Titus 2:4-5a

The book of Titus, chapter 2, reading verses 3 to 5, our focus on verse 4 in the first part of verse 5. The age women likewise, that they be in behavior as be cometh holiness, not false accusers, not given to much wine, teachers of good things. They may teach the young women to be sober, to love their husbands, to love their children, to be discreet, chaste, keepers at home, good, obedient to their own husbands, that the word of God be not blasphemed. May God bless to us the reading of His holy and sacred word this evening. Years ago, irritated by the Canadian census defining a husband as the head of the husband. the household. A Roman wrote in the space marked household comments these pointed words. In this family, my husband and I definitely share the household equally, and I wish to register my complaint at your archaic wording. Several days later, when she was checking over the form before mailing it, she found to her annoyance that her husband had pen some words after her words, to which he penned these words, statements made by the employees do not necessarily reflect the position of the management. It was signed head of the household. The feminist movement has caused great trouble, really, to the family. And it’s the most destructive, really, with regard to God’s commandments regarding the family. And our last thing. Paul commanded the aged Christian women to be teachers of good things. In particular, they were to teach the younger women about marriage and family and behavior. The word teach in the original Greek here means to train. And it has the idea here of to bring people back to their senses. This is why the King James version, you’ll find the word sober is used, where you will not find this and other versions of Bibles. There’s no actual separate word for the word sober in the Greek. The idea, though, is inherent in the word teach, and I think that’s why they made a separate word. But we’ve talked about being sober already, being serious mind, and be careful about how you live your life and so forth. I’m not going to dwell on that this evening. Now, let me speak here, first of all, tonight, about the younger women. He says you’re to love your husband. It’s assumed as a younger woman you’re going to marry, and the main focus here is on the family, not because Paul believed that all Christian women must marry, but for the most part, Christian women will marry. Paul does speak in 1 Corinthians about the single life, and certainly that is a possibility for women. But the unmarried woman, you know, careth for the things of the Lord that she may be holy, both in body and in spirit, 1 Corinthians 734. But today’s idea of marriage is that of drudgery, where children are too demanding on my freedom. and the carefree lifestyle of ease and pleasure and doing what I want to do being a swinging single doesn’t fit in with the scripture of principles that we’re going to be looking at. In scripture, caring for a husband and family are given high priority for the Christian woman. Indeed, what Paul teaches is quite at odds with the modern notes. motions of a homemaker. As he says in 1 Timothy 514, I will, therefore, that the younger women marry, bear children, guide the home, give none occasion to the adversary to speak reproachfully. So it’s assumed that you probably will marry as a Christian woman. Now, she says here you must love, he says you must love your husband. The aged women are to teach. teach the younger women to love their husbands. Now, at first glance, you might think this is odd, but why should you have to tell the younger women to love their husbands? A woman’s love for a husband involves sacrifice, and it involves certainly submissiveness. Sacrifice in the sense that you are now obligated to love your husband above all, all others, even your own family. For you must leave father and mother and cling to your husband, as the scripture says. As dear as your parents are, your husband must be loved even more. And you must certainly forsake all other men, which means you can no longer play the field, be interested in other men, and so forth. Submissiveness is involved in the sense that you are now coming under the headship of the husband that you have married. The husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church. A young Christian woman shortly after her marriage, and she was still on her honeymoon, she called home, talked to her dad, said, Dad, I want to come home. And her father responded, you are at home. When you marry, you are. you switch headships. You have been under the headship of your father, and now you’re under the headship of your husband. And so this is something we should take seriously when we’re getting married. So this is the affection due to your husband as the head of the home. He is there to be a covering for your eyes, to protect you, to cover you from all those who would harm you or wrong you. some fashion. He’s to be your spiritual guide and teacher. He is to provide and take care of your needs. And if you love your husband, then certainly that will promote the family relationship. But if that is lacking, then all the other duties that are to be performed here are going to be affected. So this is why I think he mentions this first. This past. passage reproves many women who think it’s okay to just focus on their children and forget about their husband. Have no real interest in their husband. The Bible demands that you possess an honest and proper delight in your husband and you express and show love to him. This condemns the attitude which some women have toward their husbands. They speak evil of him. Perhaps they are defiant toward him, hateful. They treat him with contempt. They refuse to engage in intimate relations with their husband, so forth. I once had to counsel a professional Christian couple where the wife refused to have sexual relations with her husband. She didn’t want to do it now that she was done having children, and it seemed like as if it were something dirty or unclean. for her. And I had to read to her the passage in 1st. Corinthians 7, where it says the wife hath not power of her body but the husband, and likewise, the husband hath not power over his own body, but the wife defraud you not one another. Let Satan, of course, would tempt you to be unfaithful. So this kind of attitude that we see in the world is not acceptable in the Christian home. God demands better of you the love you have for your husband is to grow out of a love for God who commands you to love your husband. Now you might say, well, that’s all good and well in theory, but pastor, you don’t know my husband. That’s the usual argument that you get. You don’t, you don’t, yeah, I know the Bible says that, but you just don’t understand. You don’t know who my husband’s, what my husband’s like. He killed any love I had by his gross in consideration and his weak leadership in the home. He doesn’t provide for me the lifestyle I think I ought to have. He’s not the kind of man I thought I was getting when I married. He’s not very patient with me. He never thanks me for anything. He doesn’t take the initiative in doing anything. I have to force him to do it by nagging. And on and on we could go. But these are all excuses because the Bible says, you have to love your husband. Now, some people have said, well, you know, the Bible says the husband is the love the wife, but the wife’s never commanded to love her husband. Yes, the wife is commanded to love her husband, too, as this text indicates to us. Now, loving your husband means helping him be a better man, helping to be a better father, encourage him spiritually, hindering him when it comes to sinful activity, not giving him an occasion to be disappointed in you. No husband is without faults, but you can be of great assistance to your husband. The heart of her husband does safely trust in her, Proverbs 31 says, she will do him good and not evil all the days of our life. But the key point is this. The scripture tells us that love is something that can be learned. If the aged women are to teach the young women to love, it gives us a whole new perspective on love, doesn’t it? We have such a distorted notion today where it’s hit or miss. It’s like an emotional feeling. Well, if it could be taught, that means you can learn to do it. It has to do with your attitude and your actions here. With God’s help, you can’t. So if your marriage runs into trouble, it can be repaired by the grace of God because you can learn to do. what God command you to do. So you must love your husband. Secondly, you say you are to love your children. Now we have sort of a false concept of spirituality that sometimes raises its head in our society. It’s prevalent today. While the feminists blatantly attack the family unit telling us that motherhood just say no and describing babies as crying machines, there is somewhat of a more subtle attack sometimes in the religious circles. The kind of false teaching which was affecting the people of God and Paul’s day can still be prevalent today. Sometimes there’s a great emphasis on subjective spiritual experience. A spirituality which emphasizes the need for personal religious fulfillment through hours of meditation alone or, you know, whether you’re told to go to the Mass or, you know, confess to the priest, or make sure you don’t, make sure you meet all the holy days that the church has and so forth. This inevitably then militates against the time and effort, put in the family. If you’re pulled away from the family, constantly, you see that happening. Now, in Protestant circles, you’re told, you’re not, you know, if you’re not running off to some religious seminar somewhere, or you’re not listening to going over to hear this particular popular speaker, you can’t be fulfilled spiritually. As if, you know, some special religious ministry, perhaps you have to have in order to be fulfilled spiritually. My wife met a professing Christian woman in a homeschooler group, which was consumed with the idea of having a public teaching ministry to children so she could reach thousands of children across the country, holding seminars, and, you know, traveling and reaching all these people for Christ. She believed this is the way she was to serve the Lord. Raina simply said to her that, God had already giving her teaching ministry, and that was the train up her own children and the fear of the Lord. That didn’t go over too big. If God is giving you a family, he’s already given you a ministry. He’s already placed you in a situation in which you can honor and glorify him. That’s your top priority right there. Not that we shouldn’t be concerned about others, but, you know, traveling about the country is not the way to raise a family at home. Friends, any focus that demands that you as a Christian woman somehow escape your family in order to serve God and find spiritual fulfillment is not really biblical because that’s not what the scripture indicates to us here in this text of scripture. We’ll be talking about, you know, keepers at home. There’s a point here to be made. And this is why Paul here always places the priority in the family unit. You don’t have to go outside your family to be spiritually fulfilled as a woman. Now, loving your children is your Christian dude. You might think this should be an unnecessary command. Why should we be told they have to love our children? Well, when you live in a self-centered society, which the Cretians were certainly living in, and we are living in today, anything which takes away from your own leisure, time, and pleasure sometimes gets rejected. Children are looked upon sometimes as a hindrance, a drag upon your personal life. T. Robinson aptly remarks concerning this point, and I quote, this exhortation is needed where some married women prefer poodle dogs, the children, unquote. Younger women, Christian women, should want to marry. They should want to have a family, and they should be devoted to their family. This is the highest calling a woman can have. Think about this. God has given you a position in which you are molding lives. in which you’re raising children in the fear of the Lord. That’s a wonderful responsibility. It’s a wonderful situation to be in. The great inventor, Thomas Edison, paid tribute to his mother. He said he didn’t have his mother long, but she had a lasting effect upon his life. She cast an influence that lasted all the rest of his days. He said, the good effects of her early training, he never lost. She showed great appreciation for Thomas, encouraged him at critical times in his life. He said, without this, he would never have been the inventor that he ended up being. He said that he was always careless as a boy, and his mother would get on him about being precise and more careful about things and so forth. He said, I would never have made it as an inventor if she had not stayed on my case, so to speak, and he said, I would have turned out badly. But her firmness, her sweetness, he said, her goodness were potent powers to keep him on the right path. He said, my mother was the making of me, and the memory of her will always be a blessing to me, he said. That shows you the kind of impact you can have on the lives of your children. Loving your children implies denied. yourself, you know, just as the husband sacrifices to provide for the wife, the wife sacrifices, because she’s raising, in many cases, the children, she has at least a major responsibility in this regard. Isn’t this the definition of love, giving of yourself, taking care of your children, being there for them, meeting their physical needs, and then, of course, loving your children means teaching them God’s fear. and training them up in the great troughs of God’s word. You begin when your children are very young with reading the Bible stories about the great heroes of the faith, the great saints of old in scripture, using simple prayers, learning to sing the Psalms with them, working with them on the Psalms. And as your children become more mature, you can get into more deeper instruction. your good example is certainly a means of teaching your children as well. Loving your children also means disciplining them. That means that you have to know that the correction of a child applying the rod delivers that child’s soul from hell, as the book of Proverbs tells us. Therefore, you would banish and reprove and correct them because you want them to turn out well. Because you want them to turn out well. want them to do what God commands them to do. Are these the things that you’re doing for your children? This is a very precious duty, very special duty that you have in God’s kingdom. Never sell short the importance of what you do as a mother. And God will reward you for faithfulness in this essential duty. So you are to love your children. The third thing he says here is you are to be self-controlled. Here we have the word discreet. The Greek word here means moderate to exercise self-control. Now we often have people who just do as they please in this morally persuasive atmosphere in which we live. It’s not surprising that this idea keeps coming up being self-controlled. It seems like every time we turn around, Paul has to emphasize this kind of of idea to be able to discern the godly path to take and grasp the importance of doing what God commands is needed just as much in women as it is in men. Self-control is part of the fruit of the spirit. It’s one of them. And it’s essential if you’re going to live a godly life. It begins particularly with your thought life. But the core of the spirit. Christian need, the Christian church needs level-headed women that are wise, that know the principles of Scripture, that are discerning, even keeled, able to keep their emotions in check so that they’re not having screaming tide raids and emotional meltdowns. They’re not having a bitter and contentious spirit so that your husband would rather live on the corner of a rooftop instead of in the house with you. not salking and withdrawing from the family and so forth. The Bible says a prudent light, wife is from the Lord in Proverbs 1914. There was a woman who developed a serious throat condition, and she was told that her vocal cords needed a complete rest for six months. She wasn’t supposed to speak. With a husband and six children, it wasn’t going to be easy. but she decided that she would do her best. When she needed her children, she blew a whistle. She wrote out instructions and answers on pieces of paper. The six months finally passed and she recovered. Someone was asking about her observations about this whole ordeal that she went through, and she said this. I don’t think I’ll ever shout like I used to. When asked about the note, she said, this, you’d be surprised about how many written hastily or in anger I crumbled up and threw away. She confessed that she was glad that no one ever read those words that she had written out. Seeing my words kept me from saying many of them, and she said, I learned an important lesson about self-control in all of this. Self-control is important in all areas of the Christian. Self-control is important in your desire for material things, in your spending of money, in so many areas we could talk about being governed by some type of self-control. So you’re to be self-control. Fourthly, he says here you’re to be pure. His word is chaste. Now obviously, if you love your husband, it directly follows. Then you’re going to be pure. that you will be sexually pure, right? If you’re self-controlled, then certainly you will keep yourself to your husband alone. However, in this complex society in which we live, it’s not always as simple as people might think. So Paul carefully spells out the implications here of loving your husband and self-control by saying, no, this is what I mean. In case, sexual purity is always something that commends the gospel before other people. The way you live your life, the way you keep yourself sexually pure, is important. Others looking at you, they may, you know, call you some, you know, scoff at you for your Puritan lifestyle or something like that. And make, you know, snide remarks about Goody Tooshoes or something. something of that nature. But you do have an influence. You do have an effect because of the way you conduct yourself and keep yourself pure. When you fall away in this area, it’s always a scandal in the eyes of the Lord. They’re always, you know, jumping on any Christian who strays in the area of sexual impurity. After all, remember, sexual purity. here is to, is important because your whole marriage is to reflect Christ in the church. Sexual impurity, whether before or after marriage, can have a damaging effect, a long-term effect, really on your marriage. So the question is, it becomes, can he or she ever be trusted without in people’s minds in this area? Seneca wrote about ancient Rome that women were married to be divorced and divorced to be Mary. As if it was like a rotating situation where you just go from one man to another. In Rome, the years were identified by the names of government councils, but it was said that fashionable ladies would identify the years by the names of their husbands. Raina’s in her Jack Worth years right now. Hopefully that that’s all she has. But juvenile quotes an instance of a woman having eight husbands in five years. Can imagine that kind of lifestyle going on? I won’t even get into ancient Greek, Greece, and some of the things that were going on. One of their philosophers said, we keep prostitutes for pleasure, we keep mistresses for the day-to-day needs of the body, we keep wise for the begetting of children, and for a faithful guardianship of our homes. So there you go. You look at the Hollywood lifestyle, and that is becoming the lifestyle that we see in our society. A Temple University study surveyed 2,300 wives, and found it 50% felt that they would eventually go outside their marriage for sexual experiences, and one and three had already done so, according to this survey that was taken. So the warning of Paul here is certainly, I think, a problem. appropriate. It’s appropriate for our day. It was appropriate for his day. Now, we have to remember that being unfaithful, adultery, really takes place first in the heart. So you have to keep your heart with all diligence, what less that situation get out of hand. Keep your thought life in order. Keep in mind that God is fully aware of all that you do. Consider that the pleasure of sin is short and the non- of a guilty conscience and the damage it does to your family will be extensive. I once was involved in looking for a car from my son, Jared, we met this man and while Jared and while Jared and Raina were taking the ride in the car. I’m sitting in this, I guess it was a gas station or something we were sitting in at the time. And he found, you know, we were talking, he found out I was a minister, and the next thing I know, he’s blurting out this sexual sin that he had with his wife’s sister, as if he was at confession or something. And, you know, I’m there, like, shocked that he doesn’t hardly even know me, but it was, he was feeling so guilty about it. It was like, I have to say something, I have to let it out. But I was absolutely shocked about the situation that he would actually say something like that. People don’t realize the weight of the guilt when one is unfaithful to their mate in marriage. So the wise here are told to be careful in this regard. Remember, God’s word is important. We hide it in her heart. We might not sin against the Lord. Purity of life will never be something you’ll regret. Remember your house, your house here, your body, your vessel, if you would, is to be the temple of the Lord, and it’s not for fornication, as Paul tells us in Corinthians. Well, the Canadian sense is infuriated a woman by using the phrase the head of the household. Feminist movement certainly makes, you know, has made tremendous strides against family life. It’s an anti-God movement. Keep to the word of God as a young Christian woman. Don’t be conform to the world in your thinking, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Learn to love your husband, love your children, be self-controlled, be chased. This is pleasing unto the Lord. Lord willing, next week, we’ll look at the rest of what he has to say here in verse 5. Well, let us go.