Titus: Instructions for Christian Life

Titus 2:1-10

In 1993 I went on a mission trip to Russia. Our trip was primarily a cultural exchange; we were college students, all paired with roommates who were all English language students, and our job was to teach them about America and to share the Gospel with them. There were several students who made commitments to Jesus Christ while we were there, and the goal was then to help them get plugged in to the local college ministry.

College ministries were flourishing in Russia in the early 90s, but there were some issues. One big issue was that they were all led by foreigners. There weren’t any vital, vibrant ministries led by Russians. One of our goals was to share Jesus with them, but our plan was to turn leadership over to them, but when the missionaries left, the ministries crumbled. The problem was that the Russian students didn’t trust one another. They had spent the previous fifty years in a culture of mistrust, never knowing who was a possible infiltrator or informant. Now we were expecting them to share openly with one another, and it wasn’t working.

Culture is hard to change. In Crete, their culture was rough. Liars, evil brutes, and lazy gluttons, they were called by their own prophets. Crete was a culture that prized deception and unbounded appetites, and somehow they managed to assimilate the Christian message into their culture in such a way as to not affect their behavior in any way.

So Paul instructs Titus, whose job is to install and train leaders in the church in Crete. Of utmost importance for Titus is the teaching of sound doctrine. (You must teach what is in accord with sound doctrine. Titus 2:1) The big idea here is that the teaching needs to be such that Christians, whether they are in Crete or in Millersport, in what is taught and what is practiced, need to rise above the prevailing culture. This is why I spend as much time as I do preparing the weekly sermon; because I want to make sure that what I am teaching is in accord with sound doctrine. I can’t just decide whatever I want to preach on. So when it comes to Paul’s letter to Titus, what follows is what he means by sound doctrine.

Paul initially divides the teaching with regard to gender and age, starting with older men. In Ancient Near Eastern culture, older men were the leaders, in public and in the family. So it’s no surprise that Paul starts with instructions for them. Teach the older men to be temperate, worthy of respect, self-controlled, and sound in faith, in love and endurance. (Titus 2:2)

Temperance, in other words, sober-minded, is the starting point. Crete was known for their gluttonous dinners and banquets, and Paul is saying that this should not be how Christians are known. The problem is that when temperance is not shown, everything else goes out the window. I think I’ve told you that my junior year in college was a year in which I renewed my commitment to Christ, and one thing that entailed was steering clear of the fraternity parties for the year. As a senior, I was generally present at the parties but in a different role; I was watching out for my fraternity brothers. It’s amazing what someone under the influence of drugs or alcohol will do. It’s unbelievable, really, what seems to be rational behavior for someone who is drinking heavily. Unless you’ve lived in a fraternity house, you might be surprised at what was considered “normal” behavior in a culture devoid of temperance and how many other problems arise because of it.

Older men must live lives worthy of respect. There are people who, just by who they are, command respect. I remember meeting Dr. Elsworth Kalas in seminary; I was picking up my seminary mail and I heard him. He was talking to the person at the mail counter, simply asking for a package, but he had this voice. Not having any idea who he was, I told him, “Your voice makes me want to listen to you.” His voice and his presence simply commanded respect. Usually, however, the way we get respect is by treating others respectfully. How do you treat other people? I hear from my friends who work in restaurants that they usually do not respect Christians very much. Why not? We come in all dressed up after church, but we are rude to the wait staff and then we stiff them on the tip, or, even worse, we give them one of those fake $20 bill tracts instead of a tip. That is not living a life worthy of respect.

To temperance and worthy of respect, Paul adds self-control. This would mark a direct shift against Cretan culture. We’ll find Paul calling people of all ages and genders to self-control. We are not mere animals, driven by instinct. We are set apart by God for God, with the Holy Spirit dwelling in us, leading us, directing us. Some of us aren’t very self-controlled. We allow ourselves to be controlled by every kind of external circumstance. Make sure you clearly hear this: You can control your attitude, and you can control your actions as well.

Finally, Paul stresses that older men need to be sound in faith, love, and endurance. Everything will flow from your foundation, and a firm foundation is a sound faith in Jesus Christ. With such a foundation, love is no longer some emotional good feeling, but it is a verb. When Paul defines love, he does so in light of Christ’s love for the church; in other words, love is sacrificially pouring oneself out for others. In the Church, faith and love always go together, because solid faith leads the believer to sacrificial love. To faith and love, Paul adds endurance.

Living a Christian life in a hostile environment is tough. There are times when we are really tempted to give in. After all, everybody else is… (fill in the blanks with all of the things you know you shouldn’t do and stoop to justifying yourself that if everyone else is doing it, it must not be all that bad). Anyone can change a behavior for a while, but we’re being called to endurance, to live out a different ethic. James focuses on this perseverance when he says to Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance. Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything. (James 1:2-4)

God calls us to persevere, reminding us that the hope we have will fulfill even our greatest longing.

Now that we’ve covered the older men, Paul turns his focus to the older women. To be fair to the cultural situation, women in Crete were much more “liberated” than women elsewhere in the Ancient Near East. Unfortunately, this did not mean that they were righteous. In fact, they used their liberty to behave as badly as the men. They were known to be just as deceitful and promiscuous as their male counterparts. Let me pause a moment and remind you that just because some people haven’t lived up to the biblical ideal is not a valid reason to throw out the ideal. I know people whose excuse for not being a part of a church is that church people have treated them poorly, so they have thrown out church and rejected God altogether. Unfortunately, when we get a bunch of humans together, we show up with all our human limitations and foibles… and sin. We don’t always get it right. But that’s no reason to throw out “right”. I hear this all the time when people are talking about marriage. They say that marriage as an institution has passed its usefulness – just look at all the divorces. Therefore, all kinds of other partnerships need to be honored just like marriage. This is the worst justification I’ve heard; it’s worse than “everybody else is doing it” because it doesn’t acknowledge what we can see here; there are still many, many marriages across our culture who continue to stand the test of time.

Anyway, here are Paul’s instructions for the older women. Likewise, teach the older women to be reverent in the way they live, not to be slanderers or addicted to much wine, but to teach what is good.

Live reverent lives. Not only are the older men supposed to live lives that do not conform to the culture, but the older women are, too. This, again, is because Paul is calling upon the link between our beliefs and our outward behaviors. Older women must be reverent in order to be good teachers. Paul expressly forbids the kind of loose talk associated with drunkenness – many of us know someone who gets ugly when she’s drinking, who’ll say things she wouldn’t ever say sober. But even more unfortunate is when the person in question is quite sober and still spews gossip and slander. If that’s your character, you’re disqualifying yourself from Christianity!

There are older people in our culture who wonder why nobody will listen to them anymore, why they are increasingly marginalized. Much of this has to do with our culture being obsessed with youth, but it’s important to note that sometimes the behaviors of older people has led younger people to turn away from them. Pastor Craig Groschel relates a story about his wife and the women’s society. In a church where he served as a brand new pastor, his wife saw a lack of spiritual activities. The existing women’s group wasn’t focused much on Christ. They met regularly, but their meeting topics ranged from “creating centerpieces” to “gardening” and so forth. Not bad topics, just not Christ-centered topics. So she started a Bible study, and soon there were quite a few young women participating. The older women finally decided to “recognize” the younger women by asking them to participate in their annual fundraiser. Their group was asked to do a certain task, and they set about doing it, but Mrs. Groschel soon realized that the older women were going back and re-doing what the younger women had done. Guess what that did to the credibility of the older women.

When the older women live out good Christian doctrine, however, Then they can train the younger women to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled and pure, to be busy at home, to be kind, and to be subject to their husbands, so that no one will malign the word of God. It’s important that if you want to teach someone to do something, you’re going to have to live it out first. But when you are living it out, please, please, please share it! There are some awesome older people in our church, some who have embodied what it means to have strong, healthy marriages – if that’s you, perhaps you might spend some time with someone who is younger, even a couple who isn’t yet married, helping them grow, teaching them about life. Some of you are prayer warriors. Invite someone younger to come alongside and pray with you – you can teach them about living a powerful prayerful life. You want to help a young couple out? Send them on a date and offer to babysit their kids.

As we look at the virtues Paul lists here, we are simply looking at what were widely approved in secular society as how a respectable wife lived: loving her husband and children, self-controlled and pure, busy at home, kind, and subject to her husband. Before some of you get wound up about how we’re a different culture now, yes, you’re right. I’m not advocating going back in time to when women were considered less than men. That said, the virtues here are worth looking at.

The first virtue was loving her husband and children. This came in contrast to prevailing Cretan culture, which gave women the permission for promiscuity and permission to virtually abandon her family. Women in Crete felt justified in their freedoms as they were the freedoms that men enjoyed in that culture, but again, that’s not a Christian viewpoint at all. As my mom told me numerous times, “If everybody else was jumping off the roof…”

The second pair of virtues for older women to teach younger women is self-control and purity. This speaks again to the culture in Crete. As you have probably seen, a lack of self-control was a big problem in Crete. I believe it is here, too. How many times does Dave Ramsey have to tell us to cut up our credit cards before we’ll listen? Shopping addictions are just a lack of self-control. Affairs: they don’t just happen one day. They’re symptomatic of our lack of self-control. Self-control and purity go together, because how much sin renders someone impure? It only takes one, even a little, so-called harmless sin, to leave us impure. Our calling, men and women, is to live pure lives.

The next virtue Paul advocates is for the young woman to be busy at home and to be subject to her husband. Our culture bristles at this notion; why should a woman be “stuck” at home and subject to her husband? I’ll go ahead and be controversial on this: one of the problems in our society is children who have no parents at home. I understand that there are many women who don’t have a choice but to work; this is a demonstration of the failures of our society: men who impregnate women and leave them, churches who haven’t set as a priority caring for the most powerless members of our society (orphans and widows), couples who overspend on houses and cars and leave no room for the loss of an income when someone stays home with children, selfishness in marriages that says, “I deserve…” Honestly, all of that is beside the point, because Paul is not talking about women going to work here. Paul isn’t saying that; in Acts 16, when Paul goes to Philippi, he meets Lydia, a dealer in purple cloth, and she and her household were baptized, and never does he even mention the possibility of her quitting her job.

The problem wasn’t that women were working; the problem was that they were living scandalous lives. They were not taking care of their homes and families; they were partying. Paul is saying, “Stay home and take care of what is yours. Get out of the party lifestyle.”

Elsewhere, Paul remarks on women being subject to their husbands. He calls women to submit to their husbands (Ephesians 5:22) as to the Lord. But this is in the context of mutual submission (Eph. 5:21) and the call to the husband is to love his wife… as Christ loved the church. That is a call to lay down one’s life for the other. So if you still want to complain about the call to submit, remember that you are called to submit to someone who is called to lay down his life for you.

Paul is calling older women to live godly lives so they can best teach younger women to live godly lives, with the final goal being so that nobody can malign the word of God. In his book The Christ of the Indian Road, E. Stanley Jones quotes Bara Dada: “Jesus is ideal and wonderful, but you Christians – you are not like him.”

If we live out the Gospel, there are those who will not like us (Jesus himself made that clear) but let them dislike us for our Christlikeness, not for living without him.

Now Paul turns to the young men. Similarly, encourage the young men to be self-controlled. Yes, young men, you are called to be self-controlled. In our culture, like Cretan culture, we give a special dispensation to young men. We say “Boys will be boys” and have phrases like “sowing wild oats” that young men are expected to live out. In fact, when a young man like Tim Tebow from Florida announced that he was a virgin, you would have thought he had grown a third eye in the middle of his forehead. My freshman year in college, I had a classmate down the hall named the Dissman. He didn’t drink, and the guys made fun of him all the time. The problem was first that the expectation was that college guys drink. The second problem was that he was trying really hard to fit in, and he just couldn’t seem find a way to without drinking. Did he have any role models who were living out a holy life? I remember being a senior in college on our fall retreat, getting to talk to some freshmen about the pitfalls and difficulties of joining a fraternity. It was a very negative environment, one that surely needed Christian leaders, but a very difficult environment in which to live a holy life. Paul told Titus to live out the faith and set an example for the young men. In everything set them an example by doing what is good. In your teaching show integrity, seriousness and soundness of speech that cannot be condemned, so that those who oppose you may be ashamed because they have nothing bad to say about us.

Integrity means living out the Christian life no matter what. It’s been defined as having character even when nobody is looking. It’s living with authenticity; being the same person in public as you are in private. In a former pastorate, I worked with someone who was the president of the UM Council on Evangelism, and one of his jobs was to book speakers for their yearly conference. Some of them had unbelievable requirements in their contracts and were absolutely nit-picky, and they didn’t match up with the character that these speakers portrayed in public.

Paul calls Titus to be serious and sound in speech that cannot be condemned. One of my favorite pastors to listen to is Pastor Craig Groschel, who is a fantastic preacher. He said he used to be pretty crass, even in the pulpit. He had a quick response to those who frowned on his crass jokes: you think I’m crude because you’re a prude. A loving friend came to him with a concern about it, and he mostly shrugged the friend off, but his friend told him to pray about it. Shortly after that conversation Pastor Craig was preaching and started to tell a rather crass joke, but as he started to tell it, he looked down and saw his little daughter, just old enough to be in “big church” for the first time, and he thought, “Do I really want her hearing this?” – that was the end of crude jokes from his pulpit. I know pastors who sprinkle their messages with mild profanity and with crude or demeaning language. Paul is saying that has no place in Christian leadership. One reason is that it provides God’s enemies with fodder to use against the church and against God.

Finally Paul goes into some instructions for slaves. Please note that Paul is not saying this to condone the institution of slavery; he is simply looking at the real world he lived in. Slavery was a part of this world. He instructs Christian slaves to be subject to their masters in everything, to try to please them, not to talk back to them, and not to steal from them, but to show that they can be fully trusted, so that in every way they will make the teaching about God our Savior attractive.

This word isn’t really about slavery at all. It’s about living a Christlike life in the midst of hard circumstances. You could think of it in terms of working in a job you can’t stand and even working for a terrible boss. Paul is saying that even when the job is bad, as Christians, circumstances never justify sinful behavior. If you work hard, learn obedience in your job, live a trustworthy life, you will make the teaching about God attractive. “What does she have that makes her so willing to work so hard?” “Why doesn’t he do all the things that everybody does these days?” But we are called to a different standard than the world is called to.

Sound doctrine is the beginning of everything. If we don’t have a high degree of respect for the Scriptures, we are not likely to follow God’s commands – or even to know what to believe about God. This is why the Bible has to be central to everything we teach, to every group and ministry in this church. If we don’t get our wisdom from the Scriptures, where do we get it? If we don’t understand morality from the scriptures, whose morality will we accept? This is also why loving God has to be our first priority. If we are not motivated by our love for God, then we miss the point and we try to work our way to salvation. We become legalistic, following the letter of the law but not the spirit of the law. The Bible says if we do everything but don’t have love, we are just noisemakers. So when Paul tells Titus to instruct the church, especially to be self-controlled, yes, we all need to exhibit self-control. But what it means is that our relationship with God absolutely must have an impact on the way we live. If it doesn’t, perhaps you really don’t love God.

For next week, I challenge you to read Titus 2:10-15 every day. It’s only six verses, but they are powerful verses about God. In the meantime, if you don’t know God well enough to impact your life, it’s time to seek him with everything. Not as an afterthought, but as someone who is starving seeks food, as someone thirsty seeks water. And when you seek him with all your heart, you will find him, because he is not far.