“Qualifications To Be a Good Person” || Release What You’re Not in Control Of || Week 4

Welcome to Week Four of our series called “Release What You’re Not In Control Of”! This series talks about our issues with controlling things, or more accurately, my issues with controlling things. I wanted to create a sermon series talking about my control issues and, through scripture and personal testimony, hopefully, try to help you with your possible control issues. Let’s dive into the word!

This week’s scripture finds us in Titus. Who’s Titus? Titus had become a beloved and disciple and fellow workers in the Gospel, similar to Timothy. According to 2 Timothy, Titus is reported going to ministry in Dalmatia – modern Yugoslavia. Titus served with Paul on both the second and third of Paul’s missionary journeys. Titus was to pass the encouragement and counsel that Paul gave him to the leaders Titus was to appoint in the Cretan church. That’s just a small introduction into who Titus is. I encourage you to go read all three chapters of this letter! Today’s scripture takes us to Titus 1:8 for today’s message, entitled “Qualifications To Be a Good Person”.

Titus 1:8 says: “An elder must be ready to help people by welcoming them into his home. He must love what is good. He must be wise. He must live right. He must be devoted to God and pleasing to him. And he must be able to control himself.” As I mentioned, Titus was to pass along encouragement and counsel the leaders he appoints in the Cretan church. This section lists the qualifications to become an elder. I think this also represents what it means to be a good person and a follower of Jesus. Let’s break it down bit by bit.

We need to be hospitable to those in need. I think it extends beyond welcoming those into your home. It’s meeting someone for lunch. It’s helping them at church. It’s helping people in general. The church is a great avenue to find multiple routes to help people. We, as a youth group, do a wide variety of mission projects that help both the church and the world. We’ve done World Vision’s 30-Hour Famine for the last four years, excluding this year, and raised almost $7,500 to help end world hunger. We’ve done Operation Christmas Child from Samaritan’s Purse for the last four years, and sent over 400 boxes to third-world countries for children. We do church work, worked at local food drives, cleaned the local park, and more. The church can provide many ways to get involved, so check your local church (obviously when this quarantine is lifted) and see how you can help. Actually, this pandemic has raised a large variety of ways to help others. Whether it is fiscally through rent assistance, bill payments, and more or through physical actions like grocery delivery and cleaning. Pray tonight and ask God, “How can you use me to serve you tomorrow? Point me in the direction of those that you want me to serve.” Then just pay attention to what God is telling you. Let’s look at the next requirement.

We need to love what is good. This just means to love doing what’s good in God’s eyes. The Greek translation of this just means “a lover of good men” or “a lover of good”. Sounds easy to do. Let’s move to the next qualification. We need to be wise. Use your head at all times. Control yourself. Think thoroughly. I can do that. We need to be devoted to God and pleasing him. I feel like that’s obvious, but one we fail the most. I’ll admit. It’s hard to always do what God want’s us to do 24/7. It just is. We don’t want to do what is right all the time. Doing what’s wrong sometimes is what feels right to us. We know it’s not pleasing to God, but c’mon. Everyone else is doing it! Staying devoted is tough too. Some of us just don’t read our Bible every day, or go to church every Sunday, or pray daily. We just don’t, and these, in my opinion, are the essentials. It’s been on my essential list since I got over my sickness at the end of March and has been a staple every day. I encourage you to look at your spiritual life and see if there are changes that you need to make.

The last qualification and the one I want to talk about the most. We need to able to control ourselves. Titus and Paul use this as one of the qualifications to be an elder, but it’s definitely something that we can utilize to be a good person. Controlling ourselves can fall on multiple facets of our lives, most of which can fall back to previous sermons. Last week, we covered controlling our tongue. Three weeks ago, we covered control of our responses to others. This part of self-control, that I think falls into what Titus can talk about, that I want to cover is controlling our perceptions. Elders, deacons, pastors, and other ministry leaders use their perceptions of what people go to them to try and help them. They have to control the perception of what they hear and the other bias they may have to help others. Controlling our perception of others is something we all can do. Remove the biases, the prejudices, the stereotypes, from people, and focus on who they are at the core: a human. Each of us is humans at the core and we still need to treat others with that same respect. As I mentioned in week one, we don’t know what other people are going through at any time. We need to still treat others with respect even if they don’t respect us. I know that doesn’t sound like the popular, but sometimes we don’t need to be popular. We need to do what God calls us to do. Jesus wants us to treat others the way Jesus treated us. Jesus wants us to serve others as he served us as well. Are you qualified to be an elder based on what we talked about? If not, I pray that you re-look at these qualifications to see how you can better yourself.

We will see you for Week 5 of this series, and the study of 1 Peter 5:6-8 and Matthew 11:28. We get to see how control and anxiety work together.