Titus Lesson 7 cont.
Titus · Mike Doyle · Oct 15, 2023
Titus, No. 22
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://www.hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/49261932585788

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

Okay, we are in Titus, lesson seven. If you don't have seven, there's some over there, I think. And basically what seven is about, I'm gonna read the verses and then you'll know what it's about. Starting in verse six. Six through 10, likewise, Urge your young men to be sensible.

In all things show yourself to be an example of good deeds, with purity of doctrine, dignified, sound in speech, which is beyond reproach, so that the opponent will be put to shame having nothing bad to say about us. Urge bond slaves to be subject to their own masters in everything. and be well-pleasing and not argumentative, not pilfering, but showing all good faith so that they will adorn the doctrine of God our Savior in every respect. So what Paul has done here is he's written to Titus and he has outlined for him behavior patterns for young men. We've spent time with older men and older women and I'm still laughing about the fact that both older men and older women were exhorted not to drink alcohol, but he doesn't say anything about that with young men in our society being the other way around.

So it's interesting that in this in these verses, that the focus is on, what's the one word here that would tell us, that would tell us really what a young man ought to be? He starts out in verse six by saying, likewise urge young men to be sensible. What's sensible? Mine says sober-minded. Sober-minded is a good word. King James. What's King James say? It says the same thing. Sober-minded. Sober-minded. Self-control. Say that again. Self-control. Self-control.

So these young men ought to have their act together and not be, and just as a quick review, to be a young man in this society, how old were you? To be an old man in this society or an old woman, what was the minimum age? In our societies, you get to be on Social Security at 62 and a half or Medicare at 65. What about this society?

40. 40 was considered an older person. How do we know that? Huh? How do we know that? Because I read it somewhere. Actually, that's really the right answer. I read it in two or three different places and commenters who talked about old men. I was surprised when I saw it,

40. I'm surprised to have heard that too. But you know what? How long did people live in those days? I don't know. You know, Paul lived a long time. Yeah. Most of the apostles lived a long time, especially John. So I don't know. But I find it interesting that there's an anticipated maturity for young men. Notice that? And young men, probably 20s, that at that point that they would be considered like John talks about them, that they're strong, not only physically strong, but morally, emotionally, temperamentally strong, like he talks about in 1 John.

So a young person has a tremendous influence on the sphere that he's in. And I think you find here is that there are I wish we talked about this last week. Maybe that's warm of a question. Why was Paul encouraging young men to be an example of good deeds, of purity and doctrine, dignified, sound in speech, et cetera? Why did he encourage young men to be like that? Remember what we said? I'll pick on JD. What, who does Aiden look up to? Well, are you asking me the question? Yeah. He looks up to his father. Yeah. Looks up to you.

Up to his two grandfathers, one of which is here this weekend. Um, he looks up to you, he looks up to the other men in the church and the relationships that they have, and he talks about it and he thinks about it. And what he doesn't talk about, he still observes and it's in the body that he sees these older generations and how they look. And that's how I see it too, you know. Does he look up to Travis Kelsey? But he does.

Oh, you're looking for the sports side of... No, what I'm looking for is this. Who do I, as a young man, look up to? Obviously, I'm in a peer environment, like in high school. There are always guys in high school that were exemplary type of guys. Most of the time, they were athletes. Yeah, there's definitely the impact of athletic heroism, if you will. Sure. Yeah. Sometimes they were, like the school I went to, a lot of times they were academic, because it was an academic environment, what I was doing there.

But I mean, there were guys in the class that you looked up to because they were good musicians. you know, not so much rock band, but a concert band. And guys that, like, we had a wonderful debate team. I mean, these guys at 15 years old, man, they were amazing what they could do. I used to monitor, I was a referee in debates, and I was amazed at how their knowledge of that.

And so they were an example, an example of what Paul's talking about here to Titus, telling him, people are going to look up to you and you're a young man. And that's only normal. You see that? And so I think that it's not out of the purview of telling a young man, you know, you have a responsibility as a young man. to be this kind of a man, you know? Well, I think that's one of the things that's interesting about raising a believing young man, right?

Versus, obviously, we all came to know the Lord at different ages. But one of the benefits of raising children in the body is that they get to see these ages progress as men and women both alike mature. And I don't want to miss out on the fact that what this is describing is not this list of things that we're to do, it's the things that we are because of our or walk with the Lord. You could say that much more deeply.

But those are the things that children and young children and then young women and young men, they see a functioning body as God designed it. And they see it in a family. They see it in their church. And then what they also see is the unfunctioning all around them. And that contrast is so huge.

And I think that it says in verse 5 and in verse 6, to both the young women and to the young men, that they're to be sensible. You just described that word, to be sober-minded, to be temperate. Self-control, I think, was mentioned. These are the kinds of things that are the opposite of young men and young women, typically. It's very easy to get carried away and not to make sense of what's going on and to be self-controlled in those situations. Yeah. So here we are, you know, these, these young, young people under the age of 40 are, are learning to, to be sensible and pure and everything that the world tells them is not cool. Yeah. Yeah, that's right.

I think the key is the example. Whether it's an example in sports or music or a debate team or whatever, what it means is someone to follow after. It's looking at the word there and it's to whatever it is. to follow after, be example. I think the key is that you're following after that person.

And Paul's saying, be a good example, don't be a bad example, because people will follow you. So he's exhorting them to be something to be followed after. And I think that's his real encouragement, both for the men, women, and especially for the young man who could probably be more impactful in the society, to the families, to everything. He's saying be a good example because people will follow you. Let's look at two quick verses.

1 Corinthians 4.16 and the other one is 1 Corinthians 11.1. 1 Corinthians 4.16. Go ahead. Therefore we do not lose heart, but though our outer man is decaying, yet our inner man is being renewed day by day. That's 1 Corinthians 4, 16.

No. Oh, that's second. Sorry about that. Someone else has it. She got the Muslim Bible. Okay, here's 16. Therefore I exhort you, the imitators of me. Okay, keep that in mind and look at first Corinthians 11 one. The imitators of me just as I also am of Christ. Okay, so what Paul recognizes, I think, is the fact that we are imitators.

We do look at people within our peer group or older than us, as examples. You know, we, Don and I talk all the time about We're kind of, we're watching our neighbors across the street on up one and both of them have one child and the children are like five years old or four years old and they really do imitate their parents and their parents are not to be imitated. The one, the one family, mom and dad sit in the garage and smoke marijuana. You know, and the other family, the husband and wife is split and we haven't seen the wife and the little boy in a long time. So young people pay attention to what their parents are doing.

They pay attention to. to what peers are doing. They pay attention, because they don't know. I remember when I first became a Christian, I'm 35, and the first thing that hit me, I got to watch these Christians and see what they do, so I know how to act. Because I didn't know how Christians functioned. I knew how Catholics functioned, but they weren't Christians, so it's different.

So we're always looking at each other and so Paul recognizes that that's a principle that's active within a society and so he You know, he says twice be imitators of me. He's not talking about I'm on a platform and you need to be like me. But what he's saying is I imitate, I have my focus on the Lord Jesus Christ. And if you want to see a man who walks with the Lord and focuses on him, I'm your guy.

Yeah. I was thinking, you know, someone you were counseling that was living with his girlfriend and his comment to you was, that's, that's what we do. Yeah. So you're an example to the world. That's exactly right. And, you know, the next comment I made to him, if you love her, you're going to move. He looked at me like I was nuts. I said, no, one of you has got to move. You can't, if you're considering being married, you can't live together. Let's start now. Well, you know, they do. I mean, they look at you like, well, everybody does it. Yeah, and that's why way over half of them don't last very long, because they didn't do it the Lord's way, you know.

Macaulay, Chester Macaulay in this talked about three areas of examples and we'll go through them. First he was, Titus was to be an example in his works. In other words, the word example is tupos, the English word it means to imprint, imprint left by a blow and thus a pattern. You know, punch it in the sand and you leave your imprint in the sand. The second part, the second one is, is that he's to be exemplary in his beliefs. His doctrine is to be unmixed with human viewpoint and unmixed with error.

I think that's a huge one today. I mean, how do I say this without being too critical? In most of them, Christian men that I know that go to a reformed church or they go to a make-you-feel-good church, they don't offer an example for young men to follow because they're kind of loose in the corners.

It's okay for you to be vulnerable as an adult, but you ought to be able to stand on something. What was J. Vernon McGee's greatest thing? If you don't, if you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything. That's a really good, you know, you've got to be settled down on, on what you believe and what, what you value and what your system is, you know, and I'm not talking about you need to be a premillennial dispensationalist, you know, that kind of thing, but you got to know at the very minimum what salvation is all about and how you get it. And the last one is, his speech is to be beyond reproach. This word reproach means it can't be condemnatory.

I must admit, when I became a Christian, that was a big issue with me. Personally, I had a Marine Corps tongue. Miles Stanford one time sent me a note. He said, others can talk, but you can't. You can't talk like this, especially when I started teaching. And so it was an awakening for me to be aware of that, that everything you do, if you're in any kind of capacity with a leadership role, just nothing. Nobody hung a badge on you and said you're a leader, but you just are. That there's criteria, there's a standard you have to live up to. Now, if you wake up in the morning and say, well, I'm in this leadership role, but I'm not doing a very good job with it, what do I do?

What do I do? What's that? Take it to the Lord. Take it to the Lord. Yeah, it's interesting. Verses we've been studying on Sunday, and which we'll, I think, study the last of it today. Paul's answer to, shall we sin? He says, don't you realize that who you present yourself to, you're the slave of that person you present yourself to? And then he delineates it either to sin or to the Lord or to righteousness as he puts it.

So our job is to recognize what the truth is and to believe it and secondly, We're to present ourselves to the Lord as those that are alive from the dead. I mean, the contrast is night and day, life and death. In death, I present myself to the world and its system as a believer alive from the dead. I have the privilege, the privilege of presenting myself to God. You know, I belong to him. I'm a, I'm a willing slave. I want to be, you know, and so he will do the conforming. But I think that's, you know, our responsibility. Okay. All right. Young men who are teachers, you say young men are to be teachers. How would their being teachers protect the local church?

I want you to go back and look at verse 8, sound and speech, which is beyond reproach so that the opponent will be put to shame having nothing to say about us. Who's the opponent? Sound speech is really important in this environment when he's talking to young men. in a position where you can't be legitimately criticized. And even as a young man or young woman, I think in both cases, you can't be criticized for what you believe and what you profess.

You know, in our society, we give, you know, I mean, Up until their 30s, we give them the right to be taken like a teenager. You know, we don't hold in our society, the society doesn't hold to a standard of behavior for young men and women, do they? I'm serious. Do they? They don't. So, and this is not something that a young person is straining at the gnat to do. It's just part of their life. Right. Okay, we're going to switch horses now. Any other comments about behavior? Question seven is, does the New Testament decry slavery? Don't shake your head and say something. The New Testament doesn't spend a single line condemning or commanding or suggesting or even discussing the abolition of slavery. Not one line.

Yeah, I think that's kind of surprising in the light of today where it's a hideous and horrible thing and all that. Yeah, many times it's masters and slaves in here and I think you go back to what Byrne had said at one point, that 80% of the world at this point were slaves. It was the norm to be a slave in this time frame. So I don't know if that had anything to do with it.

It basically says masters and slaves. Be as unto the Lord. You pastors be, you know, kind, gentle, all this, slaves, as unto working for the Lord, rather than, you know, there's all sorts of scripture that addresses masters and slaves, but yeah, there's never anything that condemns it. And I don't know, like I said, that's just a sign of the times.

Well, what I've noticed about like slavery, that Paul always works on the individual person. He never works on a group other than the body of Christ, but the word of God focuses on you and you and you. It doesn't focus on a sweeping change of mores of a society like slavery. You know, I mean, there's Around the world today, there are a lot of people that are slaves, you know.

I remember when we went to, what's that colonial town in Virginia? What's the name of it? Williamsburg. One of the things in Williamsburg was an original plantation. Original plantation was a farm. right, that had a fence around it to protect it from animals and stuff. And it had a building where everybody slept, and then a building where the kitchen was, and another building where the animals were. And what they tell you, it's really interesting, you walk in a building that, here's mom and dad, the kids, and the slaves, they all slept in the same room. Because most of the time, the slaves were indentured. They were voluntary. They came to the United States as a voluntary slave and worked for their freedom.

So I find that interesting because if you think about it, we kind of do that today, you know. As an employee, I enter into a contract with an employer, and I agree to do A, B, C, and D, and he agrees to do A, B, C, and D on his part. Whether you are an employee or you have a partnership, you put yourself under obligation. You say that, well, Courtney, does what he does. He's got a contract between himself and the person that's going to pay him.

If you perform, you get paid. Well, it's the same thing with a lot of these slaves. They performed. That was their job. Now, sin nature being what it is, you end up with with what was going on in the South in the mid-1800s, which there were people that when slavery was abolished, they wouldn't leave their masters. They wanted to stay with them. Why? Because they liked it there. They willingly stayed. But society said, no, no, no, you can't do that. Why can't I make a decision to be a slave? I can, can't I?

You know, so what this talks about is that God doesn't, God's word does never, never does talk about the reformation of society. It talks specifically about the issue between a individual and their conformity to Christ and that will change society if it needs changing. You know, we live in the society we live in. It's not our job to go change it.

Agree? Well, I was thinking, you know, what you're talking about this morning, the reality is we're all slaves. Either to the sin or to God. That's right. Well, that's the reality. That's really right. We're born in sin. We're slaves to sin. I'm going to talk about that later. And then, you know, because of the cross of Christ, guess what I get to do? And you get to do, I get to decide that I no longer have to be a slave to sin. I can now become willingly a bond servant of God.

Wow. That's pretty cool. But either way, I'm not a free, independent agent. You see that? God never designed us and created us to be free, independent agents, to set our own course and do our own thing. That's the big lie. We willingly put ourselves under obligation in a thousand different ways.

Purity in the church and not purity of society is the aim of Paul. This doesn't mean that the believers do not have a beneficial effect in the culture in which they live, however. We have a tremendous effect. One of the things we're studying on Wednesday night, we're studying 1 and 2 Thessalonians, which are really cool books. I had never taught them before. But I was listening to a guy talk about him the other day, and he made this comment. He said, do you ever notice that in all of the early churches, there was no department of evangelism? There were men who were called evangelists.

But he said, look at Thessalonica, their faith and that faith and that reputation in and of itself was an evangelistic effort that people were joining up because of the fame they had in Greece and Macedonia. That's why. And it was based on the grace they lived under and the love they had for one another. People would see and hear about that and come and check it out and want to be part of it. You know, when you said that, I was thinking that how changing society, whether changing society or bringing people to Christ kind of may go hand in glove, I guess, a little bit.

And I was thinking in Matthew 5, 13, you are the salt of the earth. We're supposed to season the earth with Christ. And then it goes on in 14, you are the light of the world. And then 16, let your light shine before men in such a way that they may see your good works and glorify your father who is in heaven. So we're supposed to be the light and salt. So how that changes society or it's to draw men to Christ, but it also seasons the earth with Christ as the flavor. Don't you marvel, I do sometimes, at how God set up society. What's the basic group in society?

Family. The family. He starts with the family. There's a mom and a dad and their children and they function a certain way. And then a family moves in next door. And that's what builds, you know. And so If you're going to destroy a society, where do you attack them? You attack the family. You know, the so-called nuclear family. And only the body of Christ, I think, maintains the sanctity of the family, even competing competing religions really don't, although, and because they're not morally sound people like Islam and these other places, they put a lot of emphasis on the family, but not the kind of family that the word of God talks about. You know, so if I'm the enemy, I read the book of Genesis and everything in Genesis I'm against. Everything, family, everything. And that's where the attack comes from. When you look around, that's where it is. It's against everything that God did.

So, you know, although slavery in a lot of cases isn't good, slavery Let me ask you, let's say you lived in Guatemala and you had nothing, and I mean nothing, and you had an opportunity to come to the United States and indenture yourself to a family for X amount of years, and they would feed you and clothe you, educate you, and then at the end of X amount of years, you would be free.

Would you do it? I'd do it in a minute. I would do it in a heartbeat, you know. And today we have young people who won't even go to work because they think something's owed them just because they exist, you know. It's amazing to me how that is and how it's changed so much. I just looked at the watch, it's a quarter till. All right.

Well, next week we'll pick up on question eight and we'll continue to deal with slavery and then a little bit about employment and employees. And oh, by the way, do slaves have responsibilities? Yeah, they do. Do masters have responsibilities? Sure they do. So. So let's close. Father, how we thank you for your word and the time to spend discussing it. We thank you for your son, the Lord Jesus, who gave his life for us that we might be able to live with you eternally. We pray in his precious name. Amen.