Titus 2:11-15 - Looking Back and Living Now

Hopefully you have a copy of the scripture.

If you don't, you can find it there in the Pew Bible, page 1058.

Titus chapter 2, we're continuing on through this epistle.

Titus 2 · chapter mention

Text for this morning is Titus chapter 2, verses 11 through 15.

Titus 2:11–15

Here's God's word.

For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, instructing us to deny godlessness and worldly lust, and to live in a sensible, righteous, and godly way in the present age, while we wait for the blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ.

He gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to cleanse for himself a people for his own possession, eager to do good works.

Proclaim these things, encourage and rebuke with all authority.

Let no one disregard you.

Let's seek God's help again.

Oh Lord, we need grace.

We need the grace of Jesus Christ.

We need his presence here among us.

We need the grace to understand these words and not just to understand these words, but to apply these words to our lives, to our hearts.

And we know the Spirit Himself is the author of this book and the very best applier of Scripture.

So, Spirit of God, help us as we consider your word today.

In Jesus' name, amen.

We've all known people who always seem to be looking backward.

They'll tell you all about where they used to live, what they used to do.

We've also known people who always seem to be looking ahead.

They'll tell you the plans they have for the future, the things that they hope to accomplish.

Sometimes older people are more prone to looking backward.

And other times, younger people are sometimes more prone to looking ahead.

What about our lives in the here and now?

Well, the the people that like to look back will say, if you don't know where I'm from and what's happened to me in the past, you can't really know what I'm all about right now.

And the people who love to look ahead will say, Well, we don't have a goal in mind.

If we don't know where we're going, life in the present doesn't really make any sense.

Both of those perspectives are valuable.

Both of them are necessary in some sense for living our lives in the day-to-day, in the here and now.

But here's our problem.

We're prone to fixating on what we've accomplished in the past, or maybe even how we've failed in the past.

We're prone to fixating on what we are going to do in the future.

The Bible calls us to center our heart on what God has done in the past and what God will do in the future.

Look at our passage.

Verse 11 says, the grace of God has appeared.

Something's already happened.

He's already accomplished salvation.

And it's God's grace, it's not us.

Verse 14 begins, He gave Himself.

Christ did something in the past.

Along with that past activity of God, we have His future activity.

Verse 13 says, While we wait for the blessed hope, the appearing of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ.

That's talking about his second coming.

So it actually hasn't happened yet.

He will return in power and glory.

According to our passage, God's work in the past means everything for our lives right now.

And God's work in the future means everything for our lives right now.

We've got two weeks to cover these verses, verses 11 to 15.

The title for the message this morning is Looking Back and Living Now.

And the title for next week's message is preview, Looking Ahead and Living Now.

In order for us to live for God now, we have to embrace what He has done in the past.

Let me say that again.

In order for us to live for God now, we have to embrace what He's done in the past.

Two encouragements for you this morning.

Look back to God's grace and live now in light of God's grace.

First encouragement: look back to God's grace.

Verse 11 says, the grace of God has appeared.

Grace is God's unmerited favor.

It's Him giving us what we don't deserve.

He sends His rain on the just and the unjust.

We say grace before our meals because even food is an undeserved gift from God.

He sends breezes through open windows.

That's God's general grace.

But here in verse 11, Paul's talking about something more specific.

He's talking about a specific revelation of the grace of God.

And that grace isn't a thing, it's a person.

The grace of God is revealed supremely in the coming of Jesus Christ the Son into the world to bring salvation.

John says he came full of grace and truth.

That's the Lord Jesus Christ.

He came as the way, the truth, and the life.

Whenever you need more, you just go get another scoop.

There's something to that.

God's grace is inexhaustible.

It's sweet to those of us who have experienced it, but it doesn't tell the whole story.

God's grace is not just leniency.

God's grace is not a giant pixie stick.

It's a person, the person of his son, the Lord Jesus Christ, when we experience grace in that saving way.

We've got to spend time meditating on the undeserved kindness and the glory of Christ appearing in history.

It's an amazing thing that God could take on human flesh.

God could come through a woman.

Spurgeon reminds us: though creation may be a majestic organ of praise, it cannot reach the compass of the golden canticle, the incarnation, word became flesh.

There is more melody in Jesus in the manger than in the whole sublime oratorio of the creation.

John 1, verse 18 No one has ever seen God, the one and only Son who is Himself God and is at the Father's side.

John 1:18

Grace comes through the person of Jesus Christ.

And the passage tells us when we look back to grace, we see that grace saves all kinds of people.

Verse 11, you can see that there.

God's grace is incredibly generous.

No one deserves to be saved.

And yet God offers salvation to all.

The good news is for everyone.

Whoever comes to me, Jesus says, I will never cast him out.

If you're here this morning, you're part of that whoever.

If you haven't trusted, you can trust in Christ and find grace and salvation, not from your own works, but from his glorious work alone.

And although it's true that God's grace is freely offered to all, it's not true that every single person who has ever lived will experience saving grace and find eternal life.

Second Thessalonians chapter 1 speaks of those who don't respond to the gospel, and it says they will pay the penalty of eternal destruction from the Lord's presence and from his glorious strength on the day he comes to be glorified by his saints and to be marveled at by all those who believe.

2 Thessalonians 1 · chapter mention

You must trust and receive grace.

Not every individual will be saved.

Yet all classes of people will experience salvation.

And that's especially Paul's focus here.

He's just been talking earlier in the chapter about older women, younger women, bondservants, masters, older men, younger men.

He's going to talk in the next chapter about rulers, authorities, citizens.

Every class of people is reached by the Lord Jesus Christ.

He didn't come just for Jew and not for Gentile.

He didn't come for women and not for men.

He didn't come for this tax bracket or that tax bracket.

Every kind of person needs saving grace, and Jesus accomplishes salvation for all kinds of people.

That's good news for us.

It's good news in a world that we live in that sometimes tends to accentuate and set different classes of people over against each other.

This gender is set against that gender.

This ethnicity is set against that ethnicity.

This age group is set over against that age group.

Some of you, you go into the city and you come back a little frustrated.

All the advertisements and the billboards, everything is all about youth, youth, youth, youth.

They don't care about older people at all.

And the things that are geared for older people, it's like they just want to make us somehow feel and look younger.

Like old is this terrible category.

I know it can feel like companies don't care about older people.

It can feel that way.

Here's the truth: they don't care about older people.

You're already set in your ways.

You're gonna buy what you want to buy, you like what you like.

They don't really care about you.

That's that's the bottom line.

That's not the Lord Jesus Christ.

He came for four-year-olds and for 94-year-olds.

The spirit's at work in John the Baptist in his mother's womb in some mysterious way, and the Lord doesn't abandon you no matter how old you are.

You might have heard the story of a man named Luke Short.

He grew up in Britain, and as a teenager, he sat under the preaching of John Flavelle.

This is a few hundred years ago.

Not a story in the Bible, but a story that's reported as a true story by the publisher.

He came to travel and eventually came to America, came to New England, settled down as a farmer, this Luke Short.

God gave him longevity as a 100-year-old man, as the story goes, he's sitting in his field.

He remembers a sermon he heard when he was 15 years old.

That if you die apart from Christ, you'll be cursed.

And he turned from his sins and trusted in Christ.

God saved him.

John Flavelle was long dead by that point, the preacher from his teenage years.

So, as a side note, let that be an encouragement to you.

You don't know when you testify of the grace of the Lord to somebody, you never know how God might use it in their lives.

God's grace in Christ saves all kinds of people, comes with the person of Christ.

And the text here in Titus tells us that grace redeems us.

It's another more specific way of how it saves us.

Verse 14.

Mark 10, 45, even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many.

1 Peter 1, 18 to 20.

You know that you were redeemed from your empty way of life, not with perishable things like silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of an unblemished and spotless lamb.

To redeem is to buy something back.

Slaves in this time could be redeemed out of the marketplace.

They could have their freedom purchased for them.

The Lord uses this language and imagery when he speaks of his rescue of Israel from Egypt.

He redeemed them out of Egypt.

He purchased them.

Israel was sinning against their spiritual husband, the Lord.

And so Hosea has to enact this kind of visual parable that reflects in some way Israel's sin.

And he's and he marries a woman that would prove to be a prostitute.

Chapter three of Hosea begins this way: The Lord said to me, Go again.

This is after they've had children, some time has passed.

Go again, show love to a woman who is loved by another man as and is an adulteress, just as the Lord loves the Israelites, though they turn to other gods.

So I bought her for fifteen shekels of silver and nine bushes of barley.

I said to her, You're to live with me many days, you must not be promiscuous or belong to any man, and I will act the same way towards you.

Then it goes on afterward, the people of Israel will return and seek the Lord their God and David their king.

So apparently this woman had left, Gomez, the woman had left Hosea, and he has to go buy back his own wife.

That's difficult.

But he does it, he redeems her.

And the Lord says, I'm gonna do that with my people, I'm gonna buy them back.

When's the last time you just stopped for five minutes and said, Let me reflect on what has the Lord redeemed me from?

That's one of the reasons we take time each week for our confession of sin.

We want to just pause and remember what has God actually rescued me out of amazing grace.

How sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me.

Grace buys us back, grace also cleanses us.

Look again at verse 14.

He gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to cleanse for himself a people for his own possession.

When Hosea bought Gomer back, there's a sense in which she's she's still a dirty person.

She hadn't changed overnight.

But the Lord goes above and beyond to cleanse us.

And he gives another picture of that with the nation of Israel.

So many pictures in the Old Testament of spiritual truths in our own lives.

Ezekiel 16.

The word of the Lord came to me, son of man, confront Jerusalem with her detestable practices.

Once again, it's a nation sinning against God, just like we're all sinners against the Lord.

And then Ezekiel is told, Your father was an Amorite, your mother a Heathite.

And as for your birth, goes on, on the day you were born, you weren't washed clean with water.

No one cared enough about you to do one of those things out of compassion for you.

You were thrown into the open field and despised on the day you were born.

Listen to this.

But I passed by you and saw you thrashing around in your blood.

And I said to you, as you lay in your blood, live.

Yes, I said to you, live, and I made you thrive like the plants of the field.

You're like an abandoned, bloody baby.

No one's there to clean you up.

I cleaned you up, I adopted you.

What God did for the nation of Israel, He's done in an even deeper way in our own hearts by cleansing us from the defilement of sin.

That is grace.

Ephesians 5.

Christ loved the church and gave himself for her to make her holy, cleansing her.

There's our same words we have here in Titus, cleansing her with the washing of water by the word.

He did this to present the church to himself in splendor without spot or wrinkle or anything like that, but a holy and blameless.

I belong to the Lord.

Oh, I am not my own.

I belong to the Lord.

I'm gonna press on to living now.

Look back at God's grace.

Think about the incarnation.

Consider what God has brought you out of.

Just sit with grace.

And as you do that, you'll want to walk with your Savior each and every day.

The more and more we consider what God has done in the past, and the more we look at that subject in Scripture, we'll see how often in Scripture the Bible connects God's past grace with our present living.

And you can see that now in the passage as well.

So look back to God's grace, but live now in light of God's grace.

Verse number 11 begins with a for.

For the grace of God has appeared.

He's connecting God's grace in the past in Christ with what he's just been talking about.

Well, what is that?

He's just got finished telling bondservants, submit to your masters.

He just got finished telling older men, younger men, this is how you live.

Be sober-minded.

Older women, teach younger women to love their husbands, to love their families.

You could submit to your employer because you're a recipient of grace.

You can love your family today because God's grace has already come to you in the past.

You see those connection points.

Verse 14 gives us the same pattern.

Christ gave himself, he redeemed us.

So the conclusion is we should be eager to do good works according to verse 14.

We're not saved by our good works.

But we are saved for good works.

We've got to get the order there.

The order's critical.

If we say that we're saved by our works, we're confusing the gospel.

But the Lord has redeemed us for good works.

We should never conclude that God doesn't care at all about good works.

Romans 6, 1, shall we continue in sin that grace might abound?

By no means.

This book of Titus is at pains to urge on us the importance of good works and to connect that with our life in Christ.

Chapter 2, verse 7, you can look back.

Make yourself an example of good works.

Chapter 3, verse 1, look ahead a few verses.

Remind them to submit to rulers and authorities, to obey, to be ready for every good work.

Chapter 3, verse 8.

This saying is trustworthy.

I want you to insist on these things so that those who have believed in God might be careful to devote themselves to good works.

Chapter 3, verse 14 Let our people learn to devote themselves to good works for pressing need so that they will not be unfruitful.

True Christians should be known as those who preach grace more than anyone else, and those who love good works.

More than anyone else.

According to verse number 12, chapter 2, God's grace instructs us.

So, yes, there's an element of grace that's God's forgiveness.

Grace is also this power at work in us.

Christ Himself, through the Holy Spirit, lives within us if we know Him, and He has transformed us, and He is transforming us.

Some of your versions might say that it trains us or it teaches us.

There is no school like the Academy of God's grace.

And you can be a student of that academy, and we're all, if we know the Lord, lifelong students.

There's no teacher like the Lord's grace.

Let me give you an example.

Let's say that you adopt a 12-year-old boy from a war-torn country.

Bring him back.

You get the paperwork.

He's got your last name.

He's in your home.

And the first day he says, I just want to tell you, I'm going to work as hard as I can.

And hopefully, by the end of my life, you will be willing to adopt me into your family.

Say, no, no, no, no, you don't understand.

You're already adopted.

You're part of the family.

We love you.

You don't have to work and earn it.

And let's say the next day you come home and he's got a gun and he's cleaning it out.

He said, What are you doing?

Where did you get that?

And he says, Well, I'm hungry and I'm gonna go rob someone.

That's how they do it where I'm from.

No, no, no, that's not that.

No, no, no.

If you're hungry, just ask.

We'll give you food.

We love you.

Put that away.

Now let's fast forward 10 years.

Let's say you come home, he's on the couch, he's on YouTube, 22 years old.

Did I get the math there at 12 to 10, 22?

Yes.

And you say, What are you gonna do with your life?

He says, Well, I'm gonna be famous.

And you say, Well, how are you gonna be famous?

And he says, Well, I'm gonna complain a lot.

That's how they do it in this country.

You say, No, no, no, no, no, no.

Listen, go out and get a job, serve other people.

You're wanting your love to transform him and transform the way that he thinks.

That's what grace does.

Christ freely accepts us.

We're part of the family.

He provides all our needs, but he wants to transform us so that our passions, our desires will reflect his passions and his desires.

Not what we came out of, and not even first what's around us, but first and foremost, him.

Grace does two things here in the school of grace.

Only two tests.

You gotta say no to certain things, and you gotta say yes to certain things.

Look at verse 12.

Grace instructs us to deny godlessness and worldly lusts.

There's the no.

And to live in a sensible, righteous, and godly way in the present age.

There's the yes.

And do you see how this is present tense again?

Grace has come, it has appeared in Christ, but it's transforming our lives now because we're united to Christ, that we're gonna want to say no to ungodliness and say yes to godliness.

Grace, truly understood, doesn't give us liberty to do whatever we want.

It puts a power in us to actually be able to say no.

Those living apart from grace, they don't say no to the world.

Not from the heart, not consistently.

They're slaves of sin.

We were all there.

We're free.

We could we can say no by God's grace.

Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.

Everyone else is bowing down to the idol.

They're told you have to bow down.

They say, no, we can't.

Because we love and honor God.

It's not just about saying no.

Grace is not teaching us to be ornery people.

But we say no because we love the Lord so much.

For those of you who are married, you took a vow to forsake all others.

That's a lot of no's.

But it's for an amazing and glorious purpose so that you can say yes to your beloved one.

Verse 12 mentions how grace trains us to live godly lives, and then it further describes what that looks like to say yes to godliness, living sensibly, term we've seen before in Titus, thoughtfully and righteously, living according to God's rule and standard.

The word godly is not a word that's used an awful lot in our day and age, even among Christians.

It's a great word.

You find it there in scripture.

Sometimes I think that word is not used because people have a certain idea of what that is that's kind of negative or limited.

You know, sometimes people hear the word godly and they think, hmm, that must mean the more starch you put on your clothes, the godlier you are.

That's probably what it is.

And I mean, if you if you starch your underwear, that's like a super saint.

You're like godly to the next level.

Godliness is not austerity.

And if you if you use starch on your clothes, fantastic.

If you don't, fantastic.

It's not about that.

Godliness is loving God and loving the things that He loves.

Godliness is living the way God wants us to live.

It's a beautiful thing.

And our God is a God of holiness, He's a God of justice and righteousness.

He's not aloof, he's not austere in those negative ways.

He's a God that beautifully has in himself perfect justice and righteousness, perfect grace and mercy and love.

And the list goes on and on and on.

So if we're going to live godly lives, we have to look at this book and see what he loves and what he wants us to do.

We can't be looking to cosmopolitan or to Pixar for what God values.

We got to look in this book for what God values.

Let's pray that God's grace would be at work in our hearts so that we'd have a passion to love the mystery of godliness, that we'd have a passion to live like our Savior.

For those that come tonight, I'll maybe ask: what are some ways that we can say no to ungodliness and yes to godliness?

I'll leave you to think about how you can take this home.

But in your own life, how can you say no?

And how can you say yes?

In order to live for God now, we have to embrace what he's done in the past.

Look back to God's grace, live now in light of God's grace.

Next week we'll come to looking ahead and living now.

But I want to close with 1 Timothy 3.16 and go ahead and turn there if you would, please.

While pushing us to consider that theme in relation to Jesus himself and especially his coming into the world, just like the passage in Titus did.

1 Timothy 3, verse 16.

1 Timothy 3:16

And most certainly, the mystery of godliness is great.

And then look what Paul goes on to say.

He doesn't go on to say, Wow, that mother Teresa, how does she do it?

That pastor Doug, how does he do it?

Well, we do have godliness modeled by genuine Christians that we know and love in our lives, but he goes actually to the incarnation when he talks about godliness.

He that is Christ was manifested in the flesh.

You want to know what God is like?

Look to Jesus Christ.

Look to his appearing in the world, look to the way that he lived and act and talked and walked.

That's what godliness is.

Vindicated in the spirit, still speaking of Christ, seen by angels, preached among the nations, believed on in the world, taken up in glory.

Christ has shown us all that we need to see.

May He be our teacher throughout this week and the rest of our lives.

Let's pray.

Father, how glorious and kind you are to reveal yourself in Christ, to reveal undeserved favor in so many ways.

Lord, help us to take time to turn off distractions and to sit with your grace, to sit in the school of grace.

The grace that saves, that redeems, that cleanses, and the grace that training us right now to say no and to say yes.

We want our lives to be a glorious testimony of all of the yeses that we live before our Savior, the one who cleansed us with the washing of water through the Word, the one who gave Himself for us, the one who owns us.

We delight to be able to belong to Him.

And as we leave one another today, as we sing these songs and hear your words, would grace resound in our hearts all throughout this day.

We ask this in the name of Christ.

Amen.