Discipled To Be Different: The Good Life (Week 4)

This Sunday, Elder Kyle Gustafson teaches that we reflect the character of God when we live differently from the culture around us and intentionally help one another grow in Christ through faithful discipleship. We learn that when we pursue self-control, invest in the next generation, and build Christ-centered relationships within the church, we display the goodness of God to a watching world.

PDF Resources: ( Sermon Notes )

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Good morning. Welcome to Cuyahoga Valley Church. Whether you're here with us in the room, whether you're watching online, I'm glad that you've chosen to spend your Sunday morning with us. If we've not met, my name is Kyle, and I have the privilege of serving CVC as one of our elders. Before we open the word today, I want to draw a little attention to the weekend that we find ourselves in. Yesterday, our country marked 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence. I'm grateful this morning that we Yeah. I'm grateful this morning that we can gather in this room without fear, that we can open the Bible and order our lives around it and what it says. Paul in Titus has something to say about how Christians should live under civil authority, and we're gonna get to that when we get to Titus 3. But for this morning, I just want to begin out of a place of sincere gratitude. Will you join me in prayer? Dear Lord, I stand here today very grateful for our country and our freedom. I'm grateful that we can read from your word, that we can meet in this building, that we can order our lives around our own moral direction from you. Lord, that we have an opportunity to speak boldly about your character and to display it the way that we live. I'm grateful that you have preserved and protected your word and your character through the scriptures. I'm grateful to be a part of a church that submits itself to the authority of those scriptures and allow those to dictate the flows of our life. I ask your spirit today to come into the room and to do a work on our heart. Lord, as we hear your words today, may your spirit pierce us, may it challenge us, may it convict us. May each of us in this room leave today different because we have encountered you and your wisdom and your character. Amen. If you have small kids at home, you are probably familiar with the show Blueie. If you don't, Bluey is an Australian cartoon about a family of dogs, and I will admit that it is pretty great. Also, my kids love it. Somewhere in the last few years, we noticed something go. Our kids. They started to change. They stopped responding to a mild inconvenience or a disappointment with an aw man, it became biscuits. When something needs to be emphatically questioned, they don't say, is that true? They go, is this for real life? We never taught them any of that. There was no sit-down, there was no lesson, there was no repeat after me. They simply spent time around a cartoon family and they came out of that with an Australian accent. It's something to laugh about. Until I started to consider what else my kids might be absorbing. They are not only near a heartfelt cartoon, they're near me. And I don't always want them to come out sounding like me. Today we are going to be opening a New Testament book of Titus, a letter written to the church that had to reckon with some of these same tensions in a place where the culture they were surrounded by was a great deal more concerning than a kid's cartoon. Titus is a short letter. It is only three chapters. It's written by Paul to a younger man named Titus, who he had to leave behind on the island of Crete. Paul tells us why he does this in the first chapter. He writes in verse 5 that Titus is to put what remained into order and to appoint elders in every town. The picture that Paul leaves us is with a young, messy church that is recently planted and is still unfinished. And Crete was a hard place to plant a church. In chapter one, Paul quotes a Crete writer who says that Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, and lazy gluttons. The culture that surrounds Titus is well known for its dishonesty, for its appetite, and for its violence. So Paul gives Timothy this assignment. But they come in a very specific order. Chapter one is about leadership and about sound doctrine. He tells Titus to appoint elders and to deal with false teachers that are in the church. And then in chapter two, he kind of turns to the rest of the church, to the older men and the older women, to the younger women and the younger men. If chapter one is about leadership, then chapter two is about us. And here's the threat as Paul sees it. And we need to see this to really understand what Paul is getting at in this passage. The threat to the church was not just that the culture of Crete existed. It's not that Crete was liars and evil and gluttonous. The threat that was that Crete was getting into the church. Pastor Tony highlighted this for us last week. He told us that the patterns of the surrounding culture were seeping into the church itself. And that raises a question. And it's the question that Paul is answering across this whole chapter. How can a church flourish in a culture like that? So today we are going to work through Titus 2, verses 1 through 6. And I'm going to put three questions to the text. Why does a healthy church matter? What makes a church healthy? And how does a church become healthy? And we're going to take them in that order, starting with the why. So before we go through the whole passage, I'm actually going to jump to the end because that's where Paul gives us his purpose and writing. And once we understand why Paul is writing, this passage begins to open up for us to understand what Paul is really getting at. So read with me. We are going to read the second half of verse 5. That the word of God may not be reviled. That the word of God may not be reviled. Other translations use blasphemy, that the word of God would not be blasphemied. That is Paul's purpose. Everything else in the passage that we're going to read today is aimed at the goal. The way the church lives will either protect the reputation of God's word in front of a watching creed, or it will damage it. Paul is worried that the way the Christian church lives will make the good news about Jesus seem like a lie to those who are watching it. But this is something we probably already know. The church is a place where the watching world is supposed to come and see what God looks like. I want you to picture with me an outsider on Crete, someone who has never followed Jesus, and they're watching this new church in order to learn about the characteristics of its God. If that church lies the way that the culture lies, and if that church indulges in the way that the culture indulges, that outsider is not going to leave simply unimpressed with the church. That outsider is going to leave having decided that the God of this church must approve of this culture. You see, the church hasn't, in this scenario, only failed to show God, it has instead taught the observer something false about God's character. His words and his teachings would be blasphemied. They would be reviled. I suspect that some of us in this room feel that tension from our own past experiences with church. There are people in this room who would not claim to be Christian. There are people in this room who carry deep wounds because of things that the church has done. If that's you today, I want to say clearly that often your criticism is justified. Our church is supposed to show the world, what God is like, and far too often we don't. We lean in as a church to passages like this because we need to reflect God better. And so if you're here today, I hope you hear the aspirational goal of this passage. That we as a church can grow and become more and more like the God that we claim to serve. This passage at its core is ultimately a challenge and a correction aimed first and foremost at the church itself. But I want to think about our observ, our observer example, a slightly different way, and how something might be a little bit different. So this observer is looking at the church and they see a church that tells the truth when lying is ordinary. They see a church that is self-controlled in a culture where impulse rules, and that church is different. If its values can't be explained by the culture around it, then the values must have come from somewhere else. That church reflects the character of God. This is not an idea that Paul is inventing for the church in Crete. Long before Titus, God told Israel the same thing. In the book of Deuteronomy, chapter 4, he's giving commands to Israel through the prophet Moses. And he tells them how the surrounding cultures are going to respond to these statutes. So this is Deuteronomy 4, verse 6. In regards to the statutes, keep them and do them, for they will be your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the peoples, who, when they hear all of these statutes, will say, Surely this is a great this great nation is wise in understanding people. For what great nation is there that has a God so near to it as the Lord our God is to us? Whoever we call, whenever we call upon him, and what great nation is there that has statutes and rules so righteous as all this law I set before you today. This is the purpose that God has always given his people. Not you alone, not me alone, but the whole body living out of one shared character in front of a world that is watching us. That is the heart of the words that Paul is leaving behind for Titus. Now that we have Paul's why, we can go back and we can look at the what. Likewise, urge the younger men to be self-controlled. So on a first pass, that passage looks pretty straightforward. And in many ways it is. There are four struts of instructions handed to four different groups, and every person in this room falls into one of the groups. Find your group, read the passage, done. Right? There's a word for the older men, and then for the older women, and then for the younger women, and then for the younger men. That said, I'm not going to stand up here and tell you whether you are in the older category or the younger category, I will allow that to be a work of the Holy Spirit within you. But here's the thing: if we read this passage as four separate memos to four different groups, we're going to miss the big picture of what Paul is building. He is not describing four different kinds of people. He is describing one church. Because the church isn't a collection of individuals who have been given their own rules individually. They are a part of something bigger. Paul is trying to get us not just to see the roles, but to see the connection and the responsibilities and the fit of these together to showcase something that is so much more important. These qualities are all central to how an outsider would view the church in the Cretan culture. These characteristics are all part of how an outsider would view our church and our culture. When we reflect these characters, we reflect the characteristics and the qualities of our God. And as we read this passage, we can see some of this connective tissue between this passage. There's a simple, small word. In verse 3, he turns to the older women and says, likewise. In verse 6, he reaches to the younger men and again says, likewise. The word Paul is using here means in the same way as. Paul is not starting a new subject when he goes from the older men to the older women. Rather, he's pointing back to the same picture and in effect saying, and this group too. He's drawing our attention to the similarities between these groups, not the differences. And when you lay the instructions for each of these groups side by side, the same quality keeps surfacing one group to the next. The older men in verse two are to be sober-minded and dignified and self-controlled. The younger women in verse five are to be trained to be self-controlled by the older women. The younger men in verse six are given just one word self-control. The thread runs through all of these compartments, old and young, female and male. I think what Paul is showing us here is that self-control is not just a characteristic amongst many, but it's actually the root the rest of these qualities grow out of. Ask whether a person can be dignified by being rule while being ruled by their appetites. Or whether somebody can be steadfast under pressure while being unable to govern themselves. If you take self-control away, each of the other virtues that Paul mentions have nothing left to stand on. And I will admit, this is a virtue that I would not point to in my own life as evidence that I have my life together. So in this whole part about self-control, this is Kyle preaching to Kyle. But if we don't have self-control, by definition, something is controlling us. When we shift control from ourselves, we are handing it to something else. And in doing so, we get shaped into a new image of who we are. And there's an uncomfortable question that sits right here in the text. What is controlling you now that shouldn't be? What appetite? What emotion? What relationship? What screen are you actually taking your orders from? These are the questions that Paul wants to bubble up in our hearts as we read this passage. I want to state a few things pretty clearly before we go any farther on this. I'm focusing on self-control, but Paul makes it very clear that everything else on this list is good. Paul tells Titus plainly that these are good things and that we should aspire to them. And when Paul does it, we should believe him. See, our culture changes its definition of what is good, what is the good life every few years. Yet Paul's message about what the good life actually is is the same today as it was 2,000 years ago. That brings us to the part of this passage that makes people tense up. And I'm not going to pretend it away, and I'm not going to make excuses for the text. Just as we trust Paul to explain really complex theology in Romans, and as we trust him to correct errors in the church and every other letter that he ever wrote, we also need to trust that scripture is recorded here as accurate, as faithful to God's plan, and as for our good. Paul tells us that younger women need to be taught to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled and pure, to work at home and to be submissive to their own husbands. These specific characteristics are not the primary point that Paul is making. So here we go. Let's start with the home. Because the culture that we live in has trained us to undervalue the home. We live in a world where paychecks and careers and promotions, that is where the real work happens, and that the building of a home is whatever you do when you're not doing something important. We have set ourselves up with a lifted external and an undervalued internal. But scripture doesn't share that assumption. The home is one of the primary places that the gospel is actually lived out. And it's often the first place that an outsider is going to encounter it. Whether you're married or single, whether you have roommates or you live alone, your home is a potential place for grace and hospitality and relationship. It is a space where the people that are closest to you or the people that you invite in can find out whether the gospel that you profess with your mouth. Is one that you actually live. To be clear, Paul is not saying the woman's only place is in the home. Nor is he saying in this passage that men should be unconcerned with the home. He's not speaking in these rigid black and white boxes. He's saying that this work, the work of the home, the work that the world so often undervalues, is a primary place where God's character is put on display, and that God, in his infinite wisdom, has empowered women to shape and mold that space. But notice something else. The value of the home is not some realization that Paul expects young women to learn from their culture. Rather, his command is that the older women, with their wisdom and their experience, would play a primary role in the teaching and the demonstrating of that value to the next generation. It's the same cadence that he is using when he's encouraging older women to help younger women love their husbands and love their kids and be self-controlled. These are not virtues that come from our culture. They have to come from somewhere. And Paul is anchoring them with the older women and the responsibility to pass along that wisdom and experience. And there's another word here: submissive. And we're gonna slow down a little bit. When read in English, be submissive sounds like something that is done to a woman. Something that is pressed down on her from the outside. But the Greek grammatical form that Paul uses here, it's called middle voice, I'll talk to you about it later. The Greek form that Paul uses here actually puts the action back into the woman's hands. This is not be subjected as though the woman is passive underneath it. It's much closer to consider yourself submitted. Something that the woman willingly gives rather than something that she suffers. The agency in Paul's words here are hers and hers alone. And I want to notice who Paul doesn't address in this passage. Paul doesn't address the husband. There's not even a category for husbands. Paul gives no command for a husband to make his wife submit. And he gives the man no authority to enforce it. So a man who reads this passage is permission to rule his wife is asserting something that this text does not support. The one responsibility that Paul hands the young man is self-control. And a husband who cannot govern himself has no standing to demand anything of anyone. The act of submission that Paul is referencing in this passage rests with the wife. It is hers to give, not his to impose. So, if all we hear when we read this long passage is that women should submit and that women should work at home, then I believe we have fundamentally missed the point that Paul wants us to walk away with. Steve had led a huddle that I was a part of, four of us and him meeting stupidly early on a Wednesday morning. But a month before my wedding, he sat down with me and he talked to me about marriage. Not the logistics of it, but what it actually looks like to be married well. And how a marriage done well reflects God to the people watching it. I was about to promise my life to Amy, and Steve was one of the people who sat down with me and told me what I was actually walking into. That wasn't the only time. A few years later, Amy and I were stuck trying to decide do we buy our forever home or not. And we we didn't know what to do. We ended up in Steve's family room, just the two of us and Steve, talking through how we can use our space and use our resources for God's glory. Steve didn't have an answer or a formula for us. He didn't lead us through a curriculum. He just walked with us through that season of our life the way he had walked with me every Wednesday morning, the way that he had walked me through the months before my wedding. Nobody made Steve do any of that. He's not my father. He's just a man in my church who decided that I was worth his Wednesday mornings, that I was worth his family room, that I was worth his time. And I'm standing here in part today because of Steve and because of what he did. And Steve didn't do any of that by accident. And Paul doesn't expect us to become good by accident either. He tells the older women to teach what is good and to train the younger women. The word train here is not passive, it is a language of intentional shaping, of one person taking responsibility for the growth of another. There's a name for what Steve did for me and for what Paul is describing here. It's called discipleship. And it sits very close to the center of what it means to follow Jesus. Now, I want to watch how far Paul spreads this out because it's easy to read verse 3: older women training younger women and assume that discipleship is only a women's ministry program, but it's not. Follow that word likewise through the passage. Paul moves from the older man to the older women and he says likewise. He moves from the women to the younger men, and again he says, likewise. When he turns group to group, he uses this word, except for once. When he moves from the older women to the younger women, the likewise disappears. Because he's already told us how these two are connected. They are to be likewise like each other, because one should be training the other to be like them. The older women train the younger women, and the discipleship is the link. It's the stand-in that Paul is using for the word likewise here. And once you see that likewise is connected to this concept of training, you'll begin to see discipleship run through all of the book of Titus. The elders in chapter one are teaching and correcting the older men. The older men are carrying forward that work forward to the younger men. How else could a younger man grow from self-control into sound in faith, in love, and steadfastness if they're not being trained by somebody who already has those qualities? And notice one thing here that the text does not say. Paul does not frame this as mothers and daughters. Older women are not training their own children in this passage. They are not family ties, they are church ties. Older believers taking responsibility for the younger ones that they may not be related to at all. Steve was not my father, but he was part of my church. That is the engine of a healthy church. And it's how a church survives for more than one generation when it is surrounded by a really hard culture. A single converted Cretan lives just a lifetime. But a Cretan who is discipled and then turns back and disciples somebody else is how the whole church in Crete lives long after Titus is gone. If you have grown in your faith because someone older took time with you, the question left is whether you are going to turn back to the next generation. This is one of the primary reasons that Amy and I have chosen to invest so heavily in CBC Youth, our high school ministry, to show the next generation that God is good, that he is trustworthy, and that he is worth it. That they are worth it. It's why we have so intentionally raised our own kids in and around our church kids, that they might see how Amy and I parent. It's why we try to invite others into the mess that is our house, because that mess is where the gospel actually gets lived. And we want them to watch us as we live it. We have a name for this at CBC. We call it linked generations, and it's one of our passions. It's our commitment as a church to bring the ages together so that the older keep pouring into the younger, and the faith keeps getting passed down. That is how a church outlasts the people in it. And it's what Paul told Titus to build in Crete. Told you at the start that we are being discipled into the image of something. And my hope is that as you reflect on this passage, you can see how that's true. My kids became a little bit more like a cartoon family because they spent their time around a cartoon family. We become a little bit more like whatever we give our time or our heart to. And all of us are giving our time or our heart to something. The algorithm on your phone is discipling you every day. Your preferred news outlet is discipling you. Your closest friends are discipling you. The shows that you watch or the podcasts that you trust are all shaping you into the image of something. The question is not whether you are being discipled. You absolutely are. The question is: into whose image are you being discipled? And whether you have chosen it or whether you've simply absorbed it. So let's make this concrete. Discipleship can sound like a program that you sign up for, but it is often much smaller and in some ways much harder than that. It looks like inviting a younger couple over for dinner and letting them see how you and your family actually function together. It looks like reading a book of the Bible with somebody 10 years behind you and letting them ask all the questions you were once too afraid to ask. It looks like standing a standing coffee date twice a month with a person who's not your peer. It looks like Steve deciding that a younger man was worth his Wednesday mornings. None of that requires a title or an office or a curriculum. It requires you to decide that someone else is worth your time and then keep deciding that when it's inconvenient, when they disappoint you, when it would be easier to maybe let that relationship fade. It requires us as a church to embrace the vision that Paul is giving to Titus in this passage, that the church is built to reflect Christ. And here's the hard edge to this. If we do not disciple the generation behind us, they will still be discipled. Their phones will do it, our culture will do it, TikTok and Instagram and algorithms will do it. They will be shaped into the image of something. Because that's how people are made. What we as a church disciple today decides what the church will look like in 2025. In 2050, in 3000. So where does that leave us this morning? First, I need you to hear what this is not. This is not a list of tasks to complete so that God will accept you. We know, we know that because in a few verses, Paul is going to tell Titus that the grace of God has already appeared to save us. And that this grace is what actually trains us to live the way that He has described. Grace comes first, and the changed life follows as a response. You do not govern your appetites so that God will love you. You are already loved. And this life is what it looks like. What we're reading today is what it looks like once that takes root in our heart. So we need to hear all of this passage not as a bill that needs to be paid, but as an invitation into something that is bigger and greater than anything we could have accomplished on our own. Then there's the next honest step. If one of these qualities pressed into you this morning, and if you felt its absence in your life, don't push it away. I would encourage you this week, go back and read this passage. Think about the qualities that Paul's writing about. Aspire to what is good. Bring the qualities that you're lacking to God and ask the Spirit to grow that in you. Ask the Spirit to give you somebody who can teach you. To put somebody in your life who can speak into that. As Paul writes in a different letter to the church in Philippi, whatever happens, conduct yourself in a manner that is worthy of the gospel of Christ. If you are younger in the faith, stop trying to do it alone and ask somebody farther along to walk with you. If you've been doing this for decades, don't wait to be asked. Engage in discipleship. There is someone behind you that would be changed by your attention. Volunteer with CBC Kids or in CBC Youth. Step in to help our young adult ministry. Invite the person in the row behind you out for lunch. Encourage the tired-looking parents hanging out at the playground outside of the back door after church. Open up your home. Take a walk with a neighbor. The opportunities for linked generations in this church are endless. If you walk into this four year and you turn right, there's a desk and there's a whole wall of ways that you can step in and you can join linked generations in discipleship in this church. And don't believe the lie that your life is too ordinary to matter. Nobody is going to be argued into the kingdom of heaven with your theology, but they might be drawn towards it by watching the way that you respond in a hard week, or how you treat a waiter, or how you speak to the people in your home. That is the display that Paul is after. Not a performance that you put on, but a life that is so shaped by the gospel that you display God to everyone who sees it. This passage leaves us with a couple questions. Whose image are we being shaped into? And will we help shape anyone else? We have been discipled to be different. And as a church, we were made different for a purpose. So that when the world looks at our church, it does not see Crete. And in the end, it doesn't even see us. It sees the God that we belong to. Will you join me in prayer? Dear Lord, thank you for your spirit. We thank you for these words. We thank you for the encouragement and the challenge and the beauty of the church that you've placed before us. Lord, you could have interacted with this world in so many different ways, and you chose our church and the global church as the primary vehicle that your goodness and your grace and your love and your mercy would be displayed to our world. And Lord, you have invited us into that ministry to shape other people, to grow them in their faith, that they too would turn and reflect your goodness and grace. Lord, may CBC be a church that embraces linked generations. Lord, may your spirit challenge us to step into the difficult process of discipleship, that our church, that our hearts, that our lives, that our homes would be a better representation, would more clearly reflect you and your character and your love. Amen.