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THE ESTABLISHING OF A HEALTHY CHURCH -
ITitus 1:9-11
January 11, 2009
Bob Bonner
The most pressing need for people today is to know Jesus and His forgiveness and power to transform their lives. The church in the twenty-first century has no monopoly on major problems or challenges in helping people know Jesus Christ as their Savior and Lord. In the years that followed the birth of the church at Pentecost, the early church enjoyed remarkable growth and had the privilege of Christ-appointed apostles to guide her in learning how to experience Christ’s transforming power in individuals’ lives. But alongside these blessings were the problems, and of these the most serious was the activity of false teachers who would confuse people about the truths of the Gospel. These problems were heightened in those places less visited by the apostles, such as the island of Crete.
This is why much of the New Testament was written to counteract the false teaching activity going on in the first century church. Much of this false teaching recorded in the New Testament was driven by the Judaizers. Who were the Judaizers, and what did they teach? Basically, many early Jews who had put their trust in Christ believed that Gentiles, in order to be saved, had to trust in Christ plus become a Jew through practicing many of the man-made traditions of Judaism, such as dietary laws and the practice of circumcision. These teachings left the immature and untaught Jewish Christians and non-Jewish Christians confused. Rather than putting faith solely in Christ and what He had done on the cross to secure salvation, forgiveness, and acceptance from God, the Judaizers added to the Gospel, requiring that people do something additional to make themselves acceptable to God. This type of teaching was the only kind of “Christian” teaching these believers received on the island of Crete. Similarly today, we find some churches teaching a similar but wrong gospel that leaves people confused about what it takes to be forgiven and guaranteed eternal life with God.
The passage before us, Titus 1:6-16, is one in which the Apostle Paul addresses the subject of what to do when you face a group of Christians who are being led by false teachers such as Judaizers. How do you go about organizing a healthy church based on the proper teaching of the word of God?
One might think that the best thing to do would be to get all of the Christians together at a summit meeting and teach them the simple truth all at the same time, and that should settle the confusion once and for all. However on the island of Crete during the first century, the demographics made that impossible. First, this large island was made up of a hundred small cities loosely tied together, with very few Christians in any one city. Secondly, there was no organized church or meeting place to which you could call together all of the Christians to have one meeting and settle the confusion.
Hence, the Apostle Paul writes this letter to his veteran disciple, Titus, whom he left behind on the island of Crete, and gives him the game plan for establishing a healthy church. He shows him how to bring about needed spiritual growth among a severely unorganized, immature, shepherdless number of believers and how to deal with false teachers.
Titus 1:6-16 is one large unit in this letter. This major unit divides into two parts. The first part, verses 6-9, we have been studying for the past few weeks and will finish this morning. It covers the appointment of qualified spiritual leaders, known as elders. These verses give fourteen qualifications of an elder. In dramatic contrast to the appointment of true spiritual leaders, the second part of this unit of Scripture, verses 10-16, instructs Titus to silence the false teachers, the false spiritual leaders who have proven themselves to be men who have lacked not only truth, but character as well. Our task this morning will be to finish the first part of the major unit and begin our study of the second part.
In the past two messages, we looked at the Apostle Paul’s list of qualifications for those who would lead the local church. We have seen three areas of qualification being considered. The first area in verse 6 concerned whether or not a man had proved himself able to manage his own family.
The second area of qualification was the man’s spiritual integrity as tested by eleven different character traits.
The third and last area of qualification is spelled out in verse 9 and concerns the man’s commitment to God’s Word. The potential for all spiritual growth, whether one is speaking about the spiritual growth of a church or the spiritual maturity of an individual, begins with the leadership of the church’s commitment to understanding the Word of God for the purpose of submitting one’s life to its teachings. Obviously, a local church will be only as strong as its leadership is committed to God’s Word.
Look at verse 9, where Paul writes about this final qualification for an elder. He states that an elder candidate must be one known for “holding fast the faithful word which is in accordance with the teaching, so that he will be able both to exhort in sound doctrine and to refute those who contradict.”
This verse reveals the dual nature of the teaching ministry of an elder. An elder, as a shepherd over God’s flock of people known as the church, needs two voices: According to this verse, he needs one voice for gathering the sheep, the true believers, and another for driving away wolves, the false teachers. With one voice he exhorts. That word “exhort” points to using the Scriptures to encourage or correct those who need it for their own spiritual growth. Today we would say that elders are to use the Word of God as the basis of all their counseling.
Over the years many people have turned to our elders at times when they were confused, hurting, or struggling with an area in their lives or a decision they had to make. Apart from the Word of God, no elder has anything to offer anyone. It is the Word of God that heals, clarifies, and gives direction to one’s life. And thus, in order to exhort well, the elder needs to continue to study God’s Word to get a better grasp on what the Bible teaches.
Whereas the first voice is to exhort, the second voice of an elders is used to refute those who contradict the truth about the Gospel. Understand, there were many Christians on Crete at that time who believed a lie about the Gospel and how to get saved and live as a Christian. There may even have been a few false teachers who were teaching lies but didn’t know it. That is why, in verse 9, Paul uses the word “refute.” The goal of refuting is not to win an argument or to destroy an opponent, but to restore a fellow Christian to “sound doctrine.”
That word “sound” used here as well as in verse 13 and again in chapter 2 is a medical term that literally means “healthy.” We get our word “hygiene” from it. Hence, “sound doctrine” refers to healthy doctrine or doctrine that promotes spiritual health and growth.
This verse declares that it is the Scriptures that supply the elder with the authority to say when something is right or wrong. Modern convention or mores or what others consider to be “PC” is not the authority by which we Christians are to live our lives or govern His church. Jesus Christ gives us His direction and His authority in His Word.
When Paul states that the elder must “hold fast the faithful word” he means that the elder is to remain committed to God's truth. Hence, this final requirement of an elder is that he be a person who loves, studies, and uses the Word of God as the basis for his life and ministry.
Having said that, allow me to clarify the meaning of an important term used in this verse. Normally the term “word” typically refers to the Scriptures, the Bible. However, in Paul’s three letters, 1 & 2 Timothy and Titus, his use of this term “word” in those letters specifically refers to the gospel which, he adds, is “in accordance with the teaching.” In other words, the true Gospel can be verified and substantiated by the rest of the word of God.
This is important to understand because it tells us that Paul does not just want the elders to be men who understand Scripture, but men who clearly understand and can clearly communicate the truths of the Gospel. Besides establishing a healthy church on the island of Crete, this is Paul’s number one concern, that we hold fast to and correctly teach the trustworthiness of the Gospel. This was the very thing that these false teachers, these Judaizers, had distorted, which you will see in the second part of this major unit, in verses 10-16.
Verses 10-16 make up Paul’s only real discussion of the false teachers who oppose the correct teaching of the Gospel, except maybe 3:9-10. These verses have the purpose of explaining why Titus must appoint only qualified people to church leadership. This passage also clearly shows that the corrupt teaching was primarily Jewish in origin, and that they were teaching a type of religious asceticism, meaning if you deny yourself certain foods, practice a special form of worship on certain days, and perform other religious rites you will make God happy. The opponents were or claimed to be at one time part of the church but had left the truth of the gospel. As a result of their abandoning the truth of the Gospel, it was Titus’ job, along with his newly-appointed elders, to sift out the true believing but misguided teachers from the unbelieving and deliberately-distorting-the-truth leaders who were out for personal gain.
These seven verses fall into three divisions. In verses 10-11 Paul describes a group of opposing teachers in the Cretan churches that were causing disruption. Then, in verses 12-13, Paul links these false teachers to the most base element in Cretan society. And that leads to Paul’s commanding Titus to engage and silence these opponents, followed by a sobering assessment of their depravity in verses 13-16.
With that as an overview, follow along as I read these verses, and then we will come back to look more closely at them.
10For there are many rebellious men, empty talkers and deceivers,
especially those of the circumcision, 11who must be silenced because they
are upsetting whole families, teaching things they should not teach for the
sake of sordid gain. 12One of themselves, a prophet of their own, said,
“Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons.” 13This testimony is
true. For this reason reprove them severely so that they may be sound in
the faith, 14not paying attention to Jewish myths and commandments of
men who turn away from the truth. 15To the pure, all things are pure; but to
those who are defiled and unbelieving, nothing is pure, but both their mind
and their conscience are defiled. 16They profess to know God, but by their
deeds they deny Him, being detestable and disobedient and worthless for
any good deed.
In verses 10-11, we learn a lot about the character of these false teachers. They stand in stark contrast to those church leaders that Titus was to appoint as elders. You might say that these false teachers could be classified as self-deceived, but these verses lead one to believe that many of these religious men were well aware of what they were doing. They had personal clear-cut goals and premeditated strategies.
Paul gives us three descriptions of these men in verse 10. The first is that they were “rebellious.” This is a term that describes someone who is unruly, insubordinate, and refuses to submit to divine authority. These false teachers refused to submit to Paul. Likewise, they would later refuse to submit to Titus and then to his appointed elders. “Rebellious” also describes their teaching, which was in open opposition to God’s revealed will. These false teachers rebelled against Paul’s corrective teaching of the true gospel. As we will see more clearly next week, they taught that you needed to perform in a certain way not only to be saved, but to maintain your salvation. If you did not, you either could not be saved or you could lose your salvation. How many today are being taught this very same thing? How many of you are confused about whether or not you can lose your salvation? If you believe you are saved but you can lose your salvation, you are believing in the incorrect teachings of modern day false teachers, just like the ones Paul, Titus, and Timothy encountered on the island of Crete 2,000 years ago.
Allow me to state the truth of the Gospel briefly: If you believe that you have sinned against God through violating your God-given conscience or through violating what you know in your heart is right, but you have turned to Christ and put your confidence in His death on the cross for your sin, and you have submitted your life to following Christ, then even if you should make mistakes in the future, you are eternally saved, forgiven, deeply loved, and accepted by God. You are forever approved of by Him regardless of blunders you make in the future. That is the truth of the Gospel. It is all about what Jesus has done and it has nothing to do with what you can do to get saved or maintain your state of salvation. It is only when you grasp this truth that you fully find rest and peace before God. It is only when you fully understand and put your confidence in the gift of salvation that comes to you solely by putting your faith in Christ, you are saved.
These false teachers back then and today rebel against this truth. Paul goes on to describe false teachers by giving us a second characteristic about them. He calls them “empty talkers.” This is an expression that describes someone who uses words that have no meaning, words that are without substance. Their teaching was empty, without value, and unprofitable. Their teaching did nothing to solve the deep issues of life.
Last year, before I switched away from cable TV, I remember channel surfing one evening and coming across a Josephine County station that would often have some funky religious programs. I call them funky, because some of them starred some local sincere Christians who were trying to teach the Bible, but the production of the program was so bad that it was difficult to learn anything. Other programs were funky, not only because of poor production, but their material was so “empty,” without any value, because what was being taught made no sense. Their messengers were “empty talkers.”
One program in particular sticks out in my mind as a perfect example of this “empty talkers.” It featured a man and a woman. For most of the program, one or the other of them would sit quietly up in front of a room that looked like a living room in someone’s home. In front of them were maybe 20 people. One episode that I remember involved a genuinely sincere woman who looked to be in her mid-thirties. She had asked these two teachers a question that concerned her present struggle with getting over the pain of a broken relationship. She was wondering if she could ever really trust anyone again. She recently had met a man she was interested in, but what she wanted to know was whether she should continue to see him. If she did, would she ever be able to trust him? If so, how should she approach this relationship?
After the question was asked, the man and the woman teachers just sat there for about 15 seconds and did not say a word. Their silence was deafening. When the woman teacher finally spoke, she did so in a very calm, almost hypnotic slow cadence, that it was unnerving. I noticed that both the male teacher and the female teacher spoke with this same calm hypnotically slow pace. The answer this teacher gave took 5-10 minutes, and she spoke using “New Age”-ish terms.
I couldn’t understand one thing she said and neither could I understand how it would meet the cry of this young woman’s heart. I sat there for almost 30 minutes trying to decipher what the heck either the male or female teachers were saying. Frustrated, I turned off the show and prayed for the hurting woman. A night or so later, I was surfing the channels again, and there these two teachers were. This time Becky was with me. I said, “Hey, watch this and tell me if you can figure out what they are talking about. Does anything they say make sense to you?” After five minutes, Becky shook her had and said, “I have no idea what he just said!” And yet, these poor people sitting in that room, hungering for answers, hypnotized by this couple, left with no real answers to their problems. Why? Because these teachers were “empty talkers.” They had no truth or authority behind what they were saying.
Paul uses a third term to describe such false teachers. He calls them “deceivers.” It is a term that describes someone who intentionally misleads others for their own personal gain. And to be specific, Paul names one group of such false teachers on the island of Crete. He calls them “those of the circumcision,” which refers to those Judaizers who insisted that circumcision had to be practiced by gentiles if they wanted to be saved. They taught that it was trust in Jesus plus the performance of circumcision that was needed for salvation. Trusting in Jesus plus anything else is a false Gospel. Whether that anything else is baptism, church membership, tithing, or following a particular list of dos or don’ts, it matters not. Your acceptance before God is founded upon only one thing: putting your complete confidence in what Christ has done on your behalf.
Because this false teaching was detrimental to the true gospel, it was with a sense of urgency that Paul told Titus in verse 11 to “silence” these false teachers. This word “silence” literally meant to put a “muzzle” on these false teachers. But how do you muzzle such teachers? The only way you can silence them and their teaching is through correct teaching from the Word of God, which sometimes requires “rebuking, warning, and adjuring.”
Hopefully, these rebellious teachers’ hearts could be reasoned with, and they would be changed and turned back into trusting only in Jesus and His finished work on the cross. According to verse 13, this was Paul’s hope--that these who had claimed to be Christians could be turned around. He didn’t want to immediately throw them out of the church. But over time, as he tells Titus in 3:10, if these false teachers don’t stop being divisive among the saints, they were to be permanently removed from the church. You can’t have such disruptive false teachers, in the name of Christ, bringing harm to other Christians.
And that is just what these men were doing. Verse 11 tells us that they were “upsetting whole families.” Early on in Crete, before Titus established the church on the island, most of the teaching activity took place in various individual households. These households were made up of not just family members but servants and slaves. These were not what some call today “house churches,” but were several families living in one city worshiping together. We know that because there was no church on Crete at that time. These were individual households which were looking for some spiritual guidance. Because Christians wanted spiritual direction, and presumably because there were no established churches or church leadership on the island, these Judaizers gladly made themselves available to come to the home to teach--for a fee! As a result, whole households were being upset by the defection of one or two within them. This expression “to upset” is used in John 2:15 of Jesus overturning the money changers’ tables. Similarly, these false teachers knew that they were upsetting these households, but they didn’t care. Why? Paul reveals their motive: greed. He tells us that they did this “for the sake of dishonest gain.”
There is one last term that I want to highlight here, that is most disturbing when one thinks about it. It is found back in verse 10. It is the word “many.” There were many of these false teachers wreaking havoc on the innocent, unsuspecting babes in Christ! It would have been bad enough if there had only been a few. But there were many of them. The island of Crete was riddled with false teachers. And sadly today, in the church as a whole, the situation is exactly the same!
Why? Because not only the leadership of many churches, but the congregations themselves don’t take seriously the importance of continuing to study the Bible to become informed of the truth. They would rather not put in the effort, or they would rather sit under other teachers who may or may not be telling them the truth. That is tragic. That explains one major reason why the church today is so weak and ineffective in our world.
Once again, the purpose of preaching or studying God’s Word is not simply to learn something new from the Bible. It is not just to gather information. But the study of God’s Word should change one’s way of living, thinking, and perceiving the world. So, let’s consider the following questions as a place to start answering the question, “Lord, why did you have me look at this passage of Scripture today, with these people? What do you want me to do with what I have learned?”
What are some of the harmful effects of false teaching which you have seen? Why do you think God permits false teaching when it does such harm? Can you think of ways in which God has overruled it for good? In the midst of abounding error existing in the church today, especially among its leadership, what can be done? If leadership refuses to take God’s Word seriously or shows that they fail to continue to keep studying the God’s Word, what should be done?
Do you personally study the Bible by yourself? How often do you personally study the Bible for yourself? How many times this past week did you sit down to study your Bible?
Can you use your Bible to show someone else how to be saved?
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