Grace of God

We just dealt with Paul addressing Titus and sort of training him. Titus was a younger pastor and an elder in his region. Paul was telling Titus to teach several demographics, several groups within the church to live a holy life, to live a life that is worthy of God, that is a life that would influence their community so much with the love and the grace of the gospel that they would be forever changed and that they would be an amazing witness to their neighbours, to the nonbelievers around them. And so he's just finished talking to older men, older women, younger women, younger men, and to slaves. And then he starts in verse 11.

For the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men. It teaches us to say no to ungodliness and worldly passions and to live self controlled, upright, and godly lives in this present age while we wait for the blessed hope, the glorious appearing of our great God and Saviour Jesus Christ who gave Himself for us to redeem us from all wickedness and to purify for Himself a people that are His very own, eager to do what is good. These then are the things you should teach, Titus. Encourage and rebuke with all authority. Do not let anyone despise you.

Yeah, you know me. You know that I have volunteered as a hotel chaplain down here on the Gold Coast every year for the past five years or something during schoolies week. And we go in and we help, and we protect the schoolies as they celebrate their finishing of school. And something that I hear every year that never gets old is the amazement of these young people as we sort of come and help them and do whatever, carry them back home and call the ambulance and so on.

And time and time again, time and time again, after building up these relationships and we look after these kids for a week, we see them, we interact with them, we hang out with them for an entire week. And the question always comes to us: why? Why are you doing this? What would motivate you to give up your annual leave, a week of your annual leave, or a week's worth of wages? What would cause you to actually pay to come and stay here and to do this for a bunch of kids that think they can look after themselves? Why do you do this?

It's a question that you may have faced in your life. It's a question that people may have asked you as a Christian, or maybe they don't even register that, but why do you do nice things for them? Why do you do these seemingly random acts of kindness? Why will you go the extra mile? Why will you drive their kids home from school when you've got five screaming kids in your car that you have to deal with?

Why? Why do you do these good things? Why do Christians do good things? Why should we do good things? Especially when we believe that it's not your good actions that get you to heaven.

It's not because you earn your way into heaven by these good things. So what is the motivator for our actions? What is the motivator that will uplift people, build people, heal people, restore people? If you yourself struggle with loving people, how then can you be moved perhaps to love people more? How can you be moved to be kinder to people?

What is the motivator? For a lot of people, including Christians, the premise for good actions, for doing good things, is an external one. It is to impress others, perhaps. It is to have a good name amongst your neighbours or your friends. Or perhaps I do it to impress God so God will love me more or be impressed by me.

And I do it so that when they're impressed by me, they will treat me differently. They will be kinder to me, perhaps. They will treat me better. They will respect me. They will honour me.

Once upon a time, there was a gardener who lived in a kingdom and he grew an enormous carrot, a massive carrot. And so he took this carrot to his king and he said, my lord, this is the greatest, biggest carrot I've ever grown and will ever grow. Therefore, I want to present it to you as a token of my love and my respect of you. The king was touched, and he discerned the heart of this man. And so as the gardener was walking out, the king said to him, wait.

You are clearly a good steward of the earth. I want to give you a plot of land I own that's right next to yours, and I want to give this to you freely as a gift so you can garden it all. And the gardener was amazed and delighted and went home rejoicing. But there was a nobleman in the king's court, and he overheard this dialogue. And he said to himself, man, if this is what a guy gets for a carrot, imagine if I gave the king something better.

So the next day, the nobleman came, and he led to the king a giant, beautiful, black stallion. He bowed low and he said, my lord, I breed horses, and this is the greatest horse I have ever or will ever breed. Therefore, I want to present this to you as a token of my love and my respect of you. But the king discerned his heart, and he said, thank you. And he took the horse and he merely dismissed him.

The nobleman was perplexed. He was angry. And so the king said to him, let me explain. The gardener was giving me the carrot. You were giving yourself the horse.

The passage we read in Titus 2:11-15 says that God's grace teaches us to say no to ungodliness and no to worldly passions. To say no to the things that will ultimately be negative for our lives. No to the things that will hurt us physically, emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually, and to say yes to the good things. Things like self control, the things like honesty, the things like living godly lives. In other words, what the motivator is that influences our lives is God's grace.

It's God's grace. The grace that has come to us through the good news of Jesus Christ. In other words, the gospel. And this message is that our sins have been forgiven at a great cost, and that we have been restored to a life that is completely healthy, a life that is fulfilling, a life that actually has a purpose and meaning. The cost, however, of that amazing thing was the life and the suffering of Jesus Christ who was punished for our sins, but was raised again to life.

And now that life is our life. What He gives us is a life free from sin, a life that is wholesome and good. That is the gospel. That is the message of grace. Grace means receiving something completely undeservedly, completely without merit.

So now the gospel, if you think about it, is neither a religion nor a non-religion. It is something altogether different. You see, religion, right? It makes us obedient.

It forces us to be morally obedient. Doing good things, doing those nice things, doing those random acts of kindness, doing those hotel chaplaincy things as a way of being saved, as a way of finding peace with God. Non-religion, irreligion, on the other hand, says that in the individual, me, I am a law unto myself. They are their own god, and they can do whatever they want. They can determine what is good and what is bad.

For one person, cheating on your wife is fine, is good. For another person, that is not good. Each one is, you know, fine to have that opinion. The gospel, however, is that Jesus takes God's law seriously. That there is a black and white order to life.

That there are absolute truths in life. Jesus takes God's law seriously, so seriously, in fact, that He paid the penalty for the disobedience of His followers, of those who choose to make Him their king. And so He saves them by sheer grace. This means that Christians have a unique attitude towards the law of God. A unique attitude.

On the one hand, we are freed from the moral law as a system of salvation. We are free in the sense that we don't have to regard ourselves to be tied to the view of ourselves, to be tied to moral obedience or moral performance because we are children loved by God unconditionally. Our identity, our self-worth is not tied in by how high or how much we can achieve. On the other hand, we do know how important God's law is.

We love God's law. We respect God's law and His will for our life because it reveals God's heart. It shows that God is a God who loves the poor and the marginalised, that God loves healthy marriages, that God loves healthy kids. We love the law because the law shows us God's heart. It reveals the things that God hates and what God loves.

And so Jesus took this so seriously that He made Himself completely obedient to God's laws. And we can never take what God has revealed in His word lightly. Christians should always see this word not as an option. The gospel says that we are justified. The gospel says that we are made right with God by faith alone through the work of Jesus Christ alone.

In other words, when we unite ourselves in faith to Jesus, when we put our trust in Him, we are made perfect in God's eyes, perfect in God's sight. And all our brokenness, all our imperfection, and our sin, well, that is done away with, and we're stamped. We are stamped with the words holy, with the words perfect, with the words righteous on us. So that is the gospel. That's completely different to religion, which is about how much we can do, how much we can achieve.

It's completely different to irreligion, which is about how we determine what is good and right. But the question is then, how do we actually become perfect? The gospel says that we have been washed, our brokenness has been dealt with. It's been dealt with by Jesus on the cross. But how do we actually become perfect?

How do we actually become good? How do we grow more and more into a Christ-like character? If my bad temper or my greed are pardoned and covered by the work of Jesus Christ, well, they can't cause me to go to hell. They can't cause me to be eternally separated from God. But how do I now actually make progress towards self control?

Progress to become less angry. Well, the Bible says that if you are a faithful spouse, if you are a generous person, a good parent, a good child, if you want to be that, it is not by just trying really, really hard again, redoubling that effort. It is rather a deepening of your understanding of what Jesus has done for you. It is a deepening of your understanding of what grace is. And then living out a lifestyle that has been radically transformed because of it.

It's a radical transformation of our emotions, of the way we think, of the way we act, of the way we feel. Grace changes our hearts. In fact, trying really hard to adhere to God's law without this heart change is actually superficial. It'll get you nowhere. Trying really hard always means you will fail.

It gets you nowhere. It doesn't work. I'm sure you can look at your own life, perhaps where you've tried really hard, and God was never involved in that whole story. And you just worked and you worked and you worked and you tried to do the right thing, but somehow some little thing just snapped and it all came tumbling down. In our passage this morning, Paul calls his listeners to say no to ungodliness, no to worldly passions, and to live self-controlled lives.

But how does Paul say we can do this? How can Paul make this requirement of us? Remarkably, he says it's the grace of God which has brought us salvation that does it. It ultimately teaches us to say no to ungodliness. Think of all the ways.

Think of all the ways you could try to say no to ungodliness, no to bad choices, no to bad ways of living. You can say no because I'll look bad to my friends. That's a motivator, right? No.

I'll lose face. You can say no: I'll be excluded from social circles. I won't be able to fit in with the church crowd anymore. I won't be able to fit in with my cell group anymore.

I won't be able to deal with my workmates anymore. Or you can say no because God will not bless me. God will not bless me. He can't bless something like this if I do it. Others may say no.

I can't do it because I'll hate myself in the morning, and I'll have low self-esteem. But all these motives are really just motives that come from fear, that come from pride. And interestingly, all sin, if you think about it, comes from fear and pride. So it just becomes a massive loop, a massive circle. You are just using the same self-centred impulses of the heart to keep you compliant to the external rules rather than experiencing a change of heart.

Do you see that in all these examples, you aren't doing these things out of a love for God. You are using God to get things, to get self-esteem, to get prosperity, to get social approval, and so on. In other words, your deepest joys and your deepest longings rest on the things that we just mentioned. Social esteem, self-esteem, respect, rather than God. Now the gospel, if it is really believed, if it is really taken into our hearts, it removes this neediness.

It removes wanting and desiring and craving these things. The need to be constantly respected, to be constantly appreciated, to be constantly valued and well regarded, the need to have everything go well in your life, the need to have power over others. All of these immense deep needs will continue to control your life as long as your concept of God, which is, you know, God just absolutely delighting in you, if that just remains a concept and doesn't sink in here in our hearts, won't be changed. If we cannot make this ours, if we cannot bring it into our lives, Paul is saying that if you really want to change, the gospel must teach you.

The gospel must train you. The gospel must challenge you and discipline you and curb you. You must let the gospel sink in deep until it changes your motivations, until it changes your views. So have you accepted this message? Have you accepted this message?

Not just mentally. Not just, yeah, yeah, I know that story. That's fine.

I'm happy to accept it. It sounds great. It's a lovely story. It makes me feel good. Have you made it your own?

Have you brought it into your heart, into your life so that everything you do, everything you do, is motivated by that knowledge, by that truth? Or perhaps you've neglected this part of your faith. Perhaps you are so busy with all the other important things of the faith, church involvement, doing the right thing by, you know, what needs to be done here, good programmes. Perhaps you've lost sight of what caused you to do all these things in the first place. Two weeks ago, we looked at God's ideal community.

You know? We looked at all the men being worthy of respect and younger men being self-controlled and all the women being reverent and examples of godly lives. We looked at a community that can be so attractive and can be heaven on earth. And today we see what drives all that. Today we see that it's God's grace that drives Christians to have spiritually healthy family relationships.

We see God's grace drives all the men to be respectable and self-controlled. God's grace drives older women to be reverent, to mentor younger women towards purity and holiness. It's God's grace that drives younger men to be self-controlled in everything they do. It's God's grace that drives the slaves of this time, the employees of today's time, in a life and in a relationship to their bosses that makes the gospel attractive. If you struggle with this, if you struggle with being unkind to someone, if you struggle with feelings of bitterness or anger towards someone, repent.

Turn around. Consider the free forgiveness of Jesus Christ. The free forgiveness of Jesus Christ until that bitterness, that unkindness just disappears. It just fades away. As you think of the sacrificial love of Christ for you, let your impatience drip away as you reflect on His patience for you.

Do you struggle with looking down on people? Do you struggle with spiritual pride? Well, be transformed by considering the free grace of Jesus until you sense a decrease in this pride, a decrease in this self-righteousness because you also realise when you do that that you are a sinner as well, that you are no better, and you are no more deserving. By reflecting on God's grace, you will experience a deep humility and a grateful peace because pride and fear of criticism is dealt with. It will fall away.

The grace of God that has come in Jesus Christ teaches us to say no to ungodliness, no to worldly passion, no to bad choices, and to say yes to self-control, to say yes to lives that are truly marked by good actions.