Title: Grace Appearing
Scripture: Titus 2:11-15
Speaker: Josh Rattin
It's really good to be here with you this evening and be able to open God's word with you. Let's turn to the Bibles and your Bibles to Titus chapter 2. Titus chapter 2. We're going to begin in verse 11 and read through verse 15. For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all people, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age, waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works.
Declare these things, exhort, rebuke with all authority, let no one disregard you. Father, as we dig into your word this evening, would you open the eyes of our hearts to see you clearly, not only to hear the words, but to see their beauty and the goodness of you through them. I pray this in your name.
Amen. A number of years ago, we were in Chiruli, that little village that we lived in in Uganda, and we decided that it was time to take our container and move it from our neighbor's yard into our yard. We had left for furlough a few years before that and knew that we were going to come back, but to a different place.
So we left all of our belongings in this container at our neighbor's house. So we came back to Uganda, we built the house that we're going to live in, and the time came for us to to move into it. So we called a company and they sent this big truck with the crane on the top of it to move this thing.
And the problem was, it had been raining, raining a lot. And our soil in Uganda, at least where we lived, was very, very heavily filled with clay. I don't know if any of you have ever worked with heavily clay soil, but there was so much clay that my boys would sometimes just take the mud, form it into a bowl, stick it in the oven, and they'd get a crack, but still a bowl.
It would harden, it was that much clay. And the problem with clay is that when the sun is out, it's great, it's like a brick, it's hard. But once that rain comes, it becomes really slippery and incredibly soft.
So this truck, I'll never forget, he was confident he could get there. So he got to the house, the container was on this little hill, not a big hill, very small hill. And he backed his truck as far as he could, and then he just floored it.
And he started flying up to this hill. And I remember thinking for sure he was going to fly right past this container and into my neighbor's vanilla farm. But sure enough, he actually didn't even make it there.
He got partway there and his truck just went into the mud. And he floored it, he floored it, those tires were spinning and spinning, mud was flying everywhere, and he was getting nowhere. I wonder how many of us here feel that way about our Christian lives.
We want to grow and become like Christ. We want to be transformed and become the people that God has called us to be. But it feels like we're just putting the pedal to the metal, and our wheels are spinning really fast, and then mud is flying everywhere, but we're getting nowhere.
I don't know if you ever feel that way. I often have felt that way in my life. What God has for us this morning is he wants us to realize that instead of putting the pedal to the metal and relying upon our effort, God has given us grace in Jesus Christ to stand upon.
And it's only this grace that he's given us that will give us the footing we need to move forward. And in our passage this morning, we're going to see three kind of movements. There's the appearance of grace, and that's really what holds this whole thing together.
There's the appearance of grace, there's the worthiness of Christ, and there's the fruitfulness of Christ. The appearance of grace, the worthiness of Christ, and the fruitfulness of Christ. The context here is that Paul is sending this letter to Titus, who was his disciple.
He had trained him in ministry, and then had left him to finish a task in the island of Crete that he had left before it was finished. Paul had planted a number of churches in Crete and had left before he was done with the work. So he left Titus there to finish them.
But there was a problem. Actually, before I say that, Titus chapter 1 verse 5, Paul says clearly, I left you, this is why I left you in Crete, so that you might put what remains into order and appoint elders in every town that I directed you. But there was a problem, and the problem is that Crete had a reputation of being an especially immoral place.
It was even known by the other Gentiles in the nations around as being immoral. And so the challenge that Paul and Titus faced was this especially relevant issue to our time. How can this young church, filled with new converts, grow up and become a representative of God, become the pillar and buttress of the truth, as Paul says in Timothy? How can they become that in this place that is so ungodly? Their new life in Christ, for all these new believers in these churches, was now to be radically different from anything that they had known before.
I don't know if you've ever tried to even make a smallest change in your life, but it's hard, isn't it? To even change our lifestyle a little bit, isn't it hard? You know, we make jokes about our new year's resolutions, don't we? Because change is hard. We can get excited and we can do something for a short time, but to make it last, that's tough. Imagine changing everything.
Being in a culture where there is no memory of even a pretense of godliness. But the task didn't end there, because now they not only had to add new habits to their lives, new ways of living, but they had to stay that way. They had to not only be utterly transformed and become like Christ, but they had to also persevere in representing him in this culture that was like this current, always pushing them back where they came.
And so Paul tells Titus that he needs to order the lives of this church so that they disciple one another and grow up and represent God to this culture around them. We see this, as Paul says in Titus 2.1, he gives a command to Titus. He says, you need to teach what accords to sound doctrine.
When you teach what accords to sound doctrine, but then down in verse 10, he gives the reason for all of these things that he's teaching, all this doctrine. He says, it's so that in everything you may adorn the doctrine of God. So why is Titus to teach the sound doctrine? It's so that in everything they adorn the doctrine of God.
Sound doctrine is to adorn the doctrine of God. That means that we are to live lives that proves the excellency and the glory and the superiority of the God that this doctrine is telling us about. Doctrine does not end with just knowing some words.
It's a lens to look through and see the glory of God through it and then live that out and display that before the world. Now this all sounds good, but we come back to the same problem, don't we? It sounds kind of impossible, maybe not for some of you young people, but I think for us old, honest people. We know that it is hard to change, as exciting as that is.
We are like that truck charging up this small hill, hoping to get somewhere in a mud that's just not going to hold us. We're spinning our wheels, sinking down. Well, Paul knew that Titus was going to need a solid path to lead this church on if they were going to be a people that God called them to be.
He knew that hard work and philosophy and discipline, a cheery attitude, guilt, social media, pride, self-help books, that none of them were going to work. None of them would help him because they all, all those things rely upon what? They rely upon me, don't they? That's what they all rely upon. And my friend, you and I, we are not a solid foundation.
You and I are more like that wet, slippery mud. So Paul writes this passage to help Timothy, Titus rather, to give the Church of Christ this solid path. And this path means from moving away from trusting and proving ourselves and on to just trusting and proving Christ.
And I want you to just have that dichotomy in your mind because we do all the things we do for one of those two reasons. We're either trusting and proving us or we're trusting and proving Christ. And Paul lays all the instructions that he gives in Titus upon this one foundation.
And I think it's interesting that in this case, Paul is really writing Titus because he wants them to live godly lives. That's the purpose of the book, that this church would know how to live and order itself. But he knows that it has to rest that upon this foundation.
And this foundation really begins with these two appearances of grace. Look at verse 11. Paul says, for the grace of God has appeared.
So all of this instruction, all of this ordering of our lives, here's the foundation for the grace of God has appeared. Bringing salvation to all people, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age, waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ. Brothers and sisters, this is the solid path that he's given us to walk on, the appearance of grace.
I want to give you another image to hold in your mind as we're working through these verses. Imagine, again, the same muddy, slippery, wet clay, but this time you're trying to walk up a hill. And it's raining, and it's cold, it's 38 degrees, you're wet, and this path is muddy.
You want to get up that hill. What is it you need to successfully reach the top? Well, you need two things. You're going to need solid footing to push off, and you're going to need something that you want to get up that hill enough that you are willing to go and do it.
You're going to need a solid footing to push off of, a foundation, and you're going to need the hope of something you actually want at the top. So, I want you to imagine that at the top of the hill there's a house, and you can see through the window this yellow glowing light of a fireplace. And you can see the smoke coming up from it, and you can smell the wood fire.
Obviously, I'm using images that I love. For me, that's an inviting image. I don't like to be cold and wet.
That's why I moved to Uganda. Not really, but God does sometimes give us those things, right? I don't like being 38 degrees weather while I'm wet and damp and cold and falling in the mud. And I can just imagine wanting to get up to that house where it's dry and warm and welcoming, and there's a fire.
You need these two things. And the Christian life is just like walking up this hill. You need a solid foundation with which to push off so you can make progress up the hill.
And you also need something that you want. That something is called hope. So, Paul organizes this whole passage around these two appearances of grace.
You have the two footholds that will give you a solid foundation. The foundation and the hope that we have to move forward. Two appearances of grace.
The first one is something that has appeared in the past, and the other one is something that will appear. We have grace that has appeared. We have grace that will appear.
And both of these references to grace are speaking of Jesus Christ himself. Once has already happened. Jesus came to this earth.
He humbled himself and became like us. He lived the life that you and I should have lived, and he died the death that you and I deserve to die for us. That was his life.
And then God raised him from the dead. That was the first appearance of grace. There's another appearance that's coming.
It's not here yet. It's in the future. It's not happened, but it's going to be good when it does.
This first foothold of grace that has appeared, Paul says that it's doing a few things. He says that it actually does two things. It saves us and it trains us while we wait for the appearance of grace to come.
So, this grace that has appeared, as I said, is the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. And this grace saves you and it trains you. So, the first thing it does is it saves us.
And this salvation is the foundation that we stand upon and we rest in. And Jesus has already done that. That means that you and I don't have to justify ourselves anymore.
Jesus already lived the life that we failed to live. He already died the death that we should have died if we are in him. He deserves the well done, my good and faithful servant, from his father.
You and I do not. Jesus took all the judgment that we should have received. He did not deserve the fruit of our rebellion, but he took it upon himself anyway.
This some people call the great exchange. That God has, that Christ, Jesus Christ, has taken all of our sin and everything that our sin deserved upon himself and then gave us his righteousness and everything that his righteousness deserved. What this means, this is true and it is true, it means that all we have left is to live by faith.
There's nothing left to justify about ourselves. I can't justify myself, but Jesus can. Jesus can justify me because of his life.
So, I'm going to stand with him. I'm going to stand on his life, trying to justify ourselves, trying to prove ourselves. It's just like sitting in a cage.
Jesus' life must be our justification. So, we've been saved by grace and we're standing on this grace, but this same grace that saved us is also doing something for us now. And he says here that it's training us.
I want you to think about that. The same grace that saves you is the same grace that trains you. Jesus did not save us to simply leave us living wicked lives.
He saved us so that we could have the foundation to start walking up that hill. So, Paul turns to what this great grace brings us to do now, which is to train and to wait. Look at what he says in verse 12 towards the end of it.
He says, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in this present age, waiting for our blessed hope. So, Paul is describing the life that we live if we stand upon this grace in Christ. And what it looks like is it looks like us doing two things.
We're training and we're waiting. We're training and we're waiting. Training, as you know, think about what training is.
It's preparing for something to do in the future, isn't it? You're putting off your comfort and the realization of yourself in the moment in order to get something better in the future. You're trying to improve something so that you can accomplish something in the future. It involves putting aside comfort and reward now for something better in the future, and it involves a lot of of waiting, doesn't it? I want you to think a minute about an Olympics race.
If you're training to run in the Olympics, you put a lot of effort training over and over, day after day, time after time. Why? So that at a particular moment in the future, you're ready. So, we stand upon Christ.
Rather, if we stand upon Christ, let me say that again. We stand upon Christ the moment, let me say that one more time. I was not understanding my own notes.
If we stand upon Christ, then we are waiting for Christ. That's what I want to say. If we stand upon Christ, it means we are waiting for Christ.
This means that the Christian life is preparation for seeing Jesus. Now, look at what Paul says this training is all about, because he describes the training as well. Paul says that training involves two things.
It involves renouncing, and it involves living. Training is renouncing, and it's living. That means that a life standing upon this foundation of grace does these two things.
If your life is standing upon the grace of Christ, then it means you're doing those two things as well. You are standing, or you are rather renouncing and living. To renounce is to deny something, right? To put off something.
And Paul says that we renounce our ungodliness, the ungodliness in our lives, and we renounce worldly passions. Passions are those desires. Worldly passions are desires that are for things that match up with what the world wants.
Money, and power, and comfort, and self-rule, things like that. One way of putting this is to say that if we renounce our life, to renounce these things in our life is to tell the truth about God. If we renounce a life, it's to renounce those things that pretend that God is not really there.
I want you to think about your life and all the ungodly things that you do. What do they really do in the end? They really testify that God is not who he says he is, isn't it? They really say that I need this money in any way I can get it because God is not going to take care of me. I have to lash out at you because, frankly, God just is not big enough, and God's not been good enough to me.
I sometimes struggle with being depressed, and it's one of the biggest struggles in my life because when I'm down in that place, it is very easy for me to live a life that lies about God because there's not a moment in my life, not the smallest moment in my life, that I have not received grace upon grace, that I have not received far more abundantly than I ever could imagine deserving. And no matter how much I feel down and struggle, I need to tell the truth. And so we renounce, but we don't just renounce.
We also have to what? We have to live. We're not just putting off ungodliness, but we have to live godly lives. We positively live, and he describes this as self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in this present age.
Self-controlled lives that are oriented towards God and his agenda to tell the truth about who he is. And Paul says that's what we do in this present time. We train by renouncing and living, and we wait, and we wait.
I don't know about you, but waiting is not something I like to do. Anybody here like to wait? I don't like to wait. The only thing that we wait for is something we really want, and if you don't really want Christ, you're not going to be willing to wait for him.
But a child of God, their lives, our lives, is spent and defined by waiting. I want you to think back to that illustration of the Olympic race. Think about, I think it's amazing, but when you're training, I was going to say we're training, but I've never trained for the Olympics.
When one is training for the Olympics, you're working really hard for that singular moment. The whole time you're training, all year round, you're doing it for that one moment when the gun goes off. It's all what? It's all waiting, isn't it? Waiting for that one moment when it all comes together to make sense.
That's what you're hoping for, and it's the same for the Christian life. We are waiting for what we really want, and Paul calls this our blessed hope. That's what we're waiting for.
We're waiting for our blessed hope, and this blessed hope is what gives us our second solid foundation to stand upon. Look at verse 13. Waiting for our blessed hope, the appearance of the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all unlawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works.
So our first solid foundation is what Christ has done, and the second one is the hope of what Christ will do, what he will appear again. Brothers and sisters, consider that our lives are defined by waiting, not getting now. Yes, I've said the word waiting many, many times on purpose because I want you to just wrap your mind and meditate on this idea that we are waiting, that waiting isn't a problem.
It's what we do. We wait. We don't get now.
We're not going to see our whole lives fulfilled in its fullest now. It's coming. This moment of your life does not define you.
It's not about you. Your fullest life is yet to come. This is training.
Training is preparation. So don't live your life trying to define yourself now. That is another way of saying don't continuously try to justify yourself.
We are preparing to see Jesus again. Listen to what Paul says in Colossians chapter 3 verse 1. He says to look to things above. All right, set your mind on things above.
Make your agenda and your effort Christ and his agenda. He says, if then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth.
For you have died and your life is hidden with Christ and God. And when Christ who is your life appears, then you will appear with him in glory. Your life is hidden with Christ and it will appear when you see him.
So if we are to stand upon this foundation, there's something that better be there. So we have the foundation of Christ who has come and we have the foundation of the Christ who will come. The appearance that has happened and the appearance that will happen.
But there's something that needs to hold these two things together and that is that Jesus had better really be worth it. Jesus had better be worth it. None of this works if Jesus is not worthy.
And you know what the good news is? Jesus is more worthy than you can ever imagine. He deserves it all. Everything that he has called us to walk through, everything he is doing with us, everything that he asked you to trust him in, he's worthy of it all.
Let's look at verse 13 again. Waiting for our blessed hope, that is Jesus, the appearance of the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ, who gave himself up for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and purify for himself a people for his own possession. Jesus is worth it.
He is worthy because he has stood in your place. He is worthy because he stood in your place and he won. He redeemed you from slavery to lawlessness and eternal destruction.
And Jesus is worthy because he alone is able to transform you, to give you that solid foundation to push off of. Jesus is worthy to be your king because he is the king of kings and the lord of lords. He is seated at the right hand of the father and God has said to him, well done my good and faithful servant.
And God has put all things under his feet and Jesus always keeps his promises. He is always faithful. Jesus is worthy because of what he has done.
Jesus is worthy because of what he is doing. He is worthy because of what he will do. He is simply worthy because of who he is.
And so whatever God has asked you to walk through, whatever life he's given you to display his glory through, to prove his worthy, he is worthy of that life. I just heard somebody say that. I have to give credit.
Somebody said that whatever you're walking through Jesus is worthy of your life. And that is so true. He's worthy of it.
Jesus is the goal of your life so belong to him and live for him. So we have this solid foundation of his appearances that he's given us and he is worthy to be that solid foundation and finally he is also the one who creates fruit through the faith in Christ's value and worth. Look at verse 15.
Actually let me start, let me go here. Verse 15 he says, no let's start in 14. Who gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession who were zealous for good works.
Zealous for good works. God creates a people through his work who are zealous for good works, who do the works that he's created them to do. See Christ is the only footing that's going to hold you.
Nothing else will do and that's why he ends this section with such urgency. He commands Titus saying, declare these things, exhort and rebuke with all authority that no one disregard you. Everything that Paul wants Titus to do in Crete, all of it is going to stand on this one foundation.
He's not motivating himself or them by anything else. Not guilt, not power, not organization, none of it. It's all based upon the appearance of grace in Jesus Christ.
The appearance that has happened in the appearance that will happen. So this means that we live our lives to prove the superiority of Jesus Christ. That is why we live.
We have no other purpose. We stand upon the grace of Christ to prove the excellencies of Christ. To prove that he's right and we stand upon that alone.
If we stand upon the excellencies of ourselves, what are we saying? What are we proving? We're trying to prove what? Ourselves. You can only stand upon one or the other. You either stand upon and do the righteous works, try to be righteous in order to prove Christ or you try to be righteous in order to prove yourself.
And I would ask you to take a minute and think about your life. How do you motivate yourself? What do you do that gets you to actually move and to act and to do the things you think you need to do? Do you use guilt? Do you use pride? Do you use it or is it just Christ and what he's done? Is it that you long to see him again? I can't wait to see my Jesus and I can't believe what he's done for me. And I can trust him.
Think about the freedom. Think about the freedom that comes when we can trust in Christ righteousness alone. We don't have to hide.
What can you do to me? What can you ruin me in my life's purpose if I stand upon Christ righteousness? Can you dig up dirt on me? No, you can dig up dirt but you're just proving my point. The more you shovel dirt on here, the more my point comes clear. If God can save a wretch like me, he can save you too.
It's freedom. It changes everything. We want to prove Christ instead of ourselves and show that Jesus is worthy and not us.
This is what we need to lean on in our lives and have this mindset to show the worthiness of Christ. Paul says in 2 Corinthians 3 that the life of that church, their lives are like living letters being written by Christ to the world to display Christ and to be a letter to the world about the goodness of Christ. And I think that's true of you and me.
Whatever God has given you to walk through, whatever he's given you to grow through, to struggle through, all of this is a living letter being written not just for you but for the whole world to see that Jesus is worthy and good. I want to come back to our hill illustration. We're walking up the hill.
We need a solid foundation and the first solid footing that gets us on the right path is going to be what Christ has done on the cross. Living the life that you should have lived, dying the death you should have died, but being raised again and the Father saying, well done my good and faithful servant. He's done it.
You can stand upon that foundation but there's also what Christ will do. He is coming again, your blessed hope. Those two things we can hold on to and then as we begin walking, that walking is a training and waiting.
We are training by renouncing and living, renouncing and living and then we wait for our King of Kings and our Lord of Lords, preparing for our true life that will begin when we see Christ again. Christ is worthy of all these things. So brothers and sisters, if we want to gain traction in our lives, we want to become the people who are zealous of good works the way that God has called us to do that, we need to stand upon the grace of Christ and nothing else.
And at the heart of standing upon the grace of Christ, it means we stop justifying ourselves and we begin doing things to simply show that Jesus is right. In fact, that's the whole point of the church, isn't it? Paul says that he is a missionary and one of the passages that actually brought me to the mission field was Ephesians 3.10 where Paul says he's a missionary so that through the church the manifold wisdom of God would be displayed to the principalities and powers in the heavenly places. We're showing to the universe that Jesus is right and he's good.
Let's pray. Father, we thank you for the glory of your Son. Your glory, the glory of your Son, the glory of the Spirit, it's just amazing that you would love people like us and thank you that you've given us a way to stop having to justify ourselves and just display the goodness and the rightness of Jesus Christ.
We ask forgiveness for how much we have done, how much effort we have exerted simply to prove ourselves and we ask you not only to forgive us but to place us on that solid foundation so we can live simply to show how glorious you are. Thank you for being glorious like that. Thank you for being glorious and worthy of all of it.
Pray these things in your name.