Titus 1:15

Titus chapter 1, verses 15 and 16, we’ll be looking at the first part of verse 15 for our text and study tonight. Under the pure, all things are pure, but under them that are defiled and unbelieving is nothing pure. But even their mind and conscience is defiled. They profess that they know God, but in works, they deny him, being abominable and disobedient, and unto every good work, reprobate. May God bless to us His sacred and holy word. This evening, there was a famous preacher once had a clock on the church wall, which was known for its inability to keep time accurately. It was either too fast or too slow all the time. It never would be precise. It resisted all attempts to solve the problem. Finally, the minister decided he was going to put a sign over the clock. And he thought maybe it would do some spiritual good. The sign read, don’t blame the hands, the trouble lies deeper. It’s the same way when we look at people, the trouble, real trouble, lies deeper than what shows on the surface. as our text indicates tonight. When it comes to being pure in the sight of God, a lot of people don’t look below the surface. And because of that, this is why there’s a lot of superficial holiness that is being promoted rather than what really counts, and what really counts is heart purity. God does not merely look. on the outward appearance of man, he looks on the heart, and he knows what’s going on within you. He knows your motivation for whatever you do, whether you’re pure in heart or not. Now, Paul has been talking about the sins that he finds so prevalent among the Cretians, even those professing to be Christians among the Cretians. in verses 12 and 13. He knows that believing and living according to God’s truth is what promotes holiness of life. And yet the false teachers were saying things that were contrary to that. So Paul warns about giving heed the Jewish fables and the commandments of men, as we saw in verse 14 in our last study. These things end up. turning you away from the very truth that promotes holiness of life. That leads directly to what is true purity. And he begins to take this up here in verse 15. I want to speak tonight on the topic of all things pure to the believer. I’ll start with this. Who are considered pure in God’s sight? The text says, under the pure. Who are these pure people? Well, we have to realize there are those who have what we classify as artificial purity. The false teachers, for the most part Paul tells us, were from the circumcision. Verse 10. They promoted Jewish fables. Verse 14. These false teachers had trained, had been trained from their youth, from their childhood. In all the ceremonial laws and the Jewish traditions, a major problem was that the Jews attached a saving value to the ceremonial ordinances, which the law itself never taught, such as circumcision was part of your salvation. They did not see these things as shadows. as things that would portray the spiritual purity or the spiritual reality that God would have us have in our lives. And this would come, of course, through the person and work of Jesus Christ, the Savior. Those shadows would disappear. But even in the Old Testament, as we’ve repeatedly seen from Colossians, the circumcision was heart. Of heart was promoted. God talked about. about, you know, you’ve circumcised your flesh, but your heart is uncircumcised. Now, we add to this the refinement of the Pharisees who piled their own traditions, the commandments of men, on top of the law of God, and promoted it on an equal basis with the law of God. And so what we end up with is that they develop this complete system of salvation based upon outward conformity to God’s law regulations and the Jewish traditions. This is what was being promoted. So they base purity or impurity, being clean or unclean, if you would, solely on the externals of religion. You always washed your hands before you ate because you don’t want any defilement entering into you. You always would bathe after being with a mixed group of people in public. The marketplace. Gill tells us if the Pharisees touched but the garments of the common people, they were defiled. So they had to get a bath. They always immersed their purchased furniture and cups and brazen pots and kettles and so forth to purify them. He that buys a vessel for use of a feast of Gentiles, whether molten vessels or glass vessels, they dip them in the waters of the labor, and after that they may eat and drink in them. You never eat with publicans and sinners, because that would defile you. You never partake of any unclean foods forbidden by the mosaic law. So you don’t have pork and you don’t have shrimp. Some even demand a eunuch’s life because we read in the book of 1 Timothy 4.3, there were those that were forbidding others to marry. And we see this would be the idea that if you engage in sexual relations, then you must not be pure. Now, when people engage in these relationships, kind of things they think that they are pure in the eyes of God even when they’re engaging in all kinds of sinful activities otherwise as we see with the scribes and Pharisees and how Jesus pointed out the hypocrisy of much of what they were doing but they thought they were pure in the eyes of God. Now this kind of idea would certainly this ceremonial purity was certainly appealed to the cretaceans and it certainly has a appeal today. You know, we could talk about the Roman Catholic Church. Is purity really to be found by not eating meat on Fridays, which they used to do when I was growing up? That was a, you know, that was one of those sacrosanct things. You never should touch that. That changed. When you place ashes on your head, on Ash Wednesday, does that make you pure? Does partaking of the bread and wine of the mass really provide purity to help you obtain eternal life? Are priests and nuns pure, more pure at least, because they abstain from marriage? Are they holier than other people because they don’t marry? Does a little water in the head of a child actually wash away original sin and purify that child in God’s sight so that Adam’s guilt is completely removed from them? Can one be made pure by acts of penance? If I say X number Hail Mary’s, is that going to make me pure? If I engage in physical suffering, if I flog myself or whip myself, does that actually purify me? there’s nothing new under the sun. The things that we find in the Old Testament, these things, sadly, are still being promoted in many ways. This is artificial purity. Now, you notice what we want to talk about tonight, is redemptive purity. We want to talk about being pure in heart. The word here is Catharos, pure as being cleansed. Now if you read verse 15 carefully, you will notice that being defiled is closely associated with those who do not believe. Do you see that? What he says here in verse 15. Under the pure, all things are pure, but under them that are defiled and unbelieving, nothing is pure. You see how he connects that together? Faith in Christ is what he emphasizes in this chapter as being the means by one which one can be made pure in the sight of God because Christ alone can purify the sinner unto him that loved us and washed us from our sins in his own blood. That’s the key factor. Paul knew that real pured. is neither a matter of rituals nor of your own good deeds, because your good deeds are filthy rags in the eyes of God. For Jesus utterly condemned, you recall the artificial purity of the Jews, who thought that they were acceptable before God because of all these regulations and man-made traditions they kept. Here’s what he said. in Matthew 23, 27, and 28. Woe unto you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites. For you are like unto whiteed sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead man’s bones and all uncleanness. Even so you also outwardly appear righteous unto men, but within, you are full of hypocrisy and iniquity. You’re not pure in God’s sight. True purity in God’s sight is something that God alone, can bestow, and he only bestows it through the work of Christ. It’s never what you do for God that makes you pure. It’s what God does for you, through Christ, that makes you pure in his sight. Through Christ’s perfect obedience and through his sacrificial death. His totally sufficient work for sinners is received by faith alone. So the difference between the pure and the unpure is one. One is an unbeliever, and one is a believer. And this is what we find here. We believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and our same. Now, since only Christ can make you acceptable in God’s sight, all those who are outside of Jesus Christ, no matter how religious they are, no matter how often they go to church, so to speak, or engage in their religious activities and rituals, they are impure. I’ll make this personal. You are impure and defiled as an unbeliever regardless of how religious you are. That’s the bottom line here. Most of us know of John Bunyan and Pilgrim’s Progress. John Bunyan was a profane ex-soldier who, by profession, ended up being a tinker. he would fix, you know, pots and pants. That’s what he went around the neighborhood doing that on the streets of England. Who, as he himself declared, belched out oaths like a madman. That was John Bunyan’s past. So vile was his mouth that he tells us that even a very loose and ungodly wretch of a woman, protested that she trembled when she heard him swear and curse. He was that bad. He was brought under conviction of this sin many times, but he got no peace. He heard sermons preached, but he found no salvation. He considered just one of his sins, much worse than all the sins of everybody else. All his efforts at personal reformation failed miserable. as he tells us. But one day, as he was agonizing over the sins in his life, God called him to salvation. He was meditating, he tells us, in a field, and apparently he was meditating on Psalm 8511. Righteousness shall look down from heaven, and a thought came to him. Your righteousness is in heaven. He suddenly realized what that meant. His first thing, focus of attention completely shifted away from himself to Jesus Christ. He drew the conclusion, rightly so, that his righteousness was found in Christ and not in himself. It was at God’s right hand. It was before God, where he was secure from all the power of sin and Satan. And he saw that his acceptance was God with God was not based on his own good works or how much reformation he could do in his life. It all came down to Christ. It says Jesus Christ was accepted as the sinner’s representative. He was righteous in God’s sight in heaven. And that so was John Bunyan. This realization burst upon Bunyan’s understanding, and he realized. rejoiced in Christ. It was the gospel that saved him. They found acceptance with God for the worst of sinners through the person and work of Jesus Christ. Do you know anything about this inward, redemptive purity tonight? Or are you still attempting to please God by some type of outward artificial purity? Who are considered pure in God? the believers are considered pure in God’s sight, those who are pure in heart, made so by God through Christ. Secondly tonight, why are not all things considered pure for everyone? Well, the Bible tells us here, under the pure all things are pure, but under the defowed and unbelieving is nothing pure. Now when we look at creation, we know that all things, at least the material universe in which we live, was made pure. Since God made all things for himself, the whole creation could be pronounced very good by God. And thus all beings by their original creation were God’s good creatures. All rational creatures, angels and men, were originally created with enlightened understandings, upright wills, and sanctified affections. Even the devil himself, originally was in a state of purity and holiness as an angelic creation of the highest order. If we understand Ezekiel 28 correctly, a covering cherub. All the animals, the plants, all the earthly substances that God made, were created in a pure state. They served a good purpose. So God made man upright. And human beings, enjoyed a wonderful, pure, and good world. And we can even spend tonight, we can spend a lot of time meditating on the goodness and purity of our creator. Just thinking about his creation. But we want to talk about the fall. Because all things became corrupted by the fall of man into sin. With the entrance of sin into the world, impurity now plagues all mankind. Though I have found that God hath made man upright, but they have sought out many inventions. Ecclesiastes 729. Man looked to a new way of finding happiness outside of a relationship with God. They followed Satan’s lie, you recall. Well, you know, Satan told them, well, you’d be wiser. and happier than God made you if you would become a God yourself and eat off the tree that he forbids you to eat off of and so forth. So all were polluted by Adam’s sin. All mankind was in Adam’s loins when he sin. Sin not only affected man, but it affected man, but it affected everything outside of him. For the ground, the earth was cursed because of man’s sin. Paul tells us in Romans 820 and 22, for the creature or creation was made subject of vanity not willingly, for we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now. All creation now was brought under this corrupt state. Why did God provide the restrictions that he did in the mosaic law? Wherefore then servic the, the law was added because of transgressions. It was added to reduce what man would do sinfully. God declared many creatures as unclean, impure, and harmful to mankind. It was to teach man a lesson about man’s impurity. He provided offense to restrain man’s impure and rebellious heart. So all creatures, and actions are polluted and abused really in two ways. One, by being used by an impure person, and two, by being used by a person in an impure way or impure manner. Something you might consider indifferent when used or done by an impure person is corrupted. So what we find is that man’s, man in a sinful state, contaminates all that he touches. That is the problem. Now, if you look at your automobile, it’s made of metal, rubber, some composite material, fabric, uses fossil fuels, you know, oil, gas, there’s water and the radiator, there’s airs, and the tires. All these things are earthly substances or made from earthly substances, like plastic. In and of itself, you would think of a car as an indifferent thing. There’s no morality attached directly to the car one way or the other. Yet man’s heart uses an automobile in a wicked and perverse manner. Maybe it uses a getaway car at a bank robbery, or a murderous weapon to run down someone as a terrorist often do. Or the backseat of the car of the vehicle is used for sexual sin. Or to convey someone to a bar so they can get drunk. Or traffic and drugs, so you can be a drug runner or a drug runner for some organization. It may be a source of pride where you cruise around town and strut like a rooster, or drag race someone to prove that you’re the best, or an object of worship. where the car becomes everything to you. There was a man that was so attached to his car. He was actually, the car was buried with him when he died. You see what horribly impure creatures we are, not only are you yourself impure, but you pollute everything around you because you are impure. So the fall, all things became corrupted by sin. Now the restoration, all things returned to a pure state through Jesus Christ. Here’s what we read in Colossians 1, 20 through 22, and having made peace through the blood of his cross, by him to reconcile all things unto himself. To him, I say, whether they be things in earth or things in heaven, and you that were sometimes alienated and enemies in your minds by wicked works, yet now hath he reconciled in the body of his flesh through death, to present you holy and unblamable and unreprovable in his sight. By providing redemption for His people, the Lord Jesus Christ has made them pure in God’s sight. They have a new heart. They are pure in heart. As one who believes in Jesus Christ, you are now considered holy, unblameable, unreprovable, and unreprovable, and you’re standing before God in Christ. The creature or creation itself, whether we talk about something material like the land, we talk about animals, shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption, according to Romans 821, by Christ. Even the beast of the field, the stone and the wall, the trees of the forest, the birds of the air. Everything that makes a covenant of peace with one who is reconciled with God. Eventually, everything in heaven and earth is going to be reconciled to God. For all that is defiled, all that is impure is going to be removed. Remember what we read in 2 Peter chapter 3, that this earth is going to be purified by fire when Christ comes again. So why are not all things pure for everyone? Well, the fall of man. is what’s behind the corruption. Thirdly tonight, how are all things made pure for use by the believer? Under the pure, all things are pure. Now we have to realize there’s a restrictive use here of the word all. Paul does not mean that everything that he could possibly do is pure. Murder isn’t pure. Adultery isn’t pure. Threat isn’t pure. Paul’s not talking so much about human action, but rather things indifferent which in and of themselves are neither commanded nor forbidden by God. We talk about houses. We talk about lands. We talk about clothing. We talk about recreation. The marital status. Wealth, the internet, a rifle, a hairdryer, a washer, a pencil, a computer. In all of themselves, we could put them in a state where there’s no really moral attachment necessarily to them. So this verse that Paul mentions here really has to do with Christian liberty. 1 Corinthians 612, all things are lawful for me, but all things are not expedient. 1. Timothy 4.4. For every creature of God is good and nothing to be refused if it be received with Thanksgiving. 1 Timothy 6. 17. God giveth us richly, all things to enjoy. Now it doesn’t follow, of course, that to the pure, every action is necessarily good. You can use a gun to hunt for food, or you can use a gun to murder some. Pronouncing the name of God may either be good or bad. If it’s used in worship, then it’s a good thing. If it’s used in a curse, it’s a bad thing. The point is this. The believer made pure in God’s site by the Lord Jesus Christ can use all the material things of this world in an undefiled manner. So we have a restrictive use here of the word all. Now how may you rightly use all things? Let’s ponder this a moment. I want to you to look at Romans 14 verses 22 and 23. Romans 14 verses 22 and 23. Paul writes here, hast thou faith have it to thyself before God. Happy is he that condemneth not himself in the thing which he alloweth. He that doubteth is damned if he eat, because he eateth not of faith. For whatsoever is not of faith is sin. Now Paul here is saying that we should have a full persuasion in our mind about what we are using or doing the lawful use of things indifferent. is what he’s dealing with. For example, in verse 5 of this chapter, he says, one man esteemeth one day above another, another esteemeth every day alike. Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind. About how the day is going to be used. Look at verse 14. I know and am persuaded by the Lord Jesus that there’s nothing unclean of itself. But to him that esteemeth anything to be unclean, to him and it’s unclean. Whatever you do, you need to have a pure conscience or a good conscience before God in doing it. That’s what he tells us in verse 23. So that you can do this thing if you can do it without sinning before the Lord. If you eat squid, or if you go to a baseball game, or if you buy a car, or if you buy a car, you need to have a clear conscience before God about what you’re doing. In other words, you must evaluate all the things you allow yourself to do with an eye toward the Lord and what he says in his work. If your heart doesn’t condemn you, then you can enjoy these things, as he tells us in verse 23. The second thing I suggest is this. Use things in love toward others. Look at Roman 14, verses 14 and 15 here. I know I’m persuaded by the Lord Jesus that there’s nothing unclean of itself, but to him that esteemeth anything to be unclean to him it is unclean. But if thy brother be grieved with thy meat, now walkest thou not charitably. Destroy not him with thy meat for whom Christ died. Verse 21. It is good neither to eat flesh nor drink wine nor anything whereby thy brother stumblet or is offended or is made weak. So when he talks about destroying the faith of your brother in Christ, he’s talking about putting a stumbling block and making them weak, causing them to slip in some way spiritually. In other words, we can use in our Christian liberty the things that are about us in this world, but that must give place to charity toward our brother and sister in Christ so that what we do does not negatively affect one of those who are our fellow believers. Paul says he’s persuaded he can eat any meat. He believes that God has given him permission to eat anything he wants. He could even eat meat that’s been sacrificed to an idol for he knows that the idols of the heathen are nothing. They’re not real gods, and God has given him all things to enjoy. However, there are those who are weak in conscience. There are those who are not sure as Paul is in the matter. There are those who may somehow rather get caught up in idol worship if they ate the meat that was sacrificed to idols. So he doesn’t want to destroy the faith here of a brother in Christ. Confuse him. him about idols, cause him to stumble because what he eats or what he drinks or what he does, at least publicly. Out of love, Paul says, I will yield for the good or the benefit of my brother in Christ. So I won’t eat any meat if I thought it was going to cause him to stumble spiritually. So what is Paul telling us here? He’s telling us this. You know, eat your squid privately. if it offends another Christian public. If you think you could do this before God, but your brother has trouble with it, then don’t do it before your brother, where it will cause him trouble. Not that he should curtail what you do, but you’re looking out for him. Out of love for him, you don’t want to cause him to stumble. So you use things in love toward us. And finally, use things in moderation. with regard to yourself. Look at 1st Corinthians chapter 6 and verse 12. Paul says this. All things are lawful unto me, but all things are not expedient. All things are lawful to me, but I will not be brought under the power of any. You must not be brought into some type of bondage because the use of things that are indifferent to where they end up controlling or dominating in your life. You can use meats and drinks, apparel, sleep, recreation, riches, and so forth, in order to preserve a fitness for your duties to God, you can enjoy all things. You can be thankful to God for all that he’s provided for you in this life. If you enjoy eating pork or squid, do so in a manner, however, in which you’re not dominated by that, so that you’re not becoming someone who is gluttonous. because you’re allowed to do it doesn’t mean you should overdo it. We had a family picnic one time. I don’t know. I was eight to ten years old somewhere along there. And, you know, people, there were bottles of cases of bottles of bottled pop. Well, I drank six bottles of pop that day. And I got sick. You know, you shouldn’t have drank that man. You know, could I drink pop without sinning? Yes. But if I overdo it, if it becomes, you know, I got to have another one, that’s not a good thing. And needless to say, taught me a good lesson. If you go to baseball games, do so in a manner that it doesn’t become an obsession infringe on your duties to God and family. You know, playoff games, they’re on Sunday, and maybe World Series on Sunday, people are tempted to skip it or, you know, may watch it at home or something. Look, you can’t allow it. these things that you could enjoy if you wished to dominate and control. You have to have priorities. God has to be first. No question about it. So whatever we do, let’s do it in moderation, Paul says, and not allow it to dominate or control us in any manner. Well, the church clock, which could not keep accurate time at a problem. So the pastor put the sign over top. of it, don’t blame the hands, the trouble lies deeper. So it is spiritually. When it comes to being pure in the sight of God, you have to look below the surface. Heart purity is what counts. Those made pure by Jesus Christ, who are believers in him, may use all the things that are indifferent in this world, and they can use them, hopefully, in a proper way, with a good conscience toward God and thankfulness to the Lord for His provision. but be careful that we don’t overdo something and it becomes a snare to us in some fashion. Well, let us close with our prayer tonight.