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Good Thursday morning to you my “Walking with Jesus” friends.
When the disciples were walking those dusty Palestine roads with Jesus, do you suppose the same subject of discussion ever came up more than once in those many months together? Oh I would think there were many times Jesus led them to consider the same topic from multiple vantage points. So when we are reading the Bible and we say to ourselves ‘this sounds familiar, didn’t I read something like this in another place?’ I propose we should pay close attention. If God is bringing us to the same subject a second time, perhaps He’s reminding us we have a tendency to forget too quickly!
Last week we read Paul’s first letter to Timothy whom he had sent on assignment to the big city of Ephesus to straighten out some wrong thinking and to train up leaders for the Christian movement in that very diverse city. Leadership dysfunction was rampant in Ephesus culture.
This week we’re reading Paul’s letter to Titus, but his assignment was the island of Crete in the Mediterranean Sea. While geographically only 300 miles or so apart, Ephesus and Crete were very different, yet Paul writes very much the same leadership instructions to both men. What do you conclude about that, my friends? This is why these two “Pauline Epistle” letters are translated into almost every language in the world, and applied similarly to gatherings of Christians in widely diverse cultures over the centuries since Paul wrote them.
Good leadership is needed in every gathering of human beings whether it’s athletics, business, politics, health care, education, civil order, religion, even a social group of friends and especially in the family. Would you agree, one of the major contributors to the moral and functional decline of any society is dysfunction in the family? God designed the human race this way. Without leadership there is chaos in every venue.
Character qualities for respected leaders of God’s people could easily be applied to all other leadership roles in the culture where you and I live, right? The importance of these qualities hasn’t changed over time nor with cultural differences, which is why as you look at those who are or could be leaders among God’s people where you live, these same criteria apply today everywhere in every generation, don’t they?
“An elder must be blameless…” (Titus 1:6) Paul wrote to Titus. When Paul wrote to Timothy he used the phrase “above reproach”. Identical concepts. Notice Paul repeats it a second time in Titus 1:7 “Since an overseer is entrusted with God’s work, he must be blameless …” Some Bible scholars believe the word “elder” and “overseer” are interchangeable. Others believe the word “elder” referred to a leader in one particular house church, and the word “overseer” applied to one who gave leadership oversight to multiple house churches, each with at least one elder.
This same concept of oversight of multiple subordinate leaders is found in almost every other segment of society, right? Isn’t it interesting that ‘blameless’ is the top priority criteria for leadership regardless of the specific leadership assignment or the scope and number of leaders a senior leader may be responsible to ‘oversee’.
So let’s just take a moment here to think about the leaders who touch your life, both those with limited leadership focus and those on up the ladder, all the way to the top of the various groups you are involved with. Your church leaders, your community leaders, athletic leaders of teams in your city, police, fire, school leaders, the medical facilities. Now widen it to your County, and then wider to your State or Province, then wider to your national leadership. What do you see my friends? Does the criteria “blameless” or “above reproach” seem to increase in importance the higher up the leadership ladder a leader climbs? And what do you see in the leaders who are touching your life?
Notice verse 8 please “Rather, he must be hospitable, one who loves what is good, who is self-controlled, upright, holy and disciplined.” Wow! What a list of powerful attributes. Why, you might ask, is ‘hospitable’ listed? In the time Paul was writing this Timothy, Titus and many other ‘teachers of God’s Word’ traveled a great deal, going from town to town explaining God’s truth. Remember the New Testament was in process of being written one letter at a time. As copies were made, traveling teachers would carry these copies to cities and towns, gather the Christians together and then read and explain the new letter to them. “elders” were expected to joyfully house and feed these traveling teachers, so they could gain the most understanding of these new letters, by spending extended time re-reading and discussing the contents with the traveling teacher, so after the teacher left town, the elder was equipped to continue the new teaching with clarity.
Do you see this explained in 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.”
As we continue reading in verses 10-16 you’ll see Paul is pretty strong in his challenge to Titus to confront false or distorted teachings on the island of Crete. Why? Because as Paul writes in verse 11 “They must be silenced because they are ruining whole households by teaching things they ought not to teach – and that for dishonest gain.” It was bad enough that false teachers were disrupting people with distortions of God’s truth, but they were passing the hat, asking for donations as they did so!
“Therefore rebuke them sharply…” Paul tells Titus. “They claim to know God but by their actions they deny Him. They are detestable, disobedient and unfit for doing anything good.” Wow, that’s pretty clear isn’t it my friends? Do you remember an old adage which says “actions speak louder than words”? We get the point, don’t we? Leadership is a high and holy calling because followers trust and follow leaders, and therefore if the leaders are leading the followers deceitfully or hypocritically, it could be disaster. Do you know truth well enough, that when a leader is either distorting it or leading you astray from it, you recognize it and stand firm on God’s truth?
History has too many horrific examples of leaders who captured the attention and won the hearts of those who followed them and because of their blind allegiance to those leaders, they were unable to detect when things turned and they were led unsuspecting into the trap, and it was too late. Do you remember the “Peoples Temple” cult of Jim Jones and the horrific mass suicide of 900 of his followers in Jonestown, Guyana in November 1978 as they obediently drank a poison laced ‘koolaide’?
Do you see this little phrase in verse 15 “In fact, both their minds and their consciences are corrupted.”?
In this election year in America, DAILY we have ample opportunity to listen to what those who desire to be president say. They are surrounded of course by advisers far more concerned about popularity and pole numbers than about truthfulness and God honoring leadership. So as you listen over these next months, can you do so with a fine tuned, discerning ear? Can you detect corrupt minds and consciences who desire to be leaders? Finally, can we teach our children and grandchildren how to detect such corruption and can we teach them how to live ‘blameless’ lives and if given the opportunity to lead, to do so in a God honoring fashion, leading all those they lead closer to God and godly living?
In closing today may I urge us all to ask ourselves about the balance we have of respect for our leaders but also holding them to very high standards of ‘blameless and truthful’, and all the other criteria Paul listed. Are we following our leaders respecting the roles they have, but at the same time filtering all they tell us and how they live and lead through the Word of God, so as to discern integrity, truthfulness, and God honoring character?
You see my friends, the best leaders will ALWAYS point us to Jesus, always draw us to live God honoring lives, always lead us into God’s Word. When you find yourself following a leader who does NOT do that, I urge you to be very cautious. If they aren’t leading you TO Jesus, and TO God’s Word, they are probably leading you AWAY from Jesus and AWAY from God’s Word… and that’s a very dangerous direction to go!
Oh, one last thought… look around, who is following you ? Start with family… kids, grandkids, nieces, nephews, then move out to all other relationships in your life. Are we each leading those who are following us TO Jesus, deeper INTO God’s Word, or might we be leading them astray?
Have a comment or question about today’s chapter? I’m ready to hear from you, contact me here.
Pastor Doug Anderson 262.441.8785
“Let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, with our eyes fixed on Jesus…” (Heb. 12:1,2)
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