Moments in the life of a Pastor

Walking with God

Tag Archives: bible


by Leave a comment

20. Mentoring matters – Part 7

Titus 2:1-8

“As for you, Titus, promote the kind of living that reflects wholesome teaching. 2 Teach the older men to exercise self-control, to be worthy of respect, and to live wisely. They must have sound faith and be filled with love and patience. 3 Similarly, teach the older women to live in a way that honors God. They must not slander others or be heavy drinkers. Instead, they should teach others what is good. 4 These older women must train the younger women to love their husbands and their children, 5 to live wisely and be pure, to work in their homes, to do good, and to be submissive to their husbands. Then they will not bring shame on the word of God. 6 In the same way, encourage the young men to live wisely. 7 And you yourself must be an example to them by doing good works of every kind. Let everything you do reflect the integrity and seriousness of your teaching.8 Teach the truth so that your teaching can’t be criticized. Then those who oppose us will be ashamed and have nothing bad to say about us.”

So, what does the life of a mature woman look like? 

  1. LIFE – What kind of a life are you going to live”
  1. Careful with your walk Reverent – Honor God in the way that you live.

When it comes to women Paul tells Titus to teach the older women to walk in a way that honors God. Paul is telling you to stop listening to the lies of the culture and start listen to and live for the Lord. It frees you from being a people pleaser and lets you live from an audience of One. This one verse gives value to women because it reminds you not to get wrapped up in your looks but your life. Are you listening to the Lord or are you listening to the lies? The world says you are here for pleasure, but the Word says you are here for a purpose. When you make it about looks you end up competing with other women instead of coming alongside. You end up being mean instead of mentoring. Don’t believe me, then why do women respond so rudely when they show up to an event and there is another woman wearing the same dress? Why are your first thoughts, I can’t believe she wore that besides I look better just look at her butt it looks so big! Paul is telling you to living for the Lord not for an image. He is calling you to pursue purity not popularity. So let me ask you are listening to the voice of Christ or the critical and crushing peer pressure of this culture?  If I were to ask 10 different women WHAT IS BEAUTY? Would they all say the same thing? God loves variety. If I pulled out different kinds of flowers and said roses are beautiful but lilies are not or carnations are not you would disagree with me. If we really believed that we would try to get all flowers to become roses, we would force carnations to conform to our picture of pretty. You have a few too many pettles so we would pluck and preen them and try to force them into the shape we want. But what we are really doing in the name of beauty is butchering and killing God’s creation. In 2015 the beauty industry generated $56.2 billion in the United States alone. While we are busy trying to mold them into man’s definition of beauty we are missing the bigness of God’s beauty. We have reduced God’s beauty into something that’s small and shallow and evaluates and elevates women based on the sensual instead of the spiritual. Is it any wonder that most women suffer from self-esteem issues? Today the world is telling women to base their life on looks and then we wonder why women are stuck in slavery and being reduced to sexual objects. Basing life solely on looks leads to lust, but basing it on the Lord leads to love. Ladies are you basing your life on truth or on trash? Are you listening to the culture or Christ, ladies this isn’t truth its trash, and yet its what most of you are letting run and ruin your life. Pursuing the Lord frees you from worrying about what the world things. Rather than worrying about the wrinkles we should worry about our walk. 


by Leave a comment

19. Mentoring matters – Part 6

Titus 2:1-8

“As for you, Titus, promote the kind of living that reflects wholesome teaching. 2 Teach the older men to exercise self-control, to be worthy of respect, and to live wisely. They must have sound faith and be filled with love and patience. 3 Similarly, teach the older women to live in a way that honors God. They must not slander others or be heavy drinkers. Instead, they should teach others what is good. 4 These older women must train the younger women to love their husbands and their children, 5 to live wisely and be pure, to work in their homes, to do good, and to be submissive to their husbands. Then they will not bring shame on the word of God. 6 In the same way, encourage the young men to live wisely. 7 And you yourself must be an example to them by doing good works of every kind. Let everything you do reflect the integrity and seriousness of your teaching.8 Teach the truth so that your teaching can’t be criticized. Then those who oppose us will be ashamed and have nothing bad to say about us.”

As we continue with Mentoring Matters in our series “Firm Foundations” in the book of Titus we are going to see what the Word of God has to say to women. Now while much of what Paul has to say is not very popular in our present culture, it desperately needs to be preached today. Because many women are modeling their lives after worldly wisdom instead of the Words. As we study this passage the question that we need to ask is, when it comes to being a woman are you going to listen to God’s Word or the world? Ladies you are being constantly bombarded by what the world tells you a women should be, but it’s here that the Bible provides a breath of fresh air. Because it’s here that we discover the difference between the Worlds expectations and the Words exhortation. Now there are people who look at this set of verses and think Paul is just picking on women. But nothing could be further from the truth, Paul is actually elevating women to a place of high honor. You see just like in ancient Crete we live in a world where women are evaluated based on looks.

•                how “pretty they are”

•                how sexy they are

•                how thin they are

•                how popular they are

•                (pause) or by how much skin you can show

While the world focuses on your looks the Word focuses on your life. It’s here that we see the clash between the call of the culture and the call of Christ. While the world wants to try and convince you that it’s all about your looks, ladies the Word of God reminds you that it’s actually about your life. Unfortunately many of you are trying to live up to the Worlds expectations instead of living out the Words exhortation. Trying to live up to the world’s ideals is exhausting but living out the Words is energizing. Paul lived in a pagan world and so do we, a world that looks at life though a paganistic point of view, including viewing women as objects to be used and abused, instead of to be valued and treasured. But the first thing I want you to see here is that God’s word doesn’t just value women it gives them worth and challenges the culture to do the same. Ladies where are you trying to find your worth is it in what the world says or what the word says? Are you trying to find it in your looks or in the Lord? The first counter cultural challenge that we see is that the Word puts the focus first on older women, while the world puts the value on youth God’s Word puts value on wisdom. As we learned last time the term older is relative because it means being older than others. At its heart it speaks to maturity and reminds us that we need mature women who are modeling maturity and mentoring younger women toward maturity.