Mission

[00:00:01] Holy Father, that we may not be destroyed by your wrath, nor which we justly deserve, nor be dismayed by your pure and almighty word. [00:00:22] We ask that in your great mercy you would forgive us our sins through the blood of your Son, and for his sake help us that we may receive your Word, gracious and good, with godly fear, and exalt your holy name everywhere that your Word is proclaimed, bringing glory to your name through the conversion of sinners, through the sanctification of your people, and through the feeding of your flock. [00:01:04] For your dear Son's sake, grant the illumination of our hearts, O God, that your spirit filling us would enable us to receive your word by faith, and that by your Word he might change our hearts, that we might be made more like your dear Son, for whom we give all praise and thanks. And it's in his name that we pray. Amen. [00:01:36] Sermon text is from Titus 1. [00:01:41] We'll read the whole chapter together, but we're going to look at verse 4, 5 as our sermon text. [00:01:50] Titus 1. Beginning in verse 1. Hear God's word, Paul, a servant of God and an apostle of Jesus Christ, for the sake of the faith of God's elect and their knowledge of the truth, which accords with godliness, in the 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, to Titus, my true child, in a common faith, grace and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Savior. [00:02:35] This is why I left you in Crete, so that you might put what remained into order and appoint elders in every town as I directed you. [00:02:44] If anyone is above reproach, the husband of one wife and his children are believers and not open to the charge of debauchery or insubordination. [00:02:56] For an overseer as God's steward must be above reproach. [00:03:01] He must not be arrogant, or quick tempered, or a drunkard, or violent, or greedy for gain, but hospitable, a lover of good, self controlled, upright, holy and disciplined. [00:03:19] He must hold firm to the trustworthy word as taught, so that he may be able to give instruction in sound doctrine and also to rebuke those who contradict it. [00:03:33] For there are many who are insubordinate, empty talkers and deceivers, especially those of the circumcision party. [00:03:42] They must be silenced, since they are upsetting whole families by teaching for shameful gain what they ought not to teach. [00:03:52] One of the Cretans, a prophet of Their own said Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons. [00:04:02] This testimony is true. [00:04:05] Therefore rebuke them sharply that they may be sound in the faith, not devoting themselves to Jewish myths and the commands of people who turn away from the truth. [00:04:16] To the pure, all things are pure, but to the defiled and unbelieving, nothing is pure. [00:04:24] But both their minds and their consciences are defiled. [00:04:28] They profess to know God, but they deny Him. By their works they are detestable, disobedient, unfit for any good work thus far. God's Word. Please be seated. [00:04:54] Again, our sermon text is going to be the fifth verse. [00:04:58] This is why I left you in Crete, so that you might put what remained into order and appoint elders in every town as I directed you. [00:05:10] Well, as you think about the Old Testament, could you pick one character in the Old Testament that you would say, this is an apostle, a missionary of the Old Testament age. [00:05:29] What do you think? [00:05:30] You don't have to answer out loud. [00:05:33] Can you think of anyone that fits the description of an apostle or a missionary? [00:05:46] Maybe not the easiest question, especially because the character I have in mind doesn't really in his character fit what we think of when we think of an apostle or a godly missionary. Maybe you've guessed who I'm thinking of. There is one individual who. Whom God calls and sends to go out from Israel, out into the nations, to preach a gospel of repentance to the nations. [00:06:20] You know who I have in mind now? Somebody said it, I think there's this character named Jonah. [00:06:26] And God sends Jonah on a mission to the Gentiles. [00:06:32] Interesting, right? In a way, he's kind of one of the first gospel missionaries to the Gentiles. We won't press that too hard, but I wanted to bring him up because we all know his story very well. And of course, we know God gives him this mission. [00:06:49] He calls him and he says, jonah, I want you to go to Nineveh, which is the capital of the Assyrian Empire. And the Assyrian Empire had been causing trouble, great difficulty for the nation of Israel. I want you to go to your chief enemy and call the people of Nineveh to repent. [00:07:08] And of course, he gets on his camel or his donkey or whatever it was, or his cart, and he goes the opposite direction. From Nineveh, he goes down to the sea, down to the Mediterranean, to Joppa. He gets on a boat, and instead of going east to Nineveh, he. He goes west towards the other end of the Mediterranean Sea to get as far Away from Nineveh as he can. He was sent on a mission, but he goes the other direction. Of course, God will have none of it. So you remember the story. [00:07:40] He sends this terrible storm that threatens to sink the ship. Jonah says, you got to throw me overboard. He gets gobbled up by the fish. The fish spits him back up on the land. And God says, okay, have you learned your lesson? [00:07:54] Now go and call the nation of Assyria to repentance. And of course, now Jonah goes and he preaches to the city of Nineveh. And the king calls them to repent, and God spares them judgment. [00:08:10] Okay, you know the story. But the reason we draw that story out isn't just to refresh our memory, but you're familiar with the idea that you find all over the Bible and really in all sorts of books, parts in our own lives of people being sent on a mission. [00:08:27] Someone is given a task or a big project, whatever it is, and he sent. [00:08:33] And the person sending him says, go and do this work for me. And that's your mission. We see it in the military, we see it in business when people are sent on business trips, salesmen are sent out. Their mission is to persuade people to buy the company's product. You get the idea. People are sent on missions. We have something very similar here. [00:08:54] Paul has taken Titus with him, and they've gone on a mission to the island of Crete, which is in the Mediterranean. I don't know if Jonah saw that as he sailed past or not, but that's where Paul and Titus went. They went on a mission to the island of Crete. Paul had a particular purpose in mind. He had a task. He had been sent. [00:09:17] We looked at some of that, actually, the last six sermons. I think we were looking at Paul's aims for his ministry, the mission that he'd been sent on, the things that he was called to do, his preaching, the promise that God gave him that he could depend upon in his ministry, and so on. [00:09:33] Now, I want to look and kind of zoom in here as Paul, he finishes introducing himself, introducing Titus, and giving a blessing upon Titus and the church there at Crete. And. And now he reminds Titus, this is the mission I gave you when I left Crete. [00:09:51] I want to look at this mission on the island of Crete under three points. First, we'll look at Paul's mission, because the story really starts with Paul and his mission. And then he hands this mission off to Titus as he leaves, and leaves Titus behind on Crete. And finally, Titus is going to leave Crete, and he's Going to leave that same mission to in the hands of the elders that he is to appoint. That's what's happening in this verse. [00:10:18] Paul's reminding Titus that's the mission, the reason I left you on Crete. [00:10:23] It was to finish the work and then to hand it off to those elders. Look first at Paul's mission, secondly at Titus's mission, and finally at the elders and their mission. [00:10:36] So first Paul's mission. Mission. We've looked and talked a lot about Paul's ministry, this apostleship that had been given to him by Christ. [00:10:46] We've talked about how King Jesus called Paul and gave him this commission, go out into the nations. He was a Jew. He liked being a Jew. He liked being in Jerusalem. He was a Pharisee even. He liked being in the temple, studying God's law. He didn't really like the Gentiles, but God called him, changed him, and, and King Jesus sent him out to the nations to declare the good news of the kingdom. The very same thing that we saw Jesus commissioning the apostles to in Acts chapter one. He called those 11, then he called Matthias, so there were 12. And then he came later and called Paul and especially called Paul on a mission to the nations. [00:11:29] And his job was to declare that John Jesus the king, was reigning and that now Gentiles could turn to him and be saved. [00:11:40] So here Paul, going around carrying out this mission that Christ has sent him on, has come to the island of Crete. [00:11:48] What is the method that he carries out of his ministry? What are his tactics? You might say he doesn't tell us a lot here in this letter directly of what he does. [00:12:00] But if we look at what he does in the Book of Acts, we see that the pattern here in Titus matches that. [00:12:08] So Paul's method, you see in the Book of Acts, first he. And first he would bring Barnabas with him, then later Silas with him. In the Book of Acts, he would have a partner and the two of them together would go to a town. They would go all over that town preaching the gospel that the king is here, that you need to repent and, and be saved and become his disciple, become a follower of Jesus. And that was the first part of what we call the Great Commission. Jesus said, make disciples of the nations and baptize them. [00:12:40] How do you do that? You preach the gospel to them. When they repent and they believe in Jesus, you baptize them. So first he went in gathering pagans into Jesus kingdom, making them Jesus disciples were followers. That's part one of his method. Very simple. Go preach. When people turn to Christ, baptize them. [00:13:01] Bring them out of this pagan society and into Jesus Church. [00:13:06] Part two that you find in the Book of Acts, he took these new disciples, new Jesus followers, and he organized them into congregations or churches like ours here. [00:13:21] How did he organize them? You can break up his organizing work into two more pieces. [00:13:28] First, he would instruct these new disciples some more. They've heard the milk, you might say they'd become babies. They'd been born again. They were infants in Christ, baby Christians. He would give them the milk of the gospel. But then as they matured and grew, he would begin to give them the meat of the Gospel. The New Testament uses this language, talking about how his disciples were instructed and grew more in their faith that they would mature. [00:13:58] So part one of organizing these disciples into churches was that they needed to be instructed further in the truths of the Christian faith. [00:14:08] The second thing was that they needed a formal structure. [00:14:12] Any or the church is an organism, right? We're the body of Christ. But organisms, living organisms anyway, always have a structure to them. I'm not just a. The human body isn't just an disorganized blob of cells. It has a structure to it, doesn't it? There's a head and there's arms, there's legs, there's a torso. And inside that structured body, there's bones and muscles and ligaments and all sorts of organs that structure the body and hold it together and organize it. And that's a helpful analogy for what Jesus is doing when the apostles appoint elders in every church. He gathers this group of new Christians together. He trains them, he teaches them, and as some of them mature, he appoints them to be elders, to be a governing structure in these new congregations. [00:15:04] So he preaches the gospel, makes converts, baptizes them, then he instructs them some more, organizes them into congregations with a structure under elders. Pretty simple, straightforward. If you look at Acts chapter 14, you'll see this pattern very clearly. [00:15:21] You read in verse 21, when they had preached the Gospel to that city and made many disciples, they returned to Lystra, Iconium and Antioch, to cities where they had first preached the gospel and made many disciples. They go back to where he's done that first part of preaching and conversion. And when he returned there, we read, he strengthened the souls of the disciples, exhorting them to continue in the faith. So further instruction, right? [00:15:47] And then we read in verse 23, when they had appointed elders in every city and prayed with fasting, they commended to them to the Lord in whom they had believed. So they preached the gospel, made converts. Then they came back, instructed them some more. And appointed elders over them. So that they would have a permanent structure to them as a congregation. That's his method. Pretty simple. If you've read the Book of Acts, You've seen this before, you've heard it. [00:16:13] Paul appears to be doing exactly the same thing here in Crete. [00:16:17] Paul had been imprisoned at Rome. [00:16:20] You remember the story at the end of the Book of Acts. Paul is under house arrest in Rome. He's awaiting trial before Caesar's tribunal. [00:16:28] He was eventually released after that trial, he was released from imprisonment. And he goes on another missionary journey. This time apparently to Crete. He brings Titus with him. He goes all over the island of Crete. Preaching the gospel, making disciples. [00:16:43] And then he says, great, we got the thing started. Now, Titus, you finished the job. I got other places to jet off to. And probably didn't ride an airplane. But he went off to other parts of Europe to do mission work there. And he left Titus to finish the job. [00:17:02] So the result of Paul and Titus ministry in the first phase. Is that you have disciples of Christ all over the island of Crete. [00:17:10] But the job is unfinished. [00:17:13] So we have Paul's mission. We have his methodology. But we realize here the job isn't finished. Finished. He left Titus to carry it on. [00:17:25] If nothing else. [00:17:27] They weren't organized yet under pastors and elders. The structure wasn't there yet. [00:17:34] Now, Paul and the other apostles had certain special roles. In laying the foundation of the church. As those who were commissioned by Christ to be his witnesses of the resurrection. [00:17:44] And then in laying the foundation in terms of writing the New Testament. They had special roles that they completed. But there's this other part of preaching the gospel. Bringing in disciples and organizing congregations. [00:17:58] This work isn't finished. It was left for Titus to carry on. [00:18:05] But even when Titus was done his work, the job still wasn't finished. It continued. There's always more disciples to make more disciples to train, more elders to train and to appoint to carry on this work of the gospel mission until Christ comes again. [00:18:24] It was an unfinished work in Paul's day. [00:18:27] It's an unfinished work today. [00:18:30] And it's going to continue that way until it's completed. The whole work is done. [00:18:36] All of Christ's people are brought in, and he comes again. [00:18:40] Paul's mission. There you have the. The core of it. And you see that it's unfinished. It's still our mission. It's the mission, in fact, of the whole church. Now, each of us plays our own role in this mission. [00:18:56] Preachers like Paul and Titus and others have a specific role in terms of preaching the gospel. But it's a mission that belongs to every Christian. [00:19:05] Every parent is to teach his children in the things of the Christian faith. [00:19:11] All of us are called to pray for the work of missionaries and pastors. All of us are called to pray for the conversion of the lost. [00:19:19] All of us are called to be witnesses to our pagan neighbors and family. [00:19:25] That's coming up for many of us this week, isn't it? As we go to spend time with our loved ones. [00:19:30] God calls us to be a witness through how we live, how we love them, and through our words, to be a witness to Christ and to his saving work in our lives for our unbelieving loved ones. [00:19:44] So this is Paul's mission, but it's not just his mission. It's Titus mission, but not just his. It's our mission. [00:19:52] But the last point I want to make here regarding Paul's mission is it isn't just our mission and Paul's mission. It's the mission of King Jesus. [00:20:02] He sent Paul, Paul and the other apostles out. He's the one who sends Titus out. He's the one who sends us, his church, into the world to be his witnesses. [00:20:13] And that's key to remember always, at all times, Christ. It's his work that's being done. [00:20:21] This is the mission of King Jesus. When his word is preached, he's the one who's working. [00:20:29] When men turn to Christ in repentance and faith, Jesus is the one who by his spirit and word, is working in the hearts of men. [00:20:39] And when you pray, Jesus is the one who answers your prayers. [00:20:45] This work isn't really Paul's work, or my work, or your work. It's the work of King Jesus. [00:20:52] And that's a great thing. [00:20:55] It's Paul's mission. It's Titus mission. Now that Paul has left him behind. [00:21:00] He left him on Crete to set in order the things that are remaining or lacking. What was left to do. In other words, I left you there to finish the job for me, Titus. [00:21:12] And what do you know? What was Titus supposed to do now? You kind of have to read the whole letter of Titus to get what it is that Paul left Titus to do. [00:21:23] But once you've read the whole letter, you'll pretty quickly see that you can summarize it under two headings, two jobs that Paul left Titus to do. [00:21:32] Instruct the disciples some more. Give them further training and teaching, and appoint elders in Other words, the things that Paul did in every town that he went to as he went about preaching the Gospel in Asia Minor, that you read about in Acts, the things that Paul was doing, he left Titus behind to do train the disciples some more, bring them up to maturity and then take some of them and appoint them as elders. [00:22:03] Titus method, that's what he needs to do. That's his job. How does he go about doing it? [00:22:09] If you read the letter, you'll find again by instructing God's people in sound doctrine. In other words, in writing right teaching, you might say and you find that this is in keeping with what we've looked at already about Paul's aims for ministry. [00:22:26] That Paul's apostleship was for the faith of God's elect. That they would come to saving faith and that that faith would grow and that they would come to the knowledge of the truth which accords with godliness. So they might come to know Christ and that they might come to a fuller knowledge of the truths that Christ wants for his people. [00:22:47] All that Christ has commanded that they would come to know that and that that would be expressed in their hearts and lives would be changed to live according to godliness. Not just a head knowledge of the truth, but that hearts being changed this would flow out into their lives. [00:23:04] So Titus was to instruct God's people in sound doctrine the truths of the Christian faith and how to live as Christians, how to worship God rightly and how to live lives of service to King Jesus. [00:23:18] That's the core of what Titus was to be doing as he finished the job that Paul had left him to do. [00:23:26] Now we'll make one point or one comment about this. [00:23:31] This job that Paul had left Titus to do, we'll put it mildly, was a difficult job. [00:23:40] This was no small task. [00:23:43] It was no small task I suppose for a number of reasons. One of them it's quite obvious that even as we read chapter one you could see or hear one of them is that the people who had become followers of Christ had come out of the pagan culture of the island of Crete. [00:24:02] These were not God fearing Jews, but these were pagans, people who worship rocks and trees and idols, false gods and their, you might say their culture, their way of living and the lies that they told each other is described e.g. chapter 1, verse 12. Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons. [00:24:29] These were some terrible people who had heard the Gospel and come to follow King Jesus. [00:24:37] But they still had the remnants of that paganism in them. And Paul Left Titus there to, you might say, train that out of them to, as he taught God's word, to turn them away from worldly ways to following King Jesus. [00:24:53] It's not just that the people came with that baggage, you might say, of paganism. [00:24:59] But there were active forces at work on the island of Crete to draw these new converts back into paganism. [00:25:10] Look at verse 13. [00:25:12] I'm sorry. Look at verse 11, 10 and 11. There are many who are insubordinate, empty talkers and deceivers, especially those of the circumcision party. They must be silenced since they are upsetting whole families by teaching for shameful gain what they ought not to teach. [00:25:31] There are people who are trying to lead God's people astray, these new Christians astray, and draw them back into the paganism of the island of Crete. [00:25:41] This isn't just culture. I used the word culture, but it isn't just culture. [00:25:48] We What Paul's describing here is wickedness, worldliness, things that are opposed to King Jesus and to his reign in the hearts of his people. [00:25:58] And it isn't just outward rebellion. It's a wickedness rooted in the hearts of sinners. [00:26:04] It's like weeds. If you garden, have you ever gardened and had weeds, and you thought you'd torn them up in one part of your garden, and you came back two or three days later and you realize that the roots had spread and it was growing in a different part of your garden. Deep roots that are hard to find, hard to get out. [00:26:23] That's what sin is like in our hearts. [00:26:28] Titus had a very difficult task in continuing to train the new Christian converts in the Christian faith. [00:26:38] It was difficult because of the nature of the people he was dealing with and their sinfulness. But it was difficult also because it appears to be that the work he was called to do, that the very things Titus was told he had to do, are difficult in and of themselves. [00:26:58] It was, you might say, a challenging or a stern task. [00:27:02] Verse 13. We read that he is to rebuke them sharply. [00:27:10] It's not fun or easy to come to another grown up, even to our children. It's not pleasant, but certainly to come alongside another grown up and rebuke him for his sin. [00:27:24] Chapter two. If you've read it, you know how Paul instructs Titus that he's to speak to different categories of people about their Christian living, how they're to live in a way that's in accord with sound doctrine. [00:27:38] And he gives some pretty detailed descriptions of how Titus is supposed to instruct God's people. But if you notice the categories, he doesn't pick the easy ones. [00:27:51] He picks the older men and the older women. Titus, this young buck is supposed to come alongside old men and old women and talk to them about their sin and call them to repentance and change. [00:28:04] Now, I don't know if you've ever watched elderly people, but they're often some of the more what do we say, shall we say? They're often set in their ways. [00:28:15] They've seen it all, they've lived through it all. I'm not picking on anyone here, but it's not an easy thing, especially for those of us who are younger, to come alongside and do it in a way that reaches their hearts. [00:28:28] Paul's given Titus a very difficult task. And if older people are set in their ways, he says, now I want you to go to the young women and the young men, some of the most headstrong and stubborn people in your congregation, and you're to disciple them. Titus, he's given Titus a very difficult task, but he left Titus equipped for the task. Titus himself was a pagan convert. He was raised in idol worship and he had heard the Gospel. His heart had been changed. [00:29:02] His life had come under the gospel ministry, under Paul's discipling ministry. He had been changed. And he knew what brought the change in him. [00:29:11] It was the truth of God's word. [00:29:14] That is what changed Titus. And so Paul knew that Titus was equipped with God's word. And with his own encounter and experience with the life changing truths of God's word, he knew that Titus was equipped to reach these people by the power of the Spirit. [00:29:34] Well, there's Titus task, but as we said, this mission is an ongoing mission. It was Paul's mission. It's Titus mission. It's our mission. [00:29:46] And we live in a society that reads pretty much like the Cretan society, doesn't it? [00:29:53] You could say what he says about the cretins, about Americans. Americans are always liars, evil beasts and lazy gluttons, no joke. [00:30:04] We live in a society filled literally with gluttony and just listen to our politicians if you want to know about lying. [00:30:12] It's constant. [00:30:14] The people who should be setting a godly example for godly moral behavior are constantly lying and breaking their promises. [00:30:25] Yeah, we live in a society that's just like the island of Crete and it exerts its influences on us, on our children and on people who have come to know the Lord Jesus, on converts who are new to the Christian faith. The same challenges Face us. [00:30:43] The same roots of these evil weeds grow in our hearts. [00:30:50] As men and women come to know the Lord Jesus. Their old pagan ways have to be uprooted. [00:30:57] They have to be instructed in godliness and in obedience to the Lord Jesus and our children who grow up in the Church. We have to shield them and protect them by from the lies and the evil tendencies of this world. [00:31:14] There's only one way this can happen. [00:31:17] As if we follow the means of the Lord Jesus Christ, our King has given us. [00:31:22] We have to teach the Word, sound doctrine, and we have to continually be in prayer that the King and head of the Church would carry out this mission in our hearts and lives. [00:31:35] We have no other hope. We can't do this in our own strength, but we have hope. [00:31:43] Look at chapter two, verse 14. [00:31:48] We read about our God and Savior, Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness. I'll stop there. [00:31:58] Our hope is that Jesus went and died on the cross to remove lawlessness, that is all of these pagan wicked influences. To take them away from us, not just outwardly, but to remove them from our hearts so that we would be changed. He went and died so that that would happen. [00:32:20] To redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for Himself a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works. [00:32:32] As Titus and preachers today teach sound doctrine. Jesus is using this to purify you, to change your hearts, to make you and reshape you into his own treasured possession. He loves you. He wants you free from sin. [00:32:50] And so he gives people like Titus and other preachers and as instruments to work on your hearts through the teaching of His Word. [00:32:59] He loves you. It's his mission to see you purified. [00:33:05] So we have hope. We have hope here that he will accomplish it. [00:33:09] Paul's mission, Titus mission. [00:33:12] Finally, the elders in the mission. [00:33:17] When we hit this. If you've not read the New Testament before, if it's your first time reading through it, you hear about these elders in the Book of Acts and you wonder, where did they come from? You're reading, you get to Acts, chapter 14, and it says they preached the Gospel and they baptized converts and then they appointed elders in every city. [00:33:44] What's going on here? [00:33:47] Book of Acts assumes that you've read your Old Testament, at least that you've read the five books of Moses. And because you've read your Old Testament, you know who these guys are, these elders? [00:34:00] Who are they? [00:34:02] These are men who serve in an official role in the church. [00:34:06] Both in the Old Testament church, Israel, and in the New Testament Church, they were first appointed by God at Sinai when he gave his law. He also had Moses appoint elders to serve in an official role throughout the nation of Israel to make sure that his law was applied and followed throughout the nation. [00:34:26] Jesus, when he sent his apostles out, instructed them to appoint elders. In other words, when Paul commands Titus to appoint elders in every city, it's not on his own authority. [00:34:37] But he's doing this because he's an apostle. He's carrying out, Jesus commands that these men, these elders, would be appointed in every church. [00:34:47] It's Jesus church. He's the king of the church. And he's decided he wants these men to serve in a leading role in his church. So that's the beginnings of who these elders are. [00:35:00] What do they do for the church? [00:35:03] First, Timothy 5:17 summarizes the work of these men, these elders, under two functions, a teaching function and a ruling function. He says, let the elders who rule well be counted worthy of double honor, especially those who labor in the word and doctrine. We have two kinds of activities or functions in that verse, ruling and teaching. [00:35:32] In the Old Testament Church, you had men who served in official capacities to teach. Those were the priests and the Levites. And they were joined by men called elders who ruled. And together the teachers of God's people and the elders or rulers of God's people ruled and led God's people. [00:35:53] In the Old Testament Church and in the New Testament Church, we have the same pattern. Teachers or pastors and elders. Those who don't preach join together in ruling and caring for Christ's church. This is the permanent order that Jesus has established in his church. That structure or that organization that continues on to help lead the church in her mission until Christ comes again. [00:36:19] We had special officers in the apostles and in Titus and evangelists. Now we have pastors and elders who together lead the church in her mission. [00:36:32] What are these men called to do? That's who they are. In brief, we'll look at that more in coming weeks. [00:36:38] What are they called to do? What are their methods? We looked at Paul's methods in his mission. We looked at Titus methods in his mission. These elders that Titus is to appoint in every city, what are their methods? [00:36:52] Basically, the same things that Paul told Titus to do. [00:36:57] Ruling and teaching or caring for God's people and instructing them. [00:37:02] The same methods that Titus had to organize the church, care for the flock, instruct them, train them, and then take some of the men who are more mature. And appoint them as elders. [00:37:14] The new guys, these elders, they're to carry on doing the exact same thing Titus was. [00:37:20] So their methods, same thing Paul did, same thing Titus did. We are to do the same things today. We have the same mission, we have the same methods. [00:37:32] So I won't repeat them all. [00:37:34] You got it down by now. Elders do the same kinds of things. The preaching elders instruct publicly and officially in Christian doctrine. And the ruling elders and the preaching elders together care for the flock on an individual basis and. And corporately. [00:37:51] Together, we lead the church as she fulfills her mission to the nations. [00:37:57] What do we do? [00:37:59] We use everything we got in terms of teaching, in terms of our example, in terms of spending time with you, to encourage you, build you up, and together as our witness, both officially and individually, and as families together, trying to reach the lost with the gospel for Jesus. [00:38:18] So it feels like we're tacking that on, but hopefully you can see how all of this fits together. The work that Paul did, he left Titus to do. The work that Titus did, he passed off to the elders. And we've continued that work down till today. [00:38:36] King Jesus has given the church as a whole a great mission, reaching the nations with the gospel. Not just Paul and Titus, but all of us. [00:38:46] And it's one of the most difficult jobs. It is the most difficult job anyone could be given to deal with people and their sin. There's nothing more hard, difficult than that. [00:39:02] But we have great hope because this mission and its work doesn't depend on us. It doesn't depend on me. It doesn't depend on you. It doesn't depend on Pastor Chopka. It depends on King Jesus, the head of the church. [00:39:18] He is the one at work. [00:39:21] Jesus has not given this task up. He's called us to carry it out. But it's still his work. [00:39:30] He holds the great office of king and head of this church. He may have called individual men to serve as pastors, elders, and sent them out, individual Christians, and sent you out as a witness into the world. [00:39:42] But he's still king and head of the church. He gives life to you, the body. [00:39:48] He puts his spirit in you. He puts his word in you. [00:39:52] He's the one at work, and you have his promise. [00:39:58] I will build my church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it. [00:40:02] In other words, I win. [00:40:06] I send you out to do my work, and I will make it happen. [00:40:12] When we obey Jesus calling, when we faithfully work long hours, we beat our heads against the wall, fighting our own sin, fighting the sin of others. [00:40:23] When we work faithfully together, as elders, as deacons, as pastor and flock, using Christ's methods, His word and prayer, we can be assured of success. Not because of us, but because of Jesus. [00:40:39] The King will win. He will succeed. And we know this because he sits on the very throne of heaven itself. [00:40:48] Nothing can defeat him now. What is the result at the end of all of this work? Tedious, long, hard work. [00:40:57] The end result is this. [00:40:59] One day, the very last one of Jesus sheep will hear his voice and turn to him. [00:41:06] That very last sheep that the good shepherd came to save will hear his voice and come into his flock. [00:41:13] And when all of his church is gathered in and his body is complete and whole, and there's no more to add to it, then the King will come. [00:41:24] And he will bring his bride, the church, into his presence, glorious, clothed in her bridal garments, and lead us before his Father. [00:41:35] And there we will be with him forever. [00:41:38] And then the mission will be over. Let's pray. [00:41:43] Our God and our King, we thank you for your word by which you give light and light to us, your people. [00:41:53] Grant the gift of saving faith to all who hear it today, and especially to your covenant children in our midst. [00:42:03] Make us to grow in love and in unity in Christ Jesus, our head and with each other, so that we might be shining lights in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation. [00:42:17] Grant us special grace, love and gospel witness as we meet with our unbelieving family and friends during the holiday this week so that we might bring honor to the name of Jesus our Savior, and grant us our heart's desire that our loved ones might be saved. [00:42:41] Give grace, strength and diligence to those who serve as pastors and elders so that they may faithfully instruct in sound doctrine and care for the flock which you have purchased with your blood and preserve her from this wicked world, purifying us of all ungodliness and equipping us to be zealous for good works. To your praise and glory, for we ask in Jesus name, Amen.