Titus 1

Today’s Passage: Titus 1

Paul left a man behind on an island, and this letter tells him why. But before he gets to the assignment he opens his mouth and out comes one of the fullest greetings he ever wrote, four verses of solid ground laid down before a single instruction is given: a servant of God, an apostle of Jesus Christ, sent for the faith of God’s elect and their knowledge of the truth that leads to godliness, in the hope of eternal life which God, who cannot lie, promised before time began. Take that in. Before there was a Crete, before there was a Rome, before there was an evening or a morning, God made a promise about eternal life, and He is a God who cannot lie. That is the foundation under everything else here. Only then does Paul turn to the work. Titus was left in Crete to set in order what was unfinished and to appoint elders in every town, and Paul gives him a list of what to look for, which turns out to be almost entirely a list of what a man is like. After the list comes the reason the list matters so much. Many in those young congregations were rebellious, full of empty talk, teaching for money what they had no business teaching, and pulling whole households apart. Paul quotes a Cretan poet against them, tells Titus to rebuke them sternly, and then states the aim of the rebuke in five words that change its whole character: so that they will be sound. The chapter ends where such things always end, at the difference between what a person professes and what a person does.

As you read, hold this: God gives His church leaders whose character can bear inspection, because the truth that leads to godliness must be carried by lives that do not contradict it.

Titus 1:1–4 (BSB)

¹ Paul, a servant of God and an apostle of Jesus Christ for the faith of God’s elect and their knowledge of the truth that leads to godliness, ² in the hope of eternal life, which God, who cannot lie, promised before time began. ³ In His own time He has made His word evident in the proclamation entrusted to me by the command of God our Savior. ⁴ To Titus, my true child in our common faith: Grace and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Savior.

Notice first what Paul calls himself, and the order of it. “A servant of God and an apostle of Jesus Christ.” The word behind servant is the ordinary word for a bondservant, a man who is owned, and Paul puts it in front of the title that carried authority. He is telling Titus, and every reader after him, that the man writing belongs to Somebody. Then he says what he is for, and it is a compact statement of what any true ministry is for: “the faith of God’s elect and their knowledge of the truth that leads to godliness.” Faith and knowledge of the truth, yes, but truth of a particular sort, truth that has a direction, truth that leads to godliness. Paul will not let doctrine be a thing you collect. In this letter it is a thing you become. And behind that stands the hope he names in verse two, one of the quietest, mightiest phrases in the New Testament. Eternal life was “promised before time began” by “God, who cannot lie.” Sit with that. There are things God cannot do, and they are all glorious. He cannot deny Himself. He cannot break faith. It is not a limit on His power but the perfection of His character, and it means the promise standing under your soul is as unbreakable as He is. On an island whose very name had become a byword for lying, Paul begins by naming the God who cannot.

Then verse three, and the way Paul describes preaching is worth pausing over. God “has made His word evident in the proclamation entrusted to me by the command of God our Savior.” The promise was made before time; the announcement of it came “in His own time,” at the hour God appointed, not a moment sooner or later. And the way God made His ancient word visible in the world was by handing it to a man to say out loud. That is still the way. The eternal purpose of God comes to a town through ordinary voices carrying a message they did not invent and are not free to alter. Then Paul turns to the one man he is writing to, and the warmth is unmistakable: “To Titus, my true child in our common faith.” There is no blood between them. Paul is a Jew of Tarsus, Titus a Greek, and once that gap was the widest in the world. Now one calls the other his true child, and the bond is “our common faith,” shared out equally, no one holding a better grade of it than anyone else. Grace had already done in these two men what Paul is about to ask the Cretan churches to let it do in them.

Titus 1:5–8 (BSB)

⁵ The reason I left you in Crete was that you would set in order what was unfinished and appoint elders in every town, as I directed you. ⁶ An elder must be blameless, the husband of but one wife, having children who are believers and who are not open to accusation of indiscretion or insubordination. ⁷ As God’s steward, an overseer must be above reproach—not self-willed, not quick-tempered, not given to drunkenness, not violent, not greedy for money. ⁸ Instead, he must be hospitable, a lover of good, self-controlled, upright, holy, and disciplined.

“Set in order what was unfinished.” That is a gracious way to describe a mess, and it tells you something about how Paul saw the work. He does not say the Cretan churches were false or that his labor there had failed. He says it was unfinished, left partly done, like a house with the roof on and the doors not yet hung, and the remedy was not more excitement but more order. Elders, “in every town,” which means Titus was to travel the island and plant settled, plural, local leadership in each congregation rather than run the whole thing himself from a central office. That is God’s ordinary provision for His people. Not a celebrity, not a distant headquarters, but tested men on the ground in the town where you live, who know your name.

And then the list, and its first word sets the tone for everything after: an elder must be blameless (ἀνέγκλητος) anenklētos, pronounced an-ENG-klay-tos. Strong's G410, blameless, above reproach, with no charge that will stick. The word is a legal one before it is a moral one. Anenklētos is built from the verb for bringing a charge in court, with the negative in front, so it means a man against whom no accusation can be made to stand. It is not sinlessness. Paul does not require a perfect man, because there is only one of those and He is not applying for the position. He requires a man with nothing outstanding against him, no charge that would hold up if it were examined, no open scandal everyone in town knows about. Notice how kind that wording is. It does not ask what a man was ten years ago; Paul himself would have been disqualified by that standard, and he never forgot it. It asks what can truthfully be laid at his door now. And do not miss where the same word turns up elsewhere in Paul: he tells the Corinthians that Christ will keep them blameless to the end, and tells the Colossians that Christ has already presented them holy and unblemished and free from accusation before God. So the word names both a gift and a requirement. God’s people are made unaccusable by grace, and out of that grace some are called to lives that are visibly unaccusable in the town square. The one is never earned by the other. . Two matters in verse six are read in more than one way by faithful readers, and it is honest to say so plainly rather than pretend the question is settled. The first is “the husband of but one wife.” The Greek is literally “a one-woman man,” and some take it as a description of character, a man whose affections and loyalty are fixed on his wife and no one else. Others take it as forbidding polygamy, which still existed at the edges of that world. Others take it as ruling out remarriage after divorce. Each reading has been held by serious believers who love the Scriptures. The second is “having children who are believers.” The word can mean faithful in the sense of trusting Christ, or faithful in the sense of trustworthy and well-ordered, and the parallel list in 1 Timothy speaks of children who are submissive and respectful, which leans toward the second. So some read it as requiring believing children, and some as requiring a well-managed household. We will not settle either question here, and no honest teacher should pretend to. What is not in doubt is the direction of the verse: a man’s home is not private. Whatever else an elder is, he is a man whose nearest relationships bear looking at.

Verse seven shifts the title, and the shift is instructive. Paul has been saying elder, and now he says overseer (ἐπίσκοπος) episkopos, pronounced eh-PIS-ko-pos. Strong's G1985, overseer, guardian; bishop. Episkopos is a plain, unreligious word. It is made of epi, over, and skopeō, to look, the root behind our word scope, and it simply means the one who looks over something. In the wider Greek world it was used of a supervisor of public works, an inspector sent to a colony, a foreman answerable for what happened on his watch. It is not a word about rank, it is a word about attention. The overseer is the man who is watching. That is why the qualification list reads as it does: you cannot delegate watchfulness to a talent, and a man who is not himself governed will not notice when the flock wanders. And the New Testament never lets this word float free of the shepherd image. Peter tells the elders to shepherd God’s flock, watching over them, using the verb form of this same word, and then names the Lord Himself as the Shepherd and Overseer of our souls. That is the towering comfort under this whole paragraph. Before any man watches over you, Another does, and He never sleeps, never looks away, and never grows tired of the watch. Human overseers are given because He is like that, not instead of Him. , and he is plainly speaking of the same man, since the sentence runs straight on without a break. One office, two words for it: elder, which speaks of maturity and weight, and overseer, which speaks of the work. And here we should say clearly what this passage has always been understood to teach, and say it without heat and without embarrassment. Manna Praxis holds, with the historic church, that the office of elder and the teaching authority over the gathered congregation are given to qualified men, and Titus 1 is one of the texts that gives us that pattern. That is a settled conviction here. But hear just as clearly what it does not say. It does not say that women may not use their gifts in the body of Christ. The New Testament is full of women labouring in the gospel, teaching, hosting churches in their homes, correcting a preacher’s theology, carrying letters, and being named with honour by Paul himself. The Scriptures assign an office; they do not silence a people. Any use of this text to make half the church small has misused it.

And look at the title Paul actually gives him: he must be above reproach “as God’s steward (οἰκονόμος) oikonomos, pronounced oy-ko-NO-moss. Strong's G3623, steward, the manager of a household he does not own. An oikonomos was the manager of a great household, and very often he was himself a slave, a trusted one, given the keys and the accounts and the running of an estate that belonged entirely to someone else. He bought and sold, he paid the workers, he fed the family, and he did all of it with another man’s money. Two things follow, and both govern this passage. First, authority. When the steward spoke, the household listened, because the master stood behind him. Second, and far more searching, accountability. Nothing in that house was his. He could not spend it as he pleased, could not favour his friends with it, could not skim it, and at the end there was a reckoning. That is why Paul says the overseer must be above reproach as God’s steward. The church is not his, the truth is not his, the people are not his, and the day is coming when the Owner will ask what he did with them. Hold that beside the men in verse eleven who were teaching for dishonourable gain, and you see the whole contrast of the chapter in a single word. One kind of man treats the household of God as an estate to be served. The other treats it as an income. .” Everything hangs on that phrase. Then come the five things he must not be, and they are not exotic sins. They are the ordinary failures of a man with a little authority. Not self-willed, the man who must have his own way and treats the church as his project. Not quick-tempered, the man everyone learns to handle carefully. Not given to drunkenness. Not violent, and the word means a striker, a man whose hands or whose tongue go where they should not. Not greedy for money, which in a world of paid teachers was no small temptation and is no small temptation now. Then the other side of the ledger in verse eight, and notice how homely it is. Hospitable, literally a lover of strangers, a man whose door opens. A lover of good. Self-controlled, upright, holy, disciplined. Read that whole list again and count how much of it is about ability. Almost none. There is no line about eloquence, no line about vision, no line about the size of anything. It is a list of what a man is like when nobody is applauding, when he is tired, when he is crossed, when the money is short and no one would know. God is not shopping for a platform. He is looking for a character.

Titus 1:9–12 (BSB)

⁹ He must hold firmly to the faithful word as it was taught, so that he can encourage others by sound teaching and refute those who contradict it. ¹⁰ For many are rebellious and full of empty talk and deception, especially those of the circumcision, ¹¹ who must be silenced. For the sake of dishonorable gain, they undermine entire households and teach things they should not. ¹² As one of their own prophets has said, “Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons.”

Here at last is the one competence in the whole list, and it is not what a hiring committee would look for. “He must hold firmly to the faithful word as it was taught.” Not the word as he has improved it. Not the word as it plays well on the island. The word as it was taught, received from the apostles and handed on unbent. The verb has the sense of clinging, holding fast to something that others are pulling at, which tells you the pressure was already on. And out of that grip come two things, and an elder must be able to do both. He must “encourage others by sound teaching (ὑγιαίνω) hygiainō, pronounced hoo-gee-AH-ee-no. Strong's G5198, to be sound, to be in good health. Hygiainō is a medical word, the ancestor of our English hygiene. In ordinary Greek it means to be in good health, to be whole and functioning, and Luke the physician uses it of a servant restored to health and of people who are well and have no need of a doctor. Paul takes that word and does something startling with it: he applies it to doctrine, again and again, in these last letters. Teaching can be healthy or it can be diseased. Doctrine, in other words, is not a matter of taste, and it is not merely a matter of being correct on paper. It is a matter of whether the thing being taught makes a soul well. That is why Paul can say in verse thirteen that the aim of a stern rebuke is that these people “will be sound in the faith,” using this very word. He is not trying to win. He is trying to heal. It also explains the shape of this whole letter, where sound doctrine and good works are never allowed to separate, because a healthy body moves. Test what you are being fed by that standard. Not merely, is it clever, is it stirring, does it flatter me, but this: is it making me well? ,” which is the warm and daily half of the work, the building up of ordinary people who are tired. And he must “refute those who contradict it,” which is the hard half. A man who can only comfort will let the wolves in, and a man who can only argue will scatter the sheep himself. It takes the same firm hold on the same word to do both, and notice that the teaching is what does the encouraging. Not the personality. The word.

And now we see why an elder must be able to refute. “For many are rebellious and full of empty talk and deception, especially those of the circumcision, who must be silenced.” Empty talk is a wonderful description of a certain kind of religious speech. There is a great deal of it, it sounds impressive, and there is nothing in it. But Paul’s charge against these men gets specific and it gets serious in verse eleven: “For the sake of dishonorable gain, they undermine entire households and teach things they should not.” The word behind undermine means to overturn, to upset a thing completely, and the object is not individuals but households. Whole families, and in that world a household included servants and dependents, the little communities where the churches actually met. These teachers were turning them upside down, and the motive Paul names is money. Not sincere error. Not honest confusion. Gain. That is why he says they must be silenced, and the word means to stop the mouth, to muzzle. There is a kindness that is really cowardice, and Paul has none of it. When a man is dismantling families for a fee, letting him keep talking is not gentleness toward him; it is cruelty toward them.

Then verse twelve, and this is a verse to handle with great care. Paul quotes a Cretan poet about Cretans: “Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons.” Understand what is happening. Paul is not delivering a divine verdict on a people, and no reader of this passage has any warrant to hold a nation in contempt. He is doing what a preacher does when he quotes the local proverb back to the locals, using a Cretan’s own famous line about Crete that every hearer on that island knew by heart, and aiming it at a particular set of troublemakers inside the churches there. The quotation is not the point. The next verse is the point: the whole reason he says this is so that they will be sound in the faith. That is a physician’s language. Anyone who has used this verse to write off a people has read the first half of a sentence and stopped.

Titus 1:13–16 (BSB)

¹³ This testimony is true. Therefore rebuke them sternly, so that they will be sound in the faith ¹⁴ and will pay no attention to Jewish myths or to the commands of men who have rejected the truth. ¹⁵ To the pure, all things are pure; but to the defiled and unbelieving, nothing is pure. Indeed, both their minds and their consciences are defiled. ¹⁶ They profess to know God, but by their actions they deny Him. They are detestable, disobedient, and unfit for any good deed.

“This testimony is true. Therefore rebuke them sternly, so that they will be sound in the faith.” Read the whole sentence and let the last clause govern the rest, because that is how sentences work and it is how this one has too often been broken. The rebuke is sharp; Paul does not soften it and neither should we. But its aim is restoration. He wants these people well. A stern word spoken to bring a person back is a different thing entirely from a verdict pronounced to be rid of them, and the difference is not in the volume, it is in the intent. Every parent knows this. The gentlest man in the world will speak sharply to someone walking toward a cliff, and the sharpness is the love. What Paul refuses is the false peace that lets error run because confrontation is uncomfortable. What he never does is write people off. The content of the correction follows in verse fourteen: they are to stop paying attention to “Jewish myths” and to “the commands of men who have rejected the truth.” Those two go together more often than we notice. Speculative religious stories on one side, a growing list of human rules on the other, and neither has anything to do with the God who cannot lie and the eternal life He promised before time began.

Verse fifteen is one of the most misread sentences in the letters, so let us walk slowly. “To the pure, all things are pure; but to the defiled and unbelieving, nothing is pure.” Paul is not saying that a pure person may do anything and it becomes clean. He is answering the food-and-washing rules these teachers were pressing, and he is saying that God’s created things are not the problem. The problem is the one looking at them. To a heart made clean by Christ, an ordinary meal is an ordinary mercy to be received with thanks. To a defiled heart, no external rule can produce cleanness, because the defilement is upstream of the rule. Then he names the two places it sits: “both their minds and their consciences are defiled.” The mind, which is how a person weighs things, and the conscience, which is the inner alarm that sounds when he has crossed a line. Both fouled. That is a sobering diagnosis, because it means the very instruments a man would use to check himself are the ones that have gone bad. A conscience can be trained until it no longer objects, by small degrees, and it never announces itself. This is why Paul insists on the word taught and held firmly. When your own instruments cannot be trusted, you need something outside yourself that does not move.

And the chapter lands, hard, on verse sixteen. “They profess to know God, but by their actions they deny Him.” There is the whole matter. Not a failure of vocabulary, but a contradiction between a mouth and a life. These men could say the right things about God; that was their trade. What they could not do was live in a way that did not call their own words a lie, and Paul says the actions are the denial. Now hold two things together and do not let go of either. This is a real and searching warning, and Scripture means it to search us. But never turn it into a ladder, as though your acceptance before God rested on the quality of your works. It does not, and this very letter will not let it. Two chapters on, Paul says it as plainly as it has ever been said, that God saved us not by righteous deeds we had done, but because of His mercy. The elder list is not a wall we climb to reach God. It is a description of what grace looks like after it has been at work in a man a long while: the temper mastered, the money held loosely, the door open to strangers, the word held firmly. The fruit is not the root. But fruit is how you tell what the root is.