Apostle Murunga - Missions

Apostle Murunga - Missions DISCIPLING THE NATIONS

23/08/2026

OUR MOTIVES REVEAL
CHRIST’S CHARACTER
IN US
Avoid foolish disputes, genealogies, contentions, and strivings about the law; for
they are unprofitable and useless. Reject a divisive man after the first and second
admonition, knowing that such a person is warped and sinning, being self￾condemned.
Titus 3:9–11
I
t is rather depressing to be reminded that people have not mended over
history. Paul wrote his letter to Titus approximately 1,900 years ago, and we
are still having foolish disputes about spiritual matters. Human nature has
not changed.
In this section of Titus 3, Paul also talks about avoiding genealogies
related to the law. Our modern minds may not understand the significance
of this, but family trees were important to Jewish leaders because Scripture
taught that the Messiah would be “the Son of David” (Matthew 22:42)—an
ancestor of Abraham. They kept page after page of genealogies, so if a man
claimed, “I am Christ,” they could go to the records and check his family
history. But you know religious people; they cannot let things be.
They started to misuse the genealogies, making them into a puzzle and
coming up with fanciful interpretations. Rather than trusting Scripture, they
looked for a deeper meaning of Abraham begot Isaac, Isaac begot Jacob,
and Jacob begot Joseph, and Paul sought to protect the church from these
foolish disputes.

22/08/2026

THE CHRIST-CENTERED
SERVANT
This is a faithful saying, and these things I want you to affirm constantly, that those
who have believed in God should be careful to maintain good works. These things
are good and profitable to men.
Titus 3:8
I
f, as spiritual leaders, we are to be “profitable to men,” as Titus 3:8 says,
we need to understand our position with Christ. We are to be Christ￾centered servants, which means everything we do should flow out of that
center. Anything in our lives that compromises that center needs to be dealt
with and removed immediately.
To be a Christ-centered servant means we will have quite a bit of
suffering along the way. It will not be easy, and none of it will come
naturally. It will come from the Holy Spirit’s work flowing from the center
of our life, which is Jesus Christ.
As addressed earlier in this book, Paul instructed Titus and us to “speak
the things which are proper for sound doctrine” (2:1). This was followed by
exhortations for older men and women, and young men and women. Older
men, Paul said, should be sober, reverent, and temperate. Likewise, older women should be reverent. Young women, Paul said, are to be discreet,
chaste, homemakers, and good. Young men, sober-minded and reverent.
Fifteen verses later, we read: “These things are good and profitable to
men” (3:8).

21/08/2026

Why Does God Love Us?
David asked our Lord, “What is man that You are mindful of him, and the
son of man that You visit
him?” (Psalm 8:4).
Some scholars tell us that mindful means “a fixture in the mind.” So the
only eccentricity of our great, perfect God is that He loves mankind with a
fixture He cannot escape. He cannot shake it off. Even our hating one
another has not discouraged God, nor changed His mind in the slightest
about us.
So why does God love us? I would suggest three thoughts here that might
help you intellectually if not spiritually.
The first reason is that God is love and only does what is natural to Him.
It is natural for the sun to shine, we say. It is natural for birds to fly and fish
to swim. It is natural for that which is love to love. So we say God loves us
because it is the natural thing for Him to do.
The second reason God loves us is that we are His creatures, and He is
pleased with everything He made. When sin came in and ruined it, God
started over to remake it, but He still loves us. Apart from sin, we are a part
of His creation.
There is a third reason: We are made in His image. But I do not make this
as a statement but more as a question. Could it be that the great God who
sinlessly and perfectly loves himself sees the tattered fragments of His own
image in the fallen man, loves himself in the man, and seeks to redeem the
man because that man has a family resemblance?
Now, don’t go away thinking I am certain about this third reason. It is a
question: I wonder if God loves himself in us. We must still be born again
to be saved, for Paul wrote:
According to His mercy He saved us, through the washing of regeneration and renewing of the
Holy Spirit, whom He poured out on us abundantly through Jesus Christ our Savior, that having
been justified by His grace we should become heirs according to the hope of eternal life.
Titus 3:5–7
Notice we have been made heirs, which means we inherit everything God
has. If you find being an heir of God hard to believe, it is because you do
not see yourself in verse 3: someone who is “foolish, disobedient, deceived,
serving various lusts and pleasures, living in malice and envy, hateful and
hating one another.”
If you do not believe you are as bad off as this, you will never believe
that you are as well-off as a recipient of grace, because psychologically it
cannot be done. If you hold out on God and do not confess how bad you
are, your nature will not permit you to take all the promises about how good
God is to you. You must see how bad you are to see how good God is and
how wonderful His grace is.
To understand what it means to be an heir of God, imagine a little boy
who has lived in the slums of some great city—New York, perhaps. He is
eight or ten years old and has lived among ash cans in alleys, sleeping in
corners and ducking policemen after stealing fruit from corner stores. He’s
never had a new shirt or pants or shoes in his life.
Suddenly, somebody comes along and adopts him off the street corner.
It’s one of the richest men in America, with yachts and big cars to run
around in. We tell the boy, “You know what? You’re an heir. This man has
adopted you, and now you have ranches in Arizona and Canada and huge
estates up and down the coast of Florida. It’s all yours, to say nothing of
money in the bank.” The little fellow cannot comprehend it, though, and
would exchange all of it for a Popsicle.
God does not blame us for similar thinking. We are used to spiritual
poverty. We are used to locking up everything, shutting our door, and
nervously wondering, “Did I lock it?” We are used to living in the “slums”
of the universe. Then suddenly, somebody throws cold water on us and
says, “You’re an heir of God.” We shake our heads and say, “Well, I’m willing to believe it, but I haven’t the faintest notion what you’re talking
about.”
Read your Bible, study it, pray, and keep learning to think the way God
thinks. Maybe someday you will know a little bit. If you do not know it
here, you will know it in heaven. We are heirs of God according to the
promise of eternal life.
The dynamic of my spiritual ministry is to understand how God sees me
and how God sees the world around me. In my leadership I transfer this
passion for God’s vision to the people I am ministering to.
Dear heavenly Father, I rejoice in You although I do not understand all
there is in You. I cannot comprehend that, being who I am, You would
love me. I do not understand it, but I accept Your love and long for You
to transform me into Your image. Amen.

18/08/2026

God’s Lovingkindness
I’m not sure I know too much about the future life, since I know so little
about this life. So I am very cautious about describing heavenly scenes. I
am also very cautious about quoting God unless I quote from the Scriptures
themselves. Still, imagine entering the Celestial City, and you see walking
toward you a man you recognize because personality persists in the world
to come. Do not think of yourself in heaven as a ghost or a zombie. You are
going to be you, only glorified. You are going to be recognizable. You will
call to memory things that happened below, just like Jesus did after He
came out of the grave and remembered what He had told them while still
with them before His crucifixion. You remember the last time you saw the
man now coming toward you; he was cross-eyed drunk. There are little
gaps in his history you do not know about, but you believed he had lived
and died that way.
“You’re here?” you ask.
“Yes, I am,” he says with a smile before shaking your hand “But how did you get here? Last time I saw you, you couldn’t even stand
up. You were a hopeless alcoholic. Every warden and cop in the state of
Illinois knew you. Now here you are. How do you account for this?”
With another smile, he answers, “Yes, but after the kindness and love of
God our Savior appeared toward me, something happened.”
When Christ was on the cross, don’t you suppose that many people there
didn’t know Him as the Savior? But later on, after they heard the gospel, it
is easy to imagine hundreds of Romans became believers.
I imagine that in heaven many a Roman walked up to the repentant thief
and asked, “You’re here? I remember when you were crucified for
insurrection and thieving and all sorts of sins.”
“I was all you say I was,” admitted the thief. “And I was guilty of things
the law never knew of. I was much worse than anybody here knows. Only
God knew how bad I was, but my Savior’s kindness and love appeared to
me, and by a flash of spiritual intuition I recognized Him as He died there
between us two. I said, ‘Lord, remember me.’ And He said, ‘Today you will
be with Me in Paradise.’”
Some people will be in heaven we never thought would be. They will get
there the only way possible, and we will not know how it happened because
we lost track of them.
There is nothing startling about the statement “the kindness and the love
of God our Savior toward man appeared,” because we know it is true. If I
said, “The ocean is vast,” nobody would bat an eye. If I said, “The rain that
falls from heaven is wet,” nobody would respond. They would wonder why
I said the obvious. If I were to say that the sun is bright, nobody would say
a thing.
So, when I talk about God’s kindness and love, no Christian will bat an
eye at that. We have heard it all our lives. That is nothing to wonder at,
because that is the kind of God He is.
Incidentally, that is why unbelief is so wrong. It refuses to believe that
God is the kind of God He is. When believers talk about the kindness and
love of God, our Savior, there is nothing to excite attention because we
know God is kind and He is love. That is what we expect.
You would expect a loving, tender mother to get up in the middle of the
night and look after her baby. So when Mrs. Jones gets up at two in the
morning and gives her baby a bottle, nobody will run to give her a medal.
That is simply the way she is.
We know the kindness and love of God, but the text here says, “Toward
man.” What kind of a man? Why do our Savior’s kindness and love appear
to a foolish man, a disobedient man, a deceived man, an enslaved man, a
pleasure-seeking man, a malicious man, an envious man, a hateful man?
This is why the love of God suddenly turned aside and flowed in its
fullness toward that thief on the cross. This is why we have so many great
hymns such as “Amazing Grace.” What is it that amazed the man? That
God was gracious? No. The wonder lies in that the kind, gracious love of
God should have for its object such a slavish, foolish, disobedient,
deceived, lustful, malicious, envious, hateful person as I am.
This is why hymn writers still have us singing about the wonderful love
of God toward man.

17/08/2026

HOW GOD SEES US
For we ourselves were also once foolish, disobedient, deceived, serving various
lusts and pleasures, living in malice and envy, hateful and hating one another. But
when the kindness and the love of God our Savior toward man appeared . . .
Titus 3:3–4
A
significant aspect of Christ-led leadership is to understand ourselves
from God’s point of view. The next step is to understand how God sees the
people we minister to. If we can’t get that dual perspective, we certainly
will not lead like Christ.
Too often, spiritual leaders see themselves and the people they are
ministering to through the eyes of the culture in which they live, which
seriously compromises the kind of leadership needed today.
Informed by the Holy Spirit, Paul gives us a view of our state in this
section of Scripture. Titus 3:3 is like plunging into ice-cold water: “For we
ourselves were also once foolish, disobedient, deceived, serving various
lusts and pleasures, living in malice and envy, hateful and hating one
another.” Titus 3:4 is like stepping into nice warm water: “But when the
kindness and the love of God our Savior toward man appeared.”
We might not like verse 3, but if we do not have it, we cannot have verse
4.
Few are humble enough to read Titus 3:3 and say, “That’s me.” A man
might say, “That is my wife”; a wife might say, “That is my husband”; a
child might say, “That is my mother”; for we always have someone else in
mind when it comes to things like this. I tell you frankly, I also do not think
verse 3 fits me by nature. But the nicest person must accept the verse as a
reasonable facsimile of his or her photograph: foolish, disobedient,
deceived, enslaved to lust, pleasure-mad, living in malice, envious, and
hateful. That is the description the Holy Ghost gives of us, and if we do not
believe we are as bad as He says we are, we cannot believe that He is as
good as He says He is.
Then, in verse 4, comes a glorious little word with such a variety of
meanings—the simple word but.
But when the kindness and the love of God our Savior toward man appeared.
Titus 3:4
But is one of the most powerful words in the entire Bible, because it often
signals repentance, rescue, deliverance, or salvation. And in this passage, a
thousand things come between verse 3 and God’s rescuing power in verse 4

12/08/2026

Denying Desire
The second thing Paul teaches us to deny is worldly lusts. He talked about
the danger of desire also in 2 Timothy 4:2–4:
Preach the word! Be ready in season and out of season. Convince, rebuke, exhort, with all
longsuffering and teaching. For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine,
but according to their own desires, because they have itching ears, they will heap up for
themselves teachers; and they will turn their ears away from the truth, and be turned aside to
fables. The word lust means “desires, pleasure, longings for pleasure.” The word
appears often in the New Testament with modifiers, such as foolish lust,
hurtful lust, fleshly lust, ungodly lust, former lust, youthful lust, lust in our
ignorance, and lust that wars on our members.
Lusts are natural to fallen man. Of course, they are defended and excused
by psychologists, sociologists, writers, marriage counselors, and consultants
because they are natural. The Christian, however, is taught by the Spirit in
his heart and in the pages of the Bible to renounce worldly lusts. When he
picks up a book excusing worldly lusts, he shuts it and turns away because
he has been taught inwardly and by the Book of God to do so.
God never calls us to dwell in a vacuum—to a life of sterile negativity,
nothingness, not doing things, not being ungodly, not being lustful, not
being unbelieving. He calls us away from those things to something else.
He calls us out that He might bring us in.

11/08/2026

THE FULLNESS OF
CHRISTIAN
LEADERSHIP
Teaching us that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly,
righteously, and godly in the present age.
Titus 2:12
T
o lead like Christ demands that we understand entirely what it means to
be a leader in the spiritual realm. This is not a job, but rather a commitment
to Christ. And the path to this kind of leadership is absolute surrender and
sacrifice to Jesus Christ.
Too many people think that all it takes to be a spiritual leader is to study
hard, pass a test, get credentials, and be on their way. That may be the
American idea of ministry, but it is not the biblical one.
If the grace of God has reached you, it has taught you by inward impulse.
The first thing it teaches is denial. That is, it teaches us to disavow,
renounce, repudiate. And there are two things mentioned in Titus 2:12 that
are to be renounced: ungodliness and worldly lusts. Ungodliness means, of
course, “impiety, irreverence, and whatever is not of God.” Whatever God
is not in is ungodly The dictates of grace teach us to deny whatever is ungodly, including
what is accepted in many of our schools. We spend a lot of our time in the
hands of pagans. We start in the preschool classes with finger painting, and
we end up with a PhD from some university where the name of God is
about as welcome as the name of Hi**er would be in a Jewish synagogue.
It takes a certain amount of backbone to deny what everybody else is
affirming and to affirm what everybody else is denying. Anybody who
thinks a Christian is a weakling has never been a Christian or spent much
time around Christians. Any dead or dying fish can turn over on its back
and float belly up in the stream, but a salmon will go over falls high as a
church building. For the Christian, God’s grace and God’s Word unite to
teach us that we are to deny ungodliness and renounce it for good.
Today, celebrities have become the saints and prophets of our day, and
some practice ungodly things. The fact that widely known people practice
them does not, in any way, mitigate the ungodliness. It is still ungodly, and
we are to deny ungodliness.
Even ungodliness found in classical literature and art is to be denied by
the Christian. It is still dirty if it is dirty, and it is still ungodly if it is
ungodly. It is not better because it is embalmed in classic art. Go to an art
institute, and you will find some things there that God is not in. Every
Christian needs enough backbone to be sneered at for repudiating such
things.
If this sounds severe, remember what Jesus said: “If your right hand
causes you to sin, cut it off and cast it from you; for it is more profitable for
you that one of your members perish, than for your whole body to be cast
into hell” (Matthew 5:30). It is better to go to heaven with only one eye and
one hand than go to hell with two of each.

10/08/2026

A Peculiar Treasure
Christians are not to be strange, not in any sense of that word. But we are
called to be peculiar: “Ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto me above all
people” (Exodus 19:5
KJV
).
My son, for example, is peculiar because he belongs to me. I am his
father. Love has made him mine in a way that logic cannot explain. Every
mother knows that her daughter is the brightest, and every father knows his
son is the sharpest, and every grandfather knows his grandson is the
smartest. The Lord has us as His peculiar treasure, and He is purifying unto
himself a people to be His as special jewels. We see this in the Old
Testament, where Israel was peculiar and different, but not in a ridiculous
way. We see this in Daniel, who would not eat the meat of the Babylonians.
He prayed several times a day and recognized a higher loyalty than one to
Babylonian kings, and he retained that loyalty even when cast into the den
of lions.
In the New Testament, Christians were also God’s special jewels marked
out for Him to be peculiar and different but not ridiculous or foolish.
To be a peculiar treasure unto God makes you different. You have a
higher loyalty, and you recognize God’s right to tell you how to live.
Human philosophies come and go; religions come and go; artificial revivals
come and go; healing campaigns come and go; new ideas come and go;
scientific notions come and go. But all the time, good Christians have God
in focus, living like Christ, doing God’s will, and recognizing their loyalty
ultimately belongs to Him. All this makes us different, but it does not make
us foolish. It makes us right.
God’s peculiar people sing loudly and give generously. They are zealous
of good works. They pray long and work hard. The Bible knows nothing of
armchair or ivory tower Christianity.
The church can silence critics with good works and in no other way.
Preach doctrine, and they will try to turn our doctrines against us. Quote
Scripture, and they will question the translation. But no one can argue
against godliness and good works. The devil himself would not even try it.
He knows better. Godliness and good works shut the mouths of everybody.
Critics may take you out and hang you, but they will respect you while you
die.
So here we have another beautiful passage in Titus that cannot be worn
out. Our Savior, Jesus Christ, gave himself in order to redeem us, a peculiar
people, from all iniquity and to purify us unto himself. Then Paul adds these
words in verse 15: “Speak these things, exhort, and rebuke with all
authority. Let no one despise you.”

09/08/2026

THE NEED FOR PURIFICATION

Paul says in verse 14 of our Scripture passage that God purifies “for
Himself His own special people.” The King James uses the phrase “peculiar
people.” That word, peculiar, has gotten into the enemy’s hands and has
been used to cloak some bizarre goings-on in the Christian church.
However, the biblical meaning of the word has no connection to the strange,
irrational, ridiculous, or foolish.
Jesus Christ is the perfect example of this. He walked among men with
utmost rationality. Everything He did was as logical and clear and sane as
the sunshine on the grass of a June morning. Jesus, our Lord, was the
perfect example of a mind that is poised, balanced, and symmetrical and in
perfect adjustment to itself. He never did or said anything or left anything
unsaid that would cause the raising of an eyebrow or the wondering if He
might not be quite all there.
In Christ’s day, there were people who said He had a devil within Him
because He healed the sick on the Sabbath day. The same thing was said by
those who loved the law instead of man, those who loved text in place of
children, and those who would rather hurl the evil woman into hell than see
her forgiven. But read all four Gospels, and you will see not one instance
where Jesus did or said anything that was not sane and completely normal
and right.
Those who do irrational, ridiculous things in the name of the Lord and
then flippantly say, “I am a fool for Christ’s sake,” have themselves to
blame. You can only do for Christ’s sake that which Christ told you to do.
You cannot do what you want and then make it good by saying, “It was for
Christ’s sake.” That is offering a swine on the altar of the Lord, and it will
be rejected abruptly by the great God Almighty

07/08/2026

The Price Christ Paid
All through the Bible, in both the Old and New Testaments, redemption is
found. Redemption involves pain, the giving of value for value, paying a
price for something precious.
Our Christ Jesus paid a deep price that we might be redeemed. “Being in
the form of God, [He] did not consider it robbery to be equal with God, but
made Himself of no reputation, taking the form of a bondservant, and
coming in the likeness of men” (Philippians 2:6–7). For a time, Christ made
himself less than God, saying, “I will take upon me the form of a servant.”
Before, He had been in the position of the master. Now He was stooping to
the position of servant.
How much more will you pay for men, O Lord?
His answer is not difficult to imagine: I will become obedient unto death,
as all the sons of men are obedient to their sins unto death. For their sakes,
though, I will choose the worst death ever invented, at the cross.
That’s how much our Savior paid for us.Saved from Sin
If you are ever tempted to think little of yourself, know that it is never a
godly thing to do. If you are puffed up and think you amount to something,
that is wrong too. If you overlook your sin and imagine you are good, that is
wrong. If you are inclined to compare yourself with another and put
yourself above the other, that is wrong. All these wrongs should be repented
of and amended so that they do not occur anymore in your life. Why did Christ give himself? The answer comes in the next phrase of our
passage: to “redeem us from every lawless deed” (Titus 2:14). In the King
James, it reads, to “redeem us from all iniquity.”
Iniquity was our problem. We were caught in the messes of iniquity, and
He gave himself to redeem us from all iniquity.
Notice the preposition in this phrase: not “in,” but “from.” Christ shall
save His people from their sins. Let me repeat, any interpretation of New
Testament Christianity that allows sin in human life is a false interpretation.
Any interpretation of mercy or grace or justification by faith that allows any
kind of sin, external or internal, to live unrebuked, unforsaken, unrepented
of, is a travesty of the gospel of Christ and not the true gospel at all. He
gave himself, and the price was himself, that he might redeem us unto
purity and unto himself.
The one deep disease of the world is impurity. By impurity I mean
anything that is unlike God. Sexual misconduct is an impurity, but
contentiousness is another.
To some people, when you say, “It’s a nice morning, isn’t it,” they will
respond, “No, I don’t think it is,” and start an argument. If you compliment
them, they will start an argument. No matter what you say, they are
contentious. They live in this world by the mercy of people who are not
contentious. They imagine themselves wonderful when they are merely
recipients of an almost infinite amount of patience on the part of people
who would like to tramp on them but do not. These contentious people are
impure.
Other impurities include gluttony and slothfulness. Self-indulgence is
another form of impurity. Pride is another form. Egoism is another form, as
are self-pity, resentfulness, and churlishness. I have only named a few
examples, but all that is not of God is impure.
You might be able to quote long passages of Scripture, but if the fire of
the Holy Ghost and the Lamb’s blood have not purified you, you are most
miserable and will be rejected from the presence of the Lord. It will not be
because of your beliefs so much as the state of your heart, though beliefs
certainly need purification.

Address

Tom Mboya
Kisumu

Telephone

+254755673748

Website

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