The Apostle Paul warned his co-laborer in Gospel ministry, Titus, about the divisiveness of false teachers whose schemes threaten to undermine believers' confidence and faith. Today on Truth for Life, we'll learn how we should respond to similar quarreling or divisions within our churches. Alistair Begg is teaching from chapter 3 in the book of Titus.
We're looking at verses 8 through 11. I had the privilege earlier this year of being at Second Pres in Memphis. I was there with one of my best friends, someone that I actually call my big brother, and that is Sinclair Ferguson.
And I missed the address that he gave to pastors at the lunch hour, because I didn't arrive until the afternoon. And in the course of speaking, extemporaneously to these individuals, he pointed out a number of things to them. And he pointed out that in a number of places throughout the country, it would appear that those who are in positions of prominence all have some distinguishing feature about themselves and what they're on about—essentially, that their ministry is all marked by a thing. Whatever that thing might be, like, this thing is Reformed theology, or his thing is something this, or he distinguishes himself, he places himself in the marketplace by identifying himself with these certain things.
I don't say that in an unkind way. I think it's a fairly accurate assessment. Sinclair, reflecting on this, says that this is absolutely bizarre to me. And he says, you know, if I were to ask your wives—and he's speaking to ministers—if I were to ask your wives, what is the hallmark of your ministry, there really ought to be only one answer to that. You sit under that ministry, and the thing that you will be persuaded to say is, this ministry is Christ-centered, Christ-dominated, and Christ-filled. And if anything else—and this might well be the secret—this minister is Christ-intoxicated. Intoxicated with Christ.
Saturated with the gospel. So that those under the care of Titus may not be buffeted by all of these things, may not be seeking to find their security and their assurance by taking their spiritual pulse every morning when they get up, but they have been so grounded in the truth of the gospel, in the finished work of Christ, in the absolute sufficiency of his atonement, in all that he has rendered on behalf of the sinner that they're able to look away from themselves, and from their own sorry predicament, and from their own wanderings and so on, and our ineffectiveness in prayer, and our lack of love for others, and our disgruntlement in so many areas, and to say, It is all because of Christ that God may look upon me. And that is what Paul is saying to Titus. Here is what you have to stress. This is a trustworthy saying, and I want you to stress these things. These things, which he comes back to in the final sentence of verse 8, which he says are excellent and profitable for everyone. These are the things, these gospel things. And these things are in direct contrast to the false teachers who are actually unprofitable and useless. And for your homework, again, you can go back and read from about verse 10 on in chapter 1, and you will discover that he is making that point very clearly concerning these folks. It's not unique to Titus. He does the same thing when he writes to Timothy. And for example, in verse 7 of chapter 1 of 1 Timothy, he says, Some have wandered away from these and turned to meaningless talk. They want to be teachers of the law, but they do not know what they're talking about, or what they so confidently affirm.
That's pretty straight talk, isn't it? They think they're big teachers. They've got a big following. There's lots of people taking notes when they speak. But they're talking out of the top of their heads.
They do not know what it is they're saying and what they so confidently affirm. Now, Titus, I don't want you to be like that. I want your ministry to be marked by something different. And his language—that is, Paul's language—conveys the necessity of clarity and of certainty and of authority. Now, leave those words with you.
I didn't work them out. Clarity in laying out the nature of the gospel itself, a la verses 4–7. Certainty in the way in which Titus, if you like, stands before his group or moves among his group so that the trumpet is not giving an uncertain sound.
And authority—which is not an authority that derives from Titus's personality, but an authority which derives from that which Titus conveys to his people—namely, the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. So, here he says, it's what I want you to stress. Then he says, And here is why I want you to stress it. So that… It's a purpose clause in Greek and in English.
I want you to stress these things so that those who have trusted in God may be careful to devote themselves to doing what is good. Now, I don't think he would have been upset to think that many of the people were taking notes or wrote down some of these great quotes that he had. Now, Titus was able to quote somebody far better than B.
B. Warfield. He was able to quote the apostle Paul himself. He was able to say, We've had a letter from the mighty apostle Paul, and I want to read it out to you.
Quite wonderful. But he doesn't say, And the reason I'm stressing this for your congregation this morning here in Crete is so that you might all become theological eggheads, so that you might all be able to walk around and impress everybody with the grasp that you have of all of these things. Your grasp will be revealed in your life. And indeed, the impact in the community will be seen in goodness, and the goodness will be the evidence of the fact that you have been grasped by God in his kindness. And so, again, the recurring emphasis.
Who are these people, and what are they like? Well, I want you to make sure that they get ahold of this, Titus, so that they might be careful to devote themselves to doing what is good. We cannot evade this challenge, loved ones.
It just hits me like a hammer to say it to you. Careful every morning. Here's an opportunity, Lord, I'm going out into my day, I'm going into my normal place of employment. I just studied Titus, and apparently, as I go out today, one of the things that I have to be very careful to ensure happens is I want to be careful to do good.
I want to be kind, I want to be engaged, I want to be courteous, I want to be loyal, I want to be humble. And Lord, as you know—because I haven't even got out of my bed yet, and I've sinned my soul four times—as you know, there is no possibility of me looking into myself and saying, Well, I'm ready to be good today. After all, I'm such a courteous, humble, community, engaging kind of person. No, I am a wretched sinner, Lord, and apart from the dynamic of the gospel, which assures me of my acceptance with you, the living God, and by the renewing power of the Holy Spirit in my life, I don't have a hope in the world of being anything other than a miserable sinner out there. Because there are a lot of miserable Christian sinners, aren't there? It's very distressing when our friends tell us, You know, Mr. So-and-so, who is a complete, outright pagan, who tells all the dirty jokes, is a much nicer person than Mr. So-and-so, who claims to be a born-again Christian, and he has that big sticker on the back of his car. What are you going to say in response to that?
You're going to have to say, Yeah, you're absolutely right. I think he is a miserable sinner. And the person said, Well, I thought then that if he was a Christian that he wouldn't be a miserable sinner. And you have to say, No, he is a miserable sinner, he's a Christian. And this is the story of grace, that God saves miserable sinners.
And apparently this guy is a little slow off the mark on some of the things, and you ought to be encouraged by this, because you too are a miserable sinner, and God saves miserable sinners. As opposed to, Oh, no, he's a really nice guy. You just met him.
You know, he's not good on Tuesdays, but if you ever go on a business trip with him on a Wednesday, he's a fine fellow. Oh, no, no, he reads his Bible, he's a nice—yeah, never kicks the cat—nice to his wife. So what we're trying to do is now come up with a basis of acceptability that is not the gospel. The only acceptability of that miserable sinner is in the gospel. He knows that when he looks at the mirror and sees himself.
What is he? He's a miserable sinner saved by grace. Now, he has no justification for going out and being a miserable sinner with his friends and colleagues, and it is a royal disgrace when his pagan friends are actually a lot kinder and a lot nicer than he is. But that is actually a testimony to the fact of the nature of the gospel.
So. Humility. There's one for a start, huh? No, I am not conceited, said the man, although I have every right to be so. Why don't you read my new book, Humility and How I Attained It? I've got two quotes for you on humility. This is from an article in The Wall Street, September 18, this year, by Eric Felton, entitled Apology Not Accepted. Apology Not Accepted. And the article was about people who make public apologies.
And then here's the sentence. Humbling oneself isn't exactly the same thing as humility. Humbling oneself isn't exactly the same thing as humility. Here's David Wells' definition of humility from Losing Our Virtue, page 204. Humility has nothing to do with depreciating ourselves and our gifts in ways we know to be untrue. Even humble attitudes can be masks for pride. Humility is that freedom from our self which enables us to be in positions in which we have neither recognition nor importance, neither power nor validity, and even experience deprivation, and yet have joy and delight.
It is the freedom of knowing that we are not at the center of the universe, not even in the center of our own private universe. It's an amazing point of application, isn't it? Titus, I want you to make absolutely sure that you stress these things.
These are profitable, these are excellent things. It is vital that these people are grounded in the gospel, both in terms of their own security but also in terms of their impact in community, so that they will be careful to be devoted to doing whatever is good. While our time hastens to a conclusion, you will notice that he then goes to tell them in verse 9 of what he's also to avoid. If he is to affirm certain things, he's also to avoid other things. And what he wants them to avoid is foolish controversies, genealogies and arguments and quarrels about the law, because in contrast to the gospel, those things, you will notice at the end of verse 8, excellent and profitable, and these things are unprofitable and useless.
Mindless, pointless quarreling over stuff that has a peculiar interest for warped individuals. These false teachers that he's already referenced in chapter 1 were apparently very good at embroidering and supplementing the law of God. They were more apt at mythology than they were at theology. They were better at producing human concoctions than obeying God's commands. They were capable of developing genealogies, they took names out of the Old Testament books, and then they created a whole genealogy around those names, and then they had them added into some of the religious books. And then they had these huge discussions about the nature of these bogus genealogies. It was kind of like a sort of Old Testament version of the Loch Ness Monster, just with a touch of spice added to it.
And as a result of this, they sought to distract and to divert by lengthy debates, and the debates were all about dates and all about definitions. Now, tell me you haven't met any of these people. Thank you, by your silence you tell me you have. Is this intriguing? Perhaps. Is it edifying? Not for a moment. Not for a moment. If you have a peculiar bent in your mind, you may be interested in some of the stuff—hopefully not any of you have sent me this stuff that comes routinely to me via Truth for Life. Someone sent me something just the other day explaining that they had cracked the code of a particular book, and that this has now been done by this individual using a very interesting logarithmic proposal, and he wanted me to make sure that I paid careful attention to it so that I could let you and other people like you know that someone has now finally understood the book.
Well, I filed that, and not in the same place that I've been filing these B.B. Warfield quotes. No, you see, these people cannot be tolerated. The word that he uses for them is that they are to be muzzled. Muzzled.
Put a muzzle on them, he says. Don't let them come around and flap their mouths. It's not very politically correct.
We're so messed up now that anybody that says anything like this is immediately regarded as some horribly offensive person. No! I mean, have you been bitten by a dog lately? I was bitten by a dog just a summer ago. A big boxer dog jumped up, tore my shirt, bit me, scared me half to death. And I say, you know, why don't you put a muzzle on that dog?
There wasn't nothing unkind about it. I don't want to beat the dog with a stick. But I sure don't want it just to jump up and bite me like that.
That's scary. And he doesn't want these people jumping around the congregations in Crete, biting people, devouring people, getting them all off track. And so he says, Just muzzle them up. Make sure that you silence them, because they are insubordinate, they're empty-headed, and they're deceitful. And so they must be silenced.
The word that he uses, peristaso, to avoid these controversies and the people who bring them, is the word that simply means to turn the other way, to turn your back on them. Avoid them at all costs. Don't get sucked into these things. Now, it's interesting. Somebody asked me this morning, Do you think you're getting crankier in your old age?
I don't know that I can get much crankier, to tell you the honest truth, but it's possible. But I hope not, and one of the areas that I'm trying to learn is in this very area. Because there's hardly an occasion passes where I go anywhere—and not least of all preaching the congregation here—without somebody comes up afterwards, after you have endeavored to discharge the duties of your ministry, to lay out the truth of the Bible and everything, and someone comes up, and they've got some harebrained scheme or idea that they have developed from somewhere or whatever else it might be. And, instinctively, I want to say something that I probably shouldn't say, and so I'm working hard at not doing that. But it's hard. One of my great mentors, a retired clergyman in the Anglican church now, is masterful at it, and he can actually take two or three opinions and say yes to all of them and never let anybody get him ruffled. He's got that wonderful English phlegmatic approach to life. The trouble is, when you're a Celt, you're not blessed with that. You don't have that. That's part of it.
You want to stay—let me tell you what I think of that idea, you know? And so on. But he's wonderful, you know, and he's made a career out of it. He walks around with a coffee cup—I love telling my colleagues this—he'll have his coffee cup at the end of the service, he's just walking around, and someone will come up to him and say, You know, Mr. Lucas, I noticed that you were not as expositional as I thought you ought to have been.
You seem to be far more involved in systematic theology, and I think you really ought to just watch out for that. And he said, Oh, thank you, thank you, I will pay attention to that. Thank you.
Thank you very much. And then he just walked off and just leave him. He bumps into a fellow over here, the fellow over here, says, Mr. Lucas, this is the second time I've come here, and I, you know, I noticed that you seem to be far more expositional, and you're not really paying much attention to systematic theology at all in the way you're teaching the Bible. He said, Oh, thank you so much, that's a wonderful observation, and thank you, I must remember that as well. And then he just refused to be drawn into the nonsense. It's great skill in that.
Maybe when I'm eighty-three, I can do that as well. Now, we have to stop, but this is in keeping with what Paul says elsewhere. We would expect there to be a synergy between what Paul is writing to other places and this. So, for example, in Romans 16, he says, I urge you, brothers, to watch out for those who cause divisions and put obstacles in your way that are contrary to the teaching you have learned. Keep away from them, for such people are not serving our Lord Christ but their own appetites by smooth talk and flattery.
They deceive the minds of naïve people. These are the kind, he says when he writes to Timothy, these are the kind of people who worm their way into the homes of women who are weak-willed and pressed. Now, that is not a generic statement regarding all women, but it is a designation of a certain kind of woman within the context of Ephesus who were weak in their will and who were easy prey for these charlatans.
And he says there is no way in the world that this must be allowed to continue. And therefore, I want you to watch out, and I want you to warn a divisive person once, and then a second time, and after that have nothing to do with them. The word that is used there for warn is the Greek word which gives us our English word, nothetic, from which we get nothetic counseling. It is the exact same verb that is used in Ephesians 6 for what fathers are to do. They are not to exasperate their children, but they are to bring them up in the training or the admonition of the Lord.
The same word is used there, nothesien. So in other words, the warning that is referenced here is a warning, it's not a threat. He says, I want you to point out to this individual the implication of wrong actions with the purpose of seeing them embrace right actions. Says Donald Guthrie, if this action, however, should seem rather harsh, Titus must recognize that the stubbornness of the man is evidence of a perverted mind. And so, in other words, this individual, such a man, is warped and sinful, and by his actions he will be seen to be so. And Titus, by his actions, will be seen to be concerned for the welfare of the church.
I'm tempted to suggest that what we have here is another sterling reminder of what has become for some of us almost a mantra—namely, that the main things are the plain things, and the plain things are the main things. And to be diverted and distracted and deceived by chasing down these avenues, says Paul, is something that must not happen. And the leadership of the church—in this instance, in the case of Titus—must be prepared to be totally clear concerning the gospel, absolutely certain in the things that he stresses, and aware of the fact that any authority that is his is an authority that is grounded in the truth of God's Word, which he's been given to proclaim, and in the power of the Holy Spirit, who enables him to do so. So let us heed this instruction for the good of the church and for the glory of God.
You're listening to Truth for Life with Alistair Begg and the conclusion of a message he's titled Debates and Divisions. With the end of the year just around the corner, we are grateful to God for how he has enabled Truth for Life to bring you his Word every day this year. The production and distribution of Alistair's teaching is made possible by way of your giving.
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