{"id":1196,"date":"2021-04-06T02:48:33","date_gmt":"2021-04-06T02:48:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/truth-talk.org\/wordpress\/?page_id=1196"},"modified":"2026-04-23T12:54:09","modified_gmt":"2026-04-23T12:54:09","slug":"titus-56th-book","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/truth-talk.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/titus-56th-book\/","title":{"rendered":"TITUS \u2013 56th BOOK"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

TITUS (Letter 56, Larry Crabb\u2019s 66 Love Letters)<\/u><\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

How You RELATE MAKES MY STORY ATTRACTIVE\u2014OR NOT<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

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).”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He came the first time to reveal the beauty of grace, more specifically, the kind of relating that only His grace makes possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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?’ \u2014 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.’<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Paul told Titus to aim yourself and your friends toward becoming a community where:<\/p>\n\n\n\n