Grace Baptist Santa Clarita: Service Podcast

Paul charged Titus to “organize the church, appointing Elders in every city.” These two activities cannot be separated. If the church is to be well ordered, it must be well led. And those who lead well will first be men whose personal lives and character set them apart conspicuously as those in whom the Spirit of God has taken up residence. In addition to their character, they must also demonstrate facility in knowing and understanding God’s Word so as to both teach and defend its truth against those who would misuse, subvert, ignore, or outright deny its divine power.

Leaders aren’t real leaders if their personalities make it impossible for people to respect, trust, and follow them. Paul understood leadership begins with personal restraint and the development of respectability. This weekend we look closely at five things church leaders are NOT to be, and six more God requires be conspicuous in their lives. After all, those appointed to lead God’s people are first and foremost responsible to him to manage the household of God well.

Someone has said “everything stands or falls on leadership.” When Paul left Titus on the island of Crete, he did so with instructions to set in order the church there. This meant, first and foremost, to appoint godly men as elders. While many centuries have passed since Paul penned these instructions to Titus, the basic truths of church leadership remain as necessary today as they were then. Over the next three weeks, we’ll remind ourselves of just how important leadership is in the church and review the standards our Lord has set for those who would lead his flock.

This week we begin a new series through Paul’s letter to Titus. The island of Crete, where Titus was asked to organize and oversee a fledgling church, was not a place Christianity was welcomed. Paul realized the grave challenges Titus and his fellow Christ-followers were facing and called them to a very simple life-strategy: lead with goodness! Show the validity of your faith through good lives committed to good works. Let the world around you know you are here for good … to show the goodness of God!

Too much has been made about the controversies surrounding the theology of the return of Jesus Christ our Lord. For some the return is simply an escape plan. For others it is part of a gigantic puzzle filled with secret clues, dates, and interpretations. But none of this would have been on Paul’s mind. He simply wanted his readers to understand why the return of Christ was to be the foundation of their hope while living in this sin-drenched, broken world. This weekend we look at the return of Christ the King to the world in a way that is meant to enlighten and encourage us to persevere in the mission of Jesus, through the church, to the world.

For most of us, the thought of sharing the gospel is a terrifying reality. What often keeps us from pursuing relationships with redemptive intentionality is fear and a deep feeling of inadequacy. We are afraid that we lack the skill, eloquence, or wisdom to be effective gospel ambassadors. But God doesn’t save through human persuasiveness – he saves through the intrinsic power of the Gospel. As Christ-followers on mission, God calls us to trust his plan to save.

When the Lord instituted the Church, he did so with clear purpose and priorities, which he has communicated to his people in the Scriptures. It’s there we also see that God gifted his church with shepherds. And though some view being part of a local body of believers as optional, the primacy of the Church in God’s eyes is undeniable, as is the necessity of it for his people.

As we seek to lovingly proclaim the gospel of Christ, the message of faith and repentance is essential to that mission. And though we want to teach this message accurately and faithfully, we must recognize the compelling witness of actually being people who live lives of repentance and faith.

We see and hear about the cross of Christ so much that we may actually stop viewing it with great awe. Just what did Jesus Christ do there? Why did he have to die? And what bearing should his securing of eternal redemption have on our lives? The author of Hebrews saw Jesus’ sacrifice as foundational to our peace of mind and joyful commitment to abundant living before the face of God. We’ll use his writings as our guide to re-kindle our love for Christ as we live at the foot of the cross.

Why did God need to become a man? What was so important about him taking on flesh, walking in our world, and experiencing its brokenness? This weekend we study the humanity of God the Son to find the reason we can draw near to him in confidence, knowing he sympathizes fully with our weaknesses and promises all the help we need to stay faithful to his call on our lives.

Too often we look outside of Christ for the very things we were meant to find in him. We do this, in part, because we have an anemic understanding of Christ and his work. It’s only in the power of Christ as Creator God, as Savior and Sustainer that we have hope both now and in the future. We are designed to find our righteousness, our strength, our hope, our identity, our purpose, our satisfaction, our comfort, and our rest in Christ alone. And this is only possible when we see—and keep seeing—the greatness of Jesus Christ.

It is typical in our day to have discussions on God’s Sovereignty deteriorate into arguments over free will and the nobility of man. But it was not so in biblical times. The fact that their God was the sovereign ruler over all things was, for Israel, their greatest ground of security. Imagine having a king who was, in reality, the king above all kings and the lord above all lords. And even more, this king loves his people and only wants what is ultimately best for them. As we come to realize what the sovereignty of God really means for us, we will understand there is no greater privilege than to be granted refuge under the wings of the Almighty.

This series could be titled “Things I Want My Kids to Remember Forever!” Over the next 9 weeks we’ll look at key doctrines of Christianity. First, we’ll define and defend them biblically and then show how they can bring great value to our everyday lives. We begin with the Bible, God’s authoritative and clear word to us.

If we’re honest, down deep we all live with fear. Financial and health concerns, increasing concerns for safety, and the dark unknowns of the future make it clear we really have no security in this world. But what we do have is a security that lies outside the bounds of this sin-drenched, broken, and increasingly dangerous temporal existence. Peter calls us to “fix our hope fully on the grace to be brought to us at the revelation of Jesus Christ.”

This week as we continue our series in “Yours, Mine, and Ours” look at the issue of Christian Commitment. A discussion on Commitment presupposes each of us is committed to the same thing and in the same way –or at least it should. The commitment of a Christ-follower flows naturally from the Christian life. Find out what motivates us to press on and remain faithful and hear what life applications and principles we can instill in our children as we continue the work of making disciples.

Selfishness is the great deceiver of the soul. It makes us think we are responsible for our own wellbeing when, as servants of Christ, we look to him for every good thing. Generosity disciplines our hearts away from self-reliance while providing a means of imitating the generosity of God to us. Again, it must be taught and modeled in our homes and joyfully practiced in our church.

The church must push back against the pervasive ideology that says life is about being good, and being good is the means by which one receives eternal life. As Christ followers, we are drawn to the one we are meant to reflect: the God who is repeatedly described by the biblical writers as being holy. We see that God’s people are called to be holy as he is holy, but holiness in the life of the church is first and foremost a work of God.

In our society “respect for authority” is almost a lost virtue. Yet God has established authority relationships as a means of showing us the benefit of submitting to his authority. This is to begin in the home and be modeled in the church. Where authority is properly dispensed and submitted to, there is peace. Where authority is either abused or rebuffed, chaos results.

In today’s world, “love” is so ambiguous it can mean many things. But Jesus said his disciples are to be characterized by “love,” so we better get it right. Understanding the love of God for us, we are to train our hearts to love what God loves and love as God loves. This begins in the family but flourishes in the church, as we partner to instill in ourselves and our children a sincere faith, a good conscience, and a pure heart. The result? Lives characterized as “walking in love.”

Nothing characterizes the sincere desire for God like Bible study and prayer. Yet as crucial as these spiritual disciplines are, we too often find our prayers are filled with clichés, as if spoken at arm’s length from our hearts. Our prayers grow stale and no longer satisfy the longing of our hearts to engage with Almighty God. Worse, when this is the praying we model, it becomes the pattern for our children. But it doesn’t have to be that way! Let’s get better at authentic prayer by following Elijah in one of the greatest stories in the Old Testament.