TITUS (Letter 56, Larry Crabb’s 66 Love Letters)

How You RELATE MAKES MY STORY ATTRACTIVE—OR NOT

We are now ready for His Spirit to reach deeper into what we long for and to make clearer the kind of community we need in order to live into that vision. Paul began by saying, ‘My aim is to raise hopes by pointing to life without end’ (Titus 1:2 MSG).”

When we grasp the significance of God’s Son’s two comings, we’ll understand how we can live in the power of His first coming and in the hope of His second coming.

God’s servant, George MacDonald, in a book called Lilith, wrote, “We are often unable to tell people what they need to hear because they want to hear something else.”

Without understanding the distinct purposes of Christ’s first and second coming, too many professing followers naively (though not innocently) assume His Son came to make their lives on earth comfortable, to protect them from what they fear, and to fix whatever problems come their way until He returns a second time to indulge their entitled demands even more fully.

He came the first time to reveal the beauty of grace, more specifically, the kind of relating that only His grace makes possible.

When He appears the second time with an army of angels, His Son will display for the world to see the beauty of glory, the sheer delight of the relational party the Trinity has been enjoying since before time began.

We are living between two epiphanies. We have no higher calling in this life than to relate for one supreme purpose-to reveal the beauty of His grace until the beauty of His glory fills us with joy forever.

No one from the Roman church showed up at the first hearing to advocate for Paul [2 Timothy 4:16]. His community failed him. But see what Paul did. Between the first hearing when he was abandoned and the second trial when he was sentenced to death – Paul focused not on the pain of being failed but on the mission of making God’s story attractive by the way he related.

Rather than complaining about mistreatment – as so many do by repeating grace-empty words such as, ‘Well, I have to be honest with you. You really hurt me. Now, how can we straighten things out?’ — God’s suffering servant forgave his friends and told God’s story (2 Timothy 4:16-18] – a new way to relate, the way we were redeemed to relate.

Six centuries before Paul told them God’s story, one of the the Cretans revered poets, a man named Epimenides, described his fellow Cretans as ‘always lying, evil brutes, lazy gluttons’ (Titus 1:12). In churches today, too many of God’s followers, by hiding their self-centered energy beneath a sociable veneer, see themselves as not nearly so bad as awful people like the Cretans. God never intended that His story be told to polish the veneer.

As G. Campbell Morgan put it, ‘the true spiritual power of the church, and the possibility of the lowest exercising it.’ For that purpose, ‘the most difficult soil was selected; the most difficult circumstances were employed.’

When Paul wrote to Titus, he never intended for Titus to help the new converts in Crete to merely get along. Sociably pleasant Christianity is no Christianity at all. It aims too low. It fails to reveal the beauty of grace.

Paul told Titus to aim yourself and your friends toward becoming a community where:

• men and women who long to live well between the two epiphanies enjoy spiritual influence [1:6-9]
• God’s story is told in a way that stirs people’s desire to always do good, to live and love well; that creates a vision of what revealing the beauty of grace actually looks like in tough relationships [1:9]
• teaching that makes self-preserving choices seem right or, at least, justified and necessary is exposed and rejected [1:9-16]
• the way you live reveals the beauty of grace-energized relating until the beauty of glory-filled community can be enjoyed forever [2:11-14; 3:3-7], where even the underprivileged live in a manner that makes God’s story attractive [2:10]

If we experience even a taste of that kind of community as Paul did with Timothy and Titus, we’ll be able, like Paul, when others fail us badly to reveal the beauty of grace even if we’re a Cretan.”

TITUS: From Ray Stedman

Click here for entire Bible Summary from Ray Stedman

to be completed

TITUS – David Jeremiah (Understanding the 66 Books of the Bible)

Key thought: Godly leaders should set in order what is lacking in the Church by teaching sound doctrine and modeling self-discipline.

Key Verse: Denying ingodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly in the present age, looking for the blessed hope and glorious appearing of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ. Titus 2:12-13

Key Action: Speak the things which are proper for sound doctrine … Be careful to maintain good works. Titus 2:1 and 3:8