My thoughts for the Itty Bitty Bible Study group on Facebook. (join if you’d like to get these in fb!)
For Chapter One, I utilized a video series from Right Now media. You can get that information from one of the previous studies.
- In IBBS Titus the Introduction, we talked about Paul confessing to be a servant, and that translates to being a slave – but to whom?
- In IBBS Titus 1:1-2, we talked about God’s elect and godliness.
- In IBBS Titus 1:2, we talked about an eternal hope and promise.
- In IBBS Titus 1:3-5, we talked about Who, What, Why, Where and Peace
- In IBBS Titus 6-10, we talked about being Ambassadors
- In IBBS Titus 11- 16, we talked about what is a true saying.
Titus chapter two, follows Titus chapter one. I know, that’s pretty simple. When the letter was written, there were no chapters and verses. Those were added later to assist us in some way. For more information, check out Wikipedia about why there are chapters and verses!
Why do I bring that up?
Because, Titus 2:1 starts with “but”
Titus 2:1 King James Version (KJV)
2 But speak thou the things which become sound doctrine:
But what?
It refers back to the preceeding passages in Titus 1:9-16.
Titus 1:9-16 King James Version (KJV)
Specifically, talking to the wise old men:
9 Holding fast the faithful word as he hath been taught, that he may be able by sound doctrine both to exhort and to convince the gainsayers.
and those that are not wise old men:
14 Not giving heed to Jewish fables, and commandments of men, that turn from the truth.
16 They profess that they know God; but in works they deny him, being abominable, and disobedient, and unto every good work reprobate.
IBBS Titus 1:10-16 talks about the not so wise old men.
IBBS Titus 1:6-9 talks about the qualifications of elders, or those that choose to be a light to the world – those of us who are called to be ambassadors!
Let’s put Titus 1:9, 16 with Titus 2:1
1: 9 Holding fast the faithful word as he(wise believers) hath been taught, that he may be able by sound doctrine both to exhort and to convince the gainsayers.
1:16 They(the gainsayers) profess that they know God; but in works they deny him, being abominable, and disobedient, and unto every good work reprobate.
2:1 But speak thou(wise believers) the things which become sound doctrine:
italics mine
Now, onto chapter 2.
Titus 2 Holman Christian Standard Bible (HCSB)
Sound Teaching and Christian Living
2:1 But you must say the things that are consistent with sound teaching.
2 Older men are to be level headed, worthy of respect, sensible, and sound in faith, love, and endurance.
3 In the same way, older women are to be reverent in behavior, not slanderers, not addicted to much wine. They are to teach what is good, 4 so they may encourage the young women to love their husbands and to love their children, 5 to be self-controlled, pure, homemakers, kind, and submissive to their husbands, so that God’s message will not be slandered.
6 In the same way, encourage the young men to be self-controlled 7 in everything. Make yourself an example of good works with integrity and dignity[a] in your teaching. 8 Your message is to be sound beyond reproach, so that the opponent will be ashamed, having nothing bad to say about us.
9 Slaves are to be submissive to their masters in everything, and to be well-pleasing, not talking back 10 or stealing, but demonstrating utter faithfulness, so that they may adorn the teaching of God our Savior in everything.
11 For the grace of God has appeared with salvation[b] for all people, 12 instructing us to deny godlessness and worldly lusts and to live in a sensible, righteous, and godly way in the present age, 13 while we wait for the blessed hope and appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ. 14 He gave Himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to cleanse for Himself a people for His own possession, eager to do good works.
15 Say these things, and encourage and rebuke with all authority. Let no one disregard[c] you.
Let’s Dig In!
Titus 2.1 But Speak thou the things which become sound doctrine.
What’s the point of sound doctrine?
We are ambassadors to the word of God. Our lives should reflect our relationship with Jesus Christ, and our words should reflect our understanding of the doctrine of salvation.
I have an Itty Bitty Bible Study Post, Titus 1:6-9 about being an ambassador.
The Bible seems to support the concept of “adulting”.
OLD MEN…AGED
Titus 2:2 Aged man. There are other verses that mention about aged men. The point is that as we age we are supposed to become more responsible. Apparently, unlike the animals grow from infant to young adult to being self managing adults in the wild, human beings need to be taught how to be a respectable, responsible adult.
Titus 2:2 Holman Christian Standard Bible (HCSB)
2 Older men are to be
level headed,
worthy of respect,
sensible, and
sound in faith,
love, and
endurance.
Mentoring – some verses that point to the expectation!
And another!
OLD WOMEN – AGED
Titus 2:3-4 Likewise, teach the older women
to be reverent in the way they live,
not to be slanderers
or addicted to much wine,
but to teach what is good.
Then they can urge the younger women
to love their husbands and children,
Titus 2:3-4 NIV
I find it interesting that the main responsibility for aged women, aside from character is to teach what is good. Now in this verse it doesn’t say only teach women, or only teach children, but I’m just pointing that out. The other primary goal for an aged woman is to urge younger women to love their husbands and their children.?
I’m going to share a little bit of my own thoughts about an aged woman urging others to love their husbands.
My husband and I have been married since 1980. We have 5 children.
We married when we were 19 and 20. We were a young man and a young woman. The keyword is young!
To say that we did not understand each other or how to communicate would be an understatement. We did go through premarital counseling through 2 different churches. That’s supposed to be the guarantee that you are of like mind enough to at least start out the marriage peacefully right?
Along comes the honeymoon.
Jim had no idea how long it would take for me to get dressed and ready to go out to a fine dinner. This was one of our 1st clashes. And James defense, is 1 of 3 boys with a mom who’s only Preparation for a fine dinner is to put on some lipstick. She also never really went in for dressing nice except for one wedding, but even then I’m pretty sure her outfit was very simply put on, her hair dried naturally perfect, and of course the lipstick . Jim had no idea that it might take someone an hour to get ready to go somewhere! And his experience with me as we were dating was I was always ready on time or 10 minutes early. We just needed to recognize each other’s expectations.
At some intersections, as we were driving since we took a road trip for honeymoon, I would sometimes make a comment as to which way to turn not knowing that this was a very sensitive issue for Jim. To him it was me telling him what to do. To me I was just being part of the conversation. We needed to learn a bit more about each other and trigger points or hot buttons.
There issues we didn’t know about each other, like, I have PTSD which has some interesting effects on trust, intimacy, and sensitivity. Then one I can think of that Jim had a problem with was anger and I’m not sure he ever knew he had a problem until he met the irritating, aggravating, Illogical aspects of me.
I was pregnant from summer of 81 to May of 88, and we have gotten to realize in our old age just how much those hormones mess with the personality and common sense of the woman who is pregnant. I would say things that would irritate Jim and I could not figure out why. But thanks to some experience with others who have been pregnant who have said things that have hurt me, I now understand that I was hard to live with!
Add into that 5 children between ‘82 and ‘88, which also included 2 miscarriages, I was either pregnant, nursing or recovering from pregnancy for those 6 years. We did the night time feeding issues, the babies that screamed all night issues, the diapers, sicknesses, and protecting them from themselves issues constantly for 6 years. If I actually want to be correct, it would be 7 years to include our youngest’s whole 1st year. At the end of that year, in April or May of 89, I had a complete hysterectomy throwing more of my hormones completely out the window.
I’m not gonna continue on about the different hormones and when my memories came back from the abuse as a child or anything else because I’ve laid out the story well enough to give you an idea of the stress were in . Oh, of course, money was tight so I needed to grow our own food as much as possible and stretch the penny as hard as it would stretch.
Here’s where I’m going with this.
There are several types of counseling that I got it this time.
There were those that recommended I leave Jim and divorce him because of his anger. But they did not take into consideration my issues and I was aware enough of my issues that I knew it was not an imbalanced issue that caused friction in our marriage. And, in my mind set, I was pretty sure that anything that was going wrong in our marriage was all my fault. I was trying to find ways to just stay married but there were those that felt that I needed to leave him now. I guess it was my own self opinion that kept me from doing this.
There were those that said that I should just be silent and not say anything to Jim and only reply “yes sir” “no sir” to anything that he had to say.
I was also told that if there is any trouble in a marriage it is the woman’s fault.
I was also given counseling on the appropriate method of submission to my husband, and to only speak positive things and to never groan or complain in front of anyone. This one was the closest to right, in that this one kept his perceived character flaws out of the public eye and encouraged me to love from My love of Christ, and the love Christ to placed to my heart. But this backfired. In fact when I tried to talk to an older woman from church, just ask for counsel about how to interact with Jim, she looked at me in the face and said “I thought you said your husband was perfect! So, the problem must be you!”
After separations, hours and hours and hours of counseling, and some high intensity conversations, this older woman(me) has come up with a couple things that would have really helped me when we began. I haven’t yet written up some of the latest but here are 2 that I have shared in the last few years:
This one is to aid communication
Marriage Tools 1
This one helps get your heart focus in the right place:
Marriage Tools 2
This other post just summarizes everything I’ve said and points to love.
I was given a way for me to visually express my desire to love my husband: But I only have it on Shutterfly.
But I gave Jim all sorts of tangible evidences of me loving him and I photographed them and put them in a book because we were moving into a trailer and didn’t want all the clutter of the physical items.
These are ways that I, as an old woman, am trying to teach younger women. to love their husbands without being shackled, without being belittled or talked down to.
1st Timothy 2:9 through 15 talks about women.
After I first got married, I did a deep study in The Bible about what a woman should be, including Proverbs 31.
I have no idea where that study is, but I wanted to find out how to be a godly wife and eventually how to be a godly mother.
I find it interesting that the things older women are supposed to teach the younger women are
- to be sober,
- love their husbands,
- love their children,
- to be discreet,
- chaste,
- keepers at home,
- good,
- obedient to their own husbands and that the word of God not be blasphemed.
The reason you need to teach something to someone is because it doesn’t come naturally.
Today, some of these words have very negative meanings.
Someday I may go through and discuss how they are not so negative, but today is not That Day.
YOUNG MEN
Titus 2 verse 6,7,8
- Sober minded,
- pattern of good works,
- doctrine is sound,
- they can’t be condemned by their speech and
- enemies have nothing evil to say that could be believed.
While this is listed for young men to be taught, I’m thinking that young women could be taught to have a pattern of good works, to have uncorrupt doctrine, to be sincere, and that their speech is such that they can never be questioned as well.
The speech thing reminds me of the verse about the prophet whose words never fell to the ground.
1 Samuel 3:19
What a lovely thought! What a glorious thing to be said about someone! If one were to do a topical study in the Bible about the importance of the tongue, it would be intense! Off the top of my head I’m thinking about the verse life-and-death is in the power of the tongue.
Proverbs 18:21
SLAVES – SERVANTS – EMPLOYEES
Titus 2:9-10
Obedience.
Young women are told to obey their own husbands, and servants are told to
- obey their own masters.
- Please them well in all things
- Answer not again
There are cultural aspects to this, but there is also truth.
There are positions of authority in the Kingdom of God.
Jesus was under the authority of God the Father while he walked the earth, and He said so. And yet, Jesus is fully God. Both God the Father and God the Son highly honor God the Holy Spirit.
If we look at the Godhead, the triune nature of God, and we remember that in Genesis we were created in the likeness of God we can get a hint as to what this obedience means.
A difficulty in the world today that causes us problems with this is the CEO’s of large corporations making so much money when the ones lowest on the totem pole have to have food stamps to make ends meet. Employees and employer issues. Monarchs and paupers.
Many monarchies in history were completely out of touch and many still maybe out of touch with the plight of the common man. King and subjects
Let’s look at this again:
One of the concepts of obedience in the Christian faith is similar to obedience of a child to their father. A child’s father should love and care for the child while honoring their own personality and allowing them to explore things within a safely constructed environment.
Adam-and-Eve in the garden is a great example. They were given this beautiful garden and could do whatever they want and eat whatever they wanted except for one tree.
The Bible says that Jesus learned wisdom and obedience by the sufferings that he went through as a child, which was probably the training of Joseph and Mary as his parents.
Adam-and-Eve decided to eat of the one and only tree out of only God knows how many and disobey.
One day, Jesus didn’t stay with the family but stayed back at the temple discussing things with the priests and scribes. Obviously that was outside of the boundaries his parents had given.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that Jesus sinned, I’m saying that his parents had to bring him back into the boundaries of the environment with which they were protecting him.
Adam-and-Eve did sin, because they went directly against what God had said, and then they were kicked out of the beautiful environment that was the garden, and now we all suffer the consequences.
When a child is told not to touch the hot burner on the stove, and they reach up and touch the hot burner, most parents allow the burn to be the punishment.
a wise teaches that to disobey what has been laid down can bring negative consequences.
The husband is supposed to provide the protection and the wisdom to have a godly household, a safe household, in order for the wife to excel in the giftings that God has given her to provide a peaceful household and a nourishing household.
Can a man run a household? Yes. But men don’t normally have the nurturing gifting that a woman has.
Can a woman provide for a household? Yes. But a woman isn’t naturally the detached overseer.
And then there’s the whole thing about children, they just don’t have the knowledge or the experience. They need to trust their parents to provide them with safe boundaries so that they can explore and have a safe place to process that exploration. When the parents do not provide this guidance, that’s when we have many different and difficult issues with our children.
In our world today we have many men raising families on their own and many women raising families on their own and children that are tossed around because their parents have not become responsible for them. This was not God’s plan
Just like any corporation, someone needs to be in charge to make decisions. Someone needs to advocate for the workers and create a space conducive for growth. And you need workers.
A corporation without a head will flounder because it can’t move forward. Without the human resources personnel to stand in the gap between their CEO and the workers, many abuses end up happening. Unless the business is a one person creativity business, it needs the workers to get the work done.
Obedience isn’t about blind submission and eliminating self identity. The biblical concept of obedience is that it is an act of love, respect, and honor out of gratitude for what God has done in our lives. It is also like the son who wants to be like his father or the daughter who plays imitating her mother.
And obedience is a choice.
Someday I’ll write something about submission and obedience. They are so misused to abuse others. There are many other scriptures that talk about the responsibility of those in positions of authority to humble themselves and care for those that are under their authority as their own flesh.
The church is supposed to submit one to another and to consider others more highly than themselves.
If we take The Bible as a whole, we cannot read it the way it has been used and abused for many years.
Moses was described as a friend of God, there are several times that we have it in writing that he answered God as in answering again or questioned God! If the verse saying not to answer again to our employers for our masters as a has been applied, then Moses was out of line.
David knew he wasn’t supposed to mess around with another man’s wife, no one needed to tell him about it, and he messed around with Bathsheba.
When the Lord told him that the child would die, he cried out for God to change his mind. That seems like answering again!
Elijah argued with God about what God sent him to eat.
Peter argued with God about what God showed him to eat.
So again, we can see that there’s something different here.
Then there is something about being called be the leader of the family.
When Zachariah was told by the angel that Elizabeth would have a child, he argued and was struck “dumb”
And yet when Mary was told she was gonna have a baby without having known a man, she actually questioned the angel and wasn’t struck dumb.
That tells me there’s a right way to question authority and a wrong way.
All of that was to say I’m never going to preach obedience as an aspect of salvation or submission equaling that of of doormat that can be stomped all over without any individuality and mental acuity on behalf of the woman.
The next section of chapter 2 is really the why and I think it needs its own discussion. Please join me!
Hi!
My hope in the midst of despair and my joy in the face of depression is because of my relationship with Jesus Christ. If you do not have one, or are not sure you will join him in heaven, please check out these links.
Thanks for joining me in this journey,
In His hands and under His wings,
~Christi
Ps 63:7 Because you are my help, I sing in the shadow of your wings.
“The Lord does not give me rules, but He makes His standard very clear.
If my relationship to Him is that of love, I will do what He says without hesitation.
If I hesitate, it is because I love someone I have placed in competition with Him, namely, myself.” – from My Utmost for His highest
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Mt 16:13-17 The Son of Man
Mt 16:24-28
“The Lord does not give me rules, but He makes His standard very clear. If my relationship to Him is that of love, I will do what He says without hesitation. If I hesitate, it is because I love someone I have placed in competition with Him, namely, myself.” – 
I believe that Paul is speaking to those that confess to be believers, and discussing how the body needs to be helped.
