Learning to Say the Right Words, Part 2

Whenever the New Testament speaks of God appearing, light dawning, whenever it talks about God appearing, it's always a reference to God the Son, Jesus Christ, which makes perfect sense given the fact that we're told that Jesus is the embodiment of deity. He is the physical manifestation of the invisible God. Colossians 1 15. Jesus Christ, who is our Savior and our great God, is going to do what? Paul says, he is going to appear.

We're looking for him even now. The grace of God in your life isn't something that you only need for salvation. God's grace is something you need your entire life, and thankfully, it's at work your entire life. We're looking at God's grace today, and more specifically, we're looking at the language God uses to describe his grace in our lives. This is wisdom for the heart. Yesterday, Stephen Davey began a message called Learning to Say the Right Words. We're going to do a little bit of review to refresh your memory and then bring you the conclusion to this important message.

Here's Stephen. Not only does grace teach you how to leave your past life, it teaches you how to live your present life. Notice what he writes next in verse 12, instructing us to deny ungodliness and worldly desires.

Don't stop there, but to live sensibly, righteously, and godly in this present world. You don't just stop with no. You're a growing Christian?

Yeah. How do you know? I'm not doing this, that. I'm not doing that. I'm not doing that. I'm not doing that. I'm not doing that.

Don't stop there. Grace is going to teach you how to say yes and what to say yes to. In fact, the tenses of this verb, to live, to live sensibly, indicate that it takes place at the same time as your denials. This is a wonderful truth and very encouraging to every disciple that wants to grow up in Christ. In other words, you're saying no to ungodliness and no to worldly desires, while at the same time you are saying yes to living sensibly and righteously and godly. See, part of the misconception, especially if you're new in the faith that the enemy is going to bring to your mind, is that you're going to become discouraged because you have this belief, this misconception that you'll eventually arrive at some point where you will never have to say no again.

Life will be an easy yes. I mean, surely a mature-wise growing Christian gets to the point where he never has to bother saying no. I mean, those temptations are finally going to give up and say, well, leave that guy alone.

It doesn't work. Not according to Paul, not according to the rest of the Bible. In fact, even Paul is a maturing believer, transparently admitted to struggle with doing the things he didn't want to do and not doing the things he wanted to do.

Oh, wretched man that I am. Romans 7, you are never beyond temptation. You will never outgrow the need to say no on a daily basis.

And at the same time, you're never beyond the need to say yes to affirm these things. We don't just put off the old man. We put on the new man. Ephesians 3. And Paul tells us that grace is going to clothe us correctly.

Take that off and put this on. Now, Paul tells us that grace is going to teach us to say yes to three different attributes. The first one here in verse 12 is sensibility.

This word has shown up several times, and I've tried to mark it each time in your minds. It occurred in chapter one as a qualification for an elder. He needs to be known as sensible. It is also a challenge for older men to be sensible. Chapter two, verse two.

It's part of the growing development of a young wife and mother. She's also told to be sensible in verse five of chapter two, and also in the lives of young men, they're told to be sensible in verse six. Now Paul broadens the application, as I said he would, to the entire church family so that no one is exempt from saying yes to this characteristic. The word means, if you remember, to live with discretion, to think and act with self-control.

It's a word that refers to somebody, in fact it's translated often, especially in the King James Version, to be of sound mind. That is, he's a believer who doesn't allow his mind to be controlled or distracted by either circumstances or culture, and that is then the daily battle. He daily makes up his mind to follow the truth.

Daily. Now Paul adds another course in the curriculum of grace. Not only is the believer to live sensibly, but righteously. Paul, by the way, only uses this word in this form two other times in the New Testament. One to defend his own actions as being upright.

One of the rare times he defends himself. First Thessalonians 2, verse 10. And the other time to describe the believer's obligation to stop sinning and live rightly.

First Corinthians 15, 34. Living righteously means you live rightly. You live with rightness. You live then by the divine standard of what is right. And it must be a divine standard outside of yourselves, because if it isn't, we're going to think whatever we're doing is right.

Let me get on a little hobby horse for a moment. More and more you are hearing people talk about their values. They have family values. We have personal values. The values that made our country great. People who live according to their set of values. I'm a man or a woman of values. That word values, dear flock, means absolutely nothing. It can be defined any way a person wants to define it.

The word values is entirely subjective. It's whatever you happen to believe in. Whatever you happen to think is something valuable. In the eyes of God, it might not be valuable at all, but you think it is, and so you're a person of values. And that's the word today.

It's used for everything from American-made merchandise to organic food. Whatever you value is based on what you believe, you feel, you want to do, and they are as varied as the wind. Values have replaced.

Here's the word that's disappeared. Values has replaced the word virtues. It's one thing to say I'm a man of value. It's another thing to say I'm a man of virtue. World of difference.

Why? Because of the way Webster defined it. Sometime back, himself, for our Western world, he defined virtue as a conformity to a standard of right.

No wonder that word has to go bye-bye. You're telling me there's an external standard of right? Objective standards of rightness or righteousness? There's something bad and there's something good, something wrong and something right? See, our relativistic culture doesn't want to conform to any ethical or moral or even spiritual standards of rightness. You can't go out there on the street and tell somebody who's following, you know, some guy who worships trees, you're wrong. You can't tell them they're wrong and you're right.

Who do you think you are? Values, by definition, do not conform to any external standard. But here's what's happening. The values created by people who stand up and say they hold to values are perceived as people of virtue. A man says, I firmly hold to these values and people think, oh, he's a man of virtue. Not necessarily.

He's simply holding to whatever his own standard is of what he considers valuable, and it may not be virtuous at all. William Sangster, a well-known pastor in England who was serving at the time the Titanic sank, told in one of his sermons the story that I read of a wealthy woman who'd already found her place in one of the lifeboats. She was about to be lowered along with others into the North Atlantic. She suddenly thought of something that she had forgotten and begged to go back and get. She was frantic. They allowed her to go, get out and go, and they gave her just a minute or two. She ran across that listing deck to her stateroom. There above her bed was a shelf, and on that shelf was a box of her diamond jewels, and she ran over to it, pushed the box off the shelf and onto the floor, and reached behind it where there were oranges. She grabbed the oranges and ran back to the lifeboat. What happened to her values?

William Sangster wrote this. The danger of death had boarded the Titanic. One blast of its awful breath had transformed all values.

Priceless things had become worthless, worthless things, priceless. Ladies and gentlemen, there is a day coming when the world will stand before God and discover that according to His standard of rightness, many of their values were not virtues at all. And Paul says, now you've left the world system, their perspective.

Now that you're a believer, the grace of God is going to teach you through the Word of God, by the Spirit of God, what is right, and you're going to say yes to that. He has a third word in that list you'll notice. He has the word godly. This is the opposite of ungodly. Ungodliness, which the believer is to deny. The word simply defined is an appropriate attitude toward God and the things of God, whatever they may be.

It is godlikeness in perspective and spirit. So already you know and you should be encouraged by the fact that grace is going to show up every day to teach you this because none of us will ever master any of these three things. We'll never be able to put on a shelf godly and say, I got that one nailed. I'm working on honesty, but I got godly. Working on purity, but I got godly.

No, no, no. All of this is a continual process of the curriculum of grace. We never master it until we are in the presence of Christ who completes his work in our glorification one day. He adds at the end of verse 12, we're to live this way in the present age.

I like that phrase. We live in this present age. We don't live like it. We don't live for it.

We live in it. That's how we're taught to live. So grace teaches you how to leave your past life. It teaches you how to live your present life.

But it also teaches you how to look for your future life. Look at verse 13. Looking for the blessed hope and the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Christ Jesus. Isn't that a fantastic text? I wanted to preach an entire sermon just on that one verse alone and couldn't because this is the last Sunday. Paul was talking about God the Father and God the Son, some would say. He's talking about God the Father and Jesus Christ, oh no. This verse, by the way, happens to be one of the strongest statements on the deity of Jesus Christ in all of the New Testament. He's not talking about God and somebody else, the second person or Jesus, could be a man for all other cults to believe.

There is a single definite article in this Greek title. You're going to forget that. Just remember it this way. The great God is also the Savior who is Christ Jesus.

That's what he's saying. You could reverse the reading in your English New Testament to sort of capture that idea. Jesus Christ is the Savior who is our great God.

The pronouns in the next verse are singular, pointing back to Jesus Christ. Furthermore, and I want to throw a couple other things at you, in the Old Testament, God is often referred to as great. In the New Testament, God the Son alone is referred to as great.

It's a unique title given just to him. Just as importantly, whenever the New Testament speaks of God appearing, epiphanio, epiphany, light dawning, whenever it talks about God appearing, it's always a reference to God the Son, Jesus Christ, which makes perfect sense given the fact that we're told that Jesus is the embodiment of deity. He is the physical manifestation of the invisible God, Colossians 1.15. Jesus Christ, who is our Savior and our great God, is going to do what? Paul says he is going to appear.

We're looking for him even now. This is a reference in this context to the church in any age looking for the rapturing away of that church by the sudden appearance of Christ. The Thessalonian believers were commended for waiting for God's Son who was coming from heaven.

1 Thessalonians 1.10. Paul told the Thessalonians that they further would be delivered from the wrath to come, introduced in Revelation 3.10 as the wrath, which we know is the tribulation. Paul was expecting, as he wrote to the Thessalonians, to be alive when Christ came to catch the church away, rapturo in the Latin text from which we get our word rapture, and join him in the air, chapter 4, verse 17, after which he institutes a period of wrath on the earth as he establishes Israel to receive the Messiah, and he will with us return. Paul is telling us here in Titus to look for that time when Christ will come for his church. After the tribulation, he comes with his church. Have the church get there with him. He's already come for him, for the church. We don't have time to review all the eschatological events of Revelation.

We covered that a few years ago. Fifty sermons or so, you thought it'd never end. Well, it ended. We don't have time to go back and rehearse it.

Here's the point, though, for now. Grace is teaching us to look up. She's constantly saying, look up.

Look up. Get ready. Get ready. Are you ready? Be ready. Grace is teaching us to look forward to the coming of Christ, which may be today.

So that's the third expression. She's effectively teaching us how to say, Well, yes, maybe today. Maybe today. One person's excited about that.

That's great. Maybe today our great God, who is our Savior, who happens to be the embodiment of deity, Jesus Christ, is going to come and rapture us away. There, ladies and gentlemen, is your exit strategy.

I'd love to be alive when that happens. Can I ask you if you've planned your way out of here? Most people will say, I'm set for life. I got my 401, whatever, my portfolio, insurance, money in the bank, retirement, all the provisions I need.

So what? You're going to die. Do you have a way out? The way out happens to be the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except by Him, John 14, 6. Paul says, while we're on the subject of our great God and Savior, let me tell you what He's done for those who've placed their faith in Him alone who wait for Him. Very quickly, verse 14 informs us He gave Himself for us to redeem us.

He redeemed us. Every slave would immediately understand this context. This is coming out of the culture of the slave market. And the slave market is to this day around the world. A buyer will approach the auction block upon which a slave stood where buyers are bartering.

He will meet the price that tops the others. He will remove that slave's chains, and that slave belongs to Him. Jesus Christ buys us out of slavery to sin, and He purchases us as His own slaves.

That's why Paul began this letter to Titus in chapter 1 by saying, Titus, you need to know I am a slave of God. He bought me. Now he tells us he redeemed the church.

He buys the church. He redeemed us. Would you notice from every lawless deed, the tense of the word redeem points back to the act of Christ upon the cross with ongoing implication and power, but He redeemed us from every. Circle that word every in your mind. Every.

The enemy wants to erase that word. Every. Every already at the cross?

Yes, every. Lawless deed. Which means you can't do something tomorrow where Christ will say, oh, I didn't know about that one. I didn't think you'd do that or say that or think that. That changes everything.

I'm going to have to kick you out of the family. Every lawless thought, every act against His glory, every desire has been paid for on the cross in the past by our Savior's own death. That's our standing. Now, as it relates to our ongoing experience, he adds another action by Christ here in this text. He's also purifying for himself a people for his own possession.

He redeemed you, ongoing implications. He is purifying you all the time. He's cleansing us. The blood of Jesus Christ continually cleanses us. And he's also, thirdly, making us zealous for every good deed.

He wraps up that sentence by saying that. Verse 15, I believe, belongs with Chapter 3. Are we really zealous people for God? The Puritans put it this way, that Christians are empowered with new affections.

Are we really affectionate for our faith? Woodrow Crow wrote in one of his books I have, some time ago he was preaching in Chicago. He preached for us a summer series ago. He called a taxi to the airport. He said he engaged the cabbie in conversation, found out he was a Muslim.

They passed a large building that had been converted into a mosque. He asked how many men attended there for prayer. He said, well, the 4 p.m. service has about 1,500 worshipers. The 4 a.m. service is not as well attended. It's like our 8 o'clock service on Sunday morning.

4 a.m. He said only about 900 come. Can you imagine 900 people belonging to the Lord getting up in the city of Raleigh and praying at 4 a.m.? He went on to write that almost all Americans claim to be Christians. Americans believe in God, but they evidently don't believe in the assembly, at least not like Muslims attend their assembly. Crow said this, and it startled me.

He said, if you took all the unchurched people in America, those not committed to a church family, if you took all the unchurched in America, and if you took them and made them their own separate nation, they would be the 11th most populated nation on planet earth. We have become the mission field. Are we zealous for any kind of deed that would bring glory to God? Are they hearing us say no to the wrong things? Are they watching and listening to us say yes to the right things? Do they hear us talk about or think about it? Have they ever heard a whisper from us that we believe Jesus is coming again? You tell the people at work that you believe Jesus is going to come and he could come today, and if he does, you're going to disappear.

They're going to think you fell off the turnip truck. Are you willing to say that, live like that, warn them, invite them? I was given an article from the Wall Street Journal, and I must hasten to close, but a physicist wrote in the commentary section what many are not coming to grips with is we now have data and we know that this universe is winding down. One day we know also from the book of Revelation that he is going to do away with the old and create a new universe, new heaven, new earth.

This physicist wrote, The latest data from space satellites are unmistakable. The universe will eventually die. Galaxies are being pushed apart.

Someday, when looking up, we'll be quite lonely with other galaxies too far away to even be observed. Worse, it will be deathly cold. As the universe accelerates, temperatures will plunge throughout the universe. Billions of years from now, now he's guessing, of course, they throw billions around. Billions of years from now that the stars will have exhausted their nuclear fuel. We do know that they are running out. The oceans will freeze. The sky will become dark, and the universe will consist of dead neutron stars, black holes, and nuclear debris. Is all intelligent life on earth doomed to die?

Oh, that wasn't in there. I just nodded my head because that's what I wanted you to know. He says this, It seems as if the iron laws of physics have issued a death warrant. But there's still one possible exit strategy. Leave the universe. Do the laws of physics allow for the creation of wormholes connecting our universe to a younger, more hospitable universe?

In 2021, a new space probe, LISA, laser interferometer space antenna, will be launched, which may be able to prove or disprove this conjecture. Can a gateway be built to connect our universe with another? For intelligent life, there is no choice. Listen to him. Either we leave for another universe, or we die in this old one. Can a gateway be built to travel from our universe to another?

Yes. That's the plan. We're looking for this blessed hope, which in the Greek mind was assurance, and the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, who happens to be Jesus Christ. Someday, one day, maybe this day, he will come for his church. In the meantime, I'm giving you grace, God says.

She's going to come along and she's going to tutor you every day. When teachable moments arise, and you're going to learn how to say no, you're going to learn how to say yes, and you're going to learn how to say and live with the perspective, maybe today makes me happy too. Well, I hope today's lesson helped you learn how to think about the grace that God has shown you, and is showing you every day. You've tuned in to Wisdom for the Heart. Our Bible teacher, Stephen Davey, is working through a series from Titus 2 called Family Talk. The message you just heard is called Learning to Say the Right Words. Stephen has one more message to go in this series, and we'll bring you that tomorrow.

Now, if you've missed any of the previous six messages in this series, you can go back and get caught up. Simply navigate to wisdomonline.org and you'll find that archive there. That content is absolutely free for you and your friends. So, please share this Bible teaching ministry with those who could benefit from it. We also have an app for your phone, tablet, or smart TV. When you install the Wisdom International app, all the Bible teaching content is available to you wherever you go. Install that today. If we can assist you, our number is 866-48-BIBLE. Thanks for being with us today, and join us again tomorrow right here on Wisdom for the Heart. .