Between Grace and Glory
Titus 2:11-15
Main Idea: The gospel of Jesus meets us with grace and compels us toward glory with transformational hope.
I. God’s Grace (2:11-12)
Titus 2:11-12: 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,
“When the apostle uses the same word to describe the coming of grace, he so intertwines who Christ is with what Christ provides that the two become inseparable in our consideration. Grace is not some abstract doctrine or theological construct. Grace comes as Christ does. Grace is as personal as he is. In fact, Christ is grace. The unmerited favor of God is what Jesus is about, but it is also who he is. We should thus see grace as a personal action by a personal God who saved us from our helpless condition out of pure love.”
~ Bryan Chapell
Revelation 2:5 “Behold, I am making all things new”
Romans 8:29 - “For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son”
1 John 3:2 “Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is.
“It’s true that the church is a hospital for sinners. But the point of a hospital is for the sick to get well. So, yes, the church is a hospital for sinners, but it is also a school for saints, a place where we experience progress on the journey toward the summit of Christlikeness.”
~ Trevin Wax, The Thrill of Orthodoxy
II. God’s Glory (2:13-15)
Titus 2:13-15: 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.
Declare these things; exhort and rebuke with all authority. Let no one disregard you.
“The gospel is not for the pure and healthy, but for the losers, the failed and flailing, the fallen and falling. The path to the mountaintop of Christlike virtue is a path of penitence. The victorious Christian life isn't the sinless life; it's the repentant life.”
~ Trevin Wax, The Thrill of Orthodoxy
1 Corinthians 15:10 by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me.
“For mere improvement is not redemption, though redemption always improves people even here and now and will, in the end, improve them to a degree we cannot yet imagine. God became man to turn creatures into sons: not simply to produce better men of the old kind but to produce a new kind of man. It is not like teaching a horse to jump better and better but like turning a horse into a winged creature. Of course, once it has got its wings, it will soar over fences which could never have been jumped and thus beat the natural horse at its own game. But there may be a period, while the wings are just beginning to grow, when it cannot do so: and at that stage the lumps on the shoulders - no one could tell by looking at them that they are going to be wings - may even give it an awkward appearance.”
~ C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
