Titus 1:1-9. "Expect These Three Things From Your Pastor."

In this episode, Pastor Tim emphasizes the reliability of God, contrasting it with the unreliability of things people often worship, like money, health, etc. He refers to Augustine's critique of worshiping multiple unreliable gods, highlighting the need for the never lying, eternal God who offers eternal life through Jesus Christ.

As described by Paul the Apostle in his letter to Titus, a pastor's job is to further the faith of God's elect and their knowledge of the truth, which leads to godliness. Paul outlines three expectations for pastors: they must teach according to the Bible, live lives reflecting God's character, and build up new leaders.

These expectations ensure that pastors faithfully preach Jesus Christ's message, model a life of faith and love, and nurture future church leaders. Congregations have the right to hold their pastors to these standards, as they are essential for spiritual growth and leadership within the church.

This Sunday sermon, based on Titus 1 verses 1-9, was preached at Grace of God Lutheran Church on July 14, 2024.  This sermon is preached by Pastor Timothy J. Walsh, a member of WELS (Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod). Scripture selections come from the New International Version.

Our services are at 9:30am every Sunday morning, at our campus in Dix Hills on Long Island. Visit our website for more information, at www.graceofgod.church 

Intro Music "On the Way" by Vlad Gluschenko https://soundcloud.com/vgl9
Creative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported — CC BY 3.0

Outro Music "Divenire" by Ludovico Einaudi
copyright (℗) by: Ludovico Einaudi (in 2006)               

Transcript

Grace and peace to you from God the Father and Jesus Christ our Savior, friends. Amen.

I love the name Paul gives to God in this section. He’s the “God who does not lie.” We should expect this from our God. Anything which would ask you for your worship should be reliable. But so many of the things we worship are not reliable. We worship money; inflation takes it away. We worship our health; an unexpected diagnosis shows that we had no control over it. We worship our country; it changes, we find ourselves in a place we don’t recognize.

Augustine, a Christian preacher who lived sixteen hundred years ago, remarked on the foolish tendency of humans to worship unreliable gods. In his mammoth opus magnum The City of God, he uses three pages to list all the gods the Roman pagans worshiped. A god for the harvest, a god for the mountains, a god for the hills, a god for the hilly forests, a god for each part of a door - one for the hinges, one for the handle, one for the door itself. Augustine scoffs at all these and says simply, “These small gods never manage to do the duty they claim to do, let alone can they assure eternal life to anyone.” Small gods can’t help us.

So we need the God that Paul and Titus and Augustine and billions of others have worshiped throughout the history of the world. We need the never-lying, eternal, life-giving God. We need Jesus Christ, the only perfectly reliable person we will ever know, the Savior who died for our forgiveness and rose to guarantee us everlasting life.

Pastors are not perfectly reliable. Our focus reading for today’s message, the second reading, comes from a letter written by one experienced pastor, the apostle Paul, to a young minister, Titus. Paul explains very simply for us what a pastor’s job is in the very beginning of his letter to Titus. Paul calls himself “a servant of God and an apostle of Jesus Christ to further the faith of God’s elect and their knowledge of the truth that leads to godliness.” 

That phrase describes the job of a pastor. Pastors “further the faith of God’s elect and their knowledge of the truth that leads to godliness.” Both halves of that sentence really mean the same thing. Pastors share God’s Word with people. As God’s Word is heard, God uses it to grow people’s faith in him - “furthering the faith of God’s elect” - and God uses it to grow their love for one another - the “godliness” that God’s people are led to through “knowledge of the truth.” Faith is our trust in God. Godliness is our love for one another and for God himself. As God’s Word is shared with his people, these two things, faith and love, grow.

That is, fundamentally, the work of a pastor. To share God’s Word, so that God, through it, can grow faith and love in our hearts. Along with that description here of the fundamental work of a pastor, Paul gives Christians three things which we should expect from our pastors. We should expect our pastors to teach according to the Bible, to live lives reflecting God’s character, and to build up new leaders. Let’s examine each of these today.

First: We should expect our pastors to teach according to the Bible. This is in verse nine of our reading: An overseer “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.”

That word overseer is used here alongside another word, elder. The Greek word for overseer can also be translated into English as bishop. Some Christian denominations - Catholic, Orthodox, Pentecostal, others - make a big deal out of hierarchies of bishops and archbishops. The Bible actually shows, here and in other places, that this is not a term related to hierarchy, but to function. “Elder” and “bishop” and “overseer” are interchangeable in this reading. In verses five and six, Paul speaks of Titus appointing elders to manage the congregations they had started on the island of Crete. But in verse seven, he uses the word overseer, bishop - the Greek word is episkopos - about these same leaders. We aren’t being given qualifications for two separate offices here. Paul speaks of elders and bishops as being the same men.

To be clear, it’s no problem if a Christian church decides, in freedom, to use these words to denote different levels of authority and supervision. In our church network, the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod, elders are men who are members of a local congregation who oversee the spiritual life of that congregation. Our congregation currently has four active elders. Dwight, Gus, Andrew, and myself. I also serve as pastor. Our network does also use the word bishop, but in a different way than most other Christian churches do. Bishops in the Wisconsin Synod are active pastors who are supervising a third-year seminary student during what we call their vicar year, when they serve as essentially a junior pastor. Our sister church in Queens has a vicar, so the pastor there, Pastor Bourman, is a bishop. 

It is not, when we get down to it, particularly important what titles we give to our church leaders. There are different principles we would want to employ. We might not call our pastors “Reverend Father” or “His Eminence” not because it would be inherently sinful, but because it could put more of a spotlight on them than on the God they serve. But titles are not prescribed for us in the Bible, so we are free - within the limits of a love that seeks to not confuse or offend - to call our church leaders what we want. A leader’s title is not important. Their teaching is. 

Paul tells Titus, anyone who would be appointed as an overseer, an elder, should “hold firmly to the trustworthy message as it has been taught.” Pastors must have some level of training from other pastors who have had some level of training from other pastors, and on and on. Someone may object: “Couldn’t God call someone into ministry when and where God wants?” He can, amen! But Paul, one of Jesus’ apostles, a man who was called into ministry when Jesus miraculously appeared directly to him, this same Paul tells us, with the authority of his calling from Jesus, that leaders do not appoint themselves. If God wishes to raise up a prophet, a directly-appointed messenger, God can do so. But God warns us to be quite skeptical about those who make such claims. The book of Hebrews tells us, “In the past God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son.” 

Our first expectation for pastors, then, is not that they have some claim of direct divine ordination. It is that they faithfully preach the message of Jesus Christ to us. They must be taught the trustworthy message, and they must hold firmly to what they were taught. My last sermon before I took vacation, from the last Sunday in June, dealt extensively with this idea, as we looked at the conflict in Antioch between Paul and Peter. Peter’s behavior in Antioch undercut the clear Gospel of Jesus Christ. Paul took him to task, becuase the congregation had the right to expect that Peter would teach according to the Bible.

You have the right to expect the same thing. In one church I knew, an old custom - it was no longer their practice when I was attending that church - was for the church president to sit in the front row with a Bible on one knee and the Lutheran Confessions on the other. It was not meant to humiliate the pastor; it was a reminder for him. “We have the right to expect that you teach us the teachings of the Bible as they have faithfully been handed down.”

Second. Congregations also have the right to expect that in their pastor’s life, they find someone modeling the faith and love which the Word of God brings forth in us. This doesn’t mean that we expect our pastors to be perfect. It does mean, though, that we can speak of the bar being set higher for a pastor, or an elder - any leader - than for others. 

Christians are never to be accepting of sin. Yet often, for the sake of love, we should cover our eyes to the failures and shortcomings of others. We ought not be fault-finders or grumblers, always ready to point out the specks we see in the eyes of those in the pews around us. Christians are to be long-suffering and patient with one another. But when it comes to leaders, it is okay to expect more. It is okay to go to a leader with a concern that we might simply cover over with love in the case of another believer who doesn’t hold a position of authority.

This is a tricky balance. Paul, thankfully, gives us some practical thoughts on how we do this. His overall word here is that the elder, the overseer, should be “blameless.” Everything that follows elaborates on what that means. Our Bible translation says here that he should be “faithful to his wife.” The Greek here literally says he should be “a man of one woman.” That has the idea of marital faithfulness in it, but it also reminds us that the Bible was written in a very different cultural environment. When Paul wrote this, men having multiple wives was not uncommon. Paul says that such a marital status disqualifies a candidate. Marriage, as he explains in his letter to the Ephesians, should be a living picture of Jesus Christ’s love for his Church. The husband pictures Christ as he willingly gives of his time and energy and resources for his wife. The wife pictures the Church as she follows her husband, acknowledges his leadership. A relationship other than that of one man and one woman, reciprocally loving one another in such ways, fails to reflect this. 

A pastor does not need to be married, it should be clear. Paul himself was not. Yet if he is, and if they have a family, then Paul goes on, “his children” should” “believe and not be open to the charge of being wild and disobedient.” I know I’ve referenced the Greek a lot today, but again, it’s important here to properly understand what Paul says. Paul says literally that the overseer should have “faithful” or “believing children.” But we cannot actually see into the hearts of anyone to know for certain that anyone believes. So Paul says, here are two visible means of evaluating a pastor in this area. Could his children be credibly characterized as “wild and disobedient”? Having a strong-willed child does not disqualify a pastor. But having children who are known for their inappropriate behavior, against his attempts to correct them, would be a problem.

Eli, in the Old Testament, illustrates this for us. Eli was a priest, and his two sons were priests. Eli was a fine man. His sons were scoundrels who slept with the deaconesses and stole from the offerings. He tried to correct them, but they did not listen. Not only were his sons unsuited for ministry, but Eli ought to have been disqualified as well.

After those two notes about family life, Paul runs through a list of expectations, both positive and negative, regarding the character of the pastor himself. He should be “hospitable.” If his home is never open to you, this may be an issue. He ought not be “overbearing.” If it’s only ever Pastor’s way or the highway, that’s a problem. “Not quick-tempered, not given to drunkenness, not violent, not pursuing dishonest gain; rather, one who loves what is good, who is self-controlled, upright, holy and disciplined” - we should expect such characteristics in our pastors.

The third thing we should expect from our pastors: We should expect our pastors to build up new leaders. This, Paul says, was largely the reason he left Titus on the island of Crete. Paul and Titus worked together as missionaries, starting churches all around the Mediterranean region. Some of those churches on Crete lacked local leaders. Titus was left to nurture candidates for leadership into positions of authority. 

Two thousand years later, we should expect our pastors to make this a priority as well. We should expect our pastors to encourage young people to consider training for ministry. We should expect our leaders to want to raise up new leaders. This is true for both ordained ministers in a congregation and for lay leadership. A man who serves as an elder should look for young men to encourage toward that role in the future. Any church which only presents opportunities for service to fully formed Christians who have mastered all the fine points of theology is a church that wants to be gone in twenty years. Raising up new leaders requires finding places where those who can’t lead yet can still serve now.

Expect these three things of any pastor who serves you. He wants to raise up new leaders. He models a life of love in godliness. He teaches God’s Word faithfully. You have the right - every Christian has the right - to expect this of your pastors, because you are children of God through faith in Jesus, and no man has the right to rob you of these things. Amen.