopped, whose subvert whole households, teaching things which they ought not for the sake of dishonest gain.

One of them, a prophet of their own, said, cretins are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons. This testimony is true. Therefore, rebuke them sharply that they may be sound in the faith, not giving heed to Jewish fables and commandments of men who turn from the truth.

To the pure, all things are pure, but to those who are defiled and unbelieving, nothing is pure. But even in their mind and conscience are defiled. They profess to know God, but in works, they deny him being abominable, disobedient, and disqualified for every good work.

So it says quite clearly that they're teaching things which ought not be taught, and they're doing it for dishonest gain, something we'll come back to later as well, and how that is also a contrast to what Titus is supposed to be doing and how he teaches and the purposes for which he teaches older men, older women, and the church there in Crete.

But they're also teaching Jewish fables, commandments of men, yet again, adding minutia, adding more rules, adding more fables, to the consciences, to the backs of these people in Crete. And it is a burden to them.

It defiles them, it defiles their conscience. And we have a fruit that comes out of this teaching, which is a being abominable, disobedience, and disqualification. These are the fruits of the teachings of your enemies, the teachings of the enemies of God, those who would peddle teaching, peddle their commandments in order for a dishonest gain, rather than the free gift, the free teaching, and the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Friends and lovers of sound doctrine teach one way, and enemies and lovers of shameful gain will teach another way. Eventually, those who are even teaching for dishonest reasons, and preaching, maybe even sound doctrine for dishonest reasons, that will be found out, that will be dealt with.

And the judge of all the earth knows and sees these things. Sound doctrine, another contrast that we'll have in the text is, what does sound doctrine actually do, and what kind of teaching does it do to households?

We see, contrasting in the text before, upsetting of whole households, of those of the party of the circumcision. And when we think of households, we might be thinking in our own context of husband, wife, children, not too much beyond that, besides maybe the fauna that we surround ourselves with.

But in this time period, we might be talking about multiple generations. We are talking about what we see at the end of the text that I'm gonna be dealing with, slaves even. So the upending of households, of family structures, of economic structures, which would be a little more devastating.

I mean, not to say that it's not devastating when a household is upended in our time, but we're talking about maybe a far greater impact zone than what we're dealing with right now in our context. So we have a doctrine, sound doctrine, which makes households whole, sound, healthy, or even the word itself, sound, denotes healthiness.

Higano, the Greek there, can also be used for healthy doctrine, sound doctrine or healthy doctrine. And that gives us the idea of making places whole. When we see fathers and mothers come to know the saving grace of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, these households become not less whole, they become more whole.

And if there is division, it's division toward the goal of finally giving them some wholeness. If there is a need to break, we see in other places where Paul talks about that where the wife or the husband has abandoned them, this probably needed to happen by the Lord's will in order for them to move on to a better situation.

So in God's providence, sound doctrine can actually make houses whole, and it does make houses whole on a regular basis. If we go outside of the Lord's teaching, if we go with the teaching of a different party, a different ideology, a different God, we actually see the fruit being something that breaks up and busts households.

And it even breaks, I mean, if it's breaking households, it's gonna break this chain, this hierarchy that we see of passing down what is good and right and proper for sound doctrine. You don't get this chain anymore.

You don't get this order that he's tasked Titus with on the Isle of Crete, where older men pass things down to younger men, where older women pass things down to younger women. And you're going to have loads of chaos rather than what Christ brings in all the order that he has for us to enjoy in his household.

So the fruit of our enemy's teaching is division, defilement, wandering after fables and works that deny Christ. And as opposed to the teaching that, and we're opposed, ourselves, we're opposed to the teaching which is not to be taught and not to be taught for dishonest gain as well.

So this is a distinction personal to us. It has separated us from that world. And we are now personally, just as Titus was, or I say we, those who are elders, are personally instructed with setting about this order within churches in Crete, but also wherever we are now, wherever the church is now in the world.

Titus' offer of the gospel should always be, and his exhortation, his rebuke, should always be free, as his true father in the faith, the Apostle Paul, has always done. We get loads of record of Paul always making it a point in the epistles how the gospel which he preaches is offered freely, even to the point of knowing false teachers by their want of dishonest gain.

They also teach as a pretense. We find that actually in Philippians, them teaching as a pretense to add to his chains while he's locked up. But Paul's always, he's always giving the gospel for free. He's always preaching the gospel free of charges as though it's something that is not to be peddled, not to have any sort of motive for your own gain or someone else's own detriment.

And this is the contrast that we're supposed to live with and supposed to love, how we are supposed to give the gospel, or a group of elders is supposed to continually teach in this way, offering these things for free to those under their care.

Christ or Chaos: The Partisan Divide

All right, so that's the first P, personal. The second P is something we've touched on just a hair when we've talked about enemies, is that this text is partisan. And we know that it's partisan because it starts with but.

These people did it this way, but as for you, but as for you, I have something different for you. So you're, we've talked about this many times over the last, I don't know, Michael, how many years have you been talking about this?

You're either with Christ or you're in chaos, right? Christ or chaos. And it is truly seen here in the text, ending in chapter one and beginning in chapter two. And choosing one side, you're either ultimately for Christ, his church, or you're against Christ and his church.

And you can be in this way, if you're with Christ, you're for your people, or you're against your people ultimately. And you, and in this way too, you're, you are, as now a Christian, a Cretan Christian here, in this context, you are now even for your people more than you were before.

Even when you were just a Cretan, who practiced all the Cretan traditions, all the parts of the Cretan religion, there on the island, following all the laws that were given to you, in that Roman context, you are now yet a better Cretan than you were beforehand.

And this does not need to be overlooked. As mentioned before, those who freely give, or shamefully take from those that they teach, the gospel, as though it were a service are good to be peddled. When we come across decrees of kings, are those, do you have to pay for the decree of the king?

Should you have to pay for the decree of the king?

No.

Right, this is something that he wants all of his subjects to know. This is something that goes out across all the land in order for them to be in line with his rule, be in line with his reign. The contrast that we see, the partisan view that we see here, is Christ, he's decreeing, he has a decree that's going to be sent out across all of the known world.

That the gospel of grace, and by his blood, you may be washed and cleansed and made new and regenerated, that goes out freely. But we have men looking to peddle teaching, men looking to make dishonest gain through teaching.

These who peddle this way, would you view them as servants of the king? Would you view them as those who are doing that king's work, or are they trying to get something else for themselves, to serve themselves, even with the message that the king himself might have given them to offer?

This is something that I kind of was thinking about as we're going across this. We've had some study into false teaching and what false teachers sometimes look like and what they might do. We do have almost, to a fault, false teachers almost always teaching in order for dishonest gain.

They're not offering up their bad fruit, they're not offering up their really terrible narratives or blissful sounding narratives that end up with bad fruit and bitter fruit. They're not teaching those freely.

They're doing it for some sort of scam, some sort of income, some sort of self-service to themselves. So don't we have in each group a narrative that accompanies the teaching? So with the party of the circumcision, we know a little bit of what that narrative was about.

You must be circumcised, you must go back to the law, you must add this to the gospel in order to be truly a part of the church. But with the narrative that we see given in the epistle, the narrative that we see Paul preaching over and over and over again is one that does not take us back to the law.

It does not take us back to the old covenant, it is a new covenant, and he takes us to Jesus Christ at every single turn. And that he is the fulfillment of those things that we don't have to go back to.

He fulfilled it for us. In this way, these narratives stand in conflict, the standards of conduct now will stand in conflict, and also the fruits of each group of teaching will stand in conflict to one another.

And we can kinda see this when they give their pitch, right? Right, when they come to your door, they knock, they say, I'm from, you know, the Mormon temple down the street, or you don't really have to know them because you see how they're dressed,.

You're like, ah, you too.

I remember you too. You know what they're there to do. But sometimes they have to introduce themselves to know what you're dealing with. But they'll give you your pitch. With the circumcision party, come to the circumcision party, become circumcised, believe the Jewish myths, follow the law, liberation theology.

Come to our party, oppressor, forever beg forgiveness from those who you've oppressed. Follow the law of oppressed and oppressor, follow this lens, view everything through this. Come to the party of feminism, liberate women from the home, uphold their rights for careers, voting, abortion.

When you get those pitches, do they ever tell you what the fruits of the ideology is gonna be? Do they ever tell you what the fruits of following this way is going to be? I don't remember getting those pitches.

I just kind of remember they're wanting to work you up into emotional froth, tell you how good it's all going to be, why we're doing this, who it's for. And it can be for you too, and you can feel good about it.

But the fruits on the backside of this are usually left out. And so you can go back to the circumcision party. You can be bewitched and you can subject yourself to the curse and be unjustified. You can go back to liberation theology and you can consume yourself with guilt, greed, envy, and self-righteousness.

You can go back to feminism. You can reap the wind of denying the Lord's created order for male and female and wonder why your generations get smaller and smaller and smaller. These pitches, the pitches are always laced with ease and bliss and the fruit is not just bitter and rotten, but it's always divinely cursed.

Always divinely cursed. It's not just bitter fruit. It's not just you picked it too early or you picked it too late. It is cursed and you will reap the whirlwind for it. So with Christ, the good fruits are part of the pitch.

They're part of the goal. What's going to happen to you when you follow Christ? What's going to happen when you come to Christ, when you come to the church? Well, guess what? You are going to be exhorted to be sober, reverent, temperate, sound in faith and love and patience.

You're going to be exhorted to show the fruits of the Spirit, to love the fruits of the Spirit, to enjoy these good things that the Lord is doing in you by His Spirit and through His word. These are part of the pitch.

This is part of the whole thing that we get to enjoy. When you're giving the gospel to somebody, it's not just that you are going to be justified, but you're going to be made like Jesus. You're going to be made holy.

So with Christ, the good fruits being a part of the pitch.

And the goal,.

We'll actually see when we get to Chris's text and in these verses one through 10, how ingrained those are into the pitch, into being part of the package of being a part of the church.

We'll say that.

They don't come separated from, right? We are given this instruction right on the tail end of sound doctrine and it being proper for, or even what you might say, it should be proper to accompany this sound doctrine that we're supposed to be following, that Titus is supposed to be following when he does his work there on Crete.

But let us ask the question also, because this has actually come up recently in the last half year or so. Let's also ask the question, have we seen men or women who know good doctrine but produce cursed fruit?

Can you know the good doctrine? Can you be, but also be a false teacher? Can you lead people astray? Yeah, and you can know it well. You can know it well enough to go on conference circuits. You can know it well enough to be on massive stages with thousands of men in the audience who are going to be pastors one day.

You could look at yourself almost in the same light as far as positionally goes. Loads like the Apostle Paul, teaching other future elders what their job is, what they're supposed to be doing on fresh ground, fertile ground for the gospel in places like Crete or elsewhere in the world.

A couple of things I wanna say about that because I'm extremely young and have zero experience in doing any of what is here in the text. Teaching, preaching, anything like that. But we have a gut reaction as Christians, all of us do, when we see those who go out to either peddle the gospel, they know sound doctrine, and they're looking for dishonest gain, or even those that just fall.

We know that these people, they know it, but they don't love it, right? And when we have the gut reaction, we know we love it. We know we love the gospel of Christ. We know we love his teaching. We know we love his guidance and his spirit in dwelling us in all things.

And when we get to chapter three, Paul mentions the pouring out of the spirit and the washing of regeneration in that chapter. These men producing cursed fruit do not have what we have there. And so that sound doctrine, they speak.

It seems to fall sadly dead to us, even though they know its correctness, but it's not dead in a sense that it doesn't come back vain. But for them, they don't live it. And they are, they're speaking so in such ways being dead themselves.

When we see this, we know that their reward is that exactly thing. The thing that they're seeking, they get that reward. We're told that they're going to get that reward here, that sordid gain. But we see in that gut level reaction, how unbecoming and how improper as opposed to proper and how unhealthy, unsound these things are.

We grow sick for Christ and his church. Now we grow sick for the souls who teach only for the numbers to go up in the bank account because we know what awaits them. And we also grow sick for all those who lent their ears to these men and how devastating false or false teaching might be to them.

But even those preaching Christ, like we said in Philippians out of impure motives are still preaching Christ. And we can be thankful for Christ being preached as Paul thanks the Lord in that letter to the Corinthians when he's in jail in Rome.

But now seeing this and seeing the instructions given to Titus of what is to be taught in each city on Crete, how important is the first part of the book that we saw? What's he supposed to be doing at the first part of the book at the very beginning?

See, he says, for this reason, I left you in Crete that you should set in order the things that are lacking and appoint elders in every city as I commanded you. So his job is to appoint elders. Just any elders?

No, he gives qualifications. He gives him very good qualifications for these men to be picked out in every city on Crete. Now, there aren't tons of cities on Crete. I Google Earthed it. Not a bunch of people there.

Beautiful place. But it is extremely important, even in such a place as that with a small population, small villages, small cities, to have qualified men in these positions to care for, first of all, and defend Christ's church and by the power of his word, defend Christ's church from enemies within, but also enemies without.

And we see how important that the first part of the book is tying into this now. If you don't have qualified elders in one of these cities, are they going to, do you think they're gonna start following the instructions that Titus is supposed to follow here?

He lays out this structure, this hierarchy of teaching, and he brings it to, sorry, that's my son in there. He brings it to Titus, and Titus is supposed to be bringing it to all these other cities, all these other elders in cities.

But if they're unqualified, are we gonna start following these instructions on how to teach the older men, how to teach the older women, young men and younger women, and slaves? Qualified elders are going to be extremely important when we're establishing churches on brand new fledgling Christian islands.

This morning we woke up, I'm gonna one up Michael here. He woke up to birds in the trees, I woke up to birds in a bedroom. We are incubating eggs. So we had eight that had just come out the day before.

We kind of let them dry off, do their thing, sleep for a little while. But then you have to take them out, you have to bring them over to a box, especially if it's cold and wet and rainy outside. You can't have them out there on their own.

So we've got them under a light, and the first thing you kind of need to do is hold their hand, metaphorically, and stick their bill in the water, stick their bill in the food. Now they know where that's at.

On a fledgling Christian island, they need to be held by the hand and taught, this is the conduct, this is the life that you are to be following because now you are made new in Christ. And this is what it looks like.

And thank God that the Lord has made it so for us that we are held by the hand right away. And what does he have set in order for us to enjoy this with? A church with qualified elders. Many men that you can go up to and say, hey, I'm regenerated, I believe in Christ Jesus our Lord as my savior, what now?

And one of those qualified elders can say, you know what, I've got a lot of years under my belt, the Lord has placed me in this position, this is what's to be done. This is how this is going to work. Qualified elders are a precious gift that we should always be thankful for, we should always be praising the Lord for because of just the Lord's structure to begin with, the way he's wanted to set his church up to begin with, but how protecting it is to have shepherds over a flock rather than sheep without a shepherd.

And we know this to be true. It looks like I have gone over for the first time and I didn't even get through half the peas, so sorry, but that's where we're at. I do plan to pick up again where we left off and I'll go ahead and mark it while I'm at it.

I'll plan to pick up where we left off. If I have to speed up to get done in the next two weeks, that'll be fine and Chris will plan to take over after that, but I'm very thankful for you all here to drive us to want to learn to teach well to you because Michael talked about this morning, loving one another and in this way, elders love their flock, people who are able to teach love their flock by getting into the word.

First of all, loving the word as they're reading it, loving the word itself, it drives us back to that constantly always and you're a part of that motivation. So I'm thankful for that motivation. If we want to close, are we gonna sing the doxology?

Do you usually sing the doxology? We'll go ahead and sing the doxology and I'll, we'll close this out.

Praise God for all.