To Further the Faith

So we've finished five weeks in the Book of Hosea throughout the month of June.

And as a few people have mentioned, this month of July, we're kicking into the Book of Titus.

Now, I haven't preached in 10 weeks, which is why I look like this.

I look haggard.

But I haven't preached in 10 weeks, apart from monologuing to my gracious wife, whenever I find things interesting.

But I'm itching to get into this month in Titus.

Our senior pastor is on three weeks of well-deserved holiday, so I have the joy to preach this series in Titus, and I'm excited.

And that was until I came to this passage a couple of weeks ago.

It's a hard book, Titus, and it's a hard passage that we have today.

I think for two reasons it's hard.

Firstly, the audience of Titus.

The book of Titus is different to other letters in the New Testament because it's not written from Paul to the believers in a particular area, like Rome or Corinth or Ephesus.

It's written to a person who is the leader of the leaders of those types of people, which means when we come to this book of Titus, we have to do a bit of extra kind of theological work to understand how this hits all of us in the way that we follow Jesus tomorrow morning.

That's reason number one why it's difficult.

The second reason is that this passage is the introduction to the letter, which I don't know about you.

I confess that when I read the letters of the New Testament, often I skip through these verses to get to the good stuff.

And yet our entire message today is that part of the Bible, Titus 1 verses 1 to 4.

I've learnt that when you have a hard Bible passage, something tricky, it's good to ask simple questions.

And I don't think there's any more simple questions than these five.

Who, what, where, when and why.

Who, what, where, when and why.

Those are the questions that we're going to ask of the Book of Titus this morning, as a way of introducing this series in the month of July.

So firstly, who?

Who is the Book of Titus about?

Well, we read in verse 1, Titus chapter 1, verse 1.

Paul, a servant of God and an apostle of Jesus Christ.

And then in verse 4, 2, Titus, my true son in our common faith.

So there it is, Paul and Titus.

Paul and Titus.

You might remember Paul, he was a Jewish Pharisee, which means he's one of the religious elite of Judaism, and he was ethnically Jewish.

So his parents, his parents, parents, parents, parents, parents were Jewish, tracing their line all the way back to Abraham.

He's a Jewish Pharisee, but we learn from the Book of Acts and other places that he was born in the Greek city of Tarsus, which is in modern day Turkey, which means he's a Roman citizen.

So Paul is this interesting blend of Jewish by religion and by ethnicity, and yet he's conversing in Greek and Roman culture.

He brings those two things together.

In verse 1, Paul says he is a servant of God.

That means one who does the will of God.

Literally, the word doulos means slave, bond servant, someone who is bound by loyalty to God.

And he also says he's an apostle of Jesus Christ.

That word apostle means sent one, one who is sent.

And the sender is Jesus, correct.

Jesus is the one who sends.

He has sent Paul, commissioned him to have a special authority.

The apostles in the New Testament, that's capital A apostle, not lowercase a, the apostles were ones who were eyewitnesses of the things that Jesus said and did of his life, death, resurrection and ascension.

The ones who had received the spirit and then had been sent out as apostles, capital A, to have special authority to plant churches and to correct those churches.

Now Paul himself didn't, he wasn't an eyewitness of the things that Jesus did in Israel, but he was, he had an encounter with the risen Christ.

We learn that story in Acts chapter nine.

Paul was on the road to Damascus.

His name was Saul, Saul and Paul.

And the risen Lord Jesus appeared to him in a blinding light.

And he had this encounter.

So he is in that sense a, he describes himself as one abnormally born among the apostles.

That's Paul.

And then it's to Titus.

Now we don't actually know very much about Titus.

His name only appears a few times.

For instance, in 2 Corinthians 8, Paul says, As for Titus, he is my partner and co-worker among you.

In Galatians 2 verse 3, Paul says, Not even Titus who was with me was compelled to be circumcised.

2 Timothy 4 verse 9, Do your best to come to me quickly.

Timothy 4, Demas, because he loved this world, has deserted me and has gone to Thessalonica.

Cretians has gone to Galatia, and Titus to Dalmatia.

So from these couple of mentions of Titus, we learn a few things.

He was a partner and co-worker with Paul, someone who shared in the apostolic ministry.

We learned that he was Greek, which means he was not ethnically Jewish, but he was a Gentile who through faith in Jesus, joins the people of God at a later date.

And we know that Paul, as Paul often did with his protégés, his students, he would send Titus, he sent Titus to Dalmatia and elsewhere.

So Paul and Titus.

Who is Titus about?

Paul and Titus.

But I think there's one more party in this who question that is important, and that is the kind of the background who, the people, the community that Titus is living among.

Later on, we're going to see that Paul refers to them as God's elect.

And sometimes when we say the word elect in church, we all get tight because we're wondering what's about to come.

I think in this case, it's very simple.

This word elect is the Greek eclectos, which means it's a richly loaded Old Testament term that almost every single time refers to the people of Israel.

The nation that God chose, the nation he elected out of all the nations, in the world, in 1 Peter 2 verse 9, Peter writes, but you, he's talking about the church, which is the new Israel, you are a chosen people.

That's the same word, eclectos, a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness and into his wonderful light.

That's what it means, God's elect, his church, his chosen people, the ones that he decided beforehand to bless and to give eternal life to.

And so, what that means is we have Paul writing to Titus, and Titus is living in the community of faith.

These are the three sort of parties in the who question of Titus.

And what that makes me reflect on is the fact that when we come to Titus, we're reading somebody else's mail.

There's a whole relational context that we don't know about.

What was the relationship between Paul and Titus?

What did they talk about?

How did they relate to each other?

We don't know.

All we have is this letter in front of us and the other letters of the New Testament.

There's this whole world of somebody else's mail that we don't know about, which I think, for a start, gives us pause to be humble as we come to the Scripture.

We don't know everything.

We can't make up the context that these two had.

And it also makes me reflect on the fact that we don't know a lot.

We look at what we do know.

And Paul says in verse 4, Titus, my true son in our common faith.

Paul refers to Titus as his son.

You see this pattern in the church in the first century and even now of mentorship, of discipleship, of passing on the gospel, generation to generation.

And so one of the questions that we've talked about here at church before is, who's your Paul?

Who's your Titus?

Who's the person that you are learning from, that you are asking questions of?

Someone further down the road in following Jesus.

And then who are you passing on the gospel to?

Who's your Paul and who's your Titus?

At NorthernLife, you might be familiar, we have a core value that summarizes this idea.

It's canvas of color.

We believe that God is painting his story on the canvas of generations.

That means that the wise, mature, older Christians, and then the middle ones, and then the young ones, we are a canvas woven together.

Who's your Paul and who's your Titus?

That is the who.

Paul and Titus in the context of the community of faith.

Secondly, what is the Book of Titus?

The short answer is, next slide, that.

Everything between those two people is what Titus is.

The slightly longer answer is it's a letter, an epistle of 659 words written in Koine Greek, which means common Greek, the language of the first century, on leather parchment.

So they would take leather from some kind of animal and stretch it and process it and work on it until it was really thin, really tough, and they would write their letter on it.

It's fascinating that our passage this morning is one sentence in the original language.

65 words, one sentence, and this is what it looks like.

You try and imagine that on a piece of parchment, handwritten.

That's what the letter to Titus looked like.

Now, three things you'll notice.

One, they're all capital letters.

They hadn't invented lowercase letters yet.

Two, there's no spaces between the words, but there are discrete words in there that the trained reader could discern.

And three, there's no punctuation, because the words themselves carry the punctuation inside them.

So again, when we look at that, that's the letter that we're reading.

We're not reading a 21st-century text message or an email from one person to another.

We're reading a, what is it, 20th century, 21st century old ancient Greek letter, which again is cause for humility when we come to this word.

Not many of us, I can't read that, and I studied Greek for a few years at college.

Not many of us can read that.

And so it makes us reflect on the posture that we have.

What's the posture you have when you come to the word of God?

We were just, my wife and I, away for seven weeks in Europe.

And this is quite a heavy Bible when you need to be conscious of weight.

So I didn't bring my Bible, but praise the Lord, I had this with me.

I had my Bible, my phone, my iPad, with the entire Bible.

And even, I do probably 90% of my reading is e-books.

So I had all my books with me, all my commentaries and the whole Bible.

And I could read it on a phone, which was such a blessing.

But then coming back about two weeks ago, I got back into reading this again.

And the thing that I was struck by after seven weeks of not holding this is it's heavy.

When you hold a Bible in your hand, it's heavy.

And for me, that was this cue to realize this has weight, authority.

It's a cue to the body to say this is important.

And I think that I realized that this has a kind of weight that this doesn't have.

Because yes, I read the Bible on this, but I also go on Instagram on this, and I check emails on this.

And frankly, this is a very different posture to this.

So what's your posture when you come to the Word of God?

I do encourage you to, for the rest of time, but especially for this Titus series, to bring your Bible to church, that we as a community might have the posture of coming under this book, this weighty, authoritative book, and knowing that we can't understand it, because not many of us can read that.

But we have the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Truth, to help us.

What's your posture when you come to the Word?

The letter of Titus is an epistle, a letter.

It's three chapters long, 650 odd words.

And today, we're going to look at chapters 1, verses 1 to 4.

Next week, we'll look at the rest of chapter 1, then all of chapter 2, then all of chapter 3, so that by July 27, we would have read the entire ancient Greek letter from Paul to Titus.

That's our plan.

So who is it?

Paul and Titus in the context of the community of faith.

What is it?

An ancient Greek letter.

Thirdly, where is the letter to Titus set?

On one side of the equation, on the Paul side, he doesn't say where he's writing from.

Now, scholars have tried to reconstruct Paul's journeys throughout the ancient world, and they think he was probably out of prison in Rome and in Macedonia, but it's unclear, and probably most people agree that where Paul was when he wrote the letter doesn't actually impact our interpretation that much.

What is important is what Paul says in verse 5.

The reason I left you, Titus, in Crete.

Crete was the place where Paul had sent his true son, Titus, to bear apostolic authority and foster the church.

Now, Crete is an island on the Mediterranean.

Here's a map.

This is the ancient world, well, this is the modern world.

This was taken this week, this photo, or this screenshot.

We have down the bottom right, Israel.

That's where Jesus was born, lived, died, rose again.

Top left is Rome.

And right in the middle, the circle with the big word saying Crete is Crete, an island in the Mediterranean Sea.

In fact, it's the biggest island of the Greek islands, the fifth biggest island in the Mediterranean Sea and the 88th largest island in the world.

Eight and a half thousand kilometers squared, which means if you take a triangle from New Castle down to Wollongong and then west to Katoomba and then back up, the area of that triangle is about the size of the island of Crete.

So it's quite a big island in the Mediterranean.

Scholars estimate that there would have been, in the first century when Paul is writing this letter, probably around 300,000 people living on this island.

That's a lot of people.

Now, that's Wikipedia trivia over.

What I think is more important for our purposes is to learn that in Greek mythology, Crete was the birthplace of Zeus, king of the gods.

So in the stories that the Greeks understood about their gods, he was born on this island in a cave.

And from Greek mythology, we learned that Zeus was a notorious liar.

He would manipulate people, he would bend the truth, he would appear in different forms to seduce people.

In fact, Paul says in verse 12 of chapter 1, one of Crete's own prophets has said it, Cretans are always liars, evil brutes and lazy gluttons.

Now imagine that.

Imagine some prophet says something about Crete, and then the Holy Spirit stamps it in Holy Scripture for all time.

Cretans are always liars, evil brutes and lazy gluttons.

But it was true, maybe not always, all the time, but as a culture, they were marked by these sorts of things.

In fact, there was a word, the word kreitizo meant to act like a person from Crete, to speak like a Cretan, which means to lie.

So in the first century, if you said, Oh, you're such a Cretan, you're a kreitizo, it means you are lying.

That's how strongly associated the idea of dishonesty was with the place called Crete, the island of Crete.

We see the same thing in Corinth, the ancient city of Corinth.

There was a word, Corinthatsomai, which meant to act like a person from Corinth, which was a euphemism for to be sexually immoral or to engage a prostitute.

And so it made me think that, I was reflecting on this idea, and I was born in the Shia, meaning not Hobbiton or not the Hornsby Shia, but the Sutherland Shia, the true Shia.

Somehow, they have a monopoly on the term.

And when I was 12 years old, in 2012, a TV show came out called The Shia.

Does anyone remember the TV show The Shia?

A few people.

And The Shia was a half-reality, half-drama TV show that did not depict people from The Shia very well.

I mean, I wasn't old enough to watch it, and I still haven't watched it, so I'm going to rely on these people who have seen The Shia.

It didn't feel good when that TV show came out because it depicted people from The Shia as vain, dramatic, and materialistic.

And so there was this kind of movement in the church that I grew up in, in The Shia, to say we are not The Shia.

We are not like that.

We want to push back against that.

But it makes me think, what would people call people from Hornsby be if we were to say to someone, oh, you're such a Hornsbyian?

Or even more specifically, you're such a Northernlifer.

What does that mean?

Jesus said that the world would know that we are who we are because of our love for each other.

And I don't think it's a criticism on our church, but the church globally, I don't think that the way we love each other is the first thing that comes to mind.

In this case, Paul says, if you act like a Cretan, you are a liar because that is what the place was like.

But then you have this incredible verse in verse 2.

Look at this.

Paul says, in the hope of eternal life, which God, who does not lie, promised before the beginning of time.

So what's happening is Paul is planting the seed of the gospel in the soil of Crete, which is a place that is marked by deception and by lying.

And he specifically emphasizes that in contrast to the God, Zeus, who is a notorious liar, our God does not lie.

He is faithful to his word.

And when Paul plants the seed in Crete, it begins to bear the fruit of transformation in their lives.

And so we don't know this for sure, but imagine how cool it would be if 100 years after this letter was written, in the ancient world, they began to think of the island of Crete as people who tell the truth really well.

That's what the Gospel does.

Robert Mulholland, in his book, Invitation to a Journey, has this profoundly simple idea that spiritual formation, which is the process of becoming like Jesus, happens precisely in the places where we are not like Jesus.

Meaning, for the Cretans, they are wicked liars who bend the truth constantly.

When the Word of God lands in the soil of Crete, one of the things it will do is transform them into truth tellers.

So what are we like as NorthernLife?

What do people think of us as?

As the Word of God lands in the soil of our hearts, collectively and individually, it will begin to transform us from the inside out.

That is where the letter to Titus is addressed.

Fourthly, when was the letter to Titus written?

We could answer this two ways, historically and theologically.

Historically, there's a lot of debate.

It's tricky to pin down when the letter was written.

Certainly, it was quite late in Paul's life, but it doesn't even seem to be that profitable to be specific.

But so that is historically difficult, but theologically really important to know when this letter was written.

And Paul gives us a clue.

He uses three time words in our passage, three time words, and that is time, eternal, and season.

Now, I'll read the passage and see if you can spot the time words.

Titus 1.

Paul, a servant of God and an apostle of Jesus Christ, to further the faith of God's elect and their knowledge of the truth that leads to godliness in the hope of eternal life, which God, who does not lie, promised before the beginning of time, and which now at his appointed season, he has brought to life.

These are three time words, which I think together establish the theological time zone of the Book of Titus.

And while I don't think it's important to know the historical dating, the theological dating is very important.

So, the first time word is time in English.

That's chronos in Greek.

And chronos means chronological time.

That's where we got the word chronological.

So, seconds, hours, minutes, days, weeks, months, years.

That's chronological time.

So, John chapter 5, John writes, One who was there had been invalid for 38 years.

38 years.

When Jesus saw him lying there and learned that he had been in this condition for a long time, that's chronos.

A long time, Jesus asked him, do you want to get well?

So, the time is 38 years.

Chronos time is, I mean, the 25 minutes I've been talking already, chronos time.

And so, in the Book of Titus, Paul says, before the beginning of time, God promised.

So, this is Genesis chapter 0.

Before God spoke light into existence, Paul says, in Titus, that he promised that he would give eternal life to his elect, his chosen people.

And in my kind of understanding of the way the Bible fits together, that is to say that God always intended, before time began, to create humankind that would share in his eternal life.

And after the fall, it became clear that not all the human race would receive that life, but he chose the people of Israel, which is now the church, to receive that eternal life.

God promised before time began.

So that's boundary one in our theological time zone.

The second time word is eternal in English, which is ionios in Greek.

And ionios literally means of the age to come.

So the eternal life is the life of the age to come, meaning the moment when Jesus comes back, when he makes all things new, when heaven and earth combine, when new creation comes about, that's the age to come.

In Luke 18, truly I tell you Jesus said to them, no one who has left home, or wife, or brothers, or sisters, or parents, or children, for the sake of the kingdom of God, will fail to receive many times as much in this age, this kairos, and in the age to come, eternal ionios life.

So Jesus makes a very clear distinction between this age, the one that we live in, the one that he lived in, and the age to come.

The age to come is the ionios.

And so Paul says in Titus 1, in the hope of eternal life.

Now hope is future-oriented, right?

Dallas Willard, this is my one Dallas Willard quote.

He defines hope as joyous anticipation of good, meaning it's in the future.

So from our perspective, God has promised before time began, that's boundary one, eternal life in the age to come.

That's the second boundary of our theological time zone.

The third word, are we tracking here?

No, good luck.

The third word is season in English, which is kairos in the Greek.

Kairos means God appointed season.

So Mark chapter 1, after John was put in prison, Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God.

The time has come, the kairos has come, Jesus said.

The kingdom of God has come near.

So now, putting these three things together, Paul says in Titus 1, now at his appointed kairos, appointed season, the God appointed season, God has brought to light eternal life through the preaching entrusted to me by the command of God, our Saviour.

So drawing all these things together, what I think Paul is saying is something profound, and that is that the eternal life that God promised before time began, the one which will be fully realized in the age to come, has been brought into this present moment, this kairos moment through the gospel, through the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus of Nazareth.

That eternal life promised before time began to be fulfilled in the future is brought into this moment.

Paul says, this is why I'm writing, to make you aware of this eternal life.

Which brings us to the final question, why was Titus risen?

And I think that's the answer.

Paul says, Titus 1, Paul, a servant of God and an apostle of Jesus Christ, to further the faith, to further the faith of God's elect in their knowledge of the truth that leads to godliness.

So why did Paul write this letter?

In order that Titus and the people he ministers to in Crete might be furthered in their faith in knowledge of the truth that leads to godliness.

Because Paul believes that something happened in history to bring that eternal life promised before the beginning of time and coming in the future, something happened to bring it into the present.

And Paul writes to further the faith in this eternal life, that they might know this eternal life, to further the faith.

And he says that means two things, knowledge of the truth that leads to godliness.

Paul writes to further the faith and the knowledge of truth that leads to godliness.

Knowledge of truth is knowledge of who Jesus is, what he did on the cross, the things that he taught, the reality of the life that he brings.

And that, Paul says, leads to transformed character, to godliness, to behaving like Jesus, to loving like Jesus.

Jesus said, we will know the truth, we will know the truth, and that truth will set us free to be different types of people.

So if I could summarize this a little bit.

Know truth, grow godly.

That's what Paul is saying.

And what I think he's saying is these things feed into each other.

That as we know the truth, it transforms us into godliness, which is a form of knowledge of the truth, which transforms us into godliness, which is knowledge of the truth.

It's a ball, it's a snowball, a cycle.

He writes to further the faith.

Now to give a little illustration, when I was like 10 and 11, I played soccer, football in the Shire, the Sutherland Shire.

And if you know anything about children's football, when they're 5 years old, there's no positions on the field.

They flock like seagulls to chips around the ball as it moves.

But by the time you get to about 10, 11 years old, you start to be old enough to play position football.

And it's a funny sort of thing working out, like is it genetics, the type of position that a person gravitates towards?

So at 10 years old, I started to feel myself pulling back and being a defender.

I was a left back in, you know, under 12 soccer.

And the role of the defender, the role of the left back and the right back is obviously to stop the ball when it gets to you.

But then often it's to pass it to the wings and to get the wings to take the ball up to have a go at the goal, right?

I think that's a similar thing to what Paul is doing.

He's pushing the ball forward.

He's trying to, he's a wing or a defender.

He's pushing that ball of knowledge of the truth that leads to godliness, pushing it forward.

That Titus and his people in the island of Crete might know the truth, and that would lead to godliness.

And they would know the truth that would lead to godliness, because eternal life has been made available.

He writes to further the faith, to push the ball forward.

No truth, grow godly.

That's the reason why Paul wrote this letter.

So, stepping back, drawing it all together.

Who, what, where, when, why?

Who?

Paul to Titus in the context of the community of faith.

What?

An ancient Greek letter, 650 words or so.

Where?

The Greek island of Crete, full of deception and wickedness.

When?

Sometime after the promise of God, before time began and until the age to come, comes into the present.

At this kairos moment is when Paul writes.

And why did he write?

To further the faith, to push the ball forward, to give them the knowledge of the truth that would lead to godliness, that would lead to knowledge of the truth, that would lead to godliness.

Know truth and grow godly.

That's what the letter to Titus is all about.

So, for the next three weeks, that's what's gonna happen to us.

I think that's what Paul intends to do to us.

And that's what the Spirit of God might do to us.

An injection of knowledge of the truth that leads to godliness, that leads to knowledge of the truth.

That our faith might be furthered.

That we would move closer to him and closer to the goal of knowing him fully and having eternal life.

No truth, grow godly.

Paul writes to further the faith.

And so as we finish and we're coming to the table in a second, I just want to read this passage from John 5 to frame our time at communion.

Jesus said in John 5, you study the scriptures diligently because you think that in them you have eternal life.

These are the very scriptures that testify about me, and yet you refuse to come to me to have life.

What I want to extend to you is the invitation that Paul extends to all of us, and that is not to book club.

Next week, if you come back, you're not coming to book club where we read another chapter and discuss what we think about it.

We are coming to study this word diligently, but not because this has eternal life in itself, but only because it points to the person who is eternal life and who is present here among us.

And so for these next three weeks, as we seek to know the truth, we don't seek to know something abstract, but to know a person, the person of Jesus who is truth and life eternal.

And as we know him, we grow godly.

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