Welcome to Studies with Stearman.

Join us as we look deeper into the Bible.

Strengthen your faith with us, even as we see the day approaching.

And now, here's Gary.

We hear about Titus off and on because Paul mentions him. In fact, Paul mentions

him 13 different times in his letters. It's very interesting when you look at 1st and 2 Timothy

and Titus, these are three little letters that appear close together. They're called the

pastoral epistles because they outline the functions and the goals of the

pastorate. But yet if you look beyond it, if you regard these epistles simply as instructions

for how to operate the pastorate, you really miss part of the picture. Paul wrote two distinctly

different types of letters to these two men. To Timothy, he wrote kind of

encouraging things, and it was very obvious from the context that Timothy had problems. Timothy

was kind of struggling to establish himself. Paul wrote to Timothy, let no man despise you because of your youth. Apparently people

had kind of thrown down on Timothy a little bit. He did not somehow earn the respect that Paul

felt he was capable of earning, and so he writes these very encouraging letters to Timothy.

The letter to Titus, on the other hand, something entirely different. He regards Titus as a tough guy.

If you look at the context of the New Testament and all the references to Titus, it's very obvious that Titus is the tough guy.

And in particular, in this epistle to Titus, Paul says, I'm going to send you into the worst territory I can think of. And we know from

the life of Titus that he went into the two toughest areas for Christian evangelism that it was possible to go to.

He went, first of all, to Crete. The epistle to Titus is Paul's commission, sending him to the Isle of Crete.

After that, at the end of Paul's life, Titus has gone off into Dalmatia.

Dalmatia was Southern Illyricum, which is today's Yugoslavia.

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