A Religious Problem (Part 2 of 2)

If you are diagnosed with a malignant tumor, your doctor is going to set up a plan to treat it quickly, completely, and ruthlessly before it spreads through your whole body. Today on Truth for Life, we'll learn how to deal similarly with hypocrisy and false teaching in the local church. Here's Alistair Begg teaching from chapter 1 in the book of Titus, verses 10 through 16. The problem here, he says, is a religious problem we're facing. These people have a routine, but they have no reality. These people have a creed, but their conduct does not match their creed. These people have faith talk, but there is no fruit that is seen in their lives. And so says Paul, summarizing it at the end of verse 16, professing to know God, denying him by their works. They are detestable, they're disobedient, and they're disqualified.

Unfit for any good work. He then just very briefly mentions that the impact of these people is such that they have to be dealt with properly. And he tells us what's going on, that they are unsettling, verse 11, unsettling whole families.

In the NIV, I think it is, ruining households. Now, again, Paul—and it's just one page over if you want to turn to it, one page back—Paul addresses the same problem in Ephesus. And I wonder if he doesn't… when he writes 2 Timothy, if he doesn't have in the back of his mind the problem that was there in Crete, there's nothing new under the sun when it comes to these things. Because in verse 5 of 2 Timothy 3, he's talking about those who have an appearance of godliness but deny its power. They're shams. They're hypocrites.

They're vacuous. And they're to be avoided. Avoid such people. Now, it's very important to recognize he's not saying avoid non-Christian people. He's saying avoid hypocrites.

Avoid people who are suggesting by their words that they are orthodox and yet they are denying him by their lives. And he says, let me tell you what they're like. They are the kind who creep into households and capture weak women. Now, that's not a description of women, per se. That's a description of a certain kind of woman. The kind of woman, he says, who's burdened by her sins, who is vulnerable, presumably emotionally, certainly spiritually. She's like a cork on an ocean. She has no settled conviction. She has no fundamental grasp of the truth at all.

It's a tragic picture. And here in Crete, he says, these kind of characters play on these kind of people. This is how they get into homes like this. They don't come through the front door announcing the fact that they are opposed to the truth of the gospel.

They come in through the back door suggesting that they know the key to the gospel, and it has to do not with the plainness of the gospel itself, but it has to do with the elements that they bring to it. So we meet these people all the time. I had a conversation—I told the people in the first service—I had a conversation with a lady that my wife and I know that we see her in the community regularly. She may even be here this morning, and I hope she is.

But we're very frank in our interchange with one another. I would never speak behind her back. But she always has the hardest questions for me. I meet her in the store, and she asks—I say, What's the question of the day?

The last one was, Why is the name of God being taken out of all the Jewish Scriptures? That was her question. I said, Well, who told you that? She said, Well, it was a man on the radio, and he was explaining it. I said, Well, it sounds like a question for him, because I don't know what you mean. And I said, Well, why do you even care? She said, Well, I care about everything.

I mean, I don't care if it's Christian or Jewish or whatever it is. I've got to find things out. I said, Well, how is it helping you? She said, Not very well. I said, So you know, the Bible talks about people like you who are always learning and never able to come to a knowledge of the truth, who are fascinated by this notion and that notion and this view, and they get the charts and the diagrams and the CDs and the everthings. I said, You know, why don't we just start with Jesus, who He is, why He's come, that He is the one who provides the reconciliation that is absolutely essential because of the fact that we are alienated from God, that your sense of alienation—from your family, as you've mentioned it, from your psyche as you're prepared to acknowledge it spiritually—all of these things are subsumed under the fight of the great alienation, that we're alienated from God in our rebellion, in our wandering. We're exiles, we're wilderness wanderers, we're strangers. Our forefathers started in the garden. We live in the jungle, and Jesus has come to bring us back to the garden in all of its beauty, in all of its symmetry, in all of its wholeness.

But can't we just start with Jesus? And I think that we're going to have to be having these conversations a lot. I don't think I run into these people when they're unique. I think you run into them as well. Honest people.

Seeking people. Learning. But never able to come to a knowledge of the truth. Novelty, subtlety, and the commands of men are a really bad concoction. Listening but not learning.

Investigating but never believing. Seeing the teaching of the Bible as a form, a mechanism, of rearranging our external lives, as opposed to discovering in the teaching of the Bible this immense story of the inside-out revolution that has been brought about as a result of Jesus and his work upon the cross, of the amazing upside-down transformation that he makes when he takes hold of a life and changes it. Until the reality of that grips a heart, grips a household, grips a church, then those who attend that church will be susceptible to the intriguing, alluring, appealing concoction of novelty and myth, combined with very authoritarian rules and regulations. Paul says, Titus, you need to understand this so that your elders understand it, so that the members of the congregation will be able to deal properly with those that they find who are inviting them to drink of this ruinous potion. And that is what he then says to them. He says, let me tell you how they are to be handled.

And you can see it just in two phrases. First of all, they must be silenced, or the word could be translated muzzled. They must be muzzled.

Why? Because they're upsetting whole families. Whether he means the household churches, or whether he means families, nuclear families, doesn't really matter. It could be both. Maybe it is both. So they have to silence them. The dog has to be muzzled. If the dog bites people all the time, if the dog yaps all the time, if the dogs are jolly nuisance, then muzzle the dog.

That's what he's saying. Muzzle them. It doesn't sound very nice, I admit that. He says, just tell them to shut up. Shut them up. Silence them. How are they to be silenced? By compelling argument? By the approaches of church discipline?

I don't know. But you daren't appoint them to lead small groups in your church. Now, don't let them loose with a small company of your congregation there in Crete. They'll ruin the entire thing. Now, not because they're wearing a baseball hat that says, I am opposed to the fundamental doctrine that is represented in the truth of the Bible, but because they said, when I get my little group together, I'm going to explain to them that this little element here is absolutely the key to it.

And that if I can bring them into line with these external commands that I've come up with and bring them all into subjection to this, that's how it goes. And don't put them in your Sunday school either. Silence them. And then rebuke them sharply. That doesn't sound any better either, does it? Therefore, rebuke them sharply.

Why? So that they may be sound in the faith. Now, the them there is difficult.

It's difficult in English, and it's difficult in Greek. Who's the them? Who's them? Is he saying rebuke them, the teachers, or is he saying rebuke them, the listeners?

I'm not sure, to tell you the truth. But both of them will do well to be rebuked. The teachers should be rebuked sharply if that's the kind of nonsense that they're spewing. And the congregation that is susceptible to buying that potion should be rebuked sharply so that they then may actually become healthy, that they may become sound Christians, so that they may devote themselves to the gospel, not to Jewish myths, and so that they will not be on the receiving end of the commands of people who are actually turning away from the truth. That's why he began as he did in verse 9, and that's why he's going to continue in verse 1 of chapter 2. Isn't it interesting that the two slices of bread around this rather distasteful sandwich in the middle, the ingredients in the middle, the two slices of bread are teaching? Verse 9, make sure that your elders hold firmly to the message so that they can convey the truth, so that they can refute error. And then what is he going to say in verse 1 as he goes into chapter 2? But as for you, teach what accords with sound doctrine. Teaching, teaching. And it is the teaching of God's Word, the understanding of it, the learning of it, that then provides the antidote to the kind of confusion that is represented in the middle. Now, our time is gone.

I just want to make one point, perhaps, by way of application. When you read this passage—and I've read it a lot this week, and maybe you have too—if you listen to it with the ears of an outsider, then you've got to say that it's understandable that someone will say, Well, I didn't know much about Paul, but I always thought he was a mean guy. And unlike Jesus, who was apparently a nice guy, I've heard about Paul, and he's a mean guy, and actually, now I read this thing, I think he is a mean guy. Kind of mean, isn't it? Shut up, rebuke him sharply, deal with this, deal with that.

Is he just a mean guy? And furthermore, there's a level of intolerance here that I don't really like. It's not politically correct at all. So the ears of the outsider hear this kind of thing, and we're going to have to translate for them if they are not then to reject the actual truth of the gospel because of their misunderstanding of what's being said. Now, this came to my mind yesterday when I pulled up behind a car at 91 and Cannon Road. I was immediately struck by the fact that it was in my way, and it was covered with stickers.

And so I had to wait, and I figured I'd read the stickers, and there were some there that I hadn't seen, but my favorite was right there on the back bumper. Coexist. Coexist.

And all the symbols of the various religions. And I was sitting there, and I was thinking about this morning's address, and I was thinking about the driver of the car, and I thought, I wonder what the fellow in the car would think of what Paul is doing here, and speaking so sharply. And I wonder how I could then communicate this to this fellow, who I think would probably say, I don't like the sound of that, it's mean, and I don't like mean people. Or who would say, that's the kind of intolerance that I expect from the Bible.

You see? That's the reason I don't believe the Bible. So I said, well, so how am I going to talk to my coexist friend that I don't know yet, because he's in his box and I'm in my box? And I said, well, we'd have to start a little bit back. We'd have to start and talk about revelation, rather than human speculation. We'd have to talk about the fact that Christianity is a revealed truth, that God has disclosed himself. We'd have to start working on that.

We'd have to speak about Jesus and his distinction amongst religious leaders of all time, and so on. But we would also have to address this idea of coexistence. And I would want to say to him that I like the idea of coexistence, because I actually kind of like getting on with people. I mean, I speak to English people as a Scotsman. That's coexistence.

I'll include the Welsh, and even the Irish as well. I want to coexist. I want to coexist with the Muslim doctors that I meet at the hospital when I'm visiting. I want to coexist with the fellow in the dairy mart who is a Sikh. I want to as well.

I want to do all of that. Now, he may think, no, you can't want to do that, because your thing says you're right and they're all wrong. So let's talk about that just now. Let's just talk about the fact that we want to coexist. But let's talk about toleration. It really is quite intolerant, isn't it, of Paul to say what he says. Why does he say that?

We only got one or two options. If the Bible is just a fabrication and a monumental lie, then frankly, let's just go do something else, because there's no point in conversation anyway. But if actually there's a record, an accurate record, of who Jesus is and what he's done and why he's come, then we ought to view this intolerance as the kind of intolerance that is represented in the cancer specialist who is eradicating cancer from the body of his patient. There's nothing remotely unkind about the intolerant perspective that they're taking on the cancer.

They are seeking to deal with it as vigorously, as strenuously as they possibly can, in order to heal and to make new. And so what Paul is doing here is saying, we can't allow this disease to spread through the congregation. It's not a matter of collapsing truth into error and finding the middle ground. We can't do that, he says. The reason we can't do that is because this is who Jesus is. And what Jesus has accomplished in his death on the cross challenges all of the commands of men, challenges not only the irreligion of a world that is rejected him, but challenges the religion of people who profess to know God but have no fruit in their lives.

Now, I don't know how well that would go, but I would hopefully have a chance to say to him, and, you know, the love that God looks for from us is not the love of external religious orthodoxy. It's the love of a son for his mom that is not marked simply by the tidiness of his room, by the generosity of his spirit, by his commitment to punctuality and attendance at school. All of that could be in place, with no real living relationship between the mother and the son. The son may be gone now, living on his own, and he wants his mother to know that he's still tidy, he's still punctual, and he never would miss sending her a birthday card. It's all tidy. It's all sort of right.

It's all sort of external. But he does not give to her the love that her generosity of spirit and her self-sacrifice as a mother deserves. She doesn't just want his tidiness or his punctuality.

She wants his heartfelt devotion and love. God is not looking from heaven to try and see if there are a bunch of people that want to commit to tidiness and punctuality and external religiosity. He is looking for those who will fall down at the feet of his son and say, All that I could ever do is love you in response to the majestic nature of your love for me that has been revealed in your cross. The people in Crete were in danger of having that truth snuffed out. And I think you would agree that both, whether it is in Crete or in Cairo or in Cleveland, it is the duty and responsibility of church leadership to ensure that every time that ugly concoction raises its head, that it is responded to graciously, firmly, ruthlessly, compassionately, so that the ethos of the church becomes an ethos of people who are embracing one another out of the wonder of God's goodness to them, who are doing what God says in the Bible, not in order that they might discover it to be a means of acceptance but who are doing it because of the reality of their acceptance. And that is what we long for here at Parkside, so that when our friends from the co-existent party come among us, they may want to react vociferously to what is said as they encounter the clarity of the Scriptures. And it may well be then that it is in the abiding presence of Christ within his people that they discover, if you like, not just the counterbalance but the context in which that kind of clarity is worked out. Loved ones, we need to pray to this end.

This is not an easy time, you know, to articulate these truths. It's just what the Bible says. Let's pray together. Father, thank you that your Word is a lamp to our feet and a light to our path, and that's a long way away to Crete, both geographically and chronologically, and yet it rings true.

We're all susceptible to high-sounding authoritarian dogmatic commands that come from the lips of someone who gives the appearance of godliness and yet turns his back on the truth. O God, save us from these people and from these things. And make us the kind of people that understand the Gospels so that the Gospel then may become the pervasive flavor of our relationships with one another and our desire to reach out to others. Come and abide with your church, we pray. Fill us with your love. Grant that our desire to remain true to the doctrine will be more than matched by our desire to live in the light of your love.

We desperately need your help. All of us do. Leaders and followers alike, we're all followers, we're all learners from the one who knows the answers, Jesus. We all bow at his cross, we all submit to his headship. Hear our prayers.

For Christ's sake. Amen. We are learning how we can guard ourselves and our local church from false teaching. You're listening to Alistair Begg with the conclusion of a message titled, A Religious Problem, and this is Truth for Life. If you've benefited from the messages we've been hearing from the book of Titus and you'd like to share them with somebody else, all of the teaching on our website is free for you to pass along to a friend.

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It's the responsibility of everyone who follows Jesus. Request the book, Know the Truth, when you make a donation through the Truth for Life app or online at truthforlife.org slash donate. And if you do go to our website today, look for Alistair's book, Pray Big. This is a close-up look at how the Apostle Paul prayed for the church in Ephesus. And in this book, Alistair helps us find a pattern for how we can pray like this. You can download Pray Big as an audio book for free, and you can also download a free corresponding study guide. Visit truthforlife.org slash pray big. I'm Bob Lapine. I hope you can join us tomorrow when we'll learn how a really great sermon can be rendered totally ineffective. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.