Titus Lesson 3 end, begin 4
Titus · JD McCulley · Aug 6, 2023
Titus, No. 12
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://www.hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/49261932131272

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

Let's get started this morning. I am finishing up question 10. I had one more positive quality that we wanted to look at, and then we'll roll into question 11, and then I'll pass the baton over to Mike, probably mid-class here. Question 10, just to review real quick, says, list the six positive qualities he must have and explain each. We're talking about the elder, the overseer here. And so I'm going to read, if you want to follow along with me in the Bible, Titus 1, 7 through 9. We're just going to reread this portion of the scripture that we've been covering.

And we'll pick up with this sixth positive quality here. So in Titus 1, 7 through 9, for the overseer, it must be above reproach as God's steward, not self-willed, not quick-tempered, not addicted to wine, not pugnacious, not fond of sordid gain, but hospitable, Loving and this is where those positives starts hospitable loving what is good sensible just devout Self-controlled we'll cover that today and then also verse 9 holding fast the faithful word which is in accordance with the teaching So that he will be able to both to exhort in sound doctrine and to refute those who contradict So we're finishing up this passage on qualifications for the elder and we're looking at the positive qualities.

Number six was self-controlled. Yeah, self-controlled, not too difficult to define. I think that there's some interesting aspects that we can look at here in terms of the Greek and what those words, this is an adjective, it has to do with temperance, controlling one's own desires, which would produce actions, right? So it applies to a man's appetites and actions. The word disciplined is actually another word that's a synonym to self-controlled and so We're seeing an individual here, and I think it's interesting that we're pulling these out, but remember these go in a lump sum.

They're all mentioned together, and while we're breaking them down, we should remember to see this all in the whole. When you think about hospitable, loving what is good, sensible, just, about, self-control, it's such a tall list for this role of church leadership. But they're all meant to be seen together because they represent character, right? And we talked about that character is in Christ, so we're going to review that a little bit here. But this last one here, the positive quality being disciplined, controlling desires, and ultimately being so self-controlled that you yield yourself to the work of the Spirit. It's interesting that self-control ends up in yielding.

That's what happens here in Galatians 5.23.

And I'll read this because this applies to all of us, not just the qualification of the elder. Paul's talking about here the qualities of gentleness, self-control against such things. There is no law. And so we know that if self-control is not found in the presence of the law, what is it found in? Because self-control sure sounds like something you should be doing. Sounds like a good rule to measure you against, right? But there is, against such things, there is no law.

And I think that we have to remember that these qualifications of elders are communicated in the reality or the environment of grace. Right? Mike? When you look at the term self-control, It automatically says to the reader, I've got to control myself.

But I think if you look at it from the standpoint that he's talking about the desires of the flesh, which is what self would refer to, then the control of that desire is recognizing the principles of the cross of Christ, co-crucifixion, I've been separated.

It's not up to me to get self in line and have the self marching to religious tenets. It all has to do with the cross of Christ, that I've been separated from it and I don't have to control it. I understand that self and sin nature are the same thing. And my reckoning on it, my faith in what Christ did on the cross to my old man is where I come down on that, rather than working hard to get it controlled.

Yeah, I think that that's a really important point here, is that the word self-control instantly has you focusing on yourself. And nine out of ten times that self-control is going to look like a really great flesh effort To control yourself against something so I started thinking about this. I was like, you know, how do you know this has to do with deliverance and overcoming things and obviously that's that's involved in this role, but I found a quote where actually miles Sanford was referring to what watchman me said and he said what watchman and I'm going to read this to you and Watchman Nee startles many by saying, and we're talking about deliverance here, God's way of deliverance is altogether different from man's way.

Man's way is to try to suppress sin by seeking to overcome it. But God's way is to remove the sinner. Let me say that again. Man's way is to suppress sin by seeking to overcome it. God's way is to remove the sinner. If we say, if only I were stronger, I could overcome my violent outbursts of temper. And so we plead with the Lord to strengthen us that we may exercise more self-control. But this is altogether wrong. This is not Christianity.

God's means of delivering us from sin is not by making us stronger and stronger, but by making us weaker and weaker. And this is surely, he goes on to say, this is surely a peculiar way of victory. You say, but it is the divine way. Is it the divine way?

God sets us free from the dominion of sin, not by strengthening our own man, but by crucifying him, not by helping him to do anything, but by removing him from the scene of action. That's where we get rest. Does that make sense? I love that. Yeah, that too. That's really good.

So when we think about self-control, here we're talking about God making us weaker. And we recognize that, but oftentimes we look at self-control and, Lord, strengthen me. I just need a little more self-control. If you could just up the dosage, you know, I could get through this thing. And I think the Lord, you know, understands where our heart is in those situations. And for those of us that, and I'm raising my hand here, for years, Lord, help, help. There's nothing wrong with being in desperate dependence upon the Lord. But dependence would also have an object of faith in this case.

Is it true that God has crucified your old man? Is it true that his desire is to remove you, your old man, from the scene of action so that your new life in Christ is resting through that situation as opposed to wrestling with your own domination of the temptation that you're struggling with? It's not about you becoming stronger at all, interestingly. It's about dependence. Right? Yeah. You know, J.D., though... Yeah. Go ahead, Mike.

All of Paul's epistles teach different aspects of that same truth, and it all centers around what really happened at the cross, you know. Every Christian is pretty aware of the fact that your sins were paid for at the cross, but like Lewis Ferry Chaffer said, 32 other things happened at the cross. And as you learn what they are, your faith has the food in which to believe and rest on.

And one of them, and a really important one, is the fact that I have been through that cross separated from my old man. He's still here, but I don't have to respond to him anymore because he's not attached to me. He's attached to the old guy that I live in this body, you know, and he's there and he's active and he's talking, but I'm disconnected, you know? Yeah. This ties back to what you're covering in the main service, the doctrine of the two men. That's right.

And if you take the quality of self-control and you look at it from the doctrine of the old man, and this is even from a believing standpoint, I'm talking about a believer here, but a believer operating according to the old man versus the new man, you get two different outcomes. And we know that the totality of Paul's writings with regards to to self-control and the new man, which is where we get the doctrine of the resurrection life that we live that Not knowing those truths could lead to the old man really putting on a good show Because that's where we rely on you know for our own strength but you know just like we talked about there and in Galatians 5 23 that gentleness self-control against such things there is no law and Is the law made for the new man? No No, no, it is not made for them. The law is for Adam the Adam nature Adamic nature And it's to point him you know to ultimately to the Lord and so We have that sixth quality there. We'll move on from self-control and take a look at question 11 here. It says, describe doctrinal qualifications. What are they?

So let's read Titus 1.9 one more time, and we'll work through this verse.

Holding fast the faithful word, which is in accordance with the teaching, so that he will be able both to exhort in sound doctrine and to refute those who contradict. So not only must this overseer meet moral and spiritual standards, we just talked about those, and whose standards are those? They're Christ's standards. Yeah. Well, and they're also for every believer. But what's interesting is it's not the standards of the overseer, it's ultimately Christ's standards in their personal life.

But we also see in this verse that he's got to be a reliable man of the Word of God, right? He's got to be holding fast the faithful word. And not only holding fast the faithful word, but it has to be in accordance with the teaching that he received.

So we're going to break this down a little bit. But before I do, maybe I'll just kind of put this out to the class. What does holding fast the faithful word mean? literally believing it. This is true. Okay. Okay. He truly believes what he's teaching, which happens, right? I mean, there's a lot of times where, you know, you get, there's teachers that get up and they teach something.

They don't fully believe it necessarily. I haven't come to, to fully trust that that's the truth for the believer and for themselves. I might feel that way at times, to be honest. I know that it says this about me, but I haven't come into a full dependence upon the Lord for it yet.

But here we're seeing an individual that's holding fast the faithful word. It means that he's committed to God's truth. He doesn't depart from it. We quote a lot of other authors in scripture, but it is up to us as Bereans to search out and ensure that what we're hearing from Miles Stanford or Darby or J.B. Stoney or, you know, Hal Malloy or Mike Doyle, that it lines up with the Word of God. And in this case, Paul is talking to Timothy through the kind of perspective that he has to have on the very teaching and the very Word of God. And he does not want Titus to depart from it. He wants to teach those in Crete to not depart from it. So he's saying that we as overseers, as elders, we're responsible for conserving and preserving these teachings.

You can't dilute it. We can't delete it. We can't distort it. We've got to stay in accordance with the teaching. And this actually the word accordance with the teaching comes first for emphasis in the Greek here. So this was the big deal. It's like not only hold fast, but it's got it. You've got to hold fast to the things that have been taught. You know, I was thinking on that, that there's a, there's a transference from the word to the word being Christ. You know, it's a movement to a relationship with Christ rather than just holding the words and being perfectly correct about the words. I think you're right. Yeah. Yeah, I think that when we get to this next piece, the able to exhort in sound doctrine, I'm going to talk about the sound doctrine as a person, which I think is what you're talking about here. That's really good.

Yeah, I think that one of the things that Titus needed to understand was this conserving the truth. So these church elders and overseers, they had to pass these truths on that had been taught from, you know, from the apostles without any change. And so there's an apostolic body of teaching that must be held on to And that it was the same then as it is the same now. We're not teaching something that Titus wasn't teaching. And that's where it comes to bear on those of us that are looking at this from, you know, 2023. These teachings should not have changed because they were in accordance with what he received. And when we teach, they should be in accordance with what Titus received and so forth. So it's the same body of content held fast to faithfully. And to Donna's point, that body of content ties into, and the word was God, right? So we know that it's ultimately the Lord Jesus that we're talking about here.

And I think that that is a good tie into the second aspect of this verse that says able to exhort in sound doctrine. So what does, what does exhort in sound doctrine mean? Have you ever been exhorted? Elder, what did it look like? What it looks like, I think, how my boy used to, he had a simple method.

When people would come to him with questions or anxiety revolving around maybe a doctrine, he would listen. And then when the person was finished talking, he would say, Let's go find out what God's Word says about this particular circumstance. And so the emphasis was always on what God's Word has to say. And what's interesting about God's Word, you can't have a malady or a temptation or a sin in your life that's not covered in God's Word. They're all there. You can't sin outside the realm of what God has already talked about. And so there becomes, especially a guy like Titus or Timothy or Paul, you know, an absolute reliance on what God's word says and presented in a way that it's clear. Yeah, I think, and you mentioned Hal there. I'm going to mention a different guy.

But before I do, this exhorting and sound doctrine, just by definition, we're talking about that this individual can encourage and challenge and comfort. And, you know, I definitely, I didn't know Hal, but I know this other guy, not to toot your horn, Mike, but, you know, When we come to you as an elder, do we get encouragement? Do we get challenged? Do we get comforted in the scripture? Do you point us back to the scripture? And so, you know, for me, I have a different name that comes to mind when I teach this or when I think about this, and it has to do with you.

But the point is, is that you do not spend time in this person. The overseer is quickly moving to the Word of God because he knows that that's where you're going to get spiritual growth. Not from breaking down your malady, so to speak. Not from breaking down every cause of every issue that might be happening.

But he knows the Word of God in such a way to encourage, to challenge, and to comfort. And all of that is designed for spiritual growth in the body. And so that's the mindset of this individual. It's not just that he's self-controlled and he avoids all the things listed in those prior verses, but that he also is able to exhort and sound doctrine.

I love this quote from Stanford. He says, no doubt, sound doctrine is immensely important. And I think this is tying into exactly what you're saying. It's very important. Every faithful servant of God will feel himself imperatively called upon to hold fast to the form of sound words. But after all, a living Christ is the very soul and life of sound doctrine. I'll say that last part again. But after all, a living Christ is the very soul and life of sound doctrine.

I know that having been involved in seminary level courses at one point in time in my life, and it was a seminary that held to sound doctrine. Sound doctrine was very, very important. But as I came to learn more and more in my Christian walk what sound doctrine truly meant, it wasn't just that I had a great systematic theology. It wasn't that I just had an awesome apologetical approach to defending the faith. It wasn't just that, you know, et cetera. It was about a living Christ at the very life and soul of Sound Doctrine.

That's what Sound Doctrine has become. It's a person. But that person and his qualities and who we are in him have not changed from the moment that Titus received it from Paul to the point that we are receiving it today. That make sense? That's good. We've got one more piece or part to verse nine.

And finally, and to refute those who contradict sound doctrine. So a lot of teaching other believers in the case of being an overseer has to do with pointing out the error or the false teaching and being able to explain why it's wrong. you know, exposing a wrong way of thinking is a part of the role of the overseer. I mean, after all, we're talking about protecting the flock. So not only is there the offensive nature of that role, but there's also the defensive nature of the role. And Romans 16, 17, 16, 17 says, because we want to make sure that this applies to, or how does this apply in large to the body beyond just the overseer. Paul says, Now I urge you, brethren, keep your eye on those who cause dissensions and hindrances contrary to the teaching which you learned and turn away from them. So this has to do with all brethren in the body looking out for false teaching, but ultimately it's the responsibility of the elder and the overseer to protect the flock. to keep them from, as Miles talks about, killing themselves, because that's what sheep ultimately love to be able to do with their life, is they've got to eat, and once they've had enough food, They use all their energy to figure out how to hurt or, you know, take themselves out. And so it's the role of the body and ultimately the overseer to look for those who cause dissensions and hindrances and to, you know, lean on the exhorting of sound doctrine to correct that.

So the elder really has a twofold ministry of God's Word, you know, based on this last piece of Titus 1.9. He's building up the church with healthy doctrine, and we said that that doctrine is the very soul and life of the Lord Jesus. So he's building up the church with healthy doctrine, and he's refuting the false teachers who spread unhealthy doctrine.

So the naive church member who says, we don't care about doctrine. Just give us some really good devotional stuff. I mean, like really speak to my heart. Let's get let's get the emotional, you know, pumps flowing here. He doesn't know what he's asking for. You know, the churchgoer that's like, could you just liven this up with some more topical, devotional, you know, encouragement, motivational stuff? He doesn't know what he's asking for.

So, apart from the truth, and this means Bible doctrine, there can be no spiritual help or growth or health. So, you remove Bible doctrine, and again we're talking about that as being the very soul knife of Christ, ultimately, you remove that, you get to the feel good stuff, you're missing out on an opportunity for the body to grow and to get healthier, because that's the food which they feed on. and we feed on. So I'm looking at it from those two angles, the overseer and also from the body. And so for us as the body, do we also have to be ready to point out false teaching? Well, I think we do.

First Peter 3.15 talks about that, and this applies to you, not being an elder or being an elder. It applies to both. He says, Peter talks about, but sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts.

Always being ready to make a defense. What do you think that defense is about? It's about sound doctrine. Always being ready to make a defense to everyone who asks you to give an account for the hope that is in you. Where do you get your hope? Sound doctrine. So he says be ready to make a defense to everyone who asks you to give an account for that sound doctrine of hope that is in you. Yet, do it with gentleness and reverence. Where does gentleness and reverence come from? Sound doctrine.

You know? So, this ability to ultimately protect the body from false teaching was very important in Crete. And we know that that was a pretty gnarly place. Well, you know, Denver and Thailand and California and so forth. You got your fair share of false teaching, I'm pretty sure. And so where are we to lean? Where are we to find our focus?

Sound doctrine. And we're told to refute it and to protect anything that goes against the sound doctrine, anything that's unhealthy, and to protect the flock from that. So that wraps up question number 11 in Lesson 3. And if there's no questions, any questions before I pass it over to Mike, I'll let him kind of get right there. Any thoughts? I have a comment about sound doctrine.

I've had a few people tell me, don't teach doctrine, give me something practical. And I'm like, there is nothing more practical. than the truth and what you've been sharing. It all comes from fellowship with Christ as well. I mean, we read the Word, but we're having fellowship with Christ, and it's his life in us that produces it. But when they say, you mentioned something that makes the emotions or that makes you feel good, and there's nothing that makes me feel more good than sound doctrine, than knowing what he's done, what he's promised and what he's going to do.

And this next semester, I will teach First Timothy and Titus. Not right at the start, but that's one of the things that New Tribes emphasizes is on elders. And really sad to say here in many of the churches in Thailand, they pick the elders first and then teach them what their responsibilities are and what they're, you know, what they're supposed to know and how they're supposed to act. And it's like, don't put them in a position till you've taught them what to do.

Yeah. Yeah, I think that, well, I'll let Mike kind of continue to cover that in this next section here, but I like the way you put it, practical. Give me something practical. You know, it's funny because if you were to say, well, is the fruit of the Spirit practical? I mean, that's a good question. Is the fruit of the Spirit practical? Yeah, well, absolutely. These are all the things that I want to exemplify in my Christian life. How do you get there? Yeah. How do I make that fruit of the Spirit practical for you without talking to you about who the fruit of the Spirit is?

Right, and that all includes sound doctrine. So, yeah, it's like, and what's really being said, the underlying tone there, if I can say this, is that when somebody's looking for practical truth, they're looking for law. Yeah. Give me something to measure myself against so that I can get out there and find out if I'm measuring up. Unfortunately, that ends up becoming something that really appeals to the old man.

You know, whereas if I'm pointing you to the hope that I have, the hope that is in me, in the case of First Peter there, if I'm giving an account for the hope that is in me, is sound doctrine just some rote teaching that's in me? Is it just knowledge or is it the person of the Lord Jesus? So what can be more practical than the life of the Lord Jesus? That's how you get anything done by by faith.

You know, it's the object of your entire faith. So, anyway, I'll stop there, Mike. You want to pick up here? Thanks, Hal, for that thought. I think that's very accurate to what I hear a lot, too. Give me practical. You know, if that's all right with you, I'm just going to stay seated here. Cool. Go on. Yeah. Okay. So my lesson is Titus Lesson 4, and we're going to cover verses 10, 11, and 12. So the first thing I want to do is read the verses out of the New American Standard.

For there are many rebellious men, empty talkers and deceivers, especially those of the circumcision, who must be silenced because they are upsetting whole families, teaching things they should not teach for the sake of sordid gain. One of themselves, a prophet of their own said, Cretins are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons.

So in line of, we're just continuing on with the theme. My first question in lesson four was what is Paul's main emphasis on the elder's responsibility? We've just been talking about it. His main emphasis is can he handle Scripture accurately and to correct those who misinterpret it, which is verse 9. I think you see, especially in our country in 2023, there's such a push to actually push the Scriptures aside and even I even go to, well, so-and-so said this about that verse, and so-and-so said that about this verse. One of the guys that's a real sneaky guy that way is John MacArthur.

If you ask him, what is salvation? His answer is always, well, the Puritans say this, and the Presbyterians say this, and the fundamentalists say this, but he never tells you what he thinks. And he never takes you into God's Word and says, here's what God's Word says, 1 Corinthians 15. He doesn't say that.

So we're so susceptible to, and I don't call them major bumps, but little bumps these days, things where a book is written or there's a movie or a TV show or something that just is a little bit off. You know, and that little bit off down the road turns out to be a huge split.

So, Paul is addressing this issue in 69 AD. You know, I marvel at how, in the early church, how quickly some men settled down on doctrine has taken us years to sort of learn it and get it right, and they don't have hard drives or cell phones or, you know, internet or theology books or anything like that.

They just were taught, but there was a difference. They taught, they went to school sometimes all day long. They would spend time with Paul. So let's talk about what he's talking about here is detractors to Paul's ministry. And my next question is, did Paul have a few or did he have many detractors explained as empty talkers around? And then explain. You have a lot or just a couple of guys that were making noise. He had two in general.

It was mainly the Jewish people or Every missionary journey he was on, Jewish people would go there, stir up the crowds and then they'd get upset with him. Paul would be on the verge of getting killed. One time he was almost stoned to death or he was stoned to death and God raised him from the dead or something. And the other thing is whenever he would, Paul would do something where if he did an exorcism thing on a a girl with a demon, and the guys stopped making money, then they were really angry because their whole income was destroyed, that kind of thing. Yeah. So if we look at the answer to question one, the main responsibility of an elder was to accurately handle scripture. So he had to know it, and he had to know it to correct those who misrepresent it.

And, you know, it's the oldest metaphor to this is if you're employed by the Secret Service and you're in the counterfeit department, what do you study? Do you study all of the counterfeits that are created so you can tell them apart? What do you study? A real dollar bill or a $20 bill. That's right. You study the real thing so that when the false thing shows up, you can tell the difference. And you don't have to look very far. It'll stop you dead in your tracks.

So God's Word is like that. If an elder's responsibility before God is to detect false teaching, then he's got to know the real thing. And so I think that that's one of the problems you see within the church today. Like, Hal, you were saying, well, these five guys are elders, and now we're going to teach them what being an elder is all about. Well, you know, the Word of God has got it the other way around, that they need to be fairly well-versed in Scripture so that they can recognize When the fake shows up, they can see it and they can talk about it, not from the standpoint that they're overly conversant on the fake, but they're completely conversant on the real thing.

And so, I think Christianity today in our country is loaded with people like this. And they're all pretty much high profile. All you have to do is turn on the Christian channels and watch those guys, you know, pitch their wares and that's what they do.

And they would be under the heading that Paul uses in verse one is empty talkers, deceivers, and especially those of the circumcision. What's an empty talker? What does he mean by empty talker? You know, we have the phrase, well, that guy doesn't know what he's talking about. An empty talker is one who's devoid of the truth. And what he teaches is useless and it's vain.

And my JD was pointing out what he does teach is, it's like the whole study of psychology. What do you think psychology is the study of? It's the study of the old man. It's the study of the sin nature. It's the study of why the sin nature in a man does what it does.

I remember Hal Malloy was doing a bike tour in France and one of the guys in the group was a psychiatrist and they were riding one day and they went to Normandy. And I've never been to Normandy, so I don't know, but I guess you come up over a road and you look down over the beaches and there's a huge cemetery of all the men that died there.

And this guy said, look what God did here. And Hal said, God didn't do this, man did this. You know, so the point is, is that we think or we're taught to think in secular education, that when it's something horrible, it must be God who's doing it. Or if it's something beyond our scope of really grasping it, it must be God who's doing it, when in fact, it's man who does it. You know, God allows things to happen.

But in a further conversation with this guy, Hal asked him if he'd been a psychiatrist and he was an MD, 25 years he asked him if he's ever actually Cured anybody and he said no What we try to do is You know settle them down So, you know settle them down be comfortable with this in nature. I love it So that's what you get today.

You do you see empty talkers? you see these guys that are that are deceivers and they The first thing about them is that they're not subject to God's word. You know, my wife and I were driving around yesterday and we were chatting a little bit about the difference between a highly educated person who has tremendous scholarly insights and a brain full of untold amount of information and pick the field. And then you have the guy standing next to him who isn't very well educated but knows God's Word. Which one of those guys would you rather have a relationship with? With a guy that knows God's Word. It's simple because the wisdom in God's Word makes man, you know, Romans 1 says that thinking themselves to be, what's the word, smart, they became fools.

And that's the problem with the sin nature. The more you put time and effort you put into trying to teach the sin nature to cope with other sin natures, the less dependent you are on God. And that's the way these empty talkers, for Paul to call them empty talkers is a great term. Because it shows that their empty talk is the fruit of their own rebellion. You see that?

Romans 1 is a terrific study of what happens to a human being who God reveals to him who God is and that he's sovereign. And their response is that they won't have him. They won't have him in their thought process. And so what does he do? He turns them over to themselves. That's an awful thing. We think it's great. The world thinks it's great.

So what does the New Testament give us? Especially Paul's epistle, but the whole New Testament. It always evaluates a message by the truthfulness of its content. So we need to get in the habit. That's not a good term. We need to have a principle in the way we function in life. that we compare everything to God's Word and we learn how to do it.

And today it's a lot easier than it was, oh gee, I just noticed I'm over. Today it's a lot easier with all of the tools that we have than it would have been in the early church or marvel at the Plymouth Brethren how much information that they produced in their lifetime and they were up at night or up during the day or whenever with a candle and an ink pen, you know. So we'll pick up with question three next week. Any questions?

All right, let's close. Dear Father, how we thank you. We thank You really for Your Word and thank You for men down through the years and centuries that were able to teach it, explain it with dependence on the Spirit of God so that through this process, we would become more and more intimate with the Lord Jesus Christ. And we pray in His precious name. Amen.