Thank you for selecting this message by Dr. James Hoffman. Dr. Hoffman preaches verse by verse through the entire book of the Bible. From all of us at Living Water of Lapine here in Central Oregon, we hope that it will encourage you and feed you spiritually. And if you would like to leave a message after the sermon, our contact information is found on the sermon page where you found this sermon. Now may God richly bless you as you listen. It was a routine visit for the pastor. New people had visited his church and had filled out a registration card and left their phone number. He called and he offered his services to visit them and make himself available to answer any questions they might have about the church. The answer they gave the pastor was an enthusiastic, yes, come on by. So one evening, later on that week, he came by. Now, composing this family of five was the husband, who was a firefighter, the wife, an employee of the Department of Motor Vehicles, and their three daughters. The oldest two were twins and were in the fourth grade at the time. It was a pleasant visit, and about halfway through, the wife asked the pastor a question that made his heart soar with delight. She apologized for not knowing the right words to use, but this woman who worked at the DMV did her best by using an analogy. She told the pastor that she enjoyed visiting the church, but she said with a very earnest, but still a very puzzled expression on her face, everyone seemed to be driving in a different lane than us. The whole time we were there, everyone was over there and we were here. Can you please tell me how we can get into the same lane that everybody else in your church was in? They seemed to be so joyful. That evening, the pastor led the family to the Lord. They gave their hearts to Christ as Christ followers, and their lives immediately merged into the lane that was heaven-bound. They became regular attenders and members of that, that very church of that pastor. Everything was fine for several weeks, and then the pastor received a phone call from this family. Something had shaken their newfound faith in Christ. Their faith crisis had been needlessly caused by what the twin daughters had experienced in their Sunday school class. The fourth grade girl's Sunday school teacher was Tammy. She had been part of the church for many years. She and her husband were very influential members. They were involved in Awana, they taught Sunday school, they rotated into the nursery and served when it was their turn. They were definitely at the center of all the fun activities, hosting parties and gatherings in their homes. They were popular and very connected with everyone in the church. Apparently, Tammy had abandoned the Sunday school curriculum that the Sunday school superintendent had been providing for her. She didn't think that she needed to let the Sunday school superintendent or any of the pastors of that church know. But she decided to go off on her own. Tammy ad-libbed her Bible lessons. On the Sunday morning that made the new Christian family want to quit the church, Tammy led the twin daughters to believe that their parents were certainly on the highway to hell because they were not part of the right political party. Tammy had told them that you cannot be a Christian and belong to one of the two major political parties of our country. Knowing that their parents were members of that political party, the twins were devastated. Now, I really don't care what your opinion is on the question of whether or not you can affiliate yourself with a certain political party and still be a Christian. I would probably agree with you that one seems to be more lock in step with demonic purposes but political party affiliation does not define a person's salvation. To focus on it takes the ball off of what is really important. You see, our efforts in the church must be focused on getting people better connected to Christ. Then, let's let the Holy Spirit do his work in people's lives on these much lesser matters, like political party affiliation. That's a distracted focus. Devastated this young Christian family. The pastor faced a dilemma. He needed to confront the false and divergent teaching for the sake of this family of new believers. Their faith was now shaking. Further harm would come to them if he did nothing. And such falsehood could damage others if it was allowed. He certainly did not want to be a pastor of a church where only a certain political party was welcome. But on the other hand, he knew that if he did confront someone like Tammy, any semblance of peace in the church would quickly become turmoil. This was a powder keg of TNT. Well, I did confront, and turmoil did erupt. You knew it was me all along, didn't you? Being in ministry is always challenging. Standing for the truth and protecting young believers is not a popular pastime. Defending the truth and what is really important is for neither the faint-hearted nor those who want to be liked above everything else. That's because the realm of truth is not a playground. It is a battlefield, and it's becoming more and more so today. One of the things that has helped me through the years is the honest writing of men like Chuck Swindoll. You've heard me quote him often. He gave me fresh perspective on all the romantic idealism of ministry. He does it with such comments like this, which I found as I studied for today's passage. This is what he's written. After more than five decades in pastoral ministry, you'd think that I would have outgrown my youthful idealism. Certainly by now I should have left behind my silly notion that if I worked hard enough, preached strong enough, prayed long enough, and invested myself enough in the lives of people that my church would eventually struggle free of depravity's clutches and create something close to paradise on earth. Certainly by now I should have realized that the success I long for doesn't just lie beyond whatever crisis I happen to be facing at the time. Why should I be so stunned? Why should discouragement nearly always take me to the brink of quitting after all these years? When I lose this often painful idealism, never I hope, if I ever do, then it will be time to call it quits. You know as well as I do that Satan is the master of deception. To afflict a church, he artfully drapes his lies in the regal robes of truth, often surrounding his lies with truth. He seduces charming, intelligent men and women, promising the world to them in exchange for their help in deceiving others. He brings his false teachers into the church. And how convincing they are, keeping their true nature carefully concealed, they deftly move among God's elect, up through the ranks of authority and into positions of power. Lacking truth, they win friends, they influence people by means of contrived charisma that's difficult to resist, even for those who despise falsehood. Nevertheless, a trained eye can spot them. Paul's letter to Titus in our passage today explains how. He instructed his younger colleague to watch for three clues, wrong words, wrong motives, and wrong actions. We'll see that these who come in that Satan uses with his false teaching are rebellious people, empty talkers, and deceitful people. No church is immune to them. Let's learn to recognize the signs of heresy spreaders and give our due diligence for not letting them get a foothold in our midst. Spelled out pretty clearly for us in verse 10. Look at it again with me here in verse 10. It says this. For there are many who are insubordinate, empty talkers, and deceivers, especially those of the circumcision party. Now, the word translated insubordinate means unaccountable. Heresy spreaders refuse to submit themselves to proper church authority. I will do whatever I want. I don't need authorization or anyone's approval. I am my own authority. They establish themselves as all the authority they need. Tammy, thought that it was perfectly legitimate to lay aside her church-approved curriculum, do her own thing, and not tell anyone. Throughout my years of ministry, I sometimes see a rather audacious disrespect for the proper biblical authority structure in a church. No one is going to tell me what to do. It often, it often comes through a church member who has won friends in the church and influenced fellow members by means of a contrived charisma. They're difficult to resist because they have made you feel that they would do anything for you. They always seem willing and able to help you whenever you have a need. They intentionally cultivate a sense of loyalty from you to themselves. It's true, they often seem like very caring and helpful brothers and sisters in Christ to you and to others, but they are insubordinate, and that's how you can tell them and spot them. They are unaccountable to proper authority. They are their own. Authority. Our passage is telling us to watch out for folks like that. It doesn't matter how helpful they have been to you personally. If they show signs of insubordination, don't let them have you in their back pocket. It's hard. but Scripture issues a very stern warning here. Satan is very crafty in how he plants his workers of iniquity in a church. Look beyond their helpfulness. Do they show signs of insubordination? Verse 10 mentions another marker of someone who is a deceiver in our midst. Maybe you don't see a sense of insubordination, perhaps though you might see this one. This also is a warning. Heresy spreaders sometimes will show themselves because they're empty talkers. Empty talkers speak with smooth, captivating, even persuasive conviction but have little or nothing on which to base their teaching. You won't hear clear Bible references that if you take the time and look them up, you'll see they don't really speak to the issue like they made you believe. They're empty talkers. They cleverly present their personal opinions as spiritual truth, but have no real substantive biblical backing. They can impress people with the strength of their conviction, but when you boil it all down, it is only hot air. With conviction, Tammy presented her personal opinion as spiritual truth, and she presented it to her fourth grade Sunday school class. A third indicator here in verse 10 is deception. Now, the wording that Paul used is actually mind deceivers, and scholars think that Paul coined this term. It isn't found anywhere else in Greek literature. It's thought that Paul wanted to describe the false teachers as persons who deliberately engage in mind-bending control. You know what that sounds an awful lot like? It sounds like the mind-bending tricks that the cults back in the 1970s and 80s were doing. We call it brainwashing. What they were doing here in the United States, some still do this. They play heavy mind games with their devotees and maneuver them into doing things that they otherwise would not have done. Charles Manson comes to mind. Much of their mind control is by inciting fear that if they ever leave this cult, or if you ever disrespect or dissent from our teaching, you're gonna face sure and devastating consequences that you're not gonna like. And so they play this mind-bending control on their followers. Even inside the church, a certain amount of the mind deception can still happen in evangelical churches. Imitate our behavior. Eat only certain foods. Don't engage in certain activities or you're not going to heaven. Paul singled this one out as a particular kind of mind deception for Titus that he was to deal with there on the island of Crete. He says, especially those of the circumcision party at the end of verse 10. So we know that's what the particular mind bending stuff he was to deal with. In the situation at Crete, the peddlers of theological heresy were the Judaizers who offered a Jesus plus Salvationism, which is always Jesus minus theology. Add to Christ, and you subtract from Christ. That's spiritual mathematics. Like a fast-spreading cancer, these masters of deception didn't infect one, but many entire households. They propagated a man-centered message, a what-can-I-do gospel, which deflects our focus from Christ and his cross to ourselves and our accomplishments. Glory to me. Tamiya deflected a focus from Christ and confused the simple message of the gospel. Legalism, this wrongful idea that we have to add something to faith to make it genuine or to make ourselves worthy, you know, it results in arrogance. It results in hardness. It results in envy. There's often a competition to exceed the goodness of others. I'm more worthy of my salvation than you are. Some who live the gospel plus doctrine discover the need to tear down others in order to build themselves up. And so there's gossip and backbiting and power plays that result. There's a need to cover up and minimize our own sin lest we fail to meet other people's expectations. Don't look at me, look at them. They're really bad. Any kind of belief that God loves us because we are better than others in knowledge, in practice, or lineage, creates intolerance, bitterness, dissension, and despair. So you see, entire households were being ruined. But it wasn't just in Paul's day. Gospel plus attitudes exist in every Christian church, every Christian organization of our own day. You might be listening to me right now and you might believe that because you do not measure up in some dimension that you are not as valuable to God as someone else. or as much as you could be. Gospel plus thinking is sidelining Christians with despair. Listen, the gospel of grace means that you can never earn more favor with God. Verse 11. They must be silenced, since they are upsetting whole families by teaching for shameful gain what they ought not teach. We can more readily see the signs of a false teacher of these signs that are given to us in verse 10. But what we're given here in verse 11 is a little bit more difficult to spot. We need to pay attention to those who are insubordinate to proper biblical authority that God has placed in the church. And we need to pay attention to those who speak their opinions as though they are spiritual truth without any substantive support like proper scripture citations. and to those who are mind benders, who hold others tight to their faults, gospel of earning God's favor. Now we can observe these, but verse 11 gives us their motive, which is not as easy to spot. We can't truly know somebody's motives. But if we see the more observable signs in verse 10, we can know this. These false teachers do what they do for some kind of shameful reward. It might be for money, for power, influence, or fame, popularity. Please be careful about your motive for doing ministry. Now I say that because we're about to see in verse 14 that the heresy spreaders that Paul wanted Titus to silence had turned away from the faith. They had once been biblical, but a motive for shameful gain enticed them away. Are you involved in any ministry by any kind of earthly reward? Verse 11 says clearly, they must be silenced. Two verses later in verse 13, he adds, rebuke them sharply. There's no tolerance that's allowed. There's too much tolerance in the church today, which is why the church is so weak. Every attempt to follow Paul's instructions in this passage are met with mass exodus from the church. Church leaders know this, and they fear to confront in a biblical manner. Paul advises flatly that they must be silenced and rebuke them sharply. And this sounds very harsh, doesn't it? especially in our era of wholesale religious acceptance, confront false teaching without delay or they will tear the church apart. Verses 12 and 13. One of the Cretans, a prophet of the Rome, said, Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons. This testimony is true. Therefore rebuke them sharply that they may be sound in the faith. Now, to emphasize his point, Paul quoted from Epimenides, a Cretan poet philosopher who lived on the island of Crete about 600 years earlier. He was widely believed to be a religious prophet. Paul calls him a prophet because other ancient writers, notably Aristotle and Cicero, they did so. Paul is not saying that he was a prophet in the biblical sense. He is simply a philosopher or wise man to the Greek culture. Epimenides gave a strong indictment concerning his own people, Cretans, saying that they were full of lies and were ferocious in character. to deceive and lie became known as playing the Cretan. The lying characteristic of the Cretans was so notorious that it was the subject of frequent remarks in ancient literature. But Paul's charge here was not against all Cretans. it was an accepted general description, an actual proverb, of how the population behaved, Paul used it to describe the false teachers. They actually fit this proverb. The false teachers are using the natural habits of of the people of this island to obtain shameful gain for themselves. They feed off of their own church brethren who are gullible as new believers. Now, I think that Paul was doing two other things by citing Epimenides here. Number one, he gave a subtle reminder to the Cretan believers that they have inherited a new nature in Christ when he saved them. They now have a new nature and a new identity, but the false teachers have rejected it. Number two, I believe that Paul was injecting a little wry humor. Think about it. If all Cretans are liars, then the Cretan who wrote the statement is also lying. The sweeping condemnation of all Cretans is itself a lie. So rather than giving a harsh assessment of all cretins, Paul is being humoristically ironic here. Now let's return to the last phrase of verse 13 here. It says this. Therefore rebuke them sharply. That. They may be sound in the faith. So glad he added that. Who is Paul showing a concern for? Stop and consider how gracious this is. Those who are involved in empty talk, Those who are involved in deception, selfish gain, and lies should be rebuked so that they will be sound in the faith and pay no attention to Jewish myths or to the commands of those who reject the truth. Paul is concerned for those who were opposing him, those whose words were ruining others. Those who were enemies of the gospel, they are included under the umbrella of Paul's concern. This is a marked contrast from the world's attitudes. The attitude of true believers, and the world is different. Romans 5.10, I call to your attention. It says, just as when we were God's enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his son. God showed us grace and we're to show grace to others. So we should be willing to look past hurt and pain in order to seek the progress of the gospel, even among those whose actions oppose us. While our rebuke must be prompt and forthright, it will undoubtedly feel harsh to the false teacher and to their loyal church friends. But it is never to irreparably insult and humiliate them. Paul did not call for Titus to crush his enemies of truth with withering verbal assault, but to redeem them. As a surgeon cuts away disease and infectious tissue that threatens the health of a body, we must cut away toxic teaching from the church. What is our goal in performing this spiritual surgery? It is redemptive. It is so that those who are self-deceived and deceiving others may be sound in the faith. We cut to cure. We confront, but we confront in love. We love them enough to the point that we speak of their error and with the hope of their recovery to spiritual health and vitality. False teachers have to be dealt with. There is no choice. Confronting them with the truth of Christ and the Word of God, that is their only hope. Listen, it is necessary to appear rude for safety if the house is on fire and life is in danger. We'll accept rudeness then, won't we? It's appropriate. Get out of the house. Verse 14. not devoting themselves to Jewish myths and the commands of people who turn away from the truth. Okay, so now we get a clearer picture of what the false teachers were doing there on the island of Crete. And Paul's comments suggest that there were two types of false teaching challenging these churches, Jewish mythology and rigorous abstinence, obeying religious laws. By the time of Jesus, Jewish literature overflowed with fables about angels and demons and how they procreated with human beings here on earth. These stories were all around at the time of Jesus and how their activities affected history False teachings based on a blend of Greek philosophy and with this Jewish mythology was thriving, and it was reproducing like weeds during the first century after Christ, and we see indication here that it was really running rampant on the island of Crete. Unfortunately, these sensational stories diverted attention away from truth. as revealed by Jesus Christ and as taught by the people who were trained by him. Crete's people had a preoccupation with Greek and Jewish mixed legends. Religiosity and non-biblical fiction, astonishing stories and strict rules, What a dangerous combination for any church. And we see it everywhere. Recently, Patty and I decided that we would try out some of these Christian streaming services. I don't know if you've seen them. but there are more and more that seem to be coming out every week that say, hey, build your faith, subscribe to us, watch our Christian movies and our Christian television programs and so forth. And so we tried out one or two of these things and initially it was great, loved it. The movies that we saw, they really taught God's word well in a very dramatic manner and it was great, but lately, lately, The last five or six that we try to put on, they're sensational stories, and not biblical at all. Or if they are, they just come a little bit close to it, and then they don't, and we finish it, and it's just like, oh, that was empty. Yuck. But you know, that's what many churches are doing today. sensationalism and religiosity coming oh so close to what the Bible actually teaches. And Paul is telling Titus, deal with it, it's happening there on the island of Crete. You know, such congregations need to get back to the biblical basics. Now, our next verse here in chapter one has given a lot of justification to wanderers down through the centuries as they have wandered away from biblical basics. Verse 15 has been contorted and twisted in order to fit a lot of bad theology and behavior. Let's take a look at verse 15 here. It says this. To the pure, all things are pure. But to the defiled and unbelieving, nothing is pure. But both their minds and their consciousness, or the consciences. Titus 115 is one of those verses that some ill-informed people try to use to defend their ungodly practices. To the pure, all things are pure. It's used as an excuse for all kinds of sin. There are those who say that this means, as long as you think something is not sin, it isn't. But is this a verse that justifies relativism, different strokes for different folks? What in the world does Paul mean here? Why would he say such a thing? These statements have to be kept in the context of who Paul is condemning in this passage, those of the circumcision group. We know that this group claimed that a person's relationship with God is based upon the observance of certain ceremonial codes and cleanliness practices, obeying the Jewish law. According to them, you are made pure by your outward conduct in observing the law. Now, Paul contrasts the belief of this false teaching with Jesus's teaching that purification is a matter of the internal, not the external. Nothing outside of man can make him unclean by going into him. What comes out of man makes him unclean. Mark 7, verse 15 and verse 20. Paul summarizes this here in verse 15, to the pure, all things are pure, but to those who do not believe, nothing is pure. Purity that counts comes only through faith in Christ. Nothing outside can corrupt one who is internally pure because of Christ. But someone who is internally impure, such as in their minds, in their conscience, that corrupts all that they touch. That's what Paul is saying. Now those who want to use this verse for their own sin, they stop after the first phrase. They don't read the rest. Verse 16 now. They profess to know God, but they deny him by their works. They are detestable, disobedient, unfit for any good work. Now, Paul, with this verse, returns to a central theme of this letter, and it's this. Genuine belief in the truth of God produces a lifestyle of godly behavior. That's a theme we see consistently throughout Titus. Right believing leads to right behavior. Now, it's a definite mark of a false teacher because you don't see the right behavior. because they don't have right believing. When you look closely at somebody that is not a correct teacher, who's a false teacher, you'll notice an absence of godly behavior. Sometimes you don't have to look all that close, but since they've done several favors for you, winning your loyalty to them, you get blinded to their godless behaviors, which are there. The absence of good deeds is a cause for suspicion. False teachers merely profess to understand spiritual truths but are in fact incapable of godly behavior because they do not possess the truth that they proclaim. Neither blindness through a sense of loyalty or fear of church turmoil should ever prevent us from trying to correct and restore an erring person to spiritual health. This health comes only from an acceptance of the faith. Turned around as they were, these lying and perverse heretics could still be brought to repentance through confrontation with the true faith Paul is telling Titus here. They could still be turned around. and you need to try. The ministry of confrontation is not easy, but it is essential. When the integrity of the gospel is at stake, we cannot run and hide. We must stand armed with the truth, motivated by love, and clothed with a pure life, we must engage the enemy and rescue the captive. I close this morning with an illustration by Max Lucado. He puts it to us this way. Imagine picking up your car from the shop after a routine tune-up, and the technician says, this car is in great shape. Clearly, you have an automotive genius to take care of your car. And later that day, your brakes don't work. You find out you were out of brake fluid. You could have died. You go back to the shop and you say, why didn't you tell me? And the technician replies, well, I didn't want to make you feel bad. Plus, to be honest, I was afraid you might get upset with me. I want this to be a safe place where people will feel accepted. You'd be furious. You'd say, I didn't come here for a little fantasy-based ego boost. When it comes to my car, I want the truth. Now, imagine yourself going to the doctor for a checkup. The doctor says, you're a magnificent physical specimen. You have the body of an Olympian. You are to be congratulated. Later that day, while climbing the stairs, your heart gives out. You find that your arteries were so clogged that you were like one jelly donut away from the Grim Reaper. You go back to the doctor and you say, why didn't you tell me? The doctor says, well, I knew your body is in worse shape than the Pillsbury Doughboy. But if I tell you stuff like that, you'll get offended. It's bad for business. People don't come back. I want this to be a safe place where you feel loved and accepted. You'd be furious. You'd say to the doctor, when it comes to my body, I want the truth. Obviously, when something matters to us, we do not want illusory, comfort-based response for pain avoidance. Church. Let's not be afraid of saying what matters. Let's not ridiculously seek an illusory comfort-based pain avoidance. Let us be willing to obey God's clear teaching in his word today. Amen. Please pray with me.