Titus 1:10–16
Sermon Transcript - “Graceless Gospels” - Titus 1:10–16
Introduction
Many of you know part of my story is pastoring at a church revitalization, an effort help a church revive their witness to the gospel. If you know anything about church revitalization situations, you know that often the congregation is older. And often, the congregation has been doing things a certain way for decades. And people that have been doing a certain thing a certain way for decades, do not like change— understandably so. As I get older and have been doing things a certain way for decades, I'm sure that'll be true of me too. One of the things that happens, though, in that context, is that you come in making some changes. And that brings some conflict.
One common conflict—church revitalization pastors will know exactly what I'm talking about— revolves around pictures of white Jesus. In our church, we had a library room that had this gorgeous yellow–brown–green shag carpet, and some older furniture and some musty books and a trophy case full of trophies (I think there were bowling trophies). And inside there on one of the walls was a picture of Jesus with long flowing blond hair and blue eyes and pale skin. It was white Jesus.
The other pastor and I, wanting to help us gain a better picture of who Jesus was, took that picture down because it doesn't accurately represent Jesus. That didn't go well. We had a congregational meeting and in the middle of that meeting, the issue of taking down the picture of white Jesus was brought up by a couple of dear ladies, who were very frustrated that we had taken down this picture. And as we were trying to understand why they were so frustrated, one of them said this: "How will my grandchildren know what Jesus looks like, if we don't have this picture up?"
So guess how I responded, I said, "there are 25 pictures of Jesus in this room right
now" (implying that the image of Christ is in all of us). Mic drop, right? I thought I had responded well. I think it's true—we do make better pictures of Jesus than a portrait hanging on a wall. But I want to encourage you not to respond to that story like I did. I don't think I responded correctly because I was responding like the Pharisee to the tax collector. I was saying, "Thank You, Lord, that I am not as foolish as this woman who thinks her grandchildren need to see a picture of Jesus hanging on a wall to know what he's like." I thank you, Lord, that I'm not like that foolish person, deceived into thinking this way. The problem is, I am like that. And so are you.
We are all tempted to look at our own version of a picture of white Jesus and say, "surely this is what Jesus is like." And our pictures are often found not in his Word, but in the world. You see, it's a danger for us all—the same danger that this dear saint faced— of turning away from beholding Christ in God's Word and turning towards the world (whether that's an artist's representation or whether that's something else in the culture) to see what Jesus is like. We are all in danger of having our own portrait of white Jesus in our hearts. The problem with that, as you can probably guess, is that if we turn away from God's self-revelation in His Word, we will end up worshiping a God created in our own image, whether he has long blonde hair and blue eyes or not. If we turn away from God's self-portrait that he has painted for himself in Scripture, we are in deadly peril. If we paint over that picture, we are in deadly peril. And my goal this morning is to help you see that from this text in Titus. I want us to see how turning away from God's self-portrait in Scripture and turning towards the world to try to understand what God is like, what Christ is like, and what the gospel is like—how that leads to destruction; how that leads to false teaching.
That's what we see in Titus 1:10–16. So let's turn there now. Paul writes to Titus, “For there are many who are insubordinate, empty talkers and deceivers, especially those of the circumcision party. They must be silenced, since they are upsetting whole families by teaching for shameful gain what they ought not to teach. One of the Cretans, a prophet of their own, said, 'Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons.' This testimony is true. Therefore rebuke them sharply, that they may be sound in the faith, not devoting themselves to Jewish myths and the commands of people who turn away from the truth. To the pure, all things are pure, but to the defiled and unbelieving, nothing is pure; but both their minds and their consciences are defiled. They profess to know God, but they deny him by their works. They are detestable, disobedient, unfit for any good work.”
The Root of False Teaching: A problem with authority
Paul starts off this paragraph in verse 10 with the word "for." He's tying this paragraph back to what we saw last week: this urgent need for good elders—faithful elders—who are showing the godliness that the gospel produces in their life, who are clinging to the trustworthy word as taught. Paul's saying elders are so important "for there are many who are insubordinate." This was a clear and present danger in Crete. Those who would contradict sound doctrine, as he puts it in verse nine, were prevalent. There's a lot of them. They're being led astray and leading others astray. It's dangerous and the root of this danger is an authority problem. Look with me at verses 10 and verses 16. There's an authority sandwich here.
In verse 10, Paul says “there are many who are insubordinate”—a word addressing how you respond to authority. Then in verse 16, Paul says about these same people, “they are detestable, disobedient, unfit for any good work.” They are disobedient—another word dealing with their response to authority. At the root of this problem of false teaching and those being led astray by false teachers is a problem with some kind of authority. So the question that should pop into our minds is: "insubordinate against whom?" or "disobedient against what?"
We have our answer if we look a little bit back in Titus. We see in Titus 1:2–3 that Paul is a servant of God and an apostle, “in the hope of eternal life which God, who never lies, promised before the ages began and at the proper time manifested in His Word through the preaching with which I've been entrusted by the command of God our Savior.” In other words, in giving his Word God has revealed himself, his character, his nature. How do you know God never lies? Because he's shown us over and over again in his Word that is faithful and trustworthy and true. How do you know God's going to keep his promise? Because he's kept other greater promises. How do we know that God is a Savior, desiring to save a people? Because he's told us. In His word, God has revealed himself. And it is an authoritative self-revelation. Since he's God, it carries weight, it carries authority. And since he's the one telling us about himself, it's a self-revelation. It's God's self-portrait in the Scriptures.
God has revealed himself in his Word and it's this revelation that elders are called to hold firm to (Titus 1:9). Part of the qualifications Titus is supposed to look for in an elder is someone who holds firm to the trustworthy word as taught—this trustworthy word in which God manifested the hope of eternal life; this trustworthy word in which God manifested his own character and nature. Elders are supposed to hold firm to that—God's authoritative self-revelation—so that they may be able to give instruction in sound doctrine, yes, but also to rebuke those who contradict it. In other words, the false teachers that are deserving of rebuke—those many who are insubordinate, who are disobedient—are contradicting the trustworthy word (God's self-revelation). Those who are teaching falsely are contradicting God's self- portrait. They're saying, God isn't really like that. The Gospel isn't really like that. That's not really what God requires of you. This is. They're contradicting that because they're insubordinate, they're disobedient. They're rejecting the authority of God's self-revelation. So false teaching—being led astray by false teaching or becoming a false teacher—all starts with the rejection of God's trustworthy word.
This is not news to us. If you've read your Bible, it shouldn't be news to you because you get there really quickly in Genesis 3. This is not a new problem. The temptation that Satan offered to Eve was "did God really say?". The temptation Satan offered to Adam and Eve was, "You can do better. You can be like God. You can make your own determination. You can reject His authority and not die." Since the garden, human beings like you and I have been tempted to reject God's good authority thinking we can do better. "I know God requires this but God doesn't live in these times. Jesus never lived in 2020 during a pandemic, so I know better." We're tempted to do that. We're tempted to think we know better. We're tempted to think we can do better. We're tempted to reject God's self-portrait and instead say, "let us create God in our image." Lord, forgive us!
When we turn away from God's self-revelation—when these false teachers reject God's authoritative self-revelation in his trustworthy word—what fills the space? Paul says in verse 14 that these are people who turn away from the truth. But they don't live in a void where there's only truth here and nothing else over here. If you turn away from the truth, what do you turn towards? What fills the gap of who God is and what he requires? God gives us the answer in His Word when he contrasts his kingdom with the world's kingdom.
The Fruit of False Teaching: A god in your own image
If you turn away from God and His truth, the only thing left to turn to is the world and its truth, which we find either in ourselves or in the society and culture around us. Often it's a mix of the two, isn't it? This is what happens to the false teachers at Crete. Because they reject God's authority in His Word, they begin to reflect not godliness, but their culture and its norms. Look at verse 12. Paul quotes one of their own cultural philosophers. He writes, “One of the Cretans, a prophet (or poet) of their own said, ‘Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons’” (Titus 1:12). This is their own judgment on their society. And Paul says it's true! This is what Cretan culture is like.
In Greek, the word meaning to be a Cretan came to mean to be a liar, lying was so common. Cretans are always liars. And look at what these false teachers do. What does Paul say about them in verse 10? They are empty talkers and deceivers. They reflect their culture. They reflect the norms of their culture, not godliness, not truthfulness—God is truth. They reflect "Cretans are always liars and so am I". That's not how God's people are supposed to be—"pagans are always this way and so am I. People who reject God are always this way and so am I." That's not how God's people are meant to be. But the Cretan false teachers do this because they've rejected God's word.
Not only do they lie. The Cretan prophet says Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, and lazy gluttons. The Cretans had a reputation in the ancient world as being people who thought no means of ill gain was bad. Highway robbery was considered good by them according to some of the ancient Greek writers. In their society, there was no ill gain, there was just gain. And if you could get it by being lazy, all the better. And what do the false teachers do in verse 11? “They must be silenced, since they are upsetting whole families...”—by doing what?—“by teaching for shameful gain what they ought not to teach.” They are reflecting their culture—not God and His word—because they've turned away from his self-revelation.
They become liars. They become lazy gluttons. Then the gospel for them becomes an attempt to address those cultural sins. Not an attempt at being reconciled with the Holy God, whom we have disobeyed, but an attempt to correct deficiencies in our culture. For the Cretan false teachers, it was all about purity. That's what Paul's getting at when he interjects that strange sentence in verse 15. "To the pure, all things are pure, but to the defiled and unbelieving, nothing is pure, but both their minds and their consciences are defiled." On the first read, you might think, "thanks, Paul, I don't really know how that connects to the rest of this." But here Paul is addressing the false teachers' claims. They claimed that the way you become pure is by what you do—which is a very Jewish understanding of purity from the Old Testament purity laws. They thought the way we achieve holiness—the path to holiness—is through what we do, through our works, through our abstaining from certain foods or certain practices.
This is the same challenge that was happening in Ephesus that we saw addressed by Paul in 1 Timothy 4—false teachers claimed that to be holy you had to abstain from marriage and certain foods. Paul responds with the same argument: everything created by God is good if it's received with thanksgiving. His point is not "eat what you want and as much of it as you want." His point is not that you can't do anything to defile yourself. His point is the same point that Jesus made: it's what comes out of a person that defiles them, not what goes into them. In other words, it's a matter of the heart— holiness is a matter of transformed hearts not of what we do. But for these false teachers, holiness became a matter of what they do. The gospel was Jesus plus abstaining from these things. They had redefined the gospel in an attempt to deal with their cultural sins and as a result— because they had rejected God's authoritative self-revelation—they did much harm. That's what we see in verse 11. Paul says "they must be silenced, since they are upsetting whole families." They're destroying God's people by their false teaching. They're destroying God's people by turning away from God's self-portrait and trying to paint their own.
At Crete, this might have been happening like it was in 1 Timothy 4. Think of how upsetting it would be if you were told that the only way for you to be pure is to abstain from marriage. And if you're already married, guess what you have to do? You've gotta dissolve that marriage. Can you imagine the destabilizing effect that would have on God's people, not to mention the contradiction of the beauty of marriage we see in Ephesians 5? It's evil; it's destroying God's people. The false teachers were causing much harm. And in the process of redefining the gospel and reflecting their culture and causing all this harm, they actually became the biggest hypocrites. of all.
In verse 16, Paul says, “They profess to know God, but they deny him by their works.” It's really important that we understand this is not talking about claiming to know God and being a sinner. That's not hypocrisy. Claiming that you know God and still being a sinner—still being in need of saving grace, still failing day in and day out to follow Christ, and coming to him and confessing your sins and repenting and trying a new—that's not hypocrisy, that's the gospel! The world would accuse you of hypocrisy, but that's not what Paul is talking about.
What he is talking about is exactly the opposite: claiming to know God and denying the gospel. He's not talking about claiming to know God and clinging to the gospel, but claiming to know God and denying the gospel. We do this through licentiousness (I know God, and God is a forgiving God so I can do whatever I want)—that's not the gospel. Licentiousness is lawlessness. That's evil. That's a hypocrite. Claiming to know God denying the gospel through licentiousness. But we can also claim to know God and deny the gospel through legalism (I know God and He really likes me, because I prayed a lot and gave a lot this week. I know God, and I can come to church because I did pretty good at resisting sin and temptation this week.). That's a distortion of the gospel that's just as evil. If you think you're more able to come to church this week than you were last week because you did better in your fight with sin this week than you did last week, you're a hypocrite. That's not the gospel.
These false teachers become hypocrites because they turn away from the true gospel and make a new gospel in their own image. We do that too. We make a gospel in our own image because it makes more sense to us. It doesn't make sense to us that we can know a holy and true and just God who is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness when we confess and turn to Christ. That doesn't make sense. We're not going to come up with that on our own. We're not going to come up with that from the world. The only place we find the true gospel is God's Word. And so when we turn from God's word—when we turn from his self-revelation in His Word—to these false gospels, we become what Paul concludes these teachers are. “They are detestable, disobedient, unfit for any good work.” (Titus 1:16).
What Does This Look Like In The Church?
Friends, this was happening in Crete. But it's not just in Crete. It's happening today too. It happens all the time. And it is a danger for God's people—for you and me. It happens all the time in churches. Some churches flat out reject the authority of God's Word—they've long ago abandoned it. This is liberal Protestantism at its core. These "churches" say God's word carries no weight and authority in here. They completely abandon Scripture and end up teaching something else—the doctrines of men. It's wicked and horrible. Most of us aren't drawn, I would guess, to a flat out rejection of God's authority in His Word.
It doesn't have to be a flat out rejection, though it can be a distortion beyond recognition. This is the prosperity gospel. Friends, I grew up in the prosperity gospel movement and it's important you know, I didn't outright reject God's word. I wanted to know God's word. But what I was taught out of God's word was a distortion of the gospel that is unrecognizable. But I still thought I was following Christ; I still thought I had the right picture of Christ. I would guess, that most of you probably aren't in danger of following a false teacher like Joel Osteen. It'd be easy for us to pick on the prosperity gospel boogeyman —to denounce someone like Kenneth Hagen and say, "Watch out!" But I don't think that's the most immediate danger to us.
I think the most immediate danger to us and to the church now is not an outright rejection of God's Word or distortion beyond recognition, but just plain neglect. Just plain neglect of God's trustworthy word. We see this in churches. Ask yourself, is the preacher of that church acting as a herald of King Jesus and the gospel of his kingdom? Or is that pastor being a peddler of proverbial wisdom? We see many churches where the preaching is a bunch of proverbial wisdom and not the heralding of Christ's kingdom. I feel some empathy for such preachers. Preachers are tempted to teach what we ought not for the sake of shameful gain. Or another way I would put that is to teach what people want to hear for the sake of attendance.
I heard an example of this last week. I want you to see how this works because it's so subtle. I listened to a sermon from a large Evangelical church. The sermon was on developing good habits. The pastor was riffing off of a book by Drew Dyck called "Your Future Self Will Thank You," which is a good book. And he was saying good things. The main point of his sermon was this: "successful people do consistently what others do occasionally". That'll preach! His main points were three ways to establish healthy habits and they were all good. You could listen to that and profit.
But this should not be in the place of God's Word in the pulpit—not on Sunday! It's not going to give you what you need, because here's what it does. Through neglecting God's self-revelation, it redefines the problem (just like the false teachers did). If successful people consistently what others do occasionally, what's my problem? Not sin; I'm unsuccessful. I need to fix that, I need to be successful. So the new goal becomes being a successful person. And what's the new gospel hope? It's doing it consistently. It's works. It's a gospel of works. It's a graceless gospel. It's a false gospel.
I'm confident this church does not intend to do that. I'm not accusing them of intentionally distorting the gospel. What I am accusing them of is neglect. It's a neglect of the gospel that leads to a graceless gospel. And what it's led to is an entire evangelical culture that's lost the gospel and replaced it with a counterfeit. H. Richard Niebuhr described this new gospel this way: “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.” There are many, many churches saying that what our people need is not the Scriptures but proverbial wisdom—10 steps to a better marriage, 8 ways to raise healthy kids. By misjudging what their people need and neglecting God's word, these churches preach the false gospel of a God without wrath who brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of Christ without a cross. It's terrible.
What Does This Look Like In Us?
But you know what, friends, you might be sitting here thinking, good, we're pretty safe. That's not the case. Don't be like the Pharisee who says "I thank God that I'm not like those evil churches who neglect God's word" because we do it too. The danger looms large for us too. We are in danger—as people of God living in a fallen world and in a culture that hates God. We are in danger of rejecting God's authoritative self-revelation, where it comes into conflict with our culture.
We are in danger of rejecting God's authoritative self-revelation when it comes to the creation of human beings as male and female, created in the image of God, united in marriage as a reflection of Christ and the Church—which means we outright reject any sense of transgenderism or gender identity. We outright reject the legitimacy of homosexual marriage. Will you hold to that truth about God and his creation clearly seen in the Scriptures when that kind of speech is labeled hate speech? It's a lot harder to hold to that to hold to something like the Trinity right now.
We're in danger of rejecting God's self-revelation about the goodness of authority in the home and in the church—where we see God's complementary roles for men and women and we see the goodness of God giving elders to the church who are actually put in authority. We are in danger of rejecting that testimony of Scripture when if we hold it we're called misogynistic or we're accused of wanting to abuse God's people. I read a quote recently by someone who has major problems with authority in the church—I don't remember the author. He said something to the effect of the only kind of person who would want to claim to speak for God week by week is a narcissist. Will I continue to claim to speak for God from his word week by week if I'm called a narcissist? Will you when you're talking to your friends and your neighbors? There's tremendous pressure in the culture to turn from the truth.
When we think about the preciousness of image-bearers from the cradle to the grave, will we hold fast to that when it violates our culture's idol of personal autonomy? Sadly, for some of us the answer may be "no, we won't hold to that." That's the danger that faces us, not the boogeyman of the prosperity gospel, but the danger of rejecting countercultural truths revealed in God's word.
This danger is amplified by the danger of neglecting God's self-revelation You see, many of us at many times, in many ways, are just as guilty of neglect as the preacher who preaches on habits from the pulpit. We're just as guilty of neglecting God's word. For many of us, our personal Bible reading is so small that we are malnourished from neglect of God's word (if it's true that we live on every word that proceeds from the mouth of God). Some of us are so malnourished, that if you physically represented where your soul is at, I would want to hook you up to an IV drip because I would be fearful that you're going to die.
I'm not exempting myself, I face the danger of neglecting God's word too. A particular danger that's strong for me (and I imagine it's strong for you too) is that we live in an age of distraction. I sit down, to read God's word in the morning—to feast upon his truths, to behold Christ—and then I hear about something like "Fat Bear Week." I follow a Google search into a Wikipedia article about bear attacks. And then I start reading about the difference between a black bear attack and a brown bear attack. And pretty soon it's time to get on with the day. Does that ever happen to you when you try to do your devotions?
We are in danger of neglecting God's word. It's not good, but it's common. Our social media use is a symptom of it. It's not the cause. Social media certainly makes distraction easier, but it's not the cause. It's a symptom of how frequently we flitter from this to that, being obsessed with empty talk and maybe not Jewish myths, but other myths.
We're in danger of neglecting God's self-revelation. Our distraction combined with the ease of amusement can lead us to be "willingly unthinking". What I mean by that is it can lead us to say I have so much input right now that it's much easier for me just to lean into something that's going to be distracting or lean into something that's going to be entertaining than it is for me to put on a thinking cap and think hard about something. And so we become complicit in our own unthinkingness. And guess what happens then? The same thing that happens to false teachers, when they turn away from God and His word, something else fills the void.
We were created to be thinkers—to be people who behold God in His Word, which requires thought. So our minds are going to continue to seek to know God whether or not we seek out his self- revelation. Where are we going to look? We're going to look to the world and we're going to look to ourselves. We're going to look outside of God's word for something to fill in the gaps. We're going to look to ourselves, and we're going to say, Let us make God in our own image. This is what leads a Christian to think: "What would Jesus do? Well, I know Jesus is loving. And I know Jesus wants me to be happy. So surely Jesus would be okay if I married my same sex partner." That's a redefinition of who God is as he's revealed Himself in the Scriptures. It's making Christ in our own image. What would Jesus do is a stupid question if you don't know Jesus from the Bible, because you're going to end up with not what would Jesus do but what would I do.
Or we look to our culture and we say, let us make God in our culture's image. We do this when we reason like Rob Bell did: God is love and a loving God would not send people to hell in eternal conscious torment. So I'm going to reject the doctrine of hell and call my book, "Love Wins." We're in danger of this, friends. We're in danger of it all the time.
Conclusion: What are we to do?
What do we do? What does Paul call Titus to do in response to these things? Four things. First, in verse 11, “they must be silenced.” The stakes are too high to let this kind of false teaching and this kind of neglect go on in our lives or in our church. It must stop now because life is at stake—not just present life but eternal life. God has manifested the hope of eternal life in His Word; it's found nowhere else. False teachers in the Church must be silenced.
Not only that—the goal isn't just "be quiet guys." False teachers in the church must be rebuked. Elders must be able to rebuke those who contradict sound doctrine (Titus 1:9) and must rebuke them sharply (Titus 1:13). Paul calls for rebuke. But the goal of rebuke is always soundness in the faith, that they may know Christ. The goal of any kind of rebuke that falls on you or me is that we may know Christ. Friends, it is loving to rebuke you when you reject or neglect God's self-revelation in His Word. And it is loving for you to rebuke me when I do the same.
The goal is not only silence and rebuke, though. The goal is also soundness, right? So what do we do? We hold firm, just like elders are called to do. That's not just a command for elders. It's a command for everybody in the church, hold firm to God's trustworthy word as taught (Titus 1:9). If you want to learn to recognize and reject the false gospels of the world, you must know the true gospel. There's no other way to do that. I would encourage you to diagnose your own heart. How am I holding firm to the trustworthy word? Is the picture of Jesus that I have in my mind more influenced by what I've seen in God's Word or is it more influenced by what I've read on social media, by what I've listened to in podcasts, or by what I've read even in books, or heard about from friends. Those are all fine things —it is good to learn about Jesus from common grace sources like books, podcasts, etc. But it is no substitute for feasting on the word yourself.
We hold firm to the trustworthy word. In order to do that you must know it. And then we teach the truth. That's where Paul goes next—where we're gonna go next week—Titus 2:1: “But as for you, teach what accords with sound doctrine.” Teach the truth. What happens often in the church is the culture will rightly critique things that are wrong in the church—inconsistencies, hypocrisy, failures to follow God's word. That's okay, we can learn from that. But what we sometimes end up doing is listening to the culture's correction. "Church, you have this wrong with you and you need to do this." We need to not let the picture of Jesus that we have be shaped by what the culture says Jesus is like. "You say you guys are loving. If you're really loving, you'd be affirming of all. If you are really loving, you'd care about this issue or that issue." We must not let the culture drive that narrative, friends. We must teach the truth, what accords with sound doctrine, from God's word, and let his word shape our response.
God paints his own portrait. This gives us hope because God wants to be known. God wants to reveal himself and he has revealed himself. He has gone to such great lengths to make himself known to you that he manifested his Word in a person, Jesus Christ. And he has gone to such great extent for you to know him that he sent his own Son to die in your place—so that you could be freed from the bondage of sin and death and that you could be transferred from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of His beloved Son. That's the great extent that God has gone to reveal himself to you. And so if you find your picture of Jesus doesn't match the picture God paints of his son in the Bible, despair not! Press into God's word. Get to know him because he has made himself known. And he will continue to make himself known in this age and in the next.