Sermon: Titus (Part Five): A Church in Training

Paul's Approach to Slavery and Christ's Current Work
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Richard T. Ritenbaugh
Given 30-Oct-21; 82 minutes

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Slavery is a touchy subject here in America right now with Critical Race Theory and Black Lives Matter still very frequently in the news. Progressives, those on the radical left, want to beat the drum about how terrible slavery was for black people that were enslaved by mostly white owners. It was so terrible, they say, that 175 or so years later, society still owes the descendants of slaves reparations and a lot of money. These are people who have never owned slaves giving slavery reparations to people who have never been slaves. Kind of strange. I will just leave that as it is.

But in fact, the Critical Race theorists go so far as to say that America actually invented slavery or a unique form of slavery, the kind that built a nation on the tired, ruined bodies of its slaves. Now I would cede the fact that landholders in the Colonial period and beyond did benefit from the forced labor of their slaves. But I would hardly call that anything unique in world history. That has been happening for a long time. Anyone who has read any history knows that slavery is an ancient and widespread human practice. It is not one race that has done that. It is every race, every ethnic group has practiced slavery at one time or another and, in the same way, every people has suffered being slaves at one time or another.

Like I say, it is a human thing. As humans we are both guilty of it and victims of it. It is not a practice that is confined to one part of the world or even one time in history. It has happened throughout. It is a universal human practice, which is unfortunate, but it is true. In fact, we here in the oh-so-enlightened West where we condemn chattel slavery as evil, practice it still. Not all slavery has to be working on a plantation. Some would contend that big government and big business practice a form of economic slavery, paying low wages, restricting freedoms, and running people's lives just as much as slave owners did in the American South.

Some call it a kind of serfdom, that we have not progressed far from Medieval times. We are all just serfs of the rich and when we peel away all the obfuscations of language, serfdom is just another form of slavery. As a matter of fact, if you go back and check the word origin on serf, you will find that it comes from the Latin servos, which is slaves. The Medieval serfs were just slaves of their lords.

Slavery just seems to be built into human nature and we subjugate one another in one form or another to maximize our own power and profit. If we only had the Bible as a history book, we could look there and see that it is throughout its pages, this idea of slavery and actual instances of it. Slavery or indentured servanthood appears in it from cover to cover. Why? Because all the nations practiced it. Wherever the people of God were, it was being done, and God and His church had to face it and deal with it.

Think of this. Little Israel, a very small nation there in the corner of the Mediterranean, could not stamp it out over the whole Middle East. They could not even stamp it out in their own country and they never tried. And why is that? Well, it was an old and venerated human institution in every nation and every empire. You look at the church, the fledgling church of God up against the mighty Roman Empire, which itself was built on slavery. The church would have had an even tougher time wiping out slavery over the breadth of the Mediterranean region. Even in this nation, the United States, we had to sacrifice roughly 650,000 of our sons to bring about emancipation for the slaves—on both sides. 650,000, mostly young men.

Getting rid of slavery is no easy matter because it is ingrained in human nature: control other people. So what then did God and the apostles do about slavery? Too little, according to some. They would judge God and the apostles on this. Under the Old Covenant, God regulated slavery in various ways.

Leviticus 25:39-44 And if one of your brethren who dwells by you becomes poor, and sells himself to you, you shall not compel him to serve as a slave, but as a hired servant and a sojourner he shall be with you, and shall serve you until the Year of Jubilee. And then he shall depart from you—he and his children with him—and shall return to his own family. He shall return to the possession of his fathers. For they are My servants, whom I brought out of the land of Egypt; they shall not be sold as slaves. You shall not rule over him with rigor, but you shall fear your God. And as for your male and female slaves, whom you may have—from the nations that are around you, from them you may buy male and female slaves.

That is all I really want there. Just to give you a little bit of a taste of the way God regulated slavery at the time.

Deuteronomy 15:12-15 If your brother, a Hebrew man, or a Hebrew woman, is sold to you and serves you six years, then in the seventh year you shall let him go free from you. And when you send him away free from you, you shall not let him go away empty-handed; you shall supply him liberally from your flock, from your threshing floor, and from your winepress. From what the Lord has blessed you with, you shall give to him. You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God redeemed you; therefore I command you to do this thing today.

Deuteronomy 15:18 It shall not seem hard to you when you send him away free from you; for he has been worth a double hired servant in serving you six years. Then the Lord your God will bless you in all that you do.

Like I said, this gives you a kind of a taste of how God wanted to regulate this institution within the nation of Israel. So, an Israelite slave had to be treated as a hired servant and he could leave a free man after his time of service. No slave, whatever the case, could be made to serve more than 49 years. Until the next Jubilee, when all were to be set free, all were to be given liberty. Moreover, when an Israelite slave was freed, his master had to give him animals and grain and wine liberally— load him down with these things so that he could get a fresh start. But the institution itself was not abolished. He worked within it.

Now, some people would fault God for that. But we should not because we have to realize that God was working with unconverted people. And at its base, slavery is a human nature problem. It is not something that just could be legislated and everybody falls in line. It is a human nature problem that cannot be truly solved without the Holy Spirit. It will be solved in the Millennium. But until then, men will still try to enslave other men, whether there is a law on the books or not.

Since Israel was not given the Holy Spirit as a whole, just a few were given that whom God had called, God just decided to work within it. And one of the reasons why is that Israel showed that it wanted to be like the other nations and the other nations had slavery. They were willing to do what the other nations did so that they could fit in. So God regulated it within Israel to mitigate its evils, to try to make it as as pleasant as possible, as good for the slave as He possibly could. And, on the same wavelength, He made it good for the master as well. He said, if they did what was right, He would bless them.

Now, He knew that if He were to legislate it and say, "You shall have no slaves" (that is the 11th commandment, right?), that they would ignore His command, just like they ignored all the other ones. It just would not work.

Well, that is fine. That is Old Covenant Israel, it is kind of what you expect, what some people expect. What about the church? What did the church do? The church came on the scene and people looking back at it from our perspective, nearly 2,000 years later, they think that the church should have gone right ahead and abolished slavery, right then and there. That is kind of silly. They are not thinking straight, they are not thinking about what the church was. The church was a few thousand people and it was not a nation or powerful in any respect, so the church had to deal with the situation as it existed.

Consider this analogy: has the church of God abolished idolatry in the world? Did one of the early apostles write some sort of command that slavery was abolished all over the world, all over Christendom, if you will. Of course not. When you do do things like that, you have to have the power to enforce it. The church did not have the power to enforce such a thing not being a nation at all. It preaches against it, certainly, but it has no power to enforce what it knows to be wrong.

So, the church tells everybody that, like idolatry, slavery is not good. It is sinful to control another man like that, but it cannot do anything to make other people comply. And human nature is such a strong force that slavery exists. The slavery we hear about most often now is sexual slavery, the taking of young girls and women and selling them in another place and call it trafficking for reasons of slavery. It is there even though there are laws against it. It is part of human nature.

Just like it deals with the sin of idolatry, the church, because it was not a nation, because it does not have power, it does not deal with those sorts of things on a national or societal basis, but internally and individually with people, teaching them the right way to live out of the Bible, and then it is up to them, with the application of the Holy Spirit, to do what they should do.

We have got to remember, the church of God is a little flock with little temporal power. Just think how long it took for the church of God's teaching to grow up, mature into the place where slavery, at least in its chattel form, was abolished in even Israelite countries, like Great Britain and America. It took 1,800 plus years for those teachings to finally infiltrate society enough that normal people decided they would do something about it within the nation. That just shows you how powerful the church is and God specifically curtails our power in that way, because He is not ready to give it to us for the purposes that He has.

Let us just see how Paul deals with it in the New Testament. Let us go to I Corinthians 7 and this is kind of typical about how he addresses the topic of slavery. It is kind of interesting that this is in the marriage chapter, kind of stuck in the middle here.

I Corinthians 7:20-24 [He says] Let each one remain in the same calling in which he was called. Were you called while a slave? Do not be concerned about it; but if you can be made free, rather use it. For he who is called in the Lord while a slave is the Lord's freedman. Likewise he was called while free is Christ's slave. [You get out of one kind of slavery and you are in another actually because Christ has called you to be His servant. He says,] You were bought at a price; do not become slaves of men. Brethren, let each one remain with God in that calling in which he was called.

Paul here deals with the fact that God called many slaves into the church at the time and He even called many slave owners. So there both slave owners and slaves and sometimes the slave owner and the slaves that he owned were in the same congregation and they had to work with that. He did not require all the masters to release all their slaves. And he says here that if you were called a slave, if you can become free, great, that is a good thing, you can use that in a certain way, in a good way. But if you cannot, live like a church member as a slave, live like a Christian as a slave. He says, if you can do that, if you can practice the virtues of Christianity while a slave, that makes a great witness, that even under the most trying circumstances, you can be godly and righteous in your attitudes and your actions.

So he says here, if you want to put it in different words, a Christian's physical situation is not as important as whether he is living and growing in God's way within it. In many places, he instructs slave owners to treat their slaves justly and fairly. If you want some verses on that Ephesians 6:9 and Colossians 4:1. He makes sure that they behave as Christians while they own slaves. And he intimates, if he does not quite outright say it, that they need to do this, they need to be careful about how they treat their slaves, because they themselves have a master in heaven and He has said in the gospels that He will judge people as they judge others. He is going to treat us as we treat others. So he is saying, "Okay, you slave owners, you better treat your slaves in a good and righteous way, or you yourselves will come under judgment from the judge, Jesus Christ."

Now, all that I have said here, we may not like, we may not even agree with it, that is up to you. It is not politically correct to have an attitude like the apostle Paul's. That would not fly these days. But rather than push for the abolition of slavery, which I think Paul considered a fool's errand at the time, Paul argued for making the best of the situation as it was. Even in his letter to Philemon, which is a masterful letter of psychology, if you will, Paul tiptoes around the issue. You see, the whole letter of Philemon is about a slave owner and a runaway slave, Onesimus. Onesimus had run away from a Philemon and ended up in the clutches of the apostle Paul who knew Philemon very well because he was the host there in Colossae.

And so running to Paul, Onesimus becomes converted and now he wants to make good and go back to Philemon, his master. But he is concerned because they probably did not part as good friends. Who knows, Onesimus might have stolen something or had some certain debt to pay. Paul actually says that. He says, "Please accept Onesimus back and I'll pay his debts. Do this in your love for me and don't charge anything to Onesimus because now he's not just a slave, he's a brother in the church."

But he is very careful about all these things because this relationship was already there—the slave-master relationship between Philemon and Onesimus that predated their conversions. So Paul had to be very careful about how he spoke to Philemon about Onesimus. And in the whole letter, it is not that long, but not even once does the apostle Paul ask Philemon to free Onesimus. He just asked him to to accept him back as a brother.

I am giving you all this as an introduction to Titus. What we will cover today begins with Paul's instructions to Titus about, in the New King James, it is servants. What we are talking about is actually slaves and the slave-master relationship. And we can take it, if we want to, and I think we should, as a kind of analogy of an employer-employee relationship. That is at least how we can apply it to ourselves, but he is talking about actual slaves. And from these two verses on slaves, he uses it as a kind of transition into a more doctrinal interlude in his instructions here to Titus between verses 11 and 15. (God willing, we will finish chapter 2 today and have only chapter 3 to go.)

If you will, please turn to Titus 2. I wanted to give you that that background because it is important to know what was going on and how Paul generally dealt with the situation so that we have a good running start into the instruction here.

Titus 2:9-10 Exhort bondservants to be obedient to their own masters, to be well pleasing in all things, not answering back, not pilfering, but showing all good fidelity, that they may adorn the doctrine of God our Savior in all things.

Again, like in the earlier verses here, Paul does not put a verb in in this sentence, but it is probably exhort or encourage. Those are two pretty good words to put in there as a silent verb, if you will. But we see here, he is talking about literal slaves with masters. This is not really indentured servitude or any kind of being a servant like you would think of in like a British estate or something like that. This is actual, real bondage. It is slavery. The master owned these slaves.

To bring in a little bit more background, this is more particular to Crete. The church at Crete may have had more slaves than other churches by percentage because Crete was a hotbed of the Mediterranean slave trade. You have got to remember, Crete was an island. It probably had a lot of little coves and bays. And evidently Crete had a lot of pirates that made their home there and the pirates would go out, attack a ship at sea, take their crews, bring them back to Crete, and sell them as slaves. So there was a lot of this going on on Crete and God evidently called a good number of people on Crete who were slaves. And these newly-converted slaves needed instruction on how they should maintain their faith while they were in this very unfortunate condition, while they were in or under the control of someone else who was not in the church.

What does a slave do to maintain his Christianity when he has an unconverted master? And that is usually the case. Since Paul here does not provide any instruction for masters like he does in Ephesians and Colossians, it is probable that there were not very many slave owners in the church. They were mostly just the slaves. So we can assume that he skipped instructing the masters because it would just not have been worth it. There were too few of them. Titus, if he needed to, could instruct them himself. But he tells them two major things here.

The first thing is that they are to obey their masters. Now obey, it is an okay translation here. The word "obedient" is hypotasso and it means to place or to arrange under. It would be something like if you were to have an army, you would place or arrange certain ranks under other ranks so you could get order. Well, in in this case we are talking about, to subordinate oneself or to submit to someone who is over you. So submit is actually a better word, submit or subordinate would be good here. So he implies here that they were to serve their masters with respect and submit to their orders. Just like one in an army situation, some sort of military situation, you are expected to respect and submit to the orders of your superior officers. So he tells them to do something along that line. This is the order that you are in right now, you are at the lowest part of society. The best thing you can do is submit, to put yourself under your master, and essentially obey his orders.

He gives two pieces of advice of how to do this, how to submit and to obey the orders. He says here that they are to please their masters with their work, with a good attitude, rather than working sullenly and talking back to their masters. He is talking about the master saying, "Go draw me a bath" and the servants saying, "Yeah, you really need one." You know, giving him some lip, being sassy, rather than saying, "Yes sir, I'll do that right away, sir." So he says, "Okay, your attitude should be that if your master gives you something to do, do it without all the sass. Just be respectful and do your work. That's going to take you a lot farther than having an attitude."

He says here that they are to be well pleasing, please their own masters. Actually, it says "well pleasing in all things." Everywhere else that he uses this term it is in the context of pleasing God. This is the only one in which the context is pleasing a man. A lot of commentators think that he is actually saying to them that there is a greater Master and if you please your lesser master, the one that holds your purchase price in his hand, if you please him then you are going to please the greater Master in heaven.

Let us go to Colossians 3, if you will. By the way, just so you know, one of the uses of Paul telling people to be well pleasing is in verse 20 here about children, "obey your parents in all things, for this is well pleasing to the Lord." So here in verse 22 we have a parallel addressed to servants about how they should should live and he touches on the same things. He says,

Colossians 3:22-24 Bondservants, obey in all things your masters according to the flesh, not with eyeservice as men pleasers, but in sincerity of heart, fearing God. And whatever you do, do it heartily as to the Lord and not to men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the reward of inheritance; for you serve the Lord Christ.

So, in a similar vein, then, it appears that he is implying back in Titus that they should do the same thing as he recommends there in Colossians. They should look beyond their physical master to their spiritual Master. And if they do that, then they will be in the right attitude to please God, the ultimate One who is going to give us our reward.

Back to Titus 2:10. The second way that they are to obey their masters is not pilfering, not stealing, not taking little things, not finding the master's jewelry out on the bureau and pocketing it and selling it at the market somewhere. You can even imply that they are not to hold back in their work, do slow work or not finish things the way they should, that they should put their all into it.

Now, slaves were known for doing this. The bureaucracies are known for doing this. It was only giving a little bit of their effort just to get the work done enough that it will please a supervisor. And slaves were also known for taking things. Little things, whether it was food or money, or jewelry or items of one sort of another that they could sell. Because slaves were slaves. They did not have anything of their own, only what their masters had provided them, maybe only the clothes on their backs. And so it was generally expected across the Roman Empire that slaves would take things, they would pilfer here and there. And Paul says, do not even take the little things. It says, give your all, do your best. Do not try to diminish your work or what have you, as a way to get back at the master. We can come up with all kinds of ways as human beings to cheat. He says, do not cheat your master, it is not good, and you will actually be doing a good thing.

One of the things he says here, and this is the second major point that he gets to in these two verses, because the question would come up, why should they submit or please their masters in everything? Or have a good attitude or why refrain from stealing? Why should they not shirk their duties more or less? Why must they be reliable? That is good fidelity here, being reliable. They have to show that they are trustworthy. And so the question would come up, what good is all this? I am a slave. What more could they do to me?

And Paul says that if we do the things that he recommends, they would make God's teaching—the doctrine of God—more attractive, more appealing. Their attitudes and behaviors as slaves would actually enhance the spread of the doctrine of God in every way. That is what he says here, "in all things." So by providing a good and beneficial witness of God in his way of life, God could then use their witness to call more people into His church. Maybe that master would be called, maybe his wife, maybe one of the children, who knows.

But we should not discount our own witness, even if we are a slave. We have a way available to us in our behavior, in our attitudes, where we can adorn the doctrine of God. We can make it beautiful. We can embellish the doctrine of God by how we act in front of other people now. True, God's truth can stand on its own. It is there in His Book, we can read it and it makes sense. It is beautiful and perfect as it is written. A person reading it can see all its benefits and rewards and see that it makes good people, good nations, and that the future, if everybody would do this, would be wonderful. And it will.

Yet to someone else, maybe, it is just a bunch of black on white paper, it is kind of dense, it is theological, it is dull. Or maybe they have a problem with language and it just does not make a whole lot of sense to them. They can understand things if they are maybe given to them audibly. They can hear it and it is fine. But reading it just does not make much sense to them.

But if someone sees it being lived well, one of those people who do not do well studying literature or the written word, if they see it being lived well, they observe a human being doing what is good from the church's teaching, then the doctrine is adorned or beautified or decorated or embellished by the witness of the person. "Yeah. I didn't understand that commandment until I saw so-and-so do it in front of me." "I didn't understand how this principle works until I saw this family make it work."

That is how we adorn the doctrine of God. We decorate it, we put finishing touches on it so other people can see it as an example and follow it. What is the old saying? "I'd rather see a sermon than hear one any day" or however that goes. And it is very true that when we see something illustrated by somebody's actions, then it starts to make sense. God's Word, along with a godly person's witness, is the best advertisement for God's way that there is. You not only have the doctrine, the principles of God's Word, but you have an example to follow. or not an example, just someone who has grown and matured and you see how it works in them. You do not have to necessarily follow them step by step like we would Jesus Christ. But we see an end product and we say, "Yeah, I'd like to get to that point."

So that is how we adorn the doctrine of God: by being a good witness, a proper witness of His way of life. Because if someone sees it, that teaching, then the doctrine becomes living. It is in a person, it is in his activities, it becomes real to that person and it turns into a powerful motivation for them to pursue God and His way of life. Look at I Peter 3, if you will. This is how wives can do it in the home.

I Peter 3:1-5 Wives, likewise, be submissive to your own husbands, that even if some do not obey the word [that is, the husband], they, without a word, may be won by the conduct of their wives, when they observe your chaste conduct accompanied by fear. Do not let your beauty be merely outward—arranging the hair, wearing gold, or putting on fine apparel [your outward beauty is not what he is getting at here]—rather let it be the hidden person of the heart, with the incorruptible beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is very precious in the sight of God. For in this manner, in former times, the holy women who trusted in God also adorned themselves, being submissive to their own husbands.

This is kind of a parallel statement in Peter's epistle as to what appears here in Titus in terms of the principle of adorning the doctrine of God. We adorn or beautify or embellish God's way of life with our example, a godly example. And who knows what God will do with it. Whatever it is, it will be a good thing and benefit both the person and the church.

Back to Titus 2 again. The next section, verses 11 through 15, spins off this idea, especially the adorning the doctrine of God idea that he had in verse 10. We know this because Paul begins this section with the word "for." So he comes to this conclusion where he is giving all these various groups their instruction—the older men, the older women, the younger men, the younger women—and he gets to slaves and he comes to this final point about beautifying the doctrine. It spurs a thought and off he goes into this doctrinal section here in verses 11 through 15.

So the word "for" is a signpost, if you will, where we understand that he is taking a point from what he had just said and applying it in a different way or continuing his thought. Or it means, in this case, because of this or for this reason. He is connecting the two, linking the two sections together. He is about to give a reason for his instruction to these various subsets within the congregation. The subsets were older men, older women, younger women, younger men, and slaves. Those are the five subsets that that he talks about here. And he wants to now give a reason why he had spoken to these various subsets in the way he did. It does not matter which subset we fall into. It could be any one of those five. What he is going to say in verses 11 through 15 applies to us, no matter what he says.

I will just give you the gist of this before we even read it. What he says in overall principle is that the church needs this instruction, all that between chapter 2 verses 1 and 10, because our Savior is doing a work in us for His own purposes. The church needs this because Christ is doing something and these are the kind of attitudes we have to have if we are going to cooperate with Him in His purpose. So that is the overall principle that comes out of this paragraph.

Titus 2:11-15 For the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men, teaching us that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly in the present age, looking for the blessed hope and glorious appearing of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ, who gave Himself for us, that He might redeem us from every lawless deed and purify for Himself His own special people, zealous for good works. Speak these things, exhort, and rebuke with all authority. Let no one despise you.

We have some details we need to iron out here in these verses. Protestant translations of the Bible usually make Paul say here in verse 11, that God offers His grace to all men. And it is a deliberate twisting of his words because that is not what he has done. He has not offered His grace to all men. He has not offered salvation to all men. Here in the Bible study earlier, we went to John 6:44. He has to call each one individually and bring them to Christ. This is not parallel to that. The Greek may imply that ultimately all men will be saved. But the plain meaning is, and I found this in Young's Literal Translation, "the saving grace of God was manifested to all men." It does not say offered. That is a very poor translation. The New King James here using the word appeared is better than offered.

But the saving grace of God was manifested to all men. It became apparent. It was revealed, if you will, it was made understandable to some. Actually, that is not even right because God has to open our minds to it before we can actually understand it. But he is saying that it was manifested. Just keep that in the back of your head. Paul's emphasis is on the fact that through Jesus Christ the way of salvation (you know, by grace are we saved), but it has been revealed. The way of salvation has been revealed and it is through grace.

Now that revelation puts a minister like Titus under obligation to instruct and exhort the people in God's way of life because it has been revealed. It is the servant's responsibility to speak it, to let everybody know who wants to know. And that is why Paul ends the paragraph as he does. Speak, exhort, rebuke. Do not let anybody despise you for doing your job which you are under obligation to do.

Before we leave verse 11, we need to understand the word grace here. It is the Greek word charis, as one would expect. It is almost always translated grace, but that does not help very much because charis is not easy to pin down sometimes in terms of a definition. It can mean a bunch of different things from favor, even charm, a gift, or even like our term graceful, someone is a graceful dancer or a graceful skater. The Greeks would use charis for that. And there are other definitions as well. So we often need the context to give us a clue about what the word implies.

Here in Titus 2, we find that this grace, whatever it is, teaches us three things: to deny ourselves and pursue righteousness. That is in verse 12. To look for Christ's second coming, that is in verse 13, and to cooperate in Christ's work to redeem and purify a people for Himself. That is verse 14. So you have got these three points that he is bringing out and these are taught to us by this grace, whatever it is.

Now, does grace, as we understand it in terms of "by grace you are saved" does that teach us these things? Would we know these things just by Grace itself? I do not think so. Grace may teach us about the immensity of God's love, of His willingness to forgive us, of His righteous character. But it does not teach us these specific things. So that definition of God's favor seems to be out of the running here, along with charm and graceful. Gracefulness or charm do not teach us these things either.

But what about gift? The best one I think is gift. What gift of God reveals all these things? Some of you are probably already ahead of me because we already saw it in verse 10 and a different phrase was used. Many of you, I think, are there. We are talking about the gospel because he had just talked about the doctrine of God our Savior, right? And this comes into his head, "For the grace [the gift] of God" teaches us. The gospel is the gift of God that teaches us about salvation. And it also teaches us about these things, denying ourselves, not doing these things that are called worldly lusts, looking for the hope of Christ, and getting on board with with Christ's work in redeeming His people and purifying them. That is what the gospel does.

So he calls the gospel the gift of God. And it is part of His grace that He has given it to us freely and opened our minds to understand it. He is using a word that we might not expect him to use or actually talking about the doctrine of God or the gospel. So that is how we need to think of this now. That we are talking actually about the gospel, a great gift of God that He has given us. So it is the gospel of salvation. It is the same instruction that Jesus gave His disciples to spread to all the world as a witness. Like I said, it is one of God's greatest gifts to His people and to the whole world. It is the revelation of what He is doing among humanity and how He is doing it and how we can play a part in it now and throughout eternity. This is why Paul is urging Titus to speak these things, because it is the minister's job, it is the church's job to proclaim these things in truth and make them plain for all who have an ear to hear.

Let us go on to verse 12. This verse contains a few particulars to note. We have got to start with the first word again, "teaching." It is fine translation here, but instructing or training or even disciplining might be a little bit more illustrative of what Paul means. Normally when a person writing Greek would talk about teaching, he would use the word didasko, which means "to teach." Like in this situation where I am teaching you orally, but Paul did not use didasko here. He used paideuo, and it means the training of children. We train children a little bit different than just in a lecture situation like this.

When you teach children in terms of the Greek way of doing it, it combined education, sure. You would give them facts and you would tell them how to write and do all those kinds of normal things. But it also included guidance on how to live and it also included discipline. All these factors would would be put together to bring the child to maturity. That was the goal that they wanted when they were using this this paideuo type of teaching or training. It was to bring the child from a little whippersnapper into adulthood and the person responsible for that had a lot of authority in doing all of these various things, including disciplining. Even if it was the master's son and he was a slave, e had certain authority over the son until he became of age. So he could do all sorts of things to bring the child into maturity.

Paul is plucking this word out of Greek society and putting it into the church and saying this is what God is doing with us in the church. That the church has a responsibility to train the person through the gospel, through the gift of God here, so that we can bring others to spiritual maturity.

The gospel does more than just teach in the plain sense, it instructs and guides and disciplines us to fashion us into the image Christ. So it is more than just teach. It is all these other areas of education and he tells us that it teaches us to say no or to denounce things that are ungodly or impious. These are the things that God does not approve.

Then he mentions also that were to say no to "worldly lust." This is kind of interesting. Normally worldly and lust in Greek, they would just mean "of the world" or lust would just mean "a desire." But when you put worldly lust together in terms of Christian teaching, you know that it is not a good thing and he tells us to deny it. What these two words together means is that we are to deny ourselves earthly desires or cravings that have no future, because this world is ending. We are to look beyond. We are to look to the World Tomorrow, the world ahead, if you will, the time that is in the future with Christ and the things that we lust for in this age will not go there. We cannot take them with us. And they are actually probably dragging us down. They are usually sins that beset us and we are told in Hebrews that we are supposed to put them off.

So he is saying the very similar thing here. If there is something that you are just hanging on to, that is not going to last into the World Tomorrow, jettison it. It is not worth it. We could call these things temporal vanities, things that we really want to do that do not mean anything. They are worthless. They may mean something to us right now, but they are worthless for the Kingdom of God. Temporal vanities, desires with no future.

Next Paul says that we are to live with—guess what word—sophron the word of the book here. Self- control. Remember from last time we saw all the times he uses sophron in this verse. We have to realize that he is emphasizing self-mastery in this letter, we really have to control ourselves because he was talking to the Cretans and Crete was a terrible society. And if you were going to be a Christian in Cretan society, you needed self-control because all the sins and lusts were there for your your "enjoyment."

They offered everything in Crete, just like this society offers everything. And if you are going to walk through life in this kind of a society, you need self-control, self-mastery. It is so important to a minister to make the right example. And it is equally important to the people in the church that we all practice self-mastery and help one another gain this wonderful trait of God.

Remember in II Corinthians 10:5 Paul says that we have to get to the point where we bring every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ. How many of us have thorough control over our thoughts? We would like to think that we do, but we do not. I mean, it could be little things, but off we go to the races in our minds and we have lost total control. The horses have left the barn. So we need to think more seriously about this trait of self-control, or sophron in the Greek. But once we have self-mastery, you think about it. Our behavior will be righteous and our character will be godly. And where does Paul place this self-control or self-mastery and the fruit of the Spirit? Last. Because it is so difficult. It is the one we probably work on or we will probably work on to our dying breath. I do not want to dissuade you from doing that. But it is something we have to keep top of mind as a member of God's church.

On to verse 13, "looking for the blessed hope and glorious appearing of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ." Looking is okay as a translation here, but I think it is better translated as "waiting expectantly." It tells us we are not passive, but we are moving forward with supreme confidence and anticipation. It is the kind of waiting that you do when you know something is happening, something is coming, it is a fixed date at some point, and you are working to make sure it all comes to pass. So you are not just passively waiting. You are busy and the waiting is filled with all these activities because you know it is happening, it is coming, and you will not be disappointed. So it is waiting while doing whatever we can to hasten the arrival of whatever it is we are waiting for.

Let us go to II Peter 3. We see Peter using a similar idea here. We will read verses 11 and 12. He is just talking about the Day of the Lord and the earth melting with fervent heat. He is saying that these things are coming, so what do we do?

II Peter 3:11-12 Therefore, since all these things will be dissolved, what manner of persons ought you to be in holy conduct and godliness, looking for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be dissolved, being on fire, and the elements will melt with fervent heat?

He is saying the similar thing to what Paul is saying here. We are looking for the return of Jesus Christ. We know it is going to happen. He has told us. We do not know the exact day, but we are waiting expectantly for it. We have hope. We wait in hope. It is not wishful thinking, our hope is grounded in the revealed knowledge of God and we have faith in God and His promises. So realizing that that goal is ahead, we do whatever we can to make it happen, to realize it in its fullness. So what are we doing then when we are waiting expectantly for the return of Jesus Christ, in the meantime we prepare. We get ready for the Kingdom of God. Our job in this time is to grow and mature spiritually so we will be ready for our future work. We will be ready to join Christ as His bride, and I hate this phrase, but hit the ground running. We will be ready to do anything that He asks of us because we have already prepared for it, especially in our attitudes.

Let us go to I Peter 1.

I Peter 1:3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to His abundant mercy has begotten us again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.

So because Jesus rose from the dead, we have a living hope that we will rise from the dead at His coming.

I Peter 1:13-16 [So what do we do?] Therefore gird up the loins of your mind, be sober [There is a funny word there], and rest your hope fully upon the grace that is to be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ; as obedient children, not conforming yourselves to the former lusts, as in your ignorance; but as He who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct, because it is written, "Be holy, for I am holy."

Peter again is saying the same thing as Paul. That is one of the things that this gift of God, this grace that has been given to us, has revealed to us: that Jesus is coming and we need to be looking for His coming. That is, waiting expectantly and doing what we must do to be prepared for Him to come. These are the three things he is telling us to do. That was the second one. Let us go back and look in Titus 2 for the third one.

Titus 2:14 Who gave Himself for us [talking about Jesus Christ], that He might redeem us from every lawless deed and purify for Himself His own special people, zealous for good works.

Now, we look to Christ's glorious appearing with such faith and hope because of what he has done and is doing now. We can have faith and hope because we know that He is good for it. If He tells us something, it is true. If He promises something, He will give it. So we have great faith and hope that if He told us He is coming and He wants to purify a people for Him, it is going to happen. He is going to do it. So Paul says here, He has redeemed us from our sins. That is a past work. That is history. He did that work by dying on the tree, as it were, shedding His blood for us which paid the price for our sins and now we are His.

I should make just make this clear, that His blood cleanses us from all sin, right? But that is not the end of it. Because now we are His servants, we are His people, and He is doing something with us now, it is not all just been done in the past. He is still working. My Father has been working and I have been working—and He still is working. He is not sitting on His laurels.

What is He doing? What is His work now? He is sanctifying us. He is purifying a people for Himself. So yeah, He paid for our sins, our past sins. We were made into a new creation. He gives us His Spirit. And what does He do? He continues to purify us by trial, by just walking through life. He is there by our sides. Actually, He is in us every step of the way to help us to get rid of what this world and Satan the Devil and our own human nature have picked up over the years so that we are more like Him. That we can be cleansed. That is the word he uses here. To purify us for Himself.

That would purify is katharizo. It means "cleanse from what defiles, making fit." So He is cleansing us from everything that defiles us, all of our sins, all of our bad attitudes, all the impact that human nature and Satan have had on us, and He is making us fit for something. He is preparing us for something. He is making us holy so that we can be equal partners with Him in His Kingdom. We are His particular peculiar, special people. We are His bride, the one He is going to spend eternity with and He does not want to spend eternity arguing over who squeezed the toothpaste tube or why did you burn that steak? No, He wants a bride like Him in every way who will be eager, like He is, ready and willing, people who have a zest to do good work like He does.

Peter describes Jesus Christ as a man who went about doing good back in Acts 10. What a description! Would you not like to have that description that made about you? "Oh yeah, she was always doing good. Never heard a cross word from her at all." or what have you.

Now, I do not want to get us to get fixed on the idea that these good works are in terms of merely the usual things that we do like feed the hungry, visit the sick, be hospitable, those sorts of things. God expects us to do them. But these are not the good works that He is preparing us for. These are the good works we do as practice because they are expected of us. What Christ is doing is purifying and making fit a people for the huge projects that He and they will do during the Millennium, the Great White Throne judgment, and on through eternity. Those are the good works that we have to be zealous for, ultimately. We need to be zealous for doing the smaller ones among ourselves and to whomever you happen to do them. But the ones that He is actually preparing us for are all those works of God in eternity that we will help Him with as His bride.

Like I said, the little things we do now are just practice for the big things that He plans once we are Spirit beings with power like His. You multiply that power among all these sons of God and you can adorn the whole universe, not just the doctrine of God. So He is fashioning us to be zealous to do the things He is excited to do for all humanity. He is persuading us to be all in on the things He likes to do. He wants a willing partner to assist Him in all His projects and causes for all eternity. So He is preparing a people that will be just like Him.

Let us conclude this in verse 15 back in Titus 2. After he gives this bombshell to Titus, he says, "Speak these things, exhort, and rebuke with all authority. Let no one despise you."

So he has given Titus this huge picture of what Christ is doing and he says, tell the people about these things. Let the people know that this is the way to the Kingdom of God. His speaking should encourage what is good and rebuke what is ungodly. A minister has the responsibility and authority to do both.

And this instruction leads to his next command. Do not let anyone despise you. God has given you this position, he tells Titus and other ministers who read this. He says, stick to your guns. Speak the truth. You know what is right. And be firm with those who oppose it because they are cracked. They do not understand what the truth really is. So you have to make sure that you stand for the truth and that you speak the truth and you do not allow anybody to disparage the truth. And I think that is good advice for all of us.

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