5 For this cause left I thee in Crete, that thou shouldest set in order the things that are wanting, and ordain elders in every city, as I had appointed thee.”
Introduction
Kim Linehan was one of the greatest long-distance swimmers in the world. She held the world record in the 1,500-meter freestyle competition from 1979 to 1987. According to her coach Paul Bergen, Kim did endless exercises and swam seven to 12 miles a day.
The hardest part of her regimen? “Getting in the water,” she said. If getting in the water is the hardest part, then staying in the water must be the second-hardest part.
The road to success in any endeavor is dotted with many tempting parking places. In sports, education, business, or the ministry there is always the temptation to give up, to quit, to throw in the towel. Who among us has not felt that way at times? That kind of discouragement seems to be especially prevalent in the ministry.
This feeling of discouragement is behind the words of the apostle Paul to Titus when he wrote, “For this cause left I thee in Crete, that thou shouldest set in order the things that are wanting, and ordain elders in every city, as I had appointed thee” (Titus 1:5).
The book of Titus has been called a letter to a discouraged preacher. Paul had sent Titus to Crete on a special assignment to strengthen the churches. But the work in Crete was hard and the people were difficult if not impossible to work with. One of their own poets, Epimenides, had said that all Cretans were liars, that they were wicked brutes and lazy gluttons (Titus 1:12). And the apostle Paul agreed that his testimony was true.
Even though Titus was a tough preacher, he had grown weary and discouraged in Crete and wanted to quit. Some people think that Titus had written to Paul requesting a new assignment to an easier place. But Paul refused the request and wrote back these words to Titus. He tells Titus that the reasons why he wants to quit are the very reasons why he was assigned to Crete in the first place: Crete was a hard place but God needed a good man there. Paul’s advice to Titus was to stay in Crete and to do the work God had placed him there to do.
What or where is your Crete? Of course, geographically, Crete is an island in the Mediterranean Sea. But it is representative of any place or any thing that you would like to get away from. It represents a hard place, a difficult situation, and impossible people. It represents suffering, opposition, or sorrow. We all have our Cretes no matter who we are.
Why did God leave Titus in Crete? Why did Paul encourage him to stay there in that hard place and not quit? Why does God leave us in the tough places, the hard spots, the discouraging situations of life? Why doesn’t he get us out and move us on?
There are three reasons why God left Titus and why he leaves us in our Crete: 1) he leaves us in Crete because he loves Crete; 2) he leaves us in Crete because he is interested in us; and 3) he leaves us in Crete because he wants us to be his instruments in redemption.
1. God loves Crete.
The first reason why God leaves us in Crete is because he loves Crete. According to one of their own, they were untrustworthy, overindulgent, and a bunch of lying, lazy loafers. But in spite of all of that God loved Crete and wanted to redeem it.
If ever there was a place and a people that you would think would be beyond God’s love and concern, surely it would have been Crete. But the very presence of Titus there tells us that Crete mattered to God. There are no people so bad and no situation so hopeless that God does not care about it. God loves the whole world and Crete was a vital part of it.
How could God love a place as wicked as Crete? In her book One in Seven, Margaret Slattery tells of a young couple who visited the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia, and standing on the gorge witnessed the awesome sight of the 50-foot tide, the highest in the world, come swirling in. Watching the water pushing, pouring, pounding in through the Bore, over the low flats, over the banks, over the boulders, they were left breathless.
When the majestic display of power had spent its force, the girl said quietly, “Why should the personal affairs of two people like us claim even for a moment the attention of a God of might and mystery like that?”
“Because he is God,” her companion responded.
Why did God love Crete? It is not because Crete was lovely or the people loveable. It is because he is love. God loved Crete not because of what it was, but because of what he is. His love is not dependent upon our character but upon his character.
As I read the Bible I find love to be the supreme and dominant attribute of God. Paul declares, “But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). God loved us not in our goodness, not in our purity, not in our righteousness, but in our sinfulness. And the cross of Christ was the supreme demonstration of that love.
But God’s love did not begin at Calvary. Jeremiah declares, “The Lord hath appeared of old unto me, saying, Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love: therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee” (Jeremiah 31: 3). Note that God’s love is everlasting. It had no beginning and it has no end. God loved us and so he created us in his image. God loved us and so he gave us freedom of choice. God loved us and so he sought Adam in the garden. God loved us and thus he gave us his law. And, finally and ultimately, God loved us and sent his Son to be our redeemer.
That love of God is expressed to us in 25 familiar but beautiful words: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life” (John 3:16).
The love of God is immeasurable, unmistakable, and unending. It reaches wherever man is. As Frederick Lehman wrote in the great hymn, The Love of God:
Could we with ink the ocean fill,
And were the skies a parchment made,
Were every blade of grass a quill,
And every man a scribe by trade,
To write the love of God up above,
Would drain the ocean dry.
Nor could the scroll contain the whole,
Though stretched from sky to sky.
That’s the love of God. Preacher, don’t quit! Don’t give up on Crete until God does. God loves that hard place where you are and that’s why he put you there.
2. God cares about you.
God left Titus in Crete not only because he loved Crete but also because he cared about Titus. He left him there not in order to punish him but to perfect him. It was not to make him miserable but to make him mature. God’s goal for our life is not to make us comfortable, but to make us conform to the image of his Son Jesus Christ. He is more concerned about our character than about our comfort.
God is not simply interested in saving our souls; he wants to develop a Christlike character in us. Christian character is not something we inherit or something that is given to us. It is something that we develop. Through life’s experiences and our response to them, character is built. Troubles and hardships mixed with faith make us into the kind of people we ought to be.
Character does not come cheap. It almost always involves suffering on the part of someone. When a football coach wants to build a good team, he does not send his players out on the field to play with soft pillows, but puts them to work against rough opponents, a blocking sled, a tackling dummy. He puts them through exercises that are strenuous. God does the same thing with us. To give us the strength of steadfastness and patience in our character, at times he marches us against tough opponents, against temptation, against public opinion, against discouragement. Great civilizations and great people are not made in softness but in challenge and in response to that challenge. Great ministers are made the same way.
The apostle Paul learned humility and faith through the things that he suffered (2 Corinthians 12:9). And even our Lord Jesus Christ was perfected through suffering (Hebrews 2:10). He was made complete through his experiences that he might better minister to us. And it took Calvary to do it.
So the Lord often allows us to go through painful experiences and endure hardships because these are the things that develop us into the kind of people we need to be. God allows some suffering and some difficulties because there are some things to be accomplished in our character that can be brought about only by suffering and trials (1 Peter 1:7).
Great men are born out of hardship. If you read enough biographies you will get to thinking that there can’t be a great man except he who suffers. God knows that you can’t develop strong men in easy places. The man who has never had his faith tested doesn’t know whether he has faith. God wants to make you and me into men like Christ and he allows us to stay in hard places to make us better.
James tells us that we should be happy when different kinds of trials and troubles come our way because these are the means of developing in us the strength of character that is a necessary part of Christian maturity (James 1:2-4). Pressures produce patience and patience leads to perfection. As carbon under the tremendous pressure of tons of earth produces a beautiful diamond, so God allows our character to be formed under the pressure of our circumstances.
I have lived long enough to thank God for my trials and my troubles. What I thought at one time was the benediction to my ministry turned out to be the invocation. What seemed to me to be the worst thing that could happen to me has turned out to be the best thing.
So don’t quit, preacher! God is making you into the kind of person he wants you to be. And he may be preparing you for greater usefulness in his kingdom. Don’t give up on that discouraging situation. It oftentimes takes a hard place and difficult people to make us into the kind of people God wants us to be.
3. God wants to use us.
Finally, God left Titus in Crete because he wanted to use him as his instrument to change the world. Paul tells Titus that he was left in Crete to “set in order” things that were wanting. The term set in order is a medical term that means to “set in joint.” It describes what a doctor does when you go to him with a broken bone. Because the parts of that bone are out of the right relationship with one another, he must pull them back into place so that they can heal properly and the limb can be useful once again. Though setting a bone back in place is very painful and unpleasant, it is a necessary part of healing.
The people of Crete were out of joint with God and out of joint with one another. God sent Titus there to be a spiritual orthopedist. He was not sent there for his comfort and ease. He was not sent there for his own professional advancement. He was sent there to set things in order in the churches. Crete could never be right until the church was right. And the church could not be right until the preacher was right.
By the same token, our world will never be right until the church is right and the church will never be right until preachers are right. So, preacher, don’t quit! Don’t resign! Stay where you are as long as God leaves you there and set things in order. Do what God puts there to do and stay everlastingly at it until Jesus comes again.
How can a doctor treat a patient if he is not with him? How could you set things in order if you aren’t there? Jesus was often criticized because he associated with sinners. He justified his actions by saying, “They that are whole need not a physician; but they that are sick. I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance” (Luke 5:31-32). That’s why he ate and drank with tax collectors and sinners. After all, how can a physician be effective if he has no contact with his patients? He must see, touch, and examine the sick if he is to diagnose their ills and prescribe a cure. It may be unpleasant work at times but the doctor must be in contact with disease if he is to cure it.
We are the body of Christ. Once our Lord incarnated himself for 33 years in the human body. Now he perpetually incarnates himself in his new body, the church. Through his living Spirit he dwells in every believer and thus we become his body on earth. The Holy Spirit does not haunt houses. He does not jump out of the Bible and grab people. He dwells in us. The Holy Spirit uses people and he uses the word of God.
I don’t know of anyone who has ever been converted to Christ since the time of Christ without some other human instrumentality being involved. You say, “Well, what about a man who is converted by reading a Gideon Bible in his hotel room?” Who put the Bible there? Who paid for it? Who printed it? You ask, “What about the apostle Paul?” Well, he had the witness of Steven and others. Plus Ananias came to him and instructed him in the ways of the Lord. Plus he was a Pharisee and he had memorized scores of passages from the Old Testament.
The short of the matter is that God uses people to reach other people. We are his instruments in world redemption. God could have used the angels, but we are better than the angels for they know nothing of forgiveness and grace.
We must not pray that God will take us out of the world or out of the difficult situations. We must pray that God will leave us there so that we can be his instruments in redeeming the world.
Woody Hayes, the former football coach of Ohio State once spoke to a service club in Memphis, Tennessee. In his speech he gave what he considered to be football’s three great lessons: “When you get knocked down, you get up and go again. When you go again, you go as a team. And there is nothing that comes easy that’s worth a dime. I never saw a football player make a tackle with a smile on his face.”
Life is tough. It involves hardships, difficulties, trials, tribulations. Our prayer should be not that God would relieve us but that God would strengthen us.