Sermon Tone Analysis

*The Global War on Error in Doctrine and Conduct within the Church (Titus 1:10-14)*

/Preached by Pastor Phil Layton at Gold Country Baptist Church on June 29, 2008/

www.goldcountrybaptist.org

The following is how someone has described what the model minister or elder should be like:

-It is guaranteed that he will please all the people in any church.

-His sermons are very short, but very deep, thorough, life-changing

-He preaches the whole counsel of God but is never controversial   

-He condemns sin, but never hurts anyone’s feelings.

-He works from 8:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m., doing every type of work.

-His family is completely model in deportment, dress, and attitude.

-He is 36 years old and has been preaching for 40 years.

-He is not too tall, short, thin, heavyset, has one brown eye and one blue, hair parted in the middle, left side dark and straight, right side blond, wavy.

Always with people but 100% devoted to his family.

-He has a burning desire to work with teenagers and spend all his time with the older people.

He’s devoted to prayer and study, but always available and constantly visiting people the whole week     

-He smiles all the time with a straight face because he has a sense of humor that keeps him seriously dedicated to his work.

-He makes 15 calls a day on church members, spends all his time evangelizing the unchurched, and is never out of the office.

-On top of all news and hobbies but spends all his time in the Word

-His teaching is perfectly balanced, but never offends or confronts[1]

 

People have all kinds of ideas in their head as to what should be true of the overseers or elders or pastors who lead the local church, what they should be like and where they should spend their time and energies, but of course what we want to do today is look at what God’s Word actually says, so let’s do that in Titus chapter 1.

 

WHAT ARE THEY TO BE LIKE?

/7 //For the overseer must be above reproach as God’s steward, not self-willed, not quick-tempered, not addicted to wine, not pugnacious, not fond of sordid gain, 8 //but hospitable, loving what is good, sensible, just, devout, self-controlled, /

*/ /*

WHAT IS THE ELDER PRIMARILY TO BE DOING?

/9 //holding fast the faithful word which is in accordance with the teaching, so that he will be able both to exhort in sound doctrine and to refute those who contradict.

/

/ /

WHY ARE MEN LIKE THIS SO NEEDED IN EACH CHURCH?

/10 //For there are many rebellious men, empty talkers and deceivers, especially those of the circumcision, 11 //who must be silenced because they are upsetting whole families, teaching things they should not teach for the sake of sordid gain.

12 //One of themselves, a prophet of their own, said, “Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons.”

13 //This testimony is true.

For this reason reprove them severely so that they may be sound in the faith, 14 //not paying attention to Jewish myths and commandments of men who turn away from the truth./

The elders that Paul has told Titus to appoint in every church were definitely not guaranteed to please every person in every church.

In fact, what is guaranteed is a clash in these verses, between the biblically faithful elder described in verse 9 and those who have different agendas, as described in our text, verses 10-14.

The ideal elder is not someone who never offends or confronts, according to God’s Word, an elder must be willing to lovingly offend, confront, rebuke sharply false teaching, and silence those who lead others astray.

The man of God is also a soldier who protects and serves.

You are well aware that since September of 2001, America has been engaged in a war on terrorism from militant Muslims, which is sometimes more broadly called “the global war on terror.”

The terrorist bombings a the Trade Center brought us greater terror and a new kind of enemy that had been previously underestimated by our country – an enemy not sending a fleet of planes across the ocean like at Pearl Harbor, but people who lived among us in our midst, posing as Americans, then taking our own planes and crashing them into buildings, killing thousands.

The false religion of Islam has showed just how dangerous bad theology can be, and the devilish and devastating result continues to be seen on the news around the world, where young people caught up in radical religious suicide destroy not only themselves but as many other innocent people as they can with them in the process.

It’s not hard to see the parallels between our nation’s war on terror, and the church’s far-longer spiritual war on /ERROR.

/This conflict also seems never-ending and hard to win, and the spiritual enemy is also undercover in the church.

Error often originates in our midst inside the church, from those who live among us, who pose as us, but who want to use the church as a vehicle for their error.

The destruction may not be physical and final, but it’s just as saddening to witness the spiritual destruction caused by false teachers and innocent young believers carried along to spiritual devastation.

I requested we sing hymn #499 again this week, because the words of Isaac Watts about us “Soldiers of the Cross” are very fitting for this message.

It is not only church leaders that God calls to be soldiers in this War on Error, all of us to be in the fight or else we are dishonoring our Commander and worthy of discharge.

Our actual enemy is not people who are caught up in error, because our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but it’s against the invisible spiritual source of error - Satan.

Our motive in dealing with people in our midst who are ensnared in sin or sinful teaching is the words of the song we’ll sing at the end of this service:

/Rescue the perishing, care for the dying, \\ Snatch them in pity from sin and the grave; \\ Weep o’er the erring one, lift up the fallen, \\ Tell them of Jesus, the mighty to save./

Now the Bible does differentiate between those who are deceived and those who are being deceived.

Either way, the soldier of Christ must be prepared to either exhort positively in sound doctrine or to refute those who contradict biblical truth.

*9 **holding fast the faithful word which is in accordance with the teaching, so that he will be able both to exhort in sound doctrine and to refute those who contradict.** *

In verse 10, the focus is on the false teachers themselves.

* 10 **For there are many rebellious men, empty talkers and deceivers, especially those of the circumcision,*

 

The “for” in the grammar at the beginning of the verse connects this to verse 9 and continues the thought as to why it’s so important we hold fast to the faithful word and exhort in sound doctrine and refute error … “FOR there are many rebellious men”

 

How do you look out for and recognize a false teacher?

Phil Newton points out 4 areas where false teachers are evident:

#.

Evident in their talk (v.

10)

#.

Evident in their tactics (v.

11)

#.

Evident in their testimony (v.

12-13)

#.

Evident in their teaching (v.

14)

 

#1 – Their talk: rebellious, empty, and deceptive (v.

10)

 

Notice first of all their /number/ – there are MANY of these talkers

 

They multiply like rabbits – like locusts – and keeping an eye on each flock was certainly not a task one man like Titus could keep up with, that’s why he needed to appoint multiple elders in every church (v. 5) because v. 9 calls each of them to deal with the many men in v. 10 so they won’t multiply further or reproduce.

Paul had predicted that there would be men who would come in among the church (“from among you” an "inside job") and would not spare the flock (Acts 20:29), a proverbial sheep-lookalike wolf

 

Notice also their /nature /– REBELLIOUS.

These guys are rebels with a cause, but it’s their own cause, not the cause of Christ.

The way they talk and walk reveals rebellion or insubordination to the truth.

These types are un-teachable and will not submit to church leadership.

They’re often unruly or refusing to be governed.

Even when their erroneous doctrine or immoral living is exposed, they are inclined to defy correction and discipline by the true church.

Beware of ministries ~/ ministers who won’t put themselves under authority.

Jude v8 describes rebellious men and the mark of false teachers: they “reject authority.”

A mark of false teachers in every age is their unwillingness to be under discipline.

They are fiercely unaccountable.

In the case of false teachers with large media ministries, invariably they do not allow disclosure of their earnings or financial dealings or account for their spending and they will not submit themselves to scrutiny over their practices /or /teaching by a church (that’s parachurch gone bad).

When discerning Christians question some of the doctrine of TV preachers of health, wealth, and prosperity gospel, the response is often “touch not God’s anointed” or “you’re judgmental.”

Or as one VERY famous televangelist with a supposed healing ministry said of those who question his theology, he said he wanted a machine gun to shoot them all.

That’s a little different than the attitude of the Apostle Paul who found the Bereans to be the most noble of all in Acts 17:11 because they actually examined his teaching and compared it to Scripture to make sure it was so.

Verse 10 says they are not only rebellious but “empty talkers.”

They may have large followings on TV and in book bestsellers and not everything they teach is false, but it’s fluff, it’s empty of any real value or depth, they say a whole lot of nothing, they chatter and spout all kinds of nonsense that has no substance.

Other translations describe their talk as vain, idle, useless or futile, “swelling words of emptiness or nothingness” – that’s what these guys do.

Verse 10 goes on to describe their intent as more sinister than mere superficiality, many are actually deceivers.

These are religious distorters as the end of the verse says, referencing the Jewish circumcision sect which may have been similar to the Judaizer cult that Paul battled against in the book of Galatians.

The Greek compound word for “deceiver” literally refers to "a mind deceiver" or one who leads one's mind astray!

Instead of leading men to the truth they led them away from it.

Some even deliberately cause others to believe what they know isn’t true.

So false teachers are evident first of all in their talk, now verse 11 shows us secondly, #2 They are evident in the TACTICS

 

*11 … they are upsetting whole families, teaching things they should not /teach /for the sake of sordid gain.*

There’s always a desire for gain for false teachers, especially improper or dishonest financial gain.

Crete was legendary for this.

The ancient writer Polybius wrote:

Money is so highly valued among them, that its possession is not only thought to be necessary, but highly creditable; and in fact greed and avarice are so native to the soil in Crete, that they are the only people in the world among whom no stigma attaches to any sort of gain whatever.[2]

But there can also be a desire for gain in other ways; power over others, influence, possessions, control, sadly even using their position to seduce immorally.

In the NKJV it says they “subvert whole households” – churches were primarily hosted in houses in NT times, and so there may have been smaller house churches or what we might call home Bible studies taking place around the island of Crete.

These false teachers love to get into smaller interactive groups where they can spout their theology to try and lead families or house groups astray.

“False doctrine always uses a plausible gimmick to get its foot in the door – and it’s always the back door!” – Vance Havner

 

“Heresy is picking out what you want to believe and rejecting, or at least ignoring, the rest” – A.W. Tozer

 

“When Bible believers take a stand against false doctrine, they are accused of ‘rocking the boat.’

It is better that belief should rock the boat than that unbelief should wreck the boat” – Vance Havner

 

Havner: “Unless your vision of Christ is as large as it can possibly be, you will always be in danger of heresy”

 

Having a right view of Christ and a high view of Christ is the best safeguard against error, because it’s precisely in this area of Christology that cults and false religions “teach things they should not” as v.11 says, denying Christ’s deity or sufficiency of His work

 

The phrase in v. 11 can be translated, "teaching that which is /unnecessary/" – possibly emphasizing the tactics of false teachers who often teach "unnecessary" additions to the gospel.

The verse mentions those of the circumcision, those who added to what Christ had done.