WWUTT 747 Train the Younger Women?

Women Teaching Women in Titus 2

Everyone in the church, men and women, should sit under the teaching of men. They are supposed to fulfill those roles as elders. But there are certain things that women can teach other women that a man cannot, when we understand the text.

This is when we understand the text, studying God's word to reach all the riches of full assurance in Christ. Thank you for subscribing, and if this has ministered to you, please let others know about our program.

Here once again is Pastor Gabe Hughes.

Thank you, Becky. Becky, we come back to Titus 2. And as with yesterday, I'll be reading these first six verses. The Apostle Paul wrote to Titus on the island of Crete. But as for you, teach what accords with sound doctrine.

Older men are to be sober-minded, dignified, self-controlled, sound in faith, in love, and in steadfastness. Older women likewise are to be reverent in behavior, not slanderers or slaves to much wine.

They are to teach what is good. And so train the young women to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled, pure, working at home, kind, and submissive to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be reviled.

Likewise, urge the younger men to be self-controlled. When Paul gave similar instructions to Timothy, as he was sending Timothy to the church in Ephesus and telling him how he was to shepherd the flock that was gonna be entrusted to his care, here's what Paul said in 1 Timothy 5, verses one and two.

Do not rebuke an older man, but encourage him as you would a father. Younger men as brothers, older women as mothers, younger women as sisters in all purity. And this is how we are to regard one another in the faith.

If you are a follower of Jesus, then your brothers and sisters are everyone else who is a follower of Jesus. And the siblings in the Lord that you will have, that you are most closely aligned with, are gonna be those that you fellowship with on a regular basis in the church that you are a part of.

So on Sunday, on the Lord's day in worship, you are lifting up your voices together in song. You are hearing the same sermons preached together. So you're all kind of growing together in maturity as you listen to the word of God proclaimed and it produces godliness in you.

You fellowship with one another during the week. And you know, overall, the Christians that you fellowship with that are part of your church, you may see them two or three hours a week. Church on Sunday and maybe you've got another Bible study during the week that you're a part of.

You will spend more time with your coworkers or if you're still in school, your schoolmates, than you will the people that you are attending church with. You may even have family members that you see on a more regular basis and they could even be family members who aren't Christians.

But you are called to consider your family in God more than you are to consider anybody else. As Paul said in Galatians chapter six, that as we have opportunity, we are to show charity to everyone, but especially those of the household of faith.

So as Christians, we are certainly supposed to show love and kindness and compassion to every single person. But there is a certain special measure or favor that our brothers and sisters in the Lord will have more so than any other person.

Just like your own family members, you would stick your neck out for your flesh and blood brothers and sisters more than you would any stranger or any other person, right? Well, in the family of God, it's the same way.

And in fact, those Christian brothers and sisters that you have, you should be closer with than even your own blood brothers and sisters. Consider what Jesus said in Mark chapter three. This is in Mark three, verse 31.

His mother and his brothers came and standing outside, they sent to him and called him. And the crowd was sitting around Jesus and they said to him, your mother and your brothers are outside seeking you.

And Jesus said to them, who are my mother and my brothers? And looking about at those who sat around him, he said, here are my mother and my brothers. For whoever does the will of God, he is my brother and sister and mother.

And then Jesus went on to teach his disciples something else very similar in Mark chapter 10. And this was right after the rich young ruler came to him and was asking how he could get to heaven. And Jesus told him to keep the commandments and the rich young ruler said, yeah, I've done all of that.

But Jesus said, but you lack one thing, go and sell all that you have and give it to the poor and you will have treasure in heaven and then come follow me. And disheartened by the saying, he went away sorrowful for he had many great possessions.

He was a covetor, still had things on this earth that he loved more than God. And that's what Jesus was revealing to him was the condition, was the attitude of his heart. He didn't really love God. He was looking for some outward confirmation that he was a good enough person to get into heaven and a person just simply isn't good enough to get into heaven.

And Jesus looked around and said to his disciples, how difficult it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God. And the disciples were amazed at his words, but Jesus said to them again, children, how difficult it is to enter the kingdom of God.

It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God. And they were exceedingly astonished. And they said to him, then who can be saved? And Jesus looked at them and said, with man it's impossible, but not with God, for all things are possible with God.

The disciples reaction here was that, hey, if a person who's rich, who's clearly been blessed by God and somebody who's kept the law and the commandments like this rich young guy did, if they can't get into heaven, what hope is there for any of us?

Because they always looked at rich people as God's favor was upon them. But even the rich guys can't get into heaven. So who are we poor people to be able to enter the kingdom of God? And Jesus said with man, it's impossible, but not with God.

All things are possible with God. And then Peter responded, verse 28, see that we have left everything and followed you. And Jesus said, truly I say to you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands for my sake and for the gospel, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands with persecutions and in the age to come eternal life.

What was Jesus saying there? That if you give up everything and follow him, that he will give you so much more and you will be rich in abundance with more material goods than you had before you followed Jesus.

Now, that's not what he was saying at all. But that what we give up materially on this earth, we gain that much more spiritually by the blessing of God. And though you will no longer associate with those brothers and sisters who live in pagan ways, who are not lovers of God.

And in fact, they're enemies of God because they don't love Jesus. You won't show as much favoritism toward them as you will your own spiritual brothers in the faith with whom you fellowship and you attend church and you praise God and you weep together and you rejoice together and you evangelize together.

All of this will be given to you in Christ Jesus. That many more brothers and sisters and houses and lands with persecutions, Jesus said, for the world will hate us because we choose Christ and we choose others who are in Christ instead of those that the world says that we should be a part of.

Your race, your ethnicity, these are your brothers. These are the people that you have to stick with. No, the people that you are a part of, that you are one with, are not gonna be the same color skin that you are.

It's who they are on the inside by the Holy Spirit of God changed and transformed and adopted by God as sons and daughters. It's not even about who they are on the inside in the sense of the DNA or the blood that flows through their veins, but the Holy Spirit that dwells within us makes us one.

We are closer with our church than we will be with anyone else. And that's a personal testimony for me. I was very close with my parents and with my siblings, but over time they have shown themselves, with the exception of my dad, but they have shown themselves to be more and more rebellious against God and the truth of his word.

And that has put more and more distance between me and them. I hardly see them at all anymore. And in fact, I don't try to go out of my way to visit my family the way that I used to. We used to make very frequent trips and rearrange our schedules and everything that we could do so we could get together at once.

But these times, these family reunions, these get togethers have become so troublesome and so problematic because of their rebellion that my family is with my church and it became more and more difficult for me to give up the time that I wanted to spend with my brothers and sisters in the Lord in order to go be with my siblings who did not appreciate me or my family, that eventually we stopped trying to make those trips happen.

I still love my siblings and I still share the gospel with them, but my brothers and sisters are in my church and I have come to understand what Jesus meant in Mark chapter three, when he indicated to the people who were sitting around him and said, here are my brothers and my sisters and my mother, they who do the will of my father.

I look into the faces of people whom I adore every Sunday when I stand in that pulpit and I preach. These brothers and sisters in Christ with whom I share praises and prayers and the word of God. It's beautiful, it's a wonderful thing to grow as the family of God in this way.

So appreciate one another. And as we are the family of God, we have been instructed to care for each other, encouraging and admonishing one another in all wisdom. That's Colossians 3 .16. So we let the word of Christ dwell in us richly and with the word of Christ, we're able to help one another.

We can encourage each other. We know exactly how to speak into one another's needs and into one another's situation. We know exactly the right words that might help to encourage our brother or sister in the Lord.

And we also know how to admonish one another because you may recognize a brother or sister that is acting in such a way that doesn't bring glory and honor to God. And so you admonish, which means to correct with goodwill.

And you go to them and you say, brother, I'm saying this to you in love. And if you're regular in church and you're regular in fellowship, I believe they will receive you in love with the Holy Spirit that is within us.

They will not be offended by this, but will know that you mean to bring them all the more into a path of righteousness for his name's sake. And so you will say to them, what I've seen you do and the way I've seen you behave, the words that I've heard you speaking, these things do not honor God.

And so I'm asking you to repent and that you would be more careful with what you do and the things that you say. And if they understand, like Proverbs 12, one, a wise person loves rebuke, then they will love you for the counsel that you give.

But if they are a fool, says a stupid person hates reproof, there in Proverbs 12, one. It's okay, kids. That would be an appropriate use of the word stupid when you're quoting it from the Bible. So if they're a fool, then they will hate your correction.

But if we are truly brothers and sisters in the Lord, one in spirit, worshiping the same father, one in Christ Jesus, then they will be receptive to that encouragement, knowing that you mean for good to the praise of his glorious grace, to the glory of God.

Women Are to Teach What Is Good

And so here we have those kinds of instructions also in the ways that women are to mentor other women. We have it right here. End of verse three, Paul says, they are to teach what is good. Women are to teach what is good.

There you have it right there. Women are to teach. Whenever we are quoting about teachers in the church, like from 1 Timothy 2, verse 12, I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man.

Rather, she is to remain quiet. We get all up in arms and it's not just women. There are some egalitarian men too who will get all upset at that passage. Well, this is coming from a Greco-Roman understanding.

And this doesn't at all mean that a woman can't be a pastor. No, that is exactly what it means. That's exactly the context because then we go into qualifications of a pastor right at the start of chapter three.

It's all in that same context. So a woman can't be a pastor. And whenever we're reading a verse like that, what tends to stick out the most, especially to those who get riled up about it, is the part where it says, I do not permit a woman to teach.

And that's often what they start pushing back with. Oh, really? So a woman can't teach at all. She's not supposed to teach at all in church. That's not what I said. And that's not what the verse says.

A woman is supposed to teach. It is right here. Titus two, three, they are to teach what is good. There you have it, women. You are instructed from the Bible. You are to teach. Women can't just sit back and let men do all the teaching.

Although men do have the primary responsibility to fill those roles as teachers. And remember what we talked about when we started in on this study in chapter two, that older men in particular, as far as the laity goes, they are gonna be the most influential persons in the body, setting the example and motivating people toward sound doctrine.

The pastor kind of sets the tone for the whole church and he would qualify as one of those older men. And then even the older men among the laity are going to be, they're gonna set the spiritual example more so than anyone else.

But then you have instructions that are given to women that include even they are supposed to be teachers. We have it clearly in the scriptures that women are to teach and specifically children and other women.

There are certain things, as I've said this before, you heard me say it last week also, there are certain things that a woman can teach another woman that a man cannot teach a woman and should not be teaching a woman.

I can give you a very specific example of this. We had a young mom in our church, a young couple gave birth to a beautiful baby girl. And it's a beautiful story in our church as well because there was at one point they thought it was an ectopic pregnancy.

They went to the ER, she was experiencing a lot of pain. They did a test, they did some x-rays. They came back saying, we think it's an ectopic pregnancy and you're gonna lose the baby and it could also cause great harm to you unless we do something about this right now.

The husband was very upset and he called me up and I went down to the ER and we're praying together. And one of the things that I said to them is if you've only gotten this opinion from an ER doctor, you have to talk to an OBGYN.

Don't take it just from the ER doctor, talk to someone who specializes in reproductive health. And so that's what they did and it turned out she didn't have an ectopic pregnancy and had she taken just one doctor's word for it, it could have cost them the life of their child.

And so we as a church, we really celebrated over the life of that baby because of just how great that story was. And I had the chance to go down to the hospital when the baby was born and we prayed for the baby right there and we all shared tears of joy.

It was just a great story. Well, this was their first child and this young woman spent a lot of time with my wife at that particular time. And there were certain things about her own anatomy and about how to feed a baby.

You get what I'm talking about without being too specific? They were just things that she didn't understand. She didn't know how to do and even related to her own body. She didn't know how her own body was reacting to having just given birth to a child.

And then she was experiencing hormonal changes that she had never experienced before and these kinds of things. And on one or two occasions when she would come over to the house and I would hear these conversations between her and my wife, I would hear how my wife would coach her into understanding what she needed to do as a mom and what was going on with her body and some of these kinds of things.

And as I would hear that advice, I'm thinking to myself, I could never give that advice. It wouldn't even be appropriate for me as a man to give that advice to another woman. This has to be the kinds of instructions or the kinds of teaching that comes from one woman to another.

But not just when it comes to your body, but also when it comes to faith, when it comes to understanding the word of God. There are certain ways a woman is gonna perceive things from the scriptures differently than a man.

And maybe a woman needs another woman to help her understand certain things about certain passages that maybe a man can't help her understand as well. Now, women do need the teaching of men. You do. Because you're supposed to be attending a church where the pastor is supposed to be a man.

So everyone needs to sit under the teaching of a man. That's for everybody. Women, you as well. But there are going to be other women that might help you understand things and help you decipher certain things from the word of God and how they apply to you, maybe better than a man can put it.

And so in this way, women can teach other women. They are to teach what is good. As Paul said to the Thessalonians, hold fast to what is good, abhor what is evil. So women teach one another what is good.

Not just when it comes to biological things, but even when it comes to theological things. Women can teach other women. And so train the young women to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled.

And we have that self-controlled there again. I'm going to spend more time on that tomorrow since that's the only instruction that we see here for younger men in verse six, for them to be self-controlled.

So I'm going to spend more time on that tomorrow talking about self-controlled again. Pure, and we talked about purity a little bit yesterday. We've talked about it last week, even as long as we've been here in Titus chapter two, with the instructions that Paul gives to women regarding purity.

In 1 Timothy chapter two, verse nine, women should adorn themselves in respectable apparel, with modesty and self-control, not with braided hair and gold or pearls or costly attire, but with what is proper for women who profess godliness with good works.

A woman is to be working at home. She is to be kind and submissive to their own husbands. Once again, Ephesians chapter five, verse 22, women, wives, specifically wives, submit to your own husbands as to the Lord, for the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church, his body and is himself its savior.

Now, as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything. This is a picture of submission that the whole church is supposed to follow when it comes to submitting to Christ.

And a woman has the privilege of fulfilling that role. We have this instruction, likewise in Colossians chapter three, wives submit to your husbands as is fitting in the Lord. And if a wife is resistant to that instruction and will not submit to her husband, then she brings a reproach upon the gospel.

Paul said to Timothy in 1 Timothy 5, 14, women need to manage their households and give the adversary no occasion for slander. We're actually living out the attractiveness of the gospel when we fulfill the roles that God has assigned us to.

And this picture of marriage and family is a picture of the family of God that has been created by faith in the gospel of Jesus Christ, exactly the way that God has intended the family to be. And so we even have roles that we are to fulfill in the body of Christ as both men and women.

And note here that Paul goes on into verse 10, Titus 2, 10 to say that in everything, we may adorn the doctrine of God, our savior. And there are gonna be specific doctrines and instructions for men and specific doctrines and instructions for women.

We are all one in Christ Jesus. We worship the same father. We are indwelt with the same spirit. We have been saved by the same Christ, but as much as we are also one body, we are individuals who make up this body.

We have individual responsibilities and individual callings and each one of us in faithfulness and in responsibility need to fulfill that individual assignment that God has for each and every one of us.

And in so doing, we are living out the gospel in this way, having been made into the family of God by faith in the person and work of Jesus Christ, our father by whom we have been named. We desire to walk in a manner that is worthy of the calling to which we have been called with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the spirit and the bond of peace.

For we are one body in one spirit, just as we have been called to the one hope that belongs to our calling. One Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and father of us all, who is over all and through all and in all.

We are told in the scriptures that grace is given to each one of us according to the measure of Christ's gift. And so may we be faithful to fulfill that calling that you have called us to, to the glory and pleasure of God.

Let it not be about us, but to the praise of your glorious grace. In the name of Jesus, amen.

Gabriel Hughes is the pastor of First Southern Baptist Church in Junction City, Kansas. Find out more online at www .utt .com.