We are studying Titus together these mornings, and
beginning with verse 6, Paul says, Teach young
men likewise, and exhort them to be sober
minded, in all things showing thyself a pattern
of good works, in doctrine showing uncorruptness, gravity,
sincerity, sound speech that cannot be condemned, that
he that is of the contrary part may
be ashamed, having no evil thing to say
of you.
Now as you know, without intending to do
it, but because it seems a natural development
of the text, I have over the last
three Sunday mornings that I have preached here,
preached on temptations peculiar to older men, another
sermon on temptations peculiar to older women, and
the last Sunday morning, temptations peculiar to young
women.
This morning, temptations peculiar to young men.
This is not to be sensational, but because
it's here, and that seemed to be the
easiest way to get at it.
Now we want to talk a little about
the temptations peculiar to young men, and I
want to be understood as being 100%
serious here, and I don't want any remarks
from anybody, or any kidding, or nudging anybody
in the ribs and say that means you.
The Holy Ghost is talking here, and we'd
better take it pretty seriously.
We'd better get pretty serious about the instructions
given by the Holy Apostle as he was
moved by the Spirit of God.
Now how I arrived at this little list
that I'm going to give you briefly, of
temptations peculiar to young men, one, by experience,
and two, by observation, and three, by reading
and by talking to young men and having
them come and tell me their woes, and
the fourth, by examining Paul's letters to young
men.
Paul wrote three letters to young men, 1
Timothy, 2 Timothy, and Titus.
Those are called the pastoral epistles.
They might also be called the epistles to
young men, because they're addressed to two young
men, two to Timothy, one to Titus.
We're dealing with the one to Titus today.
Now I want to mention the list.
I only have six here.
I suppose I'll dig up a seventh one
if I'm going to be a good fundamentalist.
But there are six here that I notice.
You may have a different list.
The first one is laziness.
Paul said, stir up the gift of God
that is in thee, and he addressed that
to Timothy.
And here to this man, he talked about
good works.
He said, show yourself to be a pattern
of good works.
Which, knowing my own self, and having had
sons in our own family, and being a
pretty keen observer of the human scene, and
reading a lot, and having a lot of
people come to me and talk with me,
I have concluded that laziness is one of
the greatest sins of young Christian men.
Now the average young man wants to work
enough to make a living and no more.
That's all.
He wants to work enough to make a
living, and he doesn't want to be bothered
with anything more than that.
He wants to play, of course, a lot,
and he wants to quit studying as soon
as he leaves school.
And the difference between physical labor and mental
labor is very great, though they both take
energy and application, lead to exhaustion, and require
a lot of rest and refueling.
But the average American will agree to work
ten hours a day if you don't let
him know that he's got to do some
thinking.
Thinking is always harder than working.
Any man can push a lawnmower, or dig
a ditch, or drive a truck.
That's relatively easy.
But to do a little thinking is relatively
hard.
And the man of God here says, Stir
up the gift of God that is in
thee.
To Timothy he says it.
In other words, don't quit your studying as
soon as you get out of school.
The average person takes the path of least
resistance as water finds its way down a
hillside after rain, falling into every little crevice
and crack getting down the hill the easiest
way.
Now the human mind is fluid, but the
human mind shouldn't be a puddle of water
running down a hillside.
There should be a human will back of
it directing it.
Now that's bad enough for the average person.
That's why we're a race of morons.
We might as well admit it.
It isn't kind to say it.
But if somebody doesn't say something that's credited
to be unkind, we're just going to keep
right on until we become cabbages.
Cabbages sitting behind the wheels of automobiles.
That's what we are mainly now, cabbages.
We die of heart attacks and get all
sorts of diseases from lack of exercise.
Just cabbages.
And we have to have Time Magazine, Life
Magazine, and Reader's Digest, or we would, the
top of our head would cave in from
want of support for the simple reason that
we are not learning.
And we won't read and we won't study.
That's bad enough for the world, and that's
why we're a generation of morons.
But when we become Christians and are born
again and get over into the Kingdom of
God, it becomes infinitely more tragic when we
allow this to happen to us.
When we leave undeveloped the vast riches of
the soul, undeveloped completely the vast riches of
the soul, like a farmer who has 10
,000 acres of rich black loam, and all
he does with it is to have a
little garden half a block in size, and
all the acres and thousands of acres lie
there fallow, never produce anything but briars and
weeds.
The human beings are doing that.
God never intended it.
When he redeemed us, he redeemed our mentality.
And he meant that we should develop our
mentalities.
That's almost a bad word in the day
in which we live among Christians.
But nevertheless, you have it.
God saved your mind when he saved your
soul and saved your body too.
And he means that we should develop all
the resources that we have.
And yet the average Christian man is willing
to get old and shrink up and accept
suspended growth as normal when actually it's abnormal.
And it's tragic for everybody to live like
that, but it's much more tragic for the
Christian.
Stir up the gift of God that is
in thee, says Paul.
And elsewhere he rouses men to activity.
And the book of Proverbs is a book
more or less devoted to getting people up
off their easy chairs and onto their feet
and onto their knees and then up onto
their feet in order to work.
But the average person just won't.
Here's a newspaper lying here and a good
book lying there.
And we just can't bring ourselves to read
the good book.
Moody Bible Institute put out under the sponsorship
and editorship of Wilbur Smith a series of
books that they called the Wycliffe series, Wycliffe
Library.
They were good books.
But do you know what happened to that
series?
Do you know what happened to that library?
They had to suspend publication.
And the former head of Moody Publications told
me that they were not moving.
They're lying on the shelf.
What's moving?
Religious fiction.
That's moving.
Religious fiction.
Or a wild and wooly blood and thunder
tale of some missionary that got killed.
They'll read that and they'll milk that for
all that it's worth because it thrills them.
But to do a little reading, people just
won't do it, a little thinking, laziness, mental
laziness.
Now you don't have to believe me, young
fellow.
You can smile and shrug and make a
quip if you want to about this.
But just as sure as two and two
add up to four, just as certain as
the blue sky arches over this city this
morning, just so certain you've either got to
stir yourself or get old and shrink up
and settle down to become a dried up
cabbage.
You'll get married.
You'll have two or three or four children.
And you'll have a car which you'll keep
turning in on another one and staying always
in debt.
And you'll get along, but you'll just get
old and you'll dry up.
It'll happen, and when it's all over, this
magnificent machine called the mind which God has
given you, you'll be feeding into it nothing
but moronic pictures and capsule bits of reading
you borrow from the cheapest magazines.
Now the second temptation peculiar to young men
is impulsiveness.
This may seem to contradict the other, but
it does not.
That is, a man's very health and high
spirits, young man, works against him.
He's constantly tempted to do things impulsively without
thinking them through.
Paul said therefore to Timothy, Lay hands suddenly
on no man.
Why did he say that?
Now lay hands on a man didn't mean
to treat him rough.
It meant to ordain him.
And Timothy was there to pick out men
that the church felt were equipped for the
ministry and ordain them.
And Paul had noticed that Timothy tempted to
ordain his friends or get all blessed up
about somebody and ordain him before he had
time to prove him.
So he said, Don't do that, Timothy.
Watch it.
Lay hands suddenly on no man.
Let every man prove himself.
Now a temptation of young men is to
act on impulse and waive the labor of
mature deliberation.
Watch it, young man.
And particularly the big steps.
There are certain big steps.
What kind of work you're going to engage
in for a lifetime or whether you're not
going to engage in any, but just hop
around from job to job, which God forbid.
Another big job is where you're going to
live.
Another big task, I mean, to discover and
determine.
Another one is your marriage.
There's so much impulsive marrying these days that
there's a tremendously high rate of divorce.
And it comes from impulse.
They just act on impulse.
Now that doesn't mean that these people are
not lazy.
You can be lazy and impulsive.
In fact, you can be too lazy to
deliberate and think things through and be forced
to act on impulse.
Now watch that.
Watch it.
You say, Are you wanting to screw an
old man's head down on my shoulders?
No, God forbid that I should screw an
old gray-haired head down on your young
neck.
But I'd like to have you listen to
the Holy Ghost and lay hands suddenly on
no man and do nothing else suddenly.
But take it easy and think things through
and wait on God.
When Jesus would do that which turned out
to be one of the most strategically important
acts of his life apart from his redemptive
work on the cross, that is, choosing his
disciples, you know what he did?
He spent all night in prayer.
Well, he had them all around him there.
He saw fine young men everywhere and he
might have said, Well, I'm embarrassed to know
who to choose.
Look at them here, great droves of fine
young Jews.
But he went to his father and spent
one night asking his heavenly father to make
him wise enough to know who the real
disciple should be or the apostle.
So after a night in prayer, he called
unto him his disciples and picked out his
twelve.
So if even the very Son of God
who had to take his time and move
with deliberation, I recommend that you learn it.
Acting on impulse will get you in trouble.
Well, in their self-indulgence, there's the third
thing that a young man's tempted to do.
So Paul said, Be sober and endure hardness
and be temperate.
Those are the words in Timothy and Titus.
Be sober and the translators, they can't get
together on the word sober.
They say reserved or self-possessed or temperate
or cautious, and it means all of those
things.
At least the translators throw in all of
those words.
And endure hardness, he said.
Now, self-indulgence is, we're tempted, a young
man's tempted to this probably more than others.
And now, how does this self-indulgence, and
where does it show itself?
Well, it manifests itself in three directions.
It manifests itself in sex, food, and pleasures.
Pleasures of body, mind, and soul.
I'm going to deliberately pass over the first
for the reason that some of you want
me to discuss it.
And all I would do if I did
discuss it at any length would be to
embarrass the tender-minded and feed the suggestions
of the carnal-minded.
And I don't want to do either.
I only want to remind you that God
made you and he built sex into your
disposition.
And self-indulgence is going to harm and
do terrific harm.
We'll talk about food.
I know young men ask to eat more
than an older man, but I'm a little
shy of the fellow who is proud of
being a chowhound, always.
Every company, every barracks had a chowhound in
it when I was in the service for
a short time.
The fellow who was known to be first
in line and went around for seconds three
times.
He was the chowhound.
Well, my friend, that's cute, and it's always
an object of fun, and it's finally laughed
at so much or about so much that
it becomes, after a while, it becomes quite
the thing.
But let me remind you, most solemnly young
fellow, a chowhound now and a fat old
cabbage 20 years from now.
And you can't escape it, and you might
just as well accept it.
And if I have a lot of you
go out mad, go out mad.
I just want to tell you, self-indulgence
will get you.
I said up at Ottawa in the pre
-council service that what we needed was lean,
muscular godliness.
And the poor fellow who was the publicity
man missed me altogether, and it's appeared now
in the religious news press stuff that I
said that we were too lean in our
Christianity.
What I said was we weren't lean enough.
What I said was that we were too
fat, and we had too much grease.
We needed a lean godliness.
I always pity people who get quoted in
the papers because you never know whether they
said it or not.
Never condemn anybody for anything you read in
the newspaper.
A few times I get quoted and never
get quoted right.
So remember that we need leanness and muscularliness,
muscularity, instead of fatness.
Then there are the pleasures of the mind
and of the soul.
Pleasures, just fun, just fun.
Remember what happened in Rome in the old
days?
Those cynical Roman emperors knew this.
They said the public wants two things, bread
and circuses.
Give them that and you can control them.
Give them that and that's all they want,
bread and circuses, food and fun.
So self-indulgence ate like termites at the
heart of the Iron Empire until when the
Goths and Vandals came down from the north,
tough muscular men who lived off the land
and who slept on the ground, tough muscular
men, they smashed into the Roman Empire and
it collapsed like an eggshell.
America is the land of bread and circuses.
We'd vote for the devil with three horns
if he'd get two and a half cents
an hour more in our pay and keep
the prices down so we can eat enough
to get too fat.
That's the spirit we're living in now.
And I haven't a word to say to
the world, let the world do that.
The only message I have for the world
is repent, come unto me all ye that
labor and are heavy laden, but I'm preaching
to people who are supposed to be Christians
and I warn you that we can borrow
from the world an excessive love of bread
and circuses and collapse as a result.
Protestantism in America today is so shot through
and through, so honeycombed with self-indulgence, that
if Russia took over, we'd collapse.
We haven't got enough internal strength to stand
up.
I remember what Franklin Roosevelt said, I don't
often quote that man, but he said this
and I remember it well.
He said, it's better to meet death on
your feet than to live on your knees.
And I still believe that, I still believe
it.
I believe it's better to live free Americans,
die free Americans, than to grovel on our
knees.
But if we continue to glorify bread and
circuses, we'll get so soft and spongy and
brittle, that we'll cave in when the time
comes.
Look what happened to France, poor France.
Second World War, Maginot Line was going to
protect her.
The Germans leaked the Maginot Line and those
blubbery, overfed, oversexed, over-fun, loving Frenchmen
threw up their hands and said, uncle, uncle.
And you think it can't happen here, but
it can happen here.
So let's watch it.
Watch self-indulgence.
Better be lean and muscular and self-possessed
and sure of yourself than to be soft
and spongy and in love with fun.
Then there's love of money.
Love of money.
Look what it did to people back there.
Look at Jacob.
Jacob wanted his brother's birthright, which meant his
brother's goods, and he got them.
But look what he got with them.
Balaam wanted the riches Balak could give him,
and he got it, but he died fighting
against God's people.
Judas, for 30 pieces of silver, sold the
Lord of Glory.
The rich young ruler said, what must I
do to be saved?
And when Jesus told him to give up
his money, he sadly went away.
So far as we know, never came back.
And all down the years, in the Bible
and since Bible times, you'll see what a
terrible thing love of money is.
Some people say money's the root of all
evil, but the Bible didn't say that.
Never said it.
You show me where the Bible says that
money is the root of all evil, and
I'll buy you dinner.
First person, of course, that comes gets the
dinner.
The rest wouldn't.
But know what the Bible says is that
the love of money is a root of
all evil.
It doesn't say that money is the root
of all evil.
Not even Paul could make a statement like
that stand, because the Donnys know nothing about
money, but they certainly know plenty about evil.
And a man may have not a dime
in his pocket, and yet may be full
of iniquity.
No, money's not the root of all evil.
The love of money is a root from
which all evil may spring.
That's what the Bible truly says.
Then there's pride.
Watch it, young fellow.
Pride of strength.
Your strength is pretty small.
You're proud of your athletic ability, your prowess.
Isn't it pathetic that when a baseball player's
32, they call him an old man?
Isn't that pathetic?
Strength pretty soon fades out on you, young
man.
There's a little word called ephemeral, and it's
always had a strange fascination for me.
Ephemeral.
It comes from the word ephemerid, and the
word ephemerid is the name of a fly,
a fly that lives only a few hours.
If it is hatched in the morning, it
dies before the sunset.
It lives a day, sometimes not a full
day.
That's an ephemerid.
And from that we get our word ephemeral.
The strength of a man's legs is ephemeral,
for the day, for the hour.
And you'd better get rich in something that
won't die when the sun sets.
There isn't a man anywhere on the North
American continent, or on any of the nine
continents of the world, that has enough muscle
to compete with an ordinary blue-nosed mule.
Any Arkansas hee-haw mule out of the
bush has more strength in his one right
leg than any living man has in all
of his body.
And I choose, if I'm going to compete,
I choose to compete up on a level
where I don't have as my honorable opponent
an ordinary bobtailed mule.
So my young friend, if you're inclined to
be very proud of your strength, just use
your imagination a little and look forward to
the time when your voice is cracking and
you have no strength left.
David got him no heat.
You remember David the soldier?
He got so old and he got him
no heat.
Didn't have electric blankets in those days.
Poor old David.
Then there is the pride of knowledge.
And knowledge is pitifully small.
The reason a young man is so proud
of his knowledge is he hasn't lived long
enough to find out how little he knows.
And the reason an older man tends to
be a little more cautious in his appraisal
of his own knowledge is he's been around
long enough to find out the number of
things he'll never be able to know while
the world stands.
Levity is another one I'm through.
Levity.
Paul exhorts us here, the young men here,
to gravity and sincerity.
You remember that?
Gravity and sincerity.
Now a sense of humor, as I've said
many times, is a healthy thing.
It is a healthy thing.
Missionaries testify to the value of a sense
of humor on the field.
If you're caught somewhere and have to drink
muddy water or somebody brings you an egg
that when you open it, it smells to
high heaven, there are two ways to take,
for a missionary to take that.
One is to take it seriously and be
hurt by it and pity himself.
The other way is to laugh long and
loud and they do the second.
They get rid of all these foolish things.
There's the missionary who told of the woman
once among the Orient.
She started to cook dinner for them and
she noticed that the vessel in which she
was going to boil the potatoes wasn't clean,
so she spit on the edge of her
apron and wiped it out, so it was
clean.
And the missionary that told her told her
with a rollicking good humor.
He had taken it right.
I remember another missionary now in heaven who
used to tell about sleeping on stone beds
in China, brick beds in China.
He said he never thanked God so much
in his life he had two sides.
He said because when one side got practically
worn out and tired, he said he could
turn over and rest it and let the
other side take it.
Now that's using your sense of humor right.
That's using it right.
And I don't say we must walk around
looking sober and never have a pleasantry.
No, I don't.
You know well, know better.
I don't have to defend myself on that.
But I will say this, that it is
a destructive thing when it gets control of
a man.
If a man controls his sense of humor,
it's his servant.
When it gets in control of him, he
becomes its slave.
And I have known ministers who got the
reputation of being funny and they're never quoted
for anything except something funny they said.
I pray to God Almighty that he'll let
me be right and say something that's serious
that I can be quoted for something serious
that I've said.
I'm not talking about ministers now for the
moment though Titus was a minister.
But I have noticed that there's hardly a
group of young Christians anywhere but what has
at least one shallow-brained clown who imagines
himself a born humorist who gets his ideas
off the radio and out of readers' digest,
but nevertheless reconditions them and uses them on
the Christian group of young people with the
joke and the quip and the story and
the pun and the double meaning until it's
practically impossible for some young people's groups ever
to get serious because they've got the self
-anointed clown there, the fool, court fool with
his cap and bells, keeping everything funny.
He thinks he's the life of the party,
he's the bore of the world.
Such persons, thank God there are not many,
but they're enough to ruin the average young
people's group any time, of course, except when
they're actually having a service.
And even then, some of them can't keep
still.
Never permit the conversation to get serious.
There are some serious things happening in the
world, boy, and you'd better gear into them
now while you can, while you're intelligent and
alive and healthy enough to think them through.
You'd better leave the quips to Bob Hope,
let Robert Q.
Lewis be the clown.
You're a Christian.
You'd better be a serious, grave Christian.
Says gravity and sincerity.
The reader's digest have its fun.
I look it over, too, sometimes.
I even read the funny things in it,
occasionally.
But I am determined by the grace of
God that this deadly thing is not going
to ruin me.
This double meaning to everything that is said,
this pun, this quip, this joke.
We have a politician.
He can't get defeated by what he puns
about it.
He can't make a speech, but what he's
punning and joking continues.
And he is a smart cookie, without any
doubt.
And the stage certainly missed something when he
went into politics.
But I wouldn't vote for him, if for
no other reason, just because he's a clown.
I don't want a cap and bell in
the White House.
We've got enough of them in Congress.
Be sober-minded, says the Holy Ghost.
So the temptations that I see, young men,
are particularly peculiar to young men.
Laziness, impulsiveness, self-indulgence, the love of earthly
goods, big cars and cars without tops, pride
and levity.
You keep right on those six, and you're
a whole lot better off.
Now, I wondered yesterday, when I thought this
over, I wondered if any man was ever
free from the temptation, these temptations.
I wondered about Joseph.
We think so much of Joseph.
Don't you suppose that there were lots of
times when Joseph was tempted to just lie
down, fold his hands under his head, and
just let the world go by?
He didn't do it, though.
So that's why it was Joseph.
Don't you suppose there were plenty of times
when Daniel was tempted to act impulsively and
without waiting on God, but he didn't do
it.
He prayed it through and got wisdom from
God and stood up before kings.
Don't you suppose there would be a time
when, say, Nehemiah was tempted to be self
-indulgent and let himself go and have fun
while it was day, because the night comes
when no man can eat?
Well, he didn't do it, and so he
led Israel back and built the walls of
Zion.
Don't you suppose there were times when Stephen
had the temptation?
Don't you suppose he, as a young man,
dreamed of marrying that beauty queen and having
that beautiful house and having an estate and
all the rest, but he sat on that
temptation, conquered it by the grace of God,
and was a grave and serious man?
And even as a young man, they could
not stand against the wisdom and spirit by
which he spake.
Don't you think there were times when David
Brainerd tended to be proud of himself when
he flexed his muscles and looked in the
glass and said, Dave, you're a fine boy?
But Dave got that under his feet.
Don't you suppose there was a time when
Mary McShane and Samuel Rutherford were tempted to
pun and quip and be the clown?
I suppose so.
They were human beings.
Even Scotch people have sense of humor.
Maybe not as big, but they have it.
So don't you think these holy men, such
as McShane and Rutherford, don't you think they
had their temptations?
Yes, young man, they did.
But the proof that they conquered them is
in the fact that they have left to
the world the legacy of saintliness that they
did.
If they had not conquered them, they would
have conquered McShane and Rutherford and the rest.
So nobody's pleading for dour godliness.
I'm only saying, let's watch.
Let the conversation settle down to seriousness sometimes.
People never forget, as a young fellow, I'll
tell this on myself and then I'll close.
Never forget, when I was a young preacher,
I learned my lesson.
A young woman came to the house.
Oh, I think she was in her teens
yet.
She was a cute little fat thing, and
our children were around there.
She came over, and we just talked, and
I teased her.
And that's about all I did, was just
tease her.
I forget her name now forever, but I
remember teasing her.
And the kids were around there, and we
had a nice time.
And then, later on, I found that this
girl was in serious difficulty, spiritually.
And she had come to me for help.
But I was the life of the party.
I knew more quips and more jokes, and
so I had fun.
And after a while, she left.
And I never did help her.
I hoped she got help, but God Almighty
knows she didn't get from me.
And when I found how I'd failed this
woman, I prayed, I think I prayed, and
I certainly have tried to stop that kind
of deal.
That's the temptation of the young man.
He is the Mark Twain of the 20th
century.
Be serious.
Be grave.
Be sober-minded.
Rush into nothing.
Put a bridle on your appetites.
Don't yield to self-indulgence.
Stir yourself up, and get up off your
easy chair and get going.
Shake your head till your brain begins to
function.
Get some good books.
Read up on them.
Find out what God has for you.
Now, there it is, my brethren.
There it is.
There it is, young fellow.
You can dismiss me.
It's a gray beard.
And say, what is that fellow?
Well, he's been dead for years and doesn't
know it.
All right.
Have your fun.
Pun all you will.
But when it's over, it's either listen to
God or be one more cabbage.
And the Church of Christ is filled with
sanctified cabbages.
Vegetating.
Working enough to make a living.
They'll be on Social Security when they retire.
So let the world go by, and we'll
sit and grow sluggish.
God is going to raise up another generation
of Christians, I think, who will be different.
I pray so, anyhow.
Now, that's the temptations of young men.
Now, if I wanted to, my next sermon
would be on the temptations peculiar to the
working man.
But I'm deliberately not going to preach it.
Because in verse 9 it tells, and elsewhere,
about the temptations of working men.
But I'm not going to get involved in
that.
We're all working men.
Well, I guess that's all for this morning.
All right.