In this episode, from the second part of his plenary address at the 2025 Priscilla & Aquila Centre annual conference held on Monday 3 February 2025, Paul Grimmond, Head of the Ministry Department at Moore College, continues his exploration of Titus 2 and the commands to older men, older women, younger women and younger men.
Before he discusses the practical outworkings of the chapter, however, Paul answers some common criticisms of these commands, and helps us to think about our attitude or “comportment” to Scripture as we approach this particular passage.
We hope you find the episode helpful.
(To listen to part 1 of Paul’s plenary address, please see episode 26 of our 2025 season, or visit the Priscilla & Aquila website.)
For more audio resources, visit the Moore College website. There, you can also make a donation to support the work of the College.
Contact us and find us on socials.
Watch Paul Grimmond’s plenary addresses from the 2025 Priscilla & Aquila annual conference.
Watch other talks from the 2025 Priscilla & Aquila annual conference
Find out more and register for the August Priscilla & Aquila Centre seminar on “A history of Complementarianism” with Claire Smith (Wed 13 Aug 2025).
Please note: The episode transcript provided is AI-generated and has not been checked for accuracy. If quoting, please check against the audio.
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(00:09):
Welcome to Moore in the Word, a podcast of Moore Theological College in Sydney, Australia, that seeks
to glorify God through biblically sound, thought-provoking and challenging talks and interviews.
In this episode, from the second part of his plenary address at the 2025 Priscilla & Aquila Centre Annual
Conference held on Monday the 3rd of February, Paul Grimmond, Head of the Ministry Department at Moore College,
(00:35):
continues his exploration of Titus 2 and the commands to older men, older women, younger women, and younger men.
Before he discusses the practical outworkings of the chapter, however, Paul answers some common criticisms of these
commands, and helps us to think about our attitude or "comportment" towards Scripture as we approach this particular passage.
(00:57):
We hope you find the episode helpful.
A note for our listeners (00:59):
to listen to Part 1 of Paul's plenary address, please see episode 26
of our 2025 season, or visit the Priscilla & Aquila website using the link in the show notes.
Father, would you please help us to listen carefully to your word?
Would you ground us your spirit, that we might love the truth that we hear, that we might delight to put it into practice?
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We will be thankful for your work in Christ, that we would know your grace in
the spirit, and that we will be faithful servants who honor our king father.
We ask it in Jesus' name.
Amen.
Well, I do hope that you've, uh, enjoyed morning tea and the chance to stretch your legs and the opportunity
for encouragement and hopefully some challenging and robust conversation as we come to the second talk.
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I wanna take a brief detour and speak to you for a moment about comportment, a somewhat old fashioned word
that you don't kind of just drop into conversation and a somewhat underutilized word in my experience.
It's a wonderful word though that captures something of being human.
It's a word that describes how you carry yourself.
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It's a combination of demeanor and behavior of disposition and action.
Comportment is about who you are and what you do.
So I wanna ask as we come to this text in Titus again, what is your comportment towards scripture?
How do you carry yourself in relationship with the Bible?
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I mean, the Bible's very clear, isn't it?
That there is a kind of comportment that God expects of us.
Uh, Isaiah chapter 66 in verse two, this is the one to whom I will look, he who is humble and contrite in spirit and trembles at my word.
Proverbs tells us that it's the fear of the Lord that is the beginning of wisdom.
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And two Timothy three tells us the Bible is written for teaching instruction, but also for reproof and correction.
If I was going to kind of summarize or describe the invitation that Scripture brings about
itself, I would say that we are invited to a humble, discerning submission to God's word.
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I think if you ought to wrap up the different ways in which the Bible encourages us to engage it.
It's about being humble and it's about being discerning.
But fundamentally, our attitude is to be a space of submission.
And again, I wanna point out that actually this space of submission in
particular is complex for us as Christians because of the world in which we live.
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We have, from the time that we were born drunk from kind of the well of our world, in which suspicion is the fundamental stance of life.
Suspicion is the guarantee of getting it right.
Suspicion is the guarantee of having no other authority stand over you and mess your life up.
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Now, we know that there are some good reasons that suspicion is part of our worlds.
You don't have to read much history to know that lots of people in authority have
misused their authority in terrible ways and then managed to find justifications for it.
So who wouldn't be suspicious?
And then of course there's that inner thingy that we all get involved with the source of almost all information.
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The great God of everything that's true, that is so littered with falsehood that nobody actually knows which bits are true and false.
And now they've put the robot overlords in charge, which will tell you which bits are true and false, but you can't trust them either.
Now you kind of laugh, right?
But actually when I go to research or engage with stuff on the internet, whenever I actually know what I'm talking
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about, I find so much rubbish, but it just makes me wonder what's going on when I don't dunno what I'm talking about.
And of course what that means is that for all of us, I think it's part of what's created, things like what's
happening in the US about what's real truth and can anybody know the truth and all of that kind of stuff.
We've just created this world where who knows how you actually get to what is true and what's false.
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But in the face of that, we are schooled in submission as a fundamental tenet of self-protection from a young age.
And that leaves us with a problem, doesn't it?
Because God does not encourage us to come to the scriptures suspiciously, but actually
humbly and faithfully longing to submit to the truth that we discern to be there.
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And so I think I need to say something as we engage with these texts on the attention that they have received from scholarship and
from feminist scholarship in particular, I personally feel a deep alignment with some of the main goals of feminist scholarship.
There is no doubt that women have at many times and at various places in our history, been deeply mistreated
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by the failure of men to act and use their authority with godliness or grace or wisdom towards others.
There is no doubt that they have in places born the brunt of the sinfulness,
arrogance and anxiety of men who'll fail to live as God would have them live.
I think feminism has rightly alerted us to the tragedy of systemic abuse of women through the ages.
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And yet for all of that, and I don't say this lightly in its desire to protect, I think that much feminist scholarship
and particularly radical feminist scholarship takes a stance towards scripture that is antithetical to biblical faith.
I wanna show you briefly what I mean by that statement, and it Inger is a feminist
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scholar who has written a great deal in the last decade or two on the pastoral epistles.
She's very open about the way she approaches the interpretive task.
These are her own words.
First and foremost, I approach these texts as a feminist scholar.
I mean that I myself identify as a feminist who embraces the essentially equality
of all persons regardless of sex, sexuality, or gender when reading biblical texts.
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I seek out appearances by women and topics that impact women in the past and today.
Additionally, my questions regarding biblical teachings are influenced by a hermeneutic of suspicion, meaning I do not accept a plain reading of
the texts, nor do I presume that the author's perspectives are necessarily an accurate portrayal of historical people, events, and circumstances.
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This is in her own words, her attitude as she comes towards scripture.
So to give you a little feel of what that actually means in practice, in the forward to Geisinger's commentary on the pastoral
epistles, another prominent scholar, Elizabeth sh Fiza, speaks of scripture as a garden in which both beauty and danger lies.
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She speaks about the Bible like this, she says, as a critical feminist interpretation for wellbeing, this wisdom commentary seeks to elaborate
the beauty and fecundity of this scripture garden, and at the same time, point to the harm it can do when one submits to its world of vision.
In other words, scripture has good things to teach us, but it also at points presents such a picture of the
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world that if you ab obeyed or submitted yourself to its vision of the world, it would in fact harm you.
That is her fundamental position or starting point in regards to the Bible.
Now I think that I live in a free world and I'm deeply thankful that people are allowed to express differing opinions.
And it's important that we hear them and engage with them.
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But I wanna point out that I don't think that you can hold that position and maintain Christian faith for a very long period of time.
Inger, in fact, in her commentary, argues that Titus wasn't written by Paul.
It wasn't written to Titus, and it's not about the church on Crete.
And you may chuckle at that, but she actually goes into some detail explaining why she believes that all those things are true.
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Now, again, I wanna say you're allowed to hold that position.
We live in a world where you're free to hold that position.
But I wanna say that if you are a, a lover of God's gospel and you know God's truth in God's word, there is actually
a point at which suspicion starts to place you outside of what I think is a faithful Christian response to scripture.
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And so I wanna say in this room today that even as different people will come to some different conclusions about how exactly we hold
these commands in relationship to ourselves, I wanna encourage you that the appropriate way to do that is not through a hermeneutic of
suspicion, but through a thoughtful, humble discernment that seeks to actually set yourself under the authority of God revealed in His word.
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Discernment is not about suspicion, but about a humble willingness to read and respond
wisely to the truth that actually accepts the way that scripture speaks about itself.
I would suggest, and I think I wanna encourage you to keep all of those things in place
as we actually turn, uh, to these two big questions that I've raised in the first talk.
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So the first question, if you remember is what do you do when your experience seems to contradict scripture?
Paul can say three times to Titus Live this way.
The word of God will not be reviled.
You will not be reviled, and scripture will be adorned.
But your experience seemed to suggest something very different.
Now, I wanna talk about this from a few perspectives, but I wanna say that part
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of our problem is that we tend to detach those two realities from each other.
The connection between truth and godliness is one truth, and the fact that this
truth should actually ado the word of God gets held in another hand over here.
Whereas actually for Titus, those two things are deeply, logically connected to each other.
Truth and godliness and the way that you live bringing about certain responses
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to the gospel are actually part of the deep underlying logic of scripture.
Now one of the things that we need to do though, is we need to see that this statement about people responding to the truth of the word of God
and to Christians is one statement amongst many that describes a complex picture of how the world responds to the way that people live for Jesus.
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You see, we do have this passage, but other passage gives us different perspectives that are important to hold.
So in some places we are told that you really should expect to be persecuted if you live for Jesus, Matthew 10 25, and this is Jesus himself.
It is enough for the disciple to be like his teacher and the servant like his master.
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If they've called the master of the house Ible, how much more will they malign those of his households?
And so to Timothy three, indeed all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted.
Whatever Paul is saying in Titus two is not an absolute statement about all people's response everywhere in all time.
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Of course, the scriptures bring us other moments that help to give sense to our experience as well.
One.
Peter three we're told that leaving for godliness may cause people to revile us,
but will cause some people to ask us why we have this hope and why we are different.
One Peter three 14.
Even if you should suffer for righteousness sake, you will be blessed.
Have no fear of them, nor be troubled, but in your hearts, honor Christ, the Lord as holy, always
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being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason, for the hope that is in you.
Yet do it with gentleness and respect.
Having a good conscience so that when you are slandered, see the expectation those who revile your good behavior in Christ may be put to shame.
Of course, part of it, as you read scripture, is about the eschatological moment in which you stand living for Christ will have certain responses
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that it generates in the here and now, but there is a final response on the last day that is very definite and that God guarantees one Peter to 11.
I urge you, misogynous and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul.
Keep your conduct among the Gentiles honorable so that when they speak against you
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as evil doers, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day of visitation.
We know, don't we, that actually scripture gives us these multiple perspectives.
In a sinful world, sometimes being godly will cause people to question and ask things and even come to know Jesus.
Sometimes being godly will cause people to revile us, to reject us, to say all sorts of things about scripture.
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There is a final accounting on the last day when all of those who have seen God's people act with grace and
wisdom and godliness and kindness will acknowledge God in all of his glory for His work in God's people.
But what that means is that you and I live in a world where it's possible to call good evil and to call evil good.
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You've ever had the joy of reading any nature.
You will know that people in history have railed against things that you hold dear
in his book, the Antichrist, which should give you some idea of what's coming.
He rails against pity, compassion, and sympathy as evils that actually undo and destroy our world.
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Here's the very short quote, what is more harmful than any vice practical sympathy for the botched and the weak Christianity?
And if you didn't know, nature actually lies behind lots of the philosophy that's still taught in most of your universities.
In other words, according to nature, Jesus care for the outcasts, the lame, the blind, the spiritually downtrodden.
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Those who are in any way experiencing some of the suffering of our fallen worlds, to have pity
or compassion or grace towards them is actually the fundamental evil that exists in our world.
So you know that you live in a place where sin is so wicked that it's possible to call what is good evil and to call what is evil good.
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And so we ought to expect that when we live according to what is good.
Some people will name it as evil and vice versa.
Godliness, I think, ultimately always commends the gospel on the last day.
It will silence God's critics.
In the meantime, we should expect responses to be mixed.
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We saw in Talk One that we naturally treat most of the instructions in Tide US two as universally applicable and not momentarily cultural.
So why the pressure to speak about certain instructions in this way?
It's actually because of this pressure that we feel from our world.
And the way that we approach these instructions is I would suggest often an attempt to
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ameliorate our discomfort by using a biblical truth in an unhealthy way to read scripture.
We read commands like wives submit to your own husbands.
And because this command has become an argument for some to reject the gospel, it creates difficulty and discomfort for us.
And so we naturally look for what we might call a faithful way to reshape the command.
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And the appeal to evangelism in this chapter live this way, and it will adorn the gospel, presents a little opportunity to
enact what I will call the, that was just cultural, and we need to live differently now for the sake of evangelism argument.
The problem that seems to me is that the use of that argument at this point actually fails against the extrinsic evidence at two significant points.
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The first is that in every other place that Paul calls on wives to submit to their own husbands, he never uses this argument.
In one Corinthians 11, the head coverings passage, the argument around submission proceeds
from the order of creation and the nature of the practice required in every church.
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In Ephesians five, the argument proceeds from the comparison between marriage and the nature of Christ's relationship with the church.
In Colossians three, the commandment flows out of having died and been raised with Christ and seated
with him in the heavenly realms and being called to put off the old self and to put on the new self.
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And then it's explicitly referenced with regards to the particular command wives submit to your husband's as is fitting in the Lord.
Again, the intrinsic evidence in each of these texts points to the way that Paul identifies
lots of truth about God and the gospel as being the foundation for these commandments.
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But this leads to the second thing that you need to see.
The that was a cultural practice that ought to be changed for the sake of evangelism.
Argument is actually not a common biblical argument.
The Bible doesn't unfold it in many and many places as far as I can work out.
One Corinthians nine is the one explicit unfolding of that commandment, and that happens
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in one Corinthians eight to 10 in the broader context of a call to Christian Liberty.
Now what's interesting is that as that specific argument and more broadly, liberty is engaged within
scripture, one Corinthians eight to 10, Romans 14, and a few scattered verses in Galatians and Corinthians.
I think
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the argument never proceeds on the basis that we think that it proceeds.
That is Paul explicitly outlines what he thinks Christians have freedom in on the basis of the gospel and
then calls us to live in light of those freedoms specifically for the sake of others becoming Christian.
He's not saying, here is a hermeneutical principle that you can use to read the whole of scripture and sift what is true and false.
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He says, the gospel explains to you where your freedom lies, where your freedom lies.
You ought to not stand on that when actually your love for other people might
lead you to put some freedoms aside for the sake of them becoming Christian.
That is even our language of cultural relativity.
That was for their culture, but not ours.
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That is really our language rather than scripture's language, scripture's language is what you are called to in the gospel as a
follower of Jesus, which clearly identifies areas of Christian liberty or freedom where different people are genuinely free to respond.
And so the fundamental question at a more broad level, and especially in light of the fact that so many other passages
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reference these things in regards to the gospel and God is, is there any grounds for being able to say, well, actually
these things are part of Christian freedom rather than something fundamental that God calls us to in the gospel?
If I was to summarize, I would say I think that scripture ties the submission of Wise to husbands very closely to
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the doctrine of the created Order, to the doctrine of God and to the nature of Christ's work for us in the gospel.
And when the Bible does talk about using your freedom for evangelism, the areas in which your freedom exists are clearly articulated.
So this is why I think actually the argument about the correlation between gender and slavery is quite significant for us.
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Is it okay that we've eradicated slavery but hung onto these commands about gender?
Does that actually reflect the way that scripture talks about these things or is it something different?
And so I have a string of comments that are thoroughly inadequate.
I would commend to you Peter o's work, uh, on slavery through the p and a Center.
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Uh, and as I've also included a little video, which is fascinating from the ESV translation committee on why
they chose to translate dual loss as bond servant in the New Testament, um, rather than in some other form.
Um, and you might find those helpful resources to go and chase down for yourself.
But I have a few key points that I wanna make that I think are important for us.
The first is, and this is the fundamental one, the most important thing I understand about slavery in the times of the old
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and New Testament is that it is not analogous to the chattel slavery practiced in the US from the 15th to the 19th centuries.
In fact, the Bible basically prohibits the kind of slavery practiced in the us.
US slavery would've been impossible without the slave trade and the Old Testament and
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the New Testament explicitly denounces in no uncertain terms, any kind of slave trading.
And just to give you an idea of how explicitly it denounces, here is Exodus 21, verse 16.
Whoever steals a man and sells him and anyone found in possession of him shall be put to death.
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The Israelites didn't mince words about how evil they thought this practice was.
Juno, chapter 24 and verse seven, if a man is found stealing one of his brothers, of the
people of Israel, and if he treats him as a slave or sells him, then that thief shall die.
And so you shall purge the evil from your midst.
Then in the New Testament in one Timothy chapter one, when Paul is speaking about the kinds of lifestyle that's contrary to the will of
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God, it explicitly names Enslavers or slave traders as those who are acting contrary to the law of God and deserving of God's judgment.
So you've gotta understand that actually, if people had read their scriptures carefully and thoughtfully, they would've realized that
although they may end up owning slaves, the whole economy was built on a practice that was outlawed in both the old and New Testaments, right?
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There wasn't a kind of biblical place there to say, this is okay.
Now.
It's complex, isn't it?
Because scripture does acknowledge that there was forms of slavery in its world.
And it tries to engage with those.
And the way that engages might be a little different from the ones that we would prefer because
of our cultural moment, the train them all to rise up and overthrow the oppressor route.
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Um, which is not actually biblically very helpful.
But let me point out a few big distinctions between Old and New Testament, slavery
and slavery in our modern worlds, biblical slavery was economic and not ethnic.
In biblical times, people went into slavery to deal with debt or because they were prisoners of war, not because they were
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stolen from their homelands with the express purpose of being shipped to the other side of the world and sold further.
The Bible has incredibly different rules from any of the surrounding cultures about how to love and care for people who are in this state.
Do you know that there is a law in Deuteronomy 15 if a fellow Hebrew.
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Makes themselves your slave for the cause of economic debt.
Deuteronomy commands that you release them after six years and provide economic assistance for them to live the free life afterwards.
Now, there's a rule that you're not hearing in many slave owning economies.
The slaves who have escaped in Deuteronomy 2315, we think from surrounding nations and found themselves in Israel.
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Israelites are explicitly prohibited from sending those slaves back to their masters in other
nations and are told they must give them a home amongst them and look after their wellbeing.
Okay?
The law also protects the slave from certain elements of mistreatment that where beatings have taken place and whatever.
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If that's caused severe or lasting injury, then the slave is to be given their freedom.
They are not just this thing, but they're a person in the New Testament, the.
Slavery is not identical.
But again, slavery is not ethnic.
It's economic and it's war related, but also incredibly in the Roman Empire, the rates of manumission, which
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is the freeing of slaves, occurred at a higher rate than any other slave owning society that we know of in
the history of the world, or at least that's what the historians tell me, and I'm believing that that's true.
The way of estimating how many slaves have been released is very technically complex.
Historically, the estimates range anywhere north of 50% of slaves were freed in their lifetime, which means that
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for many slaves, the expectation was not that this was a lifelong reality, and most of them would be set free.
And furthermore, the New Testament explicitly says to slaves, if you can gain your freedom, do so.
One Corinthians 7 21, it doesn't say obeying your master is about being stuck here for life.
It says, while you're in this social situation.
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Live in a way that honors Jesus.
And if your freedom becomes available to you, you take it because freedom is
actually a deep value that's expressed in the gospel, in God's plan for the world.
And we should also note that Christians and God's people in the Old Testament are all commanded
to live with the people who are slaves in ways that fundamentally recognize them as human beings.
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Do you know the most repeated command in Exodus as it speaks about slavery?
You too were slaves in Egypt.
That's not a dehumanizing move.
That is a reminder that these people are under your care and our fellow human beings.
And actually in the New Testament, we are told over and over again that masters
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are to treat their slaves as someone who knows that they have a heavenly master.
And as someone who knows that these people could be fellow heirs with them of the gift of its eternal life.
And that's why when Paul returns philemon to animus, he appeals to him to accept Philemon as a brother in the Lord.
Listen to what it says for this perhaps is why he was parted from you for a while, that you might have him
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back forever, no longer as a bond servant, but more than a Bo servant, as a beloved brother, especially to me.
But how much more to you both in the flesh and in the Lord?
The language of the New Testament and the Old Testament and the trajectory of the gospel all suggests that the Bible is responding to a condition
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that exists in its world that it wants to control, organize, and look after, in a way that recognizes the fundamental humanity of people who
are in slavery in any form, based on a reminder that you and they belong to the same Heavenly Father, if that was practiced consistently.
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In other slave owning communities that would've made a radical difference to people's experience and even to our sense of what slavery is, in fact.
But what's more important is that if you look at the laws around slaves in nearly every slave
owning society, those laws were about treating slaves as properties rather than human beings.
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And the gospel means that you cannot treat other human beings as anything less than made in the image of God and potential COHEs of life.
And I think that this is why Christians who were reading their Bible fought so hard against the slave trade because the trajectory of
the gospel is that it will come to an end within societies where the gospel is honored as indeed is what has taken place in our worlds.
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If you wanna read a very thought provoking interchange on this topic, it's a BT and Bule and Douglas Wilson had a fascinating
back and forth a few years ago over Douglas Wilson's book called Black and Tan, and over the Biblical understanding of slavery.
They come to some very different conclusions in certain places about their understanding of slavery, but remarkably two men who are very
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different and come from very different spaces agree fundamentally on these two things they would both say absolutely and with no questions asked.
The Bible is profoundly anti-racism and racism as it's normally practiced is a sinful activity.
And the second thing is that the logic of the gospel when played out in a world leads naturally and irrevocably, whatever that word means.
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You can't stop it towards the getting rid of slavery in the society in which you're part.
And so brothers and sisters, when you come to thinking about how slavery and gender are spoken about in the Bible, you
actually have to see that slow careful reading of scripture leads you to two very different pictures of those things.
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Slavery is a human institution which is messy, that the Bible encourages God's people to live with
faithfully in a way that actually treats it totally differently from anybody else in the worlds.
Whereas we're told that being male and female is fundamental to our creativeness and the way that God has made us.
Genesis 1 27, God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created he male and female, he
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created them, and Jesus declares in Mark 10 from the beginning of creation, God made them Male and female.
Male and female are not human creations.
They are God-given designations.
And unlike the trajectory of the gospel with regards to slavery, the trajectory of the gospel is not the eradication of gender in our worlds.
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There are some explicit statements that reshape our understanding of male and female differentiation in relation to certain Christian truths.
Galatians 3 28 must be read and applied appropriately.
In Christ, there is no male or female as brothers and sisters.
There is no difference between who we are, our state before God.
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There is no difference between our need for Jesus atoning work and salvation on our behalf.
And there is no difference in terms of our worth before God on the basis of what God has done for us in the Lord Jesus.
But to suggest that that verse.
Becomes a grid through which you actually read all of the rest of the statements in scripture that actually differentiate between men and women.
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I just think stretches healthy reading in an unhealthy way.
Actually, what we're doing is anachronistic.
We're applying a particular thing from our world back into the text of scripture in order to read and sift it.
Scripture's, treatment of gender is radically different from its treatment of slavery.
And so we need to, as people raise these kinds of arguments with us, which feel so
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uncomfortable and powerful in our world because of the wrongs that have been done.
We need to remember that calling for people to live in light of one.
And actually, can I say that if I was in a world, a part of the world where
slavery still existed, I think the commands to slaves would still apply by the way.
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Nevertheless, we need to say that they are not analogists and the way that evangelicals have responded to
slavery is in no way a foundation for responding in the same way to what the Bible has to say about gender.
So, and at last you may say, if what we've said today is true, then I think we've come some distance towards
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what it might mean to say that godliness is complimentarian and you're finally getting what you paid for.
How you doing?
You doing okay?
I am sorry that this has been dense and there's a lot of information I know, but you're really wrestling with it.
What I've attempted to show this morning is that both intrinsically, the shape of the book of Titus matched with the extrinsic nature of scripture.
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The whole witness of scripture and it's theology teaches us that the instructions that Paul gives
to Titus about how God's church is to conduct themselves in Titus two, they're not accidental.
They're not a cultural moment in history.
They're not a thing that's an accommodation to the society for the sake of evangelism.
They're actually, Paul thinks that these things are a fundamental outworking of the gospel.
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We have been saved from our lawlessness.
We have been saved for the sake of being zealous for good works, and we are gonna meet the one who died and rose to save us.
And so as those people, we ought to actually live in this way that accords with godliness.
All of these instructions are deeply for us.
It's interesting, isn't it?
How scripture then in God's kindness leads us to see that God addresses us all as human beings and then in different places, more
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specifically according to who we are as younger and older as men and women, as slaves, as free, even as Jews and Gentiles, in fact,
and even in different ways, in different churches at different times according to your personal, cultural and historical situation.
There is a universal truth that calls all of us to be transformed into the likeness of Jesus.
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And so there are passages in the New Testament that just say, whoever you are, you should do this.
You should put off sexual immorality or impurity or lies or behavior like that,
and you should put on things like loving kindness and grace and other things.
But very regularly, God in his kindness, chooses to address us according to some of our created categories of reality.
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God takes those commands and starts to become more explicit and real about how they work out according to the different realities of our life.
You think about the nature of the entire New Testament with me for a moment.
It's not just about being men and women or Jews and Gentiles, whatever.
Paul doesn't write one generic letter that says, here's all the things that you should do if you're Christian,
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and here's all the things you shouldn't do, and then gets the scribal photocopiers to work, so you could send
it out to every church so it would have a foundational textbook to know exactly how to live for the Lord Jesus.
What he does is he writes individual letters to different congregations, addressing them
in all of the messes of life, saying, this is how the truth about Jesus works out for you.
And so what he says to the Philippians is not identical to what he says to the Colossians, which isn't
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identical to what he says to the Galatians, and it's certainly not the same as what he says to the Philippians.
He's addressing people under threat of persecution, or he is dealing with
people who are threatening to let go of the gospel because of Jewish influence.
Or he is talking to people who have asceticism and stuff, has ruled the day and he brings the truth about God.
All the riches of theological reality in the gospel to bear on all of these different circumstances.
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And that's part of God's grace to us.
God's instruction about godliness is both general and very specific, and the scripture says that
actually you and I need both of those things in order to make sense of what godliness looks like.
The specific doesn't annu the general, and the general doesn't anul the specific.
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And part of what that means is that when you read a command that's given to a
specific bunch of people, you and I don't automatically use the opposite of it, right.
So when he says to the older women, don't be slaves to much wine and you don't go, great, doesn't apply to me.
Or when he speaks to Titus about showing dignity and integrity and soundness of speech
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because he's a teacher, you don't go, well, I can lie about anything that I like.
Now you realize that these are commands that are being brought to bear on specific people in
circumstances and space, but which reflect and have an overflow in terms of the Christian life.
But you also realize that not every command is given to every single specific person.
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Paul is telling Titus, the older women should train the younger women.
He doesn't say to the older men, you go and train the younger women because he actually
understands what it is to be human and that there are good things about that relationship.
He says to wives, be submissive to your own husband.
But he doesn't say to husbands, be submissive to your wives.
He says other things in other places.
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Fundamentally shape the nature of that relationship.
But they're not identical and they're not completely reciprocal.
As God speaks to our specificity, sometimes those commandments become more particular and in ways that relate to us at
different points in spaces in our lives, and I wanna say to you that all of that actually is God's kindness and goodness to us.
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Just pick it up with me for a moment in regards to Titus, why does Titus say to young
men the self-controlled, why talk to young men, particularly about self-control?
Now, I don't think any of you are surprised that he's chose to talk to young men, particularly about self-control.
Are you?
Now, why is that?
Because actually, young men have been young men in every generation of the history of the church.
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Now, let me read to you from Calvin's sermons on Titus to the young men in his congregation 500 years ago.
Now, when Paul speaks about young men, he commands them to be self-controlled.
This is a virtue most necessary for those of that age.
It is, as we know, a time of great heat for it's exceedingly difficult to keep young men on a tight reign.
They are like a pot which starts to boil and bubble over
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when young men see that they're full of evil desires, which drive them to do wrong when only force
will make them yield when some are promiscuous and others get up to the worst mischief imaginable.
Full hardiness, extravagance, gluttony, gaming.
Um, that's not computers by the way, but.
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When young men see that this is where their nature leads them, should they be complacent?
We are so adept at thinking of ourselves as sophisticated and modern and different from all
the other people in all of history, but we are really not like we are really, really not.
The things that young men struggle with in our age are the things that everybody who's been a young man has struggled with in every age of the church.
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We are not dealing with some radical newness people.
We're just dealing with plain old fashioned sin that has expressed itself in particular
ways with regards to particular people through all the history of God's church.
Paul speaks particularly to Titus about self-control for young men because self-control is a struggle for every young man.
Self-control in terms of temper, self-control, in terms of lust, self-control, in terms of pride, and being the center of attention.
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Self-control in terms of selfishness, learning to be the one who serves rather than watching other people be served.
Learning that when it comes to dessert, you don't take the biggest peace.
And we laugh at that, but it actually, it requires effort, doesn't it?
And a reminder of who Jesus is and why you might love other people self-control at Bible study when you
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know the answer and you've got a lot to say, but you might actually hold yourself back for the sake of other
people being able to contribute because you might have something to learn self-control with regards to gaming
in every age, the nature of being human and growing up has meant that self-control is a problem in a myriad of young ways for young men.
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And God in his kindness draws particular attention to this, even though we all need self-control.
So will you allow me for a moment just to address each of the rest of us in turn?
Older men.
What does God say to you about actually living following Jesus?
Well, you are to be sober-minded, dignified, self-controlled sounding, faith in love and steadfastness.
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I'm not exactly sure what the cutoff age is for older men, but I'm gonna say that if you have any hint of gray, you are on your way there.
And my younger brothers, this is where you're supposed to end up actually.
Now, do you notice that he says particularly self-control, but to that he adds sober minded and dignified?
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To be sober minded is to be restrained as one Greek dictionary, put it in some languages.
This could be translated as one who always has a halter on himself.
Now, isn't that an interesting image?
We put halters on toddlers to stop them from taking off.
Do you, as an older man, consider yourself as someone who actually requires a halter?
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I. Because I think God thinks that you do.
You are to be restrained.
You ought to hold yourself back.
You ought to be thoughtful about how you express and engage yourself in relationship with the people around you.
Are you quick to share your opinion or are you actually willing to sit and listen when you feel grumpy or frustrated, which I'm sure only
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happens occasionally because the music is too loud or because the young people act too quickly or because nobody notices your years and wisdom.
Are you restrained?
Do you keep your anger in check?
Do you challenge yourself to look to the Lord Jesus and be like him?
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The one who though being reviled did not revile in return,
or brothers?
Let me ask you about faith, love, and hope.
Which issues steadfastness those three fundamental Christian virtues at the end of the verse?
Are you sound healthy full In terms of your faith?
Are you still clinging to the truths of the gospel and to the goodness of scripture and engaging with it, or has actually
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some of the zeal you had started to become a bit tired and you've started to become a little loose around some of the edges?
Are you healthy with regards to your love?
Isn't it interesting that what it pinpoints for older men is that you are someone who is known for the healthiness and soundness of your love?
Brothers?
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Are you known amongst the people who are around about you for being someone who acts with grace and kindness and care?
Are you nurturing an affection and a desire for the good of all of those who are around you?
What a blessing it would be for our churches to have older men who are sound in faith, in love, and in steadfastness.
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Who are actually living out the fruit of a lifetime full of faithful, dignified, self-controlled, and restrained living
brothers.
I urge and exhort you as someone who will speak to Jesus on the last day.
What do you need to take away?
What's something that you need to do differently?
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And to my older sisters, what does God encourage you to?
Well, verse three, you ought to be reverent in behavior, not slanderers or slaves.
Too much wine.
You ought to teach what is good.
And so train the young women reverent in behavior.
It's really interesting.
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The word behavior, again, almost picks up that idea of comportment or demeanor.
How does your life display the inner reality of what you believe?
And the word reverend actually comes from the language of the Greek temple, in fact, and
is the word that describes the priestess who is totally devoted and engaged at the temple.
Does the whole of your life, if someone walked with you yesterday and watched the ins and outs of your life, does it reflect the kind of wholehearted
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devotion to the Lord Jesus and to God, your father, that would reflect that your behavior is an outworking of what you believe in your heart?
That's what it's asking in calling you to.
And he gets specific, doesn't he?
He says, um, how are you going with slandering or with your tongue?
I wonder what happens when you get together with friends?
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Do you use your tongue to put people down perhaps gently or only slightly?
Or in order to bolster your sense of self.
I mean, it's not really slander, is it?
Do you find it easy to get frustrated and cranky and for the way that you feel to leak
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out about them in relationship with others is really the question that it's asking.
What would it take to control your tongue and to choose not to speak and to challenge the thoughts of your heart?
Or in terms of not being slaves to much wine?
I wanna ask in love, has alcohol become part of your necessary wine down at the end of the day?
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Is wine a daily habit?
Do you use it to control your sense of anxiety or distress?
My dear sisters, God says this, not to shame you, even though actually if you detect it in yourself, you may feel some shame about these things.
We are all strugglers in need of grace.
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If you are becoming dependent on alcohol as a way of managing life, can I just encourage
you to reach out and talk to a friend about it and ask for some help and encouragement?
And finally, do you notice that living in these ways as an old woman is actually all
about expressing your faith in such a way that makes you fit to teach the younger women?
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It's the kind of phrase that's actually used of the elders of the church, and it's a, it's a remarkable reminder that in our angst
at times over talking about public teaching and who's allowed to preach and not whatever else, the Bible is full of the sharing
of the gospel in so many different ways in our relationships and all the women, you are being actually called by God to find
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opportunities to seek, to teach the younger woman what it means to live in a way that honors Jesus and lives out her faith in the Lord.
Now can I just make a little partial observation here?
This is a generalization and applies to nobody in particular.
Some of the older women that I know I think feel a bit reluctant and like if they offered to
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actually meet with or talk with a younger woman, they feel like, well, what would they want to know?
And I don't really have anything to offer and I'm not sure what I would be bringing here.
I just wanna say to you, God gives you permission and encouragement and it's okay to ask.
And I think some of the younger women that I know feel like I'm not sure that I can ask them.
I dunno if anyone's noticed me.
I dunno if I'm worth stopping and meeting with.
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It would be okay for you to find a godly, older woman in your church and say, I'd really love some help and I would really love it
if you would meet with me and read the scriptures and pray with me and encourage me about living as a faithful follower of Jesus.
My sisters, can I encourage you to try and find each other and work out how to put these things into practice in our life?
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Because where I see it happening, the fruit of that for all concern is actually beautiful for the sake of the gospel and God's glory.
And so finally to my younger sisters, verse four, to love your husbands and children to be self-controlled,
pure, working at home kind and submissive to your own husbands, self-controlled, pure, and kind.
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Justice.
For younger men and older men, self-control can be an issue.
As I've reflected on this, one of the things that's caused me to think about is actually engagement with social media.
I think that it's a space that is at least theoretically relational.
Uh, I'm not sure how actually relational it is in practice, but it is a space that commands a kind of relational tug.
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And it's an easy space to invest a lot of your time in.
And so I just wanna ask you actually, what kind of rules of thumb or what have you put in
place in your own life to be self controlled with regards to your engagement with that stuff?
I think it's a space actually that lends itself to gossip, to point scoring to all sorts of behavior that's not particularly helpful.
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Uh, if we took Philippians seriously and filling ourselves with things that are honorable
and noble and right, and trustworthy and true, I suspect we would all avoid it a little more.
And this leads me, and this is my grumpy older man moment.
To those of you who are younger, generally, not just my sisters but my brothers, is there anything on
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television or on your streaming service of choice that you will choose not to watch for the sake of the gospel?
Because in my conversations with young adult Christians, it seems to me that there's
lots of things that I would choose not to watch that they are very happy to watch.
And it could be that I'm old and grumpy.
I acknowledge that and there is some of that in me actually.
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But when they talk about the latest episode of Love Island or whatever else it is that they've been watching,
in part, I wanna say to you, what would you choose not to watch for the sake of expressing your Christian faith?
Not because we are censorious or because we need to avoid the things that the world talks about
or whatever, but what would you actually choose not to watch for the sake of your own heart?
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My sisters, can I encourage you too, towards kindness.
Kindness is about being gentle, isn't it?
With your humor, attentive to those who aren't noticed.
And so many of my dear sisters, I actually noticed this in your life and the way that you love people at church.
Keep being kind, keep being people who will love those around you and listen well.
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And finally, for younger women who are married, loving your husband and children.
Working at home and being submissive to your own husband.
A few quick thoughts.
It does strike me that loving husbands and children requires training.
It's remarkable and deeply true.
None of us is born wisely able to love those around about us, and it all actually requires encouragement, assistance in the work of the word of God.
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I'm pretty sure that every mom that I know who has made it past primary school, has had moments in her life.
When she says, I don't really like them,
I know that I'm called to love them, but at the moment I am really struggling to like them because quite frankly, they're not always likable.
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And as for your husband, I'm not gonna say anything else.
But do you see, we assume that these things are natural.
They're maternal, they're biological, they're something that comes with our instincts.
And in some way there are elements of truth in that, in terms of hormones and creation and whatever else.
But the reality as it is for all of us, that these things actually require effort and work and training and encouragement.
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They require the good work of God's spirit by his word.
And they require time spent with older, wiser, faithful women who have been there before us and encourage us to live this out.
And so I wanna speak particularly and point out about the fact that actually, therefore, when it says working at home, we have been trained
foolishly by our world to think that that's the private space and the space that's out of the world, and that's not very helpful or useful.
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Whereas in God's economy, there is almost nothing more precious that he could call you to than the oversight
of your household and to the raising of your young children and to the encouragement of others in the faith.
You know, our government legislates to get women back to work as soon as possible so they can be productive as if loving and caring
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for the people in your life and using your home for the good of people where there's no financial payment involved is unproductive.
We have stupid ways of measuring productivity, quite frankly, and we keep imbibing them as a culture.
Now, I'm not making any comment about whether a woman works for paid income part-time or not, or full-time or whatever else.
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It works out.
That's not what I'm talking about.
The biblical picture is not a picture of the 1950s housewife.
You stay at home and you cook, and you clean, and you make everything great.
The biblical picture of someone who manages her household, who raises her children in the faith, who uses
her household to bless and encourage the community around about her both Christian and non-Christian,
and who uses all of her resources for the sake of others, and can I say it is a deeply honorable task.
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And we as a community ought to honor it over and over and over again because God honors it.
When God calls on women to do these things, he's not putting you in a box.
He's calling you to one of the most precious things that he thinks that you can do.
Now, I think that this also means though, that we need to work out how to be gracious and generous with each other in a world where maybe it's
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gonna require you two incomes to survive and she can't be full-time full on with the kids the whole time, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Different people are going to make different decisions based on their socioeconomic reality.
They're gonna make different decisions based on their circumstances in life and other things that are part of their experience.
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And can I encourage you, my sisters, not to be judgemental of one another in the
decisions that you make about paid work or staying at home, or how those things relate.
But can I also express that like all other things that are possible to become idols
in the world, some of those decisions can also express a level of ungodliness.
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So we need to be in this weird space where we're not judgmental and we are gracious and we listen well and we understand each other.
But as brothers and sisters in the Lord Who love Jesus, we will sometimes raise questions about
where our priorities are, where we have to be honest and real with each other as we work them out.
And then finally, and I'm aware of the timeline and I will get there.
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Thank you brother.
I wanna say something about submission.
And why is being submissive to your own husbands?
I actually wanna say a lot, and I dunno that I'm gonna be able to, but anyway, a few quick things.
Do you realize that submission is not a wife thing, it's a Christian thing.
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The Bible is full of the language of submission for all of us to the government,
to other authorities, to our pastors in church and children to parents.
We live in a world where submission is anathema because we have removed God from all of our talk about the world.
If you have a world where you don't believe in God, then all relationships become about power.
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And any expressing of authority is about someone having power over somebody else.
But if you believe that there's a God who made the whole world, who's gonna bring it all to judgment, relationships aren't about power.
They just simply are not.
And God calls us to wise submission in reflection of Christ because Christ was submissive.
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He submitted himself to his Heavenly Father.
He submitted himself to the authorities of his day even when they were wrong, which is a remarkable statement.
Submission is not about a lack of personality or a lack of intelligence, or of creativity or of thought.
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It is a decision to give due honor and to sit under the leadership of another who has been appointed to a task.
We need to keep saying that the Bible sets limits to all authorities.
When the Sanhedrin tells the apostles to stop preaching about Christ, they actually are supposed to obey God.
But at the same time, submission is a virtue that all Christians are called on to engage.
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So actually biblically submission occurs in the context of relationship and partnership, and
particularly in marriage of shared faith and life with someone who is a co-heir of Christ.
And so I wanna say to you, my dear sisters, and I know that many of you wrestle with this and put this into practice in
such godly ways, just a reminder that being submissive to your own husband does actually mean there are moments to say yes.
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We'll do it your way, even when your own idea is better than his.
And there are moments not to say, I told you so after the event, when it becomes blindingly obvious that your way was the better way.
But actually to work out how to keep honoring each other and realizing that we
bring strengths and weaknesses, and as we make decisions, we will talk them through.
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And sometimes we will agree, and sometimes we'll have disagreement, and sometimes he will make a decision and that will be complex.
But I want to encourage you that as you honor him in that position and as you love him,
well, you'll actually be honoring Jesus and bringing great glory to him on the last day.
But that means that I do need to say something to my brothers.
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You must never domineer or be arrogant, or be judgmental or to throw your weight around, to use your temper and anger for control.
To be boorish, to be brutish, to be authoritarian in leadership is an abhorrent
to God at every level, and it ought never be named amongst God's people.
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And so I wanna say very clearly to my sisters, if your husband treats you maliciously, if he's inappropriately controlling, and by that I mean
he asks you for an accounting of every cent that you spend, or every moment that you spend out of his sight, or he demands your submission.
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I wanna say to you that he's not being godly or wise or honoring Christ.
And I also wanna say that you would honor God by sharing your concerns with
a trusted brother or sister and asking for their help in your circumstance.
You'll not be being disobedient.
(01:00:09):
You'll actually be loving him and loving Jesus.
But this leads me to one last thing that I wanna say.
The picture that we're often given is that the call for wires to submit to their husbands is a root cause of domestic violence in our world.
And here, brothers and sisters, I'm speaking with great trepidation, but I do wanna say some things that I think are important for us to reflect on.
(01:00:37):
There is some really important research evidence.
This is us rather than Australia.
And so there are caveats.
And you'll see the details down there.
Wilcox's study in 2004 and Ellison Etal in 2007, which shows I think, but we need to be careful about this, that where these
(01:00:59):
truths are taught in the context of ongoing engagement with the gospel, they're actually protective of women in wilcox's study.
Men who identified as evangelical and attended church regularly, by which they meant more than three times a month, their wives actually
self-reported anonymously, the highest levels of satisfaction in their marriage and the lowest rates of DV of any group that was measured.
(01:01:30):
But here is the flip side.
People who identified in some ways evangelical, but attended irregularly or not at all, actually reported the highest levels of dv.
And lesser levels of satisfaction and engagement in their marriage.
Now it's complex at a kind of concrete research level, working out how all those details work out.
(01:01:55):
I wanna suggest to you that I suspect that part of what is going on is that when we hear
these truths as a community and they, they're taught to us in the context of the whole gospel.
And when men take the gospel seriously, all of these things result in relationships that are so much better for women.
And if you wanna have a look at p's, the war on toxic masculinity for evidence about the way that male behavior
(01:02:21):
is actually transformed by the gospel in third world countries, and that's acknowledged in many feminist circles.
It's interesting, other information.
But what it means is that when we speak about these things as a Christian
community, we need to speak really clearly about what good and unhealthy looks like.
And rather than actually avoiding these passages, because we are scared about the disruption it's gonna cause in our church, and we
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are worried about what people might think of us as ministers when we speak about them, we must teach about them and take the time
to teach about them in a way that puts them in the context of the fullness of relationship that God calls us for in the gospel.
That names domestic violence for what it actually is.
That gives women permission to respond when they're being unhealthily dealt with, and that calls men to repentance and faith.
(01:03:10):
Can I encourage you, if you are the pastor of a church and you've been avoiding these texts, come to them and preach them in the context of the whole
of scripture and keep bringing the gospel to bear and train your congregation to be aware that people on the fringe might be particularly vulnerable.
Now, my last little plea is that you read the quote from Calvin at the end, who 500 years ago.
(01:03:36):
Said exactly what I've just said.
We are not the first people in history to have been aware that this is a problem or don't speak the gospel of truth towards husbands as well as wives.
And so let me just read a short snippet to towards the end.
After Genesis 2 23, Calvin concludes Unless a man makes sure that he loves his wife, he shows
(01:04:01):
that he has never tasted the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ or of His gospel accordingly.
Although Paul addresses his words and exhortation to women, he did not intend to give men free reign to do as they like.
They too have their rule in every age.
People have been able to distort what is true.
(01:04:21):
Because evil can call good sin and sin good.
The brothers and sisters, we've been called to new life in the Lord Jesus Christ.
In these commandments, when understood and applied in the light of the whole of scripture
are for us and are good for our communities, but they take a lot of working out.
So we need to talk about them and pray with each other and encourage each other to put them into practice.
(01:04:42):
Don't we please pray with me.
Father, we thank you for your word.
We thank you for the encouragement to live wholeheartedly knowing that Jesus has won us for lawlessness and has made us his own for good works.
Father, thank you that we are gonna see him, that we are gonna see him face to face.
(01:05:05):
Thank you that he's died to transform us.
Please help us as we work out what to do with these things, to do that with great love and care for one another.
Help us to speak about them in our churches in a way that honors Christ and reflects the gospel.
And help us to be people who honor our king.
For your glory we pray.
Amen.
(01:05:33):
Thank you for listening to Moore in the Word, a podcast of Moore Theological College.
Our vision as a College is to see God glorified by men and women living for
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We invite you to attend any of our upcoming events, including this one from the Priscilla & Aquila Centre.
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The term "Complementarian" was coined in 1988 to describe the view that God created men and women equally in his
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However, in marriage and in leadership of the church, some roles and responsibilities for men and women are not identical or interchangeable.
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There is ordered complementarity of equals.
Even though the term "Complementarian" was new, this view reflects 20 centuries of biblical interpretation and church practice.
Join us for the next Priscilla & Aquila evening seminar on Wednesday the 13th of August 2025, when writer
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Until next time.
Welcome to Moore in the Word, a podcast of Moore Theological College in Sydney, Australia, that seeks
to glorify God through biblically sound, thought-provoking and challenging talks and interviews.
In this episode, from the second part of his plenary address at the 2025 Priscilla & Aquila Centre Annual
Conference held on Monday the 3rd of February, Paul Grimmond, Head of the Ministry Department at Moore College,
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continues his exploration of Titus 2 and the commands to older men, older women, younger women, and younger men.
Before he discusses the practical outworkings of the chapter, however, Paul answers some common criticisms of these
commands, and helps us to think about our attitude or "comportment" towards Scripture as we approach this particular passage.
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We hope you find the episode helpful.
A note for our listeners (00:59):
to listen to Part 1 of Paul's plenary address, please see episode 26
of our 2025 season, or visit the Priscilla & Aquila website using the link in the show notes.
Father, would you please help us to listen carefully to your word?
Would you ground us your spirit, that we might love the truth that we hear, that we might delight to put it into practice?
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We will be thankful for your work in Christ, that we would know your grace in
the spirit, and that we will be faithful servants who honor our king father.
We ask it in Jesus' name.
Amen.
Well, I do hope that you've, uh, enjoyed morning tea and the chance to stretch your legs and the opportunity
for encouragement and hopefully some challenging and robust conversation as we come to the second talk.
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I wanna take a brief detour and speak to you for a moment about comportment, a somewhat old fashioned word
that you don't kind of just drop into conversation and a somewhat underutilized word in my experience.
It's a wonderful word though that captures something of being human.
It's a word that describes how you carry yourself.
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It's a combination of demeanor and behavior of disposition and action.
Comportment is about who you are and what you do.
So I wanna ask as we come to this text in Titus again, what is your comportment towards scripture?
How do you carry yourself in relationship with the Bible?
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I mean, the Bible's very clear, isn't it?
That there is a kind of comportment that God expects of us.
Uh, Isaiah chapter 66 in verse two, this is the one to whom I will look, he who is humble and contrite in spirit and trembles at my word.
Proverbs tells us that it's the fear of the Lord that is the beginning of wisdom.
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And two Timothy three tells us the Bible is written for teaching instruction, but also for reproof and correction.
If I was going to kind of summarize or describe the invitation that Scripture brings about
itself, I would say that we are invited to a humble, discerning submission to God's word.
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I think if you ought to wrap up the different ways in which the Bible encourages us to engage it.
It's about being humble and it's about being discerning.
But fundamentally, our attitude is to be a space of submission.
And again, I wanna point out that actually this space of submission in
particular is complex for us as Christians because of the world in which we live.
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We have, from the time that we were born drunk from kind of the well of our world, in which suspicion is the fundamental stance of life.
Suspicion is the guarantee of getting it right.
Suspicion is the guarantee of having no other authority stand over you and mess your life up.
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Now, we know that there are some good reasons that suspicion is part of our worlds.
You don't have to read much history to know that lots of people in authority have
misused their authority in terrible ways and then managed to find justifications for it.
So who wouldn't be suspicious?
And then of course there's that inner thingy that we all get involved with the source of almost all information.
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The great God of everything that's true, that is so littered with falsehood that nobody actually knows which bits are true and false.
And now they've put the robot overlords in charge, which will tell you which bits are true and false, but you can't trust them either.
Now you kind of laugh, right?
But actually when I go to research or engage with stuff on the internet, whenever I actually know what I'm talking
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about, I find so much rubbish, but it just makes me wonder what's going on when I don't dunno what I'm talking about.
And of course what that means is that for all of us, I think it's part of what's created, things like what's
happening in the US about what's real truth and can anybody know the truth and all of that kind of stuff.
We've just created this world where who knows how you actually get to what is true and what's false.
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But in the face of that, we are schooled in submission as a fundamental tenet of self-protection from a young age.
And that leaves us with a problem, doesn't it?
Because God does not encourage us to come to the scriptures suspiciously, but actually
humbly and faithfully longing to submit to the truth that we discern to be there.
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And so I think I need to say something as we engage with these texts on the attention that they have received from scholarship and
from feminist scholarship in particular, I personally feel a deep alignment with some of the main goals of feminist scholarship.
There is no doubt that women have at many times and at various places in our history, been deeply mistreated
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by the failure of men to act and use their authority with godliness or grace or wisdom towards others.
There is no doubt that they have in places born the brunt of the sinfulness,
arrogance and anxiety of men who'll fail to live as God would have them live.
I think feminism has rightly alerted us to the tragedy of systemic abuse of women through the ages.
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And yet for all of that, and I don't say this lightly in its desire to protect, I think that much feminist scholarship
and particularly radical feminist scholarship takes a stance towards scripture that is antithetical to biblical faith.
I wanna show you briefly what I mean by that statement, and it Inger is a feminist
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scholar who has written a great deal in the last decade or two on the pastoral epistles.
She's very open about the way she approaches the interpretive task.
These are her own words.
First and foremost, I approach these texts as a feminist scholar.
I mean that I myself identify as a feminist who embraces the essentially equality
of all persons regardless of sex, sexuality, or gender when reading biblical texts.
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I seek out appearances by women and topics that impact women in the past and today.
Additionally, my questions regarding biblical teachings are influenced by a hermeneutic of suspicion, meaning I do not accept a plain reading of
the texts, nor do I presume that the author's perspectives are necessarily an accurate portrayal of historical people, events, and circumstances.
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This is in her own words, her attitude as she comes towards scripture.
So to give you a little feel of what that actually means in practice, in the forward to Geisinger's commentary on the pastoral
epistles, another prominent scholar, Elizabeth sh Fiza, speaks of scripture as a garden in which both beauty and danger lies.
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She speaks about the Bible like this, she says, as a critical feminist interpretation for wellbeing, this wisdom commentary seeks to elaborate
the beauty and fecundity of this scripture garden, and at the same time, point to the harm it can do when one submits to its world of vision.
In other words, scripture has good things to teach us, but it also at points presents such a picture of the
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world that if you ab obeyed or submitted yourself to its vision of the world, it would in fact harm you.
That is her fundamental position or starting point in regards to the Bible.
Now I think that I live in a free world and I'm deeply thankful that people are allowed to express differing opinions.
And it's important that we hear them and engage with them.
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But I wanna point out that I don't think that you can hold that position and maintain Christian faith for a very long period of time.
Inger, in fact, in her commentary, argues that Titus wasn't written by Paul.
It wasn't written to Titus, and it's not about the church on Crete.
And you may chuckle at that, but she actually goes into some detail explaining why she believes that all those things are true.
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Now, again, I wanna say you're allowed to hold that position.
We live in a world where you're free to hold that position.
But I wanna say that if you are a, a lover of God's gospel and you know God's truth in God's word, there is actually
a point at which suspicion starts to place you outside of what I think is a faithful Christian response to scripture.
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And so I wanna say in this room today that even as different people will come to some different conclusions about how exactly we hold
these commands in relationship to ourselves, I wanna encourage you that the appropriate way to do that is not through a hermeneutic of
suspicion, but through a thoughtful, humble discernment that seeks to actually set yourself under the authority of God revealed in His word.
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Discernment is not about suspicion, but about a humble willingness to read and respond
wisely to the truth that actually accepts the way that scripture speaks about itself.
I would suggest, and I think I wanna encourage you to keep all of those things in place
as we actually turn, uh, to these two big questions that I've raised in the first talk.
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So the first question, if you remember is what do you do when your experience seems to contradict scripture?
Paul can say three times to Titus Live this way.
The word of God will not be reviled.
You will not be reviled, and scripture will be adorned.
But your experience seemed to suggest something very different.
Now, I wanna talk about this from a few perspectives, but I wanna say that part
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of our problem is that we tend to detach those two realities from each other.
The connection between truth and godliness is one truth, and the fact that this
truth should actually ado the word of God gets held in another hand over here.
Whereas actually for Titus, those two things are deeply, logically connected to each other.
Truth and godliness and the way that you live bringing about certain responses
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to the gospel are actually part of the deep underlying logic of scripture.
Now one of the things that we need to do though, is we need to see that this statement about people responding to the truth of the word of God
and to Christians is one statement amongst many that describes a complex picture of how the world responds to the way that people live for Jesus.
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You see, we do have this passage, but other passage gives us different perspectives that are important to hold.
So in some places we are told that you really should expect to be persecuted if you live for Jesus, Matthew 10 25, and this is Jesus himself.
It is enough for the disciple to be like his teacher and the servant like his master.
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If they've called the master of the house Ible, how much more will they malign those of his households?
And so to Timothy three, indeed all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted.
Whatever Paul is saying in Titus two is not an absolute statement about all people's response everywhere in all time.
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Of course, the scriptures bring us other moments that help to give sense to our experience as well.
One.
Peter three we're told that leaving for godliness may cause people to revile us,
but will cause some people to ask us why we have this hope and why we are different.
One Peter three 14.
Even if you should suffer for righteousness sake, you will be blessed.
Have no fear of them, nor be troubled, but in your hearts, honor Christ, the Lord as holy, always
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being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason, for the hope that is in you.
Yet do it with gentleness and respect.
Having a good conscience so that when you are slandered, see the expectation those who revile your good behavior in Christ may be put to shame.
Of course, part of it, as you read scripture, is about the eschatological moment in which you stand living for Christ will have certain responses
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that it generates in the here and now, but there is a final response on the last day that is very definite and that God guarantees one Peter to 11.
I urge you, misogynous and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul.
Keep your conduct among the Gentiles honorable so that when they speak against you
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as evil doers, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day of visitation.
We know, don't we, that actually scripture gives us these multiple perspectives.
In a sinful world, sometimes being godly will cause people to question and ask things and even come to know Jesus.
Sometimes being godly will cause people to revile us, to reject us, to say all sorts of things about scripture.
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There is a final accounting on the last day when all of those who have seen God's people act with grace and
wisdom and godliness and kindness will acknowledge God in all of his glory for His work in God's people.
But what that means is that you and I live in a world where it's possible to call good evil and to call evil good.
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You've ever had the joy of reading any nature.
You will know that people in history have railed against things that you hold dear
in his book, the Antichrist, which should give you some idea of what's coming.
He rails against pity, compassion, and sympathy as evils that actually undo and destroy our world.
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Here's the very short quote, what is more harmful than any vice practical sympathy for the botched and the weak Christianity?
And if you didn't know, nature actually lies behind lots of the philosophy that's still taught in most of your universities.
In other words, according to nature, Jesus care for the outcasts, the lame, the blind, the spiritually downtrodden.
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Those who are in any way experiencing some of the suffering of our fallen worlds, to have pity
or compassion or grace towards them is actually the fundamental evil that exists in our world.
So you know that you live in a place where sin is so wicked that it's possible to call what is good evil and to call what is evil good.
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And so we ought to expect that when we live according to what is good.
Some people will name it as evil and vice versa.
Godliness, I think, ultimately always commends the gospel on the last day.
It will silence God's critics.
In the meantime, we should expect responses to be mixed.
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We saw in Talk One that we naturally treat most of the instructions in Tide US two as universally applicable and not momentarily cultural.
So why the pressure to speak about certain instructions in this way?
It's actually because of this pressure that we feel from our world.
And the way that we approach these instructions is I would suggest often an attempt to
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ameliorate our discomfort by using a biblical truth in an unhealthy way to read scripture.
We read commands like wives submit to your own husbands.
And because this command has become an argument for some to reject the gospel, it creates difficulty and discomfort for us.
And so we naturally look for what we might call a faithful way to reshape the command.
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And the appeal to evangelism in this chapter live this way, and it will adorn the gospel, presents a little opportunity to
enact what I will call the, that was just cultural, and we need to live differently now for the sake of evangelism argument.
The problem that seems to me is that the use of that argument at this point actually fails against the extrinsic evidence at two significant points.
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The first is that in every other place that Paul calls on wives to submit to their own husbands, he never uses this argument.
In one Corinthians 11, the head coverings passage, the argument around submission proceeds
from the order of creation and the nature of the practice required in every church.
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In Ephesians five, the argument proceeds from the comparison between marriage and the nature of Christ's relationship with the church.
In Colossians three, the commandment flows out of having died and been raised with Christ and seated
with him in the heavenly realms and being called to put off the old self and to put on the new self.
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And then it's explicitly referenced with regards to the particular command wives submit to your husband's as is fitting in the Lord.
Again, the intrinsic evidence in each of these texts points to the way that Paul identifies
lots of truth about God and the gospel as being the foundation for these commandments.
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But this leads to the second thing that you need to see.
The that was a cultural practice that ought to be changed for the sake of evangelism.
Argument is actually not a common biblical argument.
The Bible doesn't unfold it in many and many places as far as I can work out.
One Corinthians nine is the one explicit unfolding of that commandment, and that happens
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in one Corinthians eight to 10 in the broader context of a call to Christian Liberty.
Now what's interesting is that as that specific argument and more broadly, liberty is engaged within
scripture, one Corinthians eight to 10, Romans 14, and a few scattered verses in Galatians and Corinthians.
I think
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the argument never proceeds on the basis that we think that it proceeds.
That is Paul explicitly outlines what he thinks Christians have freedom in on the basis of the gospel and
then calls us to live in light of those freedoms specifically for the sake of others becoming Christian.
He's not saying, here is a hermeneutical principle that you can use to read the whole of scripture and sift what is true and false.
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He says, the gospel explains to you where your freedom lies, where your freedom lies.
You ought to not stand on that when actually your love for other people might
lead you to put some freedoms aside for the sake of them becoming Christian.
That is even our language of cultural relativity.
That was for their culture, but not ours.
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That is really our language rather than scripture's language, scripture's language is what you are called to in the gospel as a
follower of Jesus, which clearly identifies areas of Christian liberty or freedom where different people are genuinely free to respond.
And so the fundamental question at a more broad level, and especially in light of the fact that so many other passages
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reference these things in regards to the gospel and God is, is there any grounds for being able to say, well, actually
these things are part of Christian freedom rather than something fundamental that God calls us to in the gospel?
If I was to summarize, I would say I think that scripture ties the submission of Wise to husbands very closely to
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the doctrine of the created Order, to the doctrine of God and to the nature of Christ's work for us in the gospel.
And when the Bible does talk about using your freedom for evangelism, the areas in which your freedom exists are clearly articulated.
So this is why I think actually the argument about the correlation between gender and slavery is quite significant for us.
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Is it okay that we've eradicated slavery but hung onto these commands about gender?
Does that actually reflect the way that scripture talks about these things or is it something different?
And so I have a string of comments that are thoroughly inadequate.
I would commend to you Peter o's work, uh, on slavery through the p and a Center.
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Uh, and as I've also included a little video, which is fascinating from the ESV translation committee on why
they chose to translate dual loss as bond servant in the New Testament, um, rather than in some other form.
Um, and you might find those helpful resources to go and chase down for yourself.
But I have a few key points that I wanna make that I think are important for us.
The first is, and this is the fundamental one, the most important thing I understand about slavery in the times of the old
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and New Testament is that it is not analogous to the chattel slavery practiced in the US from the 15th to the 19th centuries.
In fact, the Bible basically prohibits the kind of slavery practiced in the us.
US slavery would've been impossible without the slave trade and the Old Testament and
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the New Testament explicitly denounces in no uncertain terms, any kind of slave trading.
And just to give you an idea of how explicitly it denounces, here is Exodus 21, verse 16.
Whoever steals a man and sells him and anyone found in possession of him shall be put to death.
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The Israelites didn't mince words about how evil they thought this practice was.
Juno, chapter 24 and verse seven, if a man is found stealing one of his brothers, of the
people of Israel, and if he treats him as a slave or sells him, then that thief shall die.
And so you shall purge the evil from your midst.
Then in the New Testament in one Timothy chapter one, when Paul is speaking about the kinds of lifestyle that's contrary to the will of
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God, it explicitly names Enslavers or slave traders as those who are acting contrary to the law of God and deserving of God's judgment.
So you've gotta understand that actually, if people had read their scriptures carefully and thoughtfully, they would've realized that
although they may end up owning slaves, the whole economy was built on a practice that was outlawed in both the old and New Testaments, right?
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There wasn't a kind of biblical place there to say, this is okay.
Now.
It's complex, isn't it?
Because scripture does acknowledge that there was forms of slavery in its world.
And it tries to engage with those.
And the way that engages might be a little different from the ones that we would prefer because
of our cultural moment, the train them all to rise up and overthrow the oppressor route.
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Um, which is not actually biblically very helpful.
But let me point out a few big distinctions between Old and New Testament, slavery
and slavery in our modern worlds, biblical slavery was economic and not ethnic.
In biblical times, people went into slavery to deal with debt or because they were prisoners of war, not because they were
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stolen from their homelands with the express purpose of being shipped to the other side of the world and sold further.
The Bible has incredibly different rules from any of the surrounding cultures about how to love and care for people who are in this state.
Do you know that there is a law in Deuteronomy 15 if a fellow Hebrew.
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Makes themselves your slave for the cause of economic debt.
Deuteronomy commands that you release them after six years and provide economic assistance for them to live the free life afterwards.
Now, there's a rule that you're not hearing in many slave owning economies.
The slaves who have escaped in Deuteronomy 2315, we think from surrounding nations and found themselves in Israel.
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Israelites are explicitly prohibited from sending those slaves back to their masters in other
nations and are told they must give them a home amongst them and look after their wellbeing.
Okay?
The law also protects the slave from certain elements of mistreatment that where beatings have taken place and whatever.
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If that's caused severe or lasting injury, then the slave is to be given their freedom.
They are not just this thing, but they're a person in the New Testament, the.
Slavery is not identical.
But again, slavery is not ethnic.
It's economic and it's war related, but also incredibly in the Roman Empire, the rates of manumission, which
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is the freeing of slaves, occurred at a higher rate than any other slave owning society that we know of in
the history of the world, or at least that's what the historians tell me, and I'm believing that that's true.
The way of estimating how many slaves have been released is very technically complex.
Historically, the estimates range anywhere north of 50% of slaves were freed in their lifetime, which means that
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for many slaves, the expectation was not that this was a lifelong reality, and most of them would be set free.
And furthermore, the New Testament explicitly says to slaves, if you can gain your freedom, do so.
One Corinthians 7 21, it doesn't say obeying your master is about being stuck here for life.
It says, while you're in this social situation.
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Live in a way that honors Jesus.
And if your freedom becomes available to you, you take it because freedom is
actually a deep value that's expressed in the gospel, in God's plan for the world.
And we should also note that Christians and God's people in the Old Testament are all commanded
to live with the people who are slaves in ways that fundamentally recognize them as human beings.
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Do you know the most repeated command in Exodus as it speaks about slavery?
You too were slaves in Egypt.
That's not a dehumanizing move.
That is a reminder that these people are under your care and our fellow human beings.
And actually in the New Testament, we are told over and over again that masters
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are to treat their slaves as someone who knows that they have a heavenly master.
And as someone who knows that these people could be fellow heirs with them of the gift of its eternal life.
And that's why when Paul returns philemon to animus, he appeals to him to accept Philemon as a brother in the Lord.
Listen to what it says for this perhaps is why he was parted from you for a while, that you might have him
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back forever, no longer as a bond servant, but more than a Bo servant, as a beloved brother, especially to me.
But how much more to you both in the flesh and in the Lord?
The language of the New Testament and the Old Testament and the trajectory of the gospel all suggests that the Bible is responding to a condition
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that exists in its world that it wants to control, organize, and look after, in a way that recognizes the fundamental humanity of people who
are in slavery in any form, based on a reminder that you and they belong to the same Heavenly Father, if that was practiced consistently.
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In other slave owning communities that would've made a radical difference to people's experience and even to our sense of what slavery is, in fact.
But what's more important is that if you look at the laws around slaves in nearly every slave
owning society, those laws were about treating slaves as properties rather than human beings.
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And the gospel means that you cannot treat other human beings as anything less than made in the image of God and potential COHEs of life.
And I think that this is why Christians who were reading their Bible fought so hard against the slave trade because the trajectory of
the gospel is that it will come to an end within societies where the gospel is honored as indeed is what has taken place in our worlds.
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If you wanna read a very thought provoking interchange on this topic, it's a BT and Bule and Douglas Wilson had a fascinating
back and forth a few years ago over Douglas Wilson's book called Black and Tan, and over the Biblical understanding of slavery.
They come to some very different conclusions in certain places about their understanding of slavery, but remarkably two men who are very
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different and come from very different spaces agree fundamentally on these two things they would both say absolutely and with no questions asked.
The Bible is profoundly anti-racism and racism as it's normally practiced is a sinful activity.
And the second thing is that the logic of the gospel when played out in a world leads naturally and irrevocably, whatever that word means.
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You can't stop it towards the getting rid of slavery in the society in which you're part.
And so brothers and sisters, when you come to thinking about how slavery and gender are spoken about in the Bible, you
actually have to see that slow careful reading of scripture leads you to two very different pictures of those things.
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Slavery is a human institution which is messy, that the Bible encourages God's people to live with
faithfully in a way that actually treats it totally differently from anybody else in the worlds.
Whereas we're told that being male and female is fundamental to our creativeness and the way that God has made us.
Genesis 1 27, God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created he male and female, he
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created them, and Jesus declares in Mark 10 from the beginning of creation, God made them Male and female.
Male and female are not human creations.
They are God-given designations.
And unlike the trajectory of the gospel with regards to slavery, the trajectory of the gospel is not the eradication of gender in our worlds.
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There are some explicit statements that reshape our understanding of male and female differentiation in relation to certain Christian truths.
Galatians 3 28 must be read and applied appropriately.
In Christ, there is no male or female as brothers and sisters.
There is no difference between who we are, our state before God.
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There is no difference between our need for Jesus atoning work and salvation on our behalf.
And there is no difference in terms of our worth before God on the basis of what God has done for us in the Lord Jesus.
But to suggest that that verse.
Becomes a grid through which you actually read all of the rest of the statements in scripture that actually differentiate between men and women.
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I just think stretches healthy reading in an unhealthy way.
Actually, what we're doing is anachronistic.
We're applying a particular thing from our world back into the text of scripture in order to read and sift it.
Scripture's, treatment of gender is radically different from its treatment of slavery.
And so we need to, as people raise these kinds of arguments with us, which feel so
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uncomfortable and powerful in our world because of the wrongs that have been done.
We need to remember that calling for people to live in light of one.
And actually, can I say that if I was in a world, a part of the world where
slavery still existed, I think the commands to slaves would still apply by the way.
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Nevertheless, we need to say that they are not analogists and the way that evangelicals have responded to
slavery is in no way a foundation for responding in the same way to what the Bible has to say about gender.
So, and at last you may say, if what we've said today is true, then I think we've come some distance towards
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what it might mean to say that godliness is complimentarian and you're finally getting what you paid for.
How you doing?
You doing okay?
I am sorry that this has been dense and there's a lot of information I know, but you're really wrestling with it.
What I've attempted to show this morning is that both intrinsically, the shape of the book of Titus matched with the extrinsic nature of scripture.
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The whole witness of scripture and it's theology teaches us that the instructions that Paul gives
to Titus about how God's church is to conduct themselves in Titus two, they're not accidental.
They're not a cultural moment in history.
They're not a thing that's an accommodation to the society for the sake of evangelism.
They're actually, Paul thinks that these things are a fundamental outworking of the gospel.
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We have been saved from our lawlessness.
We have been saved for the sake of being zealous for good works, and we are gonna meet the one who died and rose to save us.
And so as those people, we ought to actually live in this way that accords with godliness.
All of these instructions are deeply for us.
It's interesting, isn't it?
How scripture then in God's kindness leads us to see that God addresses us all as human beings and then in different places, more
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specifically according to who we are as younger and older as men and women, as slaves, as free, even as Jews and Gentiles, in fact,
and even in different ways, in different churches at different times according to your personal, cultural and historical situation.
There is a universal truth that calls all of us to be transformed into the likeness of Jesus.
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And so there are passages in the New Testament that just say, whoever you are, you should do this.
You should put off sexual immorality or impurity or lies or behavior like that,
and you should put on things like loving kindness and grace and other things.
But very regularly, God in his kindness, chooses to address us according to some of our created categories of reality.
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God takes those commands and starts to become more explicit and real about how they work out according to the different realities of our life.
You think about the nature of the entire New Testament with me for a moment.
It's not just about being men and women or Jews and Gentiles, whatever.
Paul doesn't write one generic letter that says, here's all the things that you should do if you're Christian,
(35:38):
and here's all the things you shouldn't do, and then gets the scribal photocopiers to work, so you could send
it out to every church so it would have a foundational textbook to know exactly how to live for the Lord Jesus.
What he does is he writes individual letters to different congregations, addressing them
in all of the messes of life, saying, this is how the truth about Jesus works out for you.
And so what he says to the Philippians is not identical to what he says to the Colossians, which isn't
(36:03):
identical to what he says to the Galatians, and it's certainly not the same as what he says to the Philippians.
He's addressing people under threat of persecution, or he is dealing with
people who are threatening to let go of the gospel because of Jewish influence.
Or he is talking to people who have asceticism and stuff, has ruled the day and he brings the truth about God.
All the riches of theological reality in the gospel to bear on all of these different circumstances.
(36:25):
And that's part of God's grace to us.
God's instruction about godliness is both general and very specific, and the scripture says that
actually you and I need both of those things in order to make sense of what godliness looks like.
The specific doesn't annu the general, and the general doesn't anul the specific.
(36:49):
And part of what that means is that when you read a command that's given to a
specific bunch of people, you and I don't automatically use the opposite of it, right.
So when he says to the older women, don't be slaves to much wine and you don't go, great, doesn't apply to me.
Or when he speaks to Titus about showing dignity and integrity and soundness of speech
(37:12):
because he's a teacher, you don't go, well, I can lie about anything that I like.
Now you realize that these are commands that are being brought to bear on specific people in
circumstances and space, but which reflect and have an overflow in terms of the Christian life.
But you also realize that not every command is given to every single specific person.
(37:34):
Paul is telling Titus, the older women should train the younger women.
He doesn't say to the older men, you go and train the younger women because he actually
understands what it is to be human and that there are good things about that relationship.
He says to wives, be submissive to your own husband.
But he doesn't say to husbands, be submissive to your wives.
He says other things in other places.
(37:56):
Fundamentally shape the nature of that relationship.
But they're not identical and they're not completely reciprocal.
As God speaks to our specificity, sometimes those commandments become more particular and in ways that relate to us at
different points in spaces in our lives, and I wanna say to you that all of that actually is God's kindness and goodness to us.
(38:19):
Just pick it up with me for a moment in regards to Titus, why does Titus say to young
men the self-controlled, why talk to young men, particularly about self-control?
Now, I don't think any of you are surprised that he's chose to talk to young men, particularly about self-control.
Are you?
Now, why is that?
Because actually, young men have been young men in every generation of the history of the church.
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Now, let me read to you from Calvin's sermons on Titus to the young men in his congregation 500 years ago.
Now, when Paul speaks about young men, he commands them to be self-controlled.
This is a virtue most necessary for those of that age.
It is, as we know, a time of great heat for it's exceedingly difficult to keep young men on a tight reign.
They are like a pot which starts to boil and bubble over
(39:04):
when young men see that they're full of evil desires, which drive them to do wrong when only force
will make them yield when some are promiscuous and others get up to the worst mischief imaginable.
Full hardiness, extravagance, gluttony, gaming.
Um, that's not computers by the way, but.
(39:25):
When young men see that this is where their nature leads them, should they be complacent?
We are so adept at thinking of ourselves as sophisticated and modern and different from all
the other people in all of history, but we are really not like we are really, really not.
The things that young men struggle with in our age are the things that everybody who's been a young man has struggled with in every age of the church.
(39:49):
We are not dealing with some radical newness people.
We're just dealing with plain old fashioned sin that has expressed itself in particular
ways with regards to particular people through all the history of God's church.
Paul speaks particularly to Titus about self-control for young men because self-control is a struggle for every young man.
Self-control in terms of temper, self-control, in terms of lust, self-control, in terms of pride, and being the center of attention.
(40:21):
Self-control in terms of selfishness, learning to be the one who serves rather than watching other people be served.
Learning that when it comes to dessert, you don't take the biggest peace.
And we laugh at that, but it actually, it requires effort, doesn't it?
And a reminder of who Jesus is and why you might love other people self-control at Bible study when you
(40:45):
know the answer and you've got a lot to say, but you might actually hold yourself back for the sake of other
people being able to contribute because you might have something to learn self-control with regards to gaming
in every age, the nature of being human and growing up has meant that self-control is a problem in a myriad of young ways for young men.
(41:08):
And God in his kindness draws particular attention to this, even though we all need self-control.
So will you allow me for a moment just to address each of the rest of us in turn?
Older men.
What does God say to you about actually living following Jesus?
Well, you are to be sober-minded, dignified, self-controlled sounding, faith in love and steadfastness.
(41:34):
I'm not exactly sure what the cutoff age is for older men, but I'm gonna say that if you have any hint of gray, you are on your way there.
And my younger brothers, this is where you're supposed to end up actually.
Now, do you notice that he says particularly self-control, but to that he adds sober minded and dignified?
(41:56):
To be sober minded is to be restrained as one Greek dictionary, put it in some languages.
This could be translated as one who always has a halter on himself.
Now, isn't that an interesting image?
We put halters on toddlers to stop them from taking off.
Do you, as an older man, consider yourself as someone who actually requires a halter?
(42:17):
I. Because I think God thinks that you do.
You are to be restrained.
You ought to hold yourself back.
You ought to be thoughtful about how you express and engage yourself in relationship with the people around you.
Are you quick to share your opinion or are you actually willing to sit and listen when you feel grumpy or frustrated, which I'm sure only
(42:40):
happens occasionally because the music is too loud or because the young people act too quickly or because nobody notices your years and wisdom.
Are you restrained?
Do you keep your anger in check?
Do you challenge yourself to look to the Lord Jesus and be like him?
(43:02):
The one who though being reviled did not revile in return,
or brothers?
Let me ask you about faith, love, and hope.
Which issues steadfastness those three fundamental Christian virtues at the end of the verse?
Are you sound healthy full In terms of your faith?
Are you still clinging to the truths of the gospel and to the goodness of scripture and engaging with it, or has actually
(43:28):
some of the zeal you had started to become a bit tired and you've started to become a little loose around some of the edges?
Are you healthy with regards to your love?
Isn't it interesting that what it pinpoints for older men is that you are someone who is known for the healthiness and soundness of your love?
Brothers?
(43:49):
Are you known amongst the people who are around about you for being someone who acts with grace and kindness and care?
Are you nurturing an affection and a desire for the good of all of those who are around you?
What a blessing it would be for our churches to have older men who are sound in faith, in love, and in steadfastness.
(44:13):
Who are actually living out the fruit of a lifetime full of faithful, dignified, self-controlled, and restrained living
brothers.
I urge and exhort you as someone who will speak to Jesus on the last day.
What do you need to take away?
What's something that you need to do differently?
(44:34):
And to my older sisters, what does God encourage you to?
Well, verse three, you ought to be reverent in behavior, not slanderers or slaves.
Too much wine.
You ought to teach what is good.
And so train the young women reverent in behavior.
It's really interesting.
(44:54):
The word behavior, again, almost picks up that idea of comportment or demeanor.
How does your life display the inner reality of what you believe?
And the word reverend actually comes from the language of the Greek temple, in fact, and
is the word that describes the priestess who is totally devoted and engaged at the temple.
Does the whole of your life, if someone walked with you yesterday and watched the ins and outs of your life, does it reflect the kind of wholehearted
(45:22):
devotion to the Lord Jesus and to God, your father, that would reflect that your behavior is an outworking of what you believe in your heart?
That's what it's asking in calling you to.
And he gets specific, doesn't he?
He says, um, how are you going with slandering or with your tongue?
I wonder what happens when you get together with friends?
(45:44):
Do you use your tongue to put people down perhaps gently or only slightly?
Or in order to bolster your sense of self.
I mean, it's not really slander, is it?
Do you find it easy to get frustrated and cranky and for the way that you feel to leak
(46:05):
out about them in relationship with others is really the question that it's asking.
What would it take to control your tongue and to choose not to speak and to challenge the thoughts of your heart?
Or in terms of not being slaves to much wine?
I wanna ask in love, has alcohol become part of your necessary wine down at the end of the day?
(46:30):
Is wine a daily habit?
Do you use it to control your sense of anxiety or distress?
My dear sisters, God says this, not to shame you, even though actually if you detect it in yourself, you may feel some shame about these things.
We are all strugglers in need of grace.
(46:53):
If you are becoming dependent on alcohol as a way of managing life, can I just encourage
you to reach out and talk to a friend about it and ask for some help and encouragement?
And finally, do you notice that living in these ways as an old woman is actually all
about expressing your faith in such a way that makes you fit to teach the younger women?
(47:16):
It's the kind of phrase that's actually used of the elders of the church, and it's a, it's a remarkable reminder that in our angst
at times over talking about public teaching and who's allowed to preach and not whatever else, the Bible is full of the sharing
of the gospel in so many different ways in our relationships and all the women, you are being actually called by God to find
(47:38):
opportunities to seek, to teach the younger woman what it means to live in a way that honors Jesus and lives out her faith in the Lord.
Now can I just make a little partial observation here?
This is a generalization and applies to nobody in particular.
Some of the older women that I know I think feel a bit reluctant and like if they offered to
(47:59):
actually meet with or talk with a younger woman, they feel like, well, what would they want to know?
And I don't really have anything to offer and I'm not sure what I would be bringing here.
I just wanna say to you, God gives you permission and encouragement and it's okay to ask.
And I think some of the younger women that I know feel like I'm not sure that I can ask them.
I dunno if anyone's noticed me.
I dunno if I'm worth stopping and meeting with.
(48:22):
It would be okay for you to find a godly, older woman in your church and say, I'd really love some help and I would really love it
if you would meet with me and read the scriptures and pray with me and encourage me about living as a faithful follower of Jesus.
My sisters, can I encourage you to try and find each other and work out how to put these things into practice in our life?
(48:42):
Because where I see it happening, the fruit of that for all concern is actually beautiful for the sake of the gospel and God's glory.
And so finally to my younger sisters, verse four, to love your husbands and children to be self-controlled,
pure, working at home kind and submissive to your own husbands, self-controlled, pure, and kind.
(49:08):
Justice.
For younger men and older men, self-control can be an issue.
As I've reflected on this, one of the things that's caused me to think about is actually engagement with social media.
I think that it's a space that is at least theoretically relational.
Uh, I'm not sure how actually relational it is in practice, but it is a space that commands a kind of relational tug.
(49:32):
And it's an easy space to invest a lot of your time in.
And so I just wanna ask you actually, what kind of rules of thumb or what have you put in
place in your own life to be self controlled with regards to your engagement with that stuff?
I think it's a space actually that lends itself to gossip, to point scoring to all sorts of behavior that's not particularly helpful.
(49:53):
Uh, if we took Philippians seriously and filling ourselves with things that are honorable
and noble and right, and trustworthy and true, I suspect we would all avoid it a little more.
And this leads me, and this is my grumpy older man moment.
To those of you who are younger, generally, not just my sisters but my brothers, is there anything on
(50:14):
television or on your streaming service of choice that you will choose not to watch for the sake of the gospel?
Because in my conversations with young adult Christians, it seems to me that there's
lots of things that I would choose not to watch that they are very happy to watch.
And it could be that I'm old and grumpy.
I acknowledge that and there is some of that in me actually.
(50:37):
But when they talk about the latest episode of Love Island or whatever else it is that they've been watching,
in part, I wanna say to you, what would you choose not to watch for the sake of expressing your Christian faith?
Not because we are censorious or because we need to avoid the things that the world talks about
or whatever, but what would you actually choose not to watch for the sake of your own heart?
(51:02):
My sisters, can I encourage you too, towards kindness.
Kindness is about being gentle, isn't it?
With your humor, attentive to those who aren't noticed.
And so many of my dear sisters, I actually noticed this in your life and the way that you love people at church.
Keep being kind, keep being people who will love those around you and listen well.
(51:25):
And finally, for younger women who are married, loving your husband and children.
Working at home and being submissive to your own husband.
A few quick thoughts.
It does strike me that loving husbands and children requires training.
It's remarkable and deeply true.
None of us is born wisely able to love those around about us, and it all actually requires encouragement, assistance in the work of the word of God.
(51:53):
I'm pretty sure that every mom that I know who has made it past primary school, has had moments in her life.
When she says, I don't really like them,
I know that I'm called to love them, but at the moment I am really struggling to like them because quite frankly, they're not always likable.
(52:17):
And as for your husband, I'm not gonna say anything else.
But do you see, we assume that these things are natural.
They're maternal, they're biological, they're something that comes with our instincts.
And in some way there are elements of truth in that, in terms of hormones and creation and whatever else.
But the reality as it is for all of us, that these things actually require effort and work and training and encouragement.
(52:42):
They require the good work of God's spirit by his word.
And they require time spent with older, wiser, faithful women who have been there before us and encourage us to live this out.
And so I wanna speak particularly and point out about the fact that actually, therefore, when it says working at home, we have been trained
foolishly by our world to think that that's the private space and the space that's out of the world, and that's not very helpful or useful.
(53:09):
Whereas in God's economy, there is almost nothing more precious that he could call you to than the oversight
of your household and to the raising of your young children and to the encouragement of others in the faith.
You know, our government legislates to get women back to work as soon as possible so they can be productive as if loving and caring
(53:31):
for the people in your life and using your home for the good of people where there's no financial payment involved is unproductive.
We have stupid ways of measuring productivity, quite frankly, and we keep imbibing them as a culture.
Now, I'm not making any comment about whether a woman works for paid income part-time or not, or full-time or whatever else.
(53:53):
It works out.
That's not what I'm talking about.
The biblical picture is not a picture of the 1950s housewife.
You stay at home and you cook, and you clean, and you make everything great.
The biblical picture of someone who manages her household, who raises her children in the faith, who uses
her household to bless and encourage the community around about her both Christian and non-Christian,
and who uses all of her resources for the sake of others, and can I say it is a deeply honorable task.
(54:21):
And we as a community ought to honor it over and over and over again because God honors it.
When God calls on women to do these things, he's not putting you in a box.
He's calling you to one of the most precious things that he thinks that you can do.
Now, I think that this also means though, that we need to work out how to be gracious and generous with each other in a world where maybe it's
(54:49):
gonna require you two incomes to survive and she can't be full-time full on with the kids the whole time, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Different people are going to make different decisions based on their socioeconomic reality.
They're gonna make different decisions based on their circumstances in life and other things that are part of their experience.
(55:09):
And can I encourage you, my sisters, not to be judgemental of one another in the
decisions that you make about paid work or staying at home, or how those things relate.
But can I also express that like all other things that are possible to become idols
in the world, some of those decisions can also express a level of ungodliness.
(55:32):
So we need to be in this weird space where we're not judgmental and we are gracious and we listen well and we understand each other.
But as brothers and sisters in the Lord Who love Jesus, we will sometimes raise questions about
where our priorities are, where we have to be honest and real with each other as we work them out.
And then finally, and I'm aware of the timeline and I will get there.
(55:54):
Thank you brother.
I wanna say something about submission.
And why is being submissive to your own husbands?
I actually wanna say a lot, and I dunno that I'm gonna be able to, but anyway, a few quick things.
Do you realize that submission is not a wife thing, it's a Christian thing.
(56:15):
The Bible is full of the language of submission for all of us to the government,
to other authorities, to our pastors in church and children to parents.
We live in a world where submission is anathema because we have removed God from all of our talk about the world.
If you have a world where you don't believe in God, then all relationships become about power.
(56:36):
And any expressing of authority is about someone having power over somebody else.
But if you believe that there's a God who made the whole world, who's gonna bring it all to judgment, relationships aren't about power.
They just simply are not.
And God calls us to wise submission in reflection of Christ because Christ was submissive.
(56:56):
He submitted himself to his Heavenly Father.
He submitted himself to the authorities of his day even when they were wrong, which is a remarkable statement.
Submission is not about a lack of personality or a lack of intelligence, or of creativity or of thought.
(57:17):
It is a decision to give due honor and to sit under the leadership of another who has been appointed to a task.
We need to keep saying that the Bible sets limits to all authorities.
When the Sanhedrin tells the apostles to stop preaching about Christ, they actually are supposed to obey God.
But at the same time, submission is a virtue that all Christians are called on to engage.
(57:43):
So actually biblically submission occurs in the context of relationship and partnership, and
particularly in marriage of shared faith and life with someone who is a co-heir of Christ.
And so I wanna say to you, my dear sisters, and I know that many of you wrestle with this and put this into practice in
such godly ways, just a reminder that being submissive to your own husband does actually mean there are moments to say yes.
(58:11):
We'll do it your way, even when your own idea is better than his.
And there are moments not to say, I told you so after the event, when it becomes blindingly obvious that your way was the better way.
But actually to work out how to keep honoring each other and realizing that we
bring strengths and weaknesses, and as we make decisions, we will talk them through.
(58:33):
And sometimes we will agree, and sometimes we'll have disagreement, and sometimes he will make a decision and that will be complex.
But I want to encourage you that as you honor him in that position and as you love him,
well, you'll actually be honoring Jesus and bringing great glory to him on the last day.
But that means that I do need to say something to my brothers.
(58:57):
You must never domineer or be arrogant, or be judgmental or to throw your weight around, to use your temper and anger for control.
To be boorish, to be brutish, to be authoritarian in leadership is an abhorrent
to God at every level, and it ought never be named amongst God's people.
(59:24):
And so I wanna say very clearly to my sisters, if your husband treats you maliciously, if he's inappropriately controlling, and by that I mean
he asks you for an accounting of every cent that you spend, or every moment that you spend out of his sight, or he demands your submission.
(59:49):
I wanna say to you that he's not being godly or wise or honoring Christ.
And I also wanna say that you would honor God by sharing your concerns with
a trusted brother or sister and asking for their help in your circumstance.
You'll not be being disobedient.
(01:00:09):
You'll actually be loving him and loving Jesus.
But this leads me to one last thing that I wanna say.
The picture that we're often given is that the call for wires to submit to their husbands is a root cause of domestic violence in our world.
And here, brothers and sisters, I'm speaking with great trepidation, but I do wanna say some things that I think are important for us to reflect on.
(01:00:37):
There is some really important research evidence.
This is us rather than Australia.
And so there are caveats.
And you'll see the details down there.
Wilcox's study in 2004 and Ellison Etal in 2007, which shows I think, but we need to be careful about this, that where these
(01:00:59):
truths are taught in the context of ongoing engagement with the gospel, they're actually protective of women in wilcox's study.
Men who identified as evangelical and attended church regularly, by which they meant more than three times a month, their wives actually
self-reported anonymously, the highest levels of satisfaction in their marriage and the lowest rates of DV of any group that was measured.
(01:01:30):
But here is the flip side.
People who identified in some ways evangelical, but attended irregularly or not at all, actually reported the highest levels of dv.
And lesser levels of satisfaction and engagement in their marriage.
Now it's complex at a kind of concrete research level, working out how all those details work out.
(01:01:55):
I wanna suggest to you that I suspect that part of what is going on is that when we hear
these truths as a community and they, they're taught to us in the context of the whole gospel.
And when men take the gospel seriously, all of these things result in relationships that are so much better for women.
And if you wanna have a look at p's, the war on toxic masculinity for evidence about the way that male behavior
(01:02:21):
is actually transformed by the gospel in third world countries, and that's acknowledged in many feminist circles.
It's interesting, other information.
But what it means is that when we speak about these things as a Christian
community, we need to speak really clearly about what good and unhealthy looks like.
And rather than actually avoiding these passages, because we are scared about the disruption it's gonna cause in our church, and we
(01:02:45):
are worried about what people might think of us as ministers when we speak about them, we must teach about them and take the time
to teach about them in a way that puts them in the context of the fullness of relationship that God calls us for in the gospel.
That names domestic violence for what it actually is.
That gives women permission to respond when they're being unhealthily dealt with, and that calls men to repentance and faith.
(01:03:10):
Can I encourage you, if you are the pastor of a church and you've been avoiding these texts, come to them and preach them in the context of the whole
of scripture and keep bringing the gospel to bear and train your congregation to be aware that people on the fringe might be particularly vulnerable.
Now, my last little plea is that you read the quote from Calvin at the end, who 500 years ago.
(01:03:36):
Said exactly what I've just said.
We are not the first people in history to have been aware that this is a problem or don't speak the gospel of truth towards husbands as well as wives.
And so let me just read a short snippet to towards the end.
After Genesis 2 23, Calvin concludes Unless a man makes sure that he loves his wife, he shows
(01:04:01):
that he has never tasted the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ or of His gospel accordingly.
Although Paul addresses his words and exhortation to women, he did not intend to give men free reign to do as they like.
They too have their rule in every age.
People have been able to distort what is true.
(01:04:21):
Because evil can call good sin and sin good.
The brothers and sisters, we've been called to new life in the Lord Jesus Christ.
In these commandments, when understood and applied in the light of the whole of scripture
are for us and are good for our communities, but they take a lot of working out.
So we need to talk about them and pray with each other and encourage each other to put them into practice.
(01:04:42):
Don't we please pray with me.
Father, we thank you for your word.
We thank you for the encouragement to live wholeheartedly knowing that Jesus has won us for lawlessness and has made us his own for good works.
Father, thank you that we are gonna see him, that we are gonna see him face to face.
(01:05:05):
Thank you that he's died to transform us.
Please help us as we work out what to do with these things, to do that with great love and care for one another.
Help us to speak about them in our churches in a way that honors Christ and reflects the gospel.
And help us to be people who honor our king.
For your glory we pray.
Amen.
(01:05:33):
Thank you for listening to Moore in the Word, a podcast of Moore Theological College.
Our vision as a College is to see God glorified by men and women living for
and proclaiming Jesus Christ, growing healthy churches and reaching the lost.
We invite you to attend any of our upcoming events, including this one from the Priscilla & Aquila Centre.
(01:05:54):
The term "Complementarian" was coined in 1988 to describe the view that God created men and women equally in his
image, with equal dignity and purpose, and equal standing before him as sinners and as recipients of his grace.
However, in marriage and in leadership of the church, some roles and responsibilities for men and women are not identical or interchangeable.
(01:06:18):
There is ordered complementarity of equals.
Even though the term "Complementarian" was new, this view reflects 20 centuries of biblical interpretation and church practice.
Join us for the next Priscilla & Aquila evening seminar on Wednesday the 13th of August 2025, when writer
and theologian Claire Smith will examine the history of Complementarianism not just for its own sake,
(01:06:43):
but to help us gain a greater understanding of our current context and to identify areas of future focus.
To find out more and register, visit the Priscilla & Aquila website.
That's paa.moore.edu.au.
paa.moore.edu.au.
You can find out more and register by going to the Moore College website (01:07:08):
moore.edu.au.
That's moore.edu.au.
If you have not already done so, we encourage you to subscribe to our podcast
through your favourite podcast platform so that you'll never miss an episode.
For past episodes, further resources, and to make a tax deductible donation to support
(01:07:31):
the work at the College and its mission, please visit our website at moore.edu.au.
If you found this episode helpful, please share it with a friend and leave a review on your platform of choice.
We always benefit from feedback from our listeners, so if you'd like to get in touch, you can email us at comms@moore.edu.au.
(01:07:56):
The Moore in the Word Podcast was edited and produced by me, Karen Beilharz, and the Communications Team at Moore Theological College.
The music for our podcast was provided by MarkJuly from PixaBay.
Until next time.
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