My Forbidden Bible Verses post yesterday was an exegesis on Titus 1:1-4.

John MacArthur preached four sermons on those four verses in 1992.

The 1990s were a time when the word ‘values’ became part of Western consciousness.

In his sermon ‘Commitments of a Powerful Leader, Part 2’, MacArthur discusses the difference between values and principles. Excerpts follow, emphases mine.

St Paul would have had little appreciation for ‘values’:

… in this opening, in this salutation, the apostle Paul is presenting elements of his apostleship.  He’s dealing with features of his own life and ministry.  And basically what he does is give us principles that control his ministry.  This opening salutation then provides some excellent material for us to comprehend what made Paul so effective.  There were some principles in his life by which he operated.  In fact, I think it’s fairly safe to say he was a man who functioned completely on principle.

And you might say, “Well, what do we mean by principle?”  Well, basically principle is truth that doesn’t change.  There were some unchanging, non-shifting, unvarying, foundational truths that he built his life on.  He was not an individual who moved on his own whim or his own emotions or his own passion or the latest trend.  Principles, you see, are not subjective, they are objective. They are not internal, they are external.  Today you hear a lot of talk about values.  “Values” sounds good. We talk about moral values, family values, personal values, Judeo-Christian values or whatever, but generally values carries the connotation of “I value some things and I don’t value other things,” and “whatever I feel is valuable that’s what I commit myself to.”  And they can be somewhat subjective and somewhat internal.  Principles are not subjective; they are objective and they are external; they are outside the individual; they are fixed.

Paul never functioned on whim.  He never functioned on his own passion or his own emotion.  His whole life and ministry was built around a Core of principles – absolutes that never changed, divine principles at that.  That’s what made him effective. That’s what made him useful.  It’s what made him fruitful in his service to God.  These principles were the core of his life.

And just thinking about that a little bit – if you operate on principle, if principle is at the core of your life, you always, you always have a fixed starting point.  Paul had that.  He never groped around to try to figure out what to do, how to do it.  He always knew because there was this core of principles in his life.

MacArthur explains why we should operate on principles rather than values:

We need to operate off principle.  Let me tell you what principle affects.  It affects four things primarily in your life.  If you can imagine a sort of a little diagram, the center of your life is a core of principles and some arrows are going out – you could draw four of them.  And the way those principles affect your life comes in a fourfold manner.

One is confidence.  When you live by principle you live in confidence, you function with confidence.  There’s a certain security in what you do because you know it is built on something which is fixed.  You know what is true and you’re clear about what is true and you’ve committed yourself to what is true, and so you act confidently in response to the truth.  Confident people, like the apostle Paul, are confident no matter what happens. It doesn’t matter to them whether the result is good, bad, or indifferent; whether people love him or hate him; whether there is affirmation or hostility.  He does what he does with complete confidence because he’s operating off of a principle that God has planted in his heart. So he has the assurance to act.  There’s no hesitation; there’s no equivocation. He moves, he moves rapidly with confidence.

The second thing that comes out of a principled life is purpose.  You know what you’re all about.  You’re not only ready to act, you know what to do.  You know how to act.  The direction is laid down for you.  You know exactly what is expected of you, so you know what to do and you do it.

There’s a third little thing that kind of shoots out of this core of principle and that is wisdom, wisdom.  When you know principle and you act on principle, you discern and you have judgment, and you know how things are to be done.  You know enough to do something. You know what to do and you know how to do it because you have the principles that lay all of that out.

And I would think that the fourth thing is power, power.  When you operate on divine principle you have power, you move with strength, you have the energy to act because you’re acting in accord with divine principle – you have divine power, divine wisdom and divine discernment, divine direction.  The motivation of your heart is clear, and so you have divine confidence.

That was Paul.  Paul was a man of confidence.  Paul could say, “It doesn’t matter to me what you say, I know what I have to do.  It doesn’t matter what’s going to happen to me, I know what I have to do.  It doesn’t matter that I lose my life, I will move ahead because I know what the principles are and I will act on them.”

It was Paul who had such purpose in his life that he could set his face like flint in some direction and move there, and as we learn in the book of Acts, only the Holy Spirit by some miraculous means could stop him and redirect him.  And he was a man of amazing wisdom.  He applied that wisdom in a myriad of situations, and he certainly was a man of supernatural power.  All of that really flows out of the principled core of his life.  He had taken divine principles, he had acted upon them so frequently that they had become the very core of his behavior.  And those principles, I think, that controlled his ministry are revealed in this text.  Here’s the heart, here’s the core of this man that made him confident, wise, purposeful and powerful.

MacArthur looks at Paul’s greeting to Titus and contrasts it with what we see today in job applications:

Let me read you these four verses again.  “Paul, a bond-servant of God and an apostle of Jesus Christ, for the faith of those chosen of God and the knowledge of the truth which is according to godliness, in the hope of eternal life which God who cannot lie promised long ages ago but at the proper time manifested, even His Word in the proclamation with which I was entrusted according to the commandment 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.”

… He introduces himself as Paul, and then he doesn’t give a whole lot of credentials.  I just picked up some mail on my desk and in it were two job descriptions, two sort of curriculum vitae, they call them CVs, two – I don’t mean job descriptions – two job applications, people looking for ministry and giving page after page after page after page of their credentials and their accomplishments and their achievements and all of that. And I wasn’t able to receive it with the right frame of mind, having been prepared to preach on Paul who introduces himself as Paul, period – end of discussion, without credentials.

The only credentials he offers to us are that he is “a bond-servant of God and an apostle of Jesus Christ.”  That’s it.  And what you see there is his commitment to God’s mastery over his life.  “Bond-servant” is doulos.  It means “slave” and it carries all the connotations of slavery with it.  The word “apostle,” apostolos, is not a dignified, elevated term; it simply means “a messenger,” and a messenger was very often the function – messengering was very often the function of a slave.  He says, “I am under God’s mastery and my particular, specific task is to take a message that Jesus Christ wants me to take.  I am a messenger.  I am a slave who is delivering a message.”  His whole life was one of submission and yieldedness and slavery and servanthood.  He was committed to that.

Consequently, he didn’t do things that could achieve his own goals and his own ends and his own exaltation that could fulfill his own will and his own plans and could lead him to achievements which would some way aggrandize his own life.  He was committed to God’s mastery.  That principle in the core of his life affected everything …

Paul’s mission is very clear.  He was to bring the elect to saving faith by the gospel.  He was to bring the saved to sanctification by teaching them the full knowledge of God through sound doctrine that would lead them to holiness of life.  And he was to make crystal clear in their minds the reality of eternal life – that great and glorious hope that motivates toward purity and motivates toward service and galvanizes them through all the sufferings and struggles of life because they anticipate the eternal, heavenly glory. There is the sum of all his ministry, and all my ministry, and all your ministry packed in those simple and straightforward words.  He was committed to God’s mission, which was clear in his mind – evangelism, edification, encouragement.

MacArthur says that Paul has a lesson for all of us in these verses:

The man functioned from principle.  The driving principles at the core of his life, very clear – committed to God’s mastery, God’s mission, God’s message – revealed in Scripture. And it was because of those principles that this man operated the way he did –  confidently, purposefully, wisely, and powerfully.  And it really is the way we need to operate.  Certainly those are the things that should be true of my life and yours.  You’re to be under God’s mastery; you’re to be evangelizing, edifying, and encouraging at whatever level God has allowed you to have influence. And you’re certainly, you’re certainly to be one who proclaims and articulates the Word of God.  Live your life according to those commitments and you’ll be effective and useful and fruitful.

As my reader Rob wrote in response to Titus 1:1-4:

These are the things for which we should passionately yearn to hear each Lord’s Day, to remember through the week, and anticipate as we near the next day of divine services.

I could not agree more with Rob and John MacArthur.

Enough of subjective values. May the Lord return us to the principles of His eternal truth.