Titus 1:1-5
Date: September 3rd, 2023
Speaker: Samuel Crites
Scripture: Titus 1:1-5
Exegetical Outline
Main Idea of Text: Paul writes to Titus as a servant of the elect and a preacher of the truth to instruct him.
1:1-3: Paul introduces himself as the author, a servant of the elect and preacher of the truth.
1:4: Paul identifies the recipient as Titus, his true child.
1:5: Paul charge to Titus, appoint elders and put things in order.
Homiletical Outline
Main Idea of Sermon: Pastors are servants of the elect and preachers of the truth.
Serve the faith of the elect
As a means of serving God
Through knowledge of the truth
To increase their holiness
To intensify their hope
Preach the truth of the Gospel
Founded on God’s character
Promised from eternity past
Manifested for you in preaching
Introduction:
What is the relationship between a father and son? We might say a lot of things to answer this question, but one of the simplest answers is that a father is an example to a son. One of the most dangerous things throughout history to human flourishing has been sons that grow up without fathers. There is nothing that has caused more heartaches, more conflicts, that has caused more damage to society than sons without fathers.
This is because sons need an example. Being a man is not something that can be taught with words, it is something that is caught over time. This is not only true with biological fathers and sons, but also with spiritual fathers and sons.
We are about to begin a book that is a letter from a spiritual father, Paul, to his spiritual son, Titus. Paul is going to give many instructions to Titus throughout the letter, but the unspoken expectation is that Paul wants Titus to follow his example. He has been with Paul, watching him conduct his apostolic ministry, but now, Paul has sent Titus out to be Paul’s own representative in Crete. Let’s read Titus 1:1-5 and see what example Paul sets for his spiritual son.
Titus 1:1-5
1 Paul, a servant of God and an apostle of Jesus Christ, for the sake of the faith of God’s elect and their knowledge of the truth, which accords with godliness, 2 in hope of eternal life, which God, who never lies, promised before the ages began 3 and at the proper time manifested in his word through the preaching with which I have been entrusted by the command of God our Savior;
4 To Titus, my true child in a common faith:
Grace and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Savior.
5 This is why I left you in Crete, so that you might put what remained into order, and appoint elders in every town as I directed you—
I want to do two things in our sermon today. Before we get to the sermon proper, I want to spend some time setting up the book of Titus. As a letter, Paul gives us a clear purpose for why he is writing to Titus. He is tasking Titus with the job of returning to Crete to put what remained in order and appoint elders. Meaning, he was to go back to Crete and work with the new believers, organizing them into Churches and helping them become established.
In this first part of the sermon, I want to consider what is expected of Titus. Namely, Paul expects Titus to act like his true son. He expects him to conduct himself as he has seen Paul conduct himself. Which will lead us to the second and main body of the sermon.
This letter is unique in the canon because Paul gives direct instruction to one of his spiritual sons on how to care for infant churches. As we begin to focus on Paul’s introduction, we will see that he characterizes himself in two ways: as a servant and as a preacher. Paul wants Titus to follow him in this as a son follows a father, to be a pastor to these people. The main idea of our sermon today will be: Pastors are servants of God and preachers of the truth.
We will have two primary points. First, pastors are servants of God. As Titus’s spiritual father, Paul expects Titus to follow his example. Paul’s apostleship is not something that can be replicated, but this young pastor can replicate his servanthood. He is a servant to God, strengthening the faith of God’s elect and increasing their knowledge so that they will grow in godliness and intensify their hope of eternal life. In the same way, pastors labor among their people to stoke the faith of the members under their care with real knowledge so that they will grow to be more like Christ and hope in his promises.
The second point in our sermon is this: pastors preach the truth of God. One of the ways that pastors serve their people is through the preaching of God’s word. The hope of eternal life is founded on the certain confidence that God keeps the promises he has revealed in the Scriptures. How will the people know those promises? By the faithful preaching of God’s word to God’s people in God’s Church. If Titus wants to help these fledgling churches in Crete, he must devote himself, as a good son, to the same preaching ministry that has been entrusted to Paul by the command of God.
The way that Paul opens this letter to a young pastor leading young churches is to set an example of servant leadership and the regular preaching of the Gospel. Mosaic Church, we need pastors that see their primary duty as serving God and preaching the Gospel.
Overview of Titus
As I was considering what to do after we finished the book of Ruth, a pastor friend of mine suggested that we consider doing Paul’s letter to Titus. It is one of the few books of the Bible that seems to be explicitly written to young churches. Which I hope will be really helpful for us to consider, because we are a young church. In some ways, that is a distinct advantage and in others it is a disadvantage.
It is an advantage because we are nimble. We do not have any traditions or prior commitments that might prevent us from making changes for the good. We are small and agile and able to respond to opportunities that God might bring our way. All of us have been at Churches where the best answer that anyone has for why we do what we do is because that is the way that it always has been done. Well, we are stumbling our way through everything for the first time. There is no way that it always has been done, because 90% of the stuff we do we have never done before.
Another advantage to being a young church is that we have the luxury of considering every new thing we do from first principles. We can be idealistic in the best sense of the term. Everything we do can be considered. Because our church is so simple, we have the luxury of considering everything we do from the perspective of is this required of us in Scripture. We get to make those decisions for ourselves. They are not something we inherit from previous generations.
It is also an advantage to be a young church, because there is not a sense in which the church belongs to anyone. It is a new thing. No one’s grandparents were members of this church. There are no names on the pews, and there never will be. From the beginning, we can establish that the church belongs to Christ. It is his church. Everything we are doing is for his glory, not ours.
But there are also disadvantages to being a young church. We have to work really hard to become a significant part of each other’s lives. Frankly, for most of us we were strangers six months ago. We didn’t know each other and if we did, we didn’t know each other very well. It is going to take a long time of intentional effort to develop the kinds of relationships that are going to make this a healthy, vibrant church.
We also don’t have the leaders that we need. I am very conscious of the fact that I am the only elder. One of the most important skills for a pastor of a young church is the ability to live in a world that is not ideal. We want to be at a certain place in the future, but we just aren’t there yet. So we live within a reality that is not ideal. It is not ideal that we do not have multiple elders, particularly lay elders, but we patiently wait for the day when God will bring us more.
We also must be conscious of the fact that we are all coming from previous Churches that are not this church. Meaning, the way it was done there is not, probably, the way it will be done here. We need to be careful not to assume how anything should be done, and begin with the assumption that it will not be what we expected. The root of frustration is unmet expectations. If we hold our expectations loosely, we will be pleasantly surprised when things turn out the way that we hoped and excited and graciously optimistic when they do not.
So you can see that being in a new church is complicated. It tends to be a melting pot of people with various backgrounds and diverse expectations. It is an exciting thing, but it is also a scary thing. Can I trust these people or that pastor? Will I end up disappointed if I really put my heart into it? Will this just end up being a repeat of previous moments when the Church let me down or hurt me?
Paul, in his letter to Titus, offers us his fatherly wisdom. Instead of getting distracted by all the rabbits that a young church could chase, he focuses us on that which is most important to establish them in the faith.
Every sermon, I try to give you a main idea. The main idea is the thing in the sermon that I am working toward. It is that one thing that, if you take nothing else away from the sermon, you learn that and apply it to your life. Well, let me give you a main idea for the book of Titus. This is my one sentence summary for what the book of Titus is all about. The main idea of the book of Titus is: The book of Titus is Paul’s instruction to a young pastor on how to care for young churches by [three things] appointing elders, putting things in order and training them for greater Gospel ministry.
So let’s quickly take those one at a time and, hopefully, this will set you up for how to think of the book of Titus going forward. Paul’s instructions to a young pastor on how to care for young churches by, first, appointing elders. This comes from the first division of the book, Titus 1:6-16. After the introduction to the letter, Paul tells Titus his purpose for writing him in verse 5, namely, he is to put what remained in order and appoint elders. He begins explaining the second one first by giving the qualifications for elders in verses 6-9 and the reason elders are so important for their particular situation in verses 10-16.
The second section of the letter begins in chapter 2:1 and goes all the way to chapter 3:11. This section of the letter is Paul’s instructions to Titus on how to accomplish the first task, setting what remained in order. We will see that in this section there are really two things going on. There are things inside the church that need put in order but there are also things outside the church that need put in order. The members need to be trained how they are to relate and care for each other as a covenant community. We see this in Chapter 2, verses 1-15, and then in Chapter 3:1-7, he teaches the members how the Gospel requires them to submit to external authorities and live compassionately in this hostile world. This second section ends with Paul charging Titus to insist on these things and work diligently to train the people in what Paul has commanded for their good.
The third and final section of the book is Chapter 3, verses 12-15. Paul closes his letter to Titus, but not before he gives Titus special instructions for how the Church can get involved in Gospel ministry that is taking place among other brothers in other churches. He says to let the people learn to devote themselves to good works, so as to help cases of urgent need. He wants, even this young church, to orient themselves to the greater work of the kingdom that is going on around them.
The connection between the first three verses and the rest of the book is that Paul wants Titus to be the kind of pastor that he has seen Paul be time and time again. This is why he is writing the letter. Which brings us back to the main idea of our sermon. What does it mean for Titus to shepherd these people like he has seen Paul model for him in the past. Paul is the kind of leader that young Churches need. Young churches need pastors that serve God and preach the truth of the Gospel.
Pastors serve God.
Let’s take those one at a time. Young churches need pastors that serve God.
Paul identifies himself in two ways: one that is common to all leaders in the Church and one that is not. In verse 1, he says that he is a servant of God and an apostle of Jesus Christ. To be an apostle, he must have had a first-hand experience with Christ where he was commissioned for a special ministry of the Gospel. Paul had this experience in Acts Chapter 9. While he was on the road to Damascus, carrying authorization from the high priest to persecute the Church, Jesus struck him down, blinded him and called him by name to a special ministry that Paul discusses in Galatians 2. He says that he was given the apostleship over the uncircumcised just as Peter was given apostleship over the circumcised. So Paul’s apostleship is special, but being a servant is not. Every leader, and in the context of this letter, every pastor is first and foremost, a servant.
So how does a young pastor serve God? Paul gives us four ways that a young pastor serves God. I am going to list them out for you and then I am going to walk through them one at a time, and I want you to see that these are coming right out of the text. If you don’t see that this is what Paul is saying, you should not listen to me. First, he serves God by serving the faith of God’s elect. Do you see that in verse one?
Titus 1:1
Paul, a servant of God and an apostle of Jesus Christ, for the sake [For the sake of what? For the sake…] of the faith of God’s elect.
But not only their faith, but also, number two, he serves God for the sake of their knowledge of the truth. By stoking their faith and increasing their knowledge, the pastor labors for their godliness. God-likeness accompanies a growing faith and deeper understanding of the things God has revealed. And finally, as the people grow in godliness, their hope in eternal life is intensified. Hope requires an unsatisfied desire. As we become more Godly, this world will increasingly remind us that it is not our home. We will increasingly desire that future promise that we have not yet received. If you’re a real nerd for outlining like me, you can see that the first two kind of go together and the last two go together. So, as a pastor, I am taking aim at two things, your faith and your knowledge, and I am hoping, by the power of the Holy Spirit, that will lead to godliness and hope.
Let’s take a look at faith first. The pastor’s job is to serve God by stoking the faith of God’s elect. That means the goal of my ministry is your faith. So what is that? What does that mean? In Hebrews 11:1, the author of Hebrews says:
Hebrews 11:1
11 Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.
Faith is assurance and conviction. The surety that the promises of God are trustworthy, meaning they are worthy of our dependance. And the conviction that even what we don’t see will come to pass so long as God is the one who has done it.
So how does that play out in the life of the Church? It goes something like this. Perhaps one of our members that is a student in college is looking into their immediate future and crippled with anxiety, because they don’t know what they are going to do when they graduate. They wake up in the middle of the night and panic has gripped them. They can’t sleep, because they are so concerned about what job they should apply for, or where they will live, or if they will be able to make enough money to support a family. The job of the pastor is to remind that member of promise of God in the teaching of Christ in Matthew 6:31-34:
Matthew 6:31-34
31 Therefore do not be anxious, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ 32 For the Gentiles seek after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. 33 But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.
34 “Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.
Faith looks like clinging to the promise that your God knows your needs. He knows what you will need tomorrow, three years from now, and fifty years from now. Not only that, but that he values you more than the birds of the air and the flowers of the field. You are precious to him. He paid a great price for you. So he will meet your needs. You should not worry about whether your job will provide for your earthly needs, you should worry about whether your job is going to further the kingdom. This kind of encouragement trains the member to cling to God’s promises in faith.
But you cannot cling to the promises of God in faith if you do not know the promises of God. Which brings us to the second way that pastors serve God. They serve God by teaching his elect the knowledge of the truth. You cannot cling to what you do not know. Every pastor must be a teacher.
Now that doesn’t mean that every pastor has to be the primary teacher and preacher in the church. Far from it. But every pastor needs to be able to teach and must see the teaching of God’s word to God’s people as one of his primary duties. In fact, the Sunday worship service is the most important teaching moment in the life of the Church, but think of all the teaching moments that happen outside of the Sunday worship service, coffee meetings, service projects, Sunday schools, bible studies. The vast majority of teaching opportunities take place outside of Sunday worship. We need pastors that are going to weave the teaching of God’s word into every aspect of the life of the Church.
I have a quote hanging in my office. It is on the wall opposite of where I sit, high up above the bookshelves. You may not have noticed it, which is ok, because it is not really for you, it is for me. It is a quote from Richard Baxter, a non-Conformist English pastor, who was born in 1615 and died in 1691. The quote is from his book the Reformed Pastor. It reads,
The Reformed Pastor, Richard Baxter
“One word of seasonable, prudent advice, given by a minister to persons in necessity, may be of more use than many sermons.”
By this, Baxter meant that the people must be trained to seek the advice of their pastors. He saw the pastor as the physician for the soul in the same that a doctor cured their bodies and the lawyer set in order their estates. And when the people seek the advice of the pastor, he must be ready to practically apply God’s word to their lives. He says:
The Reformed Pastor, Richard Baxter
To this end it is very necessary that you be well acquainted with practical cases, and especially that you be acquainted with the nature of saving grace, and able to assist them in trying their state, and in resolving the main question that concerns their everlasting life or death.
It is the pastor’s duty to both diagnose their ailments, and apply the Gospel to their lives for their healing. This does not happen in Sunday worship. Not that you can’t be convicted in the sermon. I hope every Sunday that you are convicted about your sin, but the precise kind of care and treatment that Baxter is referring to cannot happen in the Sunday service. The individual needs of the people are too nuanced and too complex for Sunday service alone. We need pastors, among the people throughout the week, carefully applying God’s word to God’s people so that their knowledge of the Scriptures grows.
When you are being encouraged in your faith and you are being taught the knowledge of the truth, you will become more godly. The third way that the pastor serves God is by helping his people grow in godliness. He does this through prayer.
Consider the connection between prayer and godliness in 2 Thessalonians 1:11-12:
2 Thessalonians 1:11-12
11 To this end we always pray for you, that our God may make you worthy of his calling and may fulfill every resolve for good and every work of faith by his power, 12 so that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you, and you in him, according to the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus Christ.
Paul’s prayer for the Thessalonians is that God will complete the work that he began in them. God has already called these believers. They have already gone from death to life, but Paul’s prayer is that God would make them worthy of that calling to which they have already been called. That every good, meaning godly, desire that they have and every spiritual work of faith that God has prepared would be completed in them by the power of God. What a prayer.
The work of spiritual growth and sanctification is God’s work, not man’s. So what is a pastor to do. He loves his people and desperately wants them to grow in faith and good works. He wants them to love God and prioritize the right things in their lives. He wants them to be faithful to God and hospitable to outsiders. Like a father with grown children, he wants all these things for them, but he cannot make them godly. I cannot make you godly. A pastor can encourage and teach, but when it comes to the real work of spiritual growth Paul models the only thing a pastor can do. He can pray. Pray that God will make the people grow.
This is a spiritual discipline that I will just be honest, I am not very good at. I have always struggled to have a consistent prayer life. In the last 18 months, something changed in my life that really convicted me about being more consistent in prayer. Now, I have tried prayer journals, I have heard amazing sermons on prayer, and I have made countless New Year’s resolutions; nothing has made me more consistent in prayer except this one thing. Every morning, and I mean every morning, before I even get out of bed, I get a text message from an older brother with a one sentence summary of what he prayed for me that day. The prayer is short and many times I can tell that he is praying right out of a verse of Scripture.
My first reaction was, “Wow, that is so kind.” After a couple of weeks, I said to Molly, “This crazy things is happening, you’re not going to believe it.” After months, I started thinking to myself, I need a better, more robust prayer life. I need to get organized and have a more robust personal prayer life. It has now been over a year that this pastor has been praying for me, and the conclusion I reached this week is that I don’t just need to have a better private prayer life, I need to be a better pastor. I need to be the kind of pastor whose people know that he prays for them and what he prays for them, so that they grow in their godliness.
The pastor can teach. The pastor can encourage. But only God can bring the growth, so we need shepherds in the Church that bring God’s sheep to their true shepherd, and pleads that he do what he has already promised to do, to make them grow in godliness and fulfill every resolve for good and every work of faith by his power.
And as you grow in godliness through the being encouraged in the faith and growing in your knowledge of the truth, you will hope in the promise of eternal life. This is the fourth way that pastors serve God, by pointing people toward the hope they have in God. Look at verse 2 one more time:
Titus 1:2-3a
in hope of eternal life, which God, who never lies, promised before the ages began and at the proper time manifested in his word…
We have hope because godliness produces discontent. The more godly you become the more discontented you will be with this world. Remember what Paul said in Philippians 1:18 and following. Speaking of his current house arrest under Caesar, he said:
Philippians 1:18-26
Yes, and I will rejoice, 19 for I know that through your prayers and the help of the Spirit of Jesus Christ this will turn out for my deliverance, 20 as it is my eager expectation and hope that I will not be at all ashamed, but that with full courage now as always Christ will be honored in my body, whether by life or by death. 21 For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain. 22 If I am to live in the flesh, that means fruitful labor for me. Yet which I shall choose I cannot tell. 23 I am hard pressed between the two. My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better. 24 But to remain in the flesh is more necessary on your account. 25 Convinced of this, I know that I will remain and continue with you all, for your progress and joy in the faith, 26 so that in me you may have ample cause to glory in Christ Jesus, because of my coming to you again.
The more godly we become in this life the more this world does not satisfy us. It is like a pool of water. If it was a hot day and you were desperate for some relief, you might jump into the first muddy pond you saw without any consideration of what lurked beneath the surface. You are just happy with any way to escape the heat. But if you went to jump into the swimming pool in your back yard and you saw that a snapping turtle had found its way into your pool, it wouldn’t matter how hot it was, you would not be jumping into that pool until you dealt with the turtle.
This is how godliness relates to hope. The more godly we become, the more confident we are about the promises of Christ and the more dissatisfying this world is to us. We long for the day when those promises become true, when there will be no more chronic pain, no more old age, no more fear that we will not have enough money to make it to the next paycheck. The ache, that yearning we feel as the promise comes more clearly into focus and more tangible in our hearts is called hope.
It is the pastors job to orient you toward that promise, to help you feel the ache that this world is not your home. Like a good guide along the hiking trail, the pastor points up to the top of the mountain that we are headed toward. They take your mind off the pain and difficulty of the trail and remind you of the waterfall that is coming and the mountain top view that is coming. They help their people hope in promises that have yet to be fulfilled but are as certain as the God that made them.
Young churches need pastors that serve God by serving his people. They are not in it for the money or the fame, but they are in it because they love God and God loves his people. They encourage faith and give knowledge so that people grow in godliness as they hope in the eternal life that has been promised in Christ. This is the kind of pastor that Paul was and the kind of pastor he wanted Titus to be.
Pastors preach the Gospel
Which should make us ask the question, how? How was Titus to accomplish such a serious and important task in the life of the Church? Paul plans to answer that question with an entire letter, but he gives a preliminary answer at the end of verse 3. Let’s being in verse 2, but pay special attention to the end of verse 3.
Titus 1:2-3
in hope of eternal life, which God, who never lies, promised before the ages began 3 and at the proper time manifested in his word through the preaching with which I have been entrusted by the command of God our Savior;
How did God manifest his eternal plan to make his people hope in eternal life? Through the preaching of Paul. Isn’t that amazing? The eternal plan of God that was set prior to the existence of time is manifested for you and I in his word, and it was delivered to us in final form by the preaching of ordinary men like Paul. Our God is a speaking God. The second person of the Trinity is known as the Word of God, his Logos, that proceeds from the Father. His Spirit is said to be spirated, that is, to be breathed out by both the Father and the Son. God is a speaking God that has spoken to us in his Scriptures, but ultimately in his Son.
From the giving of the law, God’s people have proclaimed God’s word to each other, because our God is a speaking God. Therefore, it should be no surprise that one of the primary ministries of pastors is the proclamation of God’s word to God’s people, also known as preaching. Martin Lloyd-Jones said this about preaching in his lectures on preaching at Westminster Theological Seminary in 1969:
Martin Lloyd-Jones, Preaching and Preachers, 9
My reason for being very ready to give these lectures is that to me the work of preaching is the highest and greatest and the most glorious calling to which anyone can ever be called. If you want something in addition to that, I would say without any hesitation that the most urgent need in the Christian Church today is true preaching; and as it is the great and most urgent need in the Church, it is obviously the great need of the world also.
I remember reading that quote and feeling the great desire to be that kind of preacher. A preacher that felt the weight of communicating the glory of God every time he stepped behind the pulpit. Preaching truly is the highest and greatest and most glorious calling to which any person can be called, because it is the closest occupation to the heart of God. He loves his own glory, so to communicate God’s glory to God’s people by preaching God’s word is the highest human calling possible.
I also have to agree with Lloyd-Jones. The greatest need in the Church is true preachers that preach the true Gospel. At its core, everything we have discussed to this point in the sermon has been the message of the Gospel. Paul’s ministry is uniquely a Gospel ministry. The pastor is working to bring about the Gospel in the lives of the members. He serves for the faith of God’s elect and their growth in godliness. Faith in what? Knowledge of what truth? Godliness by what standard? Hope in what promise?
Faith in and knowledge of the finished work of Christ as we strive to become more like him in the hope that if we follow him in death, one day, we will also follow him in life. We are his elect because he chose us before the foundation of the world. He died for us to accomplish the eternal plan of his Father set out before time began. That is the message of the Gospel. We need preaching from pastors that is saturated in the Gospel, expounding it everywhere it is found in God’s word. This is how the pastor encourages your faith and increases your knowledge, he preaches God’s word to you.
By way of application, let me demonstrate the parallel between preaching and greater Gospel ministry outside of the walls of the Church. Healthy Churches plant healthy churches. In the same way that healthy adults get married and have healthy children, it is natural for healthy Churches to replicate themselves. And if you think about it, church planting is the ultimate end of disciplemaking. As members of a healthy Church go out and evangelize the lost, then disciple those new believers to grow up into spiritual maturity, eventually, that Church will grow to the point where they will need to do something with their new numbers. They will eventually need a new meeting place, or they will need to start a new Church. However, if they have not discipled their young men to be preachers and given them opportunities to preach, there will be no one to lead the new Gospel ministry at a church plant.
If we want to have a gospel impact outside the walls of this Church, we need to have more preachers of the Gospel than we need. This is why we spend so much time with App Grid Breakfast on Thursday mornings, Sermon Preview on Saturday nights and Service Review on Mondays at lunch. We are laboring as a church to raise up more preachers than we need in this Church.
I bring this up because it really is your ministry. You are the ones that are responsible for encouraging these young preachers and, frankly, charitably enduring bad sermons. There are many churches that could not conceive of letting a young guy preach, because they don’t want to listen to him mumble and stumble his way through a sermon. But how will the next Martin Lloyd-Jones be born without the opportunity to preach? Your greater kingdom impact, your contribution to the next great Church that faithfully preaches the Gospel for hundreds of years into the future, begins with graciously supporting and encouraging young men as they learn to preach God’s word.
Conclusion
In this sermon, we have seen that pastors are servants of God and preachers of the Gospel. That is the kind of pastor that we need at Mosaic Church, even if they are young like Titus, we need to pray that God will raise them up in this Church. And this is just the beginning of what Paul has to teach us through Titus about being a young Church. In fact, this is the first sermon in series of four sermons where we will be considering what it means to be a pastor. Next week, we will look at the qualifications for an elder. The following week we will take a break from Titus and look at Ezekiel 34 to get the fullest job description of a shepherd found anywhere in Scripture. Then we will come back to Titus and look at what is going on in these Cretan churches that make elders so essential to these young churches.
I am excited to study the letter to Titus, because Paul is going to teach this young pastor how to help this young Church leave the starting gate well. The foundations we lay here in the first few years of Mosaic’s life will, Lord willing, set the trajectory for Gospel ministry for generations to come.
Let’s Pray.