‘I am certainly not one of those who need to be prodded. In fact, if anything, I am the prod’, says the most popular of all leaders. During World War II, Winston Churchill was forced to make a painful choice. The British secret service had broken the Nazi code and informed Churchill that the Germans were going to bomb Coventry. He had two choices: (1) evacuate the citizens and save hundreds of lives but let the Germans know that the code was broken; or (2) take no action, which would kill hundreds of people but keep the information flowing and possibly save many more lives.
We need leaders in times of challenge and controversy. What would you have done? Saved Coventry? Avoid telling the Germans the code was broken? Do nothing? As a leader it was Churchill’s role to protect his people, defeat the enemy and lead his people into peaceful times.
A few thousand years earlier. Moses had a similar role—to rescue his people from the enemy and lead them into peace. So leaders are people who take other people from one place to another place. Amazingly God has rescued his people through the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus. And we are now a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. We are a royal priesthood, a people belonging to God, a community on our way to our glorious heavenly home. And in his mercy, the Good Shepherd appoints leaders to tend to us, so we do not wander away, so we do not rebel like Israel did in the wilderness, so we keep our eyes firmly fixed on our heavenly home.
Those whom God appoints to lead his church must be men who publicly exhibit Christ-like Christianity. According to verse 7, such men should not be ‘not overbearing, not quick-tempered, not given to drunkenness, not violent, not pursuing dishonest gain’. Here is a word for all of us and how true it must be for elders. This list of ‘nots’ is not an not an exhaustive list. The principle is elaborated in Titus 2:12. The gospel teaches us to say ‘“No” to ungodliness and worldly passions’. Run from sin, leave it behind you, it has been nailed to the cross. Get rid of your old, unregenerate self which is disobedient, deceived and enslaved. Lay to rest a life which destroys relationships through mindless manipulation. Leave the old self behind because you have been saved by grace, you have experienced rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit. Not some of you, but all of you who confess ‘Jesus is Lord’.
So none of us should live according to the old ways, especially elders whom God appoints to oversight the church. Elsewhere the apostle says, ‘Put to death whatever belongs to your earthly nature’ (Col 3:5). But, friends, understand that godliness is far more than throwing the old self away. We have the Spirit of life within us who fills us with the glory of the resurrection. Don’t you see that? Don’t you know that? Aren’t you living in the shadow of heaven? Titus is to appoint elders who teach and live the answers to these questions. Men who have renounced the old self and who are living the Christian life with strength, character and conviction. So the elder in verse 8, ‘must be hospitable, one who loves what is good, one who is self-controlled, upright, holy and disciplined’.
An hospitable person allows people into their lives. The hospitable elder is a people person—a leader who doesn’t think more highly of themselves than they ought. Not overbearing (verse 7), but hospitable. An overbearing person thinks they are superior to everyone else. In their deluded state, an overbearing person looks down on others. But elders aren’t to be like this at all! They are to be hospitable and open up their homes. Not ‘over-bearing’ but ‘under-bearing’—or as in Tit 3:2, ‘peaceable and considerate, showing true humility toward all men’.
It’s true that some folks make you feel at home and others make you wish you were. For the elder, though, hospitality is about caring for and welcoming into our homes those who need strength, encouragement and support. An elder’s home is a place where he and his wife open their home and their hearts to all sorts of people—not forgetting the lonely, the needy, single people, and those heavily burdened by life.
In Rom 12, Paul makes it clear that practicing hospitality is something for all of us to do. ‘Share with God’s people who are in need. Practice hospitality’ (Rom 12:13). And in Titus 1, the apostle tells us this is one of the qualifications for eldership.
Back to verse 8 and you’ll see that an elder is one who ‘loves what is good’ (Tit 1:8). There are so many people in our world who love what is bad. However, the elder must love both things and people deemed by God to be good. A man so filled with the Spirit of God that he enjoys doing good things. For if an elder is not eager to do what is good, then does he seriously expect those under his care to devote themselves to doing what is good?
These good things include a love for creation. Wiersbe extends this to a love of good books, good music and good causes. Wiersbe means an embracing love for all the good things in God’s world. The psalmist would agree! ‘The heavens declare the glory of God’ (Ps 19:1); ‘O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth’ (Ps 8:9).
Paul puts many good things before us in his letter to Titus. A love of the knowledge of the truth that leads to godliness (Tit 1:1). An elder should love the gospel as he encourages others with sound doctrine (Tit 1:9). A love for the truth means opposing false teaching (Tit 1:10–16). A love for the saints means putting yourself last for their sake (Tit 3:2). A love for family means being a faithful husband and a devoted father (Tit 1:6). It means being a good employee in the workplace (Tit 3:1).
An elder is one who loves what is good and who encourages and teaches others to love the same good things. A few years ago I sat under the ministry of Paul de Plater at a church in Newcastle. We all loved that man because he so obviously followed the Lord Jesus and he wanted others to do the same. If that’s what godliness looked like, then I wanted to be like him. A sound knowledge of the truth was transforming this man into a Christ-like person. Paul de Plater was known for his gentle manner, for his controlled tongue, for his considerate personality—he was a lover of what is good.
‘Self-control’. The elder must be able to master himself, he must be able to behave in a sensible manner, he must be temperate and self-restrained. I thought I was good at these things until I had children! You never really know what your personality is capable of until you have children. Campbell says that ‘The elder is to be a sensible man; a prudent man; not “given to wild, foolish ideas”. He needs to have sound judgement and be able to exercise wise leadership’. Then he must be ‘upright’—living carefully by the standards of God’s word in every area of life. And lastly ‘holy’—seeking day by day to walk closely with God and to please him in everything.
Neither God or the congregation expect elders to model perfection—that would be impossible! Remember what Paul says to Timothy, ‘Practice these things, immerse yourself in them, so that all may see your progress’ (1 Tim 4:15). Elders are to set an example as people who publicly strive for holiness—and like the rest of us, they are not there yet.
Paul brings his list of qualifications to a close by insisting that an elder must be sound in the faith. Look with me at verse 9, ‘He must hold firmly to the trustworthy message as it has been taught, so that he can encourage others by sound doctrine and refute those who oppose it’. Here is the core competency of the elder. He must hold to the gospel as received by the apostles because the apostles received it from Jesus who received it from his Heavenly Father. So this Word that we have in our hands has the authority of God himself. This is the Word that we’ve received and we must not change it, we must not adapt it, we must not oppose it. We must hold firmly to it.
It is important to hear this because we need more leaders in our church. If you’re thinking about moving into a position of leadership then its important that you are keeping to the faith once for all delivered through the apostles. If you have the character that Paul is describing, if you know the gospel and are willing to encourage others and refute those who oppose the truth, then you are eligible for consideration as a leader in this church.
Do you see how concerned the Lord is for his church? He knows that his church needs leaders and in our best interest he has told us what kind of leaders we need. Campbell puts it back in our court. ‘The responsibility now is one of implementation. Are you a member of a search committee looking for a full-time elder? Or an eldership that wants to add another man? Or a church member who at the next AGM must vote either yes or no for a particular candidate? Study the profile (in Titus) carefully and resolve, as you do so, that you will settle for nothing less’.
So Titus is to appoint elders with appropriate character, whose job is encourage others by sound doctrine and refute those who oppose it. These two activities—encouraging and refuting—are precisely what Paul does in the rest of his letter. Titus is to encourage the church community by teaching (Tit 2:1–15), by reminding (Tit 3:1), by stressing gospel truths (Tit 2:11–14, 3:3–8) and by warning the divisive person (Tit 3:10). What Paul is doing Titus is to do, and he is to appoint co-workers who will do exactly the same thing.
And Titus is to appoint elders with a sense of urgency. The church is riddled with many people firmly oppose the trustworthy message as it has been taught. Paul describes these Cretan teachers as ‘rebellious people, mere talkers and deceivers, especially those of the circumcision group’ (Tit 1:10). These teachers are corrupting Christ-like Christianity. They peddle Jewish myths, verse 14, they are overbearing, they command men and women to follow their ways. Their minds are polluted. They are morally undone because their consciences are corrupted.
We can infer what these false teachers were saying from verse 15. The Jewish man-made laws that were being peddled had to do with religious purity. So Paul insists that ‘to the pure all things are pure’—meaning to the morally pure—to those who have been genuinely cleansed—all things are religiously clean. It seems these false teachers were saying that certain innocent things and certain innocent practices were inconsistent with Christian purity. They were saying that we need more than Jesus to purify us before the Father, we need to take things into our own hands—more rules about purity, more regulations about cleanliness, more suffering because the suffering of Jesus on our behalf was not enough.
Paul’s response is swift, these rebellious people ‘must be silenced’—verse 11. ‘In the church of God,’ says William Hendrickson, ‘there is no such thing as “freedom of misleading speech.” It would be too dangerous’. Titus is to appoint men who will silence these false teachers. He is to appoint elders prepared to ‘rebuke them sharply’, verse 13, with the hope that these deceivers will repent of their ways. For at the moment ‘they claim to know God, but by their actions they deny him. They are detestable, disobedient and unfit for doing anything good’ (Tit 1:16).
The Cretan churches needed eldership with muscle! Elders not afraid to fight for the truth—men not afraid to extract the cancer which is ruining whole households. Elders with a burning passion to protect his people. Willing to make the hard decisions, like Churchill who took the second course of action—risk killing hundreds but keep the information flowing and possibly same many more lives.
What’s the character of men who are equipped for this job? Who are the strong men? Who the men to whom God says, ‘Be strong and courageous’ (Josh 1:6)? Men with this character: those who is hospitable, those who love what is good, those who is self-controlled, upright, holy and disciplined’ (Tit 1:8). And because these fruits of the Spirit are to blossom in all our lives, then all of us share the responsibility for protecting Christ-like Christianity.
Do you know the irony of the situation in Crete? Paul says you don’t need to be a Christian in order to recognise the stupidity of the false teachers. Come to verse 12, ‘Even one of their own prophets has said, “Cretans are always liars, evil brutes, lazy gluttons”’. It’s a sad, bad picture. The world can recognise what the church cannot. How blind we can be! How naïve we can be! The world sees right through these liars and the church lovingly allows them to ‘ruin whole households by teaching things they ought not to teach’ (Tit 1:11).
Certainly the world can’t distinguish good theology from bad theology. But its smart enough to know that lying, evil actions and laziness don’t make a good character reference! Perhaps in an attempt to be all embracing, all loving and all caring, these young churches accepted these scoundrels who are masters of illusion and their motif is simple—greed. They ruin households with their lies, verse 11, for ‘the sake of dishonest gain’.
Many a Presbyterian church has been ruined by Masonic teaching. Rather than the eldership showing its muscle, they failed to silence these talkers and deceivers. Some of the elders even joined the Lodge! In 1998, the Church and Nation Committee of the Presbyterian Church in Victoria issued a booklet, Christianity and Freemasonry in which they conclude, ‘Freemasons belong to an organisation that acknowledges other gods. An organisation that openly breaks the first Commandment’! (p. 21).
The apostle’s unashamedly confrontational approach is the one that is needed today. False teachers dare not be tolerated. They are too dangerous. Their teaching is spiritually harmful. It is the responsibility of church leaders to deal with them when they begin to threaten the congregation. That is a vital part of shepherding God’s flock. And if it means confrontation and sharp rebuke, so be it.
Does this not seem unloving? Obviously Paul didn’t think so! As Campbell says, ‘The unloving thing is to do nothing and leave false teachers alone so that they go on spreading their harmful teaching. The loving thing is to follow Paul’s directive and rebuke false teachers sharply so that they will be sound in the faith and cease teaching error’.
Campbell reminds us to look at the bigger picture. The church as a whole is harmed by people teaching something other than the gospel. It was being harmed in Crete, and it is being harmed across the world today. Love demands that we do what we can to stop this happening, for as Paul says in Acts 4:12, ‘Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved’. Then think about yourself. If someone started teaching you things that were false and harmful, should not the elders who love you stop this teaching lest you be spiritually harmed?
And then think about the false teachers themselves. Part of the reason for rebuking them, verse 13, is so they might shift their position, so they will be ‘sound in the faith’ and cease to pay attention to those who had corrupted them in the first place. A similar point is made in Paul’s second letter to Timothy: ‘Don’t have anything to do with foolish and stupid arguments because you know they produce quarrels. And the Lord’s servant must not quarrel … Those who oppose him he must gently instruct in the hope that God will grant them repentance leading them to a knowledge of the truth’ (2 Tim 2:23–25).
In his commentary on Titus, John Stott asks, ‘What was Paul’s strategy in the face of spreading error? It was this: when false teachers increase, we must multiply the number of true teachers’. That must be the church’s strategy today. The great need of the hour is for sound, able, mature, godly leaders—men who are self-controlled, upright, holy, and disciplined; men who hold fast to the truth that leads to godliness. We need elders who are able to encourage others by sound doctrine and refute those who oppose it. And we need to ask the Head of the church, the Lord Jesus Christ, for such men because they are his gift.
Pray for the elders we have already, pray that God will refine their character and equip them to encourage others by sound doctrine and refute those who oppose it. And when the time comes for us to appoint more elders, pray that God will give us such men who with strength of character will watch over this church. And we praise the Lord for his great promise in Matt 16:18, ‘I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it’.
