...to call attention to a piece of advertising
put out by Youth for Christ.
And, uh, I just mentioned it, perhaps gave
it half a dozen sentences and passed on.
And, uh, some beloved Judas Iscariot, present, uh,
hoping to do me a favor and Youth
for Christ, raced immediately to the headquarters of
Youth for Christ and said I was criticizing
Youth for Christ.
And they wrote me a mournful letter and
said that they thought that that would do
me injury, and also them, and divide my
church.
I've noticed a rending, like the rending of
a great oak in the midst of a
storm.
But anyway, when I told them what I'd
said, and I said I'd say the same
thing if it had been the Alliance, then
they invited me to preach for them.
And, uh, I got a call then later
from, uh, their Wheaton headquarters, saying they were
having a convention of the leaders of Youth
for Christ, I think all over the country,
and they wanted me to preach for them.
And I said, now just a minute, I
don't agree with Youth for Christ on everything.
And they said, that's why we want you
to come.
So, Wednesday at noon, 1130 to 1210, that
gives me 40 minutes, I am going to
talk to the leaders of Youth for Christ.
And, uh, I am going to tell them
what I believe is wrong with modern Christianity,
and what we can do to correct it.
Will you pray?
And, uh, if the person who thought that
he was doing me a favor could be
present, kindly note that it didn't work.
Uh, there isn't much use to run to
anybody and say, told you I said this
and that, because they like me anyhow, and
they invite me around.
If they don't, I'll know that it's all
right anyway.
I thought I'd just let you know and
ask your prayer.
I do want to be honest with these
friends, tell them what I think, and, uh,
they're looking forward to my talk, and I
am looking forward to a tour, and I
wish I knew what I was going to
say.
But now, um, the book of Titus, let
me read about four stanzas.
I say stanzas chiefly, I think, because some
of these letters of Paul are divided up
into verses, but they're singable.
Uh, Philippians and Titus are hymns almost, and
so I'll read you the opening introduction here.
Paul, servant of God and an apostle of
Jesus Christ, according to the faith of God's
elect and the acknowledging of the truth which
is after godliness, in a hope of eternal
life which God that cannot lie promised before
the world began, but hath in due times
manifested his word through preaching, which is committed
unto me according to the commandment of God
our Savior.
To Titus, my own son after the common
faith, grace, mercy, and peace from God the
Father and the Lord Jesus Christ our Savior.
Now that's as far as I'll go.
Paul, a servant of God, to Titus, my
own son after the common faith, grace, mercy,
and peace be to you.
Now I announced that I should be preaching
on the book of Titus over the next
few Sunday mornings, that is sermons from the
book of Titus.
This I hope by the grace of God
to do.
But in studying the New Testament about this
man Titus, I was so impressed with the
man himself that I felt I must present
a short portrait of the man before going
into the letter which Paul wrote to the
man, which is a part of the New
Testament inspired canon.
There's a great need always for examples, and
the oft-quoted passage from Pope, The Proper
Study of Mankind as Man, is true because
you'll find people will take more interest in
people than they do in ideas.
Very hard to get people interested in abstract
ideas, but it's not hard to get them
interested in people.
And where you find a man who is
the incarnation of a great idea, then you've
got a jewel, a gem, indeed a treasure.
And in both Paul and Titus you have
this.
You have in the man Paul an incarnation
of the doctrine he preached, and in Titus
his son in a lesser degree, you have
also an incarnation of the great doctrines of
the New Testament.
So I want to be as brief as
I can, but I thought that as a
sort of introduction to the man Titus, to
the lessons in Titus, that I'd talk about
the man Titus, and divide it up like
this.
Titus the man, and Titus the Christian, and
Titus the assistant apostle, and Titus the missionary,
and Titus the doer of good, and Titus
the organizer, and Titus the optimist.
There are seven point sermons for you, and
seven chapters in a book on Titus if
you want to write it up.
But here was a man, Titus.
Now he wasn't a Jew, he was a
Greek.
And he had a Roman name, Titus, later
on, or about that time, a little later
I think perhaps.
Titus, the emperor, Roman emperor Titus took over,
and the man's name was Roman, though he
himself was a Greek.
He was an uncircumcised Greek, and in many
ways he was a big man.
He was a native of Antioch in Asia
Minor.
Where was the strong, aggressive church?
You'll read the 11th of Acts and the
13th.
You will find there that the church at
Antioch was not founded by Paul, but Paul
certainly had gone there and had much to
say in that church, and preached often, and
was highly venerated there.
But he was a native of a city
where a strong church existed.
It says, you know, they that were scattered
abroad upon the persecution that arose about Stephen,
they went to various places, and among them
Antioch, and a great number believed and turned
to the Lord.
And then from Antioch, missionaries went out to
Seleucia, Cyprus, and other places.
So this was a strong missionary church, and
this man Titus was fortunate enough and blessed
of God enough to be born in a
city, though he was himself a pagan, and
no doubt was a pagan.
He was fortunate enough to be born in
a city where there was a strong church.
I suppose Titus, in his early life, had
been, as the Greeks were, a believer in
some kind of God.
The Romans had come in some years before,
and had spread around their ideas of the
gods, that there was Zeus, that was the
main Greek god, and Jupiter was his counterpart,
the main Roman god, and there were many
others, and no doubt this man Titus was
a religious man.
We would guess that anyway, enough so that
he listened to the message of God when
he heard it.
Well, he was a man, and he was
a strong man.
Presumably he had a lot of talents and
abilities.
And then we come to Titus the Christian,
for though he was a man of size
and ability, without any doubt, a big man,
and we're not all the same size, my
friends, we might as well admit that.
In this day of pleading for brotherhood and
likeness and wanting everybody to be like everybody
else around the world, all stamped out of
the same cookie cutter, all alike around the
world, it's a lot of modern nonsense that'll
probably die in another generation.
I hope it does, and requiescat in pace
if it does, because it doesn't amount to
too much.
But the simple fact is we're not all
alike, and when Lincoln said, repeating somebody else,
that all men were born equal, and the
Declaration of Independence said something to that effect,
they didn't mean that we were all born
the same size, they meant we were all
born equal under the law.
And I believe in equality under the law.
I believe that if President Eisenhower parks by
a water plug, he ought to get a
ticket just the same as the man who
delivers my mail or milk or takes away
the garbage.
I believe in equality before the law.
But the idea that we're all the same
size is ridiculous.
When I'm with some people, I feel restful,
in that I assume at least, it might
be pride, that I am fairly equal to
them, but when I'm with others, I'm strangely
quiet, because I know they're bigger than I
am, vastly bigger, inside and sometimes out.
So we've got to recognize that and know
that God made some people big and other
people he just made, and we've got to
do the best we can under the circumstances
with what we have to work with.
Well, he came in contact, this man Titus,
he came in contact with Paul, the blazing
apostle, and for that, he ought to be
eternally thankful and we ought to be everlastingly
thankful, and the whole Church of Christ should
be grateful eternally that these two giants met,
that this pagan man with a Roman name
and a Greek genealogy met this man named
Paul with a Hebrew background converted now to
Christ.
And Titus was converted, and his conversion was
clear and revolutionary and instant.
I read something only recently from a British
paper that I thought was very wonderful, about
Charles and John Wesley.
He quoted a letter that John had written
Charles.
He said, Brother Charles, he said, you've got
one up on me in some things.
He said, I'm bigger than you in some,
but you're bigger than me in others.
And he said, where you excel me is
in your amazing ability to say things in
a brief, pointed way.
He said, I can't do that.
It takes me longer.
But he said, now, Charles, what I want
you to do is to preach instantaneous religion
to these people.
He said, you've got the ability to do
it.
You've got the vocabulary.
He said, go everywhere preaching instantaneous religion, telling
the people everywhere that God will save them
and fill them instantly.
Then he said, I want, that'll give me
more time.
If you do that, it'll give me more
time to talk about the progressive phases of
the Christian life.
I think that's just wonderful, that Christianity is
not a progressive thing or an instantaneous thing.
It is both instantaneous and progressive.
We're converted instantaneously, but we're converted to grow.
We're filled with the Spirit instantaneously, but in
order that we might grow.
So John said, Charles, you tell them about
the instantaneousness of it, and I'll tell them
about the progress of it.
So what a team there was there.
Well, here was Titus, this man of God,
and his conversion has been instantaneous.
It was revolutionary and clear.
And his grasp of Christian truth was immediate
and full.
The reason I know that, I'll tell you
a little later.
But, well, I'll tell you now that within
one year after his conversion, he had endeared
himself so fully to the Apostle Paul and
established himself in the confidence of the Antiochian
church that when they sent up two delegates
from Antioch to Jerusalem to deal with that
pesky problem of Judaism, they picked Paul, which
would seem the natural thing to do, but
who else do you suppose they picked?
They picked a man who'd only been converted
one year, Titus.
So Titus, a one-year convert, went with
an apostle to the first and perhaps the
most important council ever held in the church
of Christ from the cross to this present
hour.
Now that's how big this man was, how
quick he was to grasp the truth, shows
how quickly he threw himself and wholeheartedly threw
himself into the things of God, and there's
a mystery.
Why is this mystery?
Why is it that some Christians are converted,
and when they are converted, it takes them
years and years to learn anything?
If they learn, they learn slowly, and it
takes them half a lifetime before the church
begins to trust them and say, well, I
think he's got his feet on the ground.
But somebody like Titus can come bouncing over
into the kingdom of God and in one
year be running around with an apostle and
being a delegate to a great council in
Jerusalem.
That's a strange thing.
I don't understand it.
Perhaps it has something to do with size,
has something to do with abilities.
I don't know.
I only know that I have seen the
beautiful sight in my day of seeing somebody
converted on Wednesday and by Sunday was able
to quote Scripture, and by the next Sunday
was able to get up and testify, and
by the next Sunday was one to teach
a Bible class.
And I have seen others converted, and they
just dragged their feet and hung around.
Well, Titus was of the first kind.
He leaped right into the kingdom of God
like a boy into a pool in a
summer's day, and he never came back out.
And then there was Titus, the assistant to
the apostle.
Paul was not easy to please.
Now, I can tell you that.
He would not be easy to work with.
Paul wouldn't be.
Not because he was churlish or had bad
temper.
He wasn't.
He was a sanctified man.
But Paul expected everybody to be just as
devoted as he was.
And he expected them to have bid good
-bye, bidden good-bye to the world, burned
the bridges behind them, destroyed the old life,
and living in the new.
He expected that.
And if they weren't, he was disappointed.
You'll remember that a man named John Mark,
who later wrote the Book of Mark, went
once with Paul, and then he got cold
feet and went home, and that was the
end of him as far as Paul was
concerned.
Paul said, we'll not take that boy anymore.
He said, anybody that would desert us when
we needed him, no good.
And Barnabas and Paul had an argument over
that, and the reason being, humanly enough, that
Barnabas and Mark were relatives, and blood is
always thicker than water.
But later on in his old age, Paul
said, send Titus too.
He'd forgiven Titus, but it took him a
lot of years to do it, and to
get his confidence back in a man who'd
walk out on him when he needed him.
Well, the man Paul, though very hard to
please, trusted this man Titus completely, and used
him as his own representative.
When he couldn't go, he'd send Titus.
And when he couldn't stay, he'd leave Titus.
So Titus was a representative of the apostle,
and it's a beautiful example of the unity
that there is in Christ.
The old ex-Pharisee, the old ex-Pharisee,
who'd worn his long phylacteries and stood on
the corner and uttered his long prayers, and
who was of the straightest sect of the
Pharisees, a Hebrew of the Hebrews, and self
-righteous to the point, i.e., kept his
nose in the air like an old Dowager,
looked down at people occasionally, that was the
old Pharisee Paul.
But do you know something?
God met Paul on Damascus Road, changed him
completely, transformed him, filled him with the Holy
Ghost, gave him back his eyesight, and made
him fall in love with the young Gentile.
Why, the Pharisee Paul wouldn't have shaken hands
with that Gentile heathen before his conversion, and
now he calls him my son and gives
him his heavy responsibilities and loves him and
treats him as a brother or a son.
Now that's what the grace of God will
do for people.
And then there was Titus the missionary.
I can only point out that Titus went
to Macedonia and he went to Corinth and
he went to Crete and he traveled with
Paul.
Do you know that missionary work wasn't as
difficult then as it is now, and I'll
tell you why.
Then the Greek language was the universal language
and everybody almost spoke Greek.
Everybody to whom Paul went spoke Greek.
Perhaps I should modify that and put a
slight question mark after it, but for the
most part everybody spoke Greek, and they could
therefore preach in one language.
But nowadays there are so many languages and
sub-languages and what we call principal dialects.
Someday I'm going to study that up and
see what Brother Sneed means when he talks
about principal dialects.
But anyway, they have so many of them
now that you've got to spend years learning
their languages.
Then they traveled around preaching in Greek and
almost everybody understood them.
So it was easy for them to go
as missionaries as far as the language was
concerned, language-wise.
It was very easy, as they said.
Well, in there was Titus, the good man
who did good.
He said of Christ in Acts 10.38
that he was anointed with the Holy Ghost
and power and went about doing good.
And now here's Titus following in his steps,
going about doing good.
You know, the poor saints up at Jerusalem
needed help.
Now, that's a strange thing.
Jerusalem was where the Gospel got its start.
Jerusalem was where Christ Jesus was crucified.
Jerusalem was where the Holy Ghost fell on
the apostles.
Jerusalem was the very center out from which
the message first started.
And yet before the end of the first
century, before the end of the first century,
what was the date?
Around 6500, thirty-two years after Christ's crucifixion,
the church at Jerusalem had gotten so poor
that it had to have help from the
Gentiles.
Now, how did it come to get so
poor?
Well, there were two ways.
And they'll hamstring you and use your hide
to make lampshades in some quarters if you
said this.
But it's true nevertheless.
The church at Jerusalem had, without any orders
from God at all, introduced a kind of
Christian communism.
Now, not the devilish, atheistic communism of Russia,
but the Christian communism.
That is, they had given up their property
and divided it up and said, now everything
belongs to everybody.
And they tried that.
That's been tried several times since.
It's never worked, but they tried it.
The result was they had no property.
And then when the persecution came about Stephen
and others, the authorities took what little they
had left.
And the result was they were stuck, these
Jewish Christians, in Jerusalem.
They had no money.
Their property was gone.
They had brought it and given it and
laid it down at the apostles' feet.
And that was a good thing.
But it might have been a little unwise
in thus giving up a source.
For instance, let's put it like this.
Suppose that I'm a shoemaker.
And I fix shoes.
And I have a shoemaking shop big enough
that I can employ three or four other
young fellows who are learning the trade.
Well, that keeps me.
That keeps those three or four other young
fellows.
And it gives a service to the neighborhood.
It enables four people to live.
And it enables me to have enough so
that I can give to help others as
long as I keep my shoe shop.
But suppose in a burst of enthusiasm I
say, I don't want to keep anything.
I want to give it away.
So I give away my shoe shop.
Well, that puts three fellows out of a
job, me out of a job.
And then what do you do?
Now, that kind of giving is not wise
giving.
The wise giver isn't the man who gives
his farm away.
The wise giver is the man who works
his farm for all it'll take and then
gives all the proceeds away that he can
spare.
There's your wise giver.
The businessman who gives his business to the
mission station, he's not a wise giver.
But a man who runs his business for
all the traffic will bear and then gives
his profits to the mission, he's a wise
man because he's doing it in a proper
way.
Well, the Church of Jerusalem, I think, made
the mistake.
They were never told to do it.
They just thought it up themselves.
So they actually sold their property and sold
their business and gave it to the apostles
and pretty soon it was all spent and
nobody had anything.
And then add to that, I say, the
persecution and the result was that something had
to be done for Jerusalem.
And now here was Paul and of course
Paul loved Jerusalem and loved the Jewish saints
in Jerusalem and he got interested right away
in taking an offering.
And where do you suppose this Jew went
to take that offering?
He went among Gentile Christians.
And he said, Now inasmuch as we desire,
moreover, brethren, we want you to know about
the grace of God bestowed on the churches
of Macedonia, how that in a great trial
of affliction and abundance of joy and out
of their deep poverty they abounded unto the
riches of their liberality and gave more than
they needed to give beyond their power they
gave, praying with much entreaty that we would
receive their gift and take the fellowship to
the saints.
That was an offering they were taking for
the saints in Jerusalem.
That's what the 8th chapter of 2 Corinthians
is about.
And he said, We desired that Titus also
would do something about this, but thanks be
to God which put the same earnest care
into the heart of Titus for you.
For indeed he accepted the exhortation, but being
more forward of his own account he went
unto you.
Now here's an odd and rather tricky little
allele.
Nobody in Corinth needed anything.
They were a well-to-do church according
to all the commentators.
They didn't need anything, but somebody up in
Jerusalem needed something.
So Titus said, I know what I'm going
to do.
I'm going to kill two birds with one
stone, two old buzzards.
And I'm going to kill these two birds
and here's what I'll do.
I'll kill poverty in Jerusalem and I'll kill
stinginess in Corinth with all but one stone.
So he went to Corinth and said, Do
you know what?
I've come to give you an opportunity to
do something.
He didn't tell them jokes and then apologize.
He said, I've come to give you an
opportunity to do something wonderful.
And they said, What's that, Brother Titus?
Well, he said, I've come to give you
an opportunity to make an offering to the
poor saints in Jerusalem.
And if some old deacon got up and
said, Now, just a minute, Titus.
We're Gentiles and those people in Jerusalem think
we're dirt and they wouldn't have anything to
do with us.
Titus said, You don't know them.
They're Jews, but they're Christians and they've changed
their attitude toward you Gentiles.
Beside that, they're hungry and what's the difference?
What they think of you, the question is,
what are you going to do for them?
So he took a great big offering from
Corinth, did it of his own accord.
Now, that was that man Titus, a man
that could go around taking an offering and
not begging for it, but saying, I've come
to give you an opportunity to serve.
That was his way of taking an offering.
So he went to Corinth and said, God
put it into his heart that he might
give them an opportunity to have this service.
And we praise God, said Paul, that you
gave, the Macedonians were poor.
And he said, Now the Macedonians have given
a big offering to take to Jerusalem and
they did it out of their poverty.
But you Corinthians, he said, why, you got
plenty.
There will appear, if it isn't already in
print, I see the proofs and then I
don't know whether it's got to your house
yet or not, but there appears in the
Alliance Weekly a letter, word for word, said,
Dear Brother King, he's the treasurer of course
of the Alliance, Dear Brother King, I'm 87
years old and I live on a pension
and I was saving a little bit of
money.
I don't know how he could do it,
but I always claim a pension just means
that it takes you longer to starve to
death.
But this man said, I'm living on a
pension and I read in the Alliance Weekly
how your offerings weren't coming up the way
they should and God spoke to me and
said, Don't you keep that $25, you send
that in.
So he said, Here, I'm sending in $25
out of my poverty.
87 years old he was and on a
pension.
He said, Here's my $25.
So he had nothing left but just three
cents to send it in.
Well, that dear old man, God bless him,
giving out of his poverty because he'd first
given himself and that's the way they did
it in Macedonia.
Paul said, You Corinthians, now you can do
better than that because you have more than
that.
Always expect more from people who have more.
Well, there was Titus the doer of good.
He wasn't so mystical that he lived in
the heavenly places and forgot that anybody else
existed.
He was practical enough that he brought his
mysticism down and put overalls on it and
sent it out and said, Now go out
and work and it went out and worked.
Then there was Titus the organizer.
We won't go into it other than to
say that he went to Corinth and helped
to straighten out that church and then Paul
says in his first, For this reason I
left thee in Crete that thou should set
in order the things that are wanting and
ordain elders in every city as I had
appointed thee.
He was an organizer, this man.
They said about Dr. Simpson that when he
was an old man he was reading about
John Wesley.
He shook his head and said, Oh, there
was John Wesley.
He was an organizer.
He was a disciplinarian.
He said, Me?
I'm no disciplinarian.
And his society barely hung together.
Dr. Simpsons, you'd give him a $20 bill
for missions which was equivalent to $80 in
those days and he'd put it down in
his great big old baggy pants pocket and
forget it for days and even weeks.
Finally find it.
Now let me see now where that goes
to China.
But that's the way he lived.
But John Wesley was a sharp, he was
an organizer.
So was Titus.
Thank God for some men who were good
organizers.
I think about our friend Rymel down in
Tucson, Arizona who used to be with us
here and whom we hear from occasionally.
When he went out of here I said,
Oh, brother, what are we going to do?
Brother Francis Chase, he's a great Christian.
He's one of our strong men but he
couldn't organize nothing.
He's an artist and a dreamer and a
poet.
And I thought about our other man.
I said, What are we going to do?
We got nobody left that can take a
screwdriver and a clinical thermometer and a compass
and know where we're going.
And then the Lord sent along another brother
whose name I won't mention because he would
blush clear to the top of his hairless
head if I did.
But I sent him along to be an
organizer, that type of fellow that can pull
things together and say, Now this is the
way we're going.
That's a wonderful gift.
I haven't got it at all.
If you think I have, come up and
I'll show him a desk.
Brother Edward Sandrock said one time that he
had a yearning, burning desire to slip up
some dark night, take my middle drawer of
my desk and take it out and empty
it in the alley.
But I know where everything is.
It's in that drawer.
That's where it is.
I don't always find it but usually do.
Well, God gives different gifts to different men.
And he gave a gift of organizing to
the man Titus.
He could walk right into a disorganized, bumbling
church and pull it up into order.
Well, then there was Titus the optimist.
I don't like the word optimist.
Liberals and crackpot poets have used the word
in the wrong way.
But he was the cheerful brother.
Paul said about him when he came to
a certain place, where was it?
He said, I had no rest in my
spirit because I found not my brother Titus.
He was a human being, this fellow, human
being.
I had no rest in my spirit because
I found not my brother Titus.
He says, God that comforts those who are
cast down comforted me by the coming of
Titus is exceeding more joy that I had
because of the joy of Titus when he
came.
Now, I'm telling you, there is a gift
in itself.
For though Paul was an apostle and was
probably one of the half dozen great brains
of all time and certainly the greatest theologian
the church ever produced, though he had all
those gifts, yet he was subject to fits
of despondency and he needed somebody to come
along and say, Paul, God's still on the
throne.
And Paul would smile and say, excuse me,
for a moment I'd forgotten it.
He said, I went looking for Titus and
I didn't find any rest in my spirit
because I found not my brother Titus.
Imagine that old Pharisee needing the consolation and
good cheerful talk of a Gentile by the
name of Titus.
That's years younger.
That's a gift in itself, my dear friends,
to be able to console the apostles.
Your brother, R.S. Roseberry, who was chairman
of our French West Africa field for so
long, said this.
He said, Brother Tozer, when I go, he
said, I know my ministry.
He said, my ministry is to go and
preach to discouraged missionaries.
He didn't contact the natives and preach to
them.
The missionaries did that.
He went around preaching to the missionaries.
And he said, I go and I find
missionaries who've been out there so long.
They're tired.
They're exhausted.
They're sick.
They've had people have backslidden and some of
their converts have failed them and they're despondent.
And he said, I go in and preach
to them about Jesus Christ.
He said, I don't talk about missions.
I talk about Jesus Christ.
He said, I bring the missionaries up and
give them hope.
That's a great gift.
Great gift.
Wonderful to be able to listen to a
teacher or a preacher who, when he's finished,
even if you don't agree with everything he
said, you go out saying, well, things aren't
so bad.
God's on the throne and Jesus Christ still
lives and I believe there's hope for us.
Well, Titus had that.
And Dr. Spence, who was Dean of Gloucester,
said this about him.
I copied this little quotation.
I thought that you'd like it.
He said this.
He said, In Titus was found a remarkable
union of enthusiasm, integrity, and discretion.
Aren't those three beautiful words?
Enthusiasm, integrity, and discretion.
First, there's enthusiasm.
I like enthusiasm.
In Wesley's day, that meant fanaticism.
Wesley preached against it.
But now, it just means zealousness and urgency,
what we call enthusiasm.
Most Christians drag their feet.
Half of the work of the preacher is
to get the people to lift their feet.
When I was a boy, young fellow, maybe
14, I used to help my father saw
logs.
We'd saw a tree down, back and forth,
then it would fall.
We'd saw it into lengths.
Pull the crosscut saw.
I'd pull one way and he'd pull the
other way.
Pull one way and he'd pull the other
way.
And my father was very much like his
son.
And he turned to me one day and
he said, Son, if you must ride that
saw, please pick up your feet.
He said, don't drag your feet.
And I remember that down the years.
If I was going to take a ride
while he pulled and pushed, please don't drag
my feet.
Well, a great many Christians in the work
of the Lord, you just have to drag
them, push them or pull them.
But not Titus.
Titus was enthusiastic.
He came out of there enthusiastic, out of
the prayer room enthusiastic.
Then he had integrity.
That is, he was a sound man.
And do you know why we know he
was a man of integrity?
Because when Paul wanted to appoint somebody to
carry that offering, it amounted to a lot
of money, to Jerusalem, you know who he
appointed?
Titus.
One other fellow.
He said, I know Titus.
He can be treasure and you won't even
have to audit his books.
He said, I know him.
So he sent Titus and Titus went back
to Gentile and carried to Jerusalem the gifts
from the Macedonian and Corinthian and other churches.
So there was enthusiasm linked with integrity.
And then along with that was discretion.
Some of the Lord's dear people are good,
honest people, but they're not discreet.
They say and do the wildest things, but
not Titus.
Paul trusted him because he had discretion, integrity
linked with his enthusiasm.
Dear God, give us this kind of spirituality
that we can be indeed Christians of the
first water, that we can pour ourselves out
as Titus did.
God will honor us by using us or
working through us.
Give us a missionary mind and teach us
as well that giving of our goods to
feed a man that's hungry is as truly
of the work of God as giving to
missions or to a church.
And that he can give us a little
gift or send somebody that has it of
organization and keep us optimistic and enthusiastic so
we don't add an ounce of gloom to
anybody's heart at any time.
Well, that's Titus.
That's the kind of man Paul wrote his
lovely little letter to.
The Holy Ghost embodied it in the New
Testament canon.
And for a few Sunday mornings I'm going
to be preaching from that book.