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A Continuing Church | Titus 1:1-4 (Mark Evans: 7-2-2023)
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The main ideas from this information are: - The book of Titus is a pastoral epistle that provides instruction on how to build and keep a church in order. - The faith of God's elect is to be built up and strengthened. - The hope of the church is in eternal life, which is a promise from God. - God's character and promise are the pillars of our hope. - The promise of eternal life was made before the ages began and is revealed through God's word and preaching. Well, if you have your Bibles, do make your way to the book of Titus as we begin our new sermon series in this wonderful letter. And to get us going, we'll be in the first four verses of chapter 1 of Titus, Titus chapter 1, verses 1 through 4. And these are the words of the God who cannot lie. Paul, servant of God and an apostle of Jesus Christ, for the sake of the faith of God's elect and their knowledge of the truth, which accords with godliness in hope of eternal life, which God, who never lies, promised before the ages began and at the proper time manifested in His word through the preaching with which I have been entrusted by the command of God our Savior. To Titus, my true child in a common faith, grace and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Savior. The grass withers and the flower fades. Let us pray. Our gracious God and heavenly Father, indeed we hear those words, grace and peace to You and such is our great hope, this hope promised even before the ages began. And so we know, Father, in our flesh we have no prophets and so we pray that You would give us ears to hear, give us eyes to see, and give us a heart to receive the knowledge of the truth that we might be evermore like You, our Maker, our Redeemer, our Rock. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen. Amen. You may be seated. Well, my father was not much of a TV viewer growing up, but there were a couple of shows that he regularly and religiously enjoyed. So alongside Texas Rangers baseball and a very old show called Gunsmoke, also at the top of the list was a show called This Old House, at one time starring the great Bob Vila, some of you are familiar. And now today I know we have home improvement shows without number, but This Old House was the first of its kind. It was the original. So you just have to appreciate this was long before the days that reality TV is the fad that it is today. And home improvement shows blossomed as they have today. This Old House was this no-nonsense, no-gimmicks production on how to build and how to keep a house. And in many ways that is what the book of Titus is all about. It's this no-nonsense, divine instruction on how to build and how to keep a house in order. Only instead of calling it This Old House, we should probably call it This New House because Titus is addressed to the New Covenant era as the church is now rapidly expanding from Judea, Samaria to the very ends of the earth. And as much as the church is going to grow, it is going to be challenged, even threatened from the outside. And so Paul writes this letter to Titus as to how the church of Jesus Christ is to be built, is to be led, and is to be lived all to the glory of her Savior. And so today we'll walk through the introduction of this great letter to the church as Paul has managed to pack this punch of profundity into just a few short verses. As if before we get into the body of the letter, God wants us to see the fundamentals of the faith. It's the same before you pick up that hammer, I want you to see these things first in your hearts and in your minds. And so we'll walk through this section, looking at three simple parts. Those would be the faith of the church, secondly the hope of the church, and then thirdly the great legacy of the church. But all with the main point that introduces not just this section, but really introduces Titus as a whole, and that is that God's church is a continuing church. It is an enduring church. It is a church built on an everlasting, immovable foundation. So verse 1, we meet up with Paul. Remember, we spent many, many months with Paul during our study in Ephesians. And unlike Ephesians, Titus is known as a pastoral epistle. Now what does that mean? Does that mean Ephesians is not pastoral? Well, no, of course not. But it does mean that Titus has this focus, this emphasis on good shepherding and godly living. Just as a mom and dad might put down some house rules to keep their house in order, Titus not just addresses the house, but says, here's some house rules to keep God's church in order. And so for us, for Cornerstone, as this growing church plant, Titus will be of great use to us of what is to be put in order and what makes for a healthy church, things like leadership and sound doctrine. This letter of Titus was actually addressed to church plants along the Mediterranean Sea, particularly this island of Crete. And so just as we are here on this island of Allen, it will be very much profitable to us. And you see that very emphasis rolled out right away in verse 1, that Paul sees himself as a servant of God, or more precisely, a slave of God. The nature of a slave is that a slave regards himself as not his own. His will is not his own. His life is not his own. His purpose is not his own. For he exists for the sake of his master. And that's the pulse of Paul's heart, saying, I am not my own. I am God's slave. Yet though a slave, you see he's deployed for the sake of something else, for someone else. There's no private me and Jesus kind of mentality with Paul. I know you see in verse 1, he says, my master has sent me to labor for a specific task, in verse 1. You see there he labors for the sake of the faith of God's elect. Note it well. It's not so much the elect, but the faith of God's elect for which he labors. I wouldn't want to put too fine a point on it, but it would be like if you hired a personal trainer and that personal trainer said, I'm not interested in you. I'm here to train your body. I'm here to whip you into shape. My goal is to get you from atrophy to muscularity. And that's Paul's ambition. His aim is to build up the faith muscles of the saints. That's something to think about even now. How much have you wrestled with the truth that your faith is to be guarded, it's to be kept, it's even to be strengthened? I mean, the predominant thought of our day is everything but that, isn't it? There's so much focus on how to build up your bank account, how to build up your body, how to build up your career, how to build up your relationships. But how much have you devoted to the simple truth of building up your faith? As Jude commands us so plainly, we are to build ourselves up. And so just ask yourself, what are you doing to build up your faith, your family's faith, the faith of those in this room, because we all share in the responsibility to build one another up. Now that's it. Faith is, of course, preeminently the gracious gift of God. And you see, that truth also leap out in verse 1. This faith that Paul labors for is the faith of God's elect. Now who are these strange creatures? Who are these elect of God? Well, we do know, if you remember from Ephesians, that the elect are those whom God chose before the foundation of the world to belong to Him, those whom God predestined in love. And so our faith is not our own doing, right? We cannot boast in it. It's the gracious gift of our sovereign God. And such is one of the great paradoxes of the Christian life, that we are commanded to keep ourselves in the faith. Of course, the only reason we could do so is because our sovereign God is the one who keeps us in the faith. Now when you hear the word faith, a great word association instinct is to pair the word faith with the word knowledge. If I could show it by contrast, this is exactly what the Western world fails to do. The Western world extends this concept of faith that is often hollow, empty of knowledge. All right, you hear it in common tag lines like a leap of faith or quote, just believe. The idea of the knowledge is not really a component of faith. Faith is a kind of mystical leap into a void. But any time you stumble across the concept of faith, just remember, you should always, always fill in the blank. Meaning, if we're speaking about faith, let's be sure and fill in the blank. Faith in what? Faith upon what? If you're here this morning and not a Christian, indeed I would invite you to see the bedrock confidence of Christianity is that faith is not blind, faith is not empty, faith is not a leap into a dark abyss. You can hear it there in verse 1, that faith is paired with and fueled by this knowledge of the truth. For my money, one of the most profound questions asked by a non-Christian in all of Scripture was that question that Pilate put before the Lord Jesus Christ. When Pilate asked him, what is truth? Who knows if Pilate realized the depths of what he was asking. What is truth? That is a question of life and death importance, of eternal consequence. Just a word to our younger saints, our students perhaps. You should be particularly aware, as I'm sure you already are, but you need to be particularly aware that the world will tell you that there is no absolute truth, that truth cannot be known, that to claim a knowledge of such truth is as arrogant as it is delusional, and so that the best you can hope for is to be on the right side of history. Or even still, that you have your version of the truth and I have my version of the truth and so we are to tolerate each other's truths, which works great until the very moment that your truth happens to contradict what they hold near and dear. And then you get the backlash that we have in our day, what is rightly called the intolerance of tolerance. This is why if you take your stand on the truth, for instance, that marriage is between a man and a woman only, or if you hold to the truth that an unborn child is exactly that, a child made in God's image, then you will be met with the polite sledgehammer of tolerance. But for all the saints, young and old, see the confidence of Scripture in verse 1, that we can and do have a knowledge of the truth and that faith has its eyesight resting upon this truth that sets us free. And so to answer Pilate's great question, what is truth? Truth is what corresponds to the mind of God. God is His Himself truth. As Ephesians says, the truth is in Jesus Christ. In Him are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. And so you can follow this clear logic as verse 1 continues, that such knowledge of the truth accords with or promotes godliness. It's just a simple way of saying that the more and more truth that we know, the more and more we become like our God. Just as polish can restore a tarnished image, truth has this remarkable ability to reshape you and to restore you more and more to be like your God. And that should come to us as a tremendous encouragement as well as a great warning. And that is to say that the knowledge of truth should always be blossoming into godliness because it is very possible, isn't it, to have knowledge and not have godliness. To quote the Puritan William Grinnell who said, you can have a pearl in your mind but a toad in your heart. Right? And some Christians may have all the right answers to Bible trivia. Their doctrine very squared away, very neat and tidy. And as 2 Timothy says, they're always learning, always learning but never arriving at a sincere knowledge of the truth. But when God sees sincerity, truth in the inner man, He recognizes its likeness to Himself and He blesses it. He smiles upon it. And so there's a word on the faith of God's people. You can see it's this knowledge-filled faith that produces godliness. And so with that, let us look now at the hope of God's people in the next two verses. And you see how Paul describes our hope, particularly verse 2, it is this hope of life eternal...life eternal. I can recall from my time in health care, interactions with hospice patients, even more so with those taking care of elderly hospice patients. And our families would have to wrestle to weigh in the decisions regarding the quantity versus the quality of life. Alright, the family of a loved one would have to agonize with this difficult question. Do we extend life but the quality of life suffers? Or do we privilege the quality of life for our loved one but the duration, the length of life suffers? Long life or good life? And we should know that the glory of the Christian's hope is that eternal life knows nothing of that dilemma. Sometimes we think of eternal life only in terms of length, of duration, right, that it goes on forever and ever. And that's certainly true. But eternal life is far richer, far better than that. It means that the quality of life as God who has authored it, has intended it, comes to full fruition. Because life eternal means that the saints are with God in an unhindered communion, a perfect fellowship, that all the effects of sin have been fully removed and all the benefits of salvation have been fully consummated. And the point of verse 2 is that the church possesses that reality right now in the form of hope. Now the biblical idea of hope is not that of wishful thinking, alright? It's not saying, I hope to be rich one day. I hope to be promoted. I hope it's not 100 degrees next week. No, this biblical idea of hope is resilient certainty of a future reality. It's unwavering confidence that something shall come to pass. And you might be wondering, well, who does Paul think he is? Where does Paul get this unwavering hope? Maybe this is a little careless. Maybe he's overextending himself. Well, we get to see that Paul's hope and your hope and my hope rest upon two very important pillars, found in verse 2. And those two pillars are God's character and secondly, God's promise. Firstly, God's character. It's easy to miss, but we shouldn't glide past it. Paul just slips in this curious phrase in verse 2. God, quote, who never lies. Right, kind of this, by the way, you know God? He never lies. Greek is even better. It's just one word. It's usually like saying God, the non-liar, God, the one who is incapable of deception. Kids, kids, if you're ever asked the question, can God do everything? Can God do everything? You might be tempted to say, yes, of course God can do anything and everything. God has all power. He has all strength, all might. Now, kids, don't be fooled. Right? You should say, no, God cannot do everything. You could point to this verse in Titus and say, see, God cannot lie. As it concerns all of us, how easy this is to confess and yet how difficult this is to live it. Now, for what was the temptation put before our first parents? What is it that the enemy would wish to implant in your mind? You know the question well. Did God really say, all right, this is our enemy's great craft, to cast doubt upon God's character, that perhaps God is deceiving you and maybe He even is withholding from you that which is good. And such devilish aspersions can take many forms. Did God really say that He would take care of you, that He would provide for you? Did God really say that nothing could separate you from the love of God in Jesus Christ? Did God really say He'd be gracious to you and merciful to you? Or maybe at an even more everyday level, did God really say that these mundane tasks of motherhood, changing diapers and wiping snotty noses, that this is really a worthwhile labor, a good use of your gifts? Perhaps there's something better out there for you that God is withholding from you. And so we must be ever renewing our minds that the essence of our unchanging God is that He is incapable of deception. Our great hope rests upon His great character. But God's character is just the first pillar, all right? God's character alone would not be enough to stimulate hope. We would still need something particular to hope in, to hope for. And so as verse 2 tells us, this God in whom there is no shifting shadow has also given us a promise. Now we all know the phrase, consider the source, right? If someone rushes up to you and says, loan me some money, I promise I'll pay it back. Or I'm passing along this news to you, I promise you can believe it. You're going to instinctively consider the source, right? You're going to start to weigh out their character, evaluate, can I trust this person? Has this person been trustworthy in the past? Or is it His nature to embellish a little bit here and there? Before you latch on to the promise, you're going to consider the source. Well, by all means, Titus invites you to do that here in verse 2. The God who by way of His perfect divinity has never lied because He cannot lie, that same God has given you the promise of eternal life. And so considering the source, this compels us, doesn't it, to repent that we have latched on to this promise far too faintly and far too weakly. Christian, do you have this hope? A hopeless Christian is a walking contradiction. A hopeless Christian is easy prey for Satan. Unstable in all his or her ways. Faints in the day of adversity. But here is the knowledge of the truth. We have this eternal hope and we have it right now promised to us. But we're not even done there. So great is the promise and so great our God that this promise was actually sealed before you were in your mother's womb. In fact, it was sealed before she was in her mother's womb and so on and so forth because it was promised before time itself. You see verse 2 describes it as promised before the ages began. In nerd speak, this is sometimes called the pactum salutis, this covenant of redemption. God the Father and the Son from all eternity made this agreement to redeem a people. It's an amazing thought that grace runs from eternity to eternity. Try not to explode your mind as you think about that. That your eternal hope began in eternity past. The great Gerhardus Voss once said, the greatest proof that God will never cease to love us is that God never began to love us. I'll say that once more. The greatest hope that God will never cease to love us is that God never began to love us. In other words, because God has loved us from all eternity before time itself. And so our most foolish concern would be to worry about draining the supply lines of God's grace. I've seen for so many of these uncertain times have brought this worry of food shortages, water shortages, even energy supplies that might be drained. Well not so from God's grace. It runs from eternity to eternity. It's this endless fountain of grace. And so as we've scaled these great heights of this eternal promise, verse 3, we now descend from that 30,000 foot view and we get to zoom in on how this hope of salvation is made known to us. Because it's one thing to say that God's promise is of eternity, that's all well and good, but how does that eternal promise make its way to the here and now? Right? Simply speaking, how does that mail get to my inbox? Right? We're just time-bound finite creatures. Here today, gone tomorrow. So if God's promise remains locked up in the corridors of eternity, it's really of no use to man. Well Paul unravels that dilemma for us. You see in verse 3, he says that at just the right time, the proper time, God manifested it. God published His promises through His Word. I'm reminded of the words of Gandalf, that great wizard from Lord of the Rings, who said, a wizard is never early. A wizard is never late. A wizard always arrives exactly on time. And how much more for our great God that at just the right time, in the fullness of time, God reveals Himself. As Galatians says, in the fullness of time, God sent forth His Son. And He's published it in His Word. And so we see just how precious is the Word of God. It's the Word that bears witness to the Son of God. And that's the point of verse 3. God has chosen His Word to be the publisher of this good news. And so the Word is perfect. The timing is perfect. But next comes the dissemination of the Word. Verse 3 tells us that the Word goes forth and advances through preaching. How is it that the church encounters Jesus Christ? That you might even hear Christ Himself speak to you? I remember this audience of Titus. It's not all that far removed from Jesus in terms of time and space. They're really not that all far off. It's not hard to imagine a Cretan asking Titus, hey, can we go to Palestine? Could we see Jesus? It's not that far. I've got a boat right here. Could we hop on the boat and go to Palestine and hear Jesus teach and preach? And Titus, of course, will have to say, no, my friend, that window of opportunity is closed forever. Never to repeat itself. But don't worry. Don't lift down your...or don't put down your head. You have something actually far better, far greater, for Christ Himself through His Spirit will continue to speak to His church from age to age. And His means to advance the gospel is through the powerful preaching of powerless men. As Romans says, how will they hear without preaching? And so precious is this task. This is why Paul sees himself in verse 3 as, quote, entrusted with it by God's command. And now what are the things that we entrust? Well, you entrust your money to a bank. You entrust secrets to a trusted friend. You entrust your safety to a seatbelt on your way home today. And the point being, we only entrust things that are of high worth and very high value. And this truth, that the church is entrusted with the mysteries of God, saturates the letter of Titus. It sets the highest bar for the church's leadership, teaching and living. Because you probably notice, the church today, as in many ages, is in some ways looked down upon as small, as insignificant, maybe even despised. But that is not how the church is to see herself. She ought to see herself as a very special kind of safety deposit box, where God has deposited, entrusted His great Word, bearing the great witness of the great gospel of the great Savior, who is the Lord Jesus Christ. And that is why the warnings are so severe for tampering with the gospel, for tinkering with God's truth. Right, going back to it, if you entrusted me with your most treasured possession, and I altered it, I changed it, maybe even I lost it, then I face your fury. And how much more so for the church entrusted with the gospel, the very power of God unto salvation. And so we see this great hope of ours. Not only is it a promise, it is also a possession to be stewarded rightly with that singular goal of hearing, well done, good and faithful servant. So there is the word on the hope of God's people. Now let us lastly, thirdly, look at the legacy of God's people in verse 4. You've probably witnessed a common phenomenon for Christians to go through, especially as they work themselves more and more into the body of Christ. It starts to dawn on them that they feel closer to their brothers and sisters in Christ than they do some of their own blood relatives. Some of you, I'm sure, have experienced this, that you have a stronger, a greater kinship with those in this room than you do with some of your own relatives. I want you to see you'd be in good company with Paul. You see in verse 4, he considers, he calls Titus his, quote, true child. Of course, every indicator is that Titus is not his true child, at least biologically speaking. And Paul even uses this Greek word here, meaning Titus is my genuine child. And you see why he makes this claim, because what they hold in common so far exceeds the commonality of any blood relative. It's this, quote, common faith found in verse 4. All right, this is the reality of how the Spirit knits together you and I. As Ephesians says, we confess one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of us all. And so if God is my Father and God is your Father, and then guess what? We are brothers and sisters. And these baptismal waters are thicker than blood. And so I'd only add that if you have yet to experience that fellowship, as in, friend, you are missing out on the fullness of the Christian life. If you don't know what it's like to have this deep kinship and fellowship with brothers and sisters in Christ, then something is amiss. Right? It's the mere use of the word brother or sister. That sounds like weird religious language to you. Friend, you are coming up short of the fullness of Christian fellowship. Just think of the many analogies that Scripture uses to describe the church. The church is described as a temple, as living stones, as a branch to the vine, even a living organism like a body. But by far, by far, the most common analogy in the New Testament of the church is that the church is a family. We are a family. That is the ideal set forth in Scripture. And the question for us is, do we live up to that ideal? Now, the truth is the American church has so much stacked against it that prevents that ideal from being lived out. We have rampant individualism. We have a consumerist approach to church. Right? I'm not here for what I can give. I am here for what I can get. On top of that, we have so little affliction, so little persecution. And then you add in our sinful self-centeredness, and it's no small wonder. But here's the great remedy to that problem. It's this truth. We have a common faith, a common confession that we unite around. That is how doctrine, not only does it not divide, but doctrine unites a people. And it's that common faith that Crete is to receive from Titus. That Titus received from Paul. That Paul received from the Lord Jesus Christ Himself. And Titus is to carry forward that work. To take on the family business as it were. And friends, you and I, we are charged with the very same task and entrusted with the very same gospel and its mission. This legacy is what Titus is all about. The legacy of a continuing church. Just ponder the simple question. I don't know if you've ever stopped to ask yourself this. How would a Jewish carpenter and 12 obscure random men take over the world? How would that happen? Well, Titus gives us the blueprints of that answer. How the church is going to be a continuing church from age to age until the Lord Jesus returns. And you might be tempted to think, well, this seems like a poor succession plan. I mean, is it not all downhill after this? Remember, Paul is an apostle. Titus is not an apostle. It's very unique. On top of it, remember, Paul was the kind of apostle whose mere handkerchief was healing people. Right? There was more power in his snot rags than there were in most men. That is how powerful Paul was. And by all accounts, Titus seems to be this timid, even shy man. So you might ask, what becomes of the legacy of a continuing church? Is this all a house of cards? Well, Paul's parting word gives us the foundation of a continuing church in verse 4. He says there, grace and peace to you. All right, how easy to gloss over that. That's just a nice way to open a letter. But Paul tells Titus to this church that's being sent out into the world. Here are two hands for you, a handful of grace, a hand full of peace as you go out into this dark world. As you know, with the very first words that the risen Christ said to his disciples, his very first words to his disciples are peace to you, peace to you. And why could he say that? Because he had conquered sin and death. He had put forward the once for all sacrifice for sins. He had ushered in true peace, peace that surpasses all understanding, peace that the world cannot give, peace that the world, try as it may, cannot take away, the peace that he made by the blood of the cross, peace from the Prince of Peace, from the Lord of heaven and earth. And so how is the church going to endure from age to age? How is the church going to go from strength to strength? It is by grace and peace from God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ. Let us pray. Our gracious God and heavenly Father, we do praise you that you are the God of grace and peace. This grace and peace that you have brought forth in your beloved Son, that from him we have received grace upon grace, that from him is the peace that surpasses all understanding. From him is the hope of life and life eternal. And so we do pray for us as your people that you would teach us to hear your word, to store it up in our hearts and to live it out by our lives, not in our own strength, not in our own might, but by your Spirit. We pray these things in his name, and amen.
