Now, if I should, for a little while,
inadvertently speak with a slight accent, you will
understand I spent last week among the Swedish
Baptists in Bethel College in St. Paul.
First meeting when, just before I preached, they
presented me with a diploma, making me an
honorary citizen of the state of Minnesota, signed
by the governor, so I took the name
of Tozequist while I was up there.
Axel Tozequist was the name.
I suppose tomorrow night I'll have to be
known as Dominique Garrett Vandertozeberg.
But it's nice to get among the us
foreigners to circulate that way a little.
Incidentally, I bring greetings from the pharaohs.
One of the big, tall, good-looking ushers
that used to roam up and down these
isles.
I suppose he's walked 900 miles up and
down these isles as an usher.
He's up there now, he and his wife,
Effie.
And so homesick, it's terrible, really.
Although they're in a good church up there.
Also bring greetings from the Fardigs.
Ruth and Sheldon were there, also met Mr.
Entner's brother, talked with him a number of
times, and a few of the others.
I received this week a letter from R
.R. Brown.
Dr. Brown had been at NIAC a week,
and he tells me, and confirms what I
had heard before, but tells me in some
detail about the revival they had there.
He said he hadn't seen anything like it
except on the foreign field.
Hours it would run without anybody running it,
just people meeting God.
And he particularly mentioned two of our young
people who had met the Lord in a
most wonderful way.
One being, well, our own daughter, Becky, and
the other being Case for Plew.
He didn't mention the others, though undoubtedly they
met the Lord and got help too.
But these two, it seemed, particularly received specific
spiritual help during those meetings.
We thought you'd want to know that.
Now, in the book of Titus, we're hearing
an apostle speak.
This is not the language of good men
who are good men who want us to
help.
That's helpful too sometimes, but this is authoritative
and inspiring.
It's the language of an apostle.
And he says to the man Titus, this
cause 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.
That's verse 5.
And on down to verse 9, we will
try today to consider this, although there is
subject matter here for 14 sermons, 15 sermons
probably, if we would take the word blameless
as God's steward.
But we'll try to get it all in
this morning.
Now, he said, ordain elders in every city
as I had appointed thee.
And then he said, if any be blameless.
Then in verse 7, he says, for a
bishop must be blameless as the steward of
God.
Now, blamelessness here is not a virtue.
Blamelessness is a summation of the other virtues.
See, he didn't say be blameless and be
good and be hospitable and be clean.
He said be blameless, and then here's what
I mean by blameless.
That was Paul's method, and here we see
it laid out before us.
And he said, appoint elders, for a bishop
must be blameless.
We ought to talk just a little bit
about this, I suppose.
If I wanted to follow the usual method
of Bible teaching, I could shift you back
and forth from one New Testament book to
another, from 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, Titus, and
back again, and shift back and forth.
But I don't intend to do it because
the people to whom Paul wrote didn't have
those other books.
And Paul, I suppose, assumed that he had
enough to say here in Titus that they
wouldn't have to refer to the other books.
So I'm not going to refer to them,
but try to stick close by this one
book.
And we have the word elder and the
word bishop mentioned here.
Now we are living hundreds of years from
the beginning of the New Testament church, and
much water has gone over the dam, and
much wind has blown across the moor.
Many people have risen with strong opinions, and
many strong dictatorial minds have impressed themselves upon
the church during the centuries.
And this bishop and elder and deacons deal
has been more or less impressed upon the
churches until you think that they get their
ideas from the Bible.
But actually, the New Testament is not very
clear about all this.
It lays down the principles, but it leaves
the outworking of them to the church.
And the result is that we have very
strong divisions within the church.
Not really divisions so much as differing views.
For instance, the word bishop here is the
word from which we get our episcopal ideas,
the form of government known as the episcopal
form of government, with bishops and archbishops, and
the rule, a kind of autocratic rule from
the top by bishops.
And then the Presbyterian form of government comes
from what is called the presbyter.
That's where the word elder, And Paul uses
both here, and he uses them synonymously.
That's a strange thing, that a bishop and
an elder in the mind of Paul was
the same person.
An elder was the title, and a bishop
outlined his duties.
So that when you hear Paul say, I
told you to ordain elders, for a bishop
must be blameless.
He's not contradicting himself, and the translators weren't
off.
There were two different words there.
One meant, or the word elder means simply
what it means now, an older person.
And that was Jewish, or at least the
idea came from the Jews.
The older men were picked.
Seventy of them.
They were the Sanhedrin.
They were the leaders, older men.
No young man got in there because he
didn't have experience.
The older men.
So the Church picked it up and used
the word elder to mean an older person.
There's no age set.
Some people are as old at 40 as
others are at 90, and some never do
get old, and some are never young.
But the thought is simply that a little
more time will give you opportunity to be
a little wiser and a little broader minded,
not quite so narrow, so that they picked
elders.
But that's describing the man as an older,
honored brother, but his duty is summed up
under the word bishop, and that was borne
from the Roman form of government.
And it meant an inspector, an overseer, a
ruler.
Out in Zion, Illinois, they used the word
overseer all the time.
And there are certain other churches.
Certain churches will not use the word reverend.
They use the word elder.
Out there, they use the word overseer.
And so what I want you to see
is that you ought to be too big
to get caught in any of those hooks.
As a Christian, you ought to be big
enough to take in all the good that
they can give you, but be bigger than
all of it.
If those who take the word bishop and
then form an Episcopal form of government out
of it, we won't condemn them, and we'll
thank God for all of them, and you
can hardly go through a service but what
you sing a hymn by some Episcopal bishop.
So it's all right.
Or if over on the other side there's
the Presbyterian form of government, they're ruled by
elders, why, you're not going to complain about
that because you can hardly pick up a
devotional book or sing a hymn but what
you find a Presbyterian in it.
Of course, the Methodists were Episcopal in their
form of government, and for years were known
as the Methodist Episcopal Church.
Now they're called simply the Methodist Church.
Episcopal meant referred to their form of government.
So that an elder and a bishop in
the Scripture seemed to be about the same
thing, and I wondered if I might not
be extreme on this, but since I came
to church this morning in my study, I
checked it with the famous Smith Bible Dictionary,
and they say the same thing, that you
have two different words to mean about the
same office.
It's an office of some authority, but it's
not the final authority that the Episcopals give
it.
Then there's the word deacon, but we'll not
bring that up.
Deacons were supposed to be young men, and
we're not, so far as I know, dealing
with it here.
The word deacon is not synonymous with bishop
or elder.
They were the ones who did the work
around the church, that is, they served tables
and all that sort of thing.
You remember that when Ananias and Sapphira died,
you remember who carried them out?
The young men carried them out.
That's in the 5th chapter.
Then in the 6th, those young men were
ordained, laid their hands on them, and they
became officially deacons in the church.
But there are other offices.
There's that of apostle.
Then there is the gift of the pastor
and the gift of the different gifts that
we've talked about here at great length in
times gone by.
Now, to be blameless, as God's steward, about
whom are we speaking then?
Well, we're speaking about anybody who holds an
office in the church.
And if it's true of them, it certainly
ought to be true of every one of
God's children.
God has no double standard.
He does not say, now you saints are
supposed to be very, very pure, and from
the saints we draw our priesthood.
Well, God wants all of his people to
be holy, and anything said here about an
elder also should apply to the newest convert,
or as soon as he can develop and
grow in spirituality, at least the standards there
for him.
Now, blameless is God's steward.
A man hasn't anything to give.
He's a dispenser of God's work.
He's God's steward, and he's to be blameless.
And I might say that it doesn't say
faultless.
There's been no faultless person that ever lived.
I think Adam was the only faultless man,
and he couldn't have been faultless or he
wouldn't have fallen.
But faultlessness is not to be looked for,
not to be looked for.
For instance, oh, who could we think of
here for a moment?
Take a man like Jonathan Edwards.
A couple of articles about him in our
magazine now.
But take that man.
He wasn't a faultless man.
He was a man who made mistakes.
And though he was probably the greatest evangelist,
second to Finney, that ever touched the American
shores, he nevertheless made so many blunders that
they actually threw him out of his church
on one occasion, and he was in trouble.
He was not a perfect man, not a
flawless man, but he was a blameless man
in that he never did anything but what
he did with a high, pure motive for
the glory of God.
And so God wants us not to be
flawless but to be blameless.
The Lord will overlook flaws in us if
he finds consecration to the death and a
willingness to serve him and be his steward
blamelessly the best we can.
The Lord will overlook flaws.
Well, now there are about 14 things that
he said that an officer in the church,
and I don't care what office it is
you hold, if you are in any wise
a leader within the church.
This applies to you, and it also applies
in its moral connotation to every true Christian.
First thing about this man that's mentioned was
that he was to be the husband of
one wife.
That is, he was to be a monogamist,
which means he was to have one wife
and not have a cluster of them as
they did in many parts of the world
then and as they do in many parts
of the world now.
And Crete being the kind of place it
was and being a melting pot for every
sort of nationality, philosophy, religion, and race, I
can understand how monogamy and the easy getting
rid of one wife and taking up of
another was common there.
It was accepted, and Paul said, now we're
introducing a standard of morals infinitely higher than
anything known in Crete.
And while he didn't press it, he put
it down as a rule.
He said that if any be blameless, the
ruler, the bishop, the elder must be blameless
in this, that he is a monogamist, an
auto-polygamist.
He is the husband of one wife.
Somebody asked a Mormon missionary about this, and
he said, well, he said, that means at
least one wife.
But what it says here is not at
least one wife, but it says one wife.
That's it.
The leader in church affairs, no matter what
he does, if he's before the public and
the public takes him as an example, he
must understand that he owes it to God
and to the faith and to the people
that he is to be right in this
particular.
Then, two, he's to keep a decent house.
It says here, having faithful children not accused
of riot or unruly.
And I got a smile out of reading
Wesley's translation of this.
He says, having faithful children not accused of
luxury or unruly.
Wesley was a great believer in a stern,
lean way of serving God.
He didn't believe in any excess fat, any
excess anything.
So he put, instead of the riot, he
put the word luxury in there.
He thought it was close as he could
get to the Greek, he thought.
So what does it mean here?
Some people have been so conscientious about this
that if all their family wasn't converted, they
wouldn't serve in the church.
They've said, no, I wouldn't serve because my
family's not all converted.
Well, now, I can't make that mean this.
I can only make it to mean that
the man who is given position in a
church should not have a reputation of running
a loose house with his children coming in
at all hours, drinking and smoking and rioting.
The Christian home should be a decent place
to live.
And if you can't get them all born
again, why, at least you can say to
them, as I've said, said a hundred times
to mine, our member, the rules of the
home are such that if you're staying under
the roof, you obey the rules.
There are some things we don't do here.
No dancing here, no smoking here, no drinking
here, no bad language here.
This must be a decent home, a clean
place.
I believe that it's this that he has
in mind that, for instance, an elder in
a church who has lost complete control of
his family.
And his wife pushes him around like a
carpet sweeper, and his family won't listen to
him.
And he's pushed around, and they come in
at all hours, and the place reeks with
smoke and is accurate with drink.
Even though the man may be a good
man and weep long hours in prayer over
this, he ought not, nevertheless, ought not to
be in a place of leadership because people
are likely to judge him by his house.
And it says here that he's not to
have a riotous house nor an unruly house,
but that his children should be faithful and
not accused of riot or unruly.
What goes on in the hearts of his
children he can't help, but he can help
what goes on in his home.
And the man who hasn't got enough gumption
to see to it that his home is
right hasn't got enough of what it takes
to be a leader in the church.
For it takes not only soft spirituality to
be a leader in the church, it takes
an ability, as I'm going to say tonight,
to say no and yes.
I'd like to break into my sermon right
here and say that tonight I'm going to
talk and I'm going to address my message
particularly to young people.
Now, I want everybody to hear, but I'm
going to give a talk particularly to young
people from the Book of Proverbs, the voice
of the Proverbs, the voice of eternal wisdom
speaking through the Proverbs to youth.
So come.
But anyway, now the third thing about this
man is, in verse 7, he's not self
-willed.
That is, he's not a headstrong fellow who'll
have his way if it busts up the
whole church.
There's no sense in that, absolutely none.
Yet there are those who consider themselves, I
know a brother who, he considers himself right
in everything, as I do, and I suppose
you do, but he makes a point of
it and he'll fight it.
And even the tiniest little thing, if he
said, I think the chair should be set
at this angle, and a deacon said, no,
I think it should be set at that
angle, he'd make a church split out of
that, he'd divide over that.
He's going to tell every way, everything.
Well, that's being self-willed.
We had a word on the firm.
I don't know whether he used it in
cities or not, but we called a man
like that bullheaded.
Did you ever hear that?
We said he was bullheaded.
And the bullheaded man has no place in
the pulpit.
I suppose one of the most bullheaded men
that ever lived is Martin Luther.
But he had to get over that.
He had to come to a place where
he said, oh, Luther died and the Lord
lives within.
And though it was normal for him to
be strong and self-willed, he had to
humble himself and learn to work with people.
My entire ministry has been a self-contradictory
affair.
It has been this, a temperament that wants
to take orders from nobody and get along
with nobody, and yet a scriptural conviction that
I ought to.
And so I do.
So that my whole life has consisted, my
public ministry has consisted of walking on the
face of a man named Tozer.
My old English father used to, he was
so, so self-willed and so independent that
when he left the farm and came to
the city and worked for a boss, he
resented that boss telling him what to do.
He resented it till he died.
Didn't want anybody pushing him around.
Well, that's the way I feel by temperament,
but the doctrine and the spirit and the
teaching of the word tells me that I
can't get away with that, that I have
to get voted down sometimes, and that my
opinions sometimes have to get slaughtered.
I say on the New York board that
if they want something killed, just let me
make a speech in favor of it.
And, yeah, I and R.R. Brown, we
are two fellas, all we have to do
is get up and make a speech in
favor of something, they'll vote her flat.
Well, I have to learn the Lord does
that, keep me humble.
He does that, keep me down.
And so we're not to be self-willed,
nobody.
Self-willed Sunday school superintendent won't get along
with his teachers.
Self-willed teacher won't get along with his
class.
Self-willed deacon won't get along with anybody.
So not self-willed.
Then in verse 7, another one, not having
a bad temper, not soon angry.
I heard of, we had a preacher who
came to us, incidentally, from the Salvation Army
and became an Alliance preacher.
And he was an eradicationist.
That is, he believed that when you're sanctified
that the root of evil went out and
you were perfectly clean, as in before the
fall.
And he sat on his board one night
and some of the deacons brought up something
he didn't agree with and they got into
an argument and he lost his temper, got
red-faced and hot and sassed back.
And after that, oh, what am I going
to do?
He said, what am I going to do?
He said, I've taught eradication and sanctified clean
heart and here I got mad and lose
my temper and blow up on my own
board.
I never knew what the brother did.
I was always too embarrassed to press it.
Never found out.
But I do know one thing, that you
don't have to believe in eradication to get
delivered from bad temper.
A bad temper, no excuse for a bad
temper.
None in the wide world.
Let nobody say yes, but I'm Irish.
Doesn't make any difference.
God can take the hottest red-headed Irishman
that ever lived, calm him and cool him
and bless him and fix him.
Imagine Tom Hare getting mad and blowing up
in your face.
Can't think of it, you know.
You just can't imagine it.
Because God's done something for him, but that
red-headed fellow, which was red before it
was gray, and I can imagine that before
he was saved, if a pipe wrench slipped
off the pipe, he could yell out an
Irish oath like anybody else.
Because he had a temper, all Irish people
do.
But don't blame your being Irish.
Don't blame your being Dutch or something else.
If you have a bad temper, consider it
a blemish of character.
Go to God and deal with it.
Pray it through, weep it through, till God
delivers you from it.
Now as dear old brother Van Dyke used
to say, when the Lord filled him with
the Holy Ghost, he didn't take away his
temper, but he took the devil out of
his temper.
Said he didn't take the temper out of
me, but he took the devil out of
my temper.
The temper in a saw my father used
to boast about, he said that's a fine
-tempered saw.
Meant by that that that was a finely
-tempered piece of steel.
It was the quality of it lay in
its temper.
And so a man with a high temper,
he isn't to have that pulled out and
promptly be meek and spineless.
But he's to have it purified and consecrated,
so what used to be a temper that
would make him blow up, now is an
inward strength of character that makes him love
righteousness and hate iniquity.
He's stronger for that thing, but when the
devil is in it, he's just simply got
an evil temper.
And an evil temper always is bad, and
there's no excuse for it.
And if you've got one, you have no
excuse for it under God.
Nobody has any right to let himself get
elected to anything in any church if he's
got a bad temper.
And then he says in verse 7, he's
not addicted to alcohol.
Verse 7.
Not given to wine.
Given to wine is just a way of
saying it, I suppose.
He's not given to alcohol.
I don't think I need to press that
here.
I never preach against liquor.
You've never heard me preach a sermon against
liquor, but nobody around here drinks.
I hope.
If they do, they don't stay around here.
There are some places where the climate just
isn't favorable to certain kinds of life.
Just not favorable.
You can't raise oranges up down in Little
America.
And a drinking man couldn't stay around here
and disguise his drinking.
All the sin, sin he can chew, he
still wouldn't feel good around here.
His own heart would take him out of
here and somewhere else for long.
Well, in there's 6.
Verse 7, no striker.
This is almost funny, but you have to
remember who he was writing to.
He was writing to the Cretans.
And evidently the way some people got their
way in Crete was to use their fists.
That's actually what it means.
Now, it has no reference whatsoever to striking,
like when the international harvester or employees strike.
That's another meaning of the word.
What it means here is using your fists
to strike a blow.
Well, it's almost humorous, isn't it, to think
of an old deacon trying to get somebody
else to do what he's told and he
wouldn't do it and he just cuffs him
to get him to obey.
That seems to me that would be just
a little bit extreme.
Yet they tell me they tend to want
to do that on the foreign field.
Some of those heathen just converted and they
get into some little position in the church
and they get their way by using their
fists.
They have to learn that's no way to
do it.
No way to do it at all.
Thank God you don't have to cuff people
around to get obedience.
The church has found other ways to get
obedience.
Purgatory is one of them.
They say, I won't pray your grandmother out
of hell if you don't be good.
But it's about the same thing.
I don't know which should be the worst,
which morally before God would be the most
preposterous for me to say to McAfee, now
McAfee, go make that call or I'll black
your eye.
Or to say, go make that call or
I'll not pray your mother out of purgatory.
It's the same.
It's using force.
It's a different kind of force, but it's
force.
It says, don't be any striker.
Don't be any striker.
Well, and it says he's not to be
a lover of money, not given to filthy
lucre.
I can hear Paul, when he uses that
word, kind of throwing it off his tongue.
He never had any money.
And now money is one thing and filthy
money is another thing.
Lucre, of course, means gain and filthy lucre
means gain that's gotten filthily or that is
loved unduly and therefore becomes filthy.
You can earn a dollar or $10 honestly
and then get a moral attitude toward it
that makes it filthy.
So money is filthy only when you have
made it filthy by your attitude toward it.
But on the other hand, Paul writes elsewhere
what to do with money.
He said on the first day of the
week, let everybody bring his money in and
lay it up and give it to God
and have to give to those that are
in need.
And Jesus, our Lord, said, have we got
any tax money?
And Peter said, no.
He said, go down and fish.
And he went down and fished and got
a fish with money in its mouth.
There was no miracle about the fish having
money in its mouth.
The miracle was that Peter got that particular
fish.
For fish are known to grab anything shiny,
you know.
That's how fishermen catch them.
They throw down in a shiny spoon, they
grab it and get a hook.
But this one had grabbed somebody had accidentally
bent over, you know, to clean a boat
or something and out of his little pouch
had gone a denarius, a little shiny affair.
And the fish got it in his mouth
and it stuck and Peter got that very
fish.
That was the miracle.
Well, money's all right.
And the Lord used it and said, pay
our tax for all of us.
But it's filthy money.
A lover of filthy money.
And you know, here's the odd thing.
The less money you have, the less likely
you are to love money.
And the more money you have, the more
likely you are to love money.
So that filthy lucre becomes filthy when it
begins to pile up.
Now watch it.
And then hospitable.
I don't think I'll ever get through this
this morning.
I'll never get through this this morning to
do it any justice at all.
So let's break it off there and talk
about something else later.
I want to talk about hospitality and keeping
company with a good man and being sober
and just and holy and temperate and orthodox.
And that's too much.
I won't keep you here.
Keep you till 1230.
You don't want to stay till 1230.
So now let's ask God.
Let's pray.
When you want to pray for a preacher,
don't necessarily pray, Lord, give him success.
Pray that the Lord will help him to
be the kind of man that he ought
to be.
You want to pray for the church.
Pray that its leadership might be this kind
of leadership and then that kind of spirit
may be found everywhere among all of God's
people.
Delivered from lust and from noisy houses where
the neighbors don't think well of us and
from stubborn bullheadedness that tends to split churches
and cause trouble and alcohol or any other
kind of habits and the habit of using
your fist to get your way.
No way to do.
And certainly not to be a lover of
money.
Well, there'll be some more.
There'll be eight more of these and some
more things I want to talk about next
Sunday morning.
But that's the way a church should be.
A church should be an example to all
the neighborhood roundabout.
A church never ought to take on the
complexion of the neighborhood.
Never.
Never should take on the complexion of the
people among whom they are.
Never should take on the moral complexion of
the age in which it lives.
The church is as separated from the age
in which it lives morally as Jesus Christ
was separated from Rome.
The church should be a separated people and
all of us should be this kind of
meek and gentle and quiet and kindly and
generous people so that the world around about
us should know what kind of people we
are and the very darkness should make the
star of our church shine that much the
brighter.
We should have that kind of a church
from the newest convert to the oldest most
honored elder.
We should have that kind of a church.
Nobody should live a life that anybody can
point to and say now I don't like
the kind of life you're living.
I'll tell you this in close.
A man told me last night at a
meeting where I preach about a friend that
he'd led to the Lord who later backslid
for a short time.
He came back wonderfully and lived his wonderful
life and went to heaven but he had
a period of backsliding and while he was
in that period of backsliding he became a
tramp and was thumbing his way by the
roadside, a disheveled, unkempt bum of a fellow
and he was thumbing his way and a
man stopped and he said want to get
in?
He got in there, rode along.
He asked him, asked the driver where are
you headed for?
Well sir, he said I'll tell you boy
where I'm headed for.
He said I'm on my way to hunt
a man who can tell me how to
be saved.
He said I want to be saved.
I want to be converted and I don't
know how and I'm on my way to
see a fellow I think he can tell
me.
And this backslidden brother sat there and he
said I felt like a dog.
I didn't dare open my mouth.
He said I knew what to tell him.
I knew the verses.
I knew the way but I never opened
my mouth.
He said I sat there in shamed silence.
I was a bum and he said here
was a man hunting God and I knew
how to tell him to get to God
but I didn't dare spoil it by saying
here I got converted.
He said what would he have thought?
You know what would have happened?
That man would have turned his back on
Christianity nine chances out of ten to hear
a man say I'm a Christian and then
look at me an unshaven bum and yet
I'm a Christian.
No.
But if that young man had been a
real Christian a real Christian had just been
thumbing his way to school or off somewhere
young fellas sometimes do happy face and clean
he could have told that driver you don't
have to go any further.
I can tell you how to meet God.
I can tell you.
You don't have to drive another foot.
I can tell you right here.
But he was wise enough even though temporarily
in a state of backsliding he was wise
enough not to tip his hand and let
this other man know that he had been
a Christian.
And if you've got to always be covering
up your Christianity for the way you live
what you need is a revival and you
need it quick and you need it bad.
We ought to live such perfectly clean open
lives everywhere we go on buses, trains, at
work, everywhere so that when we get into
a religious conversation we won't be afraid to
shame our testimony by the way we live.
Amen.