Titus 1

¹From Paul, a slave of God and an apostle of Jesus Christ. I was sent to bring God’s chosen people to faith and to the knowledge of the truth that leads to godliness, ²a faith and knowledge resting on the hope of eternal life. God, who never lies, promised this life before eternal ages began, ³and at the right time he made his word known through the preaching entrusted to me by the command of God our Savior. ⁴To Titus, my true son in the faith we share: grace and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Savior.

⁵I left you in Crete so that you could put in order what was left unfinished and appoint elders in every town, as I told you to. ⁶An elder must be blameless, the husband of one wife, with children who believe and are not open to the charge of wild living or disobedience.^{a 7}Since an overseer manages God’s household, he must be blameless. He must not be arrogant or quick-tempered, not a drunkard or violent, not greedy for money. ⁸He must be hospitable, love what is good, and be self-controlled, upright, holy and disciplined. ⁹He must hold firmly to the trustworthy message as it has been taught, so that he can encourage others with sound teaching and correct those who oppose it.

¹⁰For there are many rebellious people, full of empty talk and deception, especially those of the circumcision group. ¹¹They must be silenced, because they are ruining whole households by teaching what they should not, and doing it for dishonest gain. ¹²One of their own prophets has said, “Cretans are always liars, evil brutes, lazy gluttons.” ¹³What he said is true. So rebuke them sharply, so that they may be sound in the faith ¹⁴and pay no attention to Jewish myths or to the commands of people who reject the truth. ¹⁵To the pure, all things are pure, but to those who are corrupted and do not believe, nothing is pure. In fact, both their minds and their consciences are corrupted. ¹⁶They claim to know God, but by what they do they deny him. They are detestable and disobedient, and unfit for doing anything good.