Have you ever noticed there are Christians who think of their faith as a personal thing?
They like to blend in with the surrounding culture and treat their faith as a private matter between themselves and God. The Apostle Paul stands in contrast to that. He instructed believers to live in a way that makes us distinct from the unbelievers around us.
Today on Truth for Life, Alistair Begg challenges us to make our faith visible through radical goodness. We're studying the opening verses in Titus chapter 3. In the public square, the Christian is supposed to stand out in contrast to the general populace. The Cretans were notoriously troublesome. They were known to be agitators.
They were known to be insurrectionists. So in the context of agitation, insurrection, and downright troublesomeness, the application of Romans 12 2 is pretty clear—namely, don't allow the world around you to squeeze you into its own mold. Instead, says Paul to Titus, you better remind the people that the public duty of the Christian is to be marked by these things. Now, I've sought to summarize them, and in doing so I may have missed something, in which case I trust your judgment to fill in the gaps. But I have chosen to try and summarize verses 1 and 2 under four words.
They're fairly straightforward, and I think that there is basis for using them as I do. Remind the people to be subject to rulers and authorities to be obedient. Number one, the Christian citizen is to be marked by loyalty. Not a loyalty that shifts in relationship to whoever the prevailing political party is, but loyalty that recognizes that one of the marks of Christian civic deportment is going to be seen, if you like, essentially in patriotism. And that this involves respect for authority, recognizing that the ultimate source of authority, as Paul says both in Romans 13 and in 1 Timothy 2, that the ultimate source of authority within the political structure is none other than God himself.
Therefore, he says, the Christian in Crete is not to be engaged in civil disobedience but rather should be exemplary in upholding the rule of law—not involved in insurrection and disobedience but exemplary in upholding the rule of law, an exemplary life—so that the rule of law and the establishment of civic duty in the structures are those which are not undermined by Christian conviction but which are reinforced as a result of a proper sense of loyalty. The second word is community. You say, Where do you get community from? Well, I get it from to be ready to do whatever is good. You say, Well, that doesn't sound like community to me.
Well, let me explain. This isn't simply the suggestion by Paul that the Christians under Titus' care should engage in acts of charity. The recurring emphasis on goodness is not goodness that happens in a wardrobe, not goodness that happens in isolation, not goodness that happens in the privacy of a church community, but goodness that is expressed in community living, so that the eagerness to do good is an eagerness which becomes a characteristic of the Christian in the population.
Let me give you my old New Testament professor. This is what he says, Where good citizenship demands communal action, the Christian should be cooperative provided no question of conscience is involved. In other words, within the framework of community, one of the calling cards of the Christian is to be seen in their willingness to engage in shared goodness. In other words, it assumes involvement and engagement rather than isolation and estrangement.
What is Paul saying here to Titus? He's saying that if you're going to engage in acts of goodness, that is going to have an impact on the community, you cannot isolate yourself, you cannot be estranged from the community, you have to be involved, and you have to be engaged. Thirdly, the Christian's duty within that framework is to be marked not only by loyalty and by community but by courtesy. By courtesy.
Now, there's an old-fashioned word that we're able to drag out on a Friday evening. Courtesy. I refuse to follow a rabbit trail that is appearing in my mind's eye as I speak to you on the whole issue of manners within the Christian community. But to the extent that manners, deportment, bearing, are an expression of courtesy, these things are to be part and parcel of the Christian's lifestyle. Now, you might think that the word courtesy is not a big enough word to handle all this mentioned here.
Notice, to slander no one—not anyone, no one—to slander somebody is to say behind their back what you would never say to their face. To be peaceable and considerate. In other words, what he's saying is, make sure your folks that are in your church, Titus, are marked by grace, politeness, manners, respect that is displayed in their gestures and is displayed in their demeanor. So in other words, if you bump up against a Christian in Crete, if you meet them, as it were, on the bus—which is an anachronism, I understand—if you run into them in the bizarre, one of the ways that you might identify them is not because they have one of those covers that you have for your Bible—'cause, frankly, they didn't even have much of a Bible—it's not because they've got a big cross hanging around their neck, it's not because they've got a bumper sticker that betrays their political affiliation, but it is because after you've spent time with them and had a coffee with them, you said to yourself when you walk away, there was an incredibly nice lady! What a nice person!
You go home, and you tell your wife, I met a fellow in the town today. He was a good man! He was a good man! Now, we only spoke for twenty minutes, but I could tell he exuded goodness. He was polite. He was courteous. He listened. He engaged. And you know what? When I think about it, he never said a bad thing about anybody.
No slander from him at all. In other words, courtesy is the opposite of the teenager's one taboo. What is the teenager's one taboo? What is it that no teenager likes?
I'm gonna tell you. People who are mean. Mean. Now, you're gonna have a teenager that sleeps with his girlfriend, and he doesn't care about that, but he cares if you're mean. You're gonna have a teenager who has all kind of views on everything, but they don't like mean people. They don't like ugly, vicious, mean people.
And that is why courtesy is actually one of the calling cards in a community that is increasingly lacking in moral dignity, in a community that is uncooperative, in a community that is marked by unkindness and by unfairness and the absence of justice—a community that is vicious and nasty and difficult to deal with, and people who are difficult to handle. Now, let me just pause here and say parenthetically that you know what he's actually saying here? He's saying that Christians are supposed to be do-gooders.
That's what he's saying. Now, in my experience in the fifty-seven years of my life growing up in evangelicalism, a do-gooder was actually a form of disparagement. That was an indication of somebody who didn't believe the Bible. He was just a do-gooder.
How everybody quite got there I've never fully understood. But it was a term of disparagement. Well, we're gonna have to recapture it in light of what the Bible says—in light of what Paul says to Titus.
The whole three chapters pulsate with a call to radical goodness—that radical goodness being an extension of the radical change wrought by the gospel in the lives of those who are under the care of Titus. And this courtesy will prevent an individual from taking matters into their own hands. And the word here for peaceable that is translated peaceable, amakos, is the word which means without fighting. Without fighting. Not pugilistic.
Not constantly looking for a fight. And in the course of it all, it is the gospel which is then revealed in the conduct. Now, you can go back generations and find this in history. Most of us know the name of William Wilberforce. And Wilberforce, who lived in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, is most famous for his impact in the community in the United Kingdom by his constant struggle against slavery.
He, a contemporary of Newton and others, labored hard for these things. But in a book that he wrote, entitled A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians in the Higher and Middle Classes in this Country, contrasted with Real Christianity, published in 1833, he bemoans the fact that within his lifetime, the believers in Britain were beginning to cut the umbilical cord between gospel belief and gospel behavior, so that they began to believe that all they needed was the behavior, forget the belief. And if you think about the history of the church, it is the history of the pendulum swinging out on both extremes, isn't it? A period of time where everybody says, All we need is the belief, and don't let's worry about the behavior. And then another period of time where everybody says, No, all we really need to concentrate is on the behavior, and we don't really need to pay much attention to the belief. But that's the point that he makes, that when you disengage gospel truth from gospel living, then it won't take very long for the whole thing to cave in upon itself. And I say that parenthetically, because it's so fundamental to what he has laid down in the early chapters and what he's coming to next. The fourth word is the word humility.
It's right there if you have an NIV. What are these believers to look like? What are they to be marked by? Well, they're to be marked by courtesy, and they're to be marked by community, and they're to be marked by loyalty, and they're to be marked by humility, and to show true humility towards all men. In other words, instead of Christianity making a person proud, it ought to make a person grateful. Christianity is supposed to be marked by meekness. That's not weakness. That's strength under control. By a gentleness of demeanor that would have an impact on a place like Crete and would also have an impact on a place like Cleveland. Paul is not suggesting here the absence of moral outrage, but he is making sure that the temptations and proclivities on the part of people who came from this environment, this agitational environment, need to be tempered by the truth of God's Word.
And any attempt at being proud, any attempt at selfishness, should be countermanded by the call to humility. Some of you watched Prime Minister's Question Time—I know that's about three of you—but Prime Minister's Question Time is aired at some ungodly hour in the morning on a Wednesday, and then also on a Sunday evening at nine o'clock on C-SPAN. And if you ever watch that, you will know that there's a person there who's called the Speaker. And the Speaker doesn't really do very much speaking at all. He's just responsible for deciding to ask the questions, and every so often he says, Order!
Order! And then everyone bays like horses, and it's really fascinating and a lot more fun than the average Congress that I've seen on MSNBC, I must say. Apparently nobody's there at all most of the time, so at least in the House of Commons there's somebody there to make a noise. And my favorite speaker in my lifetime was a man called Bernard Weatherall. Bernard Weatherall was a Yorkshireman. He seemed to me to be a very nice man.
I never met him. But I was not surprised when, upon his retirement, he gave an interview to the BBC. And in the course of the interview, they went around the Speaker's essentially palace or palatial home, so that if someone visits from another country, if they're not taken into a royal residence, they will often be greeted by the Speaker, may have residence in their home, and so on. And it is really a quite remarkable place, and full of history and amazing paintings and gilded walls and all kinds of stuff. And as the man was showing us all around on TV, the interviewer said, Well, you know, this is a pretty lofty position to find yourself in.
How have you navigated your way through these high corridors and echelons of influence and of significance, and you apparently have come out of it largely unscathed? And he did. He was a man of integrity and kindness.
And I was so desperate to hear his answer. And he put his hand in his jacket pocket, and he brought out a thimble. And it was a silver thimble, and his father had been a tailor.
And when his father died, his mother gave Bernhard his father's favorite thimble. And when he became a member of the House of Commons, and then when he became the Speaker of the House, she said to him, Bernhard, keep that thimble in your pocket, and remember where you came from, and remember who you are, and treat everybody with kindness and grace and respect and humility. Is it outlandish for me to suggest that the evangelical community might, at this very moment in American history and culture, do well to put a few thimbles in our pockets? And there is, loved ones, no escape from this, because you will notice the jarring, challenging final phrase of verse 2, Towards all people. In other words, this gentle courtesy, which is so important a trait of Christian character, that it must be exhibited to the world in general, must include those who are most hostile to us, must include those whom we like the least, must include those who are not our fellow Christians and our personal friends. You see, if it's simply said at the bottom—and to show true humility to all those of you who are a part of the fellowship here at, you know, First Evangelical Church of Crete, everybody could breathe a sigh of relief and get on, couldn't they? But no, he doesn't say that. Because after all, what good would that be in a culture that is marked by agitation and by animosity, by disruption, by meanness, by viciousness, by unkindness, by immorality?
No, it's out there where the salt is on the potatoes, not in the salt cellar, that the impact comes. Now, just in case you think that somehow or another I have reached some lofty pinnacle from which I can give you a lecture on this, and, you know, tell you how well I'm doing. Remember the quote with which I began, right? Right?
Those like myself whose imagination far exceeds. Okay? Right. And then, so I read the newspaper the same as you. So now I'm doing Titus 3.
I do Titus 3 for the people that come to the thing. All right, here we've got Hollywood versus Justice, the rush to support Roman Polanski and to show true humility towards all men. Peggy Noonan, keeping America safe from the renters. This is her piece on the demise of American journalism, the absence of the elders, the loss of crystal, the loss of the old boys who actually, you know, read books and understood stuff, as opposed to the talking heads that have the airwaves twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. And this, she says, is an example of what passes for interchange in the political realm of our country at the moment. Two examples from the past week. A few days ago I was sent a link to a screed by MSNBC's left-wing anchorman, Ed Schultz, in which he explained opposition to the president's healthcare reform.
This was his quote. The Republicans lie. They want to see you dead. They'd rather make money off your dead corpse.
They kind of like it when that woman has cancer and they don't have anything for us. Next, a link to the syndicated show of right-wing radio talker Alex Jones on the subject of the US military, whose security efforts at the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh show them to be agents and lackeys of the New World Order, according to this guy. Here's his quote. They are complete enemies of America. Our military's been taken over. This is the end of our country. They'd love to kill ten thousand Americans. The republic is falling apart right now.
I want to tell you something, loved ones. If you get up in the morning and go to bed at night, listening to drivel like this, you are gonna be really, really hard-pressed to make any kind of creditable attempt. We are gonna be hard-pressed to make any kind of creditable attempt to pay attention to the clear, unequivocal instruction of the Bible in Titus chapter 3, verses 1 and 2, in a call to civic deportment that demands honesty, that demands humility, that demands loyalty, that demands courtesy, and the duty is grounded in the dynamic, and the dynamic is the gospel itself. You are sensible people.
Do your homework, and we'll come back and think about it some more. Just a moment of silent prayer, asking God to help us to work out the wood from the trees, asking him to search our hearts, to see if there are wicked ways in us. You're listening to Alistair Begg on Truth for Life, with a message titled, Energetic in Goodness. Here at Truth for Life, we count it a privilege to open God's Word each day and to proclaim the gospel. In fact, here in the month of December, Christmas presents each of us with a wonderful opportunity to share the gospel with others. And to help you with that, we've selected a number of books that are high-quality, Christ-centered gifts you can give to loved ones during this season of giving. You can purchase them at truthforlife.org slash gifts. There are a bundle of books for preschoolers, a book for older children that looks at the parables Jesus told, pocket-sized booklets that teach young children the story of God's plan of salvation, and there are gifts for adults. Everything we sell, we sell at our cost, so these books are a great deal, all of them under $10, and shipping in the U.S. is free. Take advantage of this opportunity to stock up at very affordable prices and to share the gospel widely this holiday season. Again, go to truthforlife.org slash gifts. And when you add a donation along with your purchase, you can add another book as our way of saying thanks. The book is titled Cloud of Witnesses. It's a collection of very relevant prayers written by devout believers from throughout church history. Whether you make this book your own or give it as a gift, it will enrich the prayer life of any who read it. I'm Bob Lapine, hope you have a great weekend and are able to worship with your local church family this weekend. On Monday, Alistair Begg tells us how our memory can be the best remedy for our pride. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.
