Speaker: Greg Sanders

Passage: Titus 1:10-16

TITUS 1:10-16

We’re in the Book of Titus. We are in a systematic study. If you’re new with us, welcome. Thanks for being here. We systematically just go verse by verse through the Scriptures. 

And so, we’re in the Book of Titus. We’re gonna be in chapter 1. We’re gonna look at verses 10-16 today in chapter 1. But before we start there, I want to read us a passage out of 1 Samuel 15. And I want to do that for a reason. 

Paul’s going to deal with something in Titus 1:10 that is incredibly important for us and how we internalize it today, but I want to build a case for it because I think it’s important that we understand, is this just something Paul’s bringing to light, or is this something that is a truth through the history of the people of God? 

1 SAMUEL 15

And so, in order to understand that correctly, I want to take us into the book of 1 Samuel and read a story some of you might be familiar with. But I will let you sit down because I’m kind. I won’t make you stand like Pastor Dustin does. If you’re like, But I want to, then stand up. You can stand up alone. It’ll be great.

Okay, here we go. “One day Samuel said to Saul, ‘I anointed you king of Israel because the Lord told me to. Now listen to this message from the Lord! This is what the Lord Almighty says: “I have decided to settle accounts with the nation of Amalie for opposing Israel when they came from Egypt. Now go and completely destroy the entire Amalekite nation– men, women, children, babies, cattle, sheep, camels, and donkeys.”’ 

“So Saul mobilized his army at Telaim. There were 200,000 troops, in addition to the 10,000 men from Judah. Then Saul went to the city of Amalek and lay in wait in the valley. Saul sent this message to the Kenites: ‘Move away from where the Amalekites live or else you will die with them. For you were kind to the people of Israel when they came up from Egypt.’ So the Kenites packed up and left. 

“And then Saul slaughtered the Amalekites from Havilah all the way to Shur, east of Egypt. And he captured Agag, the Amalekite king, but completely destroyed everyone else. Saul and his men spared Agag’s life and kept the best of the sheep and cattle, the fat calves and lambs– everything, in fact, that appealed to them. They destroyed only what was worthless or of poor quality. 

“And then the Lord said to Samuel, ‘I am sorry that I ever made Saul king, for he’s not been loyal to me and has again refused to obey me.’ Samuel was so deeply moved when he heard this that he cried out to the Lord all night. Early the next morning Samuel went to find Saul. Someone told him, ‘Saul went to Carmel to set up a monument to himself.’” Whew. What a phrase. “‘Then he went on to Gilgal.’ 

“When Samuel finally found him, Saul greeted him cheerfully. ‘May the Lord bless you,’ he said. ‘I have carried out the Lord’s command!’ ‘Then what is all the bleating of sheep and lowing of cattle I hear?’ demanded Samuel. ‘Oh, it’s true that the army spared the best of the sheep and cattle,’ Saul admitted. ‘But they’re going to sacrifice them to the Lord your God. We’ve destroyed everything else.’ Then Samuel said to Saul, ‘Stop! Listen to what the Lord told me last night! ‘What was it?’ Saul asked. And Samuel told him, ‘Although you may think little of yourself, are you not the leader of the tribes of Israel? The Lord has anointed you king of Israel. And the Lord sent you on a mission and told you, “Go and completely destroy the Amalekites, until they’re all dead.” Why haven’t you obeyed the Lord? Why did you rush for the plunder and do exactly what the Lord said not to do?’ ‘But I did obey the Lord,’ Saul insisted. ‘I carried out the mission he gave me. I brought back King Agag, but I destroyed everyone else. Then my troops brought in the best of the sheep and cattle and plundered to sacrifice to the Lord your God in Gilgal.’ But Samuel replied, ‘What is more pleasing to the Lord: Your burnt offerings and sacrifices or your obedience to his voice? Obedience is far better than sacrifice. Listening to him is much better than offering the fat of rams. Rebellion is as bad as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is as bad as worshiping idols. So because you’ve rejected the word of the Lord, he has rejected you from being king.’”

Let’s pray. Holy Spirit, as we set our eyes on the Scriptures, we ask that you would illuminate, bring to the forefront, the things we need to know, things we need to understand. And Lord, maybe places where we’ve been wrong in our thinking, wrong in our perspective, we ask that You would lead us into a place of truth, that we come out the other side of this teaching, better, more capable of following You. We love You and we honor You. Jesus’ name, amen. 

REBELLION AND RIGHT TEACHING

Okay, so what’s happening here? Essentially, this is the story of the downfall of Saul. But for us, it’s a landmark tutorial that reveals what the Lord sees disobedience as: He sees it as rebellion. 

Saul resisted the authority of God– and I want us to catch this– by offering a version of obedience that made sense to him. He didn’t fully obey, and yet felt the comfort of doing so because the reasoning made sense to him. 

I want us to hold that understanding as we look at Titus 1, because in this passage, Paul’s going to address the exact same concern with the church of Crete. He says, “For there are many who rebel against right teaching, and they engage in useless talk and they deceive people.” 

In verse 10, I want to start us there. I want to discuss this concept of rebellion and how it connects to right teaching because Paul will use this phrase, right teaching, over and over again in the Book of Titus. 

I would offer that it’s the central concept in the Book of Titus. So, we need to define what is right teaching. So, here’s the simple definition for right teaching: it is teaching that aligns with the Scriptures and accurately communicates and adheres to the heart of God. 

So, it’s not just aligning the Scriptures. It actually carries the nuance and the nature of the heart of God as well. How many understand that you can look at the Scriptures and not know the heart of God and end up someplace that’s not correct? So, we have to be able to discern both what the text says and who He has revealed Himself to be. 

How do we interpret that both those things are necessary to get us to this place, called right teaching? But why is right teaching so important? Because right teaching is given by the Holy Spirit to shape right living, and it leads us into the lives that He desires. 

So, I shared this when we first opened the Book of Titus: we have a lens, we have a focus that we’re going to use as we study this book, and the lens is really becoming the households of God. 

David Mitchell said it probably the most poetically, and best I could come up with, which is if Revelation was the picture of Jesus walking amongst the churches, Titus is really the picture of Jesus walking amongst our homes, which means He’s getting a little more intimate with who we really are. 

I think we err in our day and in our time because we often think the moment the front door closes on the house, it’s our business. According to Paul, every aspect of our lives is His business. 

And so for us, this Becoming the Households of God’s idea means that we are committed to allowing the Scriptures and the teachings of Jesus to shape our actions and to govern how we live in our homes. Instantly, is anyone else with me and you kind of have this like, Oh no? 

In verse 10, Paul will say that there are many who rebel against right teaching. This word rebel is a really strong word in the Greek, it means to be unruly, unwilling to be put under control. So, what he says is that right teaching, when we embrace it correctly, becomes a control agent intended to modify and direct our behavior. 

Some would argue, Well, isn’t rebellion like an internal feeling? It’s like a mental place. How does Paul know they’re rebelling? Well, that’s the part that I think is most terrifying. According to Paul, he’s measuring their lifestyle. He’s declaring that the way that he sees them living is revealing that they’re not actually willing to align with what Jesus teaches. 

He’s actually saying something more than that, that I think is even more concerning: that they had received right teaching, but they refused to obey it. They rebelled against it. I want us to consider this truth that our personal lifestyle choices and patterns of living reveal whether or not we follow Jesus. 

Why is that important? Because we live in a culture where people say, Yeah, I’m a Christian. Great. What does that mean? Do you follow Jesus? Does His teaching govern your life? Because according to Paul, it’s not just a belief set, it is to be evidenced with our lives.

We could say it this way: our faith isn’t just an existential choice, it is a measurable reality. We’re either following Him or we’re rebelling against Him with our behavior. 

So, a challenge and a caution in this: I think at times, when we bring up the word rebellion, we always think of these big ticket ideas, like, it’s really avant-garde, it’s out in front. I think rebellion can be insidious and small. 

I think it can show up any place in our lives that we are willing to ignore the leadership of Jesus, whether completely, partially, or whether we just decide that doesn’t make sense to me, and as we study this book, this understanding of rebellion is vital. 

We have to look at it and see it as any place I am willing to disobey Him, whether that disobedience is through not doing something or just arguing. I don’t know if I agree. If we allow that rebellion in our spirits, according to Paul, we will not be willing to walk into right teaching. 

Why is that important? The Hebrew culture, the Shema– anybody know what that is? Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one. Here, in that phrase, carries an idea in Hebrew language that means to approach the conversation with an attitude to obey. 

It doesn’t mean to just come listen and take a suggestion. It means I showed up intent on obeying what I hear. It’s uniquely used in relationship to teaching or to the Lord. It’s Him saying, When I talk to you, here’s what I expect from you. Plan on obeying what I say. 

That’s what Paul’s getting at– we cannot allow rebellion. Rebellion would be the thing that would say this: I don’t know. I don’t know if I think God’s really that direct. And we live in a culture where what right teaching really is has become so convoluted, the water’s so muddied, and Paul’s dealing with the same thing in Crete, and he’s trying to speak to the culture and bring clarity to it. 

WHAT DOES REBELLION LOOK LIKE?

I think we should ask the question: what is rebellion? Actually, I think the internet’s a great place for theology. It’s a joke, but the definition of rebellion, quoting the internet, is kind of fun: “The act of resisting authority.” It’s pretty simple. The act of resisting authority. 

If we look at the Scriptures to ask the question, what is rebellion? Here’s what we come up with: it’s any place that we decide not to obey the Word of the Lord, always rooted in a stubborn refusal to submit to God’s plan. 

I want us to capture what is said in 1 Samuel 15, rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft. It doesn’t say rebellion is the sin of witchcraft. It says it is as the sin of witchcraft. What’s that mean? It means it’s likened to it. It’s equal to it. 

Every person in Hebrew culture would have said witchcraft, which in this means divination, is the idea of leaning into demonic power for authority. They would understand it around them, they would see all the different nations that would sacrifice to Molech and all these different gods, and they would basically have relationships with the demonic realm to get power. 

They knew the concept, and what Samuel says to Saul is, I need you to understand rebellion is the same thing. It’s you leaning into a power beyond Him. 

Now, if we go back to the Genesis account in the Garden of Eden, to the moment when the enemy, the serpent, is speaking to Eve, he makes a phrase to her that I think is really important because he gave her an invitation to disobey because of a justification of perspective. “Did he really say?” 

What he did was say, I want you to see it differently, Eve. It’s different than what He said. And he starts to shape what the Lord says into something different. He basically says, Does that make sense to you, Eve? 

I want us as a people to understand that we do have an enemy that loves to use rebellion. It’s one of his oldest tricks. In fact, if we study the Scriptures and we study the fall of Lucifer, and we dig into why did he fall, at the root of it was this desire to be like God and to rebel against Him. 

He essentially said, I don’t want Your authority in my life. I want to be my own authority. We studied it in the Book of Jude a few years ago, this desire to be self-governed, which says, I don’t want to be under the government of Heaven. I want to be self-governed. It’s the exact same thing. It’s hardwired in our sin nature. 

The enemy loves to engage our justifications and invite our perspectives on obedience. How many times have you heard someone, or maybe even you’ve said it? I don’t know if I believe that or Hmm, not sure I agree. 

Is it wrong to have opinions? No, it’s not. But if our opinions lead us to choose actions that are in contradiction with right teaching being the Scriptures and what comes through spiritual authority, then we’re in rebellion. That’s a tough phrase. 

SAUL’S DISOBEDIENCE

If we go back to Saul, we realize that rebellion at any level is actually rooted in a desire to trust in a power outside of God more than we trust God. For Saul, it was his perspective. He thought the way he saw it was better, and we see it throughout the narrative. 

He knew what the Lord said, to destroy the Amalekites. Well, I did. I saved this one back. Well, why would he have saved the one back? I can tell you why, from a culture level. Historically, at that time, the reason you would save the king is because they were trophies of war. 

And that way, you would hold the king alive in your castle, in a room, like a living trophy, like a parrot. And every time somebody came to visit your temple, they would see this king who they recognize. Oh, that was the king of the Amalekites. That’s Agag. He was this really powerful king. Whoa, if you can do that to him, what can you do to me? And it was to cause fear. 

So, Saul had a desire in his mind. He’s like, There’s no way. The Lord must just not understand our culture. He doesn’t know what things are like right now. That can’t be what He meant. 

You see, any version of obedience I offer that isn’t actual obedience is not obedience. There is no middle ground where partial obedience gets a qualifier of like, It’s good, you got close. Neutrality is an illusion. We’re either in obedience or we’re in disobedience. 

THE CHURCH IN CRETE

According to Paul, the people in the Cretan church are allowing their perspectives to justify why they won’t obey, why they shouldn’t have to obey, why they see things differently. He says in verse 10, “For there are many who rebel against right teaching. They engage in useless talk and deceive people. This is especially true of those who insist on circumcision for salvation. They must be silenced.” 

Now, what were they doing? They were saying they were bringing in Jewish myths. They were bringing in a history of circumcision from the Jewish people. And they were saying to these new believers, You have to go get circumcised because Jesus isn’t enough. You need this other thing to be a real believer. 

That’s what Paul was dealing with in this church. That was what was common. The issue in the Book of Titus isn’t the thing he was dealing with, it’s the concept they must be silenced because, by their wrong teaching, they’ve already turned whole families away from the truth. Such teachers only want your money. 

One of their own men, a prophet from Crete, has said about them, the people of Crete are all liars. They are cruel animals and lazy gluttons. This is true. That might be the funniest portion of Paul’s teachings ever. 

All right, let’s take a look at these verses, and let’s pull some things out of this because Paul’s incredibly direct in this, that there are consequences to this mindset of allowing my perspective to trump the Word of the Lord, and they have to be dealt with. 

What it results in, according to Paul, is the wasting of time on things that don’t really matter. In this particular case, it was Jewish myths. I don’t think the point of Titus is Jewish myths, like the point of Titus is that they were wasting their time on things that didn’t matter. 

There’s a greater consequence that Paul deals with, and it’s that not only were they wasting time, they were leading people away from Jesus. Anytime we lead somebody to anything other than Jesus, we’re in sin. And Paul’s statement is, He’s enough. 

His answer for how to deal with them, I think, is great. I love it. “They must be silenced.” The word means shut them up. In Greek, it means the stopping of the mouth. Now, before we move too far, I’m not saying it’s okay and sanctionable for you to just grab someone, to put your hand over their mouth and drag them out of here, but I believe we can do that in two ways. 

Here’s what I’m asking for, here’s what I’m admonishing us towards: I think in our American culture, we’ve lost sight of right teaching. And I think we’ve lost sight of what it is to actually properly judge good teaching and say, Hey, that’s actually not okay. That’s not something we should be worried about. 

We’ve walked into this idea of personal freedom at such a level that we just decided, You know what, what you believe is your business, what I believe is my business. That is not true according to the Scriptures. 

According to the Scriptures– Dustin talked about it last week– we have a common faith that is to be shared and held sacred. We’re to hold on to these truths of Scripture together. So, I think the way we handle this is when you come across this, you tell them to stop talking about it. 

I’ll give you an example. You’ll love this one. For the last five years, the church in my lifetime has never been as divided politically as it is right now. There’s been this wild red/blue conversation. 

We went through seasons where I was getting inundated with people asking me, Well, what do you think, pastor, about this blue thing? Just the stupidity was ridiculous. And my answer all the way through was, I’m not talking about it. 

Do I have an opinion? For sure. Is this the desk to talk about it? Nope. This is about Him and Him only. And so, the answer is to say, in those situations, I wasn’t mean, I just said, Hey, I think this is ridiculous, and it doesn’t matter. We’re majoring on something that doesn’t matter. Keep your eyes on Him. 

It could be about anything. I’m just picking low-hanging fruit. That’s easy because we just, I mean, come on, honestly, think about how many conversations you’ve had in the last five years in the church that were turned into spiritual issues. 

Can I give a hot button? Oh, man, this is going to be the one for Instagram. How many conversations did you have about vaccines being a pro-Kingdom or not-Kingdom thing? My answer is, neither of those were in the Scriptures. 

Our answer should have been, you know what to do? What you think is right before the Lord, but the rest of our focus is going to be on Him. That’s what I’m calling for us to get back to. 

It’s not that we can’t have opinions. It’s not that we can’t have perspectives. It’s that we’ve got to stop making things spiritual that the Scripture doesn’t, and then when, if you can’t get them to shut up, just walk away. 

The second step is move yourself away from them so you can’t hear it. What’s Paul’s point? Don’t waste your time with people that want to drag you into some strange myth or some strange conversation about what you need to do or the perspective you need to have to be more spiritual. 

His answer just follow Jesus. If Jesus doesn’t teach it, and if He doesn’t model it, then don’t worry about it. But on the flip side of that, if Jesus teaches it and if He models it, that should be your focus. 

According to Paul, the root of their sin, these Cretans, is that they were rebelling against what they heard, which means we have to talk about how we hear. I believe what we discover in this passage is that the people of Crete heard truth, but instead of processing it, they were actually spending their times looking for reasons to ignore it or to not obey it. 

HOW DO WE RECEIVE TEACHING?

What that reveals to us is a concept that’s important: how we manage our hearing and how we evaluate teaching is directly connected to our success or failure in following it. 

So, what’s your process of hearing? Some real-time questions: are you diligent in the study of Scripture? Do you actively listen? What do I mean by that? Are you taking notes in teachings? Why would I take notes? So you can know what was said, so you can evaluate whether or not it’s real. But can’t you just give me yours at the end of the day? No. I mean, I can. I’m happy to, no big deal, but you need to be engaged in your own hearing.

Do you return to teachings, to study them, to look at what you were taught? Do you consider it? Do you pray through it? A bigger and more important statement is, do you require of yourself instant obedience to the things you discover in the Scripture, to the places where you were taught, and the Lord brings conviction? Or do you just go away and be like, God, I don’t think about that Scripturally. That means that’s the same thing as looking in a mirror and walking away and forgetting what you saw. 

Here’s the one that I think is the worst. Are you comfortable with ignorance in your understanding? What do you mean? Are you comfortable with knowing there’s stuff in the Bible, whether you don’t know what it is?

I’m just going to offer a thought. I think each one of us will give an account to Him for what we’ve done with this, and the account won’t be, Did you go to the right church? The account will be, Do you know My word? Have you studied My book? Do you know what it says? 

Well, I didn’t really have time. Liar. Every single one of us has the exact same amount of time given. What you do with the time is the difference between one person and the next. How many have ever looked at somebody super fit and be like, Well, they have more time than I do. 

It’s not true. They use their time different than you. Yes, they choose to go to the gym, they choose not to eat Reese’s, all kinds of things, but the same amount of time has been given to each of us. We have to quit making excuses and start looking at the reality of, Am I okay with the fact that I know there’s stuff in here that teaches me how to live, and I’m comfortable not knowing it? 

Your and my response to teaching is an active evidence of our heart, surrender to God. How we handle teaching, how we handle the Scripture, reveals our hearts’ surrender to God, and our response pattern to teaching is directly connected to our ability to walk in right living. 

WRONG MOTIVES IN THE CHURCH

So, Paul will go on and say that wrong motive has a direct effect on right teaching. He says such teachers only want your money. This would be an easy one to let go of and just ignore. But what he’s dealing with, that I think is wild, is two thousand years ago, Paul is dealing with wrong motive in the church. 

The church is forty years old at this time, and Paul’s already dealing with people who are doing good, Godly things for the wrong reasons. They were entrusted to teach others, and they were doing it for the wrong reasons. And he reveals a truth that I think is sobering, which is wrong motivation usually results in wrong teaching, and wrong teaching results in wrong living. 

How do we evaluate this in our day and in our time? What’s our response to it? I want to offer something that I think is important: I would argue that our first step is to recognize, as the people of God, that there’s this existential pressure in our culture to perform or to win a crowd. We have to recognize that it’s there. 

And then, I would submit that as a church at large, we have to repent that we created that culture. We have created a pop culture that wants to elevate people, and it’s become a little bit of a cult of personality concept. 

We have to repent of that because it’s wrong. We have to realize why it’s wrong. It fights against a healthy teaching culture. Here’s the real baseline truth of it, is we as people and we as leaders are too afraid of the response of the crowd, or we’re too afraid to lose a crowd, we, by nature, start to acquiesce and shy away from right teaching because it isn’t aimed at pleasing the crowd. 

How many times in Jesus’ journey did you see Him look, turn around, and be like, Do you still want to follow Me? He regularly would put a line in the sand and say, Are you still here? What was He meaning by that? He wasn’t insecure, checking in on whether or not they still want to hang out with Him. What He was saying is, This is the truth, and this is where I’m going. And if you want to follow Me, you have to be willing to embrace that. 

The danger is, if we don’t understand this reality in our culture, we’re going to find ourselves potentially gravitating towards cultures that are unhealthy. Because we see big crowds and we see popularity, it doesn’t mean everywhere there’s a big crowd, there’s a problem. There’s a big crowd here. I’m not saying that. I’m saying we are responsible to evaluate the culture of teaching. 

I had a friend in my early youth pastor days. His name was Todd, and he was kind of the OG youth pastor in the city. He’d been there about ten years, and I, at twenty-three, was really excited to be popular, was driven. I know nobody can imagine that. Pretty high strung. Worked one hundred hours a week.

And he made a statement to me one day. It was a very gentle rebuke. He said, Hey, man, I want you to understand something as you do this: because you build it and a bunch of people show up, doesn’t mean Jesus will be there. Because you put his name on the doorpost doesn’t mean He’ll be there. If you want Him there, He has to be what matters most. 

And it just pierced my heart. And at twenty-three, it became this reality of just because you put His name on it doesn’t mean He’ll show up. He shows up where He’s honored. 

Two things need to happen to combat this reality in our culture: we need the fear of the Lord in teachers so that they’re more worried about the approval of Heaven than the approval of man. And we need the fear of the Lord in the Body of Christ to be willing to honor the leadership God has given them without this subtle threat: if I don’t like it, I’m out. 

We’ve got to kill off this bounce-around-the-city culture to different churches because it’s handicapping the church. It’s causing us to be scared to teach correctly because we want to keep people. 

We are living in a day and time in America where the nation we’re in needs a move of God more than it’s ever needed it. I would offer and argue that the way we get there is by going back to the fundamental truths of Scripture, to where Jesus matters more to us than anything else. 

REBUKING WRONG TEACHING

Paul’s simple solution for the problem is rebuke them as sternly as necessary to make them strong in the faith. They must stop listening to Jewish myths and the commands of people who have turned their backs on the truth. Everything is pure to those whose hearts are pure, nothing is pure to those who are corrupt and unbelieving because their minds and consciences are defiled. 

His point: wrong teaching has to be dealt with. We can’t just ignore it. That’s not love. Please, please don’t hear rebuke, as yell at them. Rebuke doesn’t mean to yell or be ugly. It means to challenge with truth. 

And I want you to hear this message louder than any other: we can’t be a people who challenge with truth unless we’re rooted in truth. We personally have to be rooted in truth. How many have ever heard somebody say, Yeah, I changed churches because I wasn’t being fed. 

Think, get a fork, get your Bible, and study to show yourself approved. A faithful workman able to rightly divide the Word and truth is what the Scriptures teach. We have to have a personal agenda where I say to myself, Greg Sanders, it is your responsibility to study the Scriptures. It is your responsibility to know the Scriptures. It is your responsibility as a man to follow the Scriptures. 

I join with other believers because this is the family God put me in. But it’s nobody’s job here to teach me the Scriptures. It’s my job to study the Scriptures. When I come together and there’s something the Lord highlights and we all learn and study together, love that. Not arguing against study. I’m saying, if we will study it personally, the church gets stronger. 

Paul’s statement basically is just get away from the strange stuff, go back to living the Scriptures and carrying the nature of Jesus. And he ends with verse 16. He says, “Such people claim.” Say that word with me, claim. “They claim they know God, but they deny Him by the way they live.” 

And then he adds this really great sentence: “They’re despicable and disobedient, worthless for doing any good.” The crux of the issue, for Paul, is how they live their daily lives is the evidence of whether or not they know Him. 

I’ll say it this way: intimacy with Him must result in a life that proves it. Let me say it a little cleaner: don’t claim you know Him unless you’re willing to hold your life to the standard of what He says, because to live contrary to what He says is to live in open rebellion. 

I do understand how difficult that line is, but it means that we go back to a simple devotion where we say, You know what, Lord, I’m going to ingest this. I’m going to listen to teaching, and I’m going to make sure that I’m obeying it. I’m going to study. 

For too long in the church, we’ve held opinions about things or perspectives on things that we know are contrary to Scripture. I could start listing things that we know we do wrong, like how we handle our marriages. There’s a Scriptural plan for it, guys. 

I had a man say something to me a week ago that was the most sobering thought any human being has ever said to me. He said, You know where Paul says husbands love your wife as Christ loved the church? Like, Yeah. He said, You know what that means? I’m like, I’m sure you’re going to tell me something I don’t know, so go. He said, it means she’s supposed to be able to lean into you and find Him, that the response pattern that comes out of you is supposed to be so Him that she can’t tell the difference. And my answer was, Shut your mouth.

Okay. So, the reality is, we know that kind of stuff. We know the Scriptures teach it. I mean, we could go to the other side of the fence, say, ladies, you know for sure. 1 Peter 3 talks about what you ought to look like in the home and act like in the home. 

We know what it says about divorce and remarriage. We know all these different things, and we’re comfortable to ignore them and allow our lives to be what we want them to be instead of what He says. And I’m saying that’s got to stop. We have to come back to authentic discipleship, which means He is in control of us.