Titus 1:1

One of the greatest tensions in my life is the tension between what I confess to believe and then what I live out.

I confess to believe in the Bible and believe what the Bible says, and I strive to then live that out.

I want to be someone who what I say is what I believe and what I believe is how I act.

But oftentimes I come up short in that.

And this is a tension for me because I know that as what Scripture says, what God's commands are, they're not ambiguous to me, they're not unknown to me.

But yet in my heart I still feel this tension of I want to do what I want to do.

So I want to say, yes, I believe in God's word.

Yes, this is the authority in my life.

This is what rules my days and my nights.

But then oftentimes I do other things.

I don't submit to God's word.

I'm not obedient to him like I should be.

Now there are people in our culture who would say, hey man, that's okay.

Don't beat yourself up about that.

Don't beat yourself up.

We're all sinners.

You know, just enjoy God's grace.

Don't worry about it.

Jesus covered all that.

And there's a lot of truth in that.

Jesus did pay for my sins, and I do need to walk in grace and understand his mercy and his love for me.

But God did not call me or us to a life of less sin.

He called me and he called you to be sinless.

He didn't call us just to say, hey, just kind of tone it down a little bit with the sin in your life.

He called you to forsake the sin and to follow after him.

He didn't call us just to intellectually know him and say, okay, I've read the Bible and I agree with it.

It's good.

And then go and do what we want to do.

He's called us to a life of submission and following after him.

Again, this is attention because I want to do what I want to do.

There's times when I don't want to do what the Lord has commanded me to do.

But we are to be fully surrendered to Christ as our Lord and as our master.

Something I think it's good for us to ask the question about our own lifestyle, our own way of living, our own behavior.

Do I live this way?

Do I behave this way because God has regenerated my life and I'm fully his and he is my Lord and my master?

Or do I live this way because kind of I grew up in a kind of a conservative culture and, you know, I'm just kind of a decent person.

And I mean, I pay my bills, I pay my taxes, I help my neighbor from time to time, I try to do the right thing.

For the most part, I try to treat my spouse okay.

I, you know, I don't cheat on them.

You know, I might not be true to them with my thoughts and my desires, but for the most part, you know, I do my part.

So often we can we can evaluate our behavior and we just think, are we this way because the culture around us is just kind of spurring us on to be good people?

Or has God really changed our desires?

Is our behavior coming from a place of worship and adoration for the Lord?

Or is it coming from a place of it's just easier, actually.

If I do, if I start living this other way, I'm just gonna kind of blow up my life and destroy some relationships.

So this is just the easier thing to do, is to be a good person.

I have some other desires, but I'm not gonna fulfill those desires because it's just gonna kind of wreak havoc.

So this is more this is more simple for me.

Are we following after the Lord?

Are we obedient?

Does our behavior follow what he has for us because we want to worship and adore him?

Because this is what he's called us to.

This morning, as we look in the book of Titus, that Titus is called a pastoral epistle, and Paul wrote 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus to give these brothers wisdom on how to pastor and how to lead the church.

And if you're thinking, well, uh, I'm not a pastor, so I'm not sure why I need to be working through this book.

I want to encourage you in this.

This book is its instruction for the church on how it should function.

It's instruction for the church on how it should believe, what it should believe, and it's instruction to the church on what it should or how it should behave.

So how it should function, what it should believe, and how it should behave.

This is what what Titus, the book of Titus, gives us.

And this is the theme through Titus.

Our doctrine matters, and our devotion matters.

What we believe and how we behave matter.

Christ called us, he saved us, and he's sanctifying us.

Paul brings these two things together very closely that we cannot just say, I believe in the Bible, I believe the Lord, I believe these things, and then go live a life that we want to live.

We are to submit ourselves.

Our doctrine is to be good as best we can to have the right doctrine, and our devotion is to be to the Lord for the right reasons.

So doctrine and devotion, they matter.

Now, as we go through tightness, I want you to keep in mind when we talked about last week.

And if you weren't here, we talked about faithfulness.

That we are to be faithful to God and how in all the different ways, all the different things God's called us to.

The only way to know, are we succeeding in this?

Am I succeeding as a Christian?

Is are you being faithful to God?

It's not size, it's not numbers, it's not, I mean, are people kind of like following after you?

Or are you having a great influence, or are people, you know, singing your praises?

It's are you being faithful to God?

Are you being faithful to his word?

That's the only measuring stick we have.

So as we go through tightness, we're talking about our doctrine, we're talking about our behavior and our lifestyle and our growth and holiness.

It's easy for us to become legalistic in these things and to think, well, man, I'm doing well here, I'm doing well here, and we get prideful.

We're measuring the wrong thing.

Or we go on the other side and we think, man, I'm just failing.

So we we heap on the shame and the shame, and then we're again looking to ourselves.

We're measuring ourselves based on other people instead of what Christ has called us to.

So keep in mind God's call to faithfulness as we talk about our right doctrine and our right devotion.

So Titus 1.

First of all, the book of Titus has these kind of thr themes throughout it.

This there's this structure of church leadership.

Man, this is how the church should be structured, the leadership should function.

Paul writes to instruct the church on that.

He and he writes to instruct the church about false teachers.

You can't get away from the false teachers element of the New Testament because as the church was growing, they confronted false teaching everywhere.

So Paul writes to confront false teachers.

He writes to help clarify what is Christian doctrine.

What do we really believe?

And how do we spur on our obedience to God?

So we begin again in verse 1.

Verse 1, Paul, a servant of God, an apostle of Jesus Christ.

This is the first point that Paul is the missionary.

He's the missionary, the one who is carrying forth this message.

He begins with a servant.

Some translations might say a bondservant, some say a slave.

This is someone who does not have his own autonomy.

They submit to their master.

There's a master who rules over them.

So when Paul says, listen, I'm Paul, I'm a servant of God, I'm a slave of God, I'm a bond servant of God.

He doesn't say, hey, I'm Paul, one of the apostles, and so submit to me.

He doesn't say, hey, I'm Paul, I had this amazing encounter on the road to Damascus, I'm Paul, I was Saul, I had this great education.

He says, I'm Paul, a slave of God.

It starts with that.

Humble.

He's not doing his own thing here.

He's fully submitted to God's plan, to his master's plan.

This idea that he's kind of branching out, and some people, if you read commentaries on Paul, they'll say, actually, you know, Jesus was doing his own thing, and it was Paul who kind of started this whole church thing and the whole like church age.

It's actually Paul's work.

This wasn't what Jesus came to start.

Jesus came just to teach love and to kind of further the teachings of the Jews.

But then Paul comes in and talks about this whole like church thing.

And no, Paul's fully submitted to the message of God.

Servant of God.

He makes this claim a servant of God comes from the same language or lineage.

Jews who are reading this letter would have recognized this language.

He's placing himself in a similar kind of vein of Moses and Abraham and the prophets, these Old Testament figures who are submitted, who are servants of God to carry out God's message.

So Paul begins, a servant, a bondservant of God, an apostle of Jesus Christ.

This is the second title that he kind of begins to display.

So he clarifies his submission to God and his mission for God.

And he now points to, he points to his authority.

We know that Paul was working through, dealing with churches that were struggling with some false teachers.

And some of those false teachers were coming in and saying, listen, listen, Paul doesn't really know.

Okay?

Paul's off, and Paul's just like, listen, I'm going to lay out really clear right from the get-go of my letter, I'm a slave to God and I'm an apostle.

I'm an apostle of Jesus Christ.

Apostle means sent one or messenger.

And not just anyone can be an apostle.

Right?

This is why Paul used this title because it had very specific credentials.

To be an apostle, you had to have witnessed Jesus' earthly ministry.

From his baptism to crucifixion, resurrection, you had to be there for all that.

You had to see the resurrected Christ, and you had to be called by Christ specifically.

We know that Paul, when Christ was doing his ministry, was not a follower of Christ.

But he witnessed all these things, took them in.

So he meets that criteria.

We know he met, in Acts 9, he met the resurrected Christ.

When Christ showed up and called him, he is called by Christ.

So Paul is meeting these qualifications.

So when he pulls out this title, listen, I'm a servant, I'm an apostle.

He's saying, There is great authority, not because of me or I'm a great person, but because God has given me a message.

And therefore, church, you need to listen to this.

Now, the position of an apostle, it was to send out the message and to protect the church.

It's interesting as Paul's dealing with in Titus about false teachers.

We live in a day and age with false teaching.

And I just want to take a kind of a side detour for a moment and talk about some false teaching that's going on in our day and age.

There is something called the New Apostolic Reformation, which sounds pretty legit.

New Apostolic Reformation.

Just a little hint if dealing with the Bible, if there's ever a title new in it, it's probably not good because there's nothing really new, right?

So that's your first indicator.

New, what's that mean?

But there's this, the New Apostolic Reformation.

They teach that God is re-establishing apostles on the earth.

So literal apostles, the same authority, the same ability in this day and age.

Right?

And people who you might say, they might not even recognize that the name of this kind of movement.

But but they're like, oh man, you know, there's this there's this person who got a new prophecy.

They have a new prophecy from the Lord.

That's part of the new Apostolic Reformation.

But they believe there's prophets on the earth who are hearing new revelation.

So they believe, they say, well, we believe in the Bible, but we also have this new revelation.

So there's literal apostles, literal prophets with new revelation on the earth.

And this is a dangerous heresy because what it does is it's saying they use a lot of scripture to sound like they're Christians, but they don't submit to scripture.

They have new revelation.

They desire to manipulate and to coerce people through the idea of supernatural phenomenon.

They major on issues of spiritual warfare and dominance over the culture and the business and all these things.

I don't want to take a whole lot of time to talk about this, but this is a heresy dealing with apostles.

And so we need to know as believers, there are no new apostles.

There were the original apostles, there are no more.

That office has ceased.

It's been fulfilled, it's done.

But if you recognize any of these names, these are not all, but these are just some of the more well-known people who convey or who teach the new Apostolic Reformation.

Bill Johnson, he teaches, a head pastor of Bethel Church in Reading, California.

Author and Bible teacher Rick Joyner.

There's famous missionaries, Rick and Heidi Baker.

Preacher Paula White.

She had a lot to do with some of political things last year, so you might recognize her name there.

Author Peter Wagner, the leader of the International House of Prayer in Kansas City, Mike Bickle.

Evangelist and author Todd Bentley and Pastor and Evangelist Todd White.

These are just a few of the names.

But people that, man, I know people who are like, man, I saw this video from this guy named Todd White, and it was just super encouraging.

And I watched the video and the guy's like, man, Jesus loves you.

He loves you and he has a plan for your life and all these things.

And then the end is like, and I just got a word from the Lord, the Lord's telling me right now that He has this specific thing for you.

And that's what it usually sounds like.

It's it's kind of build you up.

You're kind of the center of it.

And it's exciting, an exciting thing, and then all of a sudden, it's like, and I got this new thing from the Lord, and I got this new revelation, and by the word, the Lord's telling me, and that's that's spiritual abuse.

And that's heresy.

So we need to be on guard against false teachers.

What Paul said in Philippians 3 19 are true.

It's unless people repent, unless false teachers repent, it's true.

It says their end is destruction, their God is their belly, and they glory in their shame.

With minds set on earthly things.

We need to be a people.

As Paul's writing to the church to go to the church, who who understand that there are groups who desire to manipulate and twist scripture.

So the office of apostle matters.

Again, so when Paul says, listen, I'm speaking as an apostle of Jesus Christ, he's making a claim that only 13 people on the face of the earth who ever existed can make.

Only 13 people could ever say this.

It was the original twelve, right?

And then we add Paul.

We know that Judas was in the disciples, and he then he died, he committed suicide, and so they replaced him with Matthias.

So you have the 12 disciples, you have Paul.

Paul was sent as a missionary with this amazing burden and this message as a slave and as an apostle, he had a message to us.

And this is even how he opens up the book of Romans.

Paul.

This is Romans 1:1.

Romans 1:1

A servant of God, a servant of Christ Jesus, called by it to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God.

Paul was a missionary who had a message to deliver.

This is the second point.

We're gonna cover a little bit more of verse one, and that'll be it for for today.

But Paul says in the second part of verse 1, right?

A servant of God and an apostle of Jesus Christ for the sake of the faith of God's elect.

For the sake of the faith of God's elect.

Paul is using the language of election and predestination here.

This is a doctrine that obviously has been debated by some.

Some people find this offensive and they struggle with it.

As a church, I want to read from you for you part of our statement of faith.

This is section nine on God's purpose of grace.

And it deals with the doctrine of election.

This is again out of the New Hampshire Confession of Faith.

It says we believe election is the eternal purpose of God, according to which he graciously regenerates, sanctifies, and saves sinners.

Election is perfectly consistent with human free agency and includes all the means necessary to achieve God's purpose.

It is the most glorious display of God's sovereign goodness, which is infinitely free, wise, holy, and unchangeable.

Election completely rules out boasting and promotes humility, love, prayer, praise, trust in God, and the active imitation of his free mercy.

It encourages the greatest possible exercise of human responsibility.

The election of individuals to life may be confirmed by its effect in everyone who truly believes the gospel.

Election is the foundation of Christian assurance, and confirming our election deserves our greatest diligence.

The doctrine of election and predestination might sound offensive.

Some people hear that like this idea that God has chosen his people, he's chosen who he's going to save, he's predestined, he's elected those who are his.

So then so then he has mercy on whoever he has mercy, who he will.

And again, he will harden who he will harden.

Second Peter 3 9.

The Lord is not slow in fulfilling his promises, as some count slowness, but is patient toward you.

Not wishing that any should perish, but that should all should reach repentance.

John 15 16.

You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should be should go and bear fruit, that your fruit should abide, so that whomever so that wherever you a whatever you ask the Father in my name, he might give it to you.

And John 1 13.

Who were born not of blood, nor the will of the flesh, nor the will of man, the will but of the will of God.

These are just a few passages deal with his doctrine of election.

This deals, this idea that God is working his plan of salvation out for his people.

And I don't want to be um as I don't want to be like crass and hard about this, because sometimes people hear this doctrine that God's saving his people, and they they wear it as like a badge, they wear it as like they're proud, like, hey, I'm I'm in the club.

I've done something, I'm in.

I'm elect, man.

Check it out.

And it creates this hardness, it creates this a heart that doesn't desire to see others saved, that doesn't create a desire to not evangelize.

It can create a desire to be complacent.

And that is not what God has called us to be or to do.

We are to be a humble people, but we cannot ignore what Scripture says.

And so when Paul says that I'm a servant, I'm an apostle, and it's for the sake of the faith of God's elect.

It's for their sake that I'm writing, it's for their sake that I'm a servant, it's for their sake that I'm an apostle, it's for their sake that I'm laying down my life and serving and giving up my way, giving up my rights.

It's for God's people.

We cannot hear that and say, okay, well, elect just doesn't mean what it means.

It means elect.

It means God's people, those he has predestined.

I want to take a just a brief moment and address the two main objections I hear when people hear about the doctrine of election or predestination.

The first one that I always hear is, well, that's not fair.

That's not fair.

And the second one I always hear is, well, why would I do anything if God's already chosen?

If God's already got it all mapped out, why would I do anything?

And to the first, the first objection that it's not fair, I just want to read Deuteronomy 7, 5 and 6.

This is the old covenant.

This is the way the Lord dealt with his people in the old covenant.

Instead, it says, instead, this is what you are to do to them.

Sorry, I think I have the wrong verse.

No, verse 6.

For you are a holy people belonging to the Lord your God.

The Lord your God has chosen you to be his own possession out of all the people on the face of the earth.

So we see in the old covenant God selecting his people, redeeming his people, making a plan from Abraham and his descendants, saying, You are my people.

I'm circling you out for the rest of the people on the face of the earth, and you will be my people, and I will be your God.

And then we see through what the scripture talks about in heaven.

We get to heaven and we're there for eternity with the Lord.

We don't see where there's like an opt-down, like after five years, you can decide, hey, I don't like this.

Go ahead and I'm just gonna choose hell over this.

We don't have our free will, this autonomy in heaven to choose and reject God.

So there's this issue when people say, well, it's not fair.

Well, you uphold, you hold to the Old Testament where God chose his people, and you look to eternity where God's chosen and he's secured his people, and somehow it's fair in the old covenant, it's fair in eternity, but in God's covenant, the way he's dealing with his church, it's not fair now.

So that's a challenge.

Listen, I think the way that the world views the idea of fairness is false.

God is sovereign and he's good.

He is he's not dissing anyone, he's not just saying, I just don't care about anyone.

So the Lord.

He's working his plan to redeem his people.

As we read in our statement of faith, those who reject God do so because they love their sin more than they love God.

So it's not a matter of God being fair.

Fair is hell for everyone.

God is merciful and kind.

To the second objection, well, why do anything if God's already chosen?

Listen, if God, if God has saved you and redeemed you and he put a new heart inside of you, you're regenerate, you're not gonna have a heart of just, well, whatever.

That's not a heart of someone who's been made alive in Christ.

If your heart is like, well, if God's already chosen, I'm not gonna put forth effort, it doesn't seem like it matters.

Well, if that's your heart, there's a good chance you are not saved.

You don't desire the things of God, you don't have a new heart, you want to do what you want to do.

As believers, when God changes us, he puts a heart that we want to honor him.

Again, are we perfect in that?

No, but we're to be faithful to that.

He puts in us a desire to obey him, to evangelize, and to share the good news with our neighbor that there is hope in Jesus Christ.

We don't know if God's chosen them or not.

That's not up to us.

We're to be faithful to say, I mean, this is who God is, and this is what God has done, and look what Jesus has done in my life.

And here's this amazing message of hope.

That's our job.

We're to be faithful to that.

So the doctrine of election and predestination should not make anyone complacent or prideful.

It should do the very opposite.

It should make you humble, more humble than anything else.

Because without this doctrine, then you have done some work somewhere, somehow, to kind of make yourself right with the Lord.

Even if it's only 0.0001%, you've done something.

And so you can kind of hang your head on that tiny bit.

Whereas with what Paul's saying, what scripture is saying is you have done nothing for your salvation.

It is fully God's grace lavished on you.

Therefore, be merciful, be humble, be kind.

Because God didn't need to, and you didn't deserve it, but he was merciful and kind to you.

Again, it's for the sake of God's elect that he that Paul writes to Titus how to how to build a church, how to live, how to have right doctrine and right devotion.

We are called to live out what we believe and what we profess.

So this morning I just have two questions as we close.

Are there areas of your life that you have not surrendered or given to God?

Are there areas in your life where there's still like, man, I believe what the God says, but I have not surrendered to this, I've not surrendered this to God.

And to be to be clear, I'm not saying are there areas where you just have complete victory.

I hope there's areas in your life where you're not struggling with sin and those things are going well, but we are going to struggle as believers with sin.

We're going to struggle in our walk with the Lord.

So I'm not saying are there, you know, do you not have any more struggles?

But are there things you're holding on to?

You said, Lord, I love you, you're good, you're God, but I just, I can't give up this thing.

I can't give up.

Maybe it's a dream.

Maybe it's it's it's a habit or an addiction.

Maybe it's just your fear.

What is it that you're still holding on to?

Maybe it's a part of your identity.

And if you let that thing go, like who are you?

Where are you at in the world?

This is people know me by this thing.

So if I let go of this thing, who am I anymore?

What are what are things or what's an area in your life that you're holding on to?

God has saved and sanctified his people.

We are called to repent.

We're called to repent.

That's the message of the gospel.

Repent.

Meaning acknowledge that your sin.

Acknowledge you've tried to do this on your own, and then acknowledge that that's wrong.

Turn from those things and put your faith in Jesus.

So that's the second question.

Have you done that?

Have you repented of your sin?

Turn from your sin.

And put your hope and your faith in Jesus Christ.