So this morning I alluded to a couple of passages, Ephesians chapter 2 and Ephesians chapter 4, both of which describe the church as a building that is being built up on a foundation. The Holy Spirit, we said, was working in the apostles and the prophets to lay the foundation of the building. Of course, foundations go on the bottom. Well, what is the bedrock or the foundation of the church? It is the word of God that the Holy Spirit was working through the apostles and the prophets. Ephesians 2.20, they are the foundation of the church, Christ Jesus being the cornerstone, and Ephesians 4 describes us as a building that is being built up in love, and a body that's being built up in love. The master architect is the master architect. has a plan for the building and he was laying down that plan with the apostles with the prophets and he expects all churches to build themselves up based on what we find here in the Word of God. We must follow all the details here. If we want our structure to be biblical, if we want to be a godly church, we have to follow the details that we find here in this divine blueprint. And we do find the particulars of the blueprint in the pastoral epistles. The pastoral epistles, again, are 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, and Titus. And so, as we've been looking at Titus, we have been looking at instructions that are specific for the building up of the church. We said that we wanted to be a godly church. Well, Titus addresses what a godly church is and who the godly people are inside of the church. We want to be a godly church with godly people. This is what we see in the book of Titus. And so we have that blueprint here of how to build up God's building. This is not only done through understanding leadership or membership or other questions of church structure. This is also accomplished by understanding that there is a certain character to which God is calling each one of us. We must be godly people if we are also to have a godly church. It's almost as though we see the character and grace running through the building, like plumbing and electrical work. I don't know if that's too much of a stretch of an illustration, but it provides us with what we need inside of the building. And so to close this series out in the Book of Titus, as I said, we're reflecting on the Apostle Paul's instructions concerning the traits of a healthy church. And this evening we'll see that a godly church is characterized by strong leadership, by being established in grace, and by being devoted to good works, by strong leadership by being established in grace and by being devoted to good works. And as Titus is receiving this instruction here, we too are receiving instruction for our church and how we are to operate as a church of God. So let's first consider the character of a godly church, and that is in chapter one here. And he starts off the letter much like other letters are started. Paul says that he is a bondservant of God and an apostle of Jesus Christ for the faith of those chosen of God and the knowledge of the truth, which is according to godliness. then hope of eternal life, which God, who cannot lie, promised long ages ago, but at the proper time manifested, even His word in proclamation, with which I was entrusted according to the commandment of God our Savior to Titus. After all that, he finally gets to the two here. Who is he writing to? He's writing to Titus, my true child in a common faith, grace and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Savior. Now, this is almost an extended salutation here, as he is starting it off by setting a tone of grace. We need God's grace inside of a church, and we need God's grace active inside of us. So these four verses really help us to see the importance of the truth of the gospel inside of a church, inside of a godly church. We need to be a church that is rooted in godliness and in the hope of eternal life. We must be that if we are to be a godly church. There's a reason that Paul is starting this letter in this way. This letter, by the way, Titus is supposed to read to the churches as he's going out into the churches. He's expecting this to be read to the people so that they will know what the Lord expects of them. And of course, we are reading it as well because we want to know what the Lord expects of us. And so, yes, these are important words to start us off with understanding what our character is supposed to be and where the strength of that character comes from. And so that's the introduction. Now, as we move into the next verses, we move into verses that took us weeks to get through. If you remember verses five through nine here, verses five through nine, we were talking about the leadership of a godly church, the leadership of a godly church. And he said in verse five, for this reason I left you in Crete that you would set in order what remains and appoint elders in every city, as I have directed you. We are seeing here. the qualities of godly leadership, of elders in particular. Of course, elders is a term that's borrowed from ancient Israel, from cities. Cities had elders, synagogues had elders, and the churches would have elders as well, those who would direct the church. Now, how is it that Titus, I want to say Timothy, But Titus how is it that Titus is supposed to be? Selecting these men. What is he supposed to look for? Well, what God gives him a rubric? He's not supposed to sit down and say I want the guy to be tall and good-looking and you know, kind of dark and handsome. I mean, obviously he would select me in that case, but those are not the guidelines, right? What is he supposed to be looking for? Well, he's supposed to be looking for a man who is above reproach. Someone who will lead the church in godliness. Someone who models that in his own life. Not someone who's perfect. Obviously, everyone will struggle, everyone will fall and sin at some time. But this is someone who has been living this life. Someone who has an established pattern of living that will encourage other people to establish the same pattern in their lives. someone that others can look up to. It may not be the most handsome guy. It may be someone who's not as tall. It may be someone like Pastor Jorge back there. But that's okay because it's not about looks. It's not about the Saul whose head and shoulders above the rest or anything else. God looks where? on the heart and that's what we're supposed to be looking for with leaders. We're not looking for MBAs, we're not looking for other kinds of things like that, business degrees or certain kinds of acumen or different things like that. We noted that this is a particular need because of the kind of leadership that God calls churches to. They are called to be elder led. We talked about the fact that many Southern Baptist churches in particular, since that's our history here, many Southern Baptist churches have strayed away from their founding. It used to be that the founders of the SBC and many SBC churches were more of an elder led model, but over time that began to fall away and you started to have that replaced with what? Well, sometimes you would have the single pastor model. Sometimes that's called the Moses model where you have just one guy and everyone's looking up to him and he tells everybody what to do. So that's one thing that they got replaced with. Another model is the deacon-led model, where instead it's almost like, yeah, we've got to protect the congregation from this pastor who's got such a big head. So you have this group of deacons who tell the pastor what to do, and they make all the choices for the rest of the church. That's a model that a lot of Southern Baptist churches have. And then there's, of course, the congregation-led model. I'm not sure which model is the most prevalent. Obviously, we're more congregational here, but that's not the way that God would have us to run according to this. We should seek to have the most biblical model possible, which is that we have a plurality of elders who all are qualified for that position and they are keeping each other accountable, they're keeping the church accountable as they are calling the church to holiness, to move forward in the mission, and then the faith of our Lord. But this is what he describes here in these five verses, and of course, Timothy, and 1 Timothy chapter three, and other places, we see a more expanded rubric for that. Now this all underscores, again, the importance of having the right men at the helm. There have to be the right people. If it's gonna be a godly church, there's gotta be godly leadership. You can't have a guy who is just trying to achieve his own agenda, a guy who is trying to maybe line his pockets, or trying to get influence and acclaim. No, this has to be a godly individual. And Titus has to look out for that. Titus had that challenge of, okay, a lot of these guys, pretty much everyone on Crete is going to be a newer Christian. And so it's not like, oh yeah, here's the guy who's been a Christian for 30 years walking with the Lord. No, they're all young Christians. So he has a challenge ahead of him. People who may have had past, and those pasts really aren't that past yet. They're still pretty recent. And he's gotta look for that. He's gotta suss out who is going to be the right person for the right position here. So pastoral church or pastoral search committees and churches, they've got to be looking for the same thing here. If they want godly churches, they've got to be looking for godly individuals. I think I've said everything about that section. Like I said, we spent weeks on that, so I don't want to belabor that. Let's go ahead and move on into the next section here, which is verses 10 through 16. Verses 10 through 16. This is also something we need to consider with the character of a godly church. something that is actually negative by comparison to the godly elders who are supposed to be selected. These are ungodly people in the church, false teachers who disrupt for personal gain. Verse 10 says, For there are many rebellious men, empty talkers and deceivers, especially those of the circumcision, who must be silenced because they are upsetting whole families, teaching things that they should not teach for the sake of sordid gain." I said, yes, some folks are trying to line their pockets. They were doing that back then, too. And that's just always been a problem. Sometimes we think, oh, it'd be nice to get back to the early church where there were no problems. No, there were problems in the early church. They had to deal with issues just like we have to deal with issues as well. And if we wanna be a godly church, we have to be on guard against divisive influences within the church. We have to unite around the truth. not a false unity, not just pretending like everything's okay. No, we got to unite around the truth. That means that a key mark of a godly church must be discernment, knowing right from wrong, knowing right from almost right, as Spurgeon said. That's the tougher one. It's easy to say, okay, yeah, the person over here teaching workspace salvation is wrong. It's not as easy to tell if someone is teaching a heresy that sounds, that almost sounds right. That's why you need godly leaders who can suss out the truth from error. But a key mark of a godly church is a church that practices discernment, that practices church discipline. If someone is being divisive, maybe, as I said, not just even within the church, but within his own home. We had to deal with that. That is something that we are called to. That is something that Paul calls us to recognize within this section. This doesn't mean that we are people who are always looking to pick a fight. We shouldn't be. We, I mean, after all, one of the qualifications of an elder is that he is not pugnacious. He's not a, he's not someone who's always looking to fight. He's someone who is rather gentle and loving what is good and sensible and just and valid and self-controlled. So no, we shouldn't be people who are just always itching for a fight, always itching to get in battle. There are times to fight, yes, and we should be ready to fight when those times come. But we should also be seeking to invest ourselves in each other for mutual edification. That should really be the thrust of our time and our energy. And that is a result of God's grace, which brings us to the second point. We noted the character of a godly church. Now we're noting the grace of a godly church. And I'm sorry, I don't have a PowerPoint for you, but that's the second point, the grace of a godly church. Now in this chapter, in chapter two, I should say, Paul shifts now from the character of leadership to the conduct of every believer in the church. We talked about divisive people, well, who are people to be in the church? This is the shift that's happening. And he urges Titus here in verse one, He says, as for you, speak the things which are fitting for sound doctrine. Titus needs to make sure that he is speaking words that are edifying, words that are true, words that will unite people around what God has called them to. And as he's doing that, the Individuals, people within the church, they need to be engaged in ministry as well. But now that they are empowered by his words of sound doctrine, they are to engage in sound ministry themselves, sound fellowship, godliness with one another. That flows into each group within the church as we see through Through the next verses here, everyone, older men, younger women, we see that older men are to be temperate, et cetera. Older women, verse three, are likewise to be reverent, et cetera. Verse six, likewise urge the young men to be sensible in all things. We're supposed to see this happening with the older men and the younger men, the older women and the younger women. We're supposed to see a change of life in regards to the gospel, a change that affects how we interact with one another as a church. Older men are called to be temperate and so forth. As I have said, older women to be reverent. Younger men are to be examples of good deeds as they are maintaining purity and integrity. Bond servants or slaves are also included here, right? Verses 9 and 10 says that they are to be submissive and to show themselves as trustworthy in all things with are giving us now application into our workplaces. We are supposed to live in this way so that we are adorning the gospel of Jesus Christ. And that's why he says in verse 10, that we're not pilfering, but showing all good faith so that we, or they, will adorn the doctrine of God our Savior in every respect. Slaves were to do this. Guess what? We are all slaves of Christ. We're all supposed to be doing this. And how we behave, how we work. We are supposed to be engaged in this way. Whatever our social position, whatever our station in life, we are supposed to be engaging with one another or with people outside with the same kind of grace. Edifying and seeking to build up one another. I want to be clear on this. This is not moralistic teaching. Because it's easy to gather that. Oh, okay, so here's the list of things we're supposed to do. Here's the list of things we're not supposed to do. We can hang it up on the refrigerator. Every day we can print off a new copy. We can put checks by what we're doing well. Xs by what we're not doing well that we just approve. just use this as a rubric to judge yourselves. No, that's religion. That's man-made religion, I should say. That's not the way that we are to operate in Christ. We are supposed to instead operate within grace or as an extension of the grace of God in our lives. We operate according to the power that is working within us. And that's where Paul goes next. He talks about the grace of God, and this shapes us. It shapes us individually. It shapes us as a community. It shapes our church. As we are becoming more godly, our church is becoming more godly as a result. And it's because of the grace which is active. We see this especially in verses 11 and 12. For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all men, instructing us to deny ungodliness and worldly desires, and to live sensibly, righteously, and godly in the present age. This is really the theological heart, not just of this chapter, but of this whole letter. We see exactly what he was talking about in the opening of the letter. in the first few verses. And now we see it being applied. How are we supposed to be godly young men, godly young women? How are we supposed to be godly older men, older women? We see it's by the grace of God, which appears and saves us and then instructs us. God's grace saves us and then it schools us. So it's not just a theological idea. God's grace is important for us to understand what salvation is about. But it's not just this theological term, grace. What is grace? It's undeserved merit. Very good seminary student, you get an A on that paper. It's undeserved merit. What does it mean for you though? What does it mean in your life? Does it mean that you have been saved? Does it mean that you are now being instructed in how you're supposed to live in godliness? This is what God's grace does for us on a personal level. And we've been talking about the Holy Spirit the last couple of Sundays in the in the morning service. This is what the Holy Spirit does for us as he is active in our hearts working through his word. and illuminating his word to our hearts. God's grace teaches us to deny ungodliness and worldly desires and to live righteously in this present age. We need that. We need that. We need that. They needed that too. It's something we always need. It's something that Christians need in every age. Now, this doesn't mean that leadership and structure is important, or excuse me, unimportant in the church, but it must be that by the Holy Spirit of God, everything we do as a church is directed by God's grace. When I first came here, I said there were two things that I would hope for for a church. It's that the church is open to the teaching of scripture, and it's a church that's open to the grace of God. Because everything else falls into place from there. If you're open to truth, then you're open, then you're going to receive truth. If you're open to grace, then you're going to receive it in the right way. And that's, that's, those are the two things that we must be about as a church. So we, everything must be directed by the Holy Spirit. And when, when this is happening, we're going to be. As a church not focused on all these divisive things that we read about in the first chapter, we're gonna be focused instead on the blessed hope and the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Christ Jesus, who gave himself for us to redeem us from every lawless deed and to purify for himself a people for his own possessions, zealous for good deeds. That's what we wanna be. That's what we wanna be as a people. And if the leadership of a church is dedicated to that, then like Titus, Paul can say to us, these things speak and exhort and reprove with all authority, let no one disregard you. Your focus is right. Your focus is right. So a godly church then is led from the front by the grace of God. That's something to think about. It's not led from the front by a force of personality. We don't want to build a personality cult here. We want to instead be focused on God's grace, God's eternal grace. The church is godly when it proclaims the gospel of grace and then it also lives it out in all of its members, young and old. And as that happens, it engages in good works. We start to see that here as the grace of God is training us, but we see that especially here in the third chapter. And that brings us to the third point this evening. The third point is that, is the works, or are the works, the point is the works of the godly church, the works of the godly church, chapter three tells us. And in this final chapter, we see Paul turning to a practical application of what he has said. This is what we often see in Paul's letters, by the way. We see an early part of the letter, maybe the first half of the letter, in fact, or the first two thirds of the letter, focused on theology, teaching, understanding what God's grace is, what the gospel is, and then we move on into the practical section, We do see that often in his letters. We see a little bit of that here in Titus as well. In the first couple of verses, we read that a godly church is known by its actions. What actions? Well, look at those first couple of verses. He says, remind them to be subject to rulers, to authorities, to be obedient, to be ready for every good deed, to malign no one, to be peaceable, gentle, showing every consideration for all men. Wow, that's that's how we want to live right that should be anyway when we are dealing with authorities we should live in obedience and in subjection. Now, we said when we were studying that, that doesn't mean that we have a blind obedience. Obviously, if our authorities or if an officer or those who are in authority over us are asking us to do something sinful, something wrong, something that's a violation of our duties or our oath, if we have an oath that we've taken, whatever the case may be, obviously, we have to disobey at that point. If it's a violation of God's will, we must obey God rather than men. But typically, that's not going to be what we're faced with. we're going to be faced with, I don't want to do that right now. Right? That's typically what we face more often. I don't feel like that right now. Okay. Well, what do we need to do? We need to be in subjection. That should be our default position. We should live in a way that is exalting to God. And we should live in a way that is peaceable so that we're not maligning folks, we're gentle, we're showing consideration to all men. We should be praying for people. So we start to see the good works that should begin to flow out into our lives. We already started to see that adorning the gospel of Christ. by our works, but here we see, yes, these are some very practical calls for us so that we are living according to what grace has done within us. Now, to put this another way, a church is not just inwardly focused. We're not just doing good works to the people inside. We're doing good works to those who are outside as well. And so we are going out of these walls with good works, operating with, with grace and consideration for folks. Now Paul then begins to remind us, and he doesn't get very far into a practical exhortation without a reminder, again, of God's grace. And starting in verse three, he reminds us of our past position. Who were we before Christ? Well, we were foolish, right? Disobedient. See, we need to be obedient. We were disobedient. We need to be people of truth. We were deceived. We were enslaved to various lusts and pleasures, spending our life in malice and envy, hateful, hating one another. Goodness. That's not the way we want to be now. If that's us before, we want to be different now. We want to live according to the grace of God. Of course, we start to see that in verse 4. When the kindness of God, our Savior, and his love for mankind appeared, he saved us. not on the basis of deeds which we have done in righteousness, but according to His mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Spirit, whom He poured out upon us richly through Jesus Christ, our Savior. And so these verses really accentuate our need for grace through the Holy Spirit. If we are to live godly lives, not just within the church, but outside of the church, we need God's grace active in our lives through the power of the Holy Ghost. We need that. We cannot operate without it. That's why I say this is not a moralistic teaching. You are not gonna be able to live in the way that God's called you to. without the power of the Holy Spirit. Trust me, I've tried sometimes. As a younger man, for whatever reason, I missed a whole aspect of teaching here, and I thought it was all about personal effort. Onward, Christian soldier, we sang. I thought it was all about, okay, well, you gotta pull yourself up by your bootstraps. I almost burned myself out just as a young man trying to do what God had called me to do. I didn't realize I needed his grace active in my life. I needed devotion to him. I needed to lean on his understanding and his strength rather than my own. We need his power active in our lives or else we are not going to make it. So this is a reminder that the good works of a church must flow from the work of Christ must flow from the empowerment of the Holy Spirit, must flow from the grace that God has shown to us. That's the basis here. Our good works result from the good news of Jesus Christ. That's where our good works come from, the good news of Jesus Christ. And so that brings us to verse eight. Here, Paul emphasizes that this message is trustworthy, that believers then should be careful to engage in good works and good deeds. Again, it's not that good works are the foundation of our salvation. We're saying gospel, right? Gospel means good news. It's not good news if it's all about our works. How do you know that you've done enough? How do you know that you've done it well enough, even after you've done it? That's not good news. That's bad news if it's all about works, but no, the good works flow from the good news. They're not a foundation for our salvation. They are the necessary fruit of our salvation. They flow from our salvation. A godly church understands this, it preaches this, it reminds people of this so that they are not overwhelmed. And a godly church is full of people who are actively engaged in good deeds, who demonstrate the reality of the gospel in their lives. We care about doing good because we care about people, because God's grace has made us care. And so when we read that these things are good and profitable for men, we start chomping at the bit. We say, yes, that's what we want to be about. That's what we want to be doing. Like as God's done something so gracious to us, he has given us so much good. He has given us so much profit. We want to now pour out some of that to other people. We're overflowing. We want to have some of God's grace spill out from our lives into other people's lives. That's what we want to start to see. So that's what he reminds us of here. Now again, Paul reminds us, and I think Crete had a particular problem with this and its churches. That's why Paul keeps coming back to this, but it's something that we need that reminder as well. A church that is striving, in good words, can be destroyed by divisive people. by people who are focused on the wrong things. And so Paul warns here in verse nine that there are people who are going to be all about the foolish controversies and genealogies and strife and disputes about the law. We were just talking last night, my children and I, we were talking about this one person who was saying if you believe in a round earth, if you believe in a spherical earth, you're going to hell. You have to believe in a flat earth. There are folks who are going to try to split a church over such issues, and you say, oh, first of all, To believe in a flat earth. I think that's dumb. Okay, that that may be And and I certainly don't believe in a flat earth. I believe in around earth. I I think the evidence points that way pretty clearly but One way or the other I'm not gonna say to to a flat earth or where if you don't believe that the world is round You're going to hell. No, we're going to preach the gospel here and we're gonna get back to what the truth is. And if that person continues to try to sow division and say, okay, no, this has gotta be the metric that we judge a church on. Well, what do we gotta do with that person? We have to practice church discipline on them. Why? Not just to kick him out of the church. I mean, that might be necessary. But we want that person to repent and get back to the truth so that he's not all about foolish controversies. And there were folks who were concerned about that back then, concerned about genealogies and strife and disputes about the law. I mean, just think about the Jerusalem Council. They were worried about whether a person needed, as a Gentile, to be circumcised under Moses to come to faith in Jesus Christ. You can see why someone might wonder that, but once you handle that, then you don't continue to have disputes about the law. Well, okay, you don't have to be circumcised, but you do have to eat kosher. Really? Let's not get all bent out of shape about disputes about the law. The law is important. The law is good. We need to be teaching the Ten Commandments. We need to be teaching these things so that we know what holiness looks like and what unholiness looks like. But we are not going to start adding things to people's shoulders because it's a pet doctrine. And there are Christians who do that. They can do that with good doctrines. They can do that with end times doctrines. I've seen people who get disciplined out of churches based on what their end times view was. Well, that's not a good church if the church is getting bent out of shape about that. Now, if the person's creating the vision, of course, that's another issue to talk about, but the church shouldn't be making secondary and third-tier issues primary issues. So we need to be focused on what God has called us to focus on. If there is someone who is being factious, verse 10 tells us, reject them after a first and second warning, knowing that such a man is perverted and is sinning, being self-condemned. Sometimes folks get focused on these obscure or arcane doctrines, whatever the case may be, because they actually are holding on to some kind of sin in their life. But this is what makes them feel better about themselves, that they are focused on something that seems like no one else is focused on. And so they're, you know, studying when they think the next rapture is going to be or when the rapture is going to be and trying to set a date while they're also watching porn or something else. we need to be able to call that out. And if we're gonna be a godly church, we cannot allow that kind of thing to happen. And so Paul instructs Titus to deal with this. A godly church is marked by unity that's built around the truth and the avoidance of unnecessary quarrels that can distract from its mission. So finally, we come to Paul's closing remarks, his personal remarks in verses 12 through 15. And in these verses, we see, yet again, the importance of good works. Paul is telling Titus to make sure that he is taking care of Zenos and Apollos, make sure that they have what they need on the journey. That just sets an example for the rest of the church. Oh, okay, so this is what good works looks like. You look at a person, where they are, what their need is, and then you take care of that. Oh, that's what a good work is to someone. Okay, I can do that. I can find someone who needs something. do a good work in that way? Okay, yes. And so we see that once again. He says that we need to ensure that the church learns to engage in good works. Verse 14, our people must also learn to engage in good deeds to meet pressing needs so that they will not be unfruitful. He warned about fruitlessness and unfruitfulness. We want to be fruitful. We wanna be fruitful, and this is what he calls us to, to being a godly church that is meeting the needs, that's serving, that's supporting the work of ministry. And so as we wrap this up here, in the book of Titus, we see a clear picture of what a godly church is supposed to be. It's marked by character, as seen in its leaders, as well as in its people. Its people are shaped by sound doctrine and by the grace of God, the transforming power of the gospel, the Holy Spirit being active in their lives. A godly church is also one that demonstrates good works in its people. the fruit of a life that's transformed by the kindness, the mercy of God. We want to show that same mercy to others. So I hope that as we finish up this study, that we are striving to be a godly church, a church that is seeking to do all that God has called it to do. a church of character, a church that embodies not just truth but grace, and a church that engages in good works. And we do all of these things for the glory of God.