God is a Life or Death choice…
God is the definition of life. God is all about life. When he created this world He placed life on it and said go forth and be fruitful and multiply. He set a tree of life at its center. Satan came along and struck at the very heart of God by setting death loose. Satan is all about death and decay. Sin is death and decay. When man lives without setting God before Him as God, man is apart from life. Whether you are Christian or not, Muslim or not, Mormon or not, the choice as far as God is concerned, is life or death. God’s way always leads to life. Man’s way always leads to death. LIFE IS A CHOICE!
Deuteronomy 30:19-20 I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore choose life, that you and your offspring may live, loving the LORD your God, obeying his voice and holding fast to him, for he is your life and length of days, that you may dwell in the land that the LORD swore to your fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give them.” Joshua led the Israelites into the promised land.
Christ is the Life of man!
Jesus said that He is the life, that He is the only way to God the Father. While many of us have come to Jesus Christ to obtain eternal life, many of us have failed to take hold of the LIFE that Jesus wants us to live NOW! It is a life that is not dependent upon your sight, your flesh, your strength, or your wisdom. It is a LIFE that through faith and the Word sees Jesus Christ ever before you, living in you, living through you and living for you.
Galatians 5:25 says that if you have life by the Spirit, then walk by the Spirit!
I want to begin a study toward the end of the New Testament. Today we look at Titus. If the Lord leads we will spend the next two years walking toward Revelation. Wednesday’s we will begin in Genesis and walk through the Old Testament. From time to time we will join the two together, as I will this morning, as I tie Hosea 4:6 to Titus 1:1-4
Destroyed (silenced) for a lack of knowledge
Hosea 4:6 My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge[1],[2]; because you have rejected knowledge, I reject you from being a priest to me. And since you have forgotten the 
law of your God, I also will forget your children.
Spoken to the PRIESTS! They were not making sure the Jews were experiencing God in the reality of everyday living! (This knowledge used is that which comes from an encounter and experience. They probably knew scriptures, participated in memory drills, had the scriptures hanging on their walls, but they had long ago stopped having a fresh encounter with the author of the Scriptures.)
The background of their sin was a lack of an encounter with God through His Word. “My friend, if you are a Christian, the minute you get away from the Word of God, you are doomed to failure in the Christian life. Regardless of the number of conferences or seminars you attend that tell you how to be a success in your home, in your business, and in your social life, you will be a failure”.[3]
Man’s way – failure and death
Proverbs 14:12 There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death.
My people are silenced for lack of knowing me!
- (knowledge and discernment which comes from an experience or encounter)
1. The people are lacking in their relationship with God.
Hosea 4:1 …There is no faithfulness or steadfast love, and no knowledge of God in the land;
- Neglect, busyness, priorities, excuses, hurts.
- God is ignored, forgotten, neglected and even spurned.
2. Neglect turns into rejection of God and His ways
- The pull of this world system is too powerful
- Our hearts are too deceptive
- Our heart gets cold, our faith is stale.
- We go through our day without a fresh touch from God.
- We barely hold on to believing faith
- We live the majority of our lives without Him.
3. Rejection of God leads to Him rejecting you.
-
No longer a priest, able to go directly to Him - You have lost your standing, your voice.
- Your heart has become a barrier to a living relationship with God.
- Your pride has become a brick wall.
- God is a jealous God. He must be first, or He will move on.
4. You will be Silenced
- Overcome, cut off, made to cease– silenced.
- No longer have a voice
- Doesn’t necessarily mean death-but rather you have lost your significance with God.
- The Jews would lose their voice and blessing from God.
- God left them to their own devices.
5. God will forget your children.
- Through your forgetting of the Law of God in your life and home…
- God will forget your children.
- Your children will not matter with God.
- His grace will not be at work in their lives.
- They will not hear God’s voice.
- They will not encounter God in their lives.
Hosea 4 indicates what happens when we forget Him. Our worship becomes comfortable and convenient. We worship other things. The family breaks down. There is great immorality among the youth. Wives become immoral. Marriage becomes a joke. The family breaks down.
Proverbs 1:29-31 Because they hated knowledge and did not choose the fear of the LORD, would have none of my counsel and despised all my reproof, therefore they shall eat the fruit of their way, and have their fill of their own devices.
What is God’s Way? – Success & Life!
The major thrust of Titus, while bearing on our relationships, is really upon personal character and lifestyle which grow out of the truth. God’s Word is to be encountered, for it will change your character. Christ in you will result in a new Jim or Larry or Beth or Mary. God’s Word is never empty, but always leads to LIFE!
True LIFE is never apart from God, but in God!
Titus 1:1-4 Paul, a servant of God and an apostle of Jesus Christ, for the sake of the faith of God’s elect and their knowledge of the truth, which accords with godliness, in hope of eternal life, which God, who never lies, promised before the ages began and at the proper time manifested in his word through the preaching with which I have been entrusted by the command of God our Savior; To Titus, my true child in a common faith: Grace and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Savior.
A. Paul-Focus on the Living Savior
Paul opens the veil of his life. He wants Titus to know the motivation of his life and ministry. He reminds Titus that he has the imprint of two indelible marks upon his life.
1. He is a bond-servant to God
2. He is an apostle of Jesus Christ, personally commissioned by Him.
Everything about Paul’s life bore those two marks. Everywhere he went, people knew that Paul belonged to God, and that he was representing a living Savior, whom Paul personally knew and spent time with. People could ignore the message, but they could never forget the man. Paul belonged to God, and Paul knew Jesus Christ. There was no denying that Paul was not his own. You had to be impressed with the effect that Jesus had on Paul’s life. This message to Titus is all about how the truth of Jesus Christ changes your life. The Life of Jesus impacts your life.
Paul once though he was alive. But he realized he was dead to God.
Eph 2:1 –you were dead in trespasses and sin.
Paul saw Jesus Christ on that road to Damascus. When he saw Jesus as the Christ, his life was forever changed.
B. Paul-with a Message of Life
1. For the sake God’s elect
a) For their faith
b) For their knowledge of the truth
Paul desires us to see God, to see Him at work in our lives. This only grows through fresh encounters with the Word of truth.
What are you facing in your life that has you boxed in? Instead of your problem driving you to God’s word, you spend your time arguing, your sleeping time frustrated. There is no peace. Faith opens your eyes to see God in whatever situation you are struggling with. Without the Word of truth, your eyes will be shut.
2. For the hope of Eternal Life
a) Promised by God
b) God never lies
God has always focused on LIFE God is jealous for me to experience life! Not a frustrated, defeated life, but a victorious, joy-filled life!
Look at God’s Love for LIFE!
-
In the Garden of Eden
God guarded against all that which of Life would destroy life.
After the fall, God had to guard life by casting man out
-
The Tree of Life will be in heaven-yielding fruit once a month
Sin has been dealt with
Only those who know life through Jesus will be allowed to eat.
-
Cain and Able
Blood cries from the ground
Cursed Cain for taking life
-
Noah
Genesis 9:6 “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image.
You will never gain by taking a man’s life. You will lose
-
Enoch
Walked with God and had life
-
Abraham & Isaac
Isaac must come into death so death can be destroyed,
God’s purpose is that death is past, and not future.
God wants us to always have life without fear
In Christ, death is past, life is now and in the future
-
Job
Satan: “Skin for skin, yea, all that a man hath will he give for his life. But put forth thine hand now, and touch his bone and his flesh, and he will renounce thee to thy face.”
God: “… Only spare his life.”
Controversy for life is the theme of Job
Satan could only indirectly try to take Job’s life: Satan’s indirect method is to move Job to break with God by cursing Him, so that his life is forfeited and destroyed
With God is life, even from trials.
Trials with God always lead to increase!
Trials always lead to Revelation 22
Revelation 22:1-4 Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city; also, on either side of the river, the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. No longer will there be anything accursed, but the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him. They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads.
-
The Exodus
Life in the face of death
-
Levitical Laws of Life
Always about protecting life and health
Guarding the life of the family and nation.
Don’t drink blood…
Life Is Sacred To God, And He Is Intensely Jealous Over It.
God wants us to LIVE, but LIFE is in GOD! In order to know true LIFE, we must die to our self and LIVE to God through Jesus Christ! This way, death will be past. There is no more fear of death, for we will experience God’s LIFE forever!
Sin And Death Always Go Together Just As Righteousness And Life Go Together
There is a way that seems right to a man.
I was asked to go talk to a step-father-in-law by one of the gals at EBC. He was a KS Highway Patrol officer, close to retirement, whose job it was to investigate accidents. He had seen every imaginable thing-gory, bloody and horrendous. He was a functional alcoholic. It was 9:30 Saturday morning, and I could smell the alcohol on his breath. We started talking about God in his front yard, where he was doing some yard work. He very quickly turned the conversation to his standard answer-God is everywhere. God is in the trees, in the flowers. He felt close to God when he was working in his yard.
When asked about his relationship with God’s Son, he said that he has God and that is good enough. In reality, while he though God was all around him, God had forgotten him, and life was escaping him. Death was his life now, for he did not know God in reality. His sins had not been forgiven. The pain of his life was being drowned out by alcohol. He was fooling himself. His ways seemed right, but they were the ways of death. He had been deceived.
Genesis 3:13 Then the LORD God said to the woman, “What is this that you have done?” The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”
Satan is a deceiver. Eve ate because she wanted to be like god. Instead she became like the serpent, cursed and with a death sentence upon her.
Chose life or chose death. You may think you have life, even surround yourself with life, but you are deceived. You are facing death.
There is only one who faced death and conquered it. There is only one who defeated sin, and satisfied the righteous demands of our Holy God.
Jesus Christ, the way the truth and the life. No man comes to the Life of God but through Him!
If life is in Christ, don’t you want to know more of Him?
If you are not satisfied with your life, you need to know Jesus Christ in a living way! Christ is the Life of Man!
[1] daʿat̠: A feminine noun meaning knowledge, knowing, learning, discernment, insight, and notion. The word occurs forty of its ninety-one times in Proverbs as one of the many words associated with the biblical concept of wisdom. The root meaning of the term is knowledge or knowing. In Proverbs 24:3, 4, it is the third word in a chain of three words describing the building of a house by wisdom, the establishment of that house by understanding, and finally, the filling of the rooms of the house by knowledge.
The word is also used in the sense of knowing by experience, relationship, or encounter. For example, Balaam received knowledge from the Most High who met him in a vision (Num. 24:16); the knowledge gained by the suffering Servant of Isaiah justified many people (Isa. 53:11); and to truly know the Holy God leads to real understanding (Prov. 9:10). This moral, experiential knowledge of good and evil was forbidden to the human race in the Garden of Eden (Gen. 2:9, 17). Warren Baker and Eugene Carpenter, The Complete Word Study Dictionary – Old Testament, (Chattanooga, TN: AMG Publishers, 2003), WORDsearch CROSS e-book, 245.
[2] The word meaning “knowledge” in Hebrew is daʿat, a noun coming from the root of the verb yadaʿ, “to know,” “to experience,” “to acknowledge.” This key word in the Old Testament includes both intellectual and experiential knowledge. The noun for knowledge, daʿat, also has this range of meaning.. Carpenter Eugene E. and Comfort Philip W., Holman Treasury of Key Bible Words: 200 Greek and 200 Hebrew Words Defined and Explained, (Nashville, TN: Broadman & Holman, 2000), WORDsearch CROSS e-book, 106.
[3] J. Vernon McGee, Thru The Bible with J. Vernon McGee, (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 1983), WORDsearch CROSS e-book, Under: “Chapter 4”.
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