Sunday, March 16, 2025 PM

Father, we thank you for the day and the season and the time and the place that you have placed us. We thank you for the people you've placed us with, that you have given us such wonderful brothers and sisters to unite with in worship, to unite with in common faith, to lift your name, and to pledge our undying allegiance to your Word, the thing that you have breathed out for us to take in and be fed by, that your Son, being the center of our affections, the person to whom we owe everything to, we thank you, Lord, that he is the thing we and the person we unify around.

Being washed and covered, our sin taken away, being removed from us and forgotten, we ask, Lord, that you bless what we have to learn from your Word today, being warm to everything it has to say, knowing that it is for our good, comfort, betterment, and your glory, your exaltation.

We ask, Lord, for your help now to understand and to be wise as we handle it. In Jesus' name, amen. So, to recap, everything was in peas, right? The first portion that we tried to study, tried to get through, that I failed to do, was Titus 2, verses 1 through 3.

And I was making some general observations about this portion of instruction that is given to Titus from Paul about what elders are supposed to be teaching and how they are supposed to set up and set in order a system of teaching there on the Isle of Crete for the new Christians there.

The first pea that we came across was that it was personal. The phrase, but as for you, kind of singles Titus out. It lets him know that this is now the portion that I am giving personally to you to take and teach your people.

The instruction is partisan. It is for Christ and for Christ's church that these things are to be taught. His elders are teaching his flock. They are under-shepherding, as Ken made clear this morning.

Elders are under-shepherds to the chief shepherd. I'm very thankful for that text and the way it was preached this morning because it's going to make it so much easier on me today. So, thank you for doing all the work, Ken.

But it is partisan. You are either in Christ or you are in Adam. The teaching that you receive in either one of those cases is going to be made manifest and it's going to show itself in the fruit that it bears in you.

So, those are the two peas that we got through, I believe. Sorry, three peas. No, two. Personal and partisan.

That's all I got to.

Particularity in Titus’s Instructions to Older Men and Women

So, we are going to move on to this instruction, Titus being very particular. And I know that may be trying to be a little too semantic or dividing things up a little too much, but it is particular both in scope and target.

So, when Paul is giving these instructions to Titus, under sound doctrine, he's being particular in the instructions that he gives and who they are to in scope. The second verse reading, that the older men be sober, reverent, temperate, sound in faith, in love, and in patience.

That is particularly to the older men. And who is teaching these older men? The Greek that we see there for older men is Greek for elders. So, is it elders just teaching elders? I think, given the context of the rest of the instruction, where we move on to elder women, it's older men.

Sometimes, every now and then, people will get tripped up on whether this is just older men in the congregation or it is elders specifically. I think we can, from the context of the rest of the book, conclude that we are talking about older men in the church.

So, we have gender-specific instructions, beginning in verse 2 and going all the way down through verse 8, whether it's too old or too young. So, this is the particularity in its target and scope. Men are taught things specific to men by the elders.

And this is where we can kind of see how this structure plays out because it may be somewhat skewed in modern-day churches of who's supposed to be teaching who, what they're supposed to be teaching, and with what authority are they supposed to be teaching.

And these older men are being told to be sober, reverent, temperate, sound in faith and love and patience. When we're looking at the Greek for sober, it can go either way, whether being in sober-minded, which we get later on in the text for, I believe it's for the young men.

Yeah, exhort young men to be sober-minded. It can be translated for soberness of abstaining from drink or soberness of sober-mindedness. And I would say probably in Crete we're going to need both from what we've understood from Chapter 1.

We need men who are abstaining from drunkenness, both in touching too much wine, taking too much wine, and also sober-mindedness and maybe just being overzealous, which is what we have a lot of times with young men.

High testosterone seems to flood the mind, and sound mind, it goes out the window, doesn't it? I know, I've been there. Sometimes I'm still there. So we take this instruction from Paul to Titus, and we do understand the very basic informational points here that it is older men he's talking to, and him being an elder, he's supposed to teach the older men.

So it doesn't hurt to point those very small, minute details out so they're not skewed in our heads. And sometimes when we're reading over a text like this, we read over it and we don't take into account the very simple minutia there.

And he's giving them things particular to their gender that they may struggle with, and he knows that they struggle with. I think when we see Paul in chapter 1 talking about the things that the Cretans struggle with, we know that Paul knows the Cretans.

He's not giving him instruction based upon hearsay, although he does use a little bit of hearsay as evidence or a prophet of their own, but he says it's true. I know these people. It's true. He's been to Crete.

He knows what these people are like. So he's able to teach very particularly to the men on Crete, to Cretans themselves, what they are like. They are different than people in Jerusalem. They are different than people in Antioch.

They are going to be different than the people found in Asia Minor. So he's going to instruct Titus to treat them as Cretans, the most loving way possible, as an elder should do. As Ken pointed out this morning, the shepherd has to know the flock.

I think this is a prime example of these instructions being so particular to the men there and so particular to the women there that we see Paul really, really knowing the flock and teaching Titus to really, really know the flock, as well as teaching the elders that he's going to be teaching.

This is something that will have a snowball effect. We see that with places that have good elders. There's a snowball effect where the elders knowing the rest of the flock, it shows the younger men, it shows the older men to know the other people in the flock as well.

I think we see that here, personally. I feel that here, personally. The elders know me. The elders know all the other men. Vicariously, that's how networks usually work. Network effects, usually the more tight or the more connections that you make with individuals in your small group, the tighter that that network becomes and the stronger it becomes, the more touch points it has.

You begin to know each other. You begin to have time in the network, and having time in the network allows you to really, really know the people you're around. Women are taught things specific to women.

This is another particularity of the text. The older women should likewise, in their behavior, be reverent, not slanderers, not giving them much wine, teachers of good things. We have principles that are very similar for the women that are given for the men, but why would they be separate if they're so similar?

Why would they need to be taught separately as women and men as men? Well, we know from nature that men are men and women are women. In their roles that they are given, either within their households or within the church, those roles are far different.

They need to be taught as their gender. They need to be taught piety under their gender specifically. And we have it, playing out it. Paul's giving us an example of this. He's showing us the way that it should be.

Paul, he's just listed many of the Cretan sins before, but we don't see in this instruction out-and-out rebuke, do we? You're doing this. You need to stop. He's actually giving positive vision. We talked about this last time.

These are positive principles to follow in order to— and this is the instruction that you usually give somebody in repentance, right? Someone who is now in Christ, and their life is one marked by repentance of the sins that used to define them.

They now have positive principles to look forward to. They now have positive principles to practice out of the Word. And yes, we are going to rebuke sin. That's not on the table. That's a part of sound doctrine that comes with part of the church's role, the elder's role, is calling out sin, rebuking it, and restoring.

But in order to move forward, he gives men, women, young men, young women, positive principles to follow and to march onward in, to grow in. And this is another particular where for men and women, though they have similar principles that they must follow, they do have some that are a little bit different, especially when we come to the section in chat, verses 4 and 5 and 6, where the young men are to be taught by the older men and the young women are to be taught by the older women.

We get to see now that particularly young men are to be taught by older men. Young women are to be taught by older women. So it just further separates the two genders and how they're to be handled under the authority of the elders.

His rebukes are necessary and right for sound doctrine, as we talked about, for it to be upheld. But he's looking for root causes, and being led by the Holy Spirit, he's writing to Titus to focus his teaching toward these positive commands.

Intemperance, drunkenness of body or spirit, irreverence, or you might say insincerity, or a non-graveness. That's another way that the Greek is translated. It's a graveness. And I think the KJV actually translates reverence as graveness as well.

But a lack of reverence or a lack of love and a lack of patience, et cetera, are the things that Paul's trying to point out. You may be getting drunk all the time, but it's because you don't practice temperance.

You're not practicing soberness. You can bump up against the object itself, right? You can bump up against wine, and you can practice temperance. You don't have to practice drunkenness with it. And this is why we're coming to a principle.

It's not just that thou shalt not touch wine, or thou shalt not talk to other women because you might slander. No, it's about practicing these positive principles with both the people you're with and a proper relation to the people you're with and a proper relation to the objects that you come into contact on any given day.

So Titus' task accompanying sound doctrine is not just to rebuke the sin that he's seen or to mark it down for us, but we're seeing that his task is to bring Cretans into sober, reverent, and temperate living, which is in accordance with the sound doctrine that should be being taught on the Isle of Crete.

And instead of being enslaved to bad things, they now, being slaves to Christ, must not only love what is good, but teach and pass down to those that are younger than them a love for the things that are good as well.

So they're being taught by the elders as elders in the community. Elder women, older men, they're being taught by the elders the good things to love, and now it's being passed down. So those are some of the particularities that we find in the text between the instructions to both men and women and how they are different.

And I will say the instructions that we get, obviously, at the bottom of this portion of the text versus 9 and 10 to bond servants is loads different as well, but I plan to cover that in a section later on.

But that is another particular in this block of text that we see where it seems a lot of the exhortation that he gives for bond servants doesn't really match up with what all the other Cretans are being given.

Now, that's not to say that bond servants shouldn't be temperate. They shouldn't be reverent. But we are seeing something very particular to the bond servants there that Paul has in mind for them specifically, and that the Spirit has in mind for them specifically.

So this block of text 2, we have in chapter 1, we have adversaries that are obvious, in-your-face adversaries. Paul's pointing them out. It's a problem. It's something to be shut up, as he said. The elder's job is to shut them up.

Michael talked about that pretty thoroughly. This is the elder's job is to stop them, shut them up, which is interesting. But these positive principles, they're protective as well. We can kind of examine that here really quickly.

They're positive to the word itself, and we can ask ourselves in what ways. We see in verse 5 that the instructions to older women, from older women to younger women, is to be discreet, chaste, homemakers, good, obedient to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be blasphemed.

This instruction has some sort of protectiveness to God's word, that it may not be blasphemed. It was interesting. I was going through some of Matthew Henry's commentary on these texts. He's one of the commentaries that I have, readily accessible, and he's done the whole Bible.

Great commentary to pick up and have as at least a starting place to start asking questions of the text that you're in. I really enjoy the accessibility that he writes with. He likened the text here to Romans 2, 24, for the name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you.

Now the context is a little bit different, but we are talking about the word of God or the name of God being blasphemed. How might the word of God be blasphemed because of the failure to be discreet or chaste or homemakers and obedient to your own husbands?

Why would that cause it to be blasphemed? But if we think about it, if the Cretans claim to bear the name of Christ, we have now new creations in Christ. They bear his name, but they continue to walk in their old iniquitous ways.

Would they not rightly incur reproaches from their unbelieving neighbors that you claim this God, you claim these wonderful things that he does for you, but yet you act in a way not in keeping with those glorious ways?

I think it would be a right way or a right time to reproach somebody who is not living out those glorious ways in which you claim you have been changed. So if we get the doctrine right in word, but we fail to live pious lives according to our gender, the gospel of Christ and the word of God, which is most excellent, pure and glorious, has been disgraced.

We have not fulfilled and we have not gone and done the works that were not just required of us, but now have been made us. We're now free to do those good works. It's not that we are required to do those good works.

We are now free to go do those good works. And if we fail to do so, we have omitted something that we've been freed to do. And we've remained enslaved or we've remained fettered to the old man, the flesh, the past.

And so we incur reproach. We now have the word of God being blasphemed because of the things we have done and we have also failed to do the things we've also failed to do. Now, this is also a protective text in that it protects the body.

So it's protective to the body. And one of the ways we can see this is by asking ourselves about these positive principles and maybe men and women who fill them properly. So are temperate men more unifying than intemperate men?

Yes, that's pretty obvious. Are discreet women better teachers? Yes, they're better at teaching good things. They're also better at loving good things. They love the good things that they're teaching.

Are sober-minded young men of great use to their elders? Yeah, versus the non-sober-minded young man, not of much use. In fact, a lot of times it's the opposite. It's destructive, right? It can be a very destructive thing to be the opposite of these things we're called to be.

And are obedient young wives worth more than large rubies to their husbands? I can claim yes. My young wife, she is worth far above any large rubies that I can find. So asking it in that direction, we see how these are protective to the body.

They're unifying. They ensure good teaching to extend out into the future, generation after generation. And they're also protecting a love for that body and for the bridegroom who washes that bride with the word.

Now, this is also a protection to the family. The families on Crete we see have been upended. They have been subverted. They have been attacked by those who would seek to teach things that ought not be taught, and for the sake of dishonest gain, foresorted gain.

Now, in what ways do these positive principles protect the family? The teaching of sound doctrine leads men to being sound in faith. We see the direction that's given in verse 2, that these men be sound in faith and love and patience.

Men who fulfill these principles, men who try to follow their Savior in these principles and submit themselves to this teaching under these elders, would they have more wholesome homes or less wholesome homes by following these teachings?

It's going to be more wholesome homes. We're not going to see people trying to upend their entire, well, I mean, unless it's like completely disordered, then we're trying to reorder it, right? But we're trying to make things whole again.

We're trying to make things sound. And these positive principles are going to cause elders, leaders, fathers, young men, people who have been given authority within the church, they are trying to make whole again.

They're trying to reorder and not disorder. Whereas the subversion that we see in chapter 1, we're going to be protected against it. This is part of Paul's plan to protect and shut up those who should be shut up.

This instruction here gives them a bulwark, a barrier, to all those outside of the church looking to dismantle, looking to cause chaos into the body of Christ. It gives them a protection, and it's a perpetual protection.

We'll talk about that later as well. Men sound in their faith, they make and maintain whole and healthy households. And this is also a protection to Cretans at large. Now, why would that be? If men on the island of Crete are taught reverence, temperance, if the women are taught soberness, to be teachers of good things, in every single city on the isle of Crete, what can we imagine the result to be?

We kind of have a historical evidence, we can talk about that here in a second, but we can also imagine what those results would be on an island, in a country, amongst a people, amongst a city. If those men and women are teaching the younger of their own gender what is right and proper for that gender, and age, in every city on the isle of Crete, what can we imagine the results going to be?

Well, it's going to be the same result, but it's just going to be passed down. And like we talked about network effects earlier, if we're having more children, if we're meeting the replacement rate or exceeding it, that actually has an exponential effect.

Which, as finite human beings, that type of thing should blow our minds. We're not just having more children, we're quite possibly expanding how many elders we're going to need in the future. We don't always think about that.

Every now and then I kind of think about that. If I have six more kids, I'm going to put pressure on Michael and the elders to get even more elders. Right? Not a goal, but it's a good problem to have.

But this is how some of this can work in practice. Protecting Cretans at large. Taking a look at the island on a map, and considering Paul's instructions to appoint elders in every single city, we can assume that no Cretan is safe from reform.

The way the church is to be ordered has every individual center on Crete in their sights, and in this way every Cretan is protected from themselves, and that which has been habitually dangerous to themselves, their family, and their culture in the past.

All of it's up for grabs, and Titus has been tasked with the job to go after all of them. Every last Cretan, every last city. We're putting elders, we're appointing elders in all these places. Good luck trying to avoid us.

And if you do look at the Isle of Crete, if you have elders in every city, you're not escaping. Back then we were talking about a very subsistence farming, fishing communities along the coast. You'd have vineyards here and there, otherwise they wouldn't be getting drunk.

But it's largely a self-sustaining island. Yes, there are visitors. It's a spot for rest and trade, as we've seen throughout the Gospels and throughout Acts, but it's not a hoppin' city like you would see Corinth as, or Jerusalem.

Crete is a very strategic place, let's say, for the Gospel to go and take over and last for a long time. And so as we consider the makeup of the island itself, we see this use of instruction and what it might do, what we imagine it might do.

But in practice and history, Crete had a turbulent past after the Gospel landed. It had passed between Roman hands, Greek hands, Venetians, Ottomans, back to Venetians again, back to Ottomans again. Now, in the modern day, it's under the purview of the modern state of Greece.

It now boasts a large professing Christian population, 98%. Could you imagine that, right? Of everybody that you know on the island, and the minority religions left are Muslim, and I would say that's probably a holdover from the Ottoman Empire.

But they were under the Ottoman yoke for quite a long time. It only leaked 2%. I'd say that is the blessing of God, in a way. So was this instruction successful? I'd say, looking at it from a historical point of view, it's been quite successful.

And even things like cultural issues like divorce rate, drunkenness, that sort of thing, I did the best that I could to kind of look up those things. Some of the things that we're seeing here, like upending of households, or soberness on the island.

And those percentages are far lower than what we see in our own context. And that type of fruit from this teaching, from this instruction, I see as the Lord's blessing upon a people that... And in Titus' work, too, right?

This is a blessing upon Titus' work. This was a job given to Titus as an elder picking elders in every city. And the Lord has blessed it. Should we not... It should cause us to pause and be thankful because we know that it can be just as successful in our place, in our context.

We can pray for these things. We can ask the Lord, Lord, as successful as you've made Titus' ministry over thousands of years, do the same here. Do the same for us. Do the same for our people, and our place, and our time.

Again, I think I got through half of what I was supposed to get through. So Chris is just going to have to wait a couple weeks longer than what we assumed we were going to wait. But we'll go ahead and continue.