Book of Titus - Ch. 2, vv. 11-12

Titus 2 as the Context for Christian Living

All righty, if y 'all wanna turn to Titus chapter two. Now, really quick, I'll say this. I know that we've done quite a bit of, there's been a lot of repetition, I realize that. A lot of that has to do with the nature of the epistle, the very instructional delivery that Paul is taking here.

And so we've reread kind of the same passages going into the next verse we cover each and every time. And there's reason for that. It's on purpose. Listen, it doesn't matter what side of any theological debate or argument you're on, every single person, all of them, best of them, will have a tendency sometimes, and I'm speaking generally, of course, to take verses out of context, maybe to have some proof texts, quote unquote, for their particular theological argument and things like that.

Anyone can do that. It happens. It's very easy, of course, to correct and things like that. It's not like it's some unpardonable sin or anything, but we want to avoid it for sure.

Why?

Because we care about the word of God more than anything else. We want to ensure that we are taking the apostle and through him, the Holy Spirit, for what he intended to say when we're reading their words.

And so because of that, there are some times where we want to rehash the context over and over and over again, because even though we're going verse by verse and there are words to break down and phrases to break down, we want to make sure we keep the full scope in view the whole time.

We may zoom in, but we need to zoom back out, remind ourselves where we're at, and then maybe zoom back in again and things of that sort. And so with that being said, start at verse one with me. At the top of Titus chapter two.

And as we review the section of scripture that we just finished last week. So we just finished a pretty, verses one through 10 are a very specific section where he's addressing different groups of people in church, giving exhortations and things like that.

So we completed that last week when we finished up verse 10. But I want you guys to pay attention. We're going to reread verses one through 10. And I want you all to pay attention to some of the things that we find in this section.

As we look at the context more broadly now, we've done it verse by verse, we're going to read it all in one fell swoop. And I want you to pay attention for some things going into verse 11, where Paul, as we get to verse 11, is going to give us an argument.

He's going to give us a reason or a cause that is what makes all of the preceding discussion we've had possible. And by preceding discussion, I'm talking about all the way in chapter one. So we're talking about the qualifications of elders.

We're talking about the ability for elders to actually live out this godly character that Paul expects of them to do it. All the way into, and then of course, we have the contrast with the false teachers.

So it's the cause of human beings being able not to do that. So it's in the positive and in the negative. Then it comes into chapter two, and we have what? We have 10 verses of exhortations on godly living, godly character in the positive and in the negative.

It'll say some things not to do, it'll say some things to do. We have all this stuff. So now we get to verse 11 of chapter two, and the apostle Paul is going to give us the root cause of what makes all of that possible in the first place.

So start at verse one with me though. Get the full context here, and we'll move on from there. Titus chapter two, verse one. But speak thou the things which become sound doctrine, that the aged men be sober, grave, temperate, sound in faith, in charity, in patience.

The aged women likewise, that they be in behavior as becometh holiness, not false accusers, not given to much wine, teachers of good things, that they may teach the young women to be sober, to love their husbands, to love their children, to be discreet, chaste, keepers at home, good, obedient to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be blasphemed.

Young men likewise, exhort to be sober-minded in all things, showing thyself a pattern of good works in doctrine, showing uncorruptedness, gravity, sincerity, sound speech that cannot be condemned, that he that is of the contrary part may be ashamed, having no evil thing to say of you.

Exhort servants or slaves to be obedient unto their own masters, and to please them well in all things, not answering again, not purloining, but showing all good fidelity, that they may adorn the doctrine of God our Savior in all things.

So I want you guys to notice a couple things with me. First, a couple things that pop up as you read this passage in Paul's discourse here so far is number one, we have people groups. Okay, we have older men, we have older women, we have young men and women, we have slaves, and kind of by implication, masters.

So we have people groups, first and foremost. But the second thing that pops out as you read this passage is we see that Paul is discussing sin habits within these groups. So you've got distinct people groups and distinct sin habits within these people groups.

For example, you've got impatience, you have drunkenness. These are a couple of particular sin habits that Paul associates, generally speaking, remember, generalization is a needed tool when it comes to a person teaching and exhorting large groups of people.

So he assigns this particular sin proclivity of impatience and drunkenness to the older men. Then he goes into gossip and alcoholism. In other words, alcoholism doesn't necessarily mean you're drunk all the time.

What it entails is that you have a reliance on the alcohol, on the wine, in order to get through the day. In other words, it's a thing that's filling the void rather than Christ filling the void. So he assigns gossip and alcoholism in that way to older women.

Then he goes into talking about a lack of discretion, a lack of submission with younger women in mind. Then he talks about corruptness and a lack of self-control in a number of areas, especially with regard to speech, and he assigns that to the younger men.

And then he talks about how slaves can be contentious and can embezzle the money of their masters. So he's talking about a number of sin habits that these particular groups that he's already defined can crop up, generally speaking.

So two things in these 10 verses, people groups, sin habits within these groups. And of course, Paul is giving them the positive side of it. He's telling them what to do. It's not just a matter of condemning what not to do, but he gives them the positive instruction as well.

And these sin habits are severe problems. And there's not a single group that Paul focuses on here in this passage of scripture that is immune to sin habits. It doesn't matter which group you find yourself in, which category, which age group, it doesn't matter.

There is no immunity to sin regardless of where you're at, and Paul makes that very clear. And that is why, it's because of this reality that Paul is exhorting Titus to then exhort the congregation to live out good doctrine so as to avoid their sin proclivities.

So it's because all these things are true that Paul is telling Titus, look, here's what you're gonna have to do. Here's how you're gonna have to handle this in your position as a called man of God, as an ordained man of God, as I have appointed you.

You appoint these elders to help you out, but here's what you're gonna deal with. And these are very real problems. And here's the answer. Here's how you can handle it. He exhorts him to exhort the congregations in a particular way to live out good doctrine, to avoid their sin habits, their sin proclivities.

And so what is the answer to all of this? What is the foundational cause of living out good doctrine? How is it possible? What's the thing that initiates godly character in living out good doctrine? What you might call sanctification.

What initiates that? Well, look at verse 11. For the grace of God, I want you to keep in mind the word for there, it's very important. For the grace of God that bringeth salvation hath appeared to all men.

Now, first of all, it's important to realize the scope of salvation. We, salvation so permeates the message of the New Testament that we can have the occasional problem of taking it for granted. Even though we are saved, our salvation is sealed in the Holy Spirit.

He lives within us. We can have assurance in our eternal security and all of these beautiful things. But it's because of these beautiful things, we can sometimes take the doctrine itself for granted and forget some of the power that is within it.

The gospel, Christians need the gospel just as much as the lost world. And the main reason I can say that is the gospel is not one wooden static thing. It's not a singular message. It has a broad scope of things within it.

Much like the law, you can say the law of God. Well, are you talking about 10 commandments? Are you talking about the civil particularities of Israel at the time? Or what are you talking about? It could be one of very many things.

Same thing with the gospel. We can be talking about the gospel, which part of the atonement, the finished work of Christ, sanctification or regeneration, which part of the gospel are we talking about?

So obviously salvation plays a significant role in the gospel. But again, more importantly than that, we need to be sure we're not taking the doctrine for granted as believers with our salvation already sealed.

We need to keep these things in mind so that when we read a verse like this, we're in Titus chapter two, we're now in verse 11. When we see a verse like this, it is we've talked about. All of the verses we've talked about and helps us understand Paul's point, his argument, his intention in these words.

So again, it's important to realize the scope of salvation beyond the typical kind of myopic understanding of it, kind of reserving salvation back to this thing that happened to us in the past. We called upon the name of the Lord, we got saved.

Got saved, past tense, we leave it back there. We have to be sure that we don't leave it back there. So yes, salvation applies to, if you wanna call it or think of it this way, the macro view of man's life.

So the grace of God does bring salvation from eternal hellfire. That's typically what we are thinking when we think we got saved, so we're now safe from hell.

That's true.

Salvation saves us from eternal hellfire, eternal separation from God. But Paul, by the end of this chapter, and we may even get to it today here in the next verse actually, what he's gonna do is he's going to emphasize salvation in the micro view as well.

He's going to emphasize salvation in the present world, not just from the world to come, whether that be, well, from the world to come, that being hell. So we must not forget about the micro view either.

And that is what Paul has in mind greatly in this particular passage. This salvation is deliverance from hell, yes, and all the way down to your pet sin habits, whether that be gossiping, whether that be relying on your wine to get through the day, not guarding your tongue well enough to have that sound speech Paul talked about when your emotions get the best of you.

So the salvation that appeared to all men, yes, it's salvation from eternal hellfire, but it's also salvation from your sin habits down to the most trivial level that we can think of. So that's one thing.

Now, in addition to that, the salvation is indiscriminate. God's grace is not limited to ethnicity or position in society. You could be old, you could be young, you could be a man or a woman, you could be a slave or a slave master.

And so this is why Paul uses the transitionary word for, at the beginning of verse 11 there. He's saying, because of this, all of the stuff we just talked about is made possible. He's letting Titus know, and of course, all Christians after Titus, all of us, he's letting them know that it's because of this grace of God that brings salvation to all men that makes it possible to live out the doctrine that preceded this verse.

So remember the pastoral epistles, and we'll see this more and more as we go through first and second Timothy, but it's as practical as it gets. I mean, it is down in the trenches. It's the nitty gritty details of sanctification.

It's the details of what it is to be a Christian. We get saved, and as I've said a billion times in the last few months, for the last year, after we get saved, we have lives to live. And so what do you do with that?

What do you do with all that time? Well, God in his grace gives us exactly what to do in all that time. He gives us the instruction. He gives us the commands. He gives us the exhortations. He gives us the grace and the mercy to get through that time.

And so what Paul is doing is he's taking the nitty gritty in the trenches kind of detail that we just got in the last 10 verses, and you can go all the way back to the first chapter as well and kind of include all of it.

He's doing all of it. He's talking about all of it, and he is anchoring it to a very massive doctrine, that being the salvation of God for his people. He's anchoring all of the minute details to that so that that way we can remember, oh, none of this is arbitrary.

None of this is accidental. None of this is Paul's opinion or his feeling or his way of kind of sifting through his current cultural landscape. No, it has nothing to do with Paul. It has everything to do with the grace of God and the salvation that it brings.

Now, you guys may not have noticed it yet, or maybe you have. We still have a lot of verses to get to. We haven't even finished chapter two yet. We still have chapter three. But God's title as savior is emphasized in this very brief epistle many times, and that's significant because again, we're talking about things down to the women keeping the home, the young men having self-control, the older men discipling the young men, the older women discipling the young women, the elders and the kind of godly character that they need.

And yet in the context of all of that, you have God's character as savior emphasized over and over again. For example, I mean, if you guys wanted to take a look at these with me, some of them we've seen.

Look at chapter one, verses three and four. But hath in due times manifested his word through preaching, which is committed unto me according to the commandment of God, our savior. And then look at the next verse.

To Titus, mine own son, after the common faith, grace, mercy, peace from God the father and the Lord Jesus Christ, our savior. You go to chapter two, verse 10. We've already read it. We finished it last week.

Talking about slaves says not purloining, but showing all good fidelity that they may adorn the doctrine of God, our savior in all things. You look at verse 13, we haven't gotten there yet. We'll probably get there next week though.

Looking for that blessed hope and the glorious appearing of the great God and our savior, Jesus Christ. You get to chapter three and you look at verses four and six. Verse four says, but after the kindness and love of God, our savior toward man appeared.

And then verse six says, which he shed on us abundantly through Jesus Christ, our savior. This is a very brief letter. It's three short chapters. It's all practical. It's all about godly living in the moment.

And yet the character of God as our savior is emphasized. In fact, there's only two verses in the entire epistle that don't talk about God as savior while it's talking about God himself. And that's just in the first two verses of the salutation.

And so this is something that Paul is emphasizing and it is for good reason. Now pay close attention with me. Look at verse 11 again, but pay close attention one more time as it moves into verse 12. And I want you to see if you guys notice something.

For the grace of God that bringeth salvation hath appeared to all men, teaching us that denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously and godly in this present world. Now, verse 12 talks about a teacher.

Who is this teacher? Who's the teacher? In verse 12. The key is in verse 11. It says in verse 11, look at it one more time. It's just one thought. Say that again, Dave.

Certainly.

There it is right there. So God is certainly the teacher, but he has particular means that lives within us in time and space that teaches us moment for moment. And look at it one more time. It's just a complete thought.

It's all one sentence, two verses, but one sentence. The grace of God. So this is the grace specifically of God that brings salvation hath appeared to all men, teaching us, it's the grace that is teaching us that denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, godly in this present world.

So we have an ever present teacher with us all the time. And that teacher is grace. The grace of God. Grace was the actor of our justification. Yes, so the moment that we called upon the name of the Lord, the moment the spirit moved within us, drew us to the father, gave us that yearning to call on the shepherd for who he is for the first time.

That moment, grace, the grace of God was the actor that brought about that justification. Absolutely. But remember, we can't leave that in the rear view mirror. We can't leave that as a moment in the past because that same grace that brought salvation is the very grace that teaches the believers of God in the moment for the rest of their lives.

It's the, again, the moment of salvation, if you want to put it in those terms, the moment we got saved. We can't forget that that's not just an event that took place in our past. We have lives to live.

We're living day to day. We're waiting for heaven. Yes, but we can't do that in a way that it makes us passive about the rest of our lives. And that, of course, is a trap that a lot of believers will find themselves in.

So of course, salvation is liberating, being justified. And the kind of euphoria of having the spirit live within you for the first time is present. And it's an amazing thing. It's liberating as it should be.

And we have these great feelings initially. But then a trap that many believers will fall into at that point is that we got saved. We got our ticket punched. We're going to heaven. We're safe from hell.

Bad things may happen to you in this life, sure, but it doesn't matter because we're going to heaven. And so now we're just gonna wait for that. We're just gonna wait for heaven. We don't know when it'll come.

The imminence, this idea of the imminence of Jesus is returned at any second. Many of our brothers and sisters in this area, of course, hold that firmly. So we're waiting for heaven. We're waiting for the rapture.

And that's what our life is all about now, is waiting. And what Paul is telling us here is, look, that grace that saved you initially, that gave you that liberation, that felt so good, and that gave you that feeling of freedom from the slave master of your own sin and from the devil and from the world, it saved you from that in that point in time, absolutely.

But that same grace, it's the exact same grace. It's not any different. The same grace is your active teacher in the present moment teaching you to do something. Grace is our teacher. And as our perfect, infallible teacher, we now ask, what exactly is grace teaching us?

What is this infallible teacher doing? What is its duty? What is it teaching us as we live our lives? Well, if you look at verse 12 again, we receive kind of a double command here, a double injunction from Paul, giving us the negative and then the positive.

And of course, he's been doing this throughout the whole epistle, but he does it succinctly here in this single verse. He gives us the negative and then the positive. He says, deny ungodliness and worldly lusts.

So there's some problems there that we have to deal with. Those are problems that we cannot succumb to as believers. We're saved by grace, we can't lose our salvation, but we also cannot succumb to the lusts of this world.

We cannot live in ungodliness, we have to deny it. As Paul tells us elsewhere, we have to mortify it. The Greek term is very strong for that. We have to kill it. But then he gives us the positive as well.

He says, live soberly, self-control, having control of your mind, your spirit, your body, righteously and godly. So he gives us the negative and the positive, double commands. So God's work of salvation for his people is on display throughout this entire epistle as we've demonstrated already.

And we learn that that same grace that saved us initially at the point that we were justified, again, delivering us from hell, because that's absolutely true as well. It is also our teacher in real time teaching us how to be delivered from what?

What's the end of verse 12? This present world. So that means it's not about just waiting for heaven. It's not about just being saved from hell. It's about being saved from this present world right now.

The sins that may befall us at the moment we walk out of this door, out of this building, the sins and the temptations and the fiery darts of the enemy that are awaiting us this very week. We have salvation from that.

We have salvation. Katie, Dave just visited New York. And you were talking about it at the beginning, Katie, wondering what kind of things we're gonna have to shield the kids from while we're there, because we're going into the heart of our debauched culture, at least one of the hearts.

And so you go out there and you see these things, you see them manifest around us. And it is very potent and it can bring us down. It can actually bring our spirits down quite often actually. But we have salvation from that too.

We have salvation from the present world. And it's this second point that Paul makes. So in verse 11, he highlights this grace, yes, delivered us from hell, but then he makes a second point in verse 12, it delivers us from this present world too.

And it's the second point that really carries an amazing amount of power within it. How is the saving power of a holy God demonstrated? God has existed as the triune God of the Bible, that the Bible reveals to us for all of eternity, long before the foundations of the world were laid.

And yet this saving power was part of him all along. It was there from before the foundation of the world. It's part of his character. It's part of his attributes. It's part of his essence. It's something that is always there.

It's ever present. He has always had the power to save a thing, a creature that does not deserve it. But as God exists, subsists within the three persons, the triunity of the God of our Bible, as he is subsisting and communing in eternity past with this saving power within him, how is he gonna demonstrate that power?

How is he gonna show it off? Well, he does a couple of things. First, he creates the angels, but the angels were created perfect. And of course, some of them rebelled, but those that didn't remain perfect, they remained sinless.

They are literally perfect slaves of Christ all the time. They can't fail him. They do exactly what he tells them to do. They're perfectly obedient. They never let him down. So why on earth did he create humans that let him down all the time?

And specifically his people, of course, we have the stiff-necked hard-hearted Jews of the Old Testament that led him down wholesale time and time again to the point of divorcement. Of course, he brought them back, but it got really serious is the point.

And then you fast forward to the New Testament age and you have his people living within this thing called the church, which represents his bride. But the problem is it's a defiled bride. It's a bride that he has betrothed, but hasn't yet had the marriage supper.

That is something that is in our future. And the bride is not ready for that supper right now. The bride is not ready for that gathering. The bride is dirty. Why does he put up with that? Of course, we know that the bride will become chaste.

And I believe it's through the tribulation that is to come that will make her chaste. But what is the purpose? The purpose is that it's through that stiff-necked people in the Old Testament and through the stiff-necked people in the New Testament in this age, including ourselves, that the saving power is put on display so that he can show it off a bit, so that he can show what it looks like to save a thing that does not deserve salvation.

We know that he can save. It's part of his very attributes, his character, his essence, like I already said. But how is the salvation seen? How does the rest of the creation see the salvation? Well, it's demonstrated through saved people.

It's demonstrated through saved people. And that's what chapter two is all about. You live this way, you avoid these sin habits, and you replace them with these good acts of godly character, and you do that because you are the very demonstration of the saving power of God that has appeared to all men.

Remember, it's indiscriminate. It doesn't matter if you're a slave or a slave master, a man or a woman, old or young. None of those factors matter to God. But as that demonstration, excuse me, as that salvation comes upon you, it is then demonstrated through your very life.

It's what chapter two is all about. All of the commandments and exhortations of the New Testament, the instruction pointing us toward God's standards for holy living in a world that has gone completely mad around us, they are all intended to be lived out by God's people, and not just for our sakes either, but also to act as the convincing evidence of grace that can and does save.

So remember, we've talked about this a few times throughout this study, but as we live out these godly lives, as we desire to actually take these instructions seriously and live them out, it's for us, it's for our sanctification, and so we can grow closer to our Lord and Savior and be more like Him and look more like Him.

All of that is wonderful, but remember, there's another important key. Us living out our lives and taking these instructions seriously and desiring to keep them as much as we can and calling upon the Lord daily to help guide us and give us the strength to actually do that, it is inherently evangelistic.

As we live out these lives and we keep these commands that are in chapters like Titus chapter two, an incredibly unpopular chapter, but incredibly, excuse me, incredibly practical in instructions that are needed for living out our lives and filling that time that we have.

As we do that, people see it and they think it looks a little bit bizarre and they wonder how, they think, I know that I couldn't do that and I know that I don't have the desire or the power within me to do that, so how do they have it?

How do they have it? And of course, that gives us the opportunity to tell them how we have it. Well, it's not in and of ourselves, but it's the grace of God that lives within me and is the spirit that lives within this temple that is my body.

And so living out these instructions, taking them seriously and desiring to keep and obey these instructions that aren't always fun to keep and to obey, in doing it, it is good for us and it's good for the world around us.

It's one of the greatest ways we can evangelize is simply being obedient to God's word. You do not have to go knocking on every door in town like mom and dad diligently did and they will be blessed for that, but you don't have to do that in order to be a good evangelist.

The start of any good evangelism is to take God's word seriously and to obey his word and to live it out. Again, all of the commandments, what are they? In obedience to them, they are the convincing evidence of the grace that can and does save.

Take a look at Romans chapter 12 with me as we kind of wind this lesson down. Romans chapter 12, and we are asking the question and we've already answered it. How is this grace saved people? But why is it that that is a demonstration?

Look at Romans chapter 12, just the open couple of, you could spend weeks breaking down and just says, I beseech you therefore brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service.

I wanna say something, I wanna pause right there for just a second. The Greek term for service there is Latria and it's a derivative of another Greek word Latruo, it's literally talking about worship.

So when it says, make yourself a sacrifice, a living sacrifice, your body, a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable worship, all of the sudden it makes you realize why we should take things seriously like our corporate worship and like our family worship.

And anytime we have an opportunity to worship, why we sing hymns with reverence and why we sing hymns that are doctrinal and why we gather together as a corporate body and make the Lord's day something special and set it apart.

It's not just another day of the week, it never has been, it hasn't been for 2000 years. It is a time of reverent worship where we can make our bodies a living sacrifice, acceptable unto the living God, holy and acceptable unto God.

It's our reasonable service, our reasonable worship. But look at verse two, and be not conformed to this world, but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind that you may prove what is the good and acceptable and perfect will of God.

You are the demonstration of the saving power of God. People wanna see what his attributes look like, they wanna see what the character of a God that is unseen looks like. As Hebrews tells us, our faith is evidence of things unseen.

They may not be able to see the actual person of Jesus Christ himself at this moment, they will see him someday, whether they want to or not. But for now, for the time being, we are how his character and his attributes are seen, not that we ourselves are manifesting his attributes perfectly or the way that he does, but rather that he is glorified through using imperfect corruptible earthen vessels to do good things even sometimes.

If there is even a single time in your life that you are able to obey any of the instruction in Titus chapter two, that singular moment in time will be glorifying to God because even then you did not do it in and of yourself.

You did it through his grace, which is our teacher. What does he say? This talk of transformation. In verse two, again, be not conformed to the world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. What is he talking about there?

The transformation of a person who may have been a walking dead man five minutes ago. That is something that people see and know that that is not normal, at least based upon their definition of normalcy.

Now, of course, as you get into the word, you realize it's actually perfectly natural because God created everything good, in fact, very good, and he put his people in a perfect garden made in a sinless state.

From the human viewpoint, that's how he intended us to be all along and we just messed it up. And so it is perfectly natural for us to have this restoration that was paid for by the blood of Christ as the second Adam, as the last Adam.

But from the rest of the world that does not know any of that yet, they look at a transformed person that again may have been a walking dead man five, 10 minutes ago, a year ago, 10 years ago, doesn't matter.

They remember what he was like. They remember running in a circle. They remember him being in their circle. They remember all of his sin habits. They remember all the times he messed up. And now all of a sudden they see this transformation and they wonder how on earth is that possible?

Where did that come from? This transformation is the demonstration of an ethereal saving power that otherwise cannot be seen. The world wouldn't know about the saving power if it weren't for these corruptible people in which the saving power is now manifest.

We wouldn't understand God's grace if the only thing he ever had to worship him and to serve him were the perfect angels because they deserve being in the presence of his holiness because they're sinless and they were created for that purpose.

The world would never know what grace or saving power looks like if it weren't for God's redemptive power over a human race that fell in their sin and that were enslaved to it. Saving power cannot be seen unless it is demonstrated through God's people.

But of course, God in his wisdom, he manifests that power through corruptible rebel sinners. They were previously, we were previously vessels of wrath, but we are now, according to Romans 12, verse two, transformed and actively being renewed.

You notice the continual sense there. This isn't some event in our past. This isn't something we get to leave in the rear view mirror. This is an active, ongoing relationship, journey, sanctification.

You could insert all kinds of descriptors there. This is an active thing that is happening. We are being renewed as a new creation. And I'll end with this verse. Second Corinthians 5 .17 says, therefore, if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature.

Old things are passed away. Behold, all things become new. That is the demonstration of this saving power that Paul is talking about to go back to our original passage of Titus chapter two, verse 11 and verse 12.