Why Do You Do Good Things?

This morning, we're going to be continuing a little bit, I guess, on this theme that we've started for the month of November that looks at the basics of our faith. So we talked about prayer last week, and this week we're going to be reflecting a little bit on holiness, on purity, on what it means to be a Christian, to live a life that is pleasing to God. In two weeks time, I think it's two weeks time, I'll be heading to Red Frogs again for schoolies. I'm very excited because it will be my tenth year. I'm feeling like an old veteran by now.

I'm definitely the grandfather because everyone there is like 18, 19, 20 year olds. So as a 30 year old, I definitely feel my age and I can't handle the late nights like I used to be able to, but I really, really look forward to it. It's a great opportunity to serve people, to serve them as a Christian, and one of the greatest thrills that I have in doing this is to be faced with that amazement that these young people have about a group of 700 volunteers who will clean up their vomit at 02:00 in the morning, who will walk them home when they can't even remember what their mum's name is, who will love them and look after them for a week and make sure that they have food in their stomach. It's amazing how grown up these 17 year olds think they are, but man, they can't even look after themselves. That moment though, where I ask the question, why are you doing this?

Why would you take annual leave to come and look after ungrateful little kids like us? And we get the amazing opportunity to say, we love you guys because God first loved us. That's an amazing moment. It's one of the things that drives me to do it every year. But I want to ask us the question, why do you do good things in your life?

Why do you do the good things you do in your life? Perhaps you've sat listening to a pastor in previous years, and you've heard the pastor speak and proclaim and command us to act according to a certain way. God's word says this, and so we should do this. Have you ever thought why? Why should I do this?

Why should I do this, pastor? Why should Christians do these things? I want us to have a look at one of the clearest expressions of why, the motivations for why from Titus chapter two this morning. So if you have your Bible with you, we're going to read from Titus chapter two, and we'll read pretty much the whole chapter. Titus chapter two, verse one.

Paul writes this to his disciple Titus. He says, you must teach what is in accord with sound doctrine. Teach the older men to be temperate, worthy of respect, self controlled and sound in faith, in love and in endurance. Likewise, teach the older women to be reverent in the way they live, not to be slanderers or addicted to much wine, but to teach what is good. Then they can train the younger women to love their husbands and children to be self controlled and pure, to be busy at home, to be kind, to be subject to their husbands so that no one will malign the word of God.

Similarly, the young men are to be self controlled. 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 so that those who oppose you may be ashamed because they have nothing bad to say about us. Teach slaves to be subject to their masters in everything, to try to please them, not to talk back to them, and not to steal from them, but to show that they can be fully trusted so that in every way they will make the teaching about God our saviour attractive. 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 saviour, 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. So far, our reading. For a lot of people, I'm sure you know, the motivation or the reason we do good things is an external one. We might say, I do this good thing so that someone may be impressed by me. I do this good thing so that God may be impressed by me.

And so in impressing this person or God, we do it so that they will treat us differently. So this person I do a good thing for may treat me well, or God may love me more. They may honour me. They may like me. They will respect me.

But we find in Scripture that this kind of thinking doesn't work with God. This is not the way that God responds to us. It's like a story of a gardener who grew a very big carrot. Very impressive. And this gardener lived in a kingdom very, very far away.

And he was so pleased with this carrot that he took it to the king, entered his court, and said to the king, my lord, this is the greatest carrot that I have ever and will ever grow. Therefore, I want to present it to you as a token of my love and my respect to you. The king was very touched by this gesture and he discerned the man's heart. And so as the gardener turned away to leave, the king said, wait, you are clearly a very good steward of this plot of land that you have been given. I own a plot of land right next to yours, and I want to give it to you freely as a gift.

The gardener was amazed and obviously very delighted about this grand gesture, and he went home rejoicing. But in the courts of the king was a nobleman who overheard this story, and the nobleman thought to himself, my goodness, if a man with that presented the king with this gift gets a plot of land for a simple carrot, what if I gave the king something better? So the next day, the nobleman came before the king and he was leading into the court a beautiful black stallion. And the nobleman said to the king, my lord, I breed horses and this is the greatest horse I have ever and will ever breed. Therefore, I want to present it to you as a token of my love and my respect for you.

But the king discerned the man's heart and he said, thank you very much, took the horse and dismissed him. The nobleman was perplexed and grumbled under his breath. So the king said, let me explain. The gardener gave me the carrot, but you gave yourself the horse. The passage we read in Titus two reaches its climax in verses eleven and twelve when it talks about the grace of God that teaches us to say no to ungodliness.

No to ungodliness. We find these commands Paul gives to older men, older women, young women, young men, children, slaves, how they should live. And the motivation for all of this comes in verse 11. The grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men. It teaches us to say no to ungodliness and to live self controlled, upright, and godly lives in this present age.

What does it mean to have a godly life? To be godly means to reflect the character of God Himself. It is the highest virtue that we can attain as human beings to be godly. And so in order to do the opposite of what godliness is, to say no to ungodliness means that we reject those things that would by nature go against the character of God. We will say no to addictions, to those things that hold us and hurt us physically, emotionally, psychologically, spiritually.

We will say no to participating in conversations that will be fruitless or that will dirty our minds, that will rob us of purity. We will say no to ungodliness and we will say yes to godly things. Paul says, yes to self control. Yes to honesty. Yes to kindness.

When God called you to be His very own, when He gripped your heart, and we know that moment, when He gripped your heart, He made you very aware of Him. And He also, in that moment, made a statement over you that you will not be the same. You are not expected to be how you were. He has a desire for your life. He has a desire for how your life will look.

It's as simple as that. If you belong to Him, you will resemble Him. Your life will not be the same as the rest of the world, He says. And so friend, I want to start this morning by asking you how is your life looking? If you were to compare it with those around you, how is your life looking?

Is it full of joy or is there bitterness and envy in your life? Is it marked with peace or is it marked with insecurity? Are the people around you influencing you or are you letting godliness shine into that context that you're in? When you should be soaring like eagles, are you instead scratching around with the chooks in the mud?

How is your life looking? Part of our journey, like I mentioned, this month in November is to hear the call to pray, to pray for our church, to pray for our people, to pray for our ministry so that we may be transformed, so that we may align ourselves more and more to what God's will is for us. Part of our call this month has been talking about these discipleship groups, a call back to God's word to take it seriously, to take the truth of it seriously for our life. And for a while now, we've been talking about planting churches on the Gold Coast to get the message of the gospel out to as many places in as many communities as possible. We've been doing all these things.

The question I want to ask us today is why? Why pray? Why sacrifice time to meet with others, to read God's word? Why plant churches? Why do these good things?

Why have a personal holiness? Why protect that? The simple answer we find this morning in Titus is that it's God's grace. It is God's grace that motivates us. Simple as that.

The undeserved favour of God that will move you and grip you and give you a sense of urgency that you would never have been able to generate yourself. It's a message of your sins being forgiven by undeserved favour by God at a high cost. The cost we know was the suffering and the death of Jesus Christ our Lord, and the freedom that was bought at that penalty, at that price, exemplified in the resurrection of Jesus Christ three days later, is a life free from the power of sin, a life eternal, a life we will enjoy in eternity in that moment where we will see God face to face, where there will be no more tears, where there will be no more murder of 12 year old girls. That is grace, friends. That is the motivator for what we do.

And I love Titus two and how plainly it puts it because it's so refreshing. Despite what an average Aussie will tell you, the one that you ask on the street, the gospel is not a religion, yet it's not a non religion either. It is something altogether different. Religion, we know, makes moral obedience the way to be saved. In other words, doing good things so that we will have peace with God.

Non religion, on the other hand, is not any different, although it may sound like it. Non religion says the individual is the law to themselves. They may not put it this way, but they believe that they are their own God and if they are good to this God and if they determine what is good and bad themselves and act according to that good, then they have done a good thing and they will find rest for their souls in that. Whether they believe in an afterlife or not, they still desire that peace. They still desire that rest.

But they will determine what is good. But the gospel that we believe as Christians is that Jesus, on the one hand, takes the unchangeable law of God seriously. He takes it so seriously that He lived it. He fulfilled it completely in His life. He did not break one of those laws.

And He takes it so seriously that He would pay the penalty for our noncompliance to that law. And this means two things for us as Christians. Firstly, that Christians have a unique attitude towards the law of God and moral obedience. We have a unique attitude towards it. Because on the one hand, we know how important this law of God is.

It reveals the character of God. It shows who this God is that we worship. This God that we want to be with. It shows who He is. It reveals the heart of God.

So we are kind or we are encouraged to be kind, to be forgiving, to love sacrificially, to reach out to the lost, to value purity and holiness of our minds. Why? Because that is a character of God. We love God and we want to be like Him. And Jesus took these laws so seriously that He made Himself completely obedient to God's laws and He kept them perfectly.

So we can never ever take the law of God lightly. We cannot joke about it, and I've heard this in churches. We cannot shove it off and say it doesn't apply to us. We live in a New Testament church. We live in New Testament times.

No. We don't take it lightly. We can never see obedience as an option. But yet, on the other hand, as Christians, we are freed from the moral law as a system of salvation. Because of the gospel and because of how we regard the gospel, we realise that we are no longer tied to this performance based system.

We are God's children, loved unconditionally in Jesus Christ. And this is what we hold. This is the tension that we hold as Christians. The second reality of the gospel that flips our whole life upside down is this. Christians have a unique relationship with God because of the gospel.

The gospel says that we are justified, and we learnt about this in professional faith class this week, justified. We are right with God. It is just as if I'd never sinned. How? By faith alone.

Meaning, not an awareness, an assent mentally that God is out there, that He is some sort of being. Faith meaning dependence and trust, a clinging to God as your only hope. Faith in God. And in this process, we unite ourselves with Jesus through putting this faith and this dependence on Him. And in that moment, we are made right, perfect, holy in God's sight.

All our brokenness and imperfection and sin washed away by the stamp that God placed through Jesus Christ. Perfect. Holy. And so that is the gospel. That is the gospel.

But how can Paul then say that this knowledge can have a power to influence all these people that he talks about? Slaves, masters, old people, young people, whatever. How does Paul use this? How do we actually become good? If my bad temper or my greed are pardoned, covered by the work of Jesus Christ, okay.

They won't cause me to go to hell, to spend an eternity away from this God that I have rebelled against, but how do I actually make progress in this thing called holiness, this pursuit of being good, how do I make progress in that? Well, the Bible says you can become a faithful spouse, you can become a loving husband, a good parent, a good child, a respectful older man, a self controlled younger man. How? By knowing that you will never attain these things through your own hard work. First and foremost, you will never attain these things by your own hard work.

Rather, you can become all these things only in this way, by deepening your understanding of what grace is in the gospel. That is all. That is the only way. And the more you think about it, the more you realise it. The more you think about your own life, the more you realise it.

You will only ever become more godly by realising the power of God's grace. In our passage, Paul commands his listeners to say no to ungodliness, to worldly passions, and to live self controlled lives. How? He says it is the grace of God that brings salvation which leads us to say no to these things. Think of all the ways that you could say no to ungodliness.

Think of all the ways you could say, I'm going to say no to this because I'll look bad. I'll look bad. I'll, you know, I'll look like a hypocrite. I've said one thing. I've done the other.

I will lose trust of my friends. I will look bad, so I won't do this. I'll say no to it. You could say, I'll say no because I'll be excluded from social circles. Some groups may not want me in there, so I will say no to that.

You could say no because God will not bless me. I will not get the blessing of God. You can say no because I'll hate myself in the morning. I will have low self esteem if I do this. But all of these motives are really just motives based on fear or pride, isn't it?

Think about it. Fear of losing social status. Pride that may keep you from wanting that. C. S.

Lewis put it this way. He says that there's an irony that fear and pride are the very things that lead to sin. Fear and pride will cause you to sin, and at the same time, are the very things that will keep you in that. It means that you'll be stuck in this destructive cycle trying to overcome sin caused by fear and pride by trying to stop this sin by using fear and pride. And so the truth is you'd just be using the same old self centred impulses of the heart to keep you compliant to the external rules rather than experiencing a life transforming change, and that can only ever happen in the heart.

Do you see that in all these examples you aren't doing anything of it out of love for God? You are using God to get things. You may use them to get esteem or prosperity or social approval and so on. In other words, your deepest joys and the hope that you rest on are on those things rather than on God. The gospel, if it is really to be believed, changes all of that completely.

It takes us out. It rips us away from this neediness. The need to be included. The need to be loved by a boy or a girl. The love or the need to be well regarded.

The need to have everything in your life go well, otherwise your life is a failure. All of these immense and they are immense and they are deep. They are so deep seated. They are ingrained in us. All of these immense deep needs will continue to control your life only because the concept of God bursting with delight over you remains for you just that, a concept.

And so the extent to which you have true peace in your life, true joy in your life is inversely proportional to how little our hearts believe the gospel. Let me say that again. The extent to which you have true peace and joy in your life is inversely proportional to how little our hearts believe the gospel. Paul is saying that if you want to really change, you must have the gospel teach you. It must train you.

It must discipline you. It must coach you in your life. Forget about all the life coaches you can get. The gospel has to be your coach. It must argue with you.

It must rebuke you. It must challenge you. It must sink so deep into you until every aspect of your life is changed. So this morning's message is very simple. Have you accepted the message of Jesus Christ?

And does He have authority over every aspect of your life, not just mentally? Have you accepted Jesus Christ? Not just because it sounds right or because you come from a culture that has accepted it. Not because you even had a warm fuzzy experience one time at a youth camp. Have you accepted Christ, and has that changed your life?

We read just before verse 11 about this long list of commands that Paul gives these people. How can all these commands be lived out? Paul says, God's grace drives Christians to have healthy families because it makes us prioritise relationships over things. The gospel does that. God's grace drives older men to be respectful and self controlled because they give up the need to claw and clamber for respect that we guys inherently strive for.

It sets us free from that because we know that we have already been validated by a God who is greater than anything in this world. God's grace drives older women to be reverent and to mentor their younger women towards purity because they realise that the gospel has washed them white as snow already. So why go and dirty yourself again? God's grace drives younger men to be self controlled in everything they do. God's grace drives slaves to live in a way that adorns the gospel and to make it attractive to their masters.

Very practically, if you struggle with being unkind, speaking unkindly, and we know that it's a sin and we try not to do it, and we try not to do it, and we try not to do it, if you speak unkindly to someone, repent and dwell on the forgiveness you have received in Jesus Christ until there is no more bitterness in you. Do you struggle with looking down on people and, you know, the struggle I'm going to have with seeing those schoolies doing what they're doing? Do you struggle with pride? Be transformed by considering the free grace of Jesus Christ. Considering it, reflecting on it over and over again until you sense a decrease of self righteousness in your hearts when you realise that I am a forgiven sinner.

They are a sinner not yet forgiven. It is the grace of God that has come to us in Jesus Christ that says to us, that teaches us to say no to ungodly things, to worldly passions, and to say yes to self control, to lives that are truly marked by good actions. Let's reflect on it often, as often as we can because it will change your life. Amen. Father God, we thank you for this truth, for this basic reality check once again.

Father, we so desire, because we are your children, because we have been born again, because we have regenerated hearts, we desire to do what is right. It makes us sad not to be able to do that. So father, on the one hand, I want to say, let us never ever not be sad about our sin. Let us never ever be complacent about it and forget it and live with it and be okay with it. Let us never be in that place of complacency.

Keep us hungry. Keep us restless. It is your grace. It is your mercy that leads to repentance. But father, help us also by the power, the enabling of your spirit to dwell, to be taught, to be rebuked, to be comforted by the grace of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Where there is bitterness, father remind us of the great freedom and the treasure and the inheritance that awaits us. Lord, where there is trial, give us patience and in suffering, knowing Lord that you suffered more than anyone else, and yet through that suffering you overcame the world. Lord, where there is unforgiveness, let us realise how much we have been forgiven, and therefore we can forgive and should forgive. And father, where love is needed in our lives, where love is needed to be given unto others, father, remind us that you so loved us, that you sent your son Jesus for us. Break every aspect and facet and every corner and niche in our hearts that has not made this truth its guiding principle.

And father, may every aspect of our lives be given over in surrender and abandonment to you and the grace of Jesus. May our lives be changed by this. May we reflect on it all the time. We ask in Jesus' name. Amen.