Titus 1:10-16 Part 1: Doctrine and Devotion Series week 6

I recently read some accounts of artists who destroyed their own work. I have heard of this before, but I didn’t realize that this tradition goes way back to early artists. Individuals who for many various reasons created a piece of artwork and then ended up destroying it after it was completed. I learned of several different artists in history who did this . . . Why would artists destroy their own work? Why put time and effort into such elaborate works of art only to destroy them later on? We will never know the answer to such questions, but this does go to show us one truth that usually holds true for life: oftentimes, we are our own worst enemy. ‌‌ The same is true in fact, in the church. Most churches don’t crumble from outside pressure. Churches don’t shrink, or close, due to the things going on around them in the world, they don’t struggle because of opposition from the community or religious persecution, at least not in the US. Churches, when the struggle, shrink, lose people, even close, it is most often an internal problem—they are destroyed from the inside out. There is conflict, apathy, ungodliness, all sorts of things that goes to show, we are our own worst enemy. Or as one man put it: it’s not the ship in the water, but the water in the ship that causes it to sink. ‌‌This is in fact what the Apostle Paul dealt with on the Island of Crete. Paul dealt with those inside the church who really were their own worst enemy. Men who had gotten into leadership either positional leadership or just being lay leaders, and they were not the type of people believers ought to follow. Perhaps they were false teachers, certainly they had wrong doctrine, and they were ruining the church from the inside out. So Paul sent Titus and instructs him what to do in the church-he instructs him to raise up elders, he gives the qualifications for eldership, and now in our text today he cautions Titus about these destructive men in the church by helping Titus to identify who they are and how to deal with them. And Paul’s caution to Titus is an incredibly relevant caution for us today, because we struggle in much the same way. He reminds us that: ‌‌ Big Idea: Churches are destroyed from the inside out. Because churches are destroyed from the inside out, we need to be able to identify destructive members in the church.