Titus 1:5-16 - Instructions To Titus In Crete

⁵ For this cause I left you in Crete, that you might regulate things which are deficient, and appoint elders in every city, as I charged you, ⁶ if any one is blameless, a husband of one wife, having faithful children, not accused of intemperance or of insubordination. ⁷ For a bishop must be blameless as a steward of God, not self-indulgent, not soon angry, not given to wine, not contentious, not devoted to base gain, ⁸ but a lover of hospitality, kind, sober, just, holy, self-denying, ⁹ holding firmly the faithful word taught, that he may be able both to exhort with sound instruction and to convince those who contradict.

¹⁰ For there are many disorderly wranglers and deceivers, especially those of the circumcision, ¹¹ whom it is necessary to silence, who mislead whole families, teaching for base gain what they ought not. ¹² A certain one of them, their own poet, said, Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gormandizers.

¹³ This testimony is true. Wherefore rebuke them sharply, that they may be sound in the faith, ¹⁴ not attending to Jewish myths, and commandments of men who subvert the truth.

¹⁵ To the pure all things are pure; but to the defiled and unbelieving, nothing is pure; but their mind and conscience are defiled. ¹⁶ They profess to know God, but by works deny him, being abominable and disobedient, and as to every good work reprobate.