Influencers In the Flesh

Do you know the people who have influenced you most? Stop and think about it honestly. If you made a list, would the names on it belong to people who actually know you—who know your name, your failures, your kitchen, your kids?

For most of us, the honest answer is uncomfortable. Our most formative voices belong to people we've never met. A writer. A podcaster. Someone we follow online. We consume them. They shape us. But they would not recognize us in a crowd.

This is one of the quieter tragedies of our hyperconnected age: we are alone together. More access to more voices than any generation in history—and somehow lonelier for it.

Paul had a different vision.

What Older Women Are For

In Titus 2, Paul instructs older women to teach younger women "what is good" (v. 3). The word carries weight. It isn't just moral instruction—it's the transmission of a whole vision of life, life shaped by Christ and aimed at his glory. At the center of that vision is everyday faithfulness: loving husbands and children, pursuing purity and self-control, practicing kindness, embracing the callings God has placed directly in front of you.

This kind of formation cannot be packaged into a curriculum. It is learned at the table, over coffee, through tears, across years. It requires proximity. It requires someone who has already walked the road you are just now stepping onto.

Think about what a young woman actually needs. When she has her first miscarriage—or an ectopic pregnancy, or a stillbirth—who is there? When her child is spiraling, and she doesn't know what to do? When she can't even form sentences in prayer? Paul's answer is not a book, not a podcast, not a pastor.

The answer is the women. The older women of the church, who have buried grief of their own, who have sat in those same dark rooms, who know how to pray because they have been taught to pray by suffering.

There is more content available to young parents today than at any moment in history. Until a century ago, there were no parenting books. Now shelves overflow, and nervous parents consume them. But here is a question worth sitting with: What if the older women in the church were so good at helping the younger women that the only experts they needed were already inside their own congregation?

Everyone who has raised children has been a first-time parent. You remember when you had the Ten Commandments for parenting. Then ten suggestions. Then something much more humble. And here comes a young mother who has been listening to an online influencer—someone with a one-year-old, dispensing confidence—while next to her in the pew is a woman with decades of life behind them, having walked roads she has not yet seen.

What Titus Is For

Paul turns to Titus as well—and the charge to him mirrors the charge to older women. Not just what to say, but what to be: "In everything set them an example by doing what is good. In your teaching show integrity, seriousness and soundness of speech that cannot be condemned" (Titus 2:7–8).

The word translated "sound" in that verse appears once in Acts and ten times in the Gospels, and every single time it refers to healing or being made whole. Sound speech is healing speech. The call on Titus—and by extension, on all who teach and lead—is not merely to argue well, but to heal. To take the anxiety out of the room. To live in such a way that arguments against the faith lose their oxygen.

The young men in our culture are being discipled. The question is only by whom. Right now, the loudest voices forming them are podcasters—many of them men in their thirties and forties, unmarried, projecting confidence about what it means to be a man. What if the older men in the church were so rooted, so present, so embodied in wisdom, that those outside voices seemed hollow by comparison?

What You Are For

Dear older saints - and this applies to everyone over 40...There is something Paul's vision requires that is easy to miss: you cannot silo yourself off and live it. You cannot spend your time only with people your own age, only in spaces where everyone shares your stage of life. That is the natural thing. The comfortable thing. But it is not the Titus 2 thing.

The world has a way of narrowing our ambitions. You start out wanting to make a difference, and somewhere along the way, you find yourself wanting a nap and a vacation. Our culture is spending billions of dollars to convince you that the last laps of your life belong to you—to your comfort, your travel, your entertainment—because you have earned it.

And you know what that is? It is a tragedy. It is a tragedy when older saints die, and no one under thirty knows them, because they spent their final years on pleasure. There is nothing wrong with rest. But there is everything wrong with a life aimed at nothing more than its own comfort.

You have one life. Only what is done for Christ will last.

Be an influencer. The kind who actually knows someone's name.