From time to time, it's good to pause and take inventory of what it is that we're really passionate about. He'll also, over in chapter 2, verse 2, tell older men to be dignified, sound in faith. He wants the body to be anchored to the genuine articles of faith.
So I have to ask the question, what is it that we're passionate about? Are we passionate about relaying to the next generation of believers, to Christians at large, the soundness of their faith? If there's one thing the Apostle Paul could never be accused of, it was lacking passion. In fact, you won't find a more passionate Christian in the New Testament other than Jesus himself.
Why is that? Well, Paul will tell you in his own words in the passage we're studying today. The question for you to consider is, what are you passionate about? What is it that really motivates you and excites you and drives you to action? Today on Wisdom for the Heart, Stephen Davey is returning to his series called Slave Traits. Today's message is called Passion. If you were with us in our last session, Paul introduced himself as the slave of God in verse 1.
The word doulos appears in that first self-disclosing title translated softly, bondservant. We spent a bit of time talking about that. We've been purchased.
We're no longer our own. We've been bought with a price, 1 Corinthians 6.20. Then Paul went on to describe himself as an apostle, an apostolos, a messenger boy for Jesus Christ. He is passionate about both the message and his calling as a messenger.
Paul, frankly, was one of the most passionate men you'll probably meet. I think if we met with him, his leg would always be shaking because he's ready to go. He's ready to talk.
He's ready to dig. He will teach into the early hours of the morning. He will be involved in all kinds of enterprises. He'll make tents on the side so that he can have money to do certain things.
He's looking to go to Spain. He can't wait to get to Rome. Just a passionate man. This is the perspective of Paul who was not only owned by God, but he was an owner of his calling, passionate about it. I am all of the above, Paul says, a slave and a messenger.
Why? He'll give us several passions, and we'll cover one or two. The first one is this. He is passionate about God's elect. He says in the middle part of verse 1, I'm passionate, that is, I am all that I am for the faith of those chosen of God. Construction of that Greek phrase, kata, translated for. When attached to the accusative means, this is my goal.
This is the end to which I'm headed. In other words, Paul is saying, I'm a slave of God and an apostle of Christ for this goal, for this passion. This is my incentive to establish, deepen the faith of those chosen of God. This theme, by the way, is picked up down in verse 13 where he tells Titus, you're going to need to correct those in the church because they need to become sound in the faith. He'll also, over in chapter 2, verse 2, tell older men to be dignified, sound in faith.
He wants the body to be anchored to the genuine articles of faith. So I have to ask the question, what is it that we're passionate about? Are we passionate about relaying to the next generation of believers, to Christians at large, the soundness of their faith, the depth of their faith, growth in faith? I shared with my greenhouse class the story of D.O.
Moody. I apologize if I've shared it in here, but it came back to my mind, an evangelist in the mid-1800s as a young man. He had joined the church where he was attending. Back in that day, that required that he would be interviewed by the deacons. By the way, this man would go on to preach crusades in England and America. He would establish a school we know now as Moody Bible Institute. Moody Press began with his efforts. The church he planted is now known as Moody Church Pastored by Erwin Lutzer. So he would be used significantly by the Lord. But part of the process for membership was you had to be interviewed by the deacon on the soundness of your faith, the doctrines of the church.
So after that lengthy interview, the record reveals to us that Moody was declined for membership based on the insufficient knowledge of the gospel. Now they didn't just leave him there. They put him on a study. How long? One year.
One year course of guided study in the Word. At the end of that year, they interviewed him again. And at the end of that interview, they received him into membership. The records showed, get this, they received him with reservation. We're a little concerned about whether or not he grasps the doctrines of our faith.
Can you imagine trying to sell that today? Can you imagine that in the average church in America? We don't really care what you believe. We just want you to join us. We want to get bigger.
We want to have more, maybe a little more money. We need some volunteers. So come down and I'll raise your hand. We'll vote you in. You can do all that in one Sunday.
We've never asked one question about doctrine, about what a person is believing, the soundness of their faith. Someone mentioned to me last week, I guess he kind of knew where I was headed. He said, Stephen, you've got to see this book. So he told me about it and I ordered it, got it, read it, and I've already tossed it.
He did it tongue in cheek with me, but he knew I'd enjoy it. It certainly lived up to his title. Here's the title, written by a pastor of a liberal mainline denominational church today.
Here's the title. What's the Least I Can Believe and Still Be a Christian? Just let that sink in. What's the Least I Can Believe and Be a Christian? It's no surprise that he would go through his paperback book here denying biblical inerrancy. In fact, he made the statement and I wrote it down. He said the biblical inerrancy was actually detrimental to authentic faith. I mean, believing this is the inerrant word of God is going to get in your way. He also went on to affirm homosexuality, argue for evolution, deny the literal eternal state of hell, suggest that unbelievers get into heaven as well. We don't know. We can't be certain.
I found it ironic, by the way, that it was published by John Knox Press. I can just imagine that reformer from Scotland rolling over in his grave with his name attached to such rubbish. The question is not, what's the least I can believe and still be a Christian? What's the least I can do as a father and be a good dad? What's the least amount I could do at my job and still keep it? What's the least I can believe and still be a Christian?
Frankly, that's exactly where the American church is today. The question ought to be, what's the most I can believe because I am a Christian? Would you teach? Could I learn? Can I get into the Word? We're going to go through the book of Titus and we'll be finished in a few weeks. And we'll get to the end of it and we will all say we could go back through it again because we really don't understand it.
So deep, so rich, so wonderful. How much can I believe because I belong to Jesus Christ? Is there certainty in this book? Paul is passionate about the faith of those who belong to God and he lived for the sake of the gospel. He lived for the body. Shipwrecked, nearly stoned to death. Some believe he was stoned to death and resurrected.
Beaten, imprisoned, executed as a martyr. His passion would be to advance the gospel of Jesus Christ and it would not be the bare minimum for this great evangelist gave us the deepest of doctrines in his letters, didn't he? Passionate about the soundness of the faith. Notice of those chosen by God. Now that phrase has caused a lot of heartburn, hadn't it?
Chosen by God from the word eklektos which gives us our word elect. We mentioned that and people run for cover. Let me just spend a few moments, we've spent sermons on it in the past so let me just spend a few moments here on this. Think of it as two sides of a coin, that coin being regeneration or salvation. One side of the coin is God's perspective. None of us can even come close to understanding what we read about God's perspective. The other side of the coin is our human responsibility and we get that. We understand that because we're human beings. I'm an expert at understanding my own perspective in everything, right?
We're good at that. So let me describe it in the terms that the New Testament uses for this gospel as he talks about it being a marriage. I try to think this week of perhaps a different kind of illustration to help. First we have this divine, sovereign proposal from God. That's God's perspective. And he's chosen to deliver that proposal to his elect and he chose before the foundation of the world. Secondly, on the other side of the coin, there is the willing acceptance of the unbeliever to that divine proposal.
And it's going to take both in order to bring about salvation. Let me ask you this way. How many of you guys formally proposed marriage to your wife?
This is not a trick question. If you're married, you can raise your hand. You formally proposed. How many of you guys said the words to your girlfriend that went kind of like this?
I love you. Will you marry me? Will you be my wife even though I am forever unworthy of you? And all the ladies said, Amen. Boy, is that ever true. Well, here's how it usually works. I mean, not always, but most of the time. Eventually some guy comes to the realization that this woman, this creature of enrapturing delight and infuriating complexity, I'm preaching the whole counsel of God here, okay, both sides. He says to himself, I don't want to just live with her.
I can't live without her. And all the men said, Amen. Smart guy down to the front here. I'm not sure about the rest of you.
You practice that. You really haven't fallen in love, although you have certainly, but you are choosing to deliver to that woman your love, your fidelity, your vows of servanthood, your cherishing of her and loving her. And so you proposed to her because you'd chosen her.
She also came to the same conclusion, perhaps not with the same enthusiasm, but she came to the same conclusion. Now, listen, your choices did not make a marriage. Somebody had to propose, and guys finally got around to it, and somebody has to accept. Now, on the wedding day, and I've done a number of weddings, if I were to ask the bride, Did you choose him? She'd say, Sure, I did. If I were to ask him, Did you choose her?
He would say, Yes, I did. But in the order of events he proposed, she accepted, which led to a marriage. Election is God's initiating proposal to the bride he's chosen for his son. In fact, the New Testament tells us the bride is his gift to the son. However, no one is going to go to heaven who hasn't accepted the proposal and said yes to Jesus.
Nobody. Whoever calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. You can stay up through the middle of the night, and I certainly have, trying to figure out the mystery of God's proposal, but let's instead join Paul in being passionate about delivering the terms of the marriage contract to those who before time began God had chosen, and it's that message delivered to the world that brings to life by the Spirit of God those who will believe, and there has to be a messenger because Paul will tell the Romans they can't believe in someone they've never heard of.
Somebody's got to go tell them. Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of God, Romans 10, 17. By the way, how do you know if you're one of the elect?
That's the easy part. Have you said yes to Jesus Christ? If you've said yes to Jesus Christ, then this doctrine is referring to you, and it's a positive doctrine, by the way. It's intended to do nothing more than dazzle the bride. In fact, the mystery of it dazzles us even further, and no woman that I know of that I've ever been involved in a wedding ceremony gets down to the altar and then says to her future husband, I'm not enjoying any of this.
Why not? Because I just can't get out of my mind all the girls you didn't choose. No, she's basking in the revelation of his love for her. See, this is designed for the amazement of the bride. This isn't something we go out there and ask everyone, are you elect, are you elect, are you elect? No, it's whosoever will may come, knowing that that part is God's. We deliver the message and the invitation. We don't understand God's part, but we're supposed to be left with this amazing thought that God's grace is indeed amazing.
He chose me. I don't understand that. I don't understand how Jesus Christ could pay 2,000 years ago for a sin I'll commit tomorrow. I don't understand that, but it's amazing. I don't understand how God's going to collect and reconstruct the dust in my casket and bring it to immortal life, to reunite it with my spirit, which has been with Christ already since the moment I died. I don't understand that, but I think it's amazing. Paul says effectively, I happen to be passionate about delivering the truth of the gospel, knowing that those whom God has chosen, when they hear the gospel at some point in time in their lives, they will be brought to life and believe.
Frankly, let me tell you something. There's nothing more thrilling than being a part of that process. Paul, who teaches the doctrines of grace, one of the most evangelistic men you'll ever read about, he would witness to a stump. I mean, this guy was committed to the gospel of Jesus Christ. There's nothing more thrilling than delivering the gospel, the terms of the wedding contract to someone, and watching as the Spirit of God opens their eyes in understanding.
And they say, you know what, I want to say yes to Jesus Christ. You know what our challenge is as a church? That if I were to potentially ask for a show of hands of people in this assembly who have delivered the gospel to somebody, many hands would never go up.
And if I wanted to even narrow it down further to say, everybody raise your hand if you have prayed with some unbeliever that God has allowed you to intersect and you've heard them receive Christ as Savior. You see, I can stand up here and I can talk about the loss of virtues and the growth of vice and the digression of Western culture and the mainline denomination of a liberal church with all of its confusion. We can curse the darkness. But are we delivering the light?
Titus needs to change the island of Crete. And it will not be by his efforts alone. It will be the magnificent mystery of the grace of God that will use his preaching and teaching, the light to bring people out of darkness into this marvelous light. I remember, in fact, I just reread again the story by Howard Hendricks, who retired from Dallas Seminary just recently. He retired from teaching for 50 years. He remains, for most of his students, eternally grateful in our hearts for having had somebody teach us like him.
He speaks biographically in his book, Teaching to Change Lives, which I now require for our seminary students here. And I want to read you a paragraph out of this. He writes, I'm sure I would have died and gone to hell and nobody would have particularly cared. That's how his book begins. I was born into a broken home.
My parents, having separated before I was born, the only time I ever saw them together was 18 years later when I was called to testify in a divorce court. As a boy, I lived in a neighborhood in North Philadelphia in which they said an evangelical church could never be planted. God has a sense of humor whenever anybody decides what can't be done. The Lord led a small group of Christians to band together, buy a little house, start a church. One man in the church, as it developed, his name was Walt.
He had only a sixth grade education. One day, Walt told the Sunday school superintendent he wanted a Sunday school class for boys, for himself, to teach. That's great, Walt.
We don't have an opening. Our classes are filled with teaching staff. Walt insisted, however, so the superintendent told him, well, this is good. Why don't you go out and get a class?
Anybody you find out there and bring them back is yours to teach. So he took him up on it. Hendricks wrote, Walt came into my neighborhood. The first time we met, I was in middle school playing marbles out on the concrete sidewalk. Son, he said to me, how would you like to go to Sunday school? I wasn't interested.
Anything with the word school in it had to be bad news. So he said, well, how about I play you a game of marbles? Well, that was different. So he got down on his knees, and we shot marbles that afternoon and had a great time, although he whipped me in every single game.
After that, I would have followed him anywhere. Walt ended up picking up a total of 13 boys in that neighborhood to begin his Sunday school class, all but four of us from broken homes. And today, 11 of those 13 are serving Jesus Christ full time. See, Paul was that kind of passionate man, and he calls us to be the same.
I'm going to deal lightly with just the next one. We may go back and rehearse it, but I want to give you one more passion. Paul was also passionate about God's truth.
And then we'll close here in just a moment or two. He goes on in verse 1, notice this. For the faith of those chosen of God and the knowledge of the truth. And you really ought to circle that word truth because that's one of the most disgusting words to our generation. That is incredibly dogmatic to suggest that something is true truth, as Schaeffer said. This sounds like you might be imposing a virtue on me.
It might be that you dare to suggest a vice to me, that you might suggest there is right and wrong. The word truth suggests dogma, doesn't it? But we know today in our generation, of course, that it's really just your opinion. In fact, your truth is just for you. You can keep your truth to yourself, which basically relates everything to personal opinion.
It's just your opinion. So, Paul, what do you mean that we can come to the knowledge of the truth? That sounds like certainty to me. Well, the word for knowledge, Paul uses here as a compound Greek word that's a favorite.
You'll find it over and over again in his letters. It refers to a precise understanding of something that is objectively true. Paul links it, the word knowledge, with truth often. You're coming to a precise understanding of something that's true. He's saying that truth can be knowable.
It can be grasped, embraced. We can know things for certain. It isn't a matter of opinion that a spoonful of arsenic will kill you. That's the truth. Truth can have definitive content. The problem is we can buy that about arsenic, but bring it into the world of spiritual things and all of a sudden everything is whatever you want to believe.
Something true for me can be absolutely diametrically opposed to what you believe is true for you. That's not what Paul is saying. In fact, we know the Bible is self-authenticating.
Israel exists. The church exists. Prophecies have come true by the bucket load. Jesus Christ came. He was crucified, historically attested to that. His coming changed the way we view history. He rose from the dead. I witnessed by hundreds of people the truth will not cease to be the truth if you don't buy it. The truth about this God, this Lord, that he lives.
He lives whether or not we believe it. If you're traveling, think of it this way, down a mountain road and you come across a sign and it's got that curvy serpentine figure and it says, Caution, sharp curve ahead. And the speed limit drops down to 25.
You're going to drive 25 whether you're paid by the hour or not, right? You slow down. Actually, you can do three things in relation to the truth of that message. There's a sharp curve ahead. You can obey it and slow down. You can ignore it and maintain your speed.
Or you can defy it and speed up. No matter what anybody does in relation to the truth of that sign and the coming curve, that truth remains. In fact, we will suffer or be safe depending on how we respond to the truth. Paul says, I want the church on the island of Crete to get a grip on truth and he's going to deliver a number of truths. We've got to get a hold of these. We have to understand these.
These are laws and we are either broken upon them or changed by them. The truth about sin, the truth about moral purity, the truth about authority, the truth about heaven, the truth about the mercy of God, the truth about discipline, and on and on and on. The truth that life is not all about getting all the stuff you can get so you can finally arrive at retirement.
Go back to the old version of the game. That's the gospel. Teach them that our lives on earth, that they're a voyage. They begin at birth.
They end at death. God is at the helm and one day we will stand before him and then our true reward will be given. The apostle Paul was passionate about sharing the gospel and making sure that the generation coming after him understood the truth of it. He was also passionate about teaching and defending the truth of God's word. These are both passions that should be found in us as well. This is Wisdom for the Heart with Stephen Davey.
Stephen's in a series from Titus called Slave Traits and he's entitled today's message, Passion. Wisdom for the Heart is produced by Wisdom International, a disciple-making ministry. We have several Bible-based resources designed to help you grow in your faith. Navigate your web browser to wisdomonline.org to learn more. You'll be able to access the complete archive of Stephen's teaching and that's available to you free of charge as audio files you can listen to or the printed manuscripts. We also have several books, commentaries, devotional guides and Bible studies.
It's all designed to help you become more like Christ. Once again, that website is wisdomonline.org. You can go there anytime. You can also access Stephen's teaching from the Wisdom International app so be sure and install that to your Apple or Android device. Thanks for joining us today. We'll continue through this series next time right here on Wisdom for the Heart. Thank you.
Whisper: medium.en / 2025-01-08 00:36:08 / 2025-01-08 00:46:23 / 10