Grace
Notes
Transcript
Recap last week being about corporate involvement, the big picture, and our Kingdom citizenship… This week I want to dial in to something more personal and more intimate… This week is about what is or is not happening in you on a personal level.
11 For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people,
12 training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age,
13 waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ,
14 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.
Context
The author of this letter has just spent the majority of two chapters giving instructions about life, going from role to role and explaining how each should act in a 1st Century Roman culture…
He gives all this instruction, then explains, I’m instructing you to live like this because the “Grace of God has appeared…”
In other words, we live like we do BECAUSE grace appeared, bringing salvation.
Often in discussions about the Gospel, grace is a central theme, and rightly so. Grace is the unmerited favor of God toward us…
It is Grace that brought salvation according to verse 11.
11 For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people,
8 For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, 9 not a result of works, so that no one may boast.
23 for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, 24 and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus,
Grace is the favor of God, it is God’s lovingkindness toward you, and it is His help for you…
8 And God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that having all sufficiency in all things at all times, you may abound in every good work.
In other words, you about because Grace abounds in you… You produce good works because of Grace, empowered by grace..
In his description of how the gifts of the Spirit are distributed, the biblical author says,
6 Having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them…
So Grace is not just a passive element in our lives, it is the power of God given to us in His favor..
It is also a source of strength:
1 You then, my child, be strengthened by the grace that is in Christ Jesus,
Not only is grace all that, but it is also training… Look back at where we started in Titus:
11 For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people,
12 training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age,
According to this passage Grace trains us in two things:
Grace trains us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions.
Grace trains us to live self controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age.
How unfortunate it is that so many use this unmerited favor, this Grace from God as a pass rather than as power…
“Grace covers it” “God knows my heart”
There was a group in the 1st century called the Nicolaitans and they taught that because of Grace, you could live how you wanted it didn’t matter what you ate or drank, and sexual immorality was just a part of life..
In other words, Grace covers it.
But it was about this practice that Jesus said,
6 Yet this you have: you hate the works of the Nicolaitans, which I also hate.
For Jesus to hate anything is a huge deal and Jesus hates the compromise of living a life of sin and calling it grace…
Grace isn’t an excuse for sin, it is empowerment to conquer sin.
Grace is not for us to flirt with the line, it is the power to walk away from the line completely.
But in order to walk in this kind of Grace, we have to walk in the way Jesus describes:
23 And he said to all, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.
We have a romanticized picture of what it means to take up the cross daily, but when someone in the first century saw a prisoner walking with his cross, it was a one-way trip… There was no coming back from that.
They were headed to die.
Nobody carried the cross and came back.
We might say it like this, “Dead man walking”
That phrase originated for prisoners on death row when they would walk the isle to their execution… dead man walking…
To take up our cross is to crucify our wants and desires, denying ourselves, and following after Him…
And when we make that decision, He empowers us with His grace to walk the walk…
But rather than take up the cross of denial and death to self, we have those who fly the banner of Christian, but employ what the Christian author Bonhoeffer called “cheap grace”,
Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves.
Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession…
Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ living and incarnate.
He contrasts this with costly grace:
Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ.
It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life.
It is costly because it condemns sin, and grace because it justifies the sinner.
Above all, it is costly because it cost God the life of His Son… and what has cost God much cannot be cheap for us.
If we live a life of sin and tack grace on to it, we cheapen the cost of that grace, but when we recognize it was the most costly gift we have ever been offered, why would we ever cheapen the gift by disregarding it?
But in my opinion there are other ways the grace of God has been cheapened…
We read about one in Rev. 3:15-16
15 “ ‘I know your works: you are neither cold nor hot. Would that you were either cold or hot!
16 So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth.
This is the cheapening of grace by complacency…
Complacency can take on different masks…
I’m just so busy I don’t have time to be involved… but you have time to watch Netflix 2 hours a day…
I don’t have time to read my bible… but the average phone shows 4-5 hours of screen time per DAY, most of it scrolling…
I’m too tired to pray at night… but i’ll watch one more episode..
I can’t commit to serving on a team, but you never miss a ballgame…
I just can’t afford to give… because I have 17 streaming subscriptions, 5 credit cards, a boat payment and two new cars in the driveway…
A complacent faith is like a pickup parked in the driveway with a full tank of gas, but left to idle. It never gets put in gear, but it still runs through all the gas eventually.
All the potential to take you somewhere, to do something productive, but never put into gear…
Complacency is a danger for us as individuals because it often doesn’t start as apostasy. It doesn’t look like us waking up one day and doing nothing…
It starts slowly and we drift into a place where we haven’t really rejected Christ, but we stop being moved by Him…
This I think was the sin of the church at Ephesus when Jesus told them…
2 “ ‘I know your works, your toil and your patient endurance, and how you cannot bear with those who are evil, but have tested those who call themselves apostles and are not, and found them to be false.
3 I know you are enduring patiently and bearing up for my name’s sake, and you have not grown weary.
4 But I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first.
Can I ask you, “What is grace worth to you?”
If it’s a nice addon, something you put on a shelf and look at every now and then, maybe you even have a happy memory about it when you do remember, but it lives there on that shelf, or like the pickup in the driveway…
Maybe you’ve lost the love you had at first…
Look what He says,
3 I know you are enduring patiently and bearing up for my name’s sake, and you have not grown weary.
In other words, you’ve been faithful… you’re showing up every week… you’re going through the motions… You’ve got the routine down…
But has your love and passion dwindled down?
Has the fire that once burned so brightly in you dimmed to just embers?
If it has, it may be time to listen to the words told to Timothy:
6 For this reason I remind you to fan into flame the gift of God, which is in you…
Maybe it is you need a fresh encounter with God!
Maybe you need to repent of the apathy that’s set up in your heart that will lead to complacency if you let it…
Look at what Isaiah experienced when He saw God…
1 In the year that King Uzziah died I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up; and the train of his robe filled the temple.
2 Above him stood the seraphim. Each had six wings: with two he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew.
3 And one called to another and said: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory!”
4 And the foundations of the thresholds shook at the voice of him who called, and the house was filled with smoke.
5 And I said: “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!”
Isaiah has an encounter with God and that encounter reveals the holiness and righteousness of God, But look what happens in the next three verses
6 Then one of the seraphim flew to me, having in his hand a burning coal that he had taken with tongs from the altar.
7 And he touched my mouth and said: “Behold, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away, and your sin atoned for.”
8 And I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” Then I said, “Here I am! Send me.”
Remember how Isaiah described his own shortcomings, “A man of unclean lips” so when God cleanses his lips, this is grace in action, and what’s the immediate result of that action?
HERE AM I! SEND ME!
We need an encounter with almighty God!
We need the fire of God stirred within us again!
To those who were guilt of living a life of sin and calling it covered by Grace, Jesus said, “REPENT!”
And to those who were luke warm, He said be zealous and repent!
And to those who had become apathetic, allowing their first love to dwindle he says, Remember from where you have fallen and REPENT!
No matter your state, no matter where you are on this spectrum, the answer is the same, a heart lifted up in repentance to God!
Will you answer God’s call today and repent? Repent of your sin, repent of your complacency, repent of your apathy?
