Called To Be God’s
Woman:
A
Titus 2 Woman
KEY VERSE: Titus
2:2-5
Lesson 4 – Practicing, So We Can
Walk
Scriptures
for Lesson 4 – Titus 2:1-10;
OPENING: What do
these things have in common?
Learning a new song;
A
child learning to read;
Competing in the Olympics;
Hitting a home run?
Becoming an expert in any field?
The answer is
PRACTICE!
PRACTICE!!
PRACTICE!!!
Practicing is
available to any and all of us.
There are no age barriers or
Limitations as to how
much we could practice. The only
limitations are those
that are
self-inflicted… when we DON’T practice.
Our lesson
tonight will concern the believer and in particular, practicing
consistently and
perseveringly what we say we believe. If we don’t practice, we
can’t walk. Who among the believers are to practice
their new life? Question 1
brings this more in
focus.
1.
From [B] Titus 2:1-10 what people make up the congregation?
Aged men, aged women, young women,
husbands and wives,
children, young men.
We see there are various relationships within the
congregation:
masters
and servants; husbands and wives, parents and children.
APPLICATION:
The congregations today pretty much are made up of the same groups of
people.
The first group are those that constitute a home and the second, those
who are employers and employees. God is no respecter of persons. (Acts
Deut. 10:17; 2 Chronicles
19:7). God’s Word is the same for all of His
creation and
more importantly His Word, given in Titus,
remains the same for us today.
No one is exempt from God’s Word, although the unbelieving world may
disagree with what they hold to be antiquated
values and standards. Because the
world’s standard is not God’s standard, the
world’s priorities are different from
God’s priorities. Priorities without God’s Word as our
standard will be imperfect
logic, imperfect wisdom and imperfect
understanding.
2. What does the Bible have to say about
God’s priorities? To find this
answer we first
must see what God’s Word says about Seeking God, Himself.
[Homework instruction: Look up the following verses and list
your findings from God’s Word
as it relates to
seeking God.]
SEEKING
GOD:
a. Deut.
“But if from
thence thou shalt seek the Lord thy God, thou shalt find him,
if thou seek him with all thy heart and with all thy
soul.”
(R.Q.) More concisely, how can we apply this verse? How are we
to seek
God?
We are to seek Him with
ALL! What does this mean
to you?
Q. - What does it mean to
seek God with ALL?
With your
daily
routine? With your decisions? With your needs?
With your worries? With your responsibilities? With your future?
With your ministry? With your
shortcomings? With your
time?
Your families and extended
families? And the list can go
on…when
we include ALL!
Q. - Why do you think God
says in His Word to seek Him with all?
A. -
Going back to Deut. 4:29,
“We shall find Him.” Think of all the aggravation
and worries we put ourselves through because we
don’t seek God with ALL.
Clearly,
we have His response. This is a conditional verse:
“if” we do what God tells us to do, then, we will
have the answers we need. The
answers will not be ours, but His.
And,
we can be sure that His answers will bring glory
to Him and be exactly what we need..
b. Psalm 105:4 – Tells us
one of the reasons WHY we need to seek
God:
We need to seek God for His Strength!
We know that without God we are helpless
to do what is needed to be done.
We can flail our arms all we want, but we cannot
fly. We can spin our wheels and
do all we can to ‘do things ourselves’, but,
without God’s strength; we leave ourselves open to depleting our energies and
very often, wasting our time. Think
of it as going
to the instruction book and getting
it right the first time. Very often men are the object of a joke
because they ‘won’t ask for directions’ or in assembling a new home item, they
jump right in without reading the instruction book. We know how that goes. Yet, we do the same thing, do we
not…when we don’t seek God as He commands us to
do.
c. Isaiah 55:6 – Tells us WHEN to seek
God…basically now!
While He is found; while
He is near. There’s no time like the ever-present moment to seek
God.
d.
[B] Matthew
APPLICATION: What about
the cares of this world? Food,
bills, job, families
and relatives…These are
things that are here and now…I can touch them, see them,
feel them! And they are demanding of my time
and energy! BUT---God is first.
God says to come to Him
first! To ask Him first! To get His Wisdom and
Understanding
FIRST!
3. [Homework Instruction-If we seek God FIRST---we have
various promises about
God’s provision for us. According to the following verses, how
does God’s promise: “all
these things shall be added unto you” relate
to this promise?]
The Bible speaks of
David as being a man after God’s own heart.
In Psalm 37:25 he has this to testify concerning God’s faithfulness to
the righteous: “I have been young, and now
am old; yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging
bread.”
In Proverbs 4:1-13 [B] Solomon has this to say about seeking God’s instruction,
guidance, wisdom and understanding.
What commands are given in
Proverbs 4:4-8?
Vs. 4 – Retain God’s word;
keep commandments
Vs. 5 – Get wisdom, get understanding, forget it
not, obey words.
Vs. 6 – Forsake not and love
wisdom
Vs. 7 – Wisdom is the principal thing; get
understanding!
Vs. 8 – Exalt her; embrace
her.
God’s command to us requires our action, and, you will notice it is an
ongoing action: To
retain, to keep, to get wisdom, to not forget, to obey His word,
to love wisdom and to
get understanding, to exalt and embrace wisdom…all of these speak of an ongoing
action on our part.
God’s command to us is a persevering, ongoing command to us; one that
will
not go away when it is
done one or more times, nor does this command end.
We need to come to a place of making up our minds to want what God wants
for us and then ask Him
for His Wisdom.
What is the benefit/reward of following these
commands?
Vs. 4 – Live
To not obey sometimes may place us in a
precarious situation
and in some cases, even
shorten our lives. We can make
wrong choices without His
wisdom that will lead to a
shortened life. Proverbs 14:12 says, “There is a
way that seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of
death.”
Vs. 6 – Preserve us
Vs. 8 – Wisdom will promote us, bring us to honor. In
I Samuel
says that if we honor
Him, He will honor us. Those that
do not, He will not honor
and they will be
“lightly esteemed.”
In Mark 10:29-30 [B] Jesus
assures us of His blessing, when we are willing to seek
Him first
over all earthly relationships.
This doesn’t just apply to Pastors and missionaries but to all
believers.
APPLICATION:
These are just a few of the many things we face in our lives. What are our
needs? Are they physical, material, emotional,
spiritual? We, who name the name
of Christ, must do as
He says we are to do…Seek Him First. We cannot pick and
chose when we
will obey and when we will not obey Him. Obedience is not an option.
James 1:8 says, “A double minded man is unstable in all his
ways.”
This
general instruction is
foundational to what is to follow as Titus begins to select the
elders that are to
shepherd the different groups of believers in the various cities.
God’s standards certainly are different from the world’s standards, as we
have seen thus
far. Why would God call us, as John
MacArthur has said in his
book, *Your
Family, to “a higher level of living, a different manner of life,
another dimension of existence.”? *page
59-60, Chapter 3, Sorting Out the
Priorities
4.
[B] Matthew 5:13-16 –
Q. What
does this passage saying about believers and about God?
A.
About believers: We
are salt on earth; we are light in the
world.
Salt preserves, creates
a thirst and cleanses. If we are
not salt, the earth is worthless.
As Light, we are to be
prominent in showing our light in the
world.
About God: God will
be glorified when we walk and talk as we
should.
John MacArthur puts it this way: “We are
living as salt and light in
a decaying and dark society and God calls
on us to live differently.” He also adds
that
“living differently is
never easy.” One of the things that makes it
difficult is that even though we may know what God’s Word says and understand
and agree with it, it is difficult
sometimes to apply because “we
have been influenced by a system
that is at
odds with the Divine
standard.”
What do you think about his statement?
5. How can we believers, who
are called to be distinctively different from the
world, face the pressure of
obeying God while living in this world?
Read and note
your answers from each verse
listed.
[B] Colossians 3:2 – Our mindset is to be on Heaven
and not earth.
Notice the word,
“set”. We see from this small
three-letter word a command. We
must make up our
minds to do as God commands us to do and
then do it. “Set” is not a
goal of a good ideal to hope for, to reach for, but once again, an action to
take.
Notice Scripture uses
the word “affection”. The
Dictionary defines this as a “tender attachment”. The Thesaurus tells us
‘amiability, chumminess, friendliness’ are
synonymous with
‘affection’.
Q. How then
could we paraphrase this verse and apply it to our lives?
A.
Practically speaking, we can paraphrase this to read: We must make
up our minds to obey God
in attaching friendly and amiable thoughts to things that
pertain to Heaven and
not to earth.
[B]
Ephesians
us this new man is
‘created in righteousness and true holiness.” This takes
practice.
We are equipped through
the Holy Spirit to be this new man, but it takes our determination to obey God
and follow His prescribed path in this new
life.
[B] Colossians
saved. We have God the Holy Spirit living
within us. We are NEW Creatures in
Christ Jesus. Yet the rest of this verse also tells us
we need to be ‘renewed’. No,
we don’t lose our
salvation, but we do need to keep it ‘fresh’. How do we do this?
The verse says it is
done by the knowledge of our Creator.
Q. Why do you think Paul says
the new man needs to be renewed?
A. To
keep the new man ‘fresh’, ‘renewed’, takes practice. Remember at
the beginning we said
the way to become proficient in any skill was practice. We
need to be continually renewing
our minds, as it says in Romans 12:2
[B].
Why?
That we will be
transformed more and more into the image of Christ, to the point
of His Life in me having
pre-eminence and control.
When we ‘practice’ the renewing of our minds, replacing our ways with
God’s ways, the world’s
thinking with His thinking, etc., in time His thinking will
have dominion over what
we do and how we do it.
These verses that follow
tell us this very thing:
Ephesians 4:1 [B] –We have been
called by God, we should have
a lifestyle that is
worthy of Him and reflects Him.
Ephesians
The verses that follow
vvs. 18-24 [B] tells us of the Gentiles’ lifestyle and morals.
Their ways are not
consistent with one who has been plucked out of the world and
now belongs to God’s
family. We are to walk in the
‘newness of life’.
Colossians
CONCLUSION: We have been
saved to be different from the world, because
through Christ, we ARE
different from the world and need to live on a daily basis manifesting that
difference in our lives, for God’s glory.
That is our focus. That is
our motivation. That is our goal and our aim: God’s glory! And, as it says in
Ephesians
5:18, we are to “be filled with the
Spirit.”
When we are filled with the Holy Spirit, we can and will do this; we will
bring
Glory to
God!
Returning to Titus
2:1-10, we have already established who
makes up the congregation. And the
instructions from God’s Word applies to every believer. Continuing with Titus 2:2, let’s begin
to zero in on the ‘aged men and women’.
6. According to
Titus 2:2 [B]
what should be the behavior of ‘aged men’ who
are believers?
“Aged men are to be sober, grave,
temperate, sound in faith, in charity,
in
patience.”
7. What do you notice about
these moral characteristics for the aged men
and the characteristics required for an
elder?
They are similar.
8. Why do you think
Paul addresses the aged men and gives them these
moral behavioral challenges?
These men are to set an example in their
homes, in the congregation
of all believers,
including the slaves.
9. What long range effect
could the aged men have in their homes?
In
the congregation?
Aged men, whether they hold office
within the congregation or not, are
role models. They are
looked up to as examples and carry the responsibility as
aged men to not be the
cause of another’s stumbling in the faith.
Also, if within
the church all men were to have these characteristics,
their homes would
reflect the aged man’s
obedience to the Word and as each man
and each family obey
this moral character, we will have harmony within the church.
These aged men are to be sober: that is, sober by abstaining from
wine, and also sober in
judgment concerning their choices,
their words, their
habits. To not
abstain from wine could impair their judgment, their
sensibility,
their self-control and
play itself out in behaving in ways that would not become
their profession of
faith; ways that would mar their testimony and not only their testimony but also that of the Lord
Himself.
The second half of
verse 2
says “sound in faith, in charity, in patience”.
The soundness or the good
health, refers to all three of these areas: faith,
charity or
love, and patience. Christian
testimony or perhaps we can say:
the fruit that our
believer’s walk produces, should manifest itself in these
three areas. As these aged men live their faith, their
faith will be evident
to others and it will spread
itself or
reproduce itself among other believers
within the body of Christ.
R.Q. What is a ‘sound’ or healthy faith? One that is not luke-warm nor
mixed or polluted with
the world’s values.
R.Q. What is a ‘sound’ or healthy love? One that is not luke-warm; one
That doesn’t melt in
fear at the sign of trouble; one that believes God and
doesn’t faint or become
discouraged; one that doesn’t give
way to
sentimentality over sin, to name a few examples. And, also, a healthy love is
not insisting in one’s own way. It is loving his neighbor more than
himself.
R.Q. What is a ‘sound or
healthy patience’? It is waiting on the Lord,
trusting Him daily as we wait on His answers for our lives and as we
await
His return.
Being taught the doctrine of
what aged men should be like will affect all
areas of their lives
spiritually as a Child of God, as a Christian, as a husband,
as a father, as a
grandfather, and how he behaves and obeys the doctrine will
affect all others with
whom he comes into contact. A
god-fearing man can
affect our nation. Although it is aged men who are
addressed in verse 2, all
that we have said thus
far, applies to us all.
10. Read the key verses: Titus
2:2-5, to yourself
and in your own words, without
any cross-referencing or studying
whatsoever, write your impression of
what you
THINK these verses are saying. Be
specific.
[This question is asked primarily as a point of reference to
return to and compare
what you think now,
with what you will have learned when the study is
complete.]
After reading
Titus 2:2-5
I think these verses are saying…
Again, I suggest you
keep your notes in a notebook so you can come back
and refer to them
at some future date.
Question 10 is one that you will want to
compare at
some future date, with what you have learned. It will be interesting to
see how
your answers compare.