In the book of Titus, the second chapter,
two verses, nine and ten, he's exhorting the
man of God what to teach.
And he says, exhort servants to be obedient
unto their own masters and to please them
well in all things, not answering again, not
purloining, but showing all good fidelity, that they
may adorn the doctrine of God our Savior
in all things.
Now the Holy Spirit here instructs what he
reads in the King James Version, servants.
But I would remind you that we cannot
understand this properly except against the background of
the time in which it was written.
And when I first began to teach the
book of Titus, I mentioned, which you all
know, but it's necessary to bring these things
up if we're going to be intelligently speak
and hear, that Roman society was divided roughly
into three classes.
There were the patricians, the plebes, and the
slaves.
The patricians were, of course, the fathers, or
they, it was a name given to the
nobility.
They were the, usually the rich, who had
inherited the riches probably, and who were in
high places.
There were not many, but they were a
very important class in society.
And there were the plebes.
There were the plebeian class, bourgeoisie, I believe
they call that now, the middle class, the
class from which is drawn the shopkeepers, professional
men, businessmen, and persons persons who own the
little factories or little stores or anything of
that.
They weren't patricians and they weren't slaves, they
were the middle class.
Then there were the slaves, and they were
very plentiful.
Now at first, the majority of the Christians
were drawn from the slave class.
We might as well admit that and acknowledge
it to be so.
Some have complained that in India we go
among the outcasts, but there isn't anything to
worry about there because they did the same
thing in Paul's day and in Christ.
He drew, they drew their followers chiefly from
among the simple people at first.
Now here's what Paul was talking about when
he wrote to the Corinthians, and of course
Corinth was under the Roman Empire, and he
said this, you see your calling brethren, how
that not many wise after the flesh, not
many mighty, not many noble are called, those
would be patricians.
But God hath chosen the foolish things of
the world to confound the wise.
God hath chosen the weak things of the
world to confound the things which are mighty.
The base things of the world and the
things which are despised hath God chosen, yea,
and things which are not, to bring to
naught the things that are, that no flesh
should glory in his presence.
So that in Crete, as elsewhere throughout the
Roman Empire, the largest number of Christians was
drawn from the slave classes.
Now here we must step aside for a
little excursion into a by-path meadow and
note an accusation which is brought against Christ
and against Paul and against Christianity, particularly the
Christianity of the early times.
It is that Christianity adjusted itself to society
and even to slavery instead of rising up
to exterminate it.
They said Jesus taught obedience and Paul taught
obedience.
They should have rather taught that society should
be righteous and they should have risen and
rebelled against the unrighteous society and brought about
a complete change, a renovation of society.
Well now, the answer to this is very
simple.
It's so simple that it is amazing that
men don't see it.
Jesus our Lord said, my kingdom is not
of this world and he taught all through
his earthly ministry that he came not to
improve the world but to save men out
of the world.
He said in his high priestly prayer, I
pray not for the world but for them
that thou hast given me out of the
world.
The only responsibility our Lord told his church
that they had to the world was twofold,
to pay their taxes and be obedient unto
Caesar and render to Caesar only the things
that were Caesar's.
And the second one was to go into
all the world and proclaim the message of
forgiveness through Jesus Christ the Lord that disciples
might be won out of the world, baptized
and taught the commandments of Christ.
Jesus taught this plainly and he taught the
corrupting, the progressive corruption of human society till
it got so bad that when he comes
he'll hardly find faith on the earth, so
bad that it'll be necessary for God to
send judgment on the earth in the latter
days.
And he taught that he would finally return
and establish a purer society.
But you see the critics of Christianity say,
why do you not now try to establish
a pure society?
The answer is it is not yet time.
We are here not to establish a pure
society as Christians but to preach the gospel
to all the world until a people shall
be taken out of the world for the
name of Jesus after which he will return
and raise up the tabernacle of David which
was fallen down and he shall then be
king of the world.
And the 72nd Psalm tells us that there
shall then be a pure society established of
which the King Jesus Christ is the head.
And Paul taught the same thing.
He taught that evil men and seducers should
wax worse and worse until the end came.
He taught that even the church itself should
be corrupt and should backslide and no longer
follow the teachings of Christ until the end
when there should be a few left who
should be taken at his coming at the
time the dead are raised.
Now that's the answer.
Then notice this, my friends, that in spite
of the fact that the Lord said my
kingdom is not of this world, in spite
of the fact that he taught his believing
followers to be obedient to the world as
far as they could morally, and in spite
of the fact that he and all of
his apostles taught that they did not come
to improve the world, yet so powerful is
righteousness and so creative is godliness and so
with such fiery creativeness came the Holy Ghost
that even though our Lord did not come
to make the world better, still the secondary
effect has been in society in some areas
to make it better.
Look at the way they treated the sick,
for instance, before our Lord came.
They treated the sick as they treat them
now in the countries of which our missionaries
speak.
They believe they have devils in them and
some lance them, cut them with knives and
unsanitary knives, let the devils out of them.
Lepers were driven away into the wilderness at
the time of Jesus.
The insane were considered to be possessed with
devils.
The blind had no friends and the crippled
lay by the gates waiting somebody to drop
a dime in their cup.
That was the way they treated people before
Christ came.
But even though the purpose of the Lord
was not to better the world but to
save men out of it, looking forward to
a final universal and perpetual betterment of the
world, still it wasn't long until the kind
-hearted Christians began to look after lepers.
It wasn't long until the insane were treated
no longer as devil possessed.
It wasn't long until the blind had a
place to go and the crippled had hospitals.
Even by the fourth century this was true.
And then look at slavery itself, which is
the occasion for what I'm now saying, the
fact that our Lord did not nor did
he tell his apostles to attack slavery as
an institution.
Aristotle, the great Greek teacher, believed that slavery
was a normal and proper thing and that
the division of society into slaves and masters
was a normal thing, just as dividing into
men and women might be.
And when Plato wrote his Republic, he included
a slave class in his Republic.
The Stoics were indifferent to slavery.
They said it doesn't make any difference.
The slave is as high as his master
and the master as low as the slave,
and so they waved it off as did
the Epicureans.
But still, slavery began to disappear wherever the
gospel went and does to this day disappear
wherever the gospel goes.
You know the story of slavery in the
United States.
And while it was defended by some misled
churchmen, it went down before Quakerism and Methodism
and Christian writers and poets and preachers who
couldn't stand to see it.
And then there was the treatment of children,
particularly child labor.
When Christianity got abroad, it taught the purity
and honor of childhood.
Jesus, our Lord, had been the child at
his mother's breast.
And so child labor was abolished finally by
the groundswell of revival in England.
Well, so we might go up and down
the scale.
I think there are some preachers who've handled
this and gone into it more deeply.
But though it is true that this will
collapse and that from other directions there will
come the evil that will cause the world
to go down and perish in its own
rotten slough at the last, still and nevertheless,
the gospel cannot go throughout the earth without
making it better somewhere in some areas, even
though the purpose of the gospel is to
save men out of the world rather than
to improve the world.
Now, the spirit here speaks to what we
call employees.
And I might point out, my friend, that
if you work for somebody else, the reason
you're called an employee and not a slave
is that the gospel has been here and
you owe your name as employee rather than
slave indirectly to Christianity.
Don't forget that, just keep it in mind.
Now, the instruction itself.
He says, be obedient to your masters, you
who work for others.
Work so as to please them.
Now, I see nothing but what is right
in this.
I see this is good and right.
And he said, your moral conduct in your
work, don't talk back, he said.
Don't talk back if you're told to do
something or even if your employers are not
quite fair to you or rough with you.
Don't talk back.
And he said, don't purloin.
Purloining, I think is a very beautiful sounding
word.
You could rhyme it with something else and
have a poem.
But actually, it just meant steel or it
meant pilfer rather than steel, really.
It wasn't a grand larceny.
It was petty larceny.
It was the taking of small things.
Now, this is very interesting because the slave,
you see, had no rights.
The slave belonged, the Roman slave belonged to
his master, body and soul.
He was not responsible before the law except
for a few criminal things such as murder.
He owned nothing.
He could own nothing.
He could not sign his own name to
a paper.
He could not enter into contracts.
He could not vote.
He could not stand up and make himself
heard.
He was a property, a piece of property
that belonged to his master the same as
the cow and the donkey did or the
camel.
He belonged to his master.
And so says one historian, what he took
from his master was not considered to be
stolen but merely displaced because it would be,
it would simply be the pot stealing the
kettle.
It wouldn't be somebody on the outside stealing
from the master, but it would be one
who belonged to the master already taking something
else that belonged to the master.
Rather an odd situation, but that was the
way slavery was.
And of course, knowing human nature, you know
what they did.
They just pilfered for all that was in
it and prolonged all they could.
And the master had very little recourse.
But now comes Christianity.
And instead of rising up in fury against
the institution of slavery, which incidentally, as I
have said, indirectly finally destroyed, it said to
the individual Christian worker, don't steal from your
boss.
And if the argument was, as I used
to hear in the factory where I worked,
oh, they're rich.
What do they miss?
They don't miss five dollars.
Look, they're rich.
But the Holy Ghost says, you're not doing
this for your master's sake.
You're doing this for my sake.
You're doing it because you're a Christian.
Don't be a pilfer, even though you can
get away with it.
They no doubt took whatever was at hand.
It was common and no doubt widespread.
But when a Christian, when a slave became
a Christian, he took a new master.
And while he still worked for the old
boss, he took a new master altogether.
And that was one problem the early apostles
had to work out.
You see, the apostles got a bunch of
slaves together and said to them, now you've
changed bosses.
You no longer are under your earthly master,
but you have a master which is in
heaven, Jesus Christ the Lord, and you obey
him rather than your other master.
And of course, that could have been very
serious and was very serious sometimes.
And if you'll read the book of Philemon,
you will see a beautiful example of how
a slave was treated and how he was
converted and then sent back as no longer
a slave, but a son.
But the Christian, to the Christian, the Holy
Spirit said, no more of that.
You can get away with it and it's
accepted, but there's no more of it.
Now you're a Christian.
He said, and show all good fidelity, all
good faithfulness.
I wonder if there's anything like this left
in the world.
I wonder if any man exists, at least
down on the worker level, who has anything
like loyalty to his boss.
I don't think so.
It is now get all you can in
the shortest time you can and then go
out.
But they said, show all good fidelity and
be loyal to your master that you may
adorn the doctrine of God, our savior in
all things.
Now, don't you think that an honest, faithful,
polite, and efficient worker must have astonished those
masters when a man, instead of stealing, stopped
stealing, when instead of getting away with as
little work as possible, began to do a
good day's work, instead of turning angrily and
talking back to his boss, said yes, sir,
and went and did what he was told,
and instead of lying around drunk and would
have to be, have a pail of water
thrown on him to get him up and
get him to work in the morning, he
was up bright eyed and smiling.
Don't you suppose those unsaved masters must have
said, what happened to this man?
He's still my servant.
I still own him, but he's got a
strange, far away look in his eyes and
a joy that I've never seen before.
And not only that, he's honest.
He hasn't stolen a thing since he met
this man, Paul, and he's been completely faithful.
He's polite to me, no more talking back,
and he's more efficient than he used to
be.
He's one of my best workers.
Don't you suppose that that had a tremendous
influence upon the Roman masters?
And don't you think that that was the
softening up, which the Holy Ghost gave the
Roman empire finally, which finally adopted Christianity as
the state religion?
I don't know that was a good thing,
but that was one of the reasons, because
they could trust the Christian.
And so a slave, as John Calvin pointed
out, the wonder that a slave should beautify
the doctrine of God, adorn the doctrine of
God in all things.
How wonderful if it had been a patrician,
if it had been a man with a
laurel crown about his brow, or a man
with a long toga.
Why, many people might have said it'd be
expected that one of the nobility might adorn
religion, but this was a common slave, a
chattel property who couldn't read and write often,
and who didn't own anything and couldn't own
it, who couldn't enter into contracts with anybody
else.
And yet God says, beautify my gospel, and
spoke to slaves.
Isn't that a wonderful thought?
I think it's a wonderful thought.
Now, if Christians lived as Christians should, and
it became known abroad, let's use our imagination.
It takes quite an effective exercise of our
imagination, but let us imagine that all Christians
should suddenly begin to live like Christians, that
they should, as the unsaved atheist, or as
the atheist said, Quakers came and astonished the
world by living like Christians.
Let's suppose that all Christians should begin to
live like Christians, the way Christians should.
Employers found it out, and they would find
it out very soon.
Do you know what would happen?
There would be a great clamor after Christians
to work for them.
They would want them because they were polite,
honest, faithful, and efficient, because they could trust
them with anything, anytime, anywhere.
They knew they wouldn't lie, they knew they
wouldn't pilfer, they knew they wouldn't watch the
clock and coast by until it's time to
punch out.
They knew they'd know that, and so everywhere,
Jews and atheists and unbelievers everywhere would be
looking for Christians to work for.
But we Christians have so betrayed our Lord
in our living that we're not trusted because
we're Christians.
They demand the same references for us as
they do for an atheist.
An employer, General Motors, or First National Bank,
or whoever it might be, when they want
to employ somebody, we ask for a reference,
just they have it to do, it's right,
they should do it.
But you can't write across the top, he's
a Christian, and sign it, they say, oh
well, we've hired Christians before, and they ran
off with the payroll.
We've had Christians working for us before, and
they were the dirtiest mouth people we had.
We've had Christians working for us, and that
doesn't mean anything, we want to know, do
they drink, are they honest, and do they
live right at home, do they pay their
bills, and have they ever been in prison?
They put that down, we've got to answer
those questions.
When a Christian girl from our church wants
to get a job as a stenographer, and
she gives me as a reference, though she's
a Christian and gives a pastor as a
reference, I don't have any one in mind,
but I've given many a reference, I have
to write and fill out a questionnaire two
or three pages long, telling about the character
of this girl when she's already said, I'm
a Christian and this is my pastor.
Now it isn't the individual Christian's fault, it's
a general breakdown in the moral quality of
Christianity.
If Christians lived, I say, the way Christians
should, we'd be clamored after and sought out,
and our service would be at a premium
everywhere.
Righteousness, he says here, the reason I ask
you to do this is that you may
adorn the doctrine.
My friend, righteousness is always the best adornment.
Godliness always beautifies, and it beautifies whether it
is in a slave or in a patrician,
whether it is Lady Huntington or whether it's
Billy Bray, whether it's Holy Ann or Sophie
the Scrub Woman, or whether it is Suzanne
Wesley, whether it's at the top or at
the bottom in the social scale, godliness always
beautifies.
Whether it's an emperor or a slave, always
righteousness is a beautiful thing.
And the world is waiting around, this cynical
tough world that will wink and raise its
eyebrows, but nevertheless is inwardly scared and uncertain
and ready to believe, waiting for an example,
the beauty of the Lord our God.
Let the beauty of the Lord our God
be upon us, prayed the old man, and
the work of our hands establish thou it.
Nothing is more beautiful than righteousness, nothing.
And if it were found among us, it
would run before us like a fiery flame
and make a way for us.
It would plow the field for the seed
that we plant.
It would be our letter of reference.
Paul said he didn't need any.
His life was his letter of reference.
But righteousness and godliness would go before us
like two faithful heralds and say, here comes
a man of God, here comes a woman
of the Spirit, here comes a Christian.
And though the world in its fury might
rush upon us and slay us, as it
has rushed upon and slain many thousands and
hundreds of thousands of Christians down the years,
it would be like Saul who helped to
kill Stephen and then came under such blistering,
shocking, terrifying conviction and self-accusation that it
wasn't long before he was converted by the
very presence of the Lord.
So our very martyrdom would bring some to
Christ, the story of the church down the
years has been a story of good people
among bad people, honest men among liars and
thieves, but it's also been a story of
martyrs and the very soldiers that cut their
head off being converted after them.
We find it in history where a soldier
came in white and trembling and said to
the Christian, I'm sorry, forgive me, but I'm
under orders.
Then executed the Christian and then crawled away
to lick his wounds until finally he turned
to the same Jesus on whose lips, the
same Jesus who had been on the lips
of the dying man and gave his heart
to God.
Oh, it sounds like an old religious hackneyed
expression, but my friends, it's still true that
what we need is godliness and true holiness
as adornments for the gospel.
Beautiful buildings now in this day of monetary
boom, beautiful buildings are being built, some of
them too ugly for mule, but some of
them very beautiful and expensive.
Nobody thinks anything now running up into the
hundreds of thousands and even three quarters of
a million dollars to build a church to
adorn the doctrine, and yet that same church
may be filled with bats and owls before
too long.
No bat or owl or flatworm or vampire
ever roosted in the heart of a holy
man, and it doesn't cost anything either.
You don't have to ask a congregation for
25 years to keep paying for a holy
man.
Adorn the doctrine, beautify it, beautify it.
You testified to it, you witnessed to it,
now beautify it.
Set a crown of adornment upon it, drape
it in the lovely robes of righteousness by
your own life.
That's the only way you can do it.
So whether you're an employer, an employee, a
housewife, student, whatever you may be, this is
all for you.
Live as a Christian should live, and the
world will recognize moral beauty when it sees
it.
And even though it may will not be
converted, it'll be humbled and silenced, for the
beauty of the Lord our God is still
the most beautiful thing in all the wide
world.
Amen.