B | Be Heaven - Titus | January 12

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Titus, the whole book. This is a letter from Paul, a slave of God and apostle

of Jesus Christ. I am sent to proclaim faith to those God has chosen and teach

them to know the truth that shows them how to live godly lives.

This truth gives them confidence that they have eternal life,

which God, who does not lie, promised them before the world began.

And now, at just the right time, He has revealed this message,

which we announce to everyone.

It is by the command of God, our Savior, that I have been entrusted with this work for Him.

I am writing to Titus, the true Son in the faith that we share.

May God, the Father of Christ Jesus, our Savior, give you grace and peace.

I left you on the island of Crete so that you could complete our work there

and appoint elders in each town, as I instructed you.

An elder must live in a blameless life. He must be faithful to his wife and

his children, must be believers who don't have a reputation of being wild or rebellious.

A church leader is a manager of God's household, so he must live a blameless life.

He must not be arrogant or quick-tempered. He must not be a heavy drinker,

be violent or dishonest with money.

Rather, he must enjoy having guests in his home, and he must love what is good.

He must live wisely and be just. He must live a devout and discipled life.

He must have a strong belief in the trustworthy message he was taught.

Then he will be able to encourage others with wholesome teaching and show them

who oppose it, where they were wrong.

For there are many rebellious people who engage in useless talk and deceive others.

This is especially true of those who insist on criticism for,

circumcision, circumcision for salvation.

They must be silenced because they are turning whole families away from the

truth by their false teachings.

And they do it only for money. Even one of their own men, a prophet from Crete,

has said about them, The people of Crete are all liars, cruel animals, and lazy gluttons.

This is true. So reprimand them sternly to make them strong in the faith.

They must stop listening to Jewish myths and the commands of the people who

have turned away from the truth.

Everything is pure to those whose hearts are pure.

But nothing is pure to those who are corrupt and unbelieving

because their minds and consciences are corrupted such people

claim that they know god but they deny him by the way they live they're detestable

and dishonest disobedient worthless of doing anything good as for you titus

promote the kind of living that reflects wholesome teaching teach the older

men to exercise self-control to be worthy of respect and to live wisely.

They must have sound faith and be filled with love and patience.

Similarly, teach the older women to live in a way that honors God.

They must not slander others to be heavy drinkers. Instead, they should teach others what is good.

These older women must train the younger women to love their husbands and their

children, to live wisely and to be pure, to work in their homes and to do good,

and to be submissive to their husbands.

Then they will not bring shame on the Word of God. In the same way,

encourage the young men to live wisely, and you yourself must be an example

to them by doing good works of every kind.

Let everything you do reflect the integrity and seriousness of your teaching.

Teach the truth so that your teaching can't be criticized.

Then those who oppose us will be ashamed and have nothing bad to say about us.

Slaves must always obey their masters and do their best to please them.

They must not talk back or steal, but must show themselves to be entirely trustworthy and good.

Then they will make the teaching about God our Savior attractive in every way.

For the grace of God has been revealed, bringing salvation to all people,

and we are instructed to turn from godlessness, godless lives, and sinful pleasure.

We should live in this evil world with wisdom, righteousness, and devotion to God.

While we look forward with hope to that wonderful day when the glory of our

great God and Savior Jesus Christ will be revealed.

He gave his life to us from every kind of sin to cleanse us and to make us his

very own people, totally committed to doing good deeds.

You must teach these things and encourage the believers to do them.

You have authority to correct them when necessary, so don't let anyone disregard what you say.

Remind the believers to submit to the government and its officers.

They should be obedient, always be ready to do what is good.

They must not slander anyone and must avoid quarreling.

Instead, they should be gentle and show true humility to everyone.

Once we, too, were foolish and dishonest, we were misled and became slaves to

many lusts and pleasures.

Our lives were full of evil and envy, but we hated each other, and we hated each other.

But when God our Savior revealed His kindness and love, He saved us,

not because of the righteous things we had done, but because of His mercy.

He washed away our sins, giving us a new birth and a new life through the Holy Spirit.

He generously poured out the Spirit upon us through Jesus Christ our Savior.

Because of this grace, he made us right in his sight and gave us confidence

that we will inherit eternal life.

This is the trustworthy saying, I want you to insist on these teachings so that

all you who trust in God will devout themselves to doing good.

Those teachings are good and beneficial for everyone.

Do not get involved in foolish discussions about spiritual pedigrees or in quarrels

and fights about obedience to Jewish laws.

These things are useless and a waste of time if

people are causing divisions among you give a first and

second warning after that have nothing more to

do with them for people like that have turned away from the truth

and their own sins condemn them i am planning to send either artemis or i don't

know how to say that like tichus to you as soon as one of them arrives do your

best to meet me at nicopolis for i have decided to stay there for the winter

do everything you can And to help Zenos,

the lawyer, and Polos with their trip.

See that they are given everything they need. Our people must learn to do good

by meeting the urgent needs of others.

When they are not to be, they will not need, then they will not be unproductive.

Everybody here sends greetings. Please give my greetings to believers,

all who loves us. May God's grace be with you all.

So, so true. Yeah, the key is just to say it with authority and confidence.

And then nobody's going to question you.

At least nobody will say anything to you if you're wrong.

Thank you, Brie, for kind of filling in the last minute there.

We'll get Josh to read next week. How about that?

You're not going to be here next week. Gosh.

Gladly signed up for that day, huh? Well, welcome, family. Welcome back.

Welcome to the new year. I'm really excited for all of the things that God is

going to do through us and with us this year for all the ways that he's going to use you,

everything that he's going to do in you and through you this year,

all the ways that he's going to transform our lives to reflect his glory and

goodness into the world around us.

Yeah, it's weird. We'll get into it in a second, I guess.

But I just feel like we started this journey, restarted this journey a little more than a year ago now.

And one of the first things we talked about was this verse in Zechariah,

which talks about not despising small beginnings.

And I'm still just reminded of that, of as much as we are in progress and maybe desire a destination,

and we should hold on and just hold sweet this time that we have together to

grow in intimacy and discipleship and purpose, unity of purpose.

And so I'm very thankful for that. And again, I'm excited.

I can't really begin to, because of my failure of emotion more than anything

else, express my excitement.

I probably don't seem excited for most of you, but you're like,

it's just Zach. I seem really excited.

Rebecca's like, I've known you for a long time. This is the most excited I've

ever seen you in my entire life. But I am, I'm very excited.

And I hope that you can see it, that you can feel it, you can sense it as well,

that there's something building.

There's something that God is doing in this place, in this season,

in this life, and all that has happened in this past year and all that's going

to happen in this year, that there's a gravity and importance to what is going

on right now in our lives.

What is happening right now in your life is not a mistake and it has purpose and importance in it.

And I know that some of you are probably thinking of this word importance and

just kind of like your whole thing is just hoping that this year is going to

be a little better than the last.

I know that some of you are there. And if you're, hey, if you're big Counting

Crows fans, there's a line directly from that song.

So it's been a long December. That's the name of the song. We're going to move on from that.

There is a, there's a beautiful reality taking place.

Again, I know some of you are in that place. I just want this year to be better.

Whatever happens just better than the last.

I know some of you there, but there is a reality taking place right now,

whether you're aware of it or not.

There's a reality that is surrounding your life. And it's been the call of your

life since the beginning as well. And it's this beautiful picture.

We see how crazy this is in Ephesians chapter three.

There's this really sort of throwaway verse that you've may have never seen

before, despite having potentially read this book many, many times.

There's this kind of throwaway verse.

I know many old timers, let's say, use that phrase, if it was a snake,

it would have bit you, right?

You've probably heard some older person say that because apparently that's what

constituted like good parental advice back in the day.

This is a verse that is very easily missed. It's very easily read over.

It's so easy to breeze past it and completely miss like the mind-blowing implications

that are contained in this one verse if we don't pay attention.

So this is Ephesians chapter three, verse 10.

It says, his intent, that's God's intent, was that now through the church,

the manifold wisdom of God should be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms.

Let me read that again. That's God's intent, that now through the church,

the manifold wisdom of God should be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms.

Isn't that wild? Do you understand what's happening here. Let's let it sink in for a moment.

What Paul is saying is that through the church, God is revealing,

he's making known his plan, his wisdom to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places.

That's to the angels, to the demons, to the devil himself.

These spiritual beings are not God. They're not equal to God,

right? So they're not all knowing.

They discover God's plan as it unravels in your life.

They learn about the mysteries of God as they watch you live your life,

as they watch the church live in this world.

The spiritual beings in the heavens see God's mystery revealed in your life.

That heaven is rejoicing to see God's will revealed and unveiled through the church, through you.

There's another verse in 1 Peter 1.12. It says that these are the things that

angels long to look into,

that these are the things that angels peer into and they long to see because

they witness how God's mysteries are revealed through your life.

This is a profound statement.

And I just, I hope that you're grasping the implications here.

I hope you're seeing what's being said in this verse.

And it is hard to believe, I understand that. But as we align ourselves with God's will,

as we align ourselves with God's plan, as we align ourselves,

our lives with all that God has for us and for this church and for his church

and for this small mountain community, we become vessels through which his divine

plan is unveiled to the heavens.

Our actions, our choices, mirroring his design, revealing the depths of his

purpose to the waiting world, to the waiting heavens, to the spiritual realm.

We are living as God's testaments, testaments to God's grand narrative,

his story, unveiling, unfolding, and revealing all that he has planned.

And the witnesses, sorry, the heavens witness this.

The heavens are witnesses to this, to this majesty that's happening through

each and every one of your lives.

And it's just incredible. You are chosen and beloved.

We just heard that read so wonderfully by Bree in the beginning of Titus, to those God has chosen.

You are chosen. You are necessary. You are indispensable.

You are necessary. Seth Godin is an author.

He writes mostly like these leadership development books. So this has nothing to do with Jesus at all.

But in his book, Linchpin, he writes that you are the driving force of the future.

And he goes on to talk about how everyone, every person has experienced or been

a genius at least once, right?

That everyone has winged it, invented and created their way out of a jam at least once.

And he says, if you can do it once, you can do it again. And this is how he

puts this in context, that it's the intentional act of using your humanity to

create a change in another person.

What amazing truth coming from

just some guy who's trying to make better marketers and leaders, right?

That you have so much to give. You have brilliance in you. You are necessary.

Your contribution is essential.

You are precious. You are chosen and beloved.

And more than that, you are empowered. That is, you are filled with the great

power of the Holy Spirit that Jesus has given you to create real change in the world around you.

How's that for a pep talk for the new year, huh?

Are you feeling excited and expired now after that? This is as much as I got emotion-wise, guys.

So, work with me here.

There's probably in that, of course, all of that pep talk that we've just gone through.

There's probably at least two things that many of you probably haven't thought much about,

maybe at all, but even maybe more recently, and that's angels,

because most of us in our culture don't tend to think about spiritual beings

too often, but also the book of Titus as we saw up here, because who has read Titus?

I know some of you are like, I read the Bible in a year last year, so let's go.

But also, you probably are also thinking to yourself, hey, maybe I finished

in the first week of January, so it still counts.

So, maybe you've read Titus, but it is such an but often forgotten book.

Does anybody know where it is in the Bible without singing a song?

I'll have to admit, I had to do the whole flipparoo back and forth,

convinced I knew where it was, but often, but it's also like four pages.

So I'd flip past it and flip back to it.

Here's a pro tip. It's between 2 Timothy and Philemon.

So that might not help you at all, but it's verging towards the end of the New Testament.

But it's a very often forgotten book.

And we can ask the question, what does Titus have to do with God's grand design for your life?

And in some ways, nothing, but at the same time, everything,

absolutely everything.

We don't know a lot about Titus himself.

We know that he was a companion and beloved friend of Paul. He was a Greek.

He was led to faith by Paul and he would accompany Paul on his missionary journeys.

Titus was sent to Corinth for a period of time to encourage,

to strengthen, and to minister to the church there.

In fact, Titus would have been the one, and we know this from specifically 2

Corinthians, but he would have been the one who carried the letters back and

forth to Paul and let him know what was going on there.

After Corinth, Paul left Titus in Crete, as we see here in this letter.

Titus 1.5 says, for this reason, I left you in Crete that you might set in order

what was left unfinished and appoint elders in every town I directed you.

And there's something like a hundred cities that are on the island of Crete.

And so depending on how many churches occupied these cities,

that was no short order for Titus.

It wasn't just as simple as here's a small group of people in this one place.

This was a large task, but it seemed to be that Titus was Paul's go-to man for troubled churches.

He was in Corinth. He was in Crete. And we read here that Crete was a troubled

place with troubled churches.

It's a large island in the Mediterranean Sea. It was the sort of the home of

Europe's first advanced civilization, the Minoans.

So in many ways, it's by no stretch of the imagination difficult for us to see

ourselves reflected a bit in this culture, in this prosperous island nation.

We in the West tend to believe that the world revolves around us,

that everybody should speak English, right? that we tend to believe that we

are the force driving the global economy, the trade of culture.

To put it in a maybe not so nice way, we tend to see ourselves as God's gift

to civilization, like we're the pinnacle and therefore,

everybody else follows suit by us and nothing ever is going to topple this monument

to humanity that we've created.

And that may be taking it too far. None of us have ever thought that,

but we can see how our culture drives that message forward.

And the Cretans thought this way as well.

They believed themselves to be the best civilization. They even believed themselves

to be the source of the Greek religion as the gods were rumored to be born in Crete.

And so, they thought of these gods as not necessarily as purely spiritual beings.

They, as many cultures, believed that they were once humans who achieved this

place of deity through heroic acts or awesome deeds, that they were elevated to this place of deity.

But as gods and as men and women, they reflected the culture,

or I should say the culture reflected them, that as gods, they were just as troubled as the people.

And so this is a demonstration of spiritual formation.

We're going to use that word a bit today. It's a demonstration of spiritual

formation in the sense that spiritual formation is inevitable for every people,

for all people, for every person. Spiritual formation is an inevitability.

You will look like your gods.

You will look like what you worship. You will become what you worship.

This is not just a Christian reality. This is a reality for every person.

It's the truth of every human being on this planet that your heart,

your inner being is being formed by something.

And that inner formation then pours out into the external realities of your

life, your actions, and your behavior.

Every single person on this planet is being formed in their core by something.

And some of them may not use the word God, but ultimately that could be true

of them as well. It's a spiritual formation.

It's not a behavioral formation. It's not an act of will. It's a spiritual formation

that's taking place. You become what you worship.

Dallas Willard said in Renovation of the Heart that terrorists as well as saints

are the outcome of spiritual formation.

Their spirits or hearts have been formed. We become a certain kind of person

in the depths of our being, gaining a certain type of character.

And this is true for everyone, which is a worrying message, especially for many

of us who are believers, because if we are not growing in Christ-likeness,

then what we are worshiping is not like Christ.

If we are growing in something that reflects a different character than Christ,

then the God that we say and claim that we worship is not resembling the God of the Bible.

It's not resembling Jesus.

We may call it Jesus, but ultimately it's a false idol.

It's a false gospel because you become what you worship.

The gods of Crete, the gods of Greece were despicable creatures.

If any of you are familiar with the stories, they craved pleasure and they chased

after their heart's desire and they did whatever they could to gain it using deception, lying.

Lying is a term or not a term, but a characteristic that became synonymous with people from Crete.

All of these kind of old cultures developed these stereotypes, if you will.

And if you were from Crete, the Cretan stereotype was that you were depotched and you were a liar.

And as much as we can say that certain places in the ancient world were like

Vegas or this or that, Crete was one of those places that the people were terrible

and they pursued pleasure and they treated each other terribly.

And that was the stereotype that the culture had. We can see this here in Paul in writing to Titus.

He says as much as himself when he warns Titus in chapter one,

verse 12, that even one of their own men, a prophet from Crete,

even the people from Crete say this, that they say about them,

the people of Crete are liars, cruel animals, and lazy gluttons.

And then Paul says, this is true.

I love that one translation says it this way. It says that the Cretans are always

liars, evil beasts, and slow bellies.

So, gluttons, slow bellies, I'm not sure those are the same things,

but wives, you can try this out on your husbands one time if they're not getting

off the couch on one Saturday.

Just call them a slow belly and maybe they'll get to work.

Cretans, the word Cretan, not the same way that we think of the pejorative Cretan, cretin.

It's a different word. one letter difference, but Cretan, the ethnicity,

became synonymous with these morally lax, scarish brutes, liars, heathens, womanizers.

It became a synonymous term for this sort of unwelcomed, looked down on behavior in the ancient world.

And so, Paul leaves Titus in this setting to encourage the church,

to raise up leaders, to raise up people within the church who look differently,

who would be different, who would act different than the culture around them.

That's Paul's task that he leaves to Titus, to raise up people who would be

different than the culture around them.

And this is what we talk about when we talk about our mission to be a place

where heaven meets earth, that we want to be a bastion of peace.

We want to be a beachhead of God's kingdom here in this world where the people

around us can encounter and experience God.

They can experience heaven through this community that he's created,

that we would be a portal in this world, in our culture, in this context,

where people could come to and experience the realities of what heaven will be like.

That's what we talk about when we say that we want to be a place where heaven meets earth.

That this is true for mountainside, but this is also true for our family groups.

This is also true for our family units. And this is also true for each and every

individual temple of Jesus. And that's you.

We want to be a place where heaven meets earth. We want to be a place where

people encounter heavenly realities, spiritual realities in and through us as

Jesus transforms our lives into his image.

This is why Paul spends so much time in this short book, laying out instructions

for Timothy, for people of godly character to raise up godly people who are leaders first.

Chapter one talks about elders because godly churches persist through godly leadership.

But then he goes on to the wider family and he addresses older men and older

women and younger women and younger men and slaves and everyone.

This is the godly character that sets you apart, that makes you different.

This is God's grand design for your life, that we should live in a way that

demonstrates the attractiveness of the gospel and the superiority of Jesus.

That our lives would reflect the attractiveness of the gospel,

the way that it changes lives. and it would demonstrate the superiority of Jesus

and the power he has to change our lives, that we would be different.

This is God's grand design for your life.

Have any of you seen that TV show, Grand Designs?

We used to be really into those renovation, home renovation shows.

It's one of those kind of things that's from the UK.

And essentially, each episode follows these people who have set out to create

their vision for their dream home.

They don't give them money. That's a staple in British TV.

There's no cash prizes. If you spend 12 weeks of your life baking every day

in the kitchen or every weekend, they give you a plate and not a bunch of money like we do in the US.

So, you know, it's a strange thing. So they don't give these people money.

They just document the process. They follow them along and they document the

design, the challenges, the changes, the compromises that are made along the

way in this home process.

God has a grand design for your life.

Yes, for the church, for us, this community corporately, there's many ways in

which the Bible addresses the body as the church, but then also it switches

in that same metaphor to speak to us individually.

So it's a both and, the church, but also you individually, that God has a grand design for your life.

And each of us starts out, each of us begins that journey, excited and zealous for a life with Jesus.

But along the way, we meet challenges, changes

come compromises are made

and sometimes our life doesn't end us always end up looking the way like the

grand design that we have imagined in our own heads and maybe that's because

we also have our own idea of what that grand design is and the thing is is that when god you.

When we approach God's grand design for our life, he doesn't always promise

us that life will work out the way that we thought it was going to.

We have all these plans. I should be married by now. I should have my dream

job. I should have my dream home with a white pick of hands and two and a half children.

We have all of these plans. We have all of these ideas of however our life should

turn out. And when it doesn't, the reality is that God's grand design doesn't promise us our desires.

It doesn't guarantee your heart's desire. But what it does promise is transformation.

And I'm aware some of you smart alecks in the room are like,

Psalm 37 says that it promises us our heart's desires.

It says, delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your

heart. The Bible says it right there.

But if we delight ourselves in the Lord, if our delight is the Lord,

what is it that we would desire?

It's him. It's his presence. And that's one thing he's definitely going to give

us. He definitely will honor that heart desire.

The fuller context of this verse starts in verse three.

This is Psalm 37, verse four. But if we start in verse three,

it says, trust in the Lord and do good.

Then you will live safely in the land and prosper.

Take delight in the Lord and he will give you your heart's desires.

Commit everything you do to the Lord, trust him and he will help you.

And this is what the book of Titus is all about. It's about trust in the uncertainty.

Trust when all that around us is in objection to all that we see and all that we believe in him.

Trust in the Lord. In chapter 3, Paul writes.

He generously poured out the spirit upon us through Jesus Christ,

our savior, because of his grace, he made us right in his sight and gave us

confidence that we will inherit eternal life.

And this is a counter cultural gospel.

This is a counter cultural gospel that affects the entirety of your life.

The entirety of the way that you live and all that you believe from the inside out.

It is a spiritual transformation.

As we go back to that word, it transforms what we care about and what our lives are about.

And I've warned you that in the coming months, as we get into the book of Acts,

one question we're going to be asking is, what does your life say about what you believe?

What does your life say about who you are? What does your life say about what you care about?

This is a counter-cultural gospel that transforms entirely what we care about

and what our lives are about from the inside out.

Once again, Willard writes, this is not only formation of the spirit or the inner being, but also,

and I would say perhaps more importantly for the Christian formation by the

spirit of God and by the spiritual riches of Christ, continuing incarnation in his people.

This is Christ and you, the hope of glory that your life is becoming with every

day, with every moment, with every decision, your life is becoming the image

of Jesus for the waiting world,

creating these places where heaven touches earth, where the glory of God is

revealed, where it completely changes all of the cultural compromises that are made along the way.

God is doing this in you. He's remaking you into his image.

He's remaking you into his grand design with every moment, with every breath.

This is what the angels peer into and wait from their heavenly perches with bated breath.

This is what erupts heaven into songs of praise.

This is what the angels rejoice about. Is your life becoming heaven's delight?

That your life becoming heaven. This is a weird way to think about it.

For my instruction to you this morning to be heaven.

It's like, I thought heaven was a place, first of all. How do I be a place?

But in general, I don't think the linguistics, the grammatical aspect of that

sentence makes sense, but that's my instruction. Be heaven.

And again, some of you may be thinking on the other side of this is,

you don't really know me.

You don't know the troubles of my life. I'm too far gone. You don't know what I've done.

And I will admit there's truth in that in the sense that for all of the ways

I know many of you, I can only really know what you share.

And I don't know what you aren't willing to risk to share.

So there is truth to that. We read that in 1 Corinthians, I believe.

Paul talks about that specifically.

Maybe it was somewhere else, but you can only ever know what someone is willing to share.

You can only ever truly know someone to the extent of what they're going to share with you.

So there's some truth in that statement. However, I also know it to be true

that God's not walking away from you.

And so to the best of my knowledge and strength and encouragement that I can

give today, I can say I'm not walking away either.

Because that promise, the promise of the gospel, promise of this good news is

that through the saving work of Jesus and through the power,

the empowerment of a spirit that people really can change.

And that's true for people who have been following Jesus for a short amount of time.

And that's true for people who have been following Jesus for years and decades.

No matter how much you think at this point, it's been too long and I can't change.

The reality and the promise of this gospel, this good news is that people really could change.

And that was true of the people of Crete, that they could change.

That's why Titus was sent to them because Paul believed in the power of Jesus in their lives.

And that's true for us as well, that we don't have to remain stuck in the image

of the gods that surround us, these false idols that we pour into our lives.

We don't have to remain stuck in their image. We don't have to be like our culture.

We don't have to conform to the culture around us. Paul says that this gospel

is powerful enough to create us into new creatures,

to make us new creations who become agents of change in the culture and the world around us.

That's his encouragement to Titus and his encouragement to the church.

And this is true whether you live in Crete in the first century or thousands

of years later in Boone, North Carolina.

By the power of the spirit and by the saving work of Jesus, people really can change.

Nobody's too far gone and nobody's been too religious for too long that we can't still change.

And so hopefully I've sold you on this, but maybe you're thinking, okay, you've got me.

How do we become heaven? I'm going to just buy into this delusion that that

statement makes sense. How do we be heaven?

And lucky for us, this is why we're in the book of Titus, because it's not a

participation in some theoretical idea.

Paul gives Titus and therefore us as well.

Instructions of how we can begin to walk into this heavenly reality.

He pours this out through the lists that he addresses for Titus to give to elders,

for him to give to old people, to young people.

They pour out of all of these instructions for Titus to give to the church in Crete.

And it encompasses the sound wisdom of living self-controlled and upright lives

so that though the culture around

you may object that ultimately they have nothing bad to say about you.

It's encompassed in his statements to show yourselves to be entirely trustworthy,

to stand firm on the truth.

In fact, Paul tells Titus to encourage a church that what they believe and the

way that they act or the good works that they do should be in complete agreement with one another.

That's one of his instructions, one of his encouragements.

Essentially, he's talking about actively embodying, actively embodying Christian

values in your daily interactions in your community life, that we would,

as we say in the mission, embody Jesus.

This is what Titus is bringing, is being instructed by Paul.

But I want to boil it down. Instead of going through all of these lists through

the chapters, we're going to be in Titus again next week.

So, we have time to pause for some of that stuff. I just want to boil it down to one verse.

And then what I want to do is encourage you all in whatever reading you're doing throughout the week.

Spend some time meditating on this short book. It's 46 verses.

I Googled it just to make sure because I didn't want to say something false.

And Google was like, it's one verse. I think that's wrong.

It's 46 verses. It takes seven minutes to read.

So meditate on this short book of the Bible throughout the week in your daily readings.

And I want to just leave you with this one verse in Titus chapter two,

the second half of verse seven. It's not even a full verse.

It says, let everything you do reflect the integrity and seriousness of your teaching.

Some other translations will use along with the word integrity,

it'll use the word dignity.

Let everything you do reflect the integrity and seriousness of your teaching.

Let it reflect integrity. Let it reflect dignity. Integrity within and dignity without.

That all that you are, let all that you are from the very depths of your very

being reflect a personal integrity empowered by the spirit of Jesus.

And let all that you do give dignity to those you encounter along the way,

drawing from the great well of love that is Christ.

So let everything from the very depths of you reflect a personal integrity and

commitment to Jesus being empowered by the spirit and let everything you do

in your interactions with everyone throughout your life demonstrate to them

the dignity that is inherent into them as God's beloved children.

Integrity within, dignity without. In practicality, you ask yourself these two questions.

And if any of you remember those WWJD bracelets, it's along the same lines.

So maybe we should bring those back.

Question number one, how would Jesus treat this person?

How would Jesus treat this person? When you come home from work,

how would Jesus treat your spouse?

When you pick up your kids from school, how would Jesus interact with your children?

Breaking outside of your family, your co-workers, your neighbors,

your friends, whatever situation, the person camped out on the side of the road

asking for money, how would Jesus treat this person?

The answer is always going to be with the dignity that is demanded in that particular situation.

So the action may change, but the result is giving the person dignity.

We see that through Jesus, reflected in Jesus and his actions time and time again.

We see it in the way that he healed. We see it in the way that he touches the lepers.

We see it in the way that he doesn't condemn the woman who they're trying to

stone, but he tells everyone to look at her. He gives dignity in all of his actions.

How would Jesus treat this person? Question number one. Question number two, slightly different.

If that person were Jesus, how should I treat them? How should I treat someone if they were Jesus?

So it's a simultaneously reflecting on Jesus's actions, attitude, and character.

And at the same time, reflecting on how that translates into who we are and

the person sitting across from us.

How do we see them? Do we see Jesus in them?

It's easy to be spiritual, but not religious.

When you're off on a mountain by yourself, it's hard to see Jesus and the broken

person sitting next to you.

So it's a simultaneous, how should I act as Jesus? And can I see Jesus in the people around me?

It's these two questions. And if you make it a practice, a habit,

a habit really, of using these two questions as you approach every situation

in your life, instill it within you so that it becomes a habit.

You won't believe the way that God will transform your life.

You won't believe the way that he will transform your character and reflect

his grand design into the waiting world.

Mother Teresa would talk about this.

She would talk about seeking the face of God in everything, everyone all the

time, in his hand in every happening.

This is what it means to be contemplative in the heart of the world,

seeing and adoring the presence of Jesus, especially in the lowly appearance

in the Eucharist and communion of bread, and also in the distressing disguise of the poor.

This is what committed her life so firmly to the service that we know her for.

She said, if we recognize Jesus under the appearance of bread,

we will have no difficulty recognizing him in the disguise of the suffering

poor, seeing Jesus and the people around us.

Now, the difficulty is that we are in a season of resolutions.

I don't know if you make resolutions. I tend to not, but I probably have a couple.

I want to read a chapter in a book that's not the Bible once a day.

I always say I don't read books. That's about to change. I'm about to get real cultured.

I've already failed. 11 days in, I've mostly not failed. But that's the problem

with resolutions, right?

Only about 8% of people actually succeed in keeping their resolutions.

80% of people fail before the second week in February.

Many more. So if 80% fail, a large majority of those quit their resolution by

the second Friday in January, this past Friday, mind you.

So if y'all have already quit your resolution, you're amongst most people.

Friday is called Quitter's Day. This past Friday is called Quitter's Day as

a result, right? So I don't want this to be a resolution.

I don't want this to fall in and be abandoned with so many other well-intentioned resolutions.

I want this to be a habit. I actually want it to become what resolutions were

intended to be back in like the 1700s or whenever people started making them.

I want them to be a steadfastness of purpose, a determination habit.

Make this a habit in your life.

Commit yourself to this. Commit yourself to Christ. Become heaven's delight.

Become heaven and watch as all of the angels rejoice over what God is doing

in our lives, what God is doing in your life.

Be heaven as you live out this countercultural gospel and reliance on the spirit

and reliance on the power of Jesus.

As you declare God's goodness and glory, his grace to your family,

to your community, to your neighbors, to your friends, to your co-workers,

and to the whole world. Make this a habit.

Become a place where heaven meets earth, because that's what God has created us for.

Thank you for listening to Mountainside Church's podcast. We hope you found

inspiration and encouragement in today's teaching.

To learn more about our church, stay connected or partner with us, visit mcboon.com.

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