Entrusted With Sound Doctrine

Rebar foundation

What is the most important thing you personally know how to do, and do you think it will still be done that way in twenty years? Many of us are working with computer programs that will be obsolete in two. Mechanics tell me how different car motors today than they were at the start of their careers. It seems like the information we know has an expiration date that arrives faster every year. How do you prepare a generation for what's next?

Titus has the answer for us: Teach them sound doctrine. Now, I know that for many of you, that is something that you completely expect me to say, but that is only half of what Titus has for us. Not only do we need to know sound doctrine, but we have to know how to pass it on. We need to teach the coming generation (and that's not just our own kids by the way) not only what they need to believe but how to teach it themselves.

But why should we do this? The term "sound doctrine" sound like it came from some dusty library. In the age of AI are we really saying that we need to pass on literally ancient news? It sounds like something that is really only relevant in a church setting. How does being able to articulate the Apostles' Creed help you in your career? No offense, pastor, but in the real world money has to be made, children need to marry well. You can call it worldliness if you like, but reciting the Lord's Prayer doesn't get a mortgage.

That's exactly where these first four verses hit. Paul lays out for us in this shockingly short opener, the first things, the foundations, the binary source code of the real world. The world of credit scores, marriage prospects, and fat paychecks are at best potential distractions to what is really important to know. And we will lay this out, in this amazing book called Titus, but we should know a little history first!

A Little Background

Let's start with the recipient of this letter, Titus. Titus was a trusted fellow worker with Paul who shows up a number of times in the Bible, notably 2 Corinthians 8:23, where he is mentioned many times in chapters 7-8 and is likely the one who carried that letter to them. He was a Gentile convert (Gal. 2:3) and looks to have served the church in much the same way that Timothy has.

This letter tells us that Titus has been put in charge of getting a church going on the island of Crete. Where's Crete? It's an island off the coast of mainland Greece in the midst of the Mediterranean down and between Greece and Turkey. Obviously at some point Paul went there to give the gospel, and now it was time to set up and maintain that gospel at First Pres Crete.

The people here would be Gentiles, like Titus, and that has some good and bad. Since they aren't Jewish, there is some baggage that they don't have to carry. But because they are Greek, they have less background as to what the Jews know.

What does the letter cover?

Titus has a big job. Planting a church is a lot of work, and in only three short chapters, Paul sets up what Titus is supposed to know.

Here in our passage we have the standard greeting of a letter and something of an introduction to the letter as a whole, which we will revisit in a second.

Next, he moves on in chapter one with what qualifications of elders would look like. Paul doesn't assume that Titus is going to live forever! Titus is going to have to set up leadership that can carry on the work after he is gone, and leave behind the qualifications for finding future leaders as well. There is a mix of character qualities, closing with the description of the job itself in verse 9, know God's word, pass it on, refute errors to it.

After a description of what that doesn't look like, we get into chapter 2, where we find out that the passing on of sound doctrine isn't just a job for the professional Christians and elders, it is for everyone. The older generation is told to teach the younger generation, with no distinctions between slave and free.

Chapter 3 briefly looks at what life together looks like, and the foundation for it: the gospel. It isn't to be built on quirky beliefs or known for chasing down fine points of controversy for its own sake.

Finally, Paul gives Titus some to-do list items for the winter that give the book another layer of authenticity.

So that is where it is going, but where does it start? Can it live up to the hype I gave it? Oh, far more than I could communicate, but I will try. Paul wants the Cretan Church to know that the Truth that Transforms is Trustworthy.

The Truth that Transforms is Trustworthy.

Paul begins this letter with his own title, a servant (or slave) of God and an apostle of Jesus Christ. This isn't Paul showing off, like putting "Ph.D" in one's username online. This is Paul putting his badge up to the door, as it were. His credentials are not to exalt him, but to demonstrate the importance of the message he brings.

To be an "Apostle" requires a very specific resume of two points: you had to have seen the risen Christ AND have received a special mission from Him (see Acts 1:12-26). For Paul, he became the apostle to the Jews first, and then ultimately to the Gentiles (Romans 11:23). As part of that, he wrote, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit authoritative teaching (2 Peter 3:16) that has become the majority of the New Testament. Because of that first qualification, no one can occupy this office any further. The teachings have been laid down with authority, and now we are to pass them along.

But what are they?

They are truths that transform. He lays it out more explicitly in chapter 3 what the gospel is, but he sets us up what this gospel does. Knowing the truth is going to lead to transformed behavior, that is behavior that is godly. We use that term "godly," often, and one commentator defined its use here as "a Christian attitude to life." We behave the way that God calls us to, and it turns out that this calling goes way back and it is going to last a very long time.

We live this way now in hope of eternal life. Nothing else that we do will compare to this life, and we see that this life was promised well before any of us were born. Paul makes reference to election, a process where God chooses his own and did so before the foundation of time. At some point within time, God has revealed in his Word what that promise is, sealing it with the life, death, and resurrection of his Son.

Now, what I want to point out here is that all of this was set before the world got started. None of this is made up as God went. From the beginning, his will was set and that will included the redemption of a people through the sacrifice of his son. That means that everything else that happens in this world is related to that central meaning. This is the story that animates everything. God decided first, then set everything else into motion such that it finds its purpose, its goal in eternal life.

That this is the entire purpose of everything somehow radically shrinks whatever is in front of us in itself while at the same time radically exalting it because of its role in this story.

Let's see that in your marriage, for instance. In light of eternity, the life you build together here is hilariously short. We spend years growing, preparing, dating, and finally vowing to each other to live the next 60 years (if you're very healthy) together. This is in the face of the next quintillion plus years you will experience consciousness in heaven where Jesus said that there is no marriage, at least in the way we understand it here (Matthew 22:30). It's less than a blink!

And Yet. In Ephesians 5, we are told that marriage is meant to be a visual picture of this gospel of Jesus and His Church. Far from being some sort of convenient social arrangement for the next few decades, it becomes a way to put forth the most important story in the world.

What is that story? It is you were cut off from God in your sin, and rather than just let you become an object of God's wrath, the Father put forth the plan to pay His justice the price for your soul, the death of His own Son. John Calvin points out that this is why Paul uses the term Savior for both Jesus and God: "The Father is savior, because he has redeemed us by the Son's death, that he might make us heirs of eternal life: but the Son is our savior, because he shed his blood as the pledge and price of our salvation. Thus the Son brought us salvation from the Father, and the Father bestowed it through the Son." (quoted in Bray, 470).

That's the story from beginning to end. How you use AI is implicated in that story. Who you marry, what house you buy, what job you work, and why you do all of those things in the first place is caught up in this story, so I have a question for you to consider as we go through this book: do you know this sound doctrine well enough to transform you and pass it on to others? None of it is going to come as intuitively true. One commentator pointed out that this teaching was weird to both Jews and Greeks: "Belonging to the church was a new departure for those who joined it, whether they were Jews or Greeks, because it transcended these traditional barriers and made them redundant. The church was a society of divine origin, constituted not by physical descent from a common ancestor nor by a shared language and culture, but by spiritual experience described as 'regeneration' – being born again."

This is what we are called to pass down. Are you prepared to do so?