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Well, I’m pleased that our focus this weekend is on this letter. I guess if I was discipling a young man at the moment, I’d be taking him very quickly to this letter because there’s great pastoral guidance here and solutions to real needs. It’s a short letter, a punchy letter, it’s a focused letter. Titus is on Crete and there is such an affinity between the Cretan culture and our own culture. So please join me in prayer.
Lord you have given us Your Word, the Bible, as a light to our path, and a lamp to our feet. You have told us that the wise person is the one who delights in Your Word and meditates on it day and night. You have breathed it out, inspired it. You have protected it through the ages, so that it now comes to us. This is the instrument that You use in our lives to lead us in maturity. So we pray that over these next couple of days You might have that ministry with us to Your glory. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.
In 1985, I realised that I was coming to an executive role of a Bible college. I had no experience in leading such organisations. I had pastored two churches, one in the country for six years and one in the inner city for 4 years. So I needed help. So I turned to a management manual and it was in that management manual that I saw a saying for the first time, that I can remember. “Stick to your knitting”. “Stick to your knitting”. Work out the purpose of your organisation and work at doing that really well. Now my organisation that I was going into was a Bible college and I realised that the Bible was our knitting. The Bible was to be at our core and that we needed to provide the maximum allocation of Bible subjects to our students. “Stick to your knitting”.
Now, I’ve thought about that many times since, as I see Qantas, encouraging us all to vote one way in a referendum. “Stick to your knitting”, make sure your planes fly on time, that would be a start. And then the big banks get involved in all sorts of woke enterprises – “Stick to your knitting”. Then the Australian cricket board starts giving us advice on energy policy. “Stick to your knitting”. Let’s play cricket. Then the NRL, which, can you imagine, gives us lectures on ethics in diversity and inclusion, except Kevin Walters good old kid. “Stick to your knitting”. Now I’m going to take my advice this weekend and I’m going to stick to my knitting. I’ve been educated mainly in history and theology and I’m glad to wear both hats, history and theology, because if your theology reflects what the Bible says then you realise you can look at history and see that theology work out in practice. That they speak with identical voices, that what theology asserts, history backs up and proves. They are consistent. And they speak with one voice. Our primary document this weekend is this first century letter of Paul the apostle to his young friend Titus. We’re going to look at it through the lens of this question, “where does real change come from”? That is our theme. Now it is interesting, when you look at change in our culture and in our society. I noticed in New South Wales and in Queensland, too, we no longer call jails, jails, we no longer call prisons, prisons. We now call them correctional centres, and that begs the question “How many lives get corrected”? By going to such centres in New South Wales, we have the Department of Corrective Services. But it doesn’t seem to me that they do much of a job in correction. Did you notice that recently the Victorian government appointed a parliamentary secretary in charge of Men’s Behavioural Change? Can you imagine that?
Well, I don’t want that job. That’s a big job – to change the behaviour of men. Governments can set up reviews. Governments can set up royal commissions. Governments can bring in legislation which may give relief. But look at the Australian Tax Act and look at how it keeps evolving in order to cope with many more new ways of avoidance. Where does real change come from? Now have a look at Titus, 46 verses in all three chapters and it is a letter which is dominated by 3 long verses. Each chapter has 1 long verse. And in the first chapter the long verse is 1-4. Let me read it again. It begins with the word, Paul, and the full stop comes at the end of verse 4, Saviour. Here is the key to the chapter. Paul, a servant of God and an Apostle of Jesus Christ to further the faith of God’s elect and their knowledge of the truth that leads to godliness, in the hope of eternal life which God, who does not lie, promised before the beginning of time and which now at his appointed season he has brought to light through the preaching entrusted to me by the command of God our Saviour, to Titus, my true son in our common faith, grace and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Saviour. That is the key to understanding the letter. That is the key to understanding the first chapter. Notice what it says, Paul, literally he is a slave at God’s disposal. He is an apostle which means messenger. He’s been chosen by Jesus Christ to be Jesus Christ’s messenger. What does He do? He calls the elect, that’s us, to faith, that we might be mature in the knowledge of the truth, and that will translate itself and be seen in Godliness in our practical everyday Godliness. Now there is the purpose of Paul’s apostleship. He is a messenger of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ will build His church, he continues to build His Church,
And he’s going to do it through his apostolic message. Verse 2. The certainty of eternal life, which the truthful, unlying God, compared to the liars who are the Cretans, promised. And look at this word, you can underline it there, and brought to light. This word is used four times in the letter, manifested. The first of four. This eternal life was brought to light through the preaching of the gospel, entrusted to Paul by the command of God our Saviour. Now a few years ago, I was asked to go to Adelaide and I was to preach at the 10th year anniversary of a number of church plants in that city. It was a denomination in the midst of a very liberal and unorthodox denomination. That night, as well as celebrating the 10 years of church planting, they were farewelling one of the trustees of their trust deed, which gave that church independence from the compromised denomination of which it was a part. And Peter was the trustee-29 years a trustee. They gave him a golf buggy. They asked him to give a speech. They limited the speech to 10 minutes. He warned us it was going to be a very boring speech. And it was, but I’ll never forget it because what did he do? He told us about the trust deed, how that trust deed was so precious. He pleaded with us to never give up that trust deed -no matter what the denominational authority said, never give it up. Peter was an ideal trustee. When you choose a trustee to look after a trust deed, you don’t choose someone who’s going to be creative, you don’t choose someone who’s going to be inventive. You choose someone who is reliable. You choose someone who is dependable. You choose someone who is faithful. Look at verse 3 again.
Paul says that he has been entrusted. It is exactly the same verb that Paul uses, he has entrusted his life to Jesus Christ and now Jesus Christ has entrusted his message of eternal life to the Apostle Paul. So here is the Paul who trusts Christ and here’s the Christ who trusts Paul. Same word. And he entrusts to Paul, God’s gospel. Paul is his steward. He is not free to edit it, he is not free to pass over it, he is entrusted by the command of God, our Saviour.
There is no higher stewardship and that’s why the Apostle Paul says in Galatians, if you deny this gospel, let that person be accursed if you preach anything other than this entrusted gospel. Now let me put my historians hat on. Let me take you to Crete in the first century, in the Mediterranean Sea, 220 kilometres long at its widest 60 kilometres wide. The Cretans were the experts in piracy. They were really good at it and if you were raising an army for anything and you’re prepared to pay the money you had to make sure you had plenty of Cretans in your army because they were excellent archers. They were excellent with the bow and arrow and the Romans knew that they had to get this island under control and they committed in the first century 15,000 members, three legions of troops and it took them three years to get Crete under control There was no wildlife on Crete. One ancient writer said, because the population made up for it.
There is a verb in Greek, kretizo (?), very close to Crete, and it means to lie, and to cheat.
Now, friends, that is the culture. Look at what Paul says there in verse 12, Your own prophet says, and this is true, this is your self testimony, Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons. Imagine that at the heart of this culture is lying, fake news, biased media, can you imagine it? Corruption, evil beasts, even your financial institutions, overindulgence, epidemic, lazy gluttons. Is it familiar? Well, let’s look at the church in this culture. First century on the day of Pentecost of the sixteen groups who were at Jerusalem for the day of Pentecost, there were Cretans there. And they bring the gospel back to Crete and a church is established. What is the state of this church? Well, have a look at verse 10, it’s being infiltrated, empty talkers, lots of words, they talk their own silly theories, they are deceivers, oh they’re subtle.
Well Jesus put your trust in Jesus, that’s good. But Jesus isn’t enough because it’s got to be supplemented by circumcision See, verse ten? They are of the circumcision group and verse 11 they are upsetting whole families. Imagine, do you love the Lord Jesus? I love the Lord Jesus. Do you love him enough to get yourself circumcised for him? Oh! That’s a big sacrifice. Oh yes. We’ve got to make sacrifices. Show your love for him. They’re upsetting whole families and somehow they’re doing it to line their own pockets.
Get the royalties in, get the dishonest gain. How are they doing that? Verse 14. They’re promoting Jewish myths, fantasies. I’ve got a secret and once you discover this secret, oh it’s going to turn your Christian life upside down.
Verse 15: foods. Oh well if you eat this food it can have a purifying effect on you. You eat this food don’t eat that food, and Paul says they have no effect on the defilement of unbelief those who are purified by the gospel. To the pure verse 15, all things are pure.
Verse 16: They profess knowledge of God they are Theists just as we believe that there’s a high power out there.
They live like atheists, they deny God by the way they live. And this is probably I think the saddest verse in the New Testament. Paul says they are detestable, disobedient and unfit for any good work. Is it a description of Cretan culture? No, it’s a description of the Church. The Church I’m leaving you behind to get in order, is detestable, disobedient, unfit for any good work. At the organised church in Australia there would be parts of that organised church which fit that definition. That adds to the relevance of Titus. So friends notice here you have a rotting culture and a rotting church. And Paul writes to Titus verse 4, my true child in a common faith, a close companion of Paul. He was a Greek, he was uncircumcised himself that he’d come to Christ. And now he was a source of joy to the Apostle Paul.
And so Paul has had this short mission and he leaves Titus behind, verse 5, to bring the church into order, appoint elders in every town. Now we know in the first century that there were 3 main population centres in Crete so therefore Titus has to appoint elders in those 3 main population centres. Here’s your solution Titus, to a rotting church and a rotting culture: appoint mature elders in every town. Oh that’s fairly obvious isn’t it? The answer to drought is water. The answer to famine, look it’s food. The answer to bushfire, change weather conditions. The answer to a rotten culture and a rotten church, oh mature elders. Rather like that group of tourists who go to that Balkan village and they come to the café and there’s an old man sitting outside and one of them says, are there any famous people being born in this town? No, the old man says we only have babies born in this town. You appoint elders, mature elders and you can imagine Titus coming.
Well, where do I get mature elders from? That is why Titus is so good for us. Here is the apostolic prescription. Here is the prescription for our culture. Here is the prescription for our church. Because the problem you see is always a problem of leadership. I’ve just finished a series on Judges. Everybody doing their own thing. A problem of leadership. Every Christian organisation, you can look at them, you can see examples of them, started out with an evangelical tone, now have lost their way completely. Why? It’s a problem of leadership, and so get these mature leaders. That’s what Paul says to Titus. Well what does maturity look like? Look in verse seven and you’ll see there that there are five negatives. This is not what it looks like. The elder must not be overbearing and arrogant. He mustn’t be bossy, he mustn’t be stubborn, mustn’t be a pyramid like he’s at the top and everyone does as their told over beer.
He mustn’t be quick tempered. He mustn’t be irritable, cranky, impatient. He mustn’t be a drunkard, and be ill disciplined and indulgent. He mustn’t be violent, very hard, because leaders lead, but not aggressively. And he mustn’t be greedy for gain He’s in it for the money.
Now none of these bring about the solution, they only add to the problem. Versa 8, look at it, 6 positives. He must be hospitable, practical. He must care for strangers. He must be a lover of good, charitable. He must come to people with an open hand. Must be self controlled, sober and sensible. He must be upright. He must be committed to fair play. He must be holy and devout. He must be committed to Christ.
Must be disciplined, a mastery and knowledge of himself. Now notice what this doesn’t say, doesn’t say anything about gifts. It doesn’t say anything about academic qualifications, which college they’ve gone to. It’s all about character. I love that story that the New Testament scholar, Don Carson says… On one occasion, there were visitors to Don Carson’s home and they said to his mother, Mrs. Carson what do you do, Mrs. Carson? She said, I’m a builder. What do you build? I build character. I build character. These people, verse eight, the absence of verse seven stand out in their culture. It’s not easy. You call to be a cultural nonconformist? Individually focused on people. You care for people, you’re generous with people. You’ve got yourself under control. These are people and you’ve got the solution. Now notice here, the contrast you’ve got there before.
Look at chapter one verse six. Have a look at verse six. He is to be above reproach in the home, the husband of one wife, and have children who are not wild and disobedient. But contrast that with verse 11. And the people who infiltrated the church are household wreckers, upsetting whole families. Verse seven, he’s not greedy for gain, pursuing dishonest gain. Compare that to verse 11, all they do is for shameful gain, they’ve got one eye on their bank balance. Verse seven, not quick tempered and violent. Verse 12, wild evil beasts. Verse nine instruct in sound doctrine, point out error. Verse 11, they teach what ought not to be taught? Titus, I’m leaving you behind. And I want you to get this church in order. So Titus, perhaps the first Sunday after Paul’s left, turns up to the city of Candia. And he turns up to the church on a Sunday morning. And the church seems to be all over the place. It’s disordered. People are parading young men who this time last week have got themselves circumcised for the sake of Christ. Others are saying I’ve got the secret to the full experience of the Christian life, but you have to come this week and put your money in the till and I’ll tell you what the secret is. Others are telling you this is the food you’ve got to avoid and if you take this food, everything will be fine. Others are just telling you mythical, nonsense and conspiracy theories. And Titus sits back and says, where do I go? What a disordered mob this is. I’m leaving you with nothing other than the entrusted message of eternal life.
So that you might call the elect to life and lead to maturity and godliness. My friend that’s where elders come from. That’s how Christians are made. That’s how Christians mature. That’s how you will mature. Either way, history proves it in the first century on Crete and in the 21st century today. And if you’re a believer, you know that you came to that belief. Not naturally, you came to that belief because you heard. Someone shared with you, you read, something happened. It broke through for me,in Malachi, it just broke through. It opened blind eyes and unstopped deaf ears. I heard the word. You’ve got to hear the word. God’s instrument to bring the elect to faith. And to bring the elect to maturity. The old R. C. Sproul, a theologian in the in the United States, before he died, he said, the great weakness of the Church is that almost no one believes that God has invested His power in His Word. Most people look for power in technique, programs, schemes, anywhere and everywhere, except where God has placed it in His Word.
The Gospel is the power of God to save! Here is the entrusted message, have a look when you get home to that brilliant time where the Lord appears to the Apostle Paul in the vision, he’s having a really tough time in Corinth and God speaks to him and he says, Paul, don’t be afraid and don’t be silent. Speak up! I gather that God doesn’t waste his words. I have a view of Paul, that he was never afraid and he was never tempted to be silent. But God knew that the Apostle Paul could be afraid and he was tempted to be silent. And God says to him there in Acts 18. Don’t be afraid, don’t be silent. Keep on speaking because I have many people in this place. I have many people of the elect in this place who don’t know they’re elect yet and you don’t know who they are. But you keep on speaking because I will call them out to me as you keep on speaking this entrusted message.
Dear friends, the greatest threat to the church – is its leadership, leaders who are invisible and do not lead, leaders who are unbiblical and fanciful and have departed from the entrusted Word, leaders of a debased mind, who are unconverted.
Titus tells us that he’s been left with an entrusted message. Let it loose. Making God’s message central is the key to conversion and growth. And more and more as we preach this entrusted message, our culture will hate it more and more and the reason our culture hates it is because it’s exclusive and not inclusive. It affirms that there is only one way into relationship with God and that is through the Lord Jesus and our culture hates this entrusted word because it does nothing to build up self-confidence. It humbles us. We have nothing to bring, nothing in my hand I bring simply to Thy cross I cling. And the historian tells you that when the culture hates the gospel elements of the church, it also joins in that culture and hates the gospel as well. What the culture hates, the Church often hates and Titus’ assignment is simple, look at verse 5, Get the church into order.
That’s what you’re to do. And you’re to use this entrusted message; it’s a lovely word, get the church into order. A man comes to the Lord Jesus and he is deaf. Mark tells us that he has a speech impediment because he is deaf and the Lord Jesus places his fingers in the man’s ear and he touches the man’s tongue and he says be opened and his ears are opened. And he speaks with his tongue. One word, plainly or in order and you add a couple of prepositions to this and that’s the Word. Get the church into order. Get the church into clarity. Remove the confusion, the slurring, the food laws, the circumcision the fantastic myths the revelations you’ve had from God, remove it all.
And you’ve got to do it through the preaching of the entrusted message. As, friends, we’ve got to come back to this again and again because I find that for some people there’s a strange appeal in confusing nonsense, some people get up and just sprout confusing nonsense, and Christian people are really impressed. I remember going to the Pittwood Nursing Home which was in our parish, a Presbyterian nursing home in Sydney, and one day I sat in the chapel and there was this old retired Presbyterian minister and he spoke for fifteen minutes. I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. It was just all gobbledygook. And I turned to Mrs. White at the end of the sermon and I said, What do you think of that? She said, “Wasn’t it wonderful? Wasn’t it wonderful?” it was just gobbledygook! And there’s something about getting this gobbledygook that somehow appeals to us.
And take the entrusted message. Take it to the church that is all over the place! Take it to the culture that is rotten and the church will get orderly, and crystal clarity on the big issues.
Let me just say in closing that we live in a culture with no answers, the statistics are getting worse. And our most progressive states take pride in distancing our children from this very Gospel which provides the big solution to life’s problems. We think that by building more and bigger correctional centres, that’s the way ahead. Nikita Khrushchev, who was the Secretary General of the Soviet Union said before his death, no wonder he died soon afterwards, “Communism’s failure is its failure to produce the selfless man.” It doesn’t change people. It doesn’t change the heart. Maxine and I started going out in 1971. Our first date, if I remember right, we went to a musical called Paint Your Wagon. You remember it? Well, Lee Marvin sings I Was Born under a Wandering Star. And in that musical, there’s a young man. Lee Marvin brings this young boy who is sixteen years of age. He brings him to a saloon bar, he knocks on the door of a saloon bar and he says, “I give you the boy. You give me the man.” What’s going to turn the boy into a man? Smoking, drinking, illicit activities. That’s always Hollywood’s answer: turn the boy into the man.
And recently, I read Geoffrey Blainey, I think the greatest living historian in Australia. And he lives opposite the Melbourne cricket ground. He’s talking about the huge crowds coming to the Taylor Swift concerts. Amazing, he said, just huge crowds. Bigger than anything we’ve seen. Nonsense! He says, no, wait, there was some more at AFL and VFL Grand Finals. Nonsense! Look at the history! The biggest crowd at the MCG was 143,000 in 1959. It’s all there. To hear Billy Graham.
Melbourne society was changed but in 1902. I put my historian’s hat on and I go down to Melbourne, population of Melbourne 500,000, an evangelist called Reuben Archer Torrey comes from the United States and half the population of Melbourne go and listen to him and Melbourne Society is turned upside down. Go and read/Google the Great Awakening, Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield. Go and read about John Wesley going out into the fields of Great Britain. Go and read about the Welsh revival of 1904 and 1905 where police had no crimes to solve and so they formed themselves into quartets to sing at religious revival meetings. Look at the history. I went as a student to SMBC in 1969, the year ahead of me there were seven men. That was the average intake. In my year there were 32 men. What had happened in 1968? Billy Graham had conducted a two-week crusade and men and women came forward for missionary service and ministry. Go back to 1970 I know I’m labouring the point but I will labour the point, and a New Zealand Presbyterian minister comes to a place called Hurstville in Sydney and the pulpit leads the way. And in his five years of ministry there were 20 men and the same number of women who went into ministry and Missionary Service. Incredible! Listen to Philip Jensen, in the Campus Bible Studies in the 70’s and 80’s – filled Moore College with men. What did he do that was clever? He preached the word. Every week, an hour just expounded the word, and the word did its work. Charles Darwin, the father of the Evolutionary theory. If you were washed to shore on one of your exploits, on a foreign isle what would you do? This father of the Evolutionary theory, he said, “I would pray that the message of the missionary had reached this far.”
Look at chapter 1 verse 12. Liars, evil brutes, lazy gluttons. Have a look at chapter 2 verse 12. Turn the page. And look at chapter 2 verse 12. Self-controlled, upright, Godly lives. How do you get from chapter 1 verse 12 to chapter 2 verse 12. Liars, evil brutes, lazy gluttons, to self-controlled, upright and Godly lives? Well, look at the verse before it. Chapter 2 verse 11. The grace of God appears.
The grace of God appeared, bringing salvation to all people. That’s where change comes from, the entrusted message, The grace of God has visited us!
And so the Apostle Paul says, in verse 3 of Chapter 1, through the preaching entrusted to me by the command of God our Saviour. History. 1789. The mutineers rebel against William Bligh. They toss him and some loyal officers over the side on a little rowing boat and they take HMS Bounty. They call in at Tahiti, and they kidnap women. They get to Pitcairn Islands and they are, one historian said, a drunken and debauched community. And then two men, John Adams and Ned Young, go out to HMS Bounty. They climb on board, they go down to William Bligh’s cabin. They open William Bligh’s trunk and they discover two books.
The King James Version of the Bible and the 1662 edition of the Anglican Prayer Book. And by the time that community is discovered in 1811, it is a perfectly harmonious community, with no jails, no courthouses. God had done His work. Two men. John Adams and Ned Young.
History and theology speaks with one voice. Verse 5, the reason I left you in Crete was that you might put in order what was left unfinished and appoint elders in every town, as I directed you.
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