Serving in Light of Eternity

0:58To Titus, my true child, in a common faith, grace and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus, our Savior. This is God's Word. You may be seated. Just a couple weeks after we graduated from Texas A ⁇ M, my wife and I got married. And one of the things that I was simultaneously excited about and terrified of was the fact that I was now the resident handyman. Maybe some of the men in the room can relate to those feelings.

1:31Well, my grandfather was a carpenter and a home builder, and my dad has his master's degree in industrial engineering. He can fix anything. And me, I say words. So, this is 2004, keep in mind when we got married. There's no iPhones. Google is not really a thing. We're living a thousand miles away from my dad in Charlotte, North Carolina. And so, buying our first home felt pretty daunting. It's not like I could just kind of consult YouTube or, you know, have my dad come over to help me. So, I attempted a few early projects around the house, and things went okay. I mean, I didn't bust the main water line, didn't electrocute myself, walked away with all 10 fingers.

2:18So, I was feeling pretty good, and we decided to replace a ceiling fan. Now, that's not that hard of a project, but when you're 22 and still learning, you know, it's a fairly difficult thing. So, I buy the ceiling fan and I take it home. I get the thing hooked up, and I go over to the wall and turn it on, and nothing happens. So, I tried a few more times, nothing happens. So, I take the thing down, and I unscrew all the wires from the wire nuts. I look at everything, all the wires seem to be hooked up properly, the wire nuts are tight, it looks good. Put it back up there, go back to the wall, flip it on, nothing.

2:50So, I'm really frustrated. I take the whole thing down, box it back up, drive across town to Home Depot. I'm like, this thing doesn't work. Like, Mr. Duty, we're so sorry. We'll get you another one right away. They get me. A new fan, I go home, do the whole process again, walk over to the wall, and it doesn't work. So I trudge over to the phone, pick up the phone. Hey, Dad, trying to install a ceiling fan, and I can't get it to work. And he says, okay, and he starts troubleshooting with me. Now, did you connect these wires together? Yes, Dad. Okay. Did you, I mean, the switch, the switch isn't faulty, is it? No, I mean, it was working with the previous fan just minutes ago. Okay, did you shut off the power to the house? No, Dad. Is the circuit breaker flipped? No, Dad.

3:33Did you pull the chain on the fan? Thank you, Dad. The problem is that the fan would not turn on because the circuit was broken. The circuit was disconnected, right? Inside the fan itself, there was a disconnection. And Titus gets this letter from Paul because there is a disconnection in the lives of the people that he's leading in his church. There's a disconnection between what people are believing and how they're living their lives, which is a problem that all of us are familiar with. We know how hard it can be to connect what we say we believe to how we live our everyday lives. And so Paul writes this letter in the mid-60s AD.

4:21So this is about the same time that he wrote his first letter to Timothy, which we covered in the fall. And recently, Paul has completed this journey to the island of Crete. And as I mentioned, A few minutes ago, Crete is this island in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea in between Egypt and Greece. So, as we'll see next week, he leaves Titus on this island to put what remained into order. In other words, to finish up the work that Paul had started some time ago when he went there to plant these churches.

4:50They had a lot of problems, though, on this island, a lot of problems with false teaching. And some of the false teachers seemed to belong to a particular group known as the Judaizers. And what the Judaizers went around teaching was that if you wanted to become a Christian, you first had to become Jewish. You first had to obey all of the Mosaic law, especially circumcision. And only after you essentially became Jewish could you become a Christian. So Paul writes to Titus to combat some of that false teaching and to help him to organize the church. And what we're going to do is just cover the introduction today, these first four verses, which is actually just one long sentence in the Greek. One long sentence is a whole paragraph here. And we're just going to look at that today. And we're going to see Paul connecting what it means to be a servant with how he views everything in light of eternity.

5:39So what we'll learn today is that because of the hope of eternal life, we can spend this life serving others. So let's take a look now at the text in verse 1. Paul begins, Paul, a servant of God and an apostle of Jesus Christ. He opens this letter in the same way that he opens most of his other letters. He identifies himself. He says, this is my identity. And identity is a very important concept in the Christian life. It's an important concept in all of life. All of us have an identity. It's the way that we think of ourselves.

6:19Now, that can be true or false. That can be positive or negative. That could be godly or ungodly, but all of us have a way of thinking of ourselves. And Paul is saying, the way that I identify myself is first and foremost as a servant of God. And that word servant in the Greek is doulos. It means servant or slave. And when we hear that word, of course, with our history here in America, with the horrible injustice of American slavery and then everything that followed that up with unjust laws and an unjust application of laws, we have a very negative connotation of that word, but actually in the ancient Near East, they meant it in a slightly different way. The way that that word was often used was to describe a bondservant, a servant of someone in authority.

7:10And so what he is saying is that, yes, I consider myself a slave of God. I consider myself a servant of God. But oftentimes in the ancient Near East, people would introduce themselves as the slave or the servant of such and such person that they worked for. And so you would have high-ranking government officials say, I am a slave or a servant to the king. In other words, Words, my job is to learn what his will or the queen, her will, is, and then to obey it, and then to encourage others to do the same. That's how Paul lived his life. He thought of himself as a servant, as a slave of God, as one whose life was all about finding out what is God's will, and then obeying that will, and then helping other people to obey that will as well. That's what Paul gave his life for, to be a servant to God and to others. And I think for a lot of us, we have a hard time viewing ourselves as servants.

8:05And there's a lot of reasons for that. But that's not a new thing. Every single person who has followed Jesus has had a hard time seeing themselves as a servant. You go back to the first century with Jesus and his disciples in that passage we looked at at the beginning of the service, they had a hard time viewing themselves as servants too. They didn't want to serve. They wanted the positions of honor. That's why James and John ask for them. And the rest of the disciples, they're so mad at James and John, not because they've offended Jesus, not because they don't understand the kingdom, that that's a completely backwards way of looking at things. No, they're offended because they want the very same thing.

8:43They wanted those positions of honor. They don't want James and John to have them. They want them for themselves. So Jesus has to have the disciples huddle up for a teaching moment. Look at what he says. Let me remind you of this again in Mark chapter 10. You know that those who are considered rulers of the Gentiles lord it over the Them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. But it shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all. Why?

9:14For even the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many. See, Jesus taught in God's kingdom, everything is backwards. It's upside down. Greatness in God's kingdom is not being served, it's serving others. It's laying your life down for them. And so if you want to be great in God's kingdom, you have to humble yourself. You have to make yourself a slave of all. And that's what Paul sought to do with his life. He didn't go around asking, what can I get from people? How can I benefit from them monetarily? How can I benefit from them with my social status? How can I benefit from them in terms of getting ahead in this world? He didn't ask those questions.

9:55He went around asking, how can I serve God and how can I serve other people? I think maybe one of the main reasons we struggle to serve others is because we don't see ourselves as servants. Rather, we see ourselves as the lead actors in the movie of our lives. Everybody else is just kind of a supporting cast member. They're there to provide some context. They're there to get the plot moving along. But their desires, their ambitions, their hopes and dreams, all of those things are secondary to what we want. Because when you think about a lead actor in real life, I mean, the movie. Is revolving around them. They have their own private trailer. People exist to serve them both on and off the screen, but that's not how we are called to live. How would our lives change if we asked the question every single day: how can I be used today to serve God and others? That seems to be how Paul thought of his entire life. He's a servant of God.

10:56But secondly, he identifies himself in this way as an apostle of Jesus Christ. Paul didn't abuse his authority as an apostle, but he wasn't shy about it either. He's very upfront with the fact that he is an apostle. He is an appointed messenger of God. And the reason that he's not shy about his authority is because he didn't appoint himself. He didn't ask God to become an apostle. Rather, as he was on his way down the road to Damascus to persecute the church, God met him, knocked him flat on his back, and he said, Paul, from now on, you're not going to persecute me by persecuting my people. You're going to serve my people. You're going to be my messenger, not just to the children of Israel, but to the Gentiles. I'm going to send you to them, to these people that you despise.

11:48And Paul wasn't self-conscious about his identity as an apostle because his identity, his authority, didn't come from himself. It came from God. And I think it's worth noting that as. After Paul became a follower of Jesus, 12 or 14 years passed before he then went on his first missionary journey. He's converted about 33 or 34 AD. He doesn't leave for his first trip until 46 or 47 AD. What is he doing in those 10, 12, 14 years?

12:21He's preparing. And that's so significant because Paul was as prepared as anybody. I mean, he was raised in a strict Jewish home. He became a Pharisee. He studied under Gamal, the leading rabbi of the day. I mean, he was more ready than any of us the second that he was converted, and yet he waits 10, 12, 14 years before he goes to the mission field. So our church is really passionate about sending people to the unreached, as you saw when Alex was up here talking about our goer groups. We are really passionate about this, but we also want to be sure that we are preparing people well to go as healthy as possible, to be as faithful and fruitful as possible in the nations, just like Paul. So he saw himself as an apostle of Jesus Christ, not just a servant of God, but as a messenger, one sent by God to take the news of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection to the ends of the earth. And to whom is he writing? Who is this letter for? Skip down to verse number four.

13:25He writes to Titus, my true child, in a common faith. Well, who is this Titus? We actually know very little about him. He's not mentioned at all in the book of Acts, which is the main narrative portion of the New Testament outside of the Gospels. He's not mentioned at all there. He is mentioned nine times in the book of 2 Corinthians, as well as twice in Galatians, and then once in 2 Timothy. And from those letters, we learn that he was a close friend and traveling companion of the Apostle Paul, but more than that, he was a trusted co-laborer in Christ. If you've ever read the first letter to the Corinthians, you know that that church was a mess. They had a lot of problems. There was leadership problems. There was problems with false teaching. They had problems with unrepentant sinners who were professing to be followers of Jesus, but then living in ways that dishonored God and brought the church and the message of Jesus into disrepute. They had all of these problems. And so what did Paul do? He sent Titus to them. That's how much he trusted him. He sent Titus to him to go and pastorally care for the church and lead them through that very difficult season, which we know turned out great in 2 Corinthians. And so that's an amazing testimony to his faithfulness. Now, what's significant about their relationship is that Paul and Titus probably had little or nothing in common. I mean, he is a Jewish man who's been raised as a Pharisee and studied under a rabbi. Titus is a Greek man. I mean, these are two separate worldviews, two different sets of cultural values.

15:00They have almost nothing in common, probably, but what they do share is what he says in verse 4: a common faith. You know, at New Life, we say often that one of the main differences between the church and a club of any kind is that in the church, what unites us is our common faith. We may not have any other similarities with the people that we worship with, with the people that we do life with, but what unites us is a common faith. We're not united by our ethnicity or our skin color. We're not united by our social standing. We're not united by our income level or our preferences. We're united by our common faith in Jesus Christ and his gospel.

15:50Here at New Life, we have people from all over the world. South Korea, Japan, Indonesia, Brazil, India, even places as remote as Oklahoma. We have people from all over the world, and what unites us together is our common faith in Christ. The reason that we incorporate all generations in worship and life group and everywhere else, the reason that we have families and singles and students and kids together at all of those main programming is because we learn from one another. Part of our sanctification, part of the way that we become holy and more like Jesus, is by being around Christians who are not like. Us, who have different views and different perspectives, who have different preferences. Because when we are all together in the local church in that way, we're all forced to grow, to grow in the fruit of the Spirit. And that's why being a healthy member of a healthy local church is so important. Because when you refuse to join a local church, or when you join a local church, but you're not meaningfully involved in it, what happens is you're dismembered from the body of Christ.

17:02And those of us who are meaningfully connected are at a disadvantage because we're missing you. We're missing you and your spiritual gifts and what you bring to the table with your age and life stage and everything else. The most common analogy in the New Testament for the church is the body of Christ, and so we really do need one another. And what unites us is that common faith. That's what Paul and Titus had in common: faith. Maybe nothing else, but they had faith in Jesus and that desire to make his name known all throughout the world. And that was enough.

17:35So Paul served Titus well by discipling him, by helping him to understand who Jesus was and then how to make more disciples. And that leads us into why Paul is writing this letter. So look with me again at verse 1. Why does Paul write? For the sake of the faith of God's elect and their knowledge of the truth. So, why is Paul writing this letter? Or maybe even more broadly, why was Paul appointed as a servant of God and as an apostle of Jesus Christ?

18:12For the sake of the faith of God's elect and their knowledge of the truth. So, first, he says he's writing for the sake of the faith of God's elect. His mission was to go and preach the gospel, and through that preaching, to see men, women, and children come to saving faith in Jesus Christ. And from that moment on, Paul's job was to help them by building up their faith, by helping them understand what God's word say, what does it mean, and then how does it apply to our lives? How are we supposed to live if we're trying to follow Jesus? That's what Paul's job was. So, everywhere he went, he preached that message, and then he discipled people. But oftentimes, what happened is either God called him somewhere else after a while, or he got kicked out by the religious authorities. So, how is his ministry going to continue? Well, two primary ways. One, through his writing, and praise God that Paul wrote all of these letters, so that we now, 21 centuries later, have all of these things written down so that we will know how to apply the good news of Jesus to our everyday lives.

19:23But secondly, and maybe even more directly, Paul's ministry in these cities and in these churches continued through. Through the people that he discipled. That's why he writes to Timothy and he writes to Titus. These were young men who either came to faith under his ministry or who came to faith through his ministry after he preached the gospel and set up a church in their town. And then he took them and he discipled them. He helped them to understand this is what it means to be a follower of Jesus, and this is how you can go and make more followers of Jesus yourself. That was what he saw as his job. And friends, in the same way, you and I are called to build up the faith of other people. We're called to move people along the spectrum. So whether that means from being non-believers, people who are not followers of Jesus, into those who believe in Jesus and are beginning to follow him, or those who are immature in their faith to grow in maturity and knowledge, we're all called to be a part of that process of building up their faith. I read recently that there are 4,000 new churches planted in the United States every single year. But 3,700 churches in the United States close their doors every year. And so you hear that statistic, and you're like, well, that still sounds like 300 new churches, we're netting 300 new churches every year. That's good, but the average attendance at any given church in the United States is less than 100 people. And so if you've got 300 new churches reaching about 100 people each, that's only 30,000 people. The United States Population is growing at about 2.2 million per year. 30, 2.2 million. We're not keeping up.

21:10And one of the main reasons that we're not keeping up is we're relying on attractional methods rather than missional methods. In other words, we're relying on people coming to church so that a pastor can tell them about Jesus. Well, friends, most people who are not Christians don't attend church anymore. They used to because it was part of our culture. They don't anymore. And so what that means is we have to live missionally. We have to become equipped ourselves to be disciple makers, and then we have to go out and make disciples. And as we talked about a few weeks ago, if you were here, if we will all invest in just two or three people a year, we will see spiritual multiplication rather than addition.

21:52That's what Paul was doing here. He invested in many people, but even if he only invested in Timothy and Titus, he has multiplied his ministry by a factor of two. And then if they invest in two people each, they've now multiplied that out to four more people, and so on and so forth. That's what we need to do. We need to see our mission as building up the faith of others. And the primary way that you can do that, whether you are a student, whether you are a single working a job, whether you're a married man or woman with children, is to invest in just two or three people a year heavily. To help them understand what does it mean to follow Jesus and then to help them understand. How they need to make followers of Jesus also. Paul saw his primary job as building up the faith of God's people, and that's our primary job as well.

22:41But second, you see that he wrote for their knowledge of the truth. Well, faith and knowledge go hand in hand. I mean, you can't love or trust or worship that which you don't know. That seems fairly intuitive. And thankfully, God has revealed his character, his will. He's revealed himself to us through his word. So we can come to know him, and through our knowledge of him, we can love and trust and worship him. Faith and knowledge go hand in hand. But it's important to note: faith and knowledge are not the same thing.

23:21You cannot have faith without knowledge, but you can have knowledge without faith. That's a story of many people. Maybe that was your story. That was certainly my story. I had knowledge. I knew about God, but I didn't know God until I came to college. You may have known about God for a long time, but you may not have known him. And that's not a new modern phenomenon. That was true in Jesus' day as well. Look at what he says to the religious leaders in John chapter 5.

23:53You search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life. And it is they that bear witness. About me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life. Isn't that incredible? I mean, Jesus is talking to these religious leaders. They knew their Bibles forwards and backwards. Many of these men had large sections, if not the whole Old Testament, memorized. Memorized. And he says to these men, you go to the scriptures because you think in them you have life. Just by knowing them, you have life. No, you're missing the point. All of the scriptures point to me, Jesus says. I'm standing right here in front of you, and yet you refuse to come to me. You can know a lot about God and not know God. That was the problem for these religious leaders, and that was the problem for so many in our country today as well. So the question is, how do you know? How do you know what kind of knowledge you have, whether you know about God or whether you actually know God? Well, Paul tells us right here, he says, their knowledge of the truth, which accords with godliness.

25:05Knowledge of the truth accords with godliness. They go together. And one of the things that Jesus said about the truth is that we would know the truth, and the truth will set us free. I love John Stodd. He's my favorite commentator, as many of you guys know. And I want you to look at what he says about this passage. I thought this was gold. He said, it is an essential feature of truth and a good test of its authenticity. That since it comes from God, it leads to God. Any doctrine which does not promote godliness is manifestly bogus.

25:40What a great phrase. It's manifestly bogus. Christians and non-Christians all agree about this. You see that man or that woman on TV who is obviously not concerned with anyone's soul, with anyone's spiritual growth, but is evidently concerned with making lots of money and having lots of cars and things. You take one look at that and you go, that's bogus. That's obviously not right. We all recognize that. Knowledge of the truth leads to godliness. If it starts with God, then it leads to God. And that's what Paul is saying here. He says, the way that you know whether you know about God or whether you know God is where is that knowledge leading you for these religious leaders, it wasn't leading them to love, trust, worship, and obey God. It was leading them to set up their own little kingdom.

26:37And so if any knowledge is leading you away from loving, trusting, worshiping, and obeying God, you know it's manifestly bogus. All knowledge of the truth is going to lead us to God, to love, trust, worship, and obey Him. And so that's why Paul is writing. He's writing for the faith of God. Of God's people, of the elect. And he's writing for our knowledge of the truth, which accords with godliness. And he's doing that because he has his eyes set on eternity. Look now at verse 2.

27:16He writes, in hope of eternal life, which God, who never lies, promised before the ages began, 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. This is such a critical verse because it gives you Paul's motivation. He is writing in hope of eternal life. Now, the problem with translating this word hope in English is that when we hear the word hope or when we read the word hope, what do we think? Wish.

27:54The wish of eternal life. Like, I wish God existed. I wish that after we died, we would all go to heaven. I wish. That's what we hear or think when we see this word hope. But that's not at all what hope means in the Bible. Hope does not refer to wishful thinking. Hope is confident expectation based on the promises of God. That's what hope is in the Bible. Confident expectation based on the promises of God. All throughout the Bible, you have hundreds of examples. Of God making and keeping promises.

28:34Some of them he fulfills right away. Some of them it's many, many years later. So, for example, he promises the Israelites in the wilderness, I'm going to take care of you. I know there's nothing to eat out here, but tomorrow you're going to have something to eat. What happens when they wake up the next day? Manna from heaven has appeared and they can eat. He goes to Abraham and Sarah, they're 75 and 74 years old. He says, I promise you will have a son. But it's 25 years later that God fulfills that promise. They are 199 when God fulfills his word. Or what about the Christ? I mean, you think about like the book of Isaiah, for example, written in the 8th or 7th century BC.

29:18800, 700 years pass before Jesus comes and fulfills everything that's written about the Messiah. But no matter what, every single time God has made a promise, he has kept his word. And so we can know for sure that God is going to keep every promise that he has made, even those that he has not fulfilled yet. He never lies. So when we read that he promised eternal life before the ages began, he kept his promise. And when did he do it? I love this phrase, at the proper time.

29:58See, God is sovereign, he's in control. Of everything that happens in this world and everything that happens to you and me. And so he sent Jesus the Messiah at the proper time. Not too early, not too late, but at the proper time. Look at Galatians chapter 4. It says, But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons.

30:34You see, friends, Christians aren't just wishful thinkers. We are those who have a confident expectation, a hope of eternal life. And we have that hope because that's what God has promised to every person who turns from sin and receives Jesus, his life, his death, and his resurrection by faith. We receive all that he promised: justification and forgiveness of our sins, adoption into his family, and this future hope that we are going to live in the new heavens and the new earth forever with God.

31:15That's our confident expectation as Christians. But maybe you're here today and you don't have that confident expectation. What you have could best be described as wishful thinking. You find yourself wishing that God existed. You find yourself wishing that after you and your loved ones pass away one day, that you'll be reunited again in a place like heaven. But that's just a wish to you. I want you to have that same confident expectation that believers in Jesus have. And I'm telling you today, you can have that confident expectation if you'll simply read the word and see that God has never lied, never broken a promise. So when he says that we can confidently expect these things, our hope is not in ourselves. It's not even in our own faith. It's in God and His Word, and how He never breaks it. That's the message that was entrusted to Paul by the command of God our Savior. This message of hope and eternal life that is found in Jesus Christ.

32:24Paul ends this introduction with these words. He says, Grace and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus, our Savior. God gave Paul this incredible command. I mean, can you just imagine hearing this? Your job is to take the gospel to the Gentiles. I mean, Israel is this tiny little corner of the ancient Near East. It's a tiny little corner today. And he comes to Paul and he says, Your job is to go evangelize the world.

32:58I mean, how would you even respond? To something like that, what would you need? You would need grace and peace. The same thing that every one of us need every single day. We need grace and peace. The good news is, God gives us those things to carry out what He has commanded. He gives us grace, He supplies us with the Holy Spirit and with everything that we need through the spiritual gifts that He has given to everyone in the church. That's another reason that we need one another. And He has given us peace because we know that even though the work is difficult of making disciples, of serving God and serving others, even though that work is difficult, we have peace because God is with us through the person and work of Jesus. His grace, His peace is with us.

33:47And so, living to serve God and others is very challenging. I don't want us to minimize that at all. We are all bent inward, we're all bent naturally towards serving ourselves, looking after our needs and our wants rather than those of others. We're tempted to hoard our time and money and resources. The reason that Paul could call himself and live as a servant of God is because he had his eyes set on eternity. He knew that this life was so brief, and then he was going to get to enjoy the rest of eternity with God and with God's people in the new heavens and the new earth. And our thinking, if it's the same, will allow us to become those same kinds. Of servants.

34:32Because of the hope of eternal life, we can live this life to serve others. Let's pray. Father, we're glad that we have this wonderful reminder, this wonderful challenge this morning to live our lives to serve you and to serve others. Because we have to confess before you that we go through lots of days where we aren't thinking about serving you and serving others. Instead, we're thinking about serving ourselves. We wake up thinking, what do I need? What do I want? What do I expect out of today?

35:20And then we spend that day living for ourselves. We see that that is sinful, that that's a bending inward of what you designed us to be about. And so, God, we pray this morning for grace and for peace from you so that we don't go throughout our days asking, how can I be served? But instead, like Paul did so consistently throughout his life, not perfectly but consistently, asking, how can I serve? My God, and how can I serve his people?

36:06Father, we pray that you would empower us by the Holy Spirit to do these things because try as we might, we can't do it on our own. Thank you for your word to us, and thank you most of all for the hope, the confident expectation of eternal life. If we'll keep our eyes on that, we can serve you and serve others. In Christ's name we pray. Amen.