Four Fundamentals - Titus 1:1-4

As part of our new season, kind of coming back together as a

church for the fall, we are concluding the sermon on the

plane and starting a new book of the Bible.

So if you got a bulletin on the front of that, it says that

there is grace for godliness. What a time to consider the

grace of God and what it means to be set apart in a world of

evil and ungodliness. And we are going to spend the,

the the fall months just being built up by the power of the

Holy Spirit to look like Jesus to this world that needs him by

the grace of God. So to do that, we're studying

the book of Titus. And as has been the case for a

number of our series of late, I've asked Doctor John Whitaker

to open the word and just give us kind of the the back story in

the overview of the book, what we're going to study for the

next couple months. And so if you don't know John

Whitaker before I invite him up, let me just tell you that he is

a just amazing brother of Christ in our church.

He is also the voice of the listeners commentary.

If you have not listened to that you want to study the Bible and

again, many of you, you got to start studying the Bible for

these times. Listeners commentary is a

podcast that will take you verse by verse through the entire New

Testament. Other that he's just an amazing

Bible teacher. So help me.

Welcome to our little stage, John Whitaker.

All right, thanks, Tucker. Yeah, he mentioned he had me

start the First Timothy series at the beginning of the year.

He had me kick off the Luke series at the beginning of the

summer and now the tightest series.

And so I think I'm like the place kicker.

I just kick off the game. I'm not really part of the team,

you know, just got to get the team and then go sit by

yourself. So that's me.

As Tucker said, we're going to be looking at the book of Titus

and we're going to kick off that series today.

And to help us get started with the Book of Titus and the back

story to the Book of Titus, I want you to imagine a table,

picture a table. And maybe your tables would, I

don't know. But I want you to picture like a

a classic sort of four legged table.

In my mind, that table's square. I don't know what shape yours

is, but mine's a square 4 legged table.

And on any 4 legged table, if you have one of the legs that's

like shorter than the other leg, what happens?

Yeah, the table wobbles, right. Have you ever been at a

restaurant with a wobbly table? Sort of annoying, isn't it?

Right. You want those legs to be the

same length. Well, what if your table, for

whatever reason, it's missing a whole leg.

Now you're at 4 legged tables. A three legged table.

How is that going to work for you, right?

Like your table needs 4 solid legs in order for your table to

be stable. Now here's the reason I bring

that up. On Friday morning, I was walking

my dog at about 7:00 in the morning and 7:15 in the morning.

And as I'm walking through the neighborhood, there is one of my

neighbors backing her car out of her driveway.

And all of a sudden, I hear a little voice say hi, John.

And the little boy had rolled down his window and he was

saying hi to me as I walked my dog.

And so I walked over to their car and the mom rolled down a

couple other wind windows. And I visited with him for a

little bit. And she was taking her little

boy to kindergarten that morning.

And I asked her, how are you doing?

And she said, good. And then it's already been noted

she followed up with it's been a heavy week, but we're doing good

and on the same thing. I look over my friends list on

social media and the reality is my friends list is populated by

a number of people who once sat in chairs like where you're

sitting, but no longer sit in those chairs.

They once followed Jesus and no longer follow Jesus at all.

And when you enter into, you know, walking with the Lord,

following Christ, when you have weeks that are heavy or hard,

when life gets overwhelming or is confusing, just complicated,

difficult, stressful, whatever it is, what is going to make

your life stable? Solid, right?

Like a table with four solid, stable legs.

What's going to make your life actually stand firm and stable

so that you get to the finish line of your life faithful to

Jesus? What's going to provide you a

stable, growing Christian life? And if you're here today and

you're not, you're not yet sure that you follow Jesus and you're

not even sure if you want to follow Jesus.

I can tell you that, that the things we're going to talk about

today and the following of Jesus will not just make you have a

stable Christian life. It'll make you have a stable,

solid human life, a flourishing human life.

And the first few verses out of Titus are going to introduce us

to like what what I think of as like 4 fundamentals.

That's why it's this 4 legged table.

Here's 4 fundamentals that you never outgrow as a follower of

Jesus. Here's 4 fundamentals that you

need to return to day after day after day if you want to make it

to the finish line of your life faithful to Christ.

Here's 4 fundamentals that you need to return to on a regular

basis and invest in and pour your heart in if you want to

have a stable growing Christian life.

So let me read Titus chapter 1 verses one through 4.

Titus 1 · chapter mention

It's the introduction to the letter from Paul to his

colleague Titus. And if again, if you're not

familiar with your Bible, so much of our our New Testament

are letters written from Christians to Christians, and

that's what we have in the letter to Titus.

So Titus chapter 1 verses one through 4 reads like this.

Titus 1 · chapter mention

Paul, a bondservant of God and an apostle of Jesus Christ, for

the faith of those chosen of God and the knowledge of the truth

which is according to godliness, in the hope of eternal life,

which God, who cannot lie, promised long ages ago, but now

at the proper time, revealed His word in the proclamation with

which I, Paul, was entrusted according to the commandment of

God our Savior. 2 Titus, my true Son, in a common faith, grace

and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Savior.

Now, when you were in elementary school, you were taught how to

write a letter, and we have our standard way of doing it, dear

John. And then we sign off at the end,

right? In Paul's world, when they were

taught how to write a letter, this is basically how they were

taught to start a letter. You go sender recipient

greetings. It's not like just a biblical

way to write a letter. It was just an ancient Greco

Roman way to write a letter. And that's what we have.

And as a letter, this invites us into a story, right?

Every e-mail correspondence you have, there's a back story to

that e-mail correspondence. True.

Every text message you send, there's a back story to that

text message, right? Like that's what we have here.

This is a letter from Paul to somebody named Titus.

And then some greetings and then some interruption in the middle

of the sender and the recipient in between, right.

But there's a back story. There's something going on.

What's that? Something.

Well, here's here's probably our best guess.

We don't know 100% exactly the back story to Titus.

It's one of those letters that we don't know all the details

of, but here's the most likely back story to this letter.

Titus is on an island called Crete.

If we can put this map up, I'm guessing maybe you're not super

familiar with your Mediterranean geography.

So here's the Mediterranean Sea in the Mediterranean world.

It's the world of the New Testament.

You can see Crete down there, right in the middle of the

Mediterranean Sea. It's the largest island in the

Mediterranean, and Titus is on that island.

When Paul writes to him, Paul had been with him, and now Paul

is left, and he's left Titus there.

Just to give you maybe a more visual idea of what Crete might

look like if we go to the next slide, a little picture.

So this is Crete out in the middle of the Mediterranean,

this large island with a handful of cities dotting the coastline

of this island. And here's probably what

happened. Paul on his way to his first

Roman imprisonment, the one recorded at the end of the Book

of Acts, sailing as a prisoner of the Roman Empire.

They stop on this island at a harbour much like the one we

look at, and it's approaching the end of the sailing season on

the Mediterranean Sea and the weather is turning bad.

And so they end up staying on the island for a decent period

of time, hoping to be able to sail to the other side of the

island in order to be protected from winter weather and wait out

the winter before they finish the sea voyage to Rome.

That was the plan. And so Paul actually was on

Crete before his imprisonment for a handful of weeks now.

Didn't work out so well. He ended up getting shipwrecked

on Malta. And then he ended up making it

to Rome and being in prison for two years.

And most likely, Titus was written after that first

imprisonment. Paul is now free from his Roman

imprisonment, and he's resumed his traveling ministry.

And on his journey to Rome, he had stopped by Crete.

And he was like, there is a good opportunity for the gospel right

there in the middle of the Mediterranean.

That's a place that needs to know about Jesus.

Let's go back. And so at some point after he

gets out of that imprisonment, Paul, along with his colleague

in ministry, Titus, sail back to Crete and start preaching the

gospel and making disciples and planning churches.

And now Paul has left figure. OK, the ministry's got started.

There's a handful of churches on the island.

I'm going to leave Titus there. And Titus will carry on the

work. Titus will keep moving it

forward. Now who's Titus?

Here's the interesting thing about Titus in the Bible.

Titus is never mentioned in the book of Acts, so we don't know

exactly who Titus is. We do know this from Paul's

letters. Titus had been a long time

colleague of Paul. By the time Paul writes this

letter, Titus has probably worked with Paul for about 13 or

14 years. Titus has been is like one of

his right hand men in ministry. And Titus was not a Jew.

He was a non Jew. He was a Gentile.

And Titus seems to be that guy who like, like if you had a

difficult situation, you had somebody who needed to deal with

a, a hard conversation. You had somebody who needed like

they could handle conflict, they could handle difficult

situations. That's who Titus seems to be.

We, we think that because like all the conflict that went on

with Corinth and Paul, Titus was the guy Paul sent and, and

Crete, well, Crete is where Titus is at now.

And Crete had a reputation even in the broader Roman world.

Crete had a reputation for being full of people just were like,

that is a hard place to live. Like they actually developed a

verb out of the, you know, if you were a Cretan, they turned

it into a verb in, in Greek language and basically said to,

to act like a Cretan. That meant you were a jerk, a

scoundrel, a liar, a deceiver, kind of a brutish sort of

person. Like, yeah, you, you meet

somebody that you, you can't trust, and they're really kind

of a jerk. They're a cretin, right?

Titus now is left there to minister among those people.

And the church is young and the church is new to the faith.

And Paul Rice tells us, look, I'm going to give you some

instructions that'll help you get those guys stable, well

ordered, grounded in their faith so that they can be faithful to

the end. And that's essentially why Paul

writes this letter to Titus. And that's essentially what

Titus is about. It's a letter written to a

ministry colleague saying, here's what I want you to do now

that I'm gone. I want you to help those guys

get get the fundamentals of the faith really in place so that

they can be faithful all the way to the end.

And I think that's why in the middle of his introduction and

greeting you, you get this long extended interruption.

It's not just Paul to Titus. Greetings.

You get Paul and then a long introduction and then to Titus

and then greetings. Why the long introduction?

Well, everything in that long introduction points forward to

like the fundamentals Paul's going to talk about in the

letter. So let's just briefly look at

these 4 fundamentals that show up in the the last half of verse

one down through verse 3. Paul gives 4 fundamentals for a

stable, growing Christian life. And here's the thing about

fundamentals. You never outgrow them.

You never outgrow fundamentals, right?

You started playing football when when you were seven years

old and you're playing optimist football and now you're playing

for Boise State or somebody else.

Guess what the fundamentals you learned at 7:00 you're still

using when you're 19202530 playing in the NFL.

You never outgrow the fundamentals.

It doesn't matter. Maybe it's music and you, you

know, you started learning your basic, you know, for playing the

piano way back when you were 5-6 or seven, and now you play the

piano freely and competently. But guess what?

You still deploy the fundamentals.

We never outgrow the fundamentals, and these 4

fundamentals are like the four legs of our table of our faith,

and we will never outgrow them. And we have to return back to

them over and over again. And so today, let's return back

to them and hear what Paul says. Notice what he says as he

describes his ministry. And what does ministry is about?

He's an apostle of Jesus for the faith of those chosen of God.

That's fundamental #1 the faith, the faith of those of God's

chosen people, the faith. And when we talk about the

faith, that entails both what's believed as well as the act of

believing. The faith of God's chosen people

involves what we believe as well as our own personal act of

believing it. So there's content to that

faith. And what is the core of the

faith of those who follow Jesus? What is what is the core of our

faith? I'll tell you this.

The core of our faith has very little to do with padded chairs

and a nice auditorium. The core of our faith has very

little to do with particular religious expressions of our our

faith, right? It's not Christianity.

That's not the core of our faith.

What's the core of our faith, person?

And it's Jesus. That's the core of our faith.

It's who Jesus is and what Jesus accomplished.

That's the faith that Paul sought to impart.

That's the faith that he gave his life to.

That's the faith he suffered for, was imprisoned for, right?

It was the faith of preaching that Jesus is king, risen from

the dead. That's the heart of the faith.

That's what we believe. We don't.

We don't necessarily believe. We don't put our hope and our

faith in a particular religious organization.

We put it in a person, Jesus. In fact, when the Bible says

Jesus Christ, what does the word Christ mean?

It means anointed 1 Anointed is what king.

That's what it means. To say Jesus Christ is to say

Jesus the King, and that's the heart and the essence of our

faith. We believe that God raised Jesus

from the dead, anointed him as King, and he sits on the throne

as King over all. He's King over everything.

And someday the kingdoms of this world will become the kingdoms

of our Lord and of his King forever and ever.

Amen. That's our faith.

That's what we believe. That's why it's fundamental.

We we believe that Jesus is King.

And there's that content and then there's the act of

believing it. And the act of believing it

means I trust Him. I trust him today on Sunday,

September 14th, 2025. I trust him tomorrow on Monday,

September 15th, right? I trust him and I and I will

entrust myself to him. So he's in charge.

What he said goes I I trust that he knows what he's doing.

I trust that his Kingdom will come and his will will be done.

I can trust his promises. I can trust his purposes.

I trust that his plan is good and he'll work it out in his

way. In his time, I trust him.

I trust him in the the big grand scope of things, and I trust him

in the details of my life. I trust him.

I trust him that that Jesus is the one who will make sure all

our dreams come true, all our longings for a happily ever

after will come true. Do we believe that or not?

We trust him. That's fundamental #1 Jesus is

King, risen from the dead. We trust Him.

Fundamental #2 shows up in the very next phrase for the faith

of those chosen of God and the knowledge of the truth, the

knowledge of the truth. That's fundamental #2 the truth.

Notice. Notice what it doesn't say.

It doesn't say your truth. It doesn't say my truth.

It says the truth, the truth. It's incredibly specific.

Paul is saying I have given my life and my service to King

Jesus for the sake of people knowing the truth.

Here's the problem. We live in a time and place in

history where people don't want to believe in the truth.

People don't buy that there is the truth.

People want your own truth. You live your truth.

I'll live my truth. That's the time and era that we

live in. But it hasn't always been that

way. Most people in most places have

believed in there was something definite that the world was

about, something definite about the way the world was made.

That's called the truth. I don't know if you're familiar

with the name Frederick Nietzsche, well known atheistic

philosopher. Of the late 1800s, early 1900s,

Nietzsche famously said there is your way, there is my way.

But As for the correct way, the right way, the only way, it

doesn't exist. Now, when Nietzsche said that,

that was radical and revolutionary.

But today, that's just the air we breathe.

That's the water we swim in. Oh, yeah.

Everyone has their own truth. Everyone has their own idea.

Everyone has their own way of doing things right.

There is your way, There is my way.

There's your truth. There's my truth.

But Paul doesn't say that. He says the truth, the knowledge

of the truth. Now, what's truth?

Ultimately, Jesus as a person, yes, I am the way, the truth and

the life. But just at sort of a abstract

sort of level, what is the what is truth?

I'll tell you this, every like 5 year old boy or girl knows what

the truth is. You know how they know?

Because when they lie to mom and dad, they know.

They know what the truth is and they know they're not saying it

right. You pretty much have to have a

PhD to get confused about truth. We come into the world knowing

what truth is, and it's really simple and it's not complicated.

All right, so we'll put it on the screen.

What's truth? Here's a simple little

definition. Truth is when your ideas, your

beliefs, or things you say match up with reality, that's truth.

When, when what you believe matches up with the way things

actually are, with the ideas that are in your mind, matches

up with the way things really are, when the things you say

match up with the way things actually are, that's truth.

It's not complicated, it's not hard.

And here's the deal. Truth doesn't care how you feel

about it. Truth doesn't care how sincerely

you hate it or how sincerely you believe it, right?

Like truth and error, they're like, they're pretty hard line.

Simple illustration, number of years ago, I'm out with the

singing group from Boise Bible College and we're driving down

I5 between Olympia, WA and Portland, OR.

And we're driving down the freeway and all of a sudden the

school van that we're in starts to kind of buck and lurch and

buck and lurch. Now, my fuel gauge said I had

about 1/3 of a tank of gas. And I believe that with all my

heart, I believed it was true with all my heart.

But my van is now bucking and lurching on I-5 in the middle of

nowhere. And I pointed to the student who

was sitting, you know, shotgun over here.

And I just wanted to, you know, cover my backside.

Look what the fuel gauge says. I'm not an idiot, but it didn't

matter how sincerely I believe that, how deeply I believe that

I was wrong. The truth was I ran out of gas

along I-5, right? That's the way truth and air

work. If your beliefs don't match up

with reality, probably is not going to work out real well for

you, right? That's the nature of truth.

Truth is when the things we believe, the things that we say,

the ideas that we envision match up with the way things are.

And Paul says he has given his life to help people know the

truth. The truth about God, the truth

about who's king, the truth about what it means to be human,

the truth about what the goal of human life is.

Do you want to know that truth? Do you want to know why you

exist? Do you want to know where your

life is going to end up? Do you want to know what really

matters in life? Well, Paul would say, then

listen to what I've taught you. Then listen to what I've said.

I would say, read the Bible because that's where you'll find

what Paul taught you. That's where you'll find the

truth that he says, I'm I gave my life to teach you the truth.

Read the Bible. Now, how many times have you

heard that? If you've gone to church for a

long time, you've heard that a lot, right?

Because it's fundamental. Because it's fundamental.

If you want to be stable and growing and strong in your

Christian life, then then you need to read the Bible.

And you need that more now than ever.

We are awash in information and opinions and people's ideas,

right? Every day, all over the place,

24 hour news cycle scrolling on our phones.

We are awash in all sorts of information.

But that doesn't necessarily mean you know the truth.

You want to know the truth about what it means to be human, the

truth about what it means to live a flourishing human life.

Then you need to know the truth that Paul taught, the truth of

Jesus that he passed on. And where are you going to find

that? In the Bible?

Read your Bible. Read it regularly.

Read it more than you listen to the news.

Read it more than you scroll on your phone.

Absorb it. Study it right, Spurgeon once

said, I want to know my Bible so well that when they cut me open,

I bleed Bible. What's your blood type?

Bible? Bleed Bible.

Know it, absorb it, take it into your life.

Read the Bible, learn the Bible, it's fundamental.

Know the truth because the truth will set you free.

Jesus is the one who said that, right?

Learn the truth and the truth will set you free.

That's fundamental #2 and notice what he says then in the last

part of verse one, that I want them to know the truth, which is

according to godliness. What's godliness?

Godliness is living a life before God, God's way.

You live before the face of God, and you live your life the way

of God. Remember, part of the truth of

the Bible is that how are you made?

You're made in the image of God. You're made to function the way

God functions. That's what that means.

You're made to operate and function the way God functions.

So when you actually begin to live like God is, when you begin

to act the way God would act, what are you doing?

You're actually honoring God and fulfilling your humanity.

You're functioning properly. That's godliness.

Godliness is living before the face of God in the way of God.

And Paul's going to have a lot to say about that to us and

Titus, that word godliness will show up multiple times in Titus

and hence the reason for the title of the series, Grace for

godliness. God in his wisdom and grace can

give you the ability and the strength and the power to live

God's way in God's world for God's purposes.

Godliness, right? And that, again, is a key

fundamental We don't get if we actually want to live a genuine

human life and if we want to know the truth and if we want to

live the faith, we don't get to make up our own way of doing

life. We don't get to choose our own

way. We don't get to go our own way.

We go God's way. We live like Jesus in the world

who embodied God among us. We do what He would do, we say

what He would say. We act the way He would act.

We listen to his teachings and we begin to put it in practice.

And so as you read your Bible, that's great, read it so you

know it. But then what do you have to do?

You have to begin to do it. You have to begin to put it into

practice. Don't just mark up your Bible,

highlight your Bible, put notes in your Bible without actually

saying, OK, now I'm going to practice my Bible.

I'm going to put it into practice.

I'm going to do what it says because I want to be godly.

I want to live God's way in this world.

Truth is according to godliness. It leads to that.

And then finally, the 4th fundamental he mentions here in

verse 2 is hope in the hope of eternal life, in the hope of

eternal life. Now, when we use the word hope

in English language, we almost sometimes mean something like a

wish. Gee, I sure hope my mom gets me

a new car for Christmas. Depending on your parents, that

could be a pretty foolish hope, right?

That's that's the way we use the word.

That's just not what the Bible means by the word.

It's not like just some some sort of man.

I sure hope that turns out to be that way.

When the Bible uses the word hope, it almost is better to

mean expectation in the expectation of eternal life, in

the confident aspect. Expectation that someday we will

experience life with God the way it was always meant to be.

Yes, eternal life begins now, but it culminates in a new

world. That's our hope.

We have a great expectation that all God's promises will come

true and things will be different someday.

That's our hope, right? Christian hope is not some

vague, shadowy idea of a better place.

He went to a better place. That's not Christian hope.

Christian hope isn't like, you know, just some idea of a silver

lining behind every dark cloud. That's not Christian hope.

What's Christian hope? Christian hope, in essence, is

this. The King will return to his

realm and he will rid the realm of all his enemies, and he will

sort out all that's wrong and make everything right, and he

will raise his people from the dead, and they will participate

in his resurrection with him forever.

That's our hope, that there will be a new heavens and a new earth

in which righteousness dwells. Second Peter, chapter 3.

2 Peter 3 · chapter mention

That's our hope. Our hope is incredibly focused

and very specific. We are waiting for the return of

the king. We are waiting for the

resurrected Jesus to come and raise us to be like his glorious

resurrected body. That's our hope.

We are looking forward to a day when there's a new heavens and a

new earth and everything is the way it's supposed to be someday.

We're looking forward to the day when God comes to dwell on the

new earth and wipes away every tear from our eyes and makes all

things new. And God will dwell with us

again, and we will dwell with him forever, raised, glorious

like Christ. That's our hope.

That's what we count on. That's what we're waiting for.

Someday there will be a new world in which Jesus is King

completely and forever, and all the kingdoms of this world have

given way to his glorious, eternal Kingdom.

That's our hope. And all who are with him will be

raised eternal, like him. That's what we wait for.

Now. Why?

Why would you believe that? We haven't seen that, right?

We haven't been there yet. Why would you believe that?

Paul says because God promised it and he can't lie.

God cannot lie because he himself is truth and he promised

it. And then Paul says not only did

he promise that long ago, but he's now revealed it through my

preaching. What is Paul talking about?

Jesus has risen from the dead. How do you know there's going to

be a resurrection? How do you know there's going to

be a glorious eternal Kingdom? How do you know there's going to

be a new heavens and a new earth?

Jesus is risen from the dead. That's how you know.

That's why we can count on it. We don't have to guess.

We That's why it's a confident expectation.

Jesus is king, risen from the dead right now, today, raining

on his throat, waiting until he determines that he's going to

put all his enemies under his feet.

The last enemy will be death. That's what we wait for and we

believe it because it's already happened in Jesus.

Jesus gave the devil home field advantage and beat him on his

turf. And we will be raised too

because of that. Those 4 fundamentals, Faith,

truth, godliness and hope you never outgrow Him.

Return to Him day after day. Return to Him day by day.

Nourish your faith and trust yourself to Him, right?

Study the truth, learn the truth, live the truth, and set

your gaze on the glorious hope to come when Jesus returns.

And if you do that, your life will be like a stable 4 legged

table that doesn't wobble, that doesn't shake right when things

get topsy, turvy and unstable in the world.

Your life will be rock solid and tape and stable.

Why? Because your life is founded on

the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords.

Faith, truth, godliness and hope. 4 Fundamentals of a

faithful, stable, growing Christian life.

And as we go through Titus, we're going to get to explore

those themes over and over again so that hopefully, hopefully you

and I, we will make it to the finish line faithful.

We will make it to the finish line stable and strong, pleasing

to Jesus who laid down his life for us.

Thanks for joining us today. If you would like to watch the

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