The Gospel-Driven Life: Death, Life, and Glory

In 1735, John Wesley sailed from England to America, to preach the Gospel to the unreached peoples there. But he knew that he had a problem. He could not convince himself that he had any personal saving trust in Jesus Christ. He wrote in his journal, “I went to America to convert the people there; but, oh, who shall convert me?” Three years later John Wesley received his long-sought inward conversion to Christ. He wrote in his journal, “In the evening I went very unwillingly to a [church meeting] in Aldersgate Street, [in London,] where one was reading Martin Luther’s preface to his commentary on the Book of Romans. About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my own heart strangely warmed.” This experience forever changed John Wesley’s life. What John Wesley—and many others throughout Christian history—experienced was a life-changing conversion from dead works to a living faith. It was a transfer from an old way of living (even if it was an outwardly religious life) to a new life centered on a personal saving trust in Jesus. 

In another place, the Apostle Paul writes about that experience this way: “And you were dead in the trespasses in which you once walked, following the course of this world… But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ” (Eph. 2:1-5). Whether someone is dead in sin, or dead in their outward appearance of religion like the Pharisees—who Jesus described as being like “whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead men’s bones” (Matt. 23:27)—whichever is the case for the outwardly sinful man or the outwardly religious man, both are dead, and both must be made alive. This is a work that only God can do. But God is in the business of saving, and pursuing, and redeeming, and calling people to trust in him and to find new life through the Gospel. This is the God who willingly became a man and bled and died on the cross in our place for our sins. This is the God who takes those who have made themselves his enemies, and he takes those same people and makes them his children. This is the work of God that the Apostle Paul witnesses to in Titus 3:1-8.

DEAD IN SIN

Paul once wrote the believers in Crete that he, and they, were formerly dead in sin. Here’s how he describes it: "We ourselves were once foolish, disobedient, deceived, slaves to various passions and pleasures, passing our days in malice" (Titus 3:3). How would you like to be described as foolish, wicked, hateful, and blind? But that’s how Paul described himself and the people that he was speaking to. Those are the words that God inspired him to write down. Before one can be made alive, they must first know that they were dead. Jesus once said “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance” (Mt. 9:13; Mk. 2:17; Lk. 5:32). He said in Luke chapter 19, “the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost” (Lk. 19:10). Who are the lost people? All of us are. That’s why John 1:29 says about Jesus, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!”

Jesus has come to free all who Paul writes are “slaves to various passions and pleasures.” This is everyone. 1 John 1:8 says, “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” In the Gospel of John chapter 8, Jesus said to the people that he was preaching to, “Everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin… So if the Son sets you free, then you will be free indeed” (Jn. 8:34-36). The Puritan author Thomas Boston wrote about Jesus, “His heart is open to you, his arms stretched wide.” See, Jesus will pull you in and clean you up. He will clothe you with his righteousness. He will give you a new identity as a child of God.

ALIVE IN CHRIST

Jesus Christ is the savior of the world. That is the meaning of his name: “The Lord saves.” In the Gospel of Matthew, Mary is told to give him the name Jesus, “for he will save his people from their sins” (Mt. 1:21). He himself said in Matthew 20, “the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mt. 20:28). Jesus gave up his throne in heaven, and humbled himself, the book of Philippians says: he “made himself nothing, and took on the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Phil. 2:6-8). What does it mean that God saved us through Jesus Christ? It means that the creator of the universe, the one who holds all things together, the one who will one day restore all things in heaven and on earth, and bring them under his righteous rule—our God willingly left it all and came down, out of his own love and goodness and kindness, for you and for me, to rescue us from our sin so that we could be together with him. That’s what that means. Jesus, who never committed any sin, was beaten and whipped and degraded and shamed and nailed through his ankles and his wrists to a piece of wood, and was held up for mockery, naked and in public, until he died of asphyxiation and his heart burst, so that you and I could be made right with God. He lived the life we could not live and died the death we should have died. He came to save and seek the lost (Lk. 19:10), and he found us. And he died for us. And we didn’t do anything to earn it.

How do we receive that mercy? We receive it through faith. Jesus said to one woman with a history of well-known sin, “Your faith has saved you, go in peace” (Lk. 7:50). He said to a group of Pharisees, “I am the door. If anyone enters by me, he will be saved” (Jn. 10:9). Do you want to know, and love, and serve Jesus? Do you want to know in your heart for sure that you’ve been saved? Do you want the hope of a world beyond this one where there will be no pain, no sickness, no tears, nor sorrow anymore, for the old will have passed away, and the new has come? Then place your faith in Jesus. Or, better yet, place your trust in Jesus, because that’s what the word “faith” means. It doesn’t mean that you believe Jesus exists. It doesn’t mean that you believe a certain set of facts about Jesus. It means that you trust his way more than your own way; that you trust him to be able to save; that you trust him instead of all that this world can offer, instead of yourself, instead of your righteousness. Maybe you've been in a really hard time and had to tell someone, “I have nowhere else to turn.” If you are so done with yourself that you say that to Jesus, then that is what faith and putting your trust in Jesus is. There is no halfway decision there. The only way you put your trust in Jesus is by coming to the realization that you have no other option and nowhere else to turn, and you fall upon his infinite goodness and sweetness and mercy. There is no coming back from that moment. That decision is a one-way trip.

RAISED TO GLORY

We were dead in sin, and God makes us alive in Christ. But he doesn't just stop there. He raises us to glory. Here's how Titus 3:7 puts it: "so that being justified by his grace we might become heirs according to the hope of eternal life." This is wild. We don’t just get saved, we get eternal life. And we don’t just get eternal life, we become heirs of the Kingdom. Ephesians 2:6-7 says that God “raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace.” Being heirs of the kingdom means we are placed in a royal position over God’s kingdom. 1 Corinthians 6:3 says, “Do you not know that we are to judge angels?” How incredible is the mercy of God, that he would take people who have made themselves his enemies, and then make them his children, and then make those same people into co-rulers with him in his perfect kingdom over a whole host of heavenly beings who’ve never sinned? Jesus said in Matthew 25:31-34, “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne. Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. And he will place the sheep on his right, but the goats on the left. Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.” He says in another place, “the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father” (Mt. 13:43). What a picture that is. God found us when we were dead in sin. He made us alive in Christ. He raised us up to the seat of glory. And he will continue to be good and loving and merciful, in a time eternal, and in a world without end, in his perfect Kingdom. There is literally no end to the mercy of God.

-Sean

Three Motivations for Living for Jesus

For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age, waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works. - Titus 2:11-14

Before I became a parent, I used to think that I was pretty easygoing, and that I didn’t really have a lot of rules. Maybe the basics: be kind to others, pick up after yourself. That’s it. But I find the longer I’m a parent, the more rules I keep finding out that I have. And the thing is, for the most part I think they’re pretty decent rules. So I found out that I have rules like eat all your supper quickly or it will get cold and it won’t taste good. Or, don’t run out into the street, a car might hit you. Or, don’t run backwards into the table—you might hit your head, and that’s where your brain lives. By the time she was about 5, my daughter started to realize that when she follows these rules life is actually pretty good, and when she doesn’t she usually ends up having an accident and gets hurt. And she actually started to notice this pattern for herself. So I started asking her, “Hey kiddo, do you feel like I’m a mean dad who’s always giving you rules?” And she said, “No I don’t think that, you give me rules because you love me because you’re my daddy, and you don’t want me to get hurt.”

In Titus 2:11-14 the Apostle Paul has just finished giving the believers at Crete a whole list of instructions for daily life. Now maybe he's anticipating an objection here, like “I thought we were free in Christ. This seems like a lot of rules. Why should we do all this?” And Paul points out here that God’s rules come out of God’s character. It’s because of his grace that he gives us instruction. The Puritan author Richard Baxter once pointed out: 

“If any [believer] should be discouraged at the number of duties and directions set before him, [He should] consider, 1. That it is God… that imposes these duties: and who will question his wisdom, goodness, or power to make laws for us and all the world? 2. That every duty and direction is a mercy to you; and therefore should not be a matter of grief to you, but of thanks. They are like the commands of parents to their children, when they tell them to eat their meat, and wear clothes, and go to bed, and eat not poison, and tumble not in the dirt; and be careful not to cut your fingers, and [be careful around] fire and [don’t drown in] water. To leave out any such law or duty, would be to deprive you of an excellent mercy… A student is not offended that he has many books in his library; nor a tradesman that he has a store of many tools; nor the rich at the number of his farms or flocks. Believe it, that if you bring not a malignant quarrelsome mind, you will find that God has not burdened, but blessed you with his holy precepts, and that he has not appointed you one unnecessary or unprofitable duty; but only such as tend to your content, and joy, and happiness.” - from A Christian Directory, Part 1, Introduction

So the grace of God gives us instructions for life. Consider how, to one person who is lost and has messed up their whole life, finding out that God’s Word contains rules and instructions would fill them with gratefulness. “Wait, God’s given us instructions for life? Where?”

OUR FIRST MOTIVATION: THANKFULNESS FOR HIS GRACE

Titus 2:11-12 says that "the grace of God... trains us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age." It’s God’s grace that teaches us, continually, every day. It’s because of his grace that we have the ability to deny the old way of living, and to press on to live in a new way for God. If our being right with God were all up to us, we would either get discouraged and give up, or we would become proud. But the grace of God teaches us that sin is serious (because Jesus died for sin) and also that he has taken our shame away (because Jesus died for sin). So grace becomes the only way for us to press forward and to continually live for him, without either giving into discouragement or else self-protectively denying the seriousness of our sin and moving forward in arrogance and pride. We show that we trust in God when our lives are marked by (a) not denying the seriousness of our sin, and (b) continually pressing forward in hope. And so Paul says that it’s the grace of God that teaches us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives. 

Now I thought Paul Washer, who’s been a really influential preacher in my life, had a really good definition of what it means to renounce "ungodliness and worldy passions." He said ungodliness is “any attitude or action that demonstrates a lack of reverence toward God and shows a contempt for God’s law.” And so this is an attitude that has to be unlearned. And then he says worldly desires “are desires that are substitutes for God and his will. And they are desires that are telling the world that for us God is not sufficient and God is not satisfying. That is what worldly desires are.” And those worldly passions are disordered desires for anything that comes in the place of God—whether that be romantic relationships, or money, or anything else that causes you to run after it and deny God’s instructions and end up hurting yourself. Instead we need to put our focus on God alone. God alone has appeared, bringing salvation for all people. God alone gives us his grace. God alone gives us good instructions that we can build our lives upon. God alone. 

If we receive his grace, and trust in him, and accept his salvation, then his grace trains us—not just to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, but to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age (Titus 2:12). All the commentators, at least as far back as John Calvin, have pointed out that self-controlled describes the life that we live to ourselves, upright describes the life that we live towards other people, and godly describes the life that we live to God. So the life that God promises us, by God’s grace, is a life well-lived towards ourselves, towards others, and towards God.

OUR SECOND MOTIVATION: HOPE IN HIS FUTURE APPEARING

According to Titus 2:11 and 13, we stand between two appearances of Jesus: it says "the grace of God has appeared... [we] wait for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ." The first is an appearance of grace, and the second is an appearance of glory. Here we are right in the middle. We have received God’s grace, and we look forward to Jesus’ second appearance in glory. But Paul uses three words to describe the hope of the future appearance of Jesus: it will be blessed, it will be glorious, and it will be great.

Why is Jesus’ second appearance “blessed, glorious, and great”—why is it something that we should desire? While he was preaching on Titus 2:11-14, Pastor Tim Keller said this: 

"The second coming is good news for those whose lives are filled with bad news. If you are a slave in Pharaoh’s Egypt or in the southern United States in the early nineteenth century, or if you’re an Israelite in Babylon, or a Kosovar exiled in Albania, or a woman in a culture where when the husband is mad at you he can lock you in a closet or call up his buddies and threaten to have them [beat you up], if you’re a Christian in a region today where AIDS is devastating populations, you don’t yawn when somebody mentions the return of Jesus. The [arrival] of the kingdom depends on the [arrival] of the King, and the [arrival] of the King means justice will at last fill the earth.”

We look forward to the day when Jesus will come back. His return means the end of oppression, and division, and politics, and brokenness, and pain, and depression, and loneliness. His second appearance is blessed because we will be blessed when Jesus returns."

OUR THIRD MOTIVATION: A NEW IDENTITY IN HIS REDEMPTION

Finally, Titus 2:14 says that Jesus has given us a new purpose and a new identity. He "gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession who are zealous to do good works." Just like Paul narrowed down from “all people” in Titus 2:11 to "us" in 2:14, we can read this passage and narrow it down a little further. “Jesus gave himself for us” — Jesus gave himself for me. He died for me. Our blessed, and glorious, and great God and Savior Jesus Christ—he was betrayed, and whipped, and beaten, and mocked, and crucified with thieves and criminals for me. Why would he do that? The answer is, he did that to redeem us, to purify us, and to adopt us and make us his very own. Who are you in Jesus? Are you stuck in your sin? No, Jesus has redeemed you. Are you held down by shame? No, Jesus has purified you, you are clean from any shame that anyone might try to use against you so that they could hold you down. Are you alone? No, you have been adopted as Jesus’s own possession into his family.

SUMMARY

This is why we follow Jesus: (1) because his grace makes us grateful; (2) because his future appearance gives us hope; and (3) because his sacrifice gives us a new identity and purpose.

May you be motivated to live for Jesus,
-Sean

The Gospel Witness of the Church

In 2016, Tyler VanderWeele, who is the professor of epidemiology at Harvard, wrote this: 

“If someone could come up with a single [medicine] to improve the physical and mental health of millions of Americans —at no personal cost— what value would our society place on it? Going a step further, if research proved that when consumed just once a week, this concoction would reduce mortality by 20-30% over a 15-year period, how urgently would we want to make [this medicine] publicly available? The good news is that this miracle drug -regular church attendance- is already in the reach of most Americans. In fact, there’s a good chance it's just a short drive away.”[1]

This finding shows us, the Church, something incredibly important. The way we live shows the world around us that the Gospel makes a difference—not only eternally, but in the here and now. There’s more; according to multiple long-term studies published by The Harvard School of Public Health in 2016 and 2018, regular church attendance is connected to better mental health, better physical health, stronger and more long-lasting marriages, and greater financial stability. 

The benefits of being part of a church are so significant that in December of 2019 -just a few months before churches were forced to close their doors due to COVID- the Wall Street Journal carried an article controversially titled Don’t Believe in God? Lie to Your Children. Now I don’t think that’s a good title for an article and I don’t think anyone should purposely lie to their children. But in the article, the author, who is an atheist and a professional therapist, pointed out studies that children or teens who reported attending a church service at least once per week “scored higher on psychological well-being measurements and had lower risks of mental illness. Weekly attendance was associated with higher rates of volunteering, a sense of mission, forgiveness, and lower probabilities of drug use and early sexual initiation.” 

I want to ask you, if all of that is true (and it is), do you think that would make the Gospel more or less attractive to people? See, the world is watching the kind of lives that we lead together. They won’t necessarily support what the Bible teaches about marriage, or family, or sex, or gender, or how we organize ourselves as a community, or our approach to how the Gospel affects our entire life, but they will notice when the effect is so large that it has a marked difference on the happiness, health, stability, and wholeness of the entire Bible-believing church community (as a whole) in distinction from the rest of the world. The difference that living out the Gospel makes is so large that The Harvard School of Public Health can actually measure it.

I’ll give you one more: in 2012 Professor Robert D. Woodberry demonstrated how the same thing can be seen in the effect that Christian missionaries have had on societies worldwide. According to his research, the higher the number of Protestant missionaries, per ten thousand of the local population in 1923, the higher the chance that same nation would have become a stable democracy by the year 2000. Rodney Stark, who served up until a little while ago as the Professor of Sociology at the University of Washington, wrote “The missionary effect is far greater than that of fifty other variables, including GDP and whether or not a nation was a British colony.” In fact, the higher the number of missionaries that a country had in 1923, the lower that nation’s infant mortality rate was in the year 2000, and the higher the average adult life expectancy. The American Political Science Review checked those findings, and found that the effect was more than nine times as large as the effect of current GDP. So to break that down if I lost you: the effect of whether or not a country had a lot of missionaries was nine times more impactful on their infant mortality rate, life expectancy, literacy, and chances of being a stable democracy, than whether or not that country was even rich or poor. I’ll ask you again, if all of that is true (and it is) do you think that would make the Gospel less attractive or more attractive to people? See, our lives are a witness to the truth of God’s Word. And when we live out what Jesus teaches, we show the world a couple of important things: (1) That this kind of life is possible; and (2) That God’s ways are better than our human, natural ways of doing things apart from Him. This is what the Apostle Paul is getting at in Titus 2:1-10.

WE ARE WITNESSES AS A COMMUNITY

Three times in this passage, Paul mentions the need to maintain a good reputation for the sake of the Gospel (vv. 5, 8, 10). First, in Titus 2:5, he tells Christians to live out the biblical pattern for marriage "so that the Word of God may not be reviled." The Word of God is reviled when the world looks at the instructions that God gives and scoffs, “Not even the Christians believe or do that—so why should we?” We are witnesses as a community. How we live either lifts the message of the Gospel up, or it lowers the opinion that the whole world has of the value of God’s good instructions for us. The world may not support the Christian way of doing things, but they will sure sit up and take notice if it looks like we as Christians don’t even do those things either. We should live so that “the word of God may not be reviled.”

We should also be aware that there are some people in the world who are waiting for Christians to make a mistake, so that they can exploit it and use it against the Christian community. This is a particular concern for pastors. So second, in Titus 2:8 Paul tells pastors not to give "opponents" of the Gospel an "opportunity to speak evil." This does not mean that the rest of the community doesn’t have the same responsibility—we just saw that in verse 5. But it does mean that our Christian leaders have a little more of a spotlight on them, and that there are opponents of the faith (that’s the word that Paul uses) who would love to use the inconsistent or unserious words and actions of a pastor against the whole Christian community. So Paul says, to all Christians but especially people in Christian leadership, “don’t give them an opportunity to speak evil.” Once again, how we live changes how people receive the Gospel. That’s Paul’s concern here.

Finally in verse 10, Paul gives instructions for servants -the employees of the day- to “adorn the doctrine of God our Savior.” That word adorn here in the original Greek is actually related to our English word cosmetics. Our actions as followers of Jesus can actually have a big part to play in enhancing, or at least bringing out, the beauty of the Gospel for all the world to see. The world doesn’t just want to hear the Gospel preached before they will believe it. They want to see the Gospel lived. They want to see what it looks like. When we start to create exceptions for ourselves, to say that this or that part of God’s Word does not apply to our lives, then the people in our lives will conclude that God’s Word doesn’t apply to them either, and they won’t want any part of it. But when they see the Gospel lived out, and they see Christians whose lives reflect that God is their treasure and that their hope is not in anything that is on this earth; when they see sacrifice, and consistency, and love in the midst of difficulty, and accountability within the church even when it’s hard, they will know that there is something different in our midst. And they will want to know what it is. And we will be ready to tell them: “We live for a good, and great, and glorious God, who rescued us when we did not deserve it and loved us to the point of death. He has given us a hope in heaven and for all eternity where all things will be exactly as he intended them, and we have chosen to live our lives in such a way that it reflects that hope, because we have placed our trust in Him.”

WE ARE WITNESSES AS INDIVIDUALS

We are not just a faceless group of interchangeable Christians, however. We each have an opportunity to adorn the Gospel in a different way, and we face different challenges. That is why Paul addresses specific groups of people. In verse 2 the older men are mentioned. And then in verse 3, it’s the older women. In verses 4 and 5, the younger women are addressed. In verse 6, the younger men. In verses 7 to 8, Titus and by extension all Christian leaders are mentioned. And then finally, in verses 9 and 10, the Apostle Paul addresses servants, or slaves, which were basically the employees of the day. Most of the instructions that the Bible gives for them here would apply to anyone who works for someone else today; most of the people in the church and throughout the Roman Empire at that time would have belonged to this group. So how are all these different individuals -men and women, old and young, rich and poor, the worker, and the retired man - going to live out the Gospel in a way that shows the world that God is great? The answer is, each in a slightly different way. We are all called to the same standard of living for Jesus. That’s not in question here. Actually, many of the specific instructions for everyday Christians in this passage are the same requirements that were listed in Titus 1:5-16 for Christian leaders. But as individuals we are still different people, and we have different duties and different responsibilities, and different stages of life, and even different struggles and temptations. So it’s not enough to be told, “We need to be witnesses.” No, we need to know “How do I live as a witness for Jesus? How do I live out a witness to the Gospel as an individual Christian?” This is why Paul addresses these specific groups in these verses.

I've addressed some of the specifics in sermon form in the past, so I will leave those aside for now to stick to the main point: wherever you work, whatever you do, whoever you know, however you get the opportunity, make sure that you are pursuing Jesus continually so that others see the difference that he makes in your life. Make sure that Jesus is your treasure. We talk about faith in the church sometimes, but it’s not just about a simple belief in God, faith is about what you put your trust in. Each of you, make sure that you are continually recalibrating your life so that it looks -to you and the rest of the world- like the life of someone who trusts Jesus. That trusts Jesus to save, and trusts that he’s good, and trusts that he’s God, and trusts that he’s in control, and trusts that his Word is good, and trusts his commands, and trusts his promises, and trusts in him. Our lives, as a community and as individuals, are a message to the rest of the world—is Jesus good? Is the Gospel true? Does Christianity have anything to do with life today? People will know the answer when they see God's people. God is so good to us. He loved us, he pursues us, he has provided everything. Jesus went to the cross for us. God has a plan to reconcile the whole world to himself, the Bible says, things in heaven and on earth and under the earth, metaphorically speaking. And he wants you and me by his side when he does it. So he has paid the price for our sin so we could live for him. Would the world get that message from watching us as a church, as a people? I hope they will. 

Let’s go out as a church, and with our lives, as Titus shows us, and let’s be witnesses of “the doctrine of God our Savior”--let’s be witnesses of the good news about Jesus, and what he’s done for us.

Blessings on your living, your working, and your "adorning the Gospel" with your lives wherever you go,

- Sean

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[1] Tyler VanderWeele and John Siniff, USA Today Oct, 28th, 2016, "Religion May Be a Miracle Drug: Church Attendance is Correlated with Longer Life and a Sense of Meaning."