Transcript

Watch the drama that accompanies this message: The Storm

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: Over the next couple of days, we’re going to put three verses under a microscope—Titus chapter 2, verses 3–5. In this opening session, before we start unpacking all the different parts and pieces of that passage, I want to give us a context for the whole passage and a sense of the bigger picture.

Now, the book Titus, as you probably know, was written by the apostle Paul to a pastor named Titus—the pastor of a tiny start-up, fledgling church on the island of Crete—and this church faced a lot of challenges.

They had external threats, because the Roman Empire—headed by Nero—was breathing down their necks and threatening to wipe out Christianity. Then there were internal threats—there were false teachers who were promoting teachings and philosophies that were contrary to the Scripture, and Titus tells us that these teachers were leading whole families astray. They were upsetting whole families by teaching these things.

So here’s this pastor of this new little church, and how is this church supposed to survive—much less thrive—much less evangelize the whole world? Well, God’s strategy is what we have for us in Titus, and it’s probably not the strategy you or I would have written if we’d been asked how to handle the situation.

So in Titus chapter 1, as we read earlier, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, the apostle Paul said, “You need qualified leaders in your church,” and then he tells them what those qualifications are.

Then we come to chapter 2, and he says, “You need a certain kind of people in your congregation,” and he talks about various demographics, various age groups, various men and women—gender—and people in different social strata and seasons of life. He talks how each of these demographics are charged to demonstrate the gospel through their lives, and then to pass the baton on to others.

So as I wrote a book, Adorned, on this topic through these verses of Titus chapter 2, we subtitled that book something that I want to focus on in the moments we have here this afternoon. The subtitle is Living Out the Beauty of the Gospel Together. That is really an umbrella for everything we’re going to talk about in this study. So I want to take a look at that concept, those couple of phrases, in this introductory session.

First: Living Out the Beauty of the Gospel. In verse 10 of Titus chapter 2, the apostle Paul says that purpose of all of this is so that “in everything they may adorn the doctrine of God our Savior.”

Now . . . sound doctrine. I think most of us who are gathered here today would agree that sound doctrine is important, and we would agree that sound doctrine is true. But I want to tell you, it’s more than true. It is true! But to a lot of people sound doctrine, true as it may be, sounds dry and boring.

But I want us to understand—and to help other women understand—that solid teaching from God’s Word is not just true, it’s also good! It’s beautiful! The things we’re going to be talking about make us beautiful, because doctrine points us to Christ—who is more beautiful than any human being, any other created being.

He is God; He is beautiful; He is the Supreme Treasure. So this doctrine is supposed to point us to Him. When we embrace and when we exhibit this kind of solid teaching, we make the truth—the gospel—beautiful to others. So we want to live out the beauty of the gospel.

Now, in the book of Titus, there are lots of instructions. There are instructions about our behavior, instructions about our relationships. We’re going to walk through a lot …