Separating the True Gospel from False Ones

Welcome back, Summit Church, from the Christmas break and from the holidays. A couple of things I feel like I need to acknowledge here at the beginning. First of all, yes, I do have somewhat of a black eye in case you were noticing that. In fact, zoom up. We're real close on this so you can see it. I have to acknowledge that because I know otherwise some of you would spend the entire time wondering, did Veronica just not like her Christmas present or is JD wearing mascara now? Actually, the truth is I ran into a pole coming outside of a restaurant.

I know even when I say that, it sounds like I'm making that up, but I promise you I am not. I was at Longhorn Steakhouse and I thought at him. My five-year-old son was about to walk out on the road.

And so I was like, I yelled at him and took off after him. And lo and behold, there's a pole. And so it's feeling better now.

I can see fine. But anyway, in case you noticed that, now you know exactly where it comes from. Just think of this as a wound from me heroically trying to save my son.

Although the situation ended with me doubled over and him saying, are you okay, daddy? So anyway, I also want to acknowledge that many of you were part of something that I just never want to take for granted. The extraordinary event at the Durham Performing Arts Center on the 23rd and 24th. There were hundreds of you that volunteered to help make that possible, and I want to thank you. But I also want to acknowledge that our worship ministry does things that are so consistently awesome that I feel like we just sort of take them for granted and get used to the awesomeness as the new normal.

And I think it would be fitting for us at all of our campuses just to let them know how much we appreciate the work that they do to put that together for us. We are beginning today a short series on the book of Titus, so if you have your Bible, I invite you to take it out and open it to the book of Titus, which is about halfway through the New Testament. It is what we call a pastoral epistle, which means a letter that Paul wrote to another pastor. This is one from Paul to Titus, who was a church planter in Crete. Incidentally, by the way, the book of Titus is the only book written specifically to a church planter. Now, if you know your Bible, you're like, well, what about Timothy? Wasn't he a church planter?

Actually, no. Timothy worked in already established churches. Titus is a church planter on the gates of hell. Crete, which is where Titus was assigned, was one of the most immoral places in the ancient world. Crete was like, think of it as the Las Vegas of the Mediterranean, except it was an island in the Mediterranean and also the hub for piracy in the Mediterranean, which was actually a pretty bad problem. So think of it like the first century Tortuga. Basically, Titus is trying to plant churches among the pirates of the Caribbean.

That's his assignment. Historians say that the people there stayed drunk all the time. Lying was a celebrated art form. In fact, in the Greek language, Crete was slang for lying. So if you said, you know, you Creeded or whatever, you were saying you lied.

Who Creeded? Stop reading. That meant you were lying. That's how synonymous it was with the culture there. The historian Polybius said that nowhere in the ancient world were politicians more corrupt and was even public policy and the laws bent toward the protection of the rich and the powerful than in Crete. Even the apostle Paul would say to Titus, look in your Bible, chapter 1, verse 12. Paul says, even one of their own prophets has said, Cretans are always liars, evil brutes, lazy gluttons.

This testimony is true. You say, well, that's rude, Paul. What happened to all that I'm the chief of sinners stuff? Paul's like, hey, their guy said it.

I'm just saying he was onto something. Some of you are like liars, evil brutes, lazy gluttons. I feel like you're describing my fraternity.

I feel like you're describing my workplace. Some of you, having just gotten back from the holiday, say I feel like you're describing my family, which makes the book of Titus incredibly relevant. How do you live out the faith in a really difficult immoral place like Crete? How do you handle it when what you believe is despised and belittled constantly? Where most people find what you believe, at best, irrelevant.

At worst, they find it just downright silly. Paul writes the book of Titus to answer those questions. Paul has one concern for Titus in this book, and it is, and I quote, the truth that leads to godliness. The truth that leads to godliness. In the very first verse, chapter one, verse one, Paul says that. Paul, a servant of God and an apostle of Jesus Christ for the faith of God's elect and the knowledge of the, everybody together, truth that leads. Okay, when I say everybody together, I mean like everybody, right?

This is the audience participation part of the program, so let's do it again. For the faith of God's elect and the knowledge of the truth that leads to godliness. That phrase, truth that leads to godliness, or at least that concept, is going to come up over and over throughout this book. You see, God's purpose in the gospel was to create for himself a God-loving and God-like people. That's what godliness means. That was the point in what he did.

When God saved us, he saved us for himself. I saw the new Exodus movie recently, Gods and Kings with, you know, Christian Bell and all that, and I don't want to hate on it. I mean, it was actually pretty good. It's just that it took a lot of liberties, meaning that a lot of things that weren't in the story they put in and a lot of things that were in the story they left out. For example, you know, Moses is more of a gladiator style general who ends up doing hand-to-hand combat with Pharaoh in the basin of the Red Sea when that whole incident goes down, and that didn't really happen in the actual account. But one of the things that they left out, that I was most disappointed they left out, is Moses has one line that he's famous for. Right? One line he's famous for down through history.

What is it? Let my people go. Not one time in the movie did Moses say that. But what people always leave out, even the accounts that are more biblically faithful, and I've never seen a movie that included the second part of what Moses said, and that's the most important part of what he said. Moses said, let my people go, God says, that they might serve me. That's the more important part of what Moses said because the Exodus, listen, was not about what God was delivering them from. It was about what God was delivering them to. And what God was delivering them to was to himself.

He was calling out for himself a people that would worship him and know him. That's his point in the gospel. Christians talk a lot about what we are saved from, text, drugs, and rock and roll. But what we're saved from is not nearly as important as what we're saved to. And what we're saved to is godliness, and what godliness is, is the love of God, and it is learning to love the things that God loves. So therefore, Paul says, one of the ways you can authenticate true religion from false religion is by how well it cultivates godliness in your heart.

Does that make sense? If that's been the whole point, then you ought to be able to tell that one of the characteristics of the true gospel is that it actually cultivates godliness in your heart. Not busyness, by the way, in religion.

That's different. Every religion will make you insanely busy. Religions come with a list of things to add to your calendar, a list of things you should do and not do, say and not say, drink or not drink, not smoke, not do this, not touch that.

There's all kinds of things that will make you crazy busy. Paul says godliness is different. Godliness is something that goes down to the passions of your heart. It affects what you love.

It affects the attitudes of your heart. There were all kinds of false teachers in Crete, just like there are all kinds of false teachers today. And he says these false religions are going to get you busy, but they're not actually going to cultivate godliness. So what I want to do today is show you how the apostle Paul explains why the gospel produces godliness in a way that nothing else can. Then I want to show you why every other religious approach won't work. And then I want to have you ask some evaluation questions about your church and about your faith. Namely this, is your faith producing godliness? Is your faith producing godliness? Incidentally, for those of you who made a New Year's resolution, I think you'll find out here in this very first chapter of Titus why most of them do not work.

Why they never make it out of the month of January. So let's get started. Here's number one, how the gospel produces godliness. How the gospel produces godliness. Paul introduces this in the first verse, but he really unpacks it in chapter two. So flip over to chapter two, verse 11.

Paul says, for the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men. It teaches us to say no. Here's your question, don't answer it out loud. What does it refer to? That is the most important question in the whole book.

What is the it? It teaches us to say no to ungodliness and worldly passions, to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in this present age. What produces the ability to say no to ungodliness, to live self-controlled and upright?

What is it that creates it? Let me ask you, if we hadn't just read that text, and I were to say to you, explain to me how you can become more self-controlled, more upright, live a better godly life, what would you say? For most of you, it would be, well, I need greater willpower. Some of you would say, I need greater knowledge. I need to learn the Bible better. Some of you would say, I need an accountability partner.

I need to get in a small group because they're going to be able to help me finish strong. I need to start a quiet time. Maybe if judgment felt more real to me, if hell was more real, maybe I would act right more. Paul's answer, not on one of those things. Paul said, listen, look at it, the grace of God teaches us to say no to ungodliness and worldly passions, to live self-controlled. The grace of God, according to this text, focuses our attention in three different directions.

This is really important. The first place the grace of God directs our attention is upward. He says, you'll see it there, verse 13, we wait for the blessed hope, the glorious appearing of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ, upward. We look upward to the glorious God that has called us to himself, verse 14, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all wickedness. So we look backwards to the price he paid to save us. And then he continues on, that he might purify for himself a people that are his very own.

That's looking forward. So in other words, we look upward to the God who has saved us. We look backward to the price that he paid to redeem us. We look forward into the beautiful thing that he is making us into. And those three looks, upward, backward, and forward, is what produces godly passion in your heart. Now, here's the question.

Why? Why does this produce godliness in us? Let's take these apart one at a time. Upward, upward. The gospel redirects our worship. It redirects our worship. Sin problems, as I've often explained to you, start as worship problems. The original sin, Paul says, Romans chapter 1, Paul says there are two components to the original sin.

Follow this. Component number one is false worship. Romans 1.23, we gave the glory of God to created things. Glory in Hebrew is the word kabod and means literally weight or importance.

We gave the weight or the importance that we were supposed to give to God alone, we gave that weight to something else. By the way, the New Testament word for glory is the word brilliance or beauty. If you put those two concepts together, you'll come up with a good understanding of what the Bible means when it says glory. Glory is whenever you give something incredible weight in your life, incredible importance, and when you find great beauty in it.

That's giving it glory. The original sin was we took the glory, the importance, and the beauty that we ought to have given to God and we began to assign it to lesser things. Not bad things.

Sometimes things like money, like romance, like family, like status. I mean, good things, but they become so important to us that we just could not imagine life being good without them because they represent ultimate beauty to us. Matt Papa, one of our worship leaders in his book, Look and Live, says that sin is simply worship misdirected. We never begin to worship, he said. We're born worshipers.

We don't start worshiping any more than we start breathing. He said we just misdirect our worship and that's where sin begins as we assign weight and beauty to something more than we give it to God. There are some lists of things that you have in your heart because you are an idolater and a sinner that you give more weight and more beauty to than you give to God.

What is that for you? The reputation of others, is it achieving something, is it sexual pleasure? I don't know what it is for you, but that's what it means to begin to sin. To change sin at the heart level, therefore, which is where God wants to change it, he's got to change what you worship. Because until that happens, every change you make is superficial.

You're like the guy who dutifully serves his wife when he's actually in love with another woman. His actions externally may be correct, but his heart belongs to someone else. God doesn't want people who act one way on the outside, but whose heart belongs somewhere else. God wants us to love him and to pursue him because we desire him. So Paul Tripp says it this way, if we worshiped our way into sin, then we've got to worship our way out. And so how do we change what we worship? The gospel, the gospel alone does that. The gospel redirects our worship because it shows us, to use Paul's word, the glorious God, verse 13, who saved us.

A God that is more glorious, more beautiful, more weighty, more important than our idols. And until the gospel does that, every change you make in religion is just superficial. It's what I've explained to you is what Martin Luther called the dilemma of the great commandment. The great commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind. Here's the dilemma of that commandment. If you love something, you don't need to be commanded to love it.

Right? I mean, you never have to command me to eat a steak, kiss my wife, or take a nap. I love those things, so this is just naturally, I just do it. On the flip side, if you don't love something, that cannot be fixed by command. I hate Brussels sprouts. You can command me all day long to like Brussels sprouts. I'm going to be like, nope. Maybe wrap it in bacon, pour chocolate on it, maybe.

But otherwise, I just hate Brussels sprouts. Luther said this is the dilemma. The dilemma is that God is commanding us to do something that we can never actually be commanded to do. If we don't love, then we can't be commanded to love. And if we do love, we don't need to be commanded to love. The way he said it was this, what the law requires is freedom from the law. The great commandment is asking something of you that you can never be produced if you don't already do it. It's like your parents, when you were in high school, said, love this person. We want you to marry this person. You can't be commanded to love.

You just love or you don't, and that's the dilemma. So the gospel actually redirects, it reignites our worship. Here's the second thing, the backward look. The gospel restores gratefulness. In that passage that it shows you in Romans, Paul identifies a second component to the original sin, one that most people would never guess in a thousand years. If I were to say, what are the original components of the original sin? You maybe would come up with false worship. You would never come up with this next one.

You'd be like, oh, pride or lust or reading Fifty Shades of Grey or something like that. That's the original corruption. No. Look at this, Romans 1, 21. They neither glorified God, there's your worship.

What's this? Nor gave thanks. How many of you would put thanklessness as the course in?

I'm thinking nobody. Why would thanklessness be the course in? Well, think about it. When you're thankless, not only are you robbing somebody else of the credit that belongs to them, when you're thankless, you convince yourself that you could have gotten on fine without whatever that person gave you.

You weren't really desperate for what they gave you, which is why you don't feel incredibly thankful because you feel like, well, even if they hadn't given it to me, I would have been fine. Think of it, one author said, think of it like plagiarism. Plagiarism, when you take somebody else's ideas and you put them in your own mouth or you write them as your own, there really is two problems with plagiarism. Number one, you rob somebody else of the credit that they are due for their words. Number two, B, you delude yourself and others into thinking that you can come up with that level of ideas all the time. Does that make sense? I mean, think of it like, let's say I had a relative that lived in England and I went over to visit them, and I'm rummaging through their attic, and as I'm rummaging through their attic, lo and behold, I find a manuscript by Jane Austen who wrote Pride and Prejudice, a manuscript for a new book that she never published and nobody knew about. This one's called Malice and Misery, or Lust and Loneliness, Anger and Anal Retentiveness, or something like that.

You know, I can do that all day. So here it is, Malice and Misery. Nobody in the world knows about this but me.

I just discovered it. So I dust it off, take off her name, put my name on it, take it to the publisher and say, here's my new novel. The publisher reasons, says this is fantastic, publishes it, and it goes crazy. I got two problems. One, I stole credit from Jane Austen when I should have given it to her. Number two, my publisher thinks that I can come up with this kind of stuff all the time.

So he comes back to me and says, I need a second book, and then I am in deep water. When we are thankless toward God, we have two problems. Number one, we rob God of the glory belonging to him.

Number two, we delude ourselves into thinking that we are self-sufficient. We forget that every single breath we take comes from God. Every blessing on earth we have is a gift from him. That's why I tell my kids, a thankful spirit is not just about politeness. A thankful spirit is life-giving. Because in it, you understand that you are dependent on God, that we are like the moon. Any light that I have that shines off of me is a borrowed light, a reflected light that comes from the sun.

You remove the sun, and I will go dark. That lack of gratefulness, that self-sufficiency leads to independence, which leads to more sin. Well, how does the gospel transform us? It points us backwards to the gospel to our complete inability to save ourselves.

We were hopeless. Jesus had to do it all, and we receive it as a gift. And that posture of gratefulness is the fountain from which godliness springs. Forward, here's your third look, the gospel raises expectations.

It raises our expectations. In the gospel, we get a glimpse of what God is making us. We get a glimpse of the future he has for us.

He puts into us a taste or a hunger for that future, and it begins to shape what we love and what we pursue. John Piper, who spoke here at our church a couple of years ago, a year and a half or so ago, was speaking recently at a conference that my wife was attending. And she said that he's about 70 years old now, and he's not in poor health or anything, but he says, you know, just being 70, I think a lot more about my death than I used to. He said, and then my wife said he just made this offhand comment just to the side. He just said, he said, he said, soon I will be in eternity. And then he said, sinlessness. He said, I can almost taste it.

Here's the question. When you look forward to eternity, is that what you most long for? Is that what you're looking forward to? Sinlessness. When I no longer am I under the bondage of this lust and jealousy and pride that just eats away my heart, there I'm going to be like God. If you've experienced the gospel, that's down in there, because you are looking forward. Here's how John said it, 1 John 3. We know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we will see him as he is. All those who have this hope in them, purify themselves, just like he is pure.

You see, these three looks, the upward look to the glory of God, the backward look to the price he paid, the forward look to what he's making us, deliver us from sin at the heart level. And then you become, verse 14, a person that is eager, zealous, or you can translate that, excited to do good works. It's not that you have to do good works or God's going to punish you. You're excited about doing them.

You get to do good works. Well, by contrast, Paul says, religion, false religion, can do none of those things. Go back to chapter 1, in verses 10 through 16 of chapter 1. Paul is going to go after some false teachers at work in Crete.

Now, pay attention to this. The particulars of what these Jewish teachers believed is not the same as what false teachers in Raleigh-Durham teach. I don't know anybody running around teaching the same thing that these guys taught.

Teach, taught, pout, whatever you say. The point is all false religion has a couple of characteristics. And any false religion in any generation in any time is going to have these characteristics that define it.

So even if the particulars are not the same, the essence behind it is. Verse 10, let me show you. For there are many rebellious people, mere talkers and deceivers, especially those of the circumcision group, that was the false teachers he was going after. They must be silenced because they are ruining whole households by teaching things they ought not to teach. And that, for the sake of dishonest gain, rebuke them sharply so that they will be sound in the faith and will pay no attention to Jewish myths or to the commands of those who reject the truth. They claim to know God, but by their actions they deny Him.

They are detestable, disobedient, and unfit for doing anything good. Tell us how you really feel, Paul. All right, number two, why religion cannot produce godliness. Why it cannot produce godliness.

I'll give you a couple of things here. It emphasizes adherence to rules rather than internal transformation. You see that verse 10, mere words. Verse 13, Jewish rituals and commands.

It's concerned with what you say and how you act, not what you are. All right, here's the other thing. It uses God. It uses God. You see that little phrase in verse 11, for the sake of dishonest gain? God for these people and godliness becomes a means to another end. He's the means to houses or cars or a better life now or even eternity in heaven.

They're not always bad things that you're using Him for. It's just that God's not ultimately the point. Ultimately, God is a useful means to this other end. Religion, in fact, Paul explains, leads to, listen, the opposite of godliness. Religion acts like it's promoting godliness, but the effect it has is it produces ungodliness.

I'll show you what I mean if you take a note to jot this down. Instead of gratefulness, religion produces pride. Instead of gratefulness, it produces pride. Those who excel at religion say, well, look at all that I've accomplished. I'm better than other people, and that just leads to more sin. Because pride is the mother of a lot of sins. So if I ask you right now why God's going to let you into heaven, why He accepts you, and you tell me anything about you.

Well, you know, I go to church, and I'm a good person, and I've never killed anybody, and I'm a good dad. Then even it seems innocuous, but what you're basically saying to yourself is because I am better than this group of people over here, that's why God accepts me, and that leads to pride, which leads to you looking down on people, which leads to all kinds of sin. Or the flip side, if you don't do well in religion, it leads to despair. You give up.

You get frustrated. You're like, I'm terrible at this religion thing. I try and then I fail, so I might as well indulge in pornography. I might as well drink a lot because, you know, I'm terrible at religion. I'm terrible at life, so at least this stuff feels good. Instead of producing godliness, religion produces pride and despair, which both lead to more sin.

Here's the second thing. Instead of full surrender, religion calls for only partial commitment. Instead of full surrender, religion only asks for a part of your life. You see, if salvation is a negotiation, if you've got to do a certain amount of things in order for God to let you into heaven, after you've fulfilled those things, then you feel like the rest of your life belongs to you. However, if Jesus saved you when you had nothing, if you were desperate and hopeless when he saved you, then there is not one ounce of your life that does not belong to him. That's why Paul used the word rebellious. These people are not led to full surrender.

They're led to negotiation, which is, God, I've paid you your part. Now you owe me eternal life. Instead of worshiping God and using things, you worship things and use God. That's a characteristic. Instead of worshiping God and using things, you worship things and use God.

God becomes, like I said, a means to an end. I've told you this story before, I think, but I heard about a guy in college that was notorious on campus for his sexual prowess. He was a playboy. For him, sleeping with girls was not just about lust, it was about power. It's how he felt like a man. It's kind of what set him above the other guys because he had the ability to get all these girls to sleep with him. Well, this guy undergoes this religious awakening, this conversion, and he becomes this leader on campus, Christian leader.

It's the kind of story you're supposed to be excited about. But people who got close to this guy said there was something just off about him where if you're ever discussing theology with him, he had to show you why he was smarter about the issue than you were. If you're in a Bible study together, it's his opinion that he wants to be seen as the most insightful. He wants to be the president of the group.

It's always about him. His faith lasted for three, four years, and then he kind of drifted away because, watch this, his faith was never about God. His faith was about finding a new way to get what he really wanted, which was power. Sexual prowess was once a way for power, then he foreshore that so that he could have God, which was an even better means to power. He was using God to get what he really wanted. Here's another one.

This goes along with that one. Instead of hating sin, you negotiate with it. You're always asking, like, how close can I get and it really not be sin? Your concern with sin is to avoid punishment. So you're always like, how close can I get and still be okay? People who love God hate sin.

They're not concerned. When you hate something, you're not trying to figure out how much you can have of it. You're trying to figure out how far you can stay away from it. Now, I've got a friend who lives up in Richmond, Virginia, who told my wife and I this story.

He's about our age. He said that he had to take his wife one morning at 2.30 in the morning to the emergency room because she had been bitten by a black widow in their bed. Now, she's okay.

They gave her the, you know, whatever, the antidote, but, you know, she and the antivenom. My wife, listening to the story, tells me after we leave, she says, I just want you to know, if that ever happens at our house, we will have to move. And I don't even mean to a different house.

I mean to a different state. My wife hates spiders, right? I don't have, because of that, we don't have one in a cage as a pet. If we could defang a tarantula, she's, in fact, this summer, our family was at one of these nature science center kind of places and they had a tarantula.

They defanged and you could hold it. And so my kids are all like, oh, let's hold it, and Veronica's in the other room. Like, I don't even want to look at that. I've tried to explain to her. I'm like, Isaiah says, in the new heavens and new earth, the lion will lay down with the lamb, which means there's got to be a redeemed version of the spider. She said, not in my heaven there ain't going to be that.

She hates it. So the question is not how close can we get to spiders and not get hurt. The question is how far can we keep ourselves from any version of the spider. That's how people who love God feel about sin.

They hate what it does to him, his glory, his creation, what it did to Jesus on the cross. And so you're not like, how close can I get and still be okay. It's I want to go as far away from that as I can get. Richard Sibbes, the Puritan, listen to this. After being transformed by the gospel, the sin itself becomes more loathsome to you than the punishment. Is that how you feel about sin? Do you hate the sin itself more than you hate the punishment? Because if godliness is growing in you, that's how you begin to feel.

God has always been after a group of people who are godly, who feel the way about sin that he feels, who love his glory the way that he loves it, who loves what he loves, who do righteousness not because they fear punishment, but because they love righteousness. The illustration I've given you guys with this is, some people hate it when I use this illustration, but it makes a point, that's why I use it. I've told you it's like if right before the service started, I mean like seconds before the servant started, somebody just threw up right here in the middle of the floor, right down here. Just a big steaming pile of vomit.

And it happened right before the service started and the service got going. There's not a single one of you in here, not one that would need me to stand up here and say, now, it is against the rules at the Summit Church for you to come down here and look up this vomit. This vomit is off limits.

You are not allowed to look it up. Even if after we go home, you can't come in and look, and I'm going to put guards on either side of the baseball bats to make sure that when I'm not looking, you're not down here looking up this vomit. There ain't nobody here that needs to hear me say that, is there? Right? No? No?

Nobody. Now, if you're a German shepherd listening to me right now, you do need to hear that. You need the guys with bats beside the vomit because you're like, oh, warm vomit, half-digested hot dog, awesome, you know? God does not want spiritual dogs in heaven who only avoid sin because they're afraid God's going to whack them with a baseball bat if they do. What God wants is people who have a taste for righteousness, who don't need to be threatened with punishment or blessing, who just pursue holiness and righteousness because they love it like God loves it. Religion keeps you busy with rituals, commands, and mere words, but religion can never curb sin.

If anything, religion just encourages it. Let me give you another analogy I've used. I told you it's like religion is something like if I were to take a bar that you would use to lift weights with, very hard metal but kind of brittle too, if I were to have it up here and I were strong enough to bend it just a little bit, just put all my weight into it and bend it. Now, again, I could never bend it very far. One of two things would happen. Because I'm not that strong, it would eventually, like, you know, I'd lose my strength and I'd let it go and it'd just snap back to the original shape of it, right?

Or I would put so much pressure on it if I were strong enough that I would snap the bar. And I've explained that religious pressure produces one of those two reactions in you. Religious pressure will cause you to conform for a little while when the right pressures are there.

Peer pressure, your parents, your friends or whatever. But the moment those pressures are gone, you just go back to the way that your heart wants to be. Sometimes fear is that pressure. Every year about this time we have somebody that's gotten scared and so you get scared, you start coming back to church and then that fear goes away and you go back out of church because you never really love God. You're just trying to use God to get over your fear and all it was was pressure. Or the second reaction, we put so much pressure on it that you snap spiritually. I see this happen with high school students all the time. They're like, I hate my parents' rules. I feel like I'm in captivity. Always dragging me to church and making me read my Bible and so they just snap spiritually and walk away from the faith.

If I were to take a blowtorch, though, and I were to heat the metal, then I could take the ends of that bar and shape it into whatever shape I wanted it to be because now the constitution of the metal is different. What Paul is saying is that the gospel fires the heart so that it can be reshaped according to godliness and religion can never do that because it's words and external pressures, but it cannot reshape the heart. John Bunyan, who wrote Pilgrim's Progress, has this great little poem, at least that's attributed to him, that I've loved over the years. Run, John, run, the law commands, that gives me neither feet nor hands. Far better news the gospel brings, it bids me fly than gives me wings. The gospel does what religious law can never do. So Paul says there's a lot of religious people that claim to know God with their words and with their actions, but the shape of their hearts makes them deny Him.

Even though their lives are crazy busy, religiously speaking, the shape of their hearts is detestable, disobedient, and unfit for every good work. But the gospel changes that. The kindness of God, Paul says, leads us to true repentance by redirecting our worship, by restoring gratefulness, and by raising our expectations. Charles Spurgeon said it this way, When I thought God was hard, I found it easy to sin.

But when I found God so kind, so good, so overflowing with compassion, it was then I smote upon my breast to think that I could ever have rebelled against one who loved me so and sought my good. Christianity is not turning over a new leaf. It's the power of a new life. It's not a resolve to do better. It's a resurrection to new life in Christ.

You don't need New Year's resolutions. You need a new heart, and you need the power of the Holy Spirit, and that comes not by exhortation, me yelling at you. It comes by narration of a beautiful event, which is God, your prince, your bridegroom, your mighty warrior, the glorious God appearing for you, coming to take on sin on your behalf, giving up his life to redeem you, purifying you for himself, rising again for you, promising you he's going to come back, and when you look upwards to the glory of that God, backward to the price he paid, and forward to what he's offering you, then godliness grows up in your heart, and righteousness springs up, and you don't need me yelling at you what you need.

Oh, you don't need anything. You just need this gospel that just flows out of you because it's new life flowing in you. Religion says this. Listen to this. Tim Chester.

Another pastor, Tim Chester. Religion says you should not sleep with your boyfriend. You should read your Bible every day. You should not get drunk. You should witness to your friends. You should not lose your temper.

But none of those are good news to someone struggling with those issues. To them, all the should and should nots feel like condemnation. But what the gospel says is this.

You should not, but you need not. You need not get drunk because Jesus offers a better refuge than alcohol. You need not lose your temper because God is in control of the situation. You need not give yourself away to money because God is a better treasure and security than money is.

You need not make yourself a slove to romance because God is your fulfillment and your companion. Sin, says Tim Chester, is always making promises, but the gospel exposes those promises as false promises and points to God who is bigger and better and more glorious than anything sin offers. That is good news.

So it's like I often tell you guys. The gospel that we preach here is not fundamentally good advice, not leadership lessons from Uncle JD, ways to live your life better. The gospel is not good advice.

It's good news. It's good news not about what you should do, but about what God did. So in light of that, Paul urges us to do two things. He urges us, A, to evaluate the religious teaching you receive.

What do the teachers that you listen to, what do they emphasize? Do they emphasize things that you should do, ways that you should be, or do they emphasize the grace of God and the power of new life that comes from what he did? Y'all listen, every religious tradition tends to lose the thread of the grace of God, every single one, just in different ways. If you came out of a ritualistic tradition, then you probably had church attendance, the prayers, a code of ethics that was emphasized to you.

Go to church, light the candles, say the prayers, avoid the sins. That's what godliness was. If you came out of a Baptist tradition like I did, then what was emphasized were the standards of behavior. This is how Christians look. This is how they talk.

This is how they dress, right, or the activity. You know, good Christians are busy Christians. I've told you that one of the churches I was at when I was growing up had pews, of course. And in the pew in front of us was a little blue envelope that you were supposed to put your offering in every week.

Anybody tracking with us yet? A little offering you put in. And on it, the front of it, were a list of things that good Christians were supposed to do every week, like read your Bible, pray, witness. And I think I've told you that it used to be a game for my sister and me to see if we could start and complete all the activities on that front of that envelope by the time the offering started and when it got to us. So it was like, you could read the Bible, check, pray. God is sorry, I haven't checked in all week, check. Share Christ with somebody.

I share Christ with my sister, witness to her every single week, check. Put the money in there, in the offering. But it was just do. This is what you do.

You're busy. That's sometimes what God emphasized. If you came out of a prosperity tradition, oh, it's realizing your potential.

That's how you begin to live. A friend of mine calls this visionary evangelism. The way God changes us is by showing us a vision of what we can be in the future. Showing us why he wants us to have our best life out here. And then that changes us.

It's not the thought of your best life that is going to change you. It is understanding that the best life ever lived was given for you as a sacrifice. If you came out of a Pentecostal tradition, then what was emphasized was spirit baptism. And again, listen, I'm in the fullness of the spirit.

I wrote a book on it. But the spirit of God is there to point you to the beauty of the gospel. That's the whole point is that as the grace of God appears in your heart, that's what teaches you to deny ungodliness.

So when the spirit of God comes in your heart, what he does is he makes the grace of God appear larger to you. If you came out of a Reformed or a Bible tradition, then it was all about learning, learning facts. So you didn't come to church, you came to class.

You brought a notebook and you brought pens because godly people take notes. And we call it transformation by education. It's not transformation by education. True transformation comes by revelation of the beauty of God. If you came out of a more liberal tradition, then it was all about activism. Oh, well, good Christians care about this social injustice and good Christians are trying to fix this in their community.

And that's awesome. But it is not what I do for my community. It's not what I discipline myself to do that produces godliness. What brings the power of new life is the blood of Jesus. Would you be free from your passion and pride? There's power in the blood. Come for a cleansing, the cavalry's tied. There's wonderful power in the blood. It was in the cross, listen, that you were released first from the penalty of sin, but you were released also from the power of sin.

From the penalty of sin in the past, from the power of sin in the present. If you want to know how to say no to ungodliness and worldly lust, then the grace of God has to appear to your heart. Satan loves to promote religion that is divested of the power of the blood. Satan's fine with you going to church.

He'd actually prefer it. Because then you can keep yourself deluded into thinking that you're sufficient. Satan is into religion. But he wants you to be in a place where the blood of Jesus is not emphasized. So Paul tells the Cretan believers, and I say it to you, listen, churches and pulpits that do not centralize the gospel and the grace of God should be avoided at all costs. Does that sound harsh?

Now I don't care how long your family's been there, I don't care how many friends you got there. You need to avoid them, and if that sounds harsh, then read the book of Titus, because Paul tells them to have nothing to do with counterfeit gospels. Because all they do is promote rebellion and sin in the heart. It is only the gospel that gives life to you and your family. So if you care about life and yourself and your family, then you will get yourself in a place where the grace of God is talked about and celebrated and worshiped and soaked in every single week. Then he says, here's the second thing, last thing, you need to evaluate your sincerity as a believer through this lens. You see evidence of this faith in you producing godliness? Because Paul's going to say, if you don't see that evidence, then you can't have encountered the real thing.

You've got a form of religion that's mere words, but you don't know the power. Even one last illustration that I've used to kind of help you see this, I told you, it's like if I came in here late. A sermon is supposed to start, the lights come on, there's no me up here. Like three minutes later, I come running in, I'm out of breath.

My hair's all messed up, I've got a black eye. And I'm like, you would not believe what just happened. I was on my way over here, and I had a flat tire. And so I stopped to change the tire, and I'm taking off the lug nuts, and one of the lug nuts rolls out across the interstate, Interstate 40. And I go out there and pick up a lug nut, and I pick it up and look up, and right as I'm picking it up, I look up, and here's this tractor trailer coming at me at 75 miles an hour. Just bam, just knocks me like 100 yards. He's trying to slow down, but runs over me. Been trying to figure out what he ran over, so he backed up and ran over me again. I got up and I took the lug nuts, and I finished changing the tire, and I came on over here, but that's why I'm late. That's why I got this black eye.

You're listening to me and you're like, no, no. If you got hit by a tractor trailer going 75 miles an hour, 75 miles an hour, you would look different. You would talk different, you'd walk different, everything about you would be different.

You can't get hit with that kind of force and stay the same. What Paul says is if the grace of God has appeared to you, if this glory has unfolded itself, you won't be the same. I'm not talking about perfection. You all listen to me. I am more sensitive to my sin now than I have ever been. I feel like I get prouder quicker.

I feel like I lose my temper quicker. I feel like the lust of the flesh, or they're not getting any better. I'm not talking about perfection, but I'm saying in me there is this hunger that is growing because sinlessness is there, and I know it's what God has for me, and I want to see his face, and I want to be sinless, and I'm not there now, but I want to be so badly, and although my body has all this sin that keeps tempting me, there's this thing growing in me that says, yes, one day, one day I will see God, and if that changes and happening into you, then you have never seen the grace of God. If you can say that you know God and go on to live in sin and just not really care, if you're sleeping with your girlfriend or boyfriend, you're cheating on your spouse, you're a dishonest person, you just really don't care about the passions and the lust of the flesh and what they're doing to you, then I'm telling you, you have never encountered the grace of God. Is your faith, is it producing godliness, is it real?

Why don't you bow your heads with me if you would? If you've never received the gospel, listen, it's a gift. The grace of God, grace means that God did it for you.

It's a gift you have to receive. The gospel is that Jesus is the Lord. If you will surrender yourself to him, repent of your sins, say, Jesus, you're the Lord, not me, and you'll receive the death that he died for you and your place on the cross. He'll save you right now, in this moment, right now. Say, Lord Jesus, I receive this grace as a gift, as mine. I surrender and I receive it. If you're a believer, you know you've already received the grace of God, maybe this year, instead of making a bunch of New Year's resolutions, maybe what you should ask for is revelation from God to see grace more clearly this year so that godliness will not be something we have to yell at you about, but it'll be something that just grows as naturally as roses on a rose bush. Father, I pray that as our church beholds now this grace, in these next few moments even, you would open the eyes of our heart and give us the spirit of wisdom and revelation so that this grace would appear to us beautiful and glorious as it is. We pray in Jesus' name.