Titus 1-3 -- What The Trouble-Shooter Is To Look For

My commentary describes Titus as a trouble-shooter that Paul sent “to correct doctrinal and ethical disorders” in different churches.  So his presence in a church pretty well presumed that there was something that needed fixing.

Paul was tasking Titus with appointing elders in every town.  He describes elders “as God’s managers.”  My commentary said that in Paul’s time, all the believers in the first churches were novices, but as time passed, “the Lord prepared certain ones for this important ministry.”  That preparation included the building up of a man’s desire to do no wrong, breaking down his desire to be selfish, and taming his desire to become angry quickly.  These aren’t normal responses for the human male, but they are totally necessary for God’s managers.

As a trouble-shooter, Titus was tasked with teaching specific things to specific groups in each church.  Perhaps God is showing us through these words what each such group is susceptible to struggling with. 

Older men were to be taught to work on their self-control, their seriousness, and the continual use of the wisdom they should have attained over the years.  There were also three areas of their lives that required continual strengthening:  their faith, their display of love to others, and their patience.  It would therefore sound like older men would do well to daily prepare a scorecard to see how well they were doing in each of these areas.

The trouble-shooter was tasked with straightening out older women as well.  Their daily scorecard would ask them to rate how well they’d done at holy behavior, not speaking against others, and teaching good things.  Again, it would appear that in every church Paul was seeing that these issues could become problems for the church if not addressed in the lives of older women.

For young men, the trouble-shooter was to encourage them to be wise, to think through their potential actions and reactions before making their decisions to act.  They also were to be so absorbed with doing good deeds that others would learn to desire to do them by their examples.

How was Titus to relay all of this and get people to live it all out?  Paul says God’s grace isn’t just there to save us, but also to teach us to live in these ways.  How does His grace do that?  It would seem by helping us realize where we’d be without it.  We were made right with God by His grace, and we therefore will be careful to use the rest of our lives for doing good and not for being useless.

As we age, we move from one group to the next as men, and it will be very important for us to begin gauging ourselves regarding the things the trouble-shooter has been told often cause problems for the group we are entering, so that a trouble-shooter isn’t needed in our church.

Father, help us honestly evaluate our own lives within the church to see whether there is any evidence that we may be part of a problem rather than part of a solution.  Let us look in the mirror first, before daring to look at each other.  Heal what needs healing in our church to make us more like what Paul knew a church should be like.

Your Brother In Christ,

Gary Ford