The Gospel Witness of the Church

In 2016, Tyler VanderWeele, who is the professor of epidemiology at Harvard, wrote this: 

“If someone could come up with a single [medicine] to improve the physical and mental health of millions of Americans —at no personal cost— what value would our society place on it? Going a step further, if research proved that when consumed just once a week, this concoction would reduce mortality by 20-30% over a 15-year period, how urgently would we want to make [this medicine] publicly available? The good news is that this miracle drug -regular church attendance- is already in the reach of most Americans. In fact, there’s a good chance it's just a short drive away.”[1]

This finding shows us, the Church, something incredibly important. The way we live shows the world around us that the Gospel makes a difference—not only eternally, but in the here and now. There’s more; according to multiple long-term studies published by The Harvard School of Public Health in 2016 and 2018, regular church attendance is connected to better mental health, better physical health, stronger and more long-lasting marriages, and greater financial stability. 

The benefits of being part of a church are so significant that in December of 2019 -just a few months before churches were forced to close their doors due to COVID- the Wall Street Journal carried an article controversially titled Don’t Believe in God? Lie to Your Children. Now I don’t think that’s a good title for an article and I don’t think anyone should purposely lie to their children. But in the article, the author, who is an atheist and a professional therapist, pointed out studies that children or teens who reported attending a church service at least once per week “scored higher on psychological well-being measurements and had lower risks of mental illness. Weekly attendance was associated with higher rates of volunteering, a sense of mission, forgiveness, and lower probabilities of drug use and early sexual initiation.” 

I want to ask you, if all of that is true (and it is), do you think that would make the Gospel more or less attractive to people? See, the world is watching the kind of lives that we lead together. They won’t necessarily support what the Bible teaches about marriage, or family, or sex, or gender, or how we organize ourselves as a community, or our approach to how the Gospel affects our entire life, but they will notice when the effect is so large that it has a marked difference on the happiness, health, stability, and wholeness of the entire Bible-believing church community (as a whole) in distinction from the rest of the world. The difference that living out the Gospel makes is so large that The Harvard School of Public Health can actually measure it.

I’ll give you one more: in 2012 Professor Robert D. Woodberry demonstrated how the same thing can be seen in the effect that Christian missionaries have had on societies worldwide. According to his research, the higher the number of Protestant missionaries, per ten thousand of the local population in 1923, the higher the chance that same nation would have become a stable democracy by the year 2000. Rodney Stark, who served up until a little while ago as the Professor of Sociology at the University of Washington, wrote “The missionary effect is far greater than that of fifty other variables, including GDP and whether or not a nation was a British colony.” In fact, the higher the number of missionaries that a country had in 1923, the lower that nation’s infant mortality rate was in the year 2000, and the higher the average adult life expectancy. The American Political Science Review checked those findings, and found that the effect was more than nine times as large as the effect of current GDP. So to break that down if I lost you: the effect of whether or not a country had a lot of missionaries was nine times more impactful on their infant mortality rate, life expectancy, literacy, and chances of being a stable democracy, than whether or not that country was even rich or poor. I’ll ask you again, if all of that is true (and it is) do you think that would make the Gospel less attractive or more attractive to people? See, our lives are a witness to the truth of God’s Word. And when we live out what Jesus teaches, we show the world a couple of important things: (1) That this kind of life is possible; and (2) That God’s ways are better than our human, natural ways of doing things apart from Him. This is what the Apostle Paul is getting at in Titus 2:1-10.

WE ARE WITNESSES AS A COMMUNITY

Three times in this passage, Paul mentions the need to maintain a good reputation for the sake of the Gospel (vv. 5, 8, 10). First, in Titus 2:5, he tells Christians to live out the biblical pattern for marriage "so that the Word of God may not be reviled." The Word of God is reviled when the world looks at the instructions that God gives and scoffs, “Not even the Christians believe or do that—so why should we?” We are witnesses as a community. How we live either lifts the message of the Gospel up, or it lowers the opinion that the whole world has of the value of God’s good instructions for us. The world may not support the Christian way of doing things, but they will sure sit up and take notice if it looks like we as Christians don’t even do those things either. We should live so that “the word of God may not be reviled.”

We should also be aware that there are some people in the world who are waiting for Christians to make a mistake, so that they can exploit it and use it against the Christian community. This is a particular concern for pastors. So second, in Titus 2:8 Paul tells pastors not to give "opponents" of the Gospel an "opportunity to speak evil." This does not mean that the rest of the community doesn’t have the same responsibility—we just saw that in verse 5. But it does mean that our Christian leaders have a little more of a spotlight on them, and that there are opponents of the faith (that’s the word that Paul uses) who would love to use the inconsistent or unserious words and actions of a pastor against the whole Christian community. So Paul says, to all Christians but especially people in Christian leadership, “don’t give them an opportunity to speak evil.” Once again, how we live changes how people receive the Gospel. That’s Paul’s concern here.

Finally in verse 10, Paul gives instructions for servants -the employees of the day- to “adorn the doctrine of God our Savior.” That word adorn here in the original Greek is actually related to our English word cosmetics. Our actions as followers of Jesus can actually have a big part to play in enhancing, or at least bringing out, the beauty of the Gospel for all the world to see. The world doesn’t just want to hear the Gospel preached before they will believe it. They want to see the Gospel lived. They want to see what it looks like. When we start to create exceptions for ourselves, to say that this or that part of God’s Word does not apply to our lives, then the people in our lives will conclude that God’s Word doesn’t apply to them either, and they won’t want any part of it. But when they see the Gospel lived out, and they see Christians whose lives reflect that God is their treasure and that their hope is not in anything that is on this earth; when they see sacrifice, and consistency, and love in the midst of difficulty, and accountability within the church even when it’s hard, they will know that there is something different in our midst. And they will want to know what it is. And we will be ready to tell them: “We live for a good, and great, and glorious God, who rescued us when we did not deserve it and loved us to the point of death. He has given us a hope in heaven and for all eternity where all things will be exactly as he intended them, and we have chosen to live our lives in such a way that it reflects that hope, because we have placed our trust in Him.”

WE ARE WITNESSES AS INDIVIDUALS

We are not just a faceless group of interchangeable Christians, however. We each have an opportunity to adorn the Gospel in a different way, and we face different challenges. That is why Paul addresses specific groups of people. In verse 2 the older men are mentioned. And then in verse 3, it’s the older women. In verses 4 and 5, the younger women are addressed. In verse 6, the younger men. In verses 7 to 8, Titus and by extension all Christian leaders are mentioned. And then finally, in verses 9 and 10, the Apostle Paul addresses servants, or slaves, which were basically the employees of the day. Most of the instructions that the Bible gives for them here would apply to anyone who works for someone else today; most of the people in the church and throughout the Roman Empire at that time would have belonged to this group. So how are all these different individuals -men and women, old and young, rich and poor, the worker, and the retired man - going to live out the Gospel in a way that shows the world that God is great? The answer is, each in a slightly different way. We are all called to the same standard of living for Jesus. That’s not in question here. Actually, many of the specific instructions for everyday Christians in this passage are the same requirements that were listed in Titus 1:5-16 for Christian leaders. But as individuals we are still different people, and we have different duties and different responsibilities, and different stages of life, and even different struggles and temptations. So it’s not enough to be told, “We need to be witnesses.” No, we need to know “How do I live as a witness for Jesus? How do I live out a witness to the Gospel as an individual Christian?” This is why Paul addresses these specific groups in these verses.

I've addressed some of the specifics in sermon form in the past, so I will leave those aside for now to stick to the main point: wherever you work, whatever you do, whoever you know, however you get the opportunity, make sure that you are pursuing Jesus continually so that others see the difference that he makes in your life. Make sure that Jesus is your treasure. We talk about faith in the church sometimes, but it’s not just about a simple belief in God, faith is about what you put your trust in. Each of you, make sure that you are continually recalibrating your life so that it looks -to you and the rest of the world- like the life of someone who trusts Jesus. That trusts Jesus to save, and trusts that he’s good, and trusts that he’s God, and trusts that he’s in control, and trusts that his Word is good, and trusts his commands, and trusts his promises, and trusts in him. Our lives, as a community and as individuals, are a message to the rest of the world—is Jesus good? Is the Gospel true? Does Christianity have anything to do with life today? People will know the answer when they see God's people. God is so good to us. He loved us, he pursues us, he has provided everything. Jesus went to the cross for us. God has a plan to reconcile the whole world to himself, the Bible says, things in heaven and on earth and under the earth, metaphorically speaking. And he wants you and me by his side when he does it. So he has paid the price for our sin so we could live for him. Would the world get that message from watching us as a church, as a people? I hope they will. 

Let’s go out as a church, and with our lives, as Titus shows us, and let’s be witnesses of “the doctrine of God our Savior”--let’s be witnesses of the good news about Jesus, and what he’s done for us.

Blessings on your living, your working, and your "adorning the Gospel" with your lives wherever you go,

- Sean

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[1] Tyler VanderWeele and John Siniff, USA Today Oct, 28th, 2016, "Religion May Be a Miracle Drug: Church Attendance is Correlated with Longer Life and a Sense of Meaning."