Amazing Grace, Amazing Graciousness

Welcome to Summit Church at all of our campus locations. I want to begin this morning, this weekend, by having us acknowledge together how important this weekend is in the life of our nation every year. The third Sunday of January is what we call the sanctity of life Sunday. It was first established about 30 years ago to highlight the truth that every human being at all stages of his or her life is sacred, including those not yet born. In my lifetime, in my lifetime, more than 50 million children have been terminated by abortion.

Each of those represents not only the tragedy of a lost life, but a story of tragedy that affects everybody involved. This is never, never a time to condemn. It's a time to redeem. It's a time to give and receive grace. It's a time to give thanks to the church and to our community. At the same time, Monday is Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a day in which we remember the accomplishments that are made not only by Martin Luther King, but by many others who fought to bring justice to our society, and to recognize that all people are made equally in the image of God, regardless of their skin color.

Well, here we are 50 years later, having, by God's grace, enjoyed some progress in that dream, but we have yet to achieve the fullness of the dream of which Dr. King spoke. I hope that you see that these two observances are not in competition with one another. They both, in fact, confront us with the same reality, the reality that each human is made in the image of God, that each human life is precious, regardless of whatever stage they are in development, whatever culture they come from. Every life is precious to God in the simple human heart, which you and I have in us.

That simple human heart has a tendency to demean human life when it gets in the way of our own expediencies. So this is a time for us as the people of God to lead our culture in repentance, for us to repent not for their sin, but for ours, and to ask that God's kingdom come in our hearts, that we would regard life as precious, that we would be a picture of diversity, unity within diversity, and that God would use us as instruments of healing and peace. So at all of our campuses, could you bow your heads with me and let's, as the people of God, as a kingdom of priests, let's ask God. Father, we want to first acknowledge that there are many in our congregation who have felt the sting. God of both of these tragedies, there are some in our church that have been the victims of racial injustice.

There are some in our church that have been the perpetrators of racial injustice. And Father, this morning, we come to repent, we come to acknowledge Lord Jesus that we need you to create a unity in our congregation that reflects the diversity of the kingdom of God. God that we would be a people that are united by the fact that we have one problem, sin and one Savior, Jesus. We ask God that you use this church as an instrument of healing for racial reconciliation and harmony in our community. Father, we acknowledge that there are some who have been touched by this tragedy of abortion and this morning they are hurting. I pray that they would hear the fullness, the richness of the gospel that behold, you make all things new, that if anyone is in Christ, they're a new creation, old things are passed away. God, that you can take even tragedy and weave it into triumph. God, we pray that you would use our church to have courage to speak truth to power, to stand up for those who are weak, to voice, raise our voices for the oppressed in every sphere.

God, send healing to our nation in these areas. Let your kingdom come, let your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. And all God's people together in Jesus' name said, amen. Amen. Thank you. If you have a Bible, I want you to open it to the book of Titus chapter three, Titus chapter three.

We are in our third and final week of a very short series. We are doing to the book of Titus called Everyday Theology. As you're turning there, I'll tell you that several years ago, I read a book about being a Christian on a college campus.

And it asked one of the most honest and insightful questions that I had ever considered. And that question was this, listen, what do you do when you feel like you want your neighbor to go to hell? Randy Newman, the author, explained that many Christians feel a considerable amount of anger toward the cultural around them.

They feel angry at how they seem to constantly be portrayed in the media, how the other side seems to twist reality and get away with it. I'm watching a show right now with my wife. One of the characters on the show is a Christian politician. She is judgmental. She is mean. She's dumb.

She is a knuckle dragging Neanderthal. And nobody seems to object to the fact that she is presented this way. In fact, some of you feel like the more that a movie or a show does this, the more the critics seem to love it. Or when the news finds somebody to represent the evangelical Christian perspective after a tragedy. I don't know how, but they always seem to find that guy.

You know who I'm talking about? Oh, the reason a tornado came through here is because all the gay people and Democrats that now live in our society. And this is the Christian perspective.

And I'm like, how did they find that guy? Well, I have a church, the church I pastor has 9000 Christians that gather on the weekend. And I don't know that guy. I mean, you're probably here somewhere, you know, but but you don't make up the majority. You do not make up the prevalent.

Why didn't he talk to any of the other 8999 people here? A lot of Christians feel anger at always being presented this way. And by the way, I'm not saying that we're the victims of some awful persecution.

I'm just saying this is a feeling that we have of always having a hostile culture looking at us. You are tired of liberal professors rewriting history. You are tired of activist judges redefining morality. You're tired of liberal theologians rewriting the Bible. Or you hear a guy like Christopher Hitchens, who is acknowledged as one of the leading, the late Christopher Hitchens, acknowledged one of the the leading intellectuals in our society say this faith causes people to be more mean, more selfish, and perhaps above all, more stupid. And now this is a leading intellectual.

And you're like, he's talking about me. Is this group that I'm looking at right here this morning? Is this the group that is more mean and more selfish and more stupid than everybody else in the community? Randy Newman, the author of the book I was telling you about said, quote, many Christians appear angry in the media, because they are angry. And while we would never really voice this out loud, we have this attitude in our heart of well, it's okay, you'll get yours one day, you'll get yours one day, it's coming to you.

Is anybody by the way, tracking with this? Or is this like confessions of a pastor? I think you know exactly what I'm talking about. In Titus chapter three, Paul talks to a group of people that are in this situation. And he talks about how the gospel reshapes how we feel about people on the outside.

They are in a culture that was probably even worse than ours in this sense, they had been mistreated and misrepresent and outright persecuted. And so Paul talks to them about how you relate to people who dislike you who misrepresent you. He says this in verse one, remind them that is the believers to be submissive to rule the world. To be rulers and authorities, even ones that don't share your perspectives, to be obedient, to be ready for every good work, to speak evil of no one, to avoid quarreling, to be gentle and to show perfect courtesy toward all people. That's a key word there.

All people, not just Christians, not just people who are nice to you. You show it to everybody, especially your enemies. He tells them to disagree without dishonoring. A great example of this is in the movie that just came out, Selma, that depicts the life of the late Martin Luther King.

Here you got a guy representing a group in our country who had every right to be angry. But what you see in the movie is Dr. King leading people to be gentle and courteous in response, to return good for evil, not evil for evil, to be both submissive toward government and subversive at the same time, to disagree without dishonoring. That is the command that Paul gives. But I want you to watch what he does next, because this is so classic Paul, that once you learn this pattern, you will see it everywhere in Paul's writing. Verse three, what's the first word?

For or because. And then Paul is about to give one of the clearest, most concise explanations of the gospel found anywhere in all of his letters. Y'all, this is the key to interpreting all of Paul's teaching. Commands always flow out of gospel declarations.

They're never separated. It's not that we do these things, and that makes us better people, and God approves of us. It's that when we become aware of what God has done for us in Christ, then we become all of these ways that he is describing.

Martin Luther said it this way. Listen, imperatives in the Bible always follow indicative. Now, in case you hadn't been in English class in a while, and you just got this image of having to diagram sentences, which is in the third level of hell, then imperatives are commands to do.

Indicatives are statements of declaration. So, in other words, imperatives, what God commands us to do, always come out of indicative or declarations of what God has done. The way we say it here is, before the gospel tells you to behave or become, it tells you to behold. Because beholding is the way to become, and when you become, you will behave. Beholding makes your heart become righteous, and when you become righteous, you will do righteously. So we don't start with behave.

We don't even start with become. We start with behold the love of God given for you in the gospel, and that will make you become righteous, and then you will do righteously. So we will divide this message into two parts. We will divide it into the indicative and the imperative.

We'll look first at the indicative of what Paul declares to us about the gospel, and then from that we will see the imperatives of what he wants us to do in response. Verse 3, he starts the indicative with a description of us, and bad news, it is a really dismal one. Verse 3, 4, we ourselves were once foolish. We ourselves, you're not talking about people at Hollywood, you're not talking about people in the news media, he's talking about you. So everybody look at your neighbor right now, look at your neighbor and say, he's talking about you, you're foolish, okay? And they're looking back at you saying the same thing, you're the fool, he's talking about us.

Foolish is a word in Greek meaning ignorant and warped. Literally our hearts became spiritually stupid. One commentator says, we became moral morons. The apostle John says that we began to love darkness rather than light. The light looked dark, the dark looked light, right seemed wrong, wrong seemed right. Paul said in Romans 1.21 that we became twisted in our minds and disordered in our emotions. In other words, what we were supposed to love, we didn't love, and what we weren't supposed to love, we did love, and things we were supposed to love a lot, we only loved a little, and things we were supposed to love a little, we loved a lot. The way that Martin Luther would summarize Romans 1.21 is he says the human heart curved inward on itself. It was created to be outward toward God and others, but it curved inward in selfishness. We were once foolish, we were disobedient. It's not just that our morality got distorted, we disobeyed even those things we knew to be right. So we're not just foolish, we're also disobedient about what we do know to be right.

The way that Francis Schaeffer, who was a Christian defender of the faith that died about 50 years ago, he had a great way of describing this. He said imagine, when he was talking to people who weren't Christians, he said imagine when you get to the judgment seat one day that God reveals that there's always been this little invisible tape recorder around your neck. Now in case you don't remember what a tape recorder is, it's a little device that recorded stuff on it. Think of it like if you're doing a voice memo on Siri. Does that communicate? Say you had an app on your phone and the app was put there by God to run in the background, and here's the key, it only activated whenever you said the word ought.

So whenever you said you ought to, he ought to, they ought to, she ought to, and then it would record what you said and then turn off. Schaeffer said on judgment day, if all God did was play back your ought statements and then judge you by that, there's not a person in any religion anywhere on the planet that would survive that test. We are disobedient to the things that we know to be right. We are led astray.

That's his next word. Our hearts got into a condition that we were susceptible to deception. It's not that we were honestly tricked. We wanted to be tricked. It's like the person who wants to hate somebody else or already does hate somebody else and then finds a bunch of reasons to justify their hatred.

You know what I'm getting at there? People often want to blame their issue on those who influence them. Oh, I just hung out with the wrong crowd.

That was my downfall. Well, the reason you hung out with the wrong crowd is because you like the wrong crowd better than the right crowd. It's not that you hung out with the wrong crowd, it's that you were the wrong crowd. That's why you chose to make your friends the wrong crowd instead of the right crowd.

So don't blame the crowd, blame yourself. We were born with a disposition toward the wrong which makes us so deceivable. And we see this in our kids, don't we? Nobody gets up on a Saturday morning and their fifth grader has cleaned the entire house.

They're sitting there with their Bible open journaling saying, I need to surrender more of my life to the Lord. Right? No, as a parent, you get up and you're like, who set the backyard on fire? Don't point at your two month old sister. She could not have done that.

That had to have been you. Nobody had to teach my kids to lie. None of your kids taught my kids to lie.

I never set my kids to disrespect camp. They just got all that stuff naturally. Yes, others have influenced them negatively, but all that stuff comes right out of their hearts. We were slaves, that's his next phrase, to various passions. Our separation from God left a gap in our hearts that made us dependent on other things. Blaise Pascal famously described it by saying that the absence of God, the absence of the love of God left a God-shaped void, or literally in French, a vacuum.

Nature abhors a vacuum, so all of our lives are spent trying to put things into that vacuum to cover up what we lost when we lost the love of God. It's like drowning. When you drown, you don't die from holding your breath.

When you drown, what happens is you can't hold your breath anymore under water and so you breathe in water. The same thing happens spiritually. You were created to breathe in the glory and the love of God. When you are no longer doing that, your soul begins to crave other things and you have to breathe in something so just like the drowning man breathes in water, the sinful person breathes in idols. And they become slaves to passions. Y'all, the biggest lie in our culture, listen to this, the biggest lie in our culture is that rejecting God's laws leads to freedom.

It is exactly the opposite. When you reject God, you become addicted to or slaves to other passions. Lewis used the example that I've shared with you multiple times of the fish who wants to be free of the ocean and jumps out onto the shore. He's not free from the ocean.

At that point, he can no longer live. You and I were created to breathe in the glory of God. We spiritually cannot hold our breath. So when we do not have the love of God in the right place, we become slaves to any and everything else. It is the absence of the love of her Heavenly Father, for example, that makes the high school girl the slave of the attention of boys.

That's why we say many of them become serial daters, where there's never been any, you can't point to four collective days since middle school that they have not been in pursuit of or pursued by a boy. It is the college guy's sense of alienation from his Heavenly Father that makes him a slave to other people's opinions. You are created to hear, well done, my son, from God, and when that is no longer there, then you look for it from anybody else who will give it to you. It is often the absence of purpose and identity in Christ that creates a craving that enslaves you to your bodily desires, things like pornography and alcohol, or maybe it's just amusements and new toys and hobbies. It is the absence of the purpose that God was supposed to give you that leads you to those things because your soul cannot hold its breath. You have to breathe in the fulfillment of these false idols. So then we've passed our days in malice and envy, hated by others and hating one another. Whenever you put something or someone else in the place of God, listen to this, you end up hating it whenever it inevitably disappoints you. Jonathan Edwards, the American theologian, would say it this way, what you idolize inevitably you demonize.

I know it's ironic, but that's just the way it works. You put so much weight onto something when you idolize it that it collapses under the weight that you put on it and you hate it. It's like one of those old bridges if you drive through the countryside that has a sign on it that says max weight two tons. In other words, if you got your little Chevy Volt, you're fine going across this bridge, but if you were driving a tractor trailer full of gold bullion, I would not suggest you try to drive that across this bridge.

It is not designed for that kind of weight, it will collapse. The same thing happens to your soul. It's not that these are bad things, it's that you put so much weight on these things that they collapse and that's why you hate them. That's why some of the things you long for most in your life became the very thing that you hated.

I'll give you an example. That's why marriages that start out so well often go bitter. It's why really the plot line to every romantic comedy that I've ever seen is ultimately based on a kind of foolishness. Because the basic idea is once you find him or her, Mr. Right or Mr. Wrong, then everything in life is going to go rosy from that point on. You can look at the marriages in Hollywood and tell that's not true.

Because what happens, listen, is you find somebody that is so right, but then you put all your soul's weight on them and they cannot sustain it. Here's how I have summarized the plot line of most of these romantic comedies is you got a guy floating in a sea of loneliness and despair, low self-esteem and a long body, floats a five foot four blonde headed life preserver. What's a drowning man do when he sees a life preserver? He clings to it. He begins to suffocate the life out of it.

He makes statements to it like, you complete me, you know, and that kind of stuff. And then he ends up hating her and her him because he is looking through her for something that she was not designed to give him. If you idolize family, if your idea of happiness in life is that your family is all together and tight and close, you end up becoming bitter and self-pitying when your family disappoints you. Maybe you hate your spouse because they messed up your family. I'm talking to some people that cannot forgive an ex-spouse. And by the way, inability to forgive is a form of hate. The reason you cannot forgive that ex-spouse is because they destroyed something that you had always yearned for.

And that is this perfect sense of family. You hate others, you are hated by others, your kids resent you because your idolization of family causes you to always try to control them and they chafe under that and they resent you. You're hated by others, you're hating one another. What you idolize, you demonize. When you put something in the place of God, it puts you into a place where your soul shrivels. You become guarded and hateful toward anybody or anything who threatens it.

A great picture of this is J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings with, and you've probably already thought of this, the ring, right? The ring, the ring represents the thing that you so want and you become like Gollum, my precious, you know?

And I got to hurt or destroy anybody that comes in the way of me and my precious. That picture Tolkien gave was supposed to be a picture of your soul. Do you know that shortly after Tolkien published the last of the Lord of the Rings in the 1950s, a woman wrote to him and said, I loved your books, but I have to say there was one part I found completely unbelievable. He said, why the Dark Lord would ever have put so much power in a ring that was vulnerable and susceptible to being destroyed?

She said, that doesn't make any sense and that would never happen. Tolkien writes her back and says, I know it's unbelievable, but that was supposed to be a picture of what every single human being does. You are the Dark Lord, ma'am. You are the one and I am the one who finds something that we put all of our hope, all of our sense of happiness, all of our sense of identity in. It might be the praise of others, it might be money, it might be any number of things and then we guard that with our life and it makes our soul shrivel and we become exactly what Paul describes there in Titus chapter three, verse three. You see, a lot of us want to kind of look at ourselves as basically good people. We're basically good. We've got a couple of bad spots like a banana that God's got to kind of cut out. You've got a few rough spots.

He's got to sand down. That is not how Paul presents you. Sin did not just hurt you. It corrupted you. It killed you.

God has a thousand reasons to condemn us. One of my favorite literary depictions of this is Oscar Wilde's novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray. Anybody remember reading this?

You might have read it in high school. The Picture of Dorian Gray. A young, handsome man named Dorian Gray decides that he's going to have his portrait painted. It's a beautiful painting.

He's a beautiful man. As he gazes at his finished portrait, he thinks, I know I'm going to age. If only I could trade places with this painting and if the painting would age and I would stay the same.

Well, he gets his wish. He remains a handsome, young socialite while the portrait, hidden away in his attic, begins to do the aging. The portrait also begins to bear, Wilde says, the consequences of the real man's behavior. So, for example, when Dorian makes a cruel comment, the mouth of the portrait twists into a cruel grin. Dorian nurses hatred for a rival and so the eyes in the portrait narrow into rage. Eventually, Dorian murders a man and the hands of the portrait begin to drip blood. When Dorian finally recognizes that the terrible portrait represents his true inner self, he despises the painting so much that he slashes it with a knife. Later, a servant finds that the portrait is in the attic and it's vanished.

Later, a servant finds the portrait in the attic has vanished and Dorian Gray himself lies dead on the floor with a knife through his own heart. This is what Paul says has happened to you. That what sin did is it corrupted you, it destroyed you, it made you dislike yourself, it made you become self-justifying, it withered your soul. Well, how was your day at church?

We heard a talk on eternal damnation and while we all deserve it, how was yours? But can't you admit, can't you at least admit that there is a problem? And don't you know that there's a problem and the problem is deep in your heart? Andy Stanley was, I heard him talking about something like this and he said, for those of you that really have an objection with this, just ask yourself this. He says, you know that as you get old, one of the keys to a successful life is learning to filter things.

And your filter is supposed to get better as you get into your 30s and 40s. He said, when you were young and you were like in love, you were infatuated with somebody and you were first getting to know them, you ever play that game, he asked, you ever play that game of the what are you thinking right now? Remember that? What are you thinking right now?

You tell him, he says, you learn not to play that in marriage. Because if they ask you that, you might say, how much weight have you actually gained? That's what I was thinking. He says, we learned to fill, he said, how would it be if at every point someone could read out the thoughts that are in your heart and just put them on display? Sin wiped us out and Paul calls that spiritual death. We are dead in our sin, verse four, but that is a huge but. And yes, I know exactly what that sounds like, but the beauty of the gospel is in that word but. But see, you've got to notice that before Paul gets there, he brought you face to face with your depravity. You were foolish, disobedient, you were hated and hating. And sometimes you always want to skip over this and get to the gospel, but you will never appreciate, you will never wonder at the beauty of the gospel until you understand your depravity.

You will never weep for joy. You will never be moved to the behaviors that he is telling you to be moved to in verses one and two until you understand the depravity of verse three and the but God of verse four. Spurgeon would say it this way, too many of us think too lightly of sin and that's why we think too lightly of the Savior. The one who weeps for joy at hearing the gospel, the one who extravagantly pours out his possessions in response is the one who believes he has stood before his God with a noose of condemnation rightfully around his neck and before he is condemned heard the voice that says, I will take that noose and I will wear it in your place. He said that is the one who will joyfully offer his life in response to God. So we cannot skip over this part.

I know it's not positive and encouraging. I know it's not going to get me a gig on Oprah when we go through verse three. But you understand, listen, that that is where the beauty of the gospel starts. The but God comes in response to your depravity. That's why Francis Schaeffer who I quoted earlier said this way. He said if I only had one hour to talk to a person who knew nothing about the Bible, I had one hour I would spend the first 50 minutes trying to convince them of their sinfulness and only the last 10 minutes talking to them about the gospel.

Because they will never understand the gospel, they will never appreciate the gospel, they will never weep for joy at the gospel until you understand what an amazing word that word in verse four but is. But when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, he saved us. He saved us.

He was the only actor. It wasn't that I did my best and he kind of came in and graded on the curve. No, he did it all. What was my part of salvation? I did all the sinning. He did all the saving.

He's not in verse three, I'm not in verse four. What part was my salvation? Did I have to be good and do my best and then he'll just took care of the rest?

No, from start to finish it was his work and it has to be received as a gift. It's almost I heard it described like if you just suddenly woke up in the back of an ambulance. You had no idea how you got there but there are tubes sticking out of you everywhere and you got a mask on and there's an EMT standing over you who says you were in a terrible wreck and you were unconscious and you were about to die.

But we saved your life, you're gonna be okay. He is not inviting you to get up and start helping to save yourself. He just basically says you just got to lie there because I'm doing it all for you.

What happens in conversion is suddenly you wake up to the news that Jesus Christ has saved you 2,000 years ago and he doesn't ask you to help save yourself. He just says lie there and let me do it because I am going to do it all. He saved us not because of works done by us in righteousness. He does it according to his own mercy.

Mercy literally means that God withholds from us that thing that we do we deserve. He didn't give it to me because I was better than the person on my right or my left. He didn't give it to me because I was smarter.

He didn't look at me and say that one's got potential. He looked at me and said love. It wasn't goodness in my heart or potential in my life, it was love in his.

It was mercy. He did it by the washing of regeneration. Washing means that he cleanses us from the stains of sin. In the New Testament the picture of this is leprosy when Jesus would heal lepers. He was giving us a picture of how he would remove the stain of sin. You think in the Old Testament of Naaman. Naaman was a guy who was covered with leprosy from head to toe. He comes to Elijah the prophet and Elijah says you have to dip in the Jordan River seven times.

On the seventh time he comes up and his skin is like the skin of a baby. This was a picture for us of what Jesus would do by putting people underneath his blood. That when they came up in faith, gone from their soul was the stain of sin.

We even sing about it, don't we? There is a fountain filled with blood drawn from Emmanuel's veins. And sinners plunged beneath that flood lose all their guilty stain.

The dying thief rejoiced to see that fountain in his day. And there may I, though vile as he, wash all my sins away. What the hymn writer is saying is there is no difference between the thief and the person in church.

They're both vile and covered with leprosy. And the blood of Jesus cleanses them both by the washing of regeneration. By the way, that's pictured for us in baptism. You know that in baptism it's not washing dirt off of you and that's what saves you. I mean, of course not.

That's Durham City tap water. You're dirtier when you come up than when you went down. But it's a picture of how sinners plunged beneath the blood of Jesus lose all their guilty stain.

The washing of, this is even better, regeneration. That's a really powerful and explosive word in Greek. Controversial. Palinganesia was the word.

Here's why it's controversial. It was a term the Greek philosophers had invented to describe reincarnation. Greek philosophy believed that the world would corrupt, get better, corrupt, get better.

It was just this cycle. And what Paul does is he takes their word and said, nope, that regeneration you were looking for, that happened one time in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. And the power that would make the world new comes into you when you believe on Jesus. Greek philosophers, when they read Titus, they would have gone nuts.

Because he just took their word. They'd be like, that's not your word, it's our word. Paul's like, nope, it's God's word. And what God is going to do is take the power that is going to make the world new again, that will remove the curse from the world, that will take away tsunamis and pain and cancer, and he puts it in you now when you believe on Jesus.

Tim Keller calls it time travel. Because it is the regeneration that God is going to one day apply to the whole earth, he puts in you now when you trust in Christ. Listen, do not ever underestimate the power of the new birth and what it can do in you. There is no addiction. There is no sin. There is no stain that that regeneration that brought Jesus out of the grave cannot begin to work in you.

There is no sense ever in life that somebody is hopeless because God says, behold, I make all things new. You know, the people that God built the church on the backs of, guys like Peter and Paul, these were deeply flawed individuals. Very different, in fact. Peter was a coward. He's a guy with a big mouth that would crumble as soon as he got any kind of pressure. Paul, Paul was harsh. Paul was condemning. You wouldn't have liked to have been friends with Paul. But look at what God did with these guys. Peter became so bold that he would be crucified upside down. Paul, the harsh judgmental one, would actually write something so beautiful that most of you hadn't read in your weddings. 1 Corinthians 13.

If you'd known Paul when he was a young man, that is the last guy you would want to write you something about love. But see, what the Gospel does is it takes the selfish and the bitter and it makes them loving. It takes the cowardly and it makes them brave. It takes the addicted and it makes them self-controlled. It takes those who are abusive and it makes them fountains of generosity. He breaks the power of canceled sin.

He sets the prisoner free. The blood of Jesus washed away the penalty of your sin. The resurrection of Jesus shatters the power of sin in your life. Renewal, he says, of the Holy Spirit.

That's a great word too. Renewal, made new again. Our hearts are retrained for righteousness. In Titus 2.11, Paul used the word training. We're trained in righteousness. The word training is the word paideia.

Paideia doesn't mean trained like imparted knowledge. Training that way means maturity or strengthening like you would do to a child or like you would do to an atrophied muscle. I've worked with a trainer before and, you know, trainers are all big about proper form. Now you've got to do the exercise this way. And so I'm working with him on this one exercise and he has me do it like nine times. And every time I say, no, no, you're not doing it the right way.

And finally, on the tenth time, he keeps telling me as if explaining it to me is going to fix the problem. I'm like, bro, I get the technique. I could describe it for you.

I could tell you as well as I think you're telling me. The problem is the muscle that we're making is like, nope, we're not doing that. We will not do that motion.

We are not strong enough to do that motion. My problem is not that I need to learn something else. My problem is I need that training so that I can do the things that I am asking it to do. What the gospel does is it not just tells you what is right. It gives you the strength that you can have the power to do what is right. Grace is power.

It is not just pardon. That's why we say you don't need to turn over a new leaf. You need the infusion of new life.

You need not a resolve to do better. You need a resurrection into life, new life power. Verse six, and God poured out that on us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior so that being justified by his grace. You see, whereas mercy was God withholding from us what we did deserve, grace is him pouring out on us what we do not deserve. That's why he uses words like richly and poured out because it's this fountain that just gives you everything.

It's free for you, but it costs him all. He had to go to the cross for it. You remember the definition of grace, G-R-A-C-E, God's riches for you at Christ's expense. He continues on in verse seven, so that we might become heirs according to the hope of eternal life.

As if there was not enough, Jesus said not only do you get all this, you actually get Jesus' inheritance that becomes yours. I heard a true story a few years ago about a rich man who had his wife died when they gave birth, when she gave birth to their first son. He never remarried. The son was the apple of his eye, the love of his life. When his son was 17 years old, he died in a car wreck.

The man lived a few years after that, and then he died. He didn't have many close relatives, so he had to auction off all of his estate to whoever wanted to buy it. They held this big auction.

Because he was so wealthy, people from miles around came to bid on things. The auctioneer gets up, and the first thing he does is he pulls out a portrait that had been painted of this man's son just a few weeks before he died. He said, this is the first thing up for auction, so I will accept bids on this.

It was a very personal painting. Nobody really thought it had a need for it, and so it was sort of an awkward silence. Until finally, after a couple minutes of silence, the servant, the guy that had worked at his house, his housekeeper raised his hand and said, I'll take that. He said, what's your bid? He said, I'll give 20 bucks for it. The guy said, okay, $20 is the bid. Do I hear a second? $20 going once, $20 going twice.

Sold. Brings down the gavel. Picks the gavel back up, brings it down a second time, and people are confused, and they're like, yeah, let me read you this man's will. It says very clearly, he who takes the son takes everything. So the entire estate goes to this servant because he has the son. What Paul is telling you is that when you got Christ, you not only got forgiveness, you not only got the power of new life, you got every single thing God had to offer, that everything was in the son, that all the promises of Almighty God, all the future, everything that is beautiful in God's heart is now your possession because it is in Christ. It is poured out on you richly, not because of works of righteousness, but solely because of His grace. That's Paul's statement of declaration.

That's the indicative. Then he says, now listen, you've got to catch this. Paul just didn't give a little doctrinal lesson. Paul says, I told all that as an explanation for why you were supposed to do a couple things. So what are the imperatives? Well, I see an imperative for an unbeliever, and I see an imperative for a believer. Let's talk about the imperative for the unbeliever first. The imperative for the unbeliever is you must be born again. That's the imperative is there is no other way for you to save yourself, not by works of righteousness.

It's got to be a gift that He's given to you. You see, the gospel is that Jesus Christ did what you could not do. He suffered the penalty of sin in your place. There's only two ways to pay for sin effectively.

One is you spend eternity in hell paying for it. The other is Jesus pays for it in your place. There's only one way that you can have new life, and it's by overcoming the grave, and there's only one who's ever done that, and that is the resurrection of Jesus. It is when you trust in Christ that you get the washing of regeneration and the renewal of the Holy Spirit. You must be born again. What I find is that many people confuse, listen to this, Christian conversion with moral reformation. They think they're going to come to church, and they're going to become a better person, and they're going to start going to church more, and they're going to sin less.

Christian conversion could not be more different than moral reformation. With moral reformation, you see you're mostly good. God looks at you, and he sees the bad spot in the banana. He sees the rough spot.

He's going to sand it down, and he's going to do it, but he sees some potential in you. With Christian conversion, nope, because sin did not knock you down onto God's JV team. It didn't put you on probation. It didn't put you on a slower track to get to your mansion in heaven, and Jesus is going to be your turbo boost. Sin wiped you out.

It killed you. I saw people look at me, and they say, oh, Jesus is just a crutch. I'm like, Jesus is not a crutch. He's a stretcher, because you can't even limp into heaven without Jesus. He picked me up, and he put me on the stretcher, and he carried me in.

It's all him. With moral reformation, you're in charge. With moral reformation, you're in charge. You decide what to do. You decide how far to go. You decide what the goals are.

You strive to achieve them. Receiving the power of the kingdom of God is something that's done to you. You have no idea where it's going to take you. All you can do is receive it and surrender and say, God, I have nothing to bargain with. It's all yours. You take me where you want to take me.

It has to be received as a gift. That's the only way that it can be received. Nothing in my hands I bring. Simply through that cross, I cling. That's the imperative for unbelievers. You must be born again. The imperative for believers is you need to start seeing the world through that lens.

Go back to that list in verses one and two. What do you start to see there? I see humility.

I see humility. God saying, you were this. I didn't save you because you were more moral.

That's going to lead you to gentleness. Of course, people don't understand. I didn't understand. When God saved me, it wasn't that I got smart and figured it out.

It wasn't that I was moral and God rewarded me. I was dead like they were. I'm going to use another contemporary show. It's kind of like in The Walking Dead. You see all the dead people around. In that show, if you stick them in the head, then they die. Basically, Paul says, I see the world a little differently. I see dead people, spiritually dead people, and it's the gospel that makes them alive. They're not degrees of dead people.

They're just dead. God graciously put the gospel into me. I don't look on you with condemnation. I look on you with compassion.

In order to change the metaphor for a minute, again, thinking about gentleness, how it changes your disposition, listen, I've described it before. There was a man who was clinically insane, and he thought he was Superman. You see him out on top of the tallest building in Raleigh. He's got his cape on, and he's about to fly or think he can fly. You come up behind the man, and you're like, hey, man, you're not Superman. You can't fly. The guy's like, no, I'm Superman.

I'm going to fly. You offer him a free choice. Man, if you jump, you're going to die.

He's insane. He thinks he's Superman. 100 out of 100 times, what's he going to choose? He's going to choose to jump. No matter how persuasive your arguments are, he's going to jump. If you had the ability to somehow, you know, stick him in the needle of antidote or whatever and restore his sanity to him, then you could offer him the same choice. And this time, 100 out of 100 times, what's he going to do?

He's going to come back down. The difference is not in the way you present the question. It's not presenting the question more eloquently.

It's not using better illustrations. It has to do with the sanity of the person that you're talking to. Paul said regeneration is the sanity restorer. It is not the persuasiveness of human words that converts the human heart. It is the preaching of the gospel and the regeneration of the Holy Spirit. You see, here's how that changes how I approach people. It doesn't mean that I never defend the faith.

I do. What it means, listen, is that what I do is patiently present them the gospel because the gospel is the means of life. Faith comes by hearing, Paul says in Romans 10, and hearing comes by the word of God. The believer finds themselves spending a lot of time in prayer for unsaved people because he's praying that God will help them come to see, restore the sanity of their heart. And the believer spends a lot of time patiently explaining the gospel because the gospel is the infusion of life that restores sanity. And when that happens, you don't need eloquent stories. You don't need a dynamic personality.

You can just present the question simply, and it becomes very obvious. Paul said you will become gentle. You will become humble. You will become deeply compassionate. You'll have a regard, verse one, for all, because they're dead like you were, but they're also made in the image of God like you. And you'll look at them and say, God, you rescued me when I was dead. Can you use me to bring others from death to life?

You'll find yourself giving away your money and your time to serve. You will become, verse one, eager for good works, or ready for good works. Not just because you have to, but because you want to. You want to glorify God, and you want to love others because it's just in your nature.

God has always been after a people who are gracious, because He is gracious, who treat others as they have been treated. This is the wonder, Paul says, of the gospel, and this is what authenticates our faith before the outside world. Verse eight, this saying is trustworthy, and I want you to insist on these things so that those who have believed in God may be careful to devote themselves to good works.

Why? Because good works authenticate our faith to the outside world. They show that we have a compassion and a humility that the world does not emulate. It comes from the gospel. It comes from understanding the grace of God. He said these works won't just authenticate your faith to the outside world.

They should authenticate your faith to you. How could you call yourself a believer who has encountered the grace of God and still treats sin casually? How could you be someone who believes that Jesus saved you when you were helpless and still be stingy with your money? How could you believe that God forgave you of an insurmountable debt and then not forgive somebody else?

How could you believe that you were dead in trespasses and sin when Jesus saved you and then look at 2.2 billion people in the world who have never heard the name of Jesus and say, I'm just not that concerned? Paul said, you've got to go into the gospel, and so here's how he concludes the whole book. These things are excellent and profitable for people, but avoid foolish controversies, genealogies, dissensions, and quarrels about the law, for they are unprofitable and they are worthless.

You know what he's saying there? Stay away from religious people who major on minors. And they were there in Paul's day and they're there in our day. And by the way, they're arguing about different things today than they were 2,000 years ago, but it's essentially the same version of different stuff. In Paul's day, it was genealogies. I've never had an argument with somebody about a genealogy, all right? But what I find people want to do is they want to talk to me about, oh, you know, tell me about Calvinism and how you feel about that.

Tell me about eschatology and the way you believe about when things are coming back. Or, you know, I like this style of worship, and you guys worship in this style, and I kind of like that style better. And we do this ritual over here. Why don't you do this ritual in your, you know?

And I'm like, okay. Yeah, these are all good questions in their place, but you know what, the only thing in the Christian life that actually brings power? It's the cross of Jesus Christ. And so Paul says you get yourself in a place where the minor things are minor and the major things are major. You get in a place where the cross is preached consistently week to week. You get in a place, regardless of whether they worship like what you want to worship like or if it fits your fan.

You get in a place because it is the cross of Jesus Christ that transforms the person into the kind of people that God wants them to be. You don't get distracted. You don't go other directions. You focus on the cross. That's what Paul is saying in Titus. Go deep in the cross. Go always deeper because it is in the gospel. It is in the glory of who God is and what he's done that all the beauties of the Christian life begin to come out.

So major on the majors, he says, and avoid all the other foolish stuff. You focus on the cross. See, there's one thing in the Bible, one thing that is called the power of God.

Do you know this? God does a lot of things in the Bible by his power. But there's only one thing that actually says this is the power of God.

In order to, you can probably figure it out. Romans 1, 16. For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God. It's the power of God, the gospel. Everything that God will do to remake the world and remove it from the curse is in the gospel of Jesus Christ. So believe it. Receive it.

Keep going deeper because you'll never get to the bottom. Why don't you bow your heads if you would? I believe the imperatives are clear, are they not? Have you ever been born again? I don't mean moral reformation. Have you ever been born again where you admitted that you are the one in the ambulance and that Jesus Christ has done everything necessary to save you?

Have you ever just received it as a gift? You receive his salvation as a gift and you surrender completely. If not, you can do that right now in this moment. Lord Jesus, I surrender. Lord Jesus, I receive. If you're a believer, would you just ask God again? God help me. Help me to avoid silly things. Let the gospel become large in my life until I become a gracious, patient person with people on the outside, until I become one who returns good for evil, until I patiently and prayerfully explain the gospel, knowing that I present the word but the Holy Spirit alone, the Holy Spirit alone does the convincing. God make this a gospel-rich church. I pray in Jesus' name.