Tonight at the seven o'clock hour, after
a time of those inspiring songs, I want
to give my second in a series on
the voice of eternal wisdom.
I don't know how I got into this.
It is so delightful and so elevating to
my heart, yet requires such tremendous preparation that,
honestly, it is taking a lot out of
me.
But I enjoy it, and I think that
you probably wouldn't hear this anywhere else.
It isn't that I'm a better preacher, for
there are better preachers in this city than
I am by far.
It's simply that I preach about good things.
That I will admit.
I'll say that about myself.
I'm not the best preacher in Chicago, but
I preach about some things that will warm
your heart.
And this is one of them.
Jesus Christ as the incarnation of the ancient
Hebrew idea of eternal wisdom, out of which
everything grew.
And on Wednesday at 7.30 sharp, we
begin a new series.
It is the careful study of the Sermon
on the Mount.
We'd like everybody out to get the very
first one, and follow through for those three
chapters.
At baptismal service, which has been announced, I'd
like you to take this seriously, and of
any of you who have been converted to
Christ, here or anywhere, and yet not been
baptized, you see me, see Mr. McPhee, Mr.
Moore, or anyone you know, give them your
name and address, in order that we might
take the right steps about this matter of
baptism.
The Lord is still pleased to allow the
light of the Church to move out.
Mr. McPhee and I were sitting in a
restaurant yesterday, and a great, big, fine-looking
young preacher, happy in his happy thirties, I
wouldn't call that a boy, but probably was
in his thirties, came by, stopped, made himself
known, said he was a pastor of a
church, and I had always walked by that
gray church, and thought, well, that's a liberal
church, that's modernistic, and I'd heard that it
was.
And I don't even know now that it
isn't or hasn't been.
But this man stopped and told me that
he was, using his own words, an avid
reader of the Alliance, witness.
And Mr. McPhee told him about our praying
and said, would you like to come up
sometime for our prayer meeting, Tuesdays, Thursdays, or
Saturdays?
And he said, could I bring some other
men along?
So we don't know what will come of
this.
Then I got a letter here, which I
rather like.
I rather like it.
It's from Winnetka, up there where all the
money is, and who's who and all the
rest.
And it's from a lady who heard the
talk I gave to the Youth for Christ.
And she sat down and sent the church
a check for $100.
I don't suppose she's ever seen this church,
but I got a check here.
I hope that the financial secretary will remind
me I don't carry this home with me.
But it came addressed to me, and so
it isn't mine.
It's for the church.
Had my name on it, I'd have still
turned it over.
I always do, unless it's in that rare
once in six, seven years, somebody says, this
is for you, that very rare.
But if it does, then I keep it.
But if it's just addressed to me or
to the church, it goes over to the
church.
Well, now let us turn to Titus, that
book of Titus.
I talked about Titus the man and didn't
talk about the book of Titus.
But let's look at the first two verses.
Paul, a servant of God and an apostle
of Jesus Christ, according to the faith of
God's elect, and acknowledge of the truth which
is after God in us.
I don't think we need to go beyond
that, that first, first word, first verse.
That's as far as we'll get.
Now this book of Titus was here when
you got here, and the first Bible that
was given you had it in.
And it has been bound with our other
65 books of the Bible since the second
or first, latter part of the first century.
And for that reason, it's hard for us
to visualize it ever having not been.
To us it seems as if it had
always been, but it hasn't, wasn't.
Well, there was a time when the book
of Titus didn't exist, the time when a
man wrote that book.
And he wrote it for a purpose, for
it is a letter, a very urgent letter.
Some expositors and translators complain that the word
epistle should not be used because that word
epistle is too conventional and dignified a word.
This is a letter.
It is, it was sent by Paul to
Titus who was on Crete, the island of
Crete in the Aegean Sea.
And this is not a literary composition, though
it of course in our sonorous King James
is a very beautiful thing.
It is not a literary composition, very carefully
polished.
I have discovered that nothing that is religious,
that is a mere literary composition, ever lives.
Or if it is perpetuated because of its
sheer beauty, it never helps anybody.
I think, for instance, of Gray's Elegy in
a Country Churchyard.
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day.
The lowing herd winds slowly o'er the
lee.
Plowman homeward winds his weary way and leaves
the world to darkness and to me.
Now that is so beautiful that it's like
a gem.
I've gone over that from beginning to end
and have discovered that every line has hidden
alliteration in it so that it has music,
it's music.
It's like running over a keyboard.
It took him seven years to write that.
But you know I have my first time
yet to hear any pastor say, you know
I was over at such-and-such's home
the other day to visit dear old Mrs.
So-and-so who's on her last deathbed,
and she asked me whether I wouldn't read
Gray's Elegy to comfort her.
Nobody ever did that.
And then there's that one by Tennyson, Sunset
and Evening Star and One Clear Call for
Me and May There Be No Moaning at
the Bar When I Put Out to Sea.
You can't deny that that's music and beauty.
But nobody ever asked anybody to read that.
Sometimes preachers read that after somebody's dead and
can't help themselves.
But nobody ever said, Pastor, I'd like you
to read Sunset and Evening Star.
It's too gloomy.
It's a beautiful thing, but it was a
polished literary composition.
But you know I imagine how many there
were who and are, who have in their
troubles and griefs read In Hope of Eternal
Life, which God that cannot lie promised before
the world began, but hath in due time
manifested his word through preaching, which is committed
unto me, Titus, mine own son, in the
common faith, and so on, on down the
line, clear through to the end, about the
God that cannot lie.
That's because this, that's, the reason that that
is loved and chosen and cherished and has
been by the saints all down the years
is that it is written by a man
who was at the battlefront.
And he wrote it literally in his own
sweat and blood, quite literally, for he sweat
and bled.
And he wrote this to the man of
God who was in a hard place doing
a hard work.
This is a communique from a general to
a subordinate.
It is written from one field of action
to another.
And there aren't many communiques that are very
carefully worded, and MacArthur used to write some
sonorous prose, but outside of that usually they're
pretty jerky and brief.
And this book of Titus is remarkably lovely
English in our present King James form, in
spite of the fact that it was a
hot, brief communique written by the great apostle
Paul to his assistant Titus, whom he had
left on Crete to straighten things out and
to raise the moral standards of the Cretan
Christians.
Now, let's talk a little about this island
of Crete and the Cretans.
Now, I know it says Christian in the
King James, but all other translations call it
Cretan, and it's called Cretan now, so let's
call it Crete.
The island of Crete, or sometimes called Candia,
was the fourth largest island in the Aegean
chain.
And I looked it up, and I find
that the history of Crete goes back 3
,500 years before Christ.
There was civilization on that island 3,500
years before Christ was born in Bethlehem.
And at the time that Paul wrote, and
oh, for years before that, centuries before that,
it had been inhabited by a bad mixture
of races, and it had an equally bad
mixture of religions.
And the people warred among themselves, little cities
warring against other little cities, and its religion.
Oh, they said Zeus was born there, the
Greek, older Greek god who was the counterpart
of the Jupiter of the Romans.
They said he was born on that island.
I don't know what it meant or whether
they meant anything particularly, but then old Bacchus
was supposed to be there, and of course,
as you know, Bacchus was the god of
the grape and wine.
And they carried it on logically, and the
result was that the people, the heathen religions
practiced, in their rites, drunkenness.
They used to get drunk, gloriously drunk in
order to practice their, in order to show
Bacchus that they appreciated the grape out of
which the wine was made.
Well, it's had a bad reputation.
There isn't very much good that can be
said about it, and the historians say that
when all the great trouble was going on
in Greece, that Crete practically did nothing at
all, just lay around and drank and argued
and fought with themselves.
And the people had a bad reputation, and
they'd had a bad reputation.
Oh, three, four hundred years before Christ was
born, there was a man on the island
who wasn't a bad man.
His name was Epimenides.
That sounds as if it might be a
pun, but actually it's a real man's name,
Epimenides.
And he was a good man, presumably.
They called him a prophet, and they looked
up to him, and finally made a kind
of a demigod out of him.
And he wrote himself a poem about the
Cretans, and it started off with these terrible
words, Cretans are always liars.
Paul quotes it here, you know.
Cretans are always liars, evil beasts and slow
bellies.
That was the first line of their prophet.
Paul had read this, no doubt, and studied
this, just the way we have to study
Shakespeare and Emerson and Bacon when we go
to school.
He studied Epimenides, and he remembered what, after
he got converted and became an apostle, he
remembered what Epimenides had said about the Cretans.
He said the Cretans are always liars, evil
beasts and slow bellies.
Now he said to Titus, that's the kind
of people you're among, therefore regroup them sharply.
Now there was a church on this island,
and I've searched into how that church got
onto that island, and I don't know for
sure.
It started one of two ways.
Paul didn't found it.
It started by one of two ways.
It was either the work of missionaries, for
you remember that when they were scattered abroad
upon the persecution of Stephen, they went everywhere
preaching, and the Lord went with them confirming
this word with sign following, and there were
churches founded, and either somebody got in a
boat and paddled over to Crete and started
a little church there and it grew, or
else, and I think this probably is a
better explanation, that Jews who came in contact
with Paul or other apostles or Christians, various
places, then went back home to Crete where
they lived, for there were Jews on Crete,
as if there were any place where there
weren't Jews or aren't Jews.
There were Jews on Crete, and those converted
Jews went back and started the church.
Some people think that, and I think that
sounds as if it might be the fact.
These Jews, you know, were always traveling.
They're merchants, and they buy and sell and
take little ships.
They used to take little ships and go
and get stuff and bring it back and
sell it at a profit.
And some of them, when they were over
there, like Lydia, who was a seller of
purple, came in contact with Paul and got
converted.
Somebody got over there, evidently, a Jewish merchant,
and ran into a Christian, and he got
converted and went back home and started telling
the story, and pretty soon he had the
church going, and that caught fire, and pretty
soon the island of Crete had quite a
number of churches.
There were quite a number of them, and
they were large churches, and this, of course,
attracted Paul's attention.
And Paul went over to investigate what was
going on in that island of Crete, and
he found both good and bad.
He found a lot of churches, and he
found them numerically strong.
But he also found that while there were
many who called themselves Christian, and Paul was
willing to believe that they were, their lives
were not godly.
They were too much influenced by the Cretans,
for the Cretans, you know, were all around
about them.
They were a minority group, small in proportion
to the large number who dwelt on Crete,
and the general moral level of Crete was
low, and these Christians, while they accepted Jesus
Christ as the Savior and began to pray
and trust him as Redeemer, they didn't have
enough strong teachers to show them that a
Christian is not only somebody who believes on
Jesus, he's somebody who is a disciple of
Jesus and who belongs to a new order
and must live another kind of life.
They didn't know that.
And so there was a lot of influence
by the Cretans.
The evil influence harmed the church, and their
conduct was not in accord with Christ.
Their political conduct was not good.
You see, the way to read the epistles
is this.
If I had a disease and you didn't
know what it was and hadn't any way
of discovering it, but you went to my
doctor and he didn't tell you what it
was, but he told you what he was
giving me for it, you could figure out
what I had by what he was giving
me.
If you had a lot of intelligence, and
I assume you do, you could easily figure
out my disease by what they gave me.
Well, now you can read the epistles and
you can tell what was wrong in Corinth
or Rome or Ephesus or Colossae or on
Crete.
You can tell what was wrong by the
medicine Paul prescribed.
And I will say this, that Paul was
a believer in the old-fashioned medicine that
the bitter it is, the quicker it cures.
And some of his medicine was mighty strong,
and so in this book of Titus he
really prescribed some strong bitter medicine.
They weren't politically right and they weren't industrially
right.
He found out that some of the Christians,
because they were Christians and worked for men
who were Christians, they took advantage of the
fact that they were brethren and loafed around.
Paul handed them that and said, take one
of these before each meal and straighten that
out.
And then they were not socially right.
Some of the old ladies were in gossips
and the young women didn't stay home and
the young men weren't doing right and some
of the old fellows weren't good examples.
So Paul tried to straighten the whole business
out.
He told Titus what to say.
They badly needed order and discipline.
So that's why the book of Titus was
written.
Now Paul leaves Titus over on Crete.
He says that he might straighten out things.
But let's look a little here at this
first, this very first Paul, a servant of
God and apostle of Jesus Christ.
Now that word servant is a rather nice
word and it's a soft, smooth word in
our English, but it isn't actually the word
that was here.
The word that was here was slave, and
that's not a nice word.
Born servant, slave.
See, the Roman people were divided up into
three classes generally.
There were the patricians.
They were the 400, the high authorities, and
usually the priests were made.
Their heathen priests came out of that class.
They got in who's who.
They had the yachts and the big ranch
houses.
They were the patricians.
Then there was the common people called plebeians.
You hear that yet in college, they're called
somebody a pleb.
Well, that's just an old way of saying
he's just a common fellow.
And these plebeians were second-class citizens, and
then they had the third-class citizens, and
they were slaves, and they might belong to
anybody.
These slaves, they owned nothing and could own
nothing.
They belonged to somebody, and that somebody was
responsible for them.
And when they got converted, naturally they felt,
well, I'm equal to the man who owns
me.
Why should I look up to him?
And Paul rebuked them sharply and said, humble
yourself and live your life right.
Well, anyway, Paul was a freeborn Roman citizen.
Remember when the Romans said, with a great
price obtained I this freedom, and Paul said,
but I was freeborn.
I've always thought Paul said that with his
chest up and his head back.
I was freeborn, he said.
I'm not a slave and wasn't born a
slave.
I was born a plebeian, not a patrician,
not the high class, but I was born
a free citizen of Rome.
And yet, though he were a freeborn Roman
citizen and could go where he pleased, and
when he got in trouble could appeal unto
Caesar, which a slave could never have done,
yet he declared himself a slave for Christ's
sake and of Christ.
And using the word in its setting that
it had there, what he said to Titus
was, I am Paul, I am a servant
of Jesus Christ.
Christ owns me by purchase.
That's how they got slaves, inheritance or purchase.
He owns me and he feeds me and
he keeps me and he's responsible for me
before the law.
And I work in Christ's service and my
service is voluntary and inexpressibly delightful.
For while Paul called himself a servant or
a slave of Jesus Christ, he never allowed
it to have the connotation of bondage.
He always meant the opposite.
He was a voluntary servant and happy to
serve the master whose service was freedom.
If he had been a servant of sin,
he would have been bound.
Let's illustrate it like this.
Take such a country as Russia or any
of the totalitarian states that own the souls
of their citizens.
So in Italy once under Mussolini before he
got hanged up by the heels.
It was so with Hitler before he lit
out and hasn't been seen.
And it's so in Russia.
Well, whoever is there is a slave.
That is, there's a certain bondage.
He's got to be careful.
He can't talk.
He's got to believe what he's told.
He's got to work with it, tell him.
He can't quit jobs without permission.
He is a servant there.
But in the United States, the humblest happy
tramp sitting in Grant Park every June evening
on a bench asleep is a freer man
than the freest Russian.
You see, it all depends on what realm
you're in, what kingdom you're in.
And the freest Roman citizen, the patrician, who
could be elected to the Senate and could
wear his long robes and make his speeches,
he was a bondsman because he lived in
sin.
But St. Paul was a voluntary servant in
a kingdom where there are no chains and
where there is no slavery.
And yet he said, I voluntarily declare myself
a happy slave of Jesus Christ.
I'm attached to him.
I'm a servant of his.
I belong to him.
And he found more complete freedom in his
happy servitude to Christ than he could ever
have felt if he had not been a
servant of Christ but had been free to
sin and free to go and do as
he pleased.
Well, he said, I'm not only a servant
of Christ, but I'm a servant for a
purpose.
I'm an apostle, which means a sent messenger.
And I am a sent one.
He served the Lord Jesus as a messenger
to bring God's elect to the knowledge of
the truth.
Now, that first verse here, Paul, a servant
of God and apostle of Jesus Christ, according
to the faith of God's elect, I've looked
into, I guess, ten versions this last week.
And it says, and they agree that what
he said was this, that for the promotion
of the faith among the elect of God,
that's what he's an apostle for.
He said, I'm an apostle to promote the
faith and get the message to those whom
he called the elect of God.
Now, God's elect, what about this?
God's elect, shall we pass this over and
act as if it wasn't here and look
over and keep still and hope it'll go
away?
I refuse to do it.
I don't follow along with all that's taught
about election, but I don't skip the word.
It's here, and it means a divine choice.
And the New Testament teaches the doctrine of
election.
But I don't understand it.
Sometime we'll understand it, or we'll understand that
we cannot understand it.
In either case, we'll be relaxed and feel
at home.
In that great day when the Lord gives
us a body like unto his glorious body,
and gives us a brain in keeping with
that glorious body, and a mind in keeping
with that glorified brain, we'll either understand the
doctrine of election, or we will understand that
we can't understand.
And you know the learned man is not
necessarily the man who understands a thing.
He's the man possibly who understands that he
can't understand it.
That's what I tell schools and colleges when
I have occasion to talk to them, that
the best any college can do for anybody
is to show him how much he can't
know.
And the most learned person is the one
who knows more things that he'll never know
than the other fellow who knows less things
that he'll never know.
You understand what I mean, and I think
I'm right in that.
Not quite?
Don't get that?
Well, the rest of them did.
Well, you see, if I can know, if
I can know 30 things, and then I
can know that there are 70 things that
I can never know, why, the fact that
I know that there are 70 things that
can never be known makes me learn it
just as certainly as knowing the 30 things
that can.
So when a young student comes out from
college, he ought to come out clutching under
his arm that little scroll that says that
he knows a few things.
Then under the other arm, he ought to
have another scroll whereon and wherein is listed
the things that he find out he didn't
know and probably never will be able to.
And thus I think we turn out some
learned men.
But our problem is we turn out students
who, because they know a few things, think
they know all things.
Well, sometime we're going to understand.
You know the little colored song that they
sing at the camp meetings?
By and by, when the morning comes, all
the saints of God are gathered home.
We'll tell the story how we've overcome and
we'll understand it better by and by.
I wouldn't mind hearing that again sometime.
Isaac Watts didn't write it, but there's a
lot of truth in it.
We understand it better by and by.
Or we'll understand that we can't understand.
And then we'll throw our hands up and
say, Oh Lord, God thou knowest.
But the difficulty is to take a young
student and teach him the doctrine of election
and then he goes out and tries to
cram it down everybody else's throat.
A man called me the other day on
the phone, a very nice, courteous young man.
He may even be here this morning.
He said, I'm so-and-so.
And I said, hello.
And he said, well, I've been saved five
years.
Or maybe it was only two years, just
a brief time.
And he said, I've come to your church
some.
But he said, I don't agree with you
on some things.
And I said, why?
Well, he said, I believe in election and
predestination.
And I said, why?
So do I.
And I don't know how I took that.
But I said to him, son, here you've
been a Christian.
He said he was 23.
And I said to him, son, here you've
been a Christian.
It was two or whatever it was, two
years.
And you're asking me to settle over the
telephone a theological problem so profound that the
greatest minds of the centuries have stood in
reverence and gazed into its far heights and
down into its profound depths and didn't understand
it.
You can't understand it.
Maybe never will be able to.
But I'll tell you two things now that
you can understand.
Take these and you're all right.
One is, only the elect will come.
For Jesus said, no man can come to
me except the Father draw him.
He said, ye have listened and heard of
the Father and all that hear of the
Father come to me and I give them
eternal life and I'll not cast them out.
So only the elect will come, but anyone
who will come can come.
Now hear that.
You have those two things and then you're
not going to make either mistake.
You're not going to deny it and you're
not going to go off the deep end
and drown.
Here are the two facts.
Only the elect will come, but whoever will
come can come.
With his usual flair for succinct, little concise
gems of theology, though he was not known
as a theologian, D.L. Moody settled that
whole election question.
They were discussing the non-elect and the
elect in his day and he settled it
like this.
He says, the elect are the whosoever wills
and the non-elect are the whosoever won'ts.
So the non-elect are the whosoever won'ts
and whosoever won't he's not in, but whosoever
will he can come.
So you can go and give a bonafide
message of truth to everybody in the world
and say, if you will come you'll be
saved and if they will come they'll be
saved.
Well, then there's the truth which is after
godliness and actually this is the burning heart
of the message here.
This is the burning core of the message
that God through Paul gives to Titus which
he is to give to the cretins who
are always liars and evil beasts and slow
bellies and they need some help.
So he said this truth is after godliness.
Now the truth of Christ acts not only
to rescue men but to purify and transform
them.
Now hear me, that the gospel of Jesus
Christ works not only to rescue men.
We have put the emphasis on the rescue
all over the last years.
Everybody is the same.
Come and be rescued.
Well, the Bible doesn't put it there.
The Bible does say that the Lord will
rescue us from perishing but he says we
are saved unto purity and godliness.
So the purpose of Titus was to teach
that all those elect prove they were by
living lives of holiness and godliness.
And the man who sits and drinks beer
and chews a cigar and argues election and
who goes to church when he feels like
it and lives a common life of Adam
and yet he is arguing about predestination I
wouldn't spend one minute with him.
Not one minute.
Titus the Roman slave said if a man
starts to talk to you and you see
he has no sincerity in him turn your
back on him.
You can't talk to an insincere man.
The man who lives an evil life and
then argues about election he doesn't have the
faintest idea what the message of Christ is
about.
For the message of Christ is unto godliness.
The message which is after godliness.
But don't forget friends the presence of the
cretins is all around about us.
Just as you'll get Asian flu if you
get on a bus and you're surrounded by
people that have it and they say it's
highly contagious.
I've never yet had the moral courage when
I got on the bus and somebody behind
me got to wheezing never yet had the
moral courage to get up and leave.
Have you?
Never had it.
I'd rather get the flu than to hurt
the fellow.
So I'd sit there for 20 blocks while
he blew, wheezed and snorted and I was
afraid I'd got it by the grace of
god I haven't up to now.
But all around about you there's the doctrine
of the cretins.
The cretins are always liars.
The Americans are always liars.
Slow bellies, evil beasts.
They always live like animals and they will
live like animals and if you're not a
converted Christian and don't have the grace of
god in your heart why you'll be influenced
by them.
Let me say to you young people particularly
you young Christians hear this man when I
say to you in god's name keep separated
from the cretins for they're all around about
you.
They vote Republican or Democratic or else don't
vote which is more like us.
We may be black or white or red
or yellow and we may be drive a
big car or a little one but they're
cretins gentlemen all around about us.
The Christians are a minority group surrounded by
cretins and Paul said look out for these
cretins and warn them and rebuke them sharply
in order that they might be sound in
the faith and live the right kind of
lives.
So I tell you young people if you
think it's cute and funny to put on
jive records you're giving the cretins a chance
to blow terms into your soul.
If you think it's cute to tell the
off-color stories that circulated high school you're
surrendering to the cretins who are always liars
and evil beasts and slow bellies.
And the whole level of the American morals
is low.
They think low and everything is low and
if you young people want to live for
Christ you're going to have to sternly turn
your back on all the cretins and say
no I'll go with Christians I'll go along
with Christians I'll live with Christians.
My people are Christian people I walk not
with the ungodly.
My people are Christian people.
Well, I would close with this according to
the New Testament if there is not some
degree of transformation and purification there is no
guarantee of salvation.
No matter how many times you've renewed your
consecration no matter how many cards you've signed
and how many revival meetings no matter how
many times you have thought you were accepting
Christ if there is not a good degree
of transformation and purification there is no guarantee
of salvation.
For the salvation that truly saves also transforms
and purifies.
This is the essence of Paul's letter to
Titus that he might tell these Cretans Could
Crete be any worse than Chicago I ask
you?
Could it?
Could it be any worse than Chicago?
No.
Historians say Crete was a bad mixture of
evil races and evil religions.
But could it be any worse than Chicago?
No.
God help you kids in school wherever you
are from the 6th grade on up or
in college because the whole influence is away
from righteousness.
You've got to turn hard to God and
pray and believe in Him and stay close
to the people that know God.
Let the vims put their arms around you
and keep you.
A man said to me the other day
this penetrating thing he said there are some
people that won't let you help them.
He said there are certain people I've tried
to help I've tried to put my arms
around them give them, expose them to the
truth and throw around them a fellowship that
would help them in a world like this
but they simply hold you at arm's length
they won't let you help them.
And you're going to have to humble yourself
and let yourself be helped.
Get with the people of God.
Get into the prayer meetings and young people's
meetings and church meetings and see to it
that you'll allow yourself to be helped because
you can be sure of one thing the
cretins are out to get you they're after
you everywhere and if you refuse to be
helped by the children of God then you'll
be dragged down by the cretins which may
God forbid.