Titus 3:1-3: Doctrine and Devotion Series week 16

I don’t know if you’ve ever thought about advertising, But one of the best ways to advertise for something is to go public with whatever item or service is being offered. You can go nearly anywhere today and see all sorts of advertisement. I wonder—how many goods or services we have purchased or even simply know about based off an ad. Driving into church today, chances are you saw vehicles with an advertisement on side—a painting company, a store, a construction company. All these things we know about from a public advertisement. But what I’ve noticed is that the best advertisement for something are actual people—people who buy into something completely and their usage of an item or service has given them a really good experience. ‌‌ We had this when we moved to town. You don’t really think about it, at lead I didn’t, but when I moved here I had to get connected with a group of professionals who could offer services that I need. For instance—what plumber do you call when you have a pipe break? Or if you have an electrical problem which electrician do you go to? Or what about a car mechanic, you need to find one of those. So what did I do? I asked around. I asked a few people what good or bad experiences they had, and who they would recommend that I go to. So I established a connection with some of these businesses in town and now I’m able to give my own recommendation and refer others to the ones that I use. ‌‌ This reminds me of our spiritual lives. Just like a good referral goes a long way, the way that we live our lives as believers goes a long way toward giving a personal witness of Jesus Christ. One of the most effective ways that we can share the gospel with those around is very simply by how we live our lives. God wants us to have a public faith!‌‌ Too often times, our faith isn’t public. Sure, we can be found at church on Sunday and perhaps our neighbors know we go to church, and maybe we even invited them a time or two. But when it comes to publicly living out our faith, we aren’t very good at that. We struggle to witness and share Jesus those around, and though we have our faith, it is’t very public. ‌‌ In our text today Paul address this, and he gives us some ideas for how we can get better at living our faith out publicly, especially when it comes to how we as believers relate to our civil and governmental authorities. From our text, we see five components to demonstrating public faith in Jesus. So as we read our text, I want us to think about our big idea for today: ‌‌ BIG IDEA: public faith leads to personal witness; private faith leads to no witness