As Witness to the Reign of Jesus
So the year is 336 BC. Alexander the Great has just become the king of Macedonia, and almost immediately Alexander launches into a military campaign that within seven years would establish the largest empire of the ancient world.
Alexander would conquer everything from what is modern-day Greece, down into Egypt, and then all the way across into India. And in the midst of these conquests, before he moved from one battle to the next, he would rename the conquered territories after himself. He gave 70 different cities the new name Alexandria, and most of these are still around today.
And this renaming of cities was a strategic move, because the purpose of Alexander’s conquests was to advance Greek culture. Each of the cities named Alexandria was created to be model community for the surrounding area on what it meant to be Greek. They were Greek outposts that became Greek ecosystems of Greek language and values and identity. And as for a strategy, this went pretty well — there’s a reason we don’t call him Alexander the Normal. What Alexander did was effective and unprecedented, except that within 300 years of his death a similar thing would happen. ...
This time a Jewish man named Jesus showed up in Western Asia and claimed to be God. He was crucified by the Romans, but then three days later he rose from the dead and ascended to heaven, and he empowered his followers, by his Spirit, to understand the Hebrew Bible and start a movement that would outlast every man-made empire. It started first in Jerusalem, when three thousand Jewish people swore allegiance to Jesus in a single day.
They formed a community to worship Jesus and follow him together, and then from there new communities spread to Judea and then Samaria, and then it wasn’t long before a Roman-citizen, Greek-trained Jewish scholar from Turkey was dramatically converted. They started calling him by the Greek name Paul. The resurrected Jesus had appeared to him and commissioned him to take the news of his reign to the Gentile world: Go and tell this news to Greeks and barbarians. Tell the whole world!
And so Paul started doing that. He would go into these different cities and he would preach the truth about Jesus, and people would believe, and then he’d organize these believers into communities, assemblies — called churches. And Paul did this everywhere: in Corinth and Galatia and Ephesus and Rome, and through his deputies also in this Greek island called Crete.
Paul would plant the gospel and grow churches organized under the lordship of Jesus. And similar to the ‘Alexandrias’ of the ancient world, these churches were created to be model communities for the surrounding area on what it meant to be Christian, or we would say, what it meant to be truly human. These churches, rooted in the gospel of Jesus, were meant to be outposts for the kingdom of Jesus that advance new creation culture until Jesus returns. That is the purpose of the church. Local churches are meant to witness to the reign of Jesus.
Understanding Titus 2
And this is really important if we’re going to understand Titus Chapter 2.
Because if we just skim Chapter 2 we might mistake these verses as “only ethical instructions.” But if we can locate these ethical instructions within the greater purpose of the church, then I think we’ll see the stakes are high, and this passage is actually central to this entire letter. And I’d like for us to start there. There are two parts to the sermon:
Why does it matter how we live?
How do we live?
Father in heaven, thank you for your Word, and for this time as we gather to worship you and to hear from you. We ask that you would speak to us and guide us, by your Spirit, in Jesus’s name, amen.
Why does it matter how we live?
It’s important to see what surrounds these ethical instructions. This is verse 1 and verse 11.
Let’s look at verse 1. Paul starts, “But as for you” — which means this is a contrast to what he has previously said about the false teachers. Most recently, in Chapter 1, verse 16, Paul has said that the false teachers are unfit for any good work. But as for you, Titus, unlike these false teachers, “teach what accords with sound doctrine.”
And this word for “what accords with” is key. It means what is fitting, what is appropriate. Paul is talking about instructions on how you live, and he’s saying there must be a congruence between our conviction and our practice.
The way that we live — the things you do, the way you act, how you relate to others, our behavior — must be in line with our embrace of what God has said in the Scriptures and through his apostles. That is “sound doctrine.” It’s the whole hog of what God has said. That’s verse 1.
And then in verses 2–10, Paul explains to Titus how this looks. He gives actual instruction on living in line with sound doctrine.
And now look at verse 11 — and I know I’m dipping into next week’s passage (Pastor Joe, you understand) — but look at how verse 11 starts:
For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, training us to live a certain way. Paul basically summarizes what he has just detailed in the previous verses.
Verse 11 is the ground for all the instruction on how to live. It provides the basis. What is the basis? The grace of God has appeared! Which is to say, the person and work of Jesus Christ. This is what God has done! God has manifested his grace in sending Jesus to rescue sinners and disciple us in his ways. And how we live must emerge from this!
Never to Be Separated
Verse 1 and verse 11 go together in a glorious union, and we can never separate them.
Verse 1 tells just that how we live must be in line with what God has said;
Verse 11 tells us that how we live must emerge from what God has done.
Another way to say it: we must live congruent with the Scriptures, empowered by the gospel. And it’s always, everywhere both:
If you try to live congruent with the Scriptures without the gospel, you will stumble into a suffocating self-righteousness.
If you ignore how you live to focus on “grace” then you distort the gospel and miss the point.
The way we live must be in line with what God has said, and emerge from what God has done. This explains the ethical instructions of verses 2–10. This is how the church witnesses to the reign of Jesus.
As Witness to the Reign of Jesus
What do you think makes the outside world look at the church and say, “Wow, they answer to a different King! They’re part of a different kingdom!”?
It’s when we live congruent with the Scriptures, empowered by the gospel.
Living this way is our witness to the reign of Jesus. And this is not just a theological principle, but we see it in the text. There are three purpose clauses in this passage that each have to do with an outside display of our faith: these are verses 5, 8, and 10. Look ahead here:
Verse 5: young women are to be submissive to their own husbands, so that the word of God may not be reviled.
Verse 8: Titus should have non-condemnable speech so that an opponent may be put to shame, having nothing evil to say about us.
Verse 10: Slaves should show all good faith so that in everything they may adorn the doctrine of God our Savior.
In each of these cases, the purpose for the behavior is what it displays on the church’s behalf. This is what we call witness. It’s especially clear in verse 8. Titus, an individual, should teach and speak in a way that cannot be condemned “so that opponents will be ashamed, having nothing evil to say about US.”
Do you see the church member-church relation here?
When the outside world sees a Christian individual (a church member) do something shady, do you know what they do? They say something evil about the church!
Concerned with the Church’s Witness
How many times have you heard people say “Those Christians...”? This happens all the time, and it happened even in the First Century.
Individual Christians — church members — bear a responsibility to represent the church corporate. Our lives say something about our King and the kingdom we belong to!
Paul is very concerned about the church’s faithful witness here in Chapter 2 — just like he is concerned for the gospel’s purity in Chapter 1. They go together:
Truth-telling and right-living;
The content of the confession and the character of the confessor;
What we believe and how we live — they must be in harmony, and when they’re not, the church’s witness is muzzled.
This is why it matters how we live. And that’s Part One.
In summary, Part One: Church members must live congruent with Scripture, empowered by the gospel, in order for the church to faithfully witness to the reign of Jesus.
Now Part Two (this is getting more specific on how we do that):
How do we live?
Paul mentions five groups of church members, and he tailors Christian behavior for each of these groups. There are 21 different behaviors listed here overall (and I kept going back and forth on the best way to work through this!) I decided just to slow down on each group, briefly mention each behavior, and then give a little bit of commentary.
And first, I want to preface what I’m about to do, so that we’re all on the same page. I’m about to speak to men and women, old and young, about how we should live, and I’m doing it, as best as I can, with a “humble confidence.”
It is confidence because this is the word of God — and God’s word is good; his way is better than ours.
And it is humble because this is the word of God — and not my words! I’m a man under authority. I’m taking my orders, just like Titus did.
For the Older Men
So start with verse 2, the older men. And in case you’re wondering about what constitutes an older man for Paul, there’s not a set age, but there’s evidence that suggests around 50 is the dividing line. Some say around 40 to 50 and upwards, and so it’s somewhere around there.
Paul tells Titus to teach the older men to be:
Sober-minded
Dignified
Self-controlled
Sound in faith, love, and steadfastness
Be sober-minded is to be measured and clear-headed. Be dignified means to be respectable.
It’s to be the kind of man that the younger men admire. The word for self-control has a range of meaning that covers everything from moderation to wisdom. Think about the wise governance of the self.
And then lastly to be sound in faith, love, and steadfastness reminds of 1 Corinthians 13:13 where Paul mentions three Christians virtues of faith, hope, and love. That same triad pattern is echoed here except that Paul replaces hope with steadfastness — and that’s not because hope is less important for older men. I think it’s because steadfastness is the manifestation of hope in older men.
The way that most of us think about hope, especially if you’re younger, is that hope is the name for reality way out ahead of us. We have God’s promises, there are realities we’re banking on, but they’re out there, and we figure there’s a lot of living to do between here and there. There’s a lot of hoping that will happen between this point and that point. But then somewhere along the journey, you cross a threshold, and you realize that you’re actually closer to that hope than you were when first you started, and so the way you hope starts to look different. You’re not thinking about it as something way out there because you’re getting closer and closer, and so you hope by holding on. By being patient. By being steadfast. Because more years on earth are behind you than before you, hope means standing strong. Brother-sirs, be sound in faith, love, and steadfastness.
For the Older Women
Next in verse 3 is the older women. Titus is to teach the older women to be:
Reverent in behavior
Not slanderers
Not slaves to much wine
Teach what is good and train younger women
To be reverent in behavior is all-encompassing, and the idea is to be noble. This is only time the word is used in the New Testament. It’s to be glorious.
And practically, that means not slandering others. Other English translations say “malicious gossip.” Don’t do that.
And don’t be enslaved to much wine. And then fourth, teach what is good and so train the younger women.
And this last one is especially remarkable, because in all the behaviors that Paul mentions, this is the only positive action that is expected of one group in relation to another. Older women are to be teachers and trainers of younger women.
And notice this is not a behavior that Paul qualifies. He doesn’t say that this is really only for the extraverted older women, but this is for all older women. Teaching is expected of older women in that same way they’re expected not to be drunks.
This is an amazing responsibility, especially because of how Paul talks about younger women in verse 4.
For the Younger Women
In verse 4, on the younger women, their behavior is described as what the older women teach them. This again emphasizes the role of older women in the church. When it comes to the rhythms of discipleship and ethical instruction for younger women, that is to come through the older women.
So Titus is to teach the older women to teach and train the younger women to:
Love their husbands and love their children
To be self-controlled and pure
To be workers at home and kind
To be submissive to their husbands
Now Paul assumes that most of these young women are married, but at least half of what he says applies to all young women, married or not.
The first thing he says is that the young women should “love their husbands and children.” It’s literally to be husband-loving and children-loving. And this is interesting because we might think this is almost too easy to even mention. Why does Paul tell mothers to love their children? Well, it’s because as easy and delightful as it is, family love is a discipline to be taught. Family love is not something to be left on autopilot in a young mother’s life, but it should be a quality about her.
Also, verse 5, young women are to be self-controlled and pure. This again means to live wisely, and also wholesomely.
Next, young women are to be “workers at home.” That’s one word, home- workers.
And this is a part where we can tend to read our own context into the text. We can think that Paul is saying that women should work at home as opposed to outside the home. But we should remember that in this day, everybody “worked” at home. There was nowhere else to work! There were no offices to go to. No factories. The home was the primary place of industry, whether it was farming or trade or whatever.
So Paul is not saying women must work at home so that the men can work outside the home. Paul is saying that women have a special role in the home that is particular to them as women, even when everybody else is home too. Wives and mothers are the heartship of the home.
They command its environment, which is true even if they have other work and responsibilities outside the home. The home is a special domain that only becomes what it’s meant to be through the exercise of a woman’s design.
And also young women are to be kind, which is a little word squeezed in there, but it’s important, because kindness is a demeanor that affects everything else. The question “Am I being kind?” is a relevant question all the time.
And then lastly here, young women should be submissive to their own husbands, which is the same verb we find in Ephesians 5:21. Paul says there, “Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord.” And the word for “submit” is the idea of respect, which Paul says later in Ephesians 5:33, “... let each of you love his wife as himself and let the wife see that she respects her husband.”
So submissiveness or respect is the behavior expected of young women toward their husbands, and this should not be controversial — no more than that wives and mothers should be husband-loving and children-loving. This is God’s natural order for the family, and it’s good. The husband is to love his wife; the wife is to submit to her husband. Love and respect. That is the Bible’s recipe for a healthy marriage that is a witness to Jesus. And here in verse 5, though, Paul doesn’t mention the expectations of husbands like he does in Ephesians. He is just speaking about the wife’s behavior.
And this behavior of submissiveness or respect, I think, is especially challenging today because our cultural current does not flow in that direction. If wives respecting their husbands is over here, our cultural current is going that way. And when that current is all around us it’s easy for young wives to pick up subtle postures toward their husbands that are disrespectful and demeaning and cynical. And it’s not necessarily overt defiance, but it comes through in their tone of voice to their husbands or their attitude or their lack of trust or the way they patronize his interests or how they talk about their husbands with others.
One place you might see this is when wives get together and — unplanned, unscripted — they begin to speak negatively about their husbands, and all the women roll their eyes, and based upon the conversation you would think that their husbands are knuckle-dragging Neanderthals.
What you end up having is the opposite of Paul’s instruction. Because Christian women are precisely the ones — the only ones — who can encourage other Christian women to respect their husbands like the Bible says, but instead they end up commiserating on how their husbands are all buffoons. Because they simply repeat the stereotype of men that’s promoted in our culture. This is not good.
And I think this is a real danger for Christian wives, and not just because of the cultural current, but because of what is required of Christian husbands. Christian husbands are to love their wives sacrificially, like Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her. And if you have a sacrificially loving husband but a disrespectful wife his love can actually enable her disrespect, because he assumes (and he’s told) that taking his lumps is what it means to be like Jesus. So he takes his lumps, but her sin is never challenged. It’s never addressed because the Christian women around her don’t help. This is why we need wise women who teach and train like Paul says. And we have such wise and godly women at our church.
For the Younger Men
Verse 6, is to the younger men. And Titus is to urge this group. It’s the only time this verb is used. Titus is to earnestly exhort these younger men to be: Self-controlled.
And that’s the only behavior mentioned. There’s the strong verb to urge, but it’s to only do one behavior. And this is the third time this behavior is mentioned! It was said to older men and younger women, and here again to younger men. It’s the word sophroneo and it means to live wisely. It’s the wise governance of the self. It means your person is compelled by prudence not passion.
This is the banner behavior for younger men, but of course it’s not the only one. None of these lists are exhaustive, and that’s clearest here in verse 6 because notice what Paul says to Titus in verse 7: He says, “Show yourself in all respects to be a model of good works...” Paul goes straight from the self- control expected of young men to Titus being an example to them.
Which tells us a couple things: First, it means that Titus was most likely part of that group. He was somewhere between 30 and 40 years old.
Second, it means that young men are not just expected to have self-control, but they are expected to follow the example of their pastors, including all the character qualifications required of pastors. So see, this is a little sneaky. Because when we read through this list we just see one word, “self-control,” but if we get the implications of what Paul is saying in verse 7, his expectations for younger men are maybe the highest of all. Every younger man should have the kind of character that qualifies him for pastoral ministry.
And start with self-control. There is nothing more relevant to your self than taking responsibility for yourself. Self-control is the magisterial virtue for young men. (And do you know the opposite of self-control? It’s whining. That’s what I tell my sons.)
For the Employees
Verse 9 is for slaves — and we’ve addressed the topic of ancient slavery in our 1 Timothy series — so for today, for application, what Paul says here applies to employees. Any salaried, wage-earning employee should be:
Submissive to your masters or superiors
Well-pleasing
Not argumentative
Not pilfering
Showing all good faith
And pretty much any employment contract in our day will include expectations like this, it’s just that Christians are the ones who actually abide by them.
First, to be submissive or respectful is the general posture. It’s spelled out more as being well-pleasing, which simply means to perform your duties in a way that your boss appreciates. To not be argumentative means to not have an antagonistic bent. Don’t huff and puff your way around the workplace. To not pilfer literally means to not keep back what isn’t yours. It means not to steal. And then lastly, to “show all good faith” or “faithfulness,” means to be trustworthy or reliable. Be a model employee in all things, whatever your duties might be.
And the purpose mentioned here in verse 10, as we’ve seen twice before, is to be a witness to Jesus.
Don’t let your behavior contradict the gospel transformation that has happened in your life, but let your behavior adorn it, commend it, highlight it.
Discriminate Discipleship in the Same Way
And that goes for everyone, for older men and women, and younger women and men, for all members of the church. There is a remarkable connectedness here among these different groups. Paul certainly advocates discriminate discipleship — Christlikeness is the single goal for Christian behavior, but it’s not one-size-fits-all. It’s tailored for these different groups who are different, but who also are bound together.
One small word in this passage that reminds us of this is the word “likewise” used in verses 3 and 6. It means “in the same way.” Paul is saying: Young and old, men and women, here are the particular behaviors expected of you, in the same way.
Because remember, we still have the same goal: it’s to witness to the reign of Jesus. Which comes through our living in congruence with the Scriptures, empowered by the gospel. And that’s what brings us now to the Table.
The Table
The last and most important thing to say about verses 1–10 is said in verses 11–15. The grace of God has appeared!
That means that none of the behaviors we’re called to is the basis of our salvation. Our salvation is based solely on the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Because of Jesus, we don’t grab onto these behaviors like gung- ho volunteers eager to flex our own strength, but instead we receive these words as loving guidance for men and women set free by the mercy of God. We receive these behaviors like we come to this Table, empty-handed and thankful that Jesus is enough.
We share in this Table as the covenant members of Cities Church, but if you’re here this morning and you trust in Jesus, if you are united to Jesus by faith, we invite you to eat and drink with us.
